The Spycatcher | FBI
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Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. All foreign countries wish to know America's diplomatic and military intentions and capabilities. Ultimately, some classified information, if it got into the wrong hands, could compromise the identity and eventually the lives of American sources.

This is True Spies, Episode 5: The Spy Catcher. We also want them to tell us the tricks of the trade. How do they steal the information? How do they go unnoticed? How do they get it out of the building? And how do they send that information on to their handlers? This is the story of the hunt for one of Fidel Castro's most effective and damaging spies, Kendall Myers.

a US citizen and double agent for the Cubans. Myers operated in partnership with his wife, passing secrets from the heart of the US government, undetected and with impunity for 20 years. Your guide for this episode: former deputy director of the State Department's Office of Counterintelligence, Robert Booth.

Some people would call me a spy hunter, and that would be relatively accurate. Not only was Robert responsible for finally revealing the identity of Cuba's U.S. mole, he was also part of the team that hunted Myers down and eventually caught him in the act. And it was Robert Booth who then spent hours alone with Myers, winning his trust to extract his secrets.

Just how had Kendall, working in an unlikely partnership with his wife Gwendolyn, managed to get away with being a double agent for so long? What had made him turn against his country? So that I learned very early on in my career there were things you needed to do in order to ensure your safety and look around you to see whether or not the individuals you might be working with are in fact safe.

potential spies. Information will always be sought clandestinely by almost every country in the world. People who believe as though the U.S. government is not a good player and that the United States has attempted to betray other countries so that some Americans believe in helping level the playing field by allowing these countries to have our secrets.

September 2001. It's decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but one small section of the Cold War still rages on, albeit covertly. Fidel Castro, the man who brought the Cold War to the brink of nuclear apocalypse, remains in near total control of Cuba. As hostilities with the United States persist, Cuba's government is on the hunt for information that could give them valuable leverage.

Then, just ten days after the attacks of 9/11, a top Cuban analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency named Ana Belén Montes is arrested by the FBI. It turned out that since the 1980s she's been spying for Castro. And now, finally, she's been caught. But it doesn't end there. Montes was not working alone.

Another top-level double agent is working inside the US government and is continuing to pass Castro secrets, and no one had any idea who they were. Fast forward to the spring of 2007, and the hunt for that mole was going nowhere fast. Their identity is still a mystery, save a scant few facts. The target is passing secrets to Castro from deep inside one of the US intelligence agencies in Washington, D.C.,

The FBI was leading the investigation but drawing blanks, growing increasingly frustrated and badly in need of help. So they turned to someone unexpected. Not an operative at the peak of their career, nor even someone in the FBI. Instead, the FBI turned to a retiree. It's very hard to establish your counterintelligence credentials in the intelligence community. But once it's established,

Then people come to you, and I remember literally up to the last day, other agencies were seeking my advice on how to do things. And that's always very satisfying when you have that reputation in the community, that you're trusted and that you know what you're doing, or most of the time. Now, forget any ideas you might have conjured up of a stooped pensioner in a worn-out cardigan. This was not just any retiree.

In this moment of crisis, the FBI had turned to a counterintelligence investigation expert who had worked all over the world establishing a very specific set of skills. Yes, I had a bit of a reputation as a true investigator. Robert Booth.

Not just an experienced investigator with a proven track record of seeking out rogue spies. Working out in the field for decades, he was also an expert interviewer, extracting the crucial pieces of information from sources and captured spies. When you do interviews, the most important quality is to listen. Let the source talk. The more they talk, the more they reveal. And that's a skill that really takes time to develop, and you really don't learn that in the classroom. It's

Catching someone and listening carefully, was that the truth? Did he or she just shave a bit off that last sentence? Something just doesn't sound right. Robert Booth's investigating and debriefing abilities had seen him rise in the State Department's Office of Counterintelligence, a trusted and celebrated force in the world of rogue spy hunting. But he was about to meet his match.

Robert's involvement in this story all began with someone you might have heard about before on this podcast. I first became involved in the case when an FBI agent by the name of Kate approached me and told me that the intelligence community had been working on a counter-espionage investigation for some seven years without much success. That's Special Agent Kate Alleman.

If you heard our earlier episode on the Robert Hansen case, you'll know this wasn't her only significant contribution to the world of spy catching. This is a bit unusual is why Kate came to approach me. And that is the information that was guiding the FBI in this counter espionage investigation came from another intelligence agency. And that intelligence agency had made it very clear that

that its information could only be shared with intelligence community components whose employees had sat and successfully passed a polygraph or lie detector test. And State Department special agents do not take polygraph examinations. Okay, side note. There is a very long and complicated reason for this. It is, I'm afraid, classified.

