Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  After the Myerses were arrested in June 2009, Castro said that they “deserve every honor in this world.” Instead, in July 2010, Kendall Myers was sentenced to life imprisonment; Gwendolyn received eighty-one months, almost seven years. “Our overriding objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution,” Myers said in court.

  With Montes and Myers in prison, only one member of the SAIS troika who had spied for Cuba was still at large: Velázquez.

  * * *

  STRICKEN WITH ALZHEIMER’S, Don Miguel died in December 2006. He was buried in his native Moca. Mourners at his funeral looked in vain for his beloved daughter. If her siblings and mother knew that Velázquez would be arrested if she set foot on American soil, they didn’t betray it.

  “The family said they could not find her,” recalled Aponte Toro, who spoke at the funeral. “It was an extraordinary situation. Nobody knew why. I thought there was some break between the family. It was not that.”

  According to another law school colleague, Don Miguel had been aware of his daughter’s predicament. “I was told that, when he wanted to see her, he had to leave the United States, because she could not come in,” Professor Luis Muñiz Argüelles told me.

  With his death, Marta lost not only a father, but a mentor who had shaped her views and understood the sacrifices she had made. “He would have been proud of Marta, though he probably wouldn’t have said so openly,” Hey-Maestre said.

  Velázquez’s greatest espionage triumph, recruiting Montes, proved to be her downfall. During Montes’s debriefing, she identified Velázquez as a Cuban agent. But the United States didn’t catch Velázquez. Aware from press reports that her onetime friend and classmate was talking, she resigned from USAID and fled from Guatemala to Stockholm. Sweden bans extradition for a “political offense,” a category that, under Swedish legal precedent, includes espionage. With her husband’s help, Velázquez became a Swedish citizen in February 2003, while keeping U.S. citizenship.

  “The FBI dropped the ball,” Simmons said. “They had Montes first, and she gave Velázquez. The FBI talked to Montes for three or four weeks. Then we interrogated her for three months. The FBI knew Velázquez was a talent spotter for three months while she was working for the State Department. They could have gotten her anytime. Then she fled to Stockholm.”

  A 2004 indictment for conspiracy to commit espionage was sealed to avoid alerting Velázquez, but she stayed out of the reach of the U.S. government anyway. She “is undoubtedly aware” that Montes “has cooperated with the United States and would have exposed” that Velázquez helped recruit her, the Justice Department said in a 2011 court filing.

  Traveling on a Swedish passport with the privileges accorded to a diplomat’s wife, she accompanied Kviele on his assignments in Europe, which included postings to Vienna, where he attended an International Atomic Energy Agency conference in 2004, and Lisbon. Like Sweden’s, the extradition treaties that Austria and Portugal have with the United States exclude political offenses.

  Unwilling to return to the United States to stand trial, burdened with a secret past that could burst into public scandal at any moment, Velázquez had every reason to lie low, but she was too ardent and restless to be a stay-at-home mother. Instead, still driven to improve society, she embarked on a second career—as an educator. She taught English at a vocational education institute for adults in Vienna in 2005–06. Then, in Portugal, she tutored students at an international school in Spanish, and taught business English to engineers at BP/Global Alliance and to board members of the commission that supervises the stock market. Surprisingly, she even worked for the government of the United States’ close ally, the United Kingdom, teaching English in 2009 for its international cultural arm, the British Council. Seeking new friends to replace old ones in the United States whom she could no longer visit, she joined International Women in Portugal, a social group.

  Its patience exhausted, the U.S. Justice Department offered to negotiate a deal, with the warning that otherwise it would make her indictment public. Apparently Velázquez refused, because the government fulfilled its threat, stunning her former classmates and USAID colleagues. “I can’t tell you how often a group of us from the mission has gotten together” and talked about Marta’s spying for Cuba, one told me. “None of us had a clue.” Friends in the United States were unable to contact her; Princeton’s alumni directory lists her address as “lost” as of May 1, 2013, six days after her indictment was unsealed.

