State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies

by Robert David Booth

  Thanks to Kendall, whatever human rights, financial, family repatriation, medical, or aid initiatives were being considered, Cuba knew our bottom line in any diplomatic negotiations before they started. Even if we covertly asked Spain or the Vatican, Kendall’s area of regional expertise, to work on our behalf on humanitarian issues, Castro was aware of their origins. When Castro closed the Spanish embassy’s cultural center in the Palacio Velasco Sara building in 2003, claiming that it was inciting subversion and anti-government sentiments, did he do so because he was informed that perhaps it was being secretly funded by the US government? Does USAID contractor Alan Gross, currently languishing in a Cuban jail since 2009 for “acts against the independence or the territorial independence of the state” by providing an undeclared satellite communications system that allowed Internet access to “pro-democracy groups,” owe his situation to Kendall?

  Worse, we determined that Kendall perused INR’s internal secure SIPR net computer networks to see what informational papers were being prepared about Cuba. Most damning was the fact that when he reported back to Cuba about information gathered by US technical means, those operations were then compromised and shut down. With Kendall deep inside State and Ana Montes deep inside DIA, Castro had an almost complete understanding of our diplomatic and military policies concerning Cuba. No wonder he has outwitted ten US presidents.

  As a result of my work, the FBI immediately deployed massive human and electronic resources to monitor Kendall’s public and private life. DS/CI made sure that Kendall’s every move inside the HST was documented, and we monitored all of his classified and unclassified computer messages as a matter of course.

  Almost immediately, though, disaster struck. Within a few months of ramping up the monitoring, we discovered that Kendall was finalizing his retirement papers with the department’s Office of Human Resources. We could not believe our bad luck. After finally identifying our suspect, he was about to leave the information-rich environment that supported his espionage activities.

  And he did. He retired before the FBI could obtain evidence that Kendall was taking classified information out of the HST. Kendall would no longer be passing government secrets to his Cuban masters without access to classified information. Ergo—no violation of the espionage statutes unless he had squirreled away some nuts for a rainy day. It really looked like our efforts had been for naught.

  I would discover belatedly that Kendall had been alerted to our interest in him due to the bureaucratic stupidity and protocols that force federal investigators to inform the head of any agency whenever the strong possibility exists that one of their own employees is a suspected penetration agent. According to bureaucratic requirements, the secretary of state and her deputy were notified of the FBI/DS’s suspicions concerning Kendall—as they should have been. Another senior State Department employee who was similarly nominated by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate, and Kendall’s ultimate boss from 2006 until his retirement, was Assistant Secretary of State Randall Fort. He was a former corporate officer with Goldman Sachs (director of Global Security) and program director at TRW’s space and defense division. He was nominated in June 2006 to serve as assistant secretary of state for INR during President George W. Bush’s second term.

  In early 2007, the fateful decision was made to inform Fort of the DS and FBI investigation. During his initial briefing meeting with the FBI, he was advised to be careful in future interactions with Kendall so as not to betray any new feelings he might have for Kendall and thereby alert him to the FBI/DS inquiry.

  I saw absolutely no value in alerting Kendall’s ultimate boss about our suspicions because there would be nothing Fort could offer to assist in the investigation. I had been very vocal in the past in such cases, believing that only those senior officials absolutely necessary should be informed in order to avoid another Felix Bloch leak of information and botched espionage case. Certainly the secretary of state must determine the national security implications of the case and how best to proceed with any investigation inside the State Department. But why the assistant secretary of INR? What’s the investigative value?

  Kendall would tell us later that in late 2007 he noticed a “chill” in his relations with Randy Fort, who suddenly refused to allow him to sign and forward analysis to department bureaus, something Kendall had done for over a decade. Kendall would reveal later, “I clashed with . . . the assistant secretary of state [Fort] who was my boss.”

  Kendall initially wondered if it was a result of his impromptu speech at SAIS where he criticized Tony Blair and was admonished by the department. Kendall remarked later, “my boss at INR put me on a ‘watch list’” and “thought it would be unwise for us to be going to Mexico for contacts at that point.”