What I will tell you is that it dates back to an argument between Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover in the early 70s, and the actions of some very overzealous CIA agents. Some State Department officials may have had some rough polygraph treatment at the hands of their colleagues. Some of them may have gone on to become influential US senators.

with a determination that none of their State Department colleagues should ever again be humiliated in polygraph interviews. But that's not important right now. What is important is the fact that the State Department is the only agency in the US intelligence community where officials don't always take polygraph examinations. And that was one reason for the FBI not wanting to bring in Robert.

It was critically important because that meant the FBI could not share the intelligence community's information with us. There might have been a slight pride issue here, too. I mean, the world of counterintelligence is not that different from any other workplace. No one ever wants to admit they need help from someone in a rival department, even if they're on the same side.

But Robert Booth wasn't just someone from a rival department. Kate knew me and understood what my background was and my access and understanding of information. She also actually broke the rules by bringing me over to the FBI headquarters

and allowing me to see the information that the other intelligence agency would not have allowed me to see. And Kate, a known mediator for resolving counterintelligence turf disputes among the NSA, CIA, FBI, and others, was persuasive. So Robert was allowed inside the hunt for the Cuban mole. It was at that point with the FBI that I was notified that this counterespionage case was codenamed

Vision Quest. But he wasn't necessarily on the team, and there was pressure on him from the moment he arrived on the case. A newcomer to an ongoing investigation, already on borrowed time to prove himself. How would you react? You'll have to hit the ground running. After all those years on the job, your reputation is now on the line. Not to mention Kate, who broke the rules to keep you in. And all you have to do is find a needle in the haystack.

A haystack that America's finest needle hunters have been searching for years. Are you ready? You arrive at a brutalist low-rise office on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. The J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You're guided through security as an outsider. You're met by agents who accompany you to join the FBI's analysts.

They tell you that the mole has evaded them for years. All eyes turn on you. What is it that you can do that all these people in this room cannot? What's your plan? When I initially entered the little conference room at the J. Edgar Hoover building to see the information that Kate wanted me to see, I had three FBI analysts in front of me. By bringing me over there, I understood that this had some kind of importance.

Well, what happened was is that I was told that since this case had been going on for at least seven years, that meant that this penetration agent or spy had been working for, and we knew it was the Cubans at this point, for over 10 years. And that meant he had to be a valuable source for the Cubans. Despite the tension in the room, Robert immediately had some ideas of where they should be looking. And so he set to work.

When I initially was given the information, I had concluded that the most likely suspect was someone who had worked inside the State Department for 10 years and had to meet a certain profile. It had to be a male, had to be married, had to work domestically for 10 years, and had actually ran a computer run. And it came up with only some 20-odd names.

So I had to have the personnel files for all 20 people pulled quietly, without arousing any suspicion, and I had to read them. And the first 12 files I went through, nothing else seemed to come up. Robert's initial confidence started to falter, but then... When I opened Kendall Meyer's file for the first time, all of a sudden, a lot of the pieces started to fall into place.

So who is Kendall Myers? Kendall Myers is the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Yes, you heard that right. His great-grandfather was one of the most famous inventors in human history. This isn't your average mole. He's an American blue blood, highly educated, got his PhD from John Hopkins University, went on to have a very successful career with the US government. And Gwen, his wife,

His wife never worked for the government. His wife never had a top-secret clearance. She actually worked for a local bank. One thing I can guarantee you, they were truly in love with each other from the moment they met up until the moment they left each other. Kendall Myers is working in the Office of Intelligence and Research. This is the department of the U.S. government that handles the most sensitive information that's passed between different intelligence agencies.

So the CIA, the NSA, and the other intelligence components gather together information in one place. It's almost the perfect target for a double agent. It puts the information together and disseminates it within the State Department to the officers needing the information. They see everything. When I started to review his personnel file, the thing that struck me was his eventual move

from the Foreign Service Institute, where he was involved more in education, to the office of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Kendall had deliberately moved to where the most sensitive information would be gathered. And once he'd succeeded in doing that, he stayed there. And that's when I knew we were in deep trouble because he'd been working there for almost eight years, seeing and reviewing the most sensitive intelligence community assets, including intelligence

technical operations and human source operations. Then came the key piece of information to indicate that the mole was Kendall. The most critical part was that he had a Cuban connection and the fact that he had traveled to Cuba while he was a contract employee of the U.S. Department of State.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Cuba. For arrivals, please... That led me to conclude, if the information and my analysis was correct, it could be no one other than Kendall Myers. I was absolutely convinced when I finished reading his personnel file. And I remember I was in a small windowless cubicle and I laid the file on top of the others and I just...

thought to myself, "My goodness, I think I've identified a Cuban spy." It is a great sense of satisfaction. It appeared that Robert Booth had achieved what the FBI and CIA analysts had failed to uncover in years: the name of a mole with his hands on the US's most sensitive intelligence assets. But would the FBI accept his analysis?