  Her brother Jorge Velázquez, a lawyer in Puerto Rico who runs Don Miguel’s old firm preparing students for the bar exam, represents her. Like his sister, he has degrees from three eminent U.S. universities: Stanford (bachelor’s), Northwestern (master’s in American history), and Cornell (law). He told me that he would not discuss her case, and had instructed all family members not to do so, either, “because anything they say could attract questioning from the FBI.”

  After reading her senior thesis and talking with her father’s friends, her Princeton classmates and teachers, and her colleagues at USAID and Thorildsplans, I began to feel a certain affinity for Marta Rita Velázquez. We were the same age and attended Ivy League universities at the same time; I had protested against Harvard’s South Africa investments, though less zealously than she had against Princeton’s.

  Pointing out that we had “a fair bit in common,” I emailed her to request an interview. There was no reply.

  * * *

  STYMIED FOR MORE than half a century, hopes for better U.S.-Cuban relations may finally be coming true. President Barack Obama eased restrictions on trade, tourism, and financial transactions and in 2016 became the first sitting president to visit Cuba since the Castros took power in 1959. The American embassy in Havana reopened in 2015, and plans were afoot for a Cuban consulate in Tampa. Fidel Castro—hero of Montes, Myers, and Velázquez, and long a U.S. nemesis—died in November 2016.

  It was reported in June 2016 that the Obama administration was considering trading Montes herself to Cuba for fugitive former Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur. Cuba gave Shakur asylum after she escaped in 1979 from a New Jersey prison where she was serving a life sentence for the 1973 murder of a state trooper. California congressman Devin Nunes, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, denounced the idea of releasing Montes as “preposterous … it is difficult to overstate the damage caused by Ms. Montes’s treachery.”

  Like U.S. corporations, American higher education is poised to capitalize on the rapprochement. Academic exchanges with Cuban universities are springing up. A 2013 study by a consultant to Florida International University, where Cuban agent Carlos Alvarez taught from 1974 until his 2006 arrest, urged it to explore establishing a campus in Cuba. In 2015, the New Jersey–based Educational Testing Service administered the Test of English as a Foreign Language in Cuba for the first time. U.S. colleges rely on the TOEFL to evaluate international applicants. Because of Cuba’s poverty, most of its students would need scholarships, but for many U.S. universities, the cachet of a Cuban connection might justify the extra expense.

  A thaw in hostilities, though, would be unlikely to reduce academic espionage—or the harm it can cause. On the contrary, if the effect of globalization elsewhere is any guide, more educational traffic between Cuba and the United States would spur a corresponding increase in spying. Cuba would probably rely on homegrown students and professors, along with American disciples like Montes, Myers, and Velázquez, to collect information in the United States.

  Moreover, the documents stolen or whispers overheard by these agents might circulate beyond Cuba. Even if Cuba itself becomes friendlier to the United States, it trades intelligence with countries that aren’t. “The sale and barter of U.S. secrets is one of the major revenue sources sustaining the Cuban regime,” Simmons told me. Some of Montes’s dispatches to Cuba ended up in Beijing and Moscow, he said.

  Montes “compromised programs of broader scope—highly sensitive intelligence of limited value to Cuba, but pote
ntially very high value to other adversaries,” Van Cleave said in her testimony. “There is a continuing market for such stolen U.S. secrets.… The damage to the United States from the loss of sensitive national security information to Cuban espionage is not bounded by the national security threat presented by Cuba alone, but also by its value to potentially more dangerous adversaries.”

  * * *

  THE CENTRAL SQUARE of Spånga, a suburb of Stockholm, reflects the diversity of modern Sweden, where 17 percent of the population is foreign-born. A Thai restaurant has leaflets in Arabic explaining Sweden’s health care system. A woman wearing a hijab sells strawberries at the entrance to the commuter rail station.