  Kendall’s INR colleagues would begin to ask him in private if there was anything that he had done to Fort to cause such a negative reaction whenever Kendall’s name was mentioned. As a result of Fort’s sudden change in behavior towards him, Kendall correctly guessed that there was something amiss and decided to plan his retirement immediately. Then Randy Fort made matters worse.

  When INR decided to host a retirement party for Kendall inside the HST, a common practice for a twenty-five-year veteran of the department, Fort personally ended all plans for such a ceremony. As a courtesy, Kendall’s INR colleagues sought Fort’s “blessing” for the farewell party but were stunned when the assistant secretary said, “No way,” and then added, “Trust me on this one.”

  When Kendall’s startled and unknowing colleagues relayed Fort’s words to Kendall, the CuIS’s penetration agent’s suspicions were confirmed. To avoid any internal conflict, Kendall’s INR colleagues held the retirement party outside the department at the DACOR Bacon House in Washington, DC. Randy Fort was not invited. In 2010, my FBI contacts told me that two senior FBI officials had later held an informal “chat” with Fort to inform him that he had been less than helpful in the investigation.

  Kendall retired, and he and Gwendolyn apparently ceased all clandestine activities and focused on learning to pilot their sailboat. The FBI’s investigation was at a stand-still, and after eighteen months of futile surveillance, something drastic needed to occur or there would be no possible way to develop an espionage case against them.

  Then, in spring 2009, the FBI developed a plan to lure Kendall back into the secret life that he had apparently abandoned. After months of preparation, a bold and risky “false-flag” operation was launched as an undercover agent, codenamed “EK,” approached Kendall at the SAIS campus and pretended to be a Cuban intelligence officer. Kendall took the bait, and soon he and Gwendolyn met with the undercover agent at a nearby hotel lounge. Over the course of their conversation, they hinted at their methods, including discussion of receiving messages in Morse code over a shortwave radio, thus confirming that our suspicions had been correct.

  Kendall told EK how he and Gwendolyn had already acquired the appropriate sea charts so they could “sail home” to Cuba. There was no indication of when this might happen, but that revelation did not bode well for our investigation. The FBI had to develop overwhelming evidence of espionage against the Myerses before they set sail for Cuba. But what had influenced them to plan to leave the US?

  The answer was simple, as Kendall described to EK: “Let me explain something . . . which is important for us and . . . could be important to you. When I left the State Department, one of the reasons . . . I was gonna leave anyway. . . . I was going to leave in 2008 . . . but I clashed with . . . the assistant secretary [Randy Fort] who was my boss.”

  Kendall stated that, as a result of that clash, he felt “uncomfortable [and] more or less threatened,” and he added, “So I’ve been very cautious about reestablishing contact because I didn’t want to, uh implicate you. . . . We have been very cautious, careful with our moves, and, trying to be alert to any surveillance if there was any.”

  Before departing, they agreed to meet the next day at a differe
nt hotel. Most importantly, Kendall and Gwendolyn promised to obtain the information requested by EK and were now prepared to accept espionage taskings. They also insisted that any future meetings begin with the use of a Cuban code word they had employed in the past. That was theatrical to say the least but very much in keeping with their spy personas.

  The Myerses would meet again with EK on April 16, April 30, and finally June 4. What had Kendall and Gwendolyn discussed with EK during those hotel meetings? A lot, quite frankly as evidenced by sample statements from their meetings.

  Kendall (when EK offered a drink of scotch): “No, no, that’s OK . . . while I work, you know.” He told EK: “I will get information for you on the next meeting concerning the upcoming Trinidad and Tobago Summit of the Americas meeting.”

  Even more significantly, Kendall acknowledged that a code name used for him in messages was “202,” and Gwendolyn acknowledged that one she used was “123.” A match for the intercepted messages. Kendall told EK “to send special greetings . . . and hugs . . . to everybody . . . and all our friends . . . two very old friends” in Cuba. He refused EK’s request to identify SAIS students “who could be useful to us,” saying, “I don’t trust any of them.”