He'd only been working on the case for a matter of days, and he just swans in on their turf and blows the whole thing wide open. He's either going to look like a genius, or his colleagues are going to look incompetent.

How are they going to handle this? Now, the FBI was a bit hesitant because, frankly, I did this in less than 10 days. Now, they've been doing this for eight years, so I can understand there was a bit of hesitation and reluctance on the part of my FBI colleague to accept this. But very quickly, in using their information and their methods and sources, it became clear to them that it was Kendall. Robert was on the team.

But this was just the beginning. And there's a difference between an inquiry and an investigation. In an inquiry, you're just trying to establish basic facts. Once the fact leads you to identify a suspect, then the case goes into the investigative mode. This stage of a spy hunting operation is all about getting watertight evidence.

Robert and his newly won-over FBI colleagues set about trying to catch Kendall in the act. Without that piece of the picture, Kendall Myers might get away with his years of betrayal. It's very difficult to catch a spy because it's one thing to have a suspicion, and even a strong suspicion, but it's a totally other thing to eventually have enough evidence to prosecute.

A really good, smart person like Kendall will always avoid detection for years and years, if maybe not forever. I mean, there are State Department employees who I know successfully evaded us and retired and got away with it. From the moment we identified Kendall Myers by name, we implemented all sorts of activities to physically catch him in the act of passing classified information to a foreign intelligence service.

But he and she were very good, and we never did. Kendall and his wife Gwen were able to keep passing information to Castro, right under the noses of Robert and his team. This strange partnership, an elderly duo in their early 70s, hardly Bonnie and Clyde, but clearly very much in love, working as an unlikely but devastating team.

compromising the US government's diplomatic initiatives with Cuba for the last two decades, not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars worth of technical operations. Now they continue to live out seemingly normal domestic lives while outfoxing numerous highly trained intelligence operatives. How were they doing it? No one could work it out. Were they really that far ahead of the game?

Now, in the past, they employed what we call brush passes. And that would be a Cuban intelligence officer would enter a grocery store. Gwendolyn would enter the grocery store. They'd both have carts. They'd both put carts. They'd have one chicken, one thing of eggs, one loaf of bread, similar. And as they would pass each other in an aisle, they'd quickly exchange carts.

And in Gwen's cart would be some classified information in the form of a microfilm or whatever. We would have loved to film that. We'd have loved to film one going in, one coming out, one going in, one going out. But by the time we came on to Kendall and Gwen, all that information was being passed electronically on laptops and internet cafes, which is incredibly difficult to catch. There was very little physical passing information.

very little meeting face-to-face in the United States. They would only meet face-to-face outside the United States. And by the time we identified them, they were not meeting face-to-face outside the United States anymore, so we couldn't even follow them in South America, where they normally met their Cuban handlers once every six months. And as time passed, the situation got worse. Kendall announced his retirement from the State Department, so the clock was now ticking on his spying days.

and with it, any opportunity to catch him in the act. And then things got worse. And when they did, it came in the form of every Maverick spy hunter's number one nemesis.

Some of the protocols are that at some point you must let some senior people in the State Department know that there's an ongoing counterespionage investigation and the focus is on a State Department employee. And normally the Secretary of State or her deputy would be notified. But someone said the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State that controls the Office of Intelligence and Research

needs to be told. And when that happened, it resulted in every maverick spy hunter's number two nemesis: politicians. I was violently opposed to that. The person who occupied that position was a political appointee, and I felt there was no value in it. It usually signals danger for a spy operation when a politician gets involved in a case. Maybe it's their ego? Maybe their enthusiasm to help? It's definitely their ego.

But either way, Robert knows if they are let in on the operation, they are a threat. Because frankly, they haven't been trained in the subtleties needed for spy hunting. But I was overturned. At that point, I was only a consultant. I was not the deputy director anymore. And he was informed. And being a political person and not someone very well learned in counterintelligence, he started to do things that would indicate to Kendall that he might be under suspicion.