  The Kvieles live in Spånga’s posher section, about four hundred yards from the square, in a two-story yellow house with a tile roof, a basement, and two balconies facing south. They bought it in 2013 for about $500,000, moving there from a more glamorous Stockholm address just a few months after the indictment against Velázquez was unsealed. Like Velázquez’s childhood home in Puerto Rico, the six-room Spånga house is surrounded by greenery, including a garden with pine and birch trees, and an apple tree with a birdhouse. There’s a 2010 Volvo in the driveway, and a brick porch with a twenty-inch religious statuette, perhaps reflecting Velázquez’s Catholic heritage and schooling.

  One day in June 2016, a Stockholm-based journalist who was helping me with this chapter approached the statue for a closer look. From inside the house, a rap on a window warned him to retreat. In response to a follow-up phone call, a woman’s voice—presumably either Velázquez or her daughter—asked, “Who is this?” in Swedish. When the journalist identified himself, she hung up.

  No longer posted abroad, Kviele has worked in recent years as a regular desk officer in the Swedish foreign ministry. Velázquez, who speaks fluent Swedish as well as Portuguese, English, and Spanish, blends into the scene, just one more transplanted foreigner with a complicated history in a cosmopolitan capital. “If you look closely at the Latin American population in Stockholm, many of them were involved in leftist politics,” says a Thorildsplans colleague.

  For a fugitive from U.S. justice, Velázquez appears to lead a settled and productive life. Since she and Kviele returned to Sweden from Lisbon around 2010, she has continued to teach English and/or Spanish: at the now-defunct International School for Justice and Peace, at an adult-education program called Folkuniversitetet, and then at Thorildsplans.

  In 2014, she joined the Thorildsplans staff, teaching beginning Spanish and advanced English to college prep students aged sixteen to nineteen. Although she lacks the requisite teaching certificate, schools in Sweden with shortages of credentialed teachers may hire unqualified candidates. Offsetting her lack of teacher training, her degrees from three elite U.S. universities likely impressed school administrators. She also has an English-teaching certificate from the University of Cambridge, according to her curriculum vitae on file with the school district. She works on a year-to-year contract, earning about four thousand dollars a month, while pursuing a teaching degree to meet the qualifications set by the Swedish National Agency for Education. She expects to complete her degree in 2017, and then will move into a permanent slot, Waardahl said. “Marta gets very good reviews from her students.”

  Velázquez remains intense and idealistic, a crusader for social justice—a trait she passed on to her son, Ingmar, who graduated from another Stockholm high school in 2015, and has signed petitions for releasing prisoners of conscience in Eritrea, and against deporting two Ethiopian children from Sweden. One of her students in English at Thorildsplans in 2015–16 said Velázquez went out of her way to emphasize the importance of human rights. Somewhat surprisingly, she assigned her pupils to write an essay about an organization that has assailed the Castro regime for repressing dissidents and independent media: Amnesty International. Perhaps, unlike Montes, Velázquez regrets spying for Cuba.

  4

  FOREIGN EXCHANGE

  Magnolia and crabapple trees were blossoming pink and white on a blustery Saturday afternoon in April 2016 on the hillside campus of Marietta College in southern Ohio, where red-brick, Georgian-style buildings overlook the Ohio and Muskingum rivers. Beside the McDonough Rock—actually a hunk of concrete found near a bridge and hauled up the hill—about thirty people gathered to dedicate a sapling and a plaque in memory of Andrea Parhamovich, a Marietta alumna and prodemocracy activist killed in Iraq in 2007. It was fitting to honor Parhamovich there, a Marietta administrator told the crowd, because the rock is a “symbol of free speech.”

  Many in the group then headed inside the nearby McDonough Center for Leadership and Business for a student presentation on relations between the United States, China, and Russia. Here, though, there was no mention of democracy or free speech. The six American students discussing their research sounded like mouthpieces for the Chinese government. Their historical overview omitted the Tiananmen Square massacre, and their discussion of covert action ignored Chinese economic espionage and cyber-spying. Instead, citing mutual interests in promoting international trade and fighting global health epidemics, they predicted an era of unprecedented cooperation.

  “The U.S., Russia, and China have a greater opportunity to work together than ever before,” one sophomore declared.

