A retired State Department official -- aided by a top security clearance, a shortwave radio, and his wife -- passed on secret information to the Cuban Intelligence Service for nearly three decades.

That’s the gist of a grand jury indictment unsealed by federal prosecutors on Friday. The State Department is still working on a damage assessment, but federal prosecutor David Kris describes the alleged spy activity as “incredibly serious.”

The arrest of Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, is the latest in a series of high-profile Cuban spying cases. This latest federal indictment, the result of a three-year joint investigation by the FBI and State Department, came just days after Cuba accepted a US offer to renew talks on immigration.

"These talks are part of our effort to forge a new way forward on Cuba, that advances the interests of the United States, the Cuban people and the entire hemisphere," said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a press conference in San Salvador on June 1.

Spy case could stymie US-Cuba talks

But the Myers’s arrest is at the very least a stumbling block to any rapprochement.

On Friday, the State Department reported that Secretary Clinton has ordered a "comprehensive review" of security procedures and practices to protect sensitive and classified information and a "comprehensive damage assessment in coordination with the intelligence community.”

Citing Friday’s arrests, Rep. Mel Martinez (R) of Florida called on the Obama administration to postpone the talks with Cuba.

“Today’s arrest of two Americans alleged to have spied for Cuba is reason enough for the administration to halt any further diplomatic outreach to the regime including postponing the migration talks until the U.S. Congress has a full accounting of the damage these individuals have caused to our national security,” he said in a statement.

Myers recruited 30 years ago

Kendall Myers first traveled to Cuba in December 1978. He was 41 years old, a contract instructor at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and, by his own account, a disillusioned man – driven to spy, not by a desire for money or other personal gain but by a changing attitude about the United States and its communist neighbor.

“I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the evening news is a radicalizing experience,” he wrote in a diary entry from the trip released in court documents Friday. “The abuses of our system, the lack of decent medical system, the oil companies and their undisguised indifference to public needs, the complacency about the poor, the utter inability of those who are oppressed to recognize their own condition.”

By contrast, Cuba was “so exciting!” he wrote. “The revolution has released enormous potential and liberated the Cuban spirit.”

Walking past exhibits in the Museum of the Revolution in Havana “left me with a lump in my throat. They don’t need to try very hard to make the point that we have been the exploiters,” he wrote.

US academics targeted for spying

The Cuban Intelligence Service has a well-established program aimed at “spotting and assessing persons within the United States academic community who may be suitable for recruitment,” according to an FBI affidavit. The recruitment of Myers and other recent Cuban agents fit that pattern.

Myers and his wife first visited Cuba on “unofficial personal travel for academic purposes” at the invitation of an official with the Cuban Mission to the United States in New York City. Six months later, they were visited by a Cuban agent [“co-conspirator A”] in South Dakota and recruited as clandestine agents. Myers was urged to find a job at either the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency.

They returned to Washington. After failing to get a job as an analyst at the CIA, Myers(“Agent 202”) resumed employment with the Department of State's Foreign Service Institute. Gwendolyn (“Agent 123 and Agent E-634”) worked at a branch of the Riggs National Bank. She was never granted a security clearance.

Shortwave radio and Morse code

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