  At the April 30, 2009, meeting, Kendall said he and Gwendolyn told EK that they were “delighted to have contact again. We really have missed you. And you, speaking collectively, have been a really important part of our lives, and we have felt incomplete. I mean, we really love your country . . . and the people and the team are just important in our lives. So we don’t want to fall out of contact again.”

  Kendall said that he and Gwendolyn “would like to be a reserve army . . . ready when we are needed. I will begin a process of getting back in contact with . . . my old contacts . . . work on new ones . . . to be able to react if the situation gets dangerous or we hear something that makes us worried, that we think you should know. . . . But I think, honestly, we don’t want to be back to the regular stuff. . . .”

  Gwendolyn was hardly innocent in this matter. Of Fidel Castro, she stated: “He’s . . . the most . . . incredible statesman in . . . a hundred years for goodness sakes.” She said, “I envy her [Ana Montes] being able to love what she was doing [spying for the CuIS], and say what she was doing and why she was doing that . . . ’cause I can’t do it. She was not paranoid enough. . . . But she loved it [spying]; she did what she loved to do.”

  Gwendolyn confirmed that Cuba was the most comfortable country in which to conduct business, saying, “once you got there . . . we knew we were OK.” She stated that her favorite method of passing information to the CuIS inside the United States was by changing shopping carts inside supermarkets because it was “easy enough to do.” She said she “would not do it now because they have a camera, but they didn’t then.”

  She reminded EK that Kendall removed secret documents from the State Department and she copied “page-by-page” the documents that Kendall brought home in his briefcase, on a typewriter originally and then a laptop. She added that she never used her own computer to send encrypted e-mails to the CuIS and that they “would go to Internet cafes” to send messages.

  And finally, about leaving the United States for Cuba, Gwendolyn said, “we’ve sailed there. . . . We’ve always said we’ll just come on a boat. . . . We’re not taking a train or plane, you know.”

  They talked about their affinity with Castro, Cuba, and the Cuban people. Kendall and Gwendolyn reminded EK that in January 1995 they had traveled clandestinely to Cuba and spent an evening with Fidel Castro in a small house outside Havana. He awarded them a medal for their service to the Cuban revolution. Nostalgically they discussed their early “brush passes” in New York City and Washington, DC, and how difficult and dangerous they seemed.

  Yet despite their voluntary retirement, the Myerses still enjoyed being penetration agents, and the thought of being resurrected on a part-time basis was a joyous prospect. In furtherance of the new relationship, they received and were trained in the use of an encryption device for a laptop computer for the purpose of encoding future e-mail communications with their “new” Cuban handler.

  What I really didn’t like to hear was how easy it was for Kendall to take classified documents out of the State Department. Kendall had no worries about walking out of Main State with secrets because he put the documents in “official envelopes,” and there were no random searches of employees by the Main State security guards. If that method was too risky, Kendall simply memorized key words from documents or took shorthand notes of their contents. When he got home, Gwendolyn transcribed the written notes or recitation for transmittal to Cuba. So simple.

  There was no doubt now that Kendall and Gwendolyn were the penetration agents we had been hunting for all these years. But there was one difficult threshold to overcome: Kendall no longer had access to classified material. Any reports or analysis he provided would almost exclusively come from open source materials or sensitive scraps of information elicited from former colleagues. Finding an e-mail message from Kendall to his handlers that might be linked to a specific classified document would be next to impossible.

  The Myerses had already made admissions against self-interest about their prior spying activities as well as their willingness to engage in new espionage work on behalf of Cuba, and had accepted clandestine communications equipment to further their endeavors. Was this evidence sufficient to go forward with a prosecution? Damned if I knew!