  The same tone prevailed during the question-and-answer session. When a member of the audience asked whether Japan’s rearming might cause tensions between the United States and China, the sophomore dismissed the possibility. “China’s relationship with us is a lot stronger than our relationship with Japan,” he said. Another questioner wondered how to change the perception of most Americans that China and Russia are “bad guys.” A female undergraduate rejected the premise. Her generation sees Syrian refugees and illegal Mexican immigrants as villains, she explained, not Russia or China.

  I was tempted to attribute the students’ apparent brainwashing to their teacher, Yingjie Luo, who was listening intently in the front row. His participation in the conference was the reason that I had chosen this particular weekend to visit Marietta. Luo wore glasses, and a natty blue suit without a tie; his dark hair was tinged with silver. After a Marietta dean introduced him as a “renowned scholar” on China-Russia relations, Luo himself thanked the students and the audience.

  “Today is very important for me,” he said. “I never think I can teach a course in the U.S.”

  * * *

  LUO DIDN’T EXPLAIN why teaching in this country had seemed so far-fetched. He was probably alluding to his lack of English fluency, but perhaps also to the unique status of the university in China that sent him to Marietta. Luo was a visiting scholar from the University of International Relations (UIR) in Beijing, which U.S. diplomats have described as the Chinese Ministry of State Security’s “elite institute for preparing its new recruits.” UIR is affiliated with and partly funded by the security ministry, China’s intelligence organization, which plucks promising candidates from the university to replenish its ranks. The special attention that the FBI has long lavished on UIR graduates in the United States triggered South Florida professor Dajin Peng’s travails.

  Luo owed his presence at Marietta to one of the strangest partnerships in higher education, between a Chinese spy school and a small, isolated liberal arts college in the American heartland. At the very least, like the Confucius Institutes in the United States, UIR’s Marietta connection represents an exercise in soft power, instilling Chinese propaganda in unwary undergraduates like the presenters at the McDonough Center. At most, it may be a security breach, a successful ploy by Chinese intelligence to gain an inconspicuous foothold in the United States by taking advantage of the guileless hospitality of the American Midwest. A more far-fetched theory is that it’s a CIA tactic to penetrate China’s spy school. Whatever the explanation, the relationship turns some Marietta professors into functionaries of China’s security ministry, which pays them to come to Beijing and teach American culture to UIR summer students, likely including f
uture intelligence officers.

  “I’m thinking, ‘I’m so naïve,’” a former Marietta provost told me. “I personally never questioned the UIR relationship.”

  Few people have. Created and overseen by a magnetic, mysterious Marietta professor with ties to Mao Zedong and Chinese president Xi Jinping as well as the U.S. State Department, the partnership benefits both schools. UIR has helped Marietta, which has a modest endowment and depends primarily on tuition revenue, to attract a flood of full-paying Chinese students. The windfall has been sizable enough to squelch any doubts within the Marietta administration about the wisdom of collaborating with a spy school.

  In return, as UIR’s only strategic partner in the United States, Marietta gives it both legitimacy outside China and a low-profile outlet where its students and faculty can experience America firsthand. Jonathan Adelman, a University of Denver professor who specializes in Chinese and Russian national security policy, has lectured and taught extensively in China, including at UIR. When I asked him how the Marietta connection benefited UIR, he said he wasn’t familiar with it, but added, “If I had to make a guess, I’d guess somebody got up and said, ‘We need to find an all-American place, so we can learn the habits of America.’”

  The partnership has many facets. Chinese high school seniors take Marietta’s English-proficiency exam on UIR’s campus. Once they enroll at Marietta, they can fulfill its general education requirements by taking UIR summer courses. Marietta hosts twenty to twenty-five UIR students and two faculty members for two weeks each summer, and as many as ten exchange and transfer students and one or two professors, such as Professor Luo, during the academic year. The exchange students typically pay board but no tuition; the visiting professors stay for free in Marietta’s International Scholars House, a blue cottage on campus.