| | |  Americas & Beyond 
US Jails Cuba Spy Couple
 Aljazeera.net
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July 17, 2010
| | The district judge said the couple had betrayed the US. (AFP) | |
A US judge has sentenced a former state department official to life in prison without parole for his role in a 30-year conspiracy to provide classified data to Cuba, officials said.
Seventy-three-year-old Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, 72, who worked at a bank, were sentenced on Friday under a plea deal in which they admitted spying for the Communist-led government.
Gwendolyn was sentenced to more than six years in prison.
Defence lawyers had argued that she should get a more lenient sentence partly because of her poor health. She has suffered a heart attack and several minor strokes.
The husband told the judge the couple acted not for money or because they were anti-American, but because of their beliefs.
"Our overriding objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution," he said.
The couple pleaded guilty last year after their June 2009 arrest.
Known as "Agent 202," Myers pleaded guilty last November to a three-count complaint charging him with conspiracy to commit espionage and two counts of wire fraud.
His wife, known as "Agent 123" and "Agent E-634", pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to gather and transmit national defence information.
They also agreed to forfeit $1.7m from the sale of their apartment and other goods.
'Country betrayed'
Myers said US-Cuban relations had long been marked by hostility and misunderstanding and that he sought to alleviate the fears of the Cuban people who felt threatened.
Reggie Walton, the district judge, said the couple had betrayed their country, showed no remorse and even seemed proud of what they had done.
The couple were recruited by Cuba during the 1970s.
Myers rose to senior analyst on European intelligence with "top secret" clearance and access to scores of classified documents, which he passed to the Cuban government
US prosecutor Michael Harvey said at Friday's hearing that the couple received medals from the Cuban government and flew to Cuba in 1995 for a private meeting with the country's leader, Fidel Castro.
"If you believed in the revolution," the judge told the couple as they stood before him in the packed courtroom, "you should have defected".
Myers, who left the State Department in 2007, is telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell's great-grandson.
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