  Working alongside the FBI and DS, the Department of Justice now had to decide whether there was probable cause to arrest the Myerses for espionage or lesser related charges. I attended a number of these meetings where the elements of espionage were debated ad infinitum and ad nauseam. At this point, Senior Trial Attorney Clifford Rones and Assistant US Attorney Michael Harvey decided to go forward with the novel charge of wire fraud, which we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt, because DOJ/FBI/DS were uncertain if the espionage count could stick for lack of specificity on what national security information Kendall and Gwendolyn had compromised. The wire fraud count simply charged that having his US government paycheck sent electronically to his bank while not fully “loyal” to the department was evidence of fraud.

  It was a brilliant legal move given our circumstances. Driving the need for quick action were the FBI’s discoveries that Kendall and Gwendolyn were planning a couple of significant sailing trips on their $375,000 sailboat and that the GPS compass had been loaded with nautical coordinates for sailing to Cuba. Worse, none of their home calendars or daily planners indicated any scheduled activities in Washington, DC, or anywhere else for that matter, after November 2009.

  At one meeting where the FBI, DS, and DOJ prosecution team was assembled in WFO to discuss the ramifications of the Myerses plan for “sailing home,” the conversation became tense. We knew that Kendall and Gwendolyn were about to embark on an “over-the-horizon” sailing course to Nova Scotia with a yachting club from their berth in Maryland. What if they suddenly sailed toward the Caribbean? Did DOJ have enough evidence to convince a federal judge to issue an arrest warrant? Could we risk Kendall and Gwendolyn sailing away on a “training exercise”? Could we afford losing them on the high seas while trying to confirm that the threshold for violations of federal law had been tripped? The FBI was uncomfortable with the prospect of the Myerses sailing the Atlantic Ocean without government surveillance in a vessel capable of a long voyage.

  I tried to break the tension. “Can we request that the US Navy have a standby attack submarine ready for use next week?”

  “Robert,” a DOJ official responded, “are you serious?”

  “Well, if they get beyond twelve nautical miles, the US Coast Guard can’t intervene, and we need something more robust.”

  “Like an FBI parachute SWAT team?” an FBI colleague asked.

  “There will be no hostile boarding of ships on this investigation,” someone replied. Maintaining a sense of humor was the best we could do. We were all tired and
anxious.

  After the third meeting between EK and the Myerses, DOJ was confident that it had enough evidence to go forward with an arrest and prosecution. It was time to bring Kendall and Gwendolyn in from the cold without so much as a “bon voyage.”

  A fourth and final meeting with the Myerses and EK was arranged to take place in a hotel located in the 800 block of New Hampshire Avenue. The location was picked because of easy street parking, and the room prices were gentle on the government expense account.

  On the morning of June 4 at 6:16 a.m., approximately ten hours before the fourth scheduled meeting, a federal judge signed a sealed warrant for the arrest of Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers for violations of 18 USC 371 (conspiracy to defraud the US government by defeating the State Department’s control over its information, acted illegally as an agent of the government of Cuba, and communicated to agents of Cuba information Kendall and Gwendolyn knew to be classified), 18 USC 951(acting as illegal agents of the government of Cuba without prior notice to the Attorney General) and 18 USC 1343 (devising a scheme to defraud the US government and to obtain monies by means of materially false pretenses). On the same date, the FBI established a Command Center located in two large, windowless rooms on the ground floor of WFO. Tables topped with telephones, computer monitors, legal pads, and pens were scattered about. The Command Center was filled with special agents and analysts who had been working the case for years. I was pleased to see that Donna and Rachel were finally smiling. At approximately 3:50 p.m., Kendall and Gwendolyn walked into the hotel lobby and headed to a previously identified room.

  At 4:10 p.m., EK and the Myerses were seated comfortably on the beds in the hotel room and began to talk about specific IC technical operations of which Kendall was aware. Kendall’s incriminating responses were the final nail in the coffin. By 4:24 p.m., both Gwendolyn and Kendall were in handcuffs and being driven to the FBI’s Washington Field Office for initial processing. The Myerses’ residence was entered around 5:00 p.m. and methodically searched for any evidence of their espionage activities. There was plenty.