Up to that point, everything we had done in monitoring Kendall, even going into his house when he wasn't there, Kendall had never detected. But at one point, when Kendall was considering retiring, and what you always do when an employee says, I'm going to retire, his fellow employees or her fellow employees will throw a farewell party. So his fellow employees learned that Kendall may be retiring, so they went to the assistant secretary, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Forte,

And they told him he wanted to throw a retirement party. And Fort said, over my dead body. You'll never have a farewell party for him. Trust me on this. And when the fellow employees heard Mr. Fort say that, they were flabbergasted. They'd never heard that before. So they went to Kendall and said, hey, Kendall, did you do something to piss off Mr. Fort? And at that point, Kendall suspected that something was amiss.

As Robert predicted, the politician had made a key mistake. He had outwardly showed hostility towards Kendall that couldn't be logically explained. That behavior had put the double agent on alert. Not wanting to risk their actions being watched so close to the date of their retirement, Kendall and Gwen completely shut down their clandestine life. They really became a normal retired couple. They even started devoting themselves to the pleasures of learning to sail a 38-foot sailboat.

complete with luxurious mahogany-lined living quarters. The kind of boat that could easily make a short trip over to, say, Cuba? Should the situation arise. Eventually, after he'd retired, we realized he did not have access to classified information anymore, so we'd never physically catch them in the act of trying to pass information. Surely the final opportunity to catch Kendall and his accomplice passing secrets to Castro had now passed.

After almost 18 months of intensive, expensive and exhaustive surveillance, Kendall, Gwen and Castro seem to have won. How would you feel? The injustice. Would you just walk away? Or would you try and make one last high-risk play? Robert and his team felt they still had one play left. It was a final high-risk opportunity.

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In spring 2009, Robert and the FBI developed a plan to lure Kendall back into the secret life that he had abandoned. We would employ what's called a false flag operation. And a false flag means someone would approach Kendall claiming he's a Cuban when in fact he's an asset of the U.S. intelligence community. The reason why this is a high risk, if Kendall were to suspect

that this false flag, this Cuban agent, was in fact a U.S. intelligence asset, he would then know that his cover was blown, that he was a full-time suspect of the FBI, and that he had to undertake no future activity to endanger himself. It was raining on the morning of Kendall Meyer's 72nd birthday, and as he was waking and opening his presents from Gwen,

Robert and his team were preparing their own surprise. Once final preparations were in place, Robert and his team nervously made the short trip to Baltimore, Maryland. Their destination was a university campus. After retiring from U.S. intelligence, Kendall had taken up lecturing at John Hopkins University, teaching the next generation his take on international relations and foreign policy.

But on this damp April day in 2009, Robert and his team were ready to plant their false flag. When it was all agreed that we believed Kendall might be susceptible to a false flag, an asset of the intelligence community posed as a Cuban intelligence officer, approached him on the campus of John Hopkins University where Kendall was teaching. It was almost evening now.

and the campus was emptying of students for the day. The Cuban intelligence officer was on his way to approach Kendall. The plan was for him to engage as a comrade from Castro's Cuba. But would Kendall take the bait? Robert and his colleagues waited out of sight, breaths held, pulses racing, intently listening to the events about to unfold. They were utterly powerless in this moment.

It all came down to how convincing their undercover Cuban intelligence officer could be. In spy operations, it often comes down to crucial moments like these. If Kendall walked away, it was over. The undercover officer strode decisively across the campus, under his arm, a small wooden box. He saw his target, bespectacled, standing six feet, six inches tall, with a receding white hairline and a mustache that draped over his mouth.

looking every bit the professor these days. Walked up to him, offered him a Cohiba cigar and said a pass code word, which Kendall then accepted as being genuine, could only come from a genuine intelligence officer, and agreed to meet for a drink after class at a hotel close to the John Hopkins University campus. And we were listening in on this. We all just looked at each other and said, he's admitting it.

He's acknowledging a clandestine relationship with a suspected Cuban asset, talking to this Cuban asset about his career as a spy. It may not have been enough to prosecute, but for us, we knew we finally had him. Kendall Myers might have thought he was receiving the best birthday present possible. After years of lying low in retirement, out on the sidelines, he was being called back into the spying game.

In his excitement, he made another fatal error. Incidentally, one that could have been prevented if it wasn't for the cleverness of his great-grandfather, Alexander Graham Bell. And even better than that is that he called Gwendolyn up on the phone and said, "Gwen, you have to come down to the hotel here. I've got something going that's really important."

