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25 Spies for Cuba II
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25 275 Spies for Cuba II KENDALL AND GWENDOLYN MYERS When I heard they were arrested, I felt like they had arrested Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. LARRY MACDONALD, an acquaintance of the Myerses, who lived at the marina in Maryland where the Myerses docked their boat; quoted by Sheridan and Wilber, “DC Couple’s Disdain” 275 Walter Kendall Myers would have looked more appropriately dressed in a tweed coat and khaki trousers than in the blue prison jumpsuit he wore to his indictment on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage. His wife, Gwendolyn, likewise would have been more suitably attired in a sunflower dress than the matching prison suit she wore as she sat next to her husband in the courtroom. Kendall—seventy-two years old; tall at six feet, six inches; bespectacled; white-haired; and mustachioed—resembled the Donald Sutherland of his later movie career and appeared more like an elderly blueblood or distinguished professor than an accused prisoner.1 Kendall Myers, in fact, was both. On April 15, 1937, he was born into a Washington society family that counted among its forbears a number of notable Americans. His father, a cardiac surgeon, was a distant relative of President William Howard Taft, and his mother was the daughter of Gilbert Grosvenor, a longtime director of the National Geographic Society, and granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Myers had the typical schooling of one born to such lineage, attending a Espionage in the New Millennium 276 private boarding academy in Pennsylvania, graduating from Brown University , and then obtaining a doctorate in European history from Johns Hopkins University, the same institution where Ana Montes studied. He also did a stint in the US Army where, fluent in Czech, he monitored intercepts of the Soviets’ Eastern European ally. Myers’s subsequent career was a blend of academia and government service. He taught European studies at his alma mater, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), later worked as a contract instructor at the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute, and eventually became a full-time staff employee with a security clearance working on European matters in State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). His life was not without turmoil. In 1974, after ten years of marriage, he separated from his wife, a fellow student at Brown and later a microbiologist who obtained sole custody of their two young children.2 A year later, he lost control of his car on a Washington street and killed a teenage girl and seriously injured two of her friends. He was convicted of reckless driving but received only three years of unsupervised probation, a light sentence that some attributed to his family connections.3 In the late 1970s Myers met Gwendolyn Steingraber through mutual friends. Gwendolyn’s background was markedly different from the urban, patrician milieu of Kendall Myers. She was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and raised in rural South Dakota, and she later volunteered to work for George McGovern’s presidential campaign and then for liberal Senator James Abourezk. She would later work for the senator in Washington, where she walked the Capitol corridors with fellow aides such as Tom Daschle, future Senate majority leader, and Peter Rouse, who was later President Obama’s acting chief of staff. Along the way she was twice divorced and had four children from her first marriage of eighteen years. Despite their different backgrounds, Kendall and Gwendolyn were attracted to each other by their common belief in liberal causes. The couple lived together and moved to South Dakota, where Gwendolyn got a job through Abourezk at the state’s Public Utilities Commission, while Kendall worked on a book about British prime minister Neville Chamberlain that he never finished.4 The Myerses also adopted a lifestyle reminiscent of the 1960s, espousing and marching for various causes such as legalized abor- [3.235.139.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:34 GMT) Spies for Cuba II 277 tion, solar energy, and the end of uranium mining. At one point, the police even raided their home and seized marijuana plants that the pair was growing in their basement.5 Just before their move to South Dakota, in December 1978, Kendall Myers spent two weeks in Cuba, a trip that proved to be the turning point in his and Gwendolyn’s lives. Kendall was significantly impressed by his tour of the communist island, which had been arranged by a Cuban official...