The arrest of Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, demonstrates the extent to which the Cuban Intelligence Service has penetrated and manipulated American academic institutions.
Mr. Myers is accused of acting in 1977 at the behest of Cuba's Directorate General of Intelligence in attaining employment with the State Department and received top-secret security clearance. He worked as instructor and chairman for West European Studies at the department's Foreign Service Institute.
Mr. Myers received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. The same institution in 1988 awarded a master's degree to Ana Belen Montes, the key Pentagon intelligence analyst on Cuba, who in 2002 pleaded guilty to working for Cuban intelligence and received a 25-year prison sentence. According to Cuban intelligence defectors, Cuban intelligence has targeted American colleges and universities for nearly half a century.
The FBI debriefed Cuba's DGI Capt. Jesus Perez Mendez after his defection in 1983. In a publicly available transcript, Mr. Perez Mendez identifies U.S. university professors and administrators known to be "activists" in pro-Castro groups. Mr. Perez Mendez revealed that, in reality, they were Cuban agents working under the supervision of Jesus Arboleya Cervera, a DGI officer and diplomat in the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York City.
According to the defector, Florida International University political science professor Marifeli Perez-Stable assumed the spy duties of DGI agent Lourdes Casal, a Rutgers University psychology professor, who died in Havana in 1980. So extensive were Ms. Perez-Stable's intelligence responsibilities that the DGI prepared annual plans for her.
A decade later, Antonio de la Cova, a Latino-studies professor at Indiana University Bloomington, published "Academic Espionage: U.S. Taxpayer Funding of a Pro-Castro Study." This thoroughly researched and exhaustively detailed paper described how the State Department gave $500,000 to Florida International University (FIU) for a study on U.S.-Cuba relations. FIU is one of about 15 universities Cuba intelligence focuses on as recruiting grounds. Heading FIU's "Cuba in Transition" study was sociology professor Lisandro Perez. He was assisted by 16 mostly Cuban-American professors, including Ms. Perez-Stable and Trinity Washington University professor Gillian Gunn, who during the previous 20 years had been active in the pro-Castro groups exposed by Mr. Perez Mendez.
On June 6, 2005, Alberto Coll, the Havana-born chairman of the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., was sentenced to one year probation after pleading guilty to lying about the purpose of his trip to Cuba the previous year. Mr. Coll, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, had his security clearance rescinded and was fined $5,000.
Mr. Coll was suspected of espionage, but his earlier service as a source in Navy Intelligence debriefings proved to be a major liability in court proceedings. His confession remains sealed to this day. Government officials told Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz that Cuban intelligence "recruited Coll ... in part by using a female agent to seduce him."
Seven months later, the FBI arrested FIU psychology professor Carlos M. Alvarez and his wife, Elsa, an FIU counselor, and like the Myers couple, charged them with failing to register with the federal government as foreign agents.
Six months earlier, Alvarez admitted to FBI agents the espionage activities he and his wife carried out for three decades. These included a written report about the personal finances and private life of his friend Modesto A. Maidique, the president of FIU. Another report detailed a meeting between various FIU professors and Michael Eagan, the director of the Investigations Office of the Department of State.