And so he's going on and on. He wouldn't tell her what was going on. And we actually had FBI agents monitoring Glenn at her house. And she got so nervous about it, she jumped in the car and almost had five accidents driving down to the hotel. This phone call then confirmed the fact that she was a full-time co-conspirator.

And so when they went to the hotel and they initially started talking, and he started talking about his previous work for the Cubans, we knew we were on to something good. But still no arrests. More meetings between the undercover Cuban agent and Robert and Gwen were arranged. Each time, Robert and his team listened out for new pieces of evidence that would come together to form a watertight prosecution. It's really the Department of Justice.

And the Department of Justice lawyers have to examine all the information we had gathered, all the evidence we had gathered, to determine whether or not an arrest would hold up. And the FBI had been told, can you get the asset on a final meeting to start to reveal even more sensitive information? It was a bit of a Hail Mary pass, as we say in English. So, the final meeting was arranged.

One last attempt to hold Kendall and Gwen accountable for years of betrayal. Could their spy get Castro's spies to fully incriminate themselves? Luckily, the Cuban asset was skillful enough to get Kendall to start revealing even more sensitive information. And the Cuban asset started asking even more probing sensitive information. Kendall started to hesitate.

And at that point, the FBI realized enough is enough, and the FBI entered the room. And the amazing thing is the FBI walks in, says, we're FBI, and Gwen realized all along that now that Cuban asset really was an FBI asset and looks over at Kendall and points her finger and says, I told you so. Gwendolyn always deep down had a real suspicion about the Cuban, but really FBI asset.

Luckily for us, Kendall did not share her beliefs, nor did he listen to her. He really wanted to get back into the spy business. He'd been gone for almost one year, and I think that he missed being a spy. Kendall enjoyed going to parties and dinners surrounded by senior State Department people, knowing deep down he had a secret that they did not know, and that he was a spy. And he really thoroughly reveled

in that secret life. Kendall and Gwen's secret life was now over. But many of the secrets themselves, what they had actually revealed to the Cubans and how they evaded detection for so long, was still a mystery. Again, America's intelligence community turned to Robert Booth. Something that's not well known is that after the arrest of a suspected spy,

that as you go forward with prosecution, one of the things we, the spy catchers, really want to get to is a debriefing. And that is an interview with a spy to talk to him or her about his or her life. It's very important for us, and in most cases in which a spy who is convicted and pleads guilty

In order to have his or her sentence reduced, they agree to be debriefed by special agents of the FBI and diplomatic security, and then maybe by other intelligence community components. It's important to do these interviews to learn from him or her how they were so successful for so long in evading us.

We also want them to tell us the tricks of the trade. How did they steal the information? How did they go unnoticed? How did they get it out of the building? And how did they send that information on to their handlers? These are all important things. You really want them to tell you how they were able to achieve what they did and maybe why they did it and some of the efforts they took to mask and disguise how they went about doing their clandestine information collecting.

I think why I was picked to be the lead State Department debriefer is because I've had thousands of hours of debriefing State Department people and others, and I had previously debriefed Rick Ames, the CIA betrayer who is in prison for life, and Jim Clark, a non-State Department employee who had successfully had two State Department people provide him with classified. And I think people who read my reports

We're very satisfied with the quality of the report and what I was able to get out of both of those individuals. So how did Robert plan on getting all this out of Kendall? After all, it was largely down to Robert that Kendall had been caught. You'd think he was the last person in the world Kendall would want to be in a room with.

let alone give up vital information that could help catch other spies. So the most important thing is to develop rapport. The primary goal of my debriefing was to have Kendall explain to me how he was so successful in hiding his clandestine activities and for him to tell me what we could do to better protect ourselves from people like him.

You can't sit down and talk to them in an accusatory tone. I'm not there to point my finger and say you're a bad person. I'm there to establish a relationship. Of course, that sounds good in theory. But in the heat of the moment, things are different. When you're there, finally, in the same room, investigating every possible angle and aspect of their life, from what time they brush their teeth in the morning to the side of the bed they go to sleep on at night, yet you've never actually met them.

They can attain almost mythical status in your mind. And then suddenly, you're sitting across from them. During the course of the investigation, I had seen Kendall Myers numerous times on videotapes. I'd listened to his voice. But I never actually met Kendall face to face until the first time of the debriefing. And as I opened up the door,

And I started to step in, the FBI agent interrupted and says, "Let it be noted that Robert Booth has stepped into the room and Kendall Myers now has a smile on his face." The individual sitting across from the table from me, that person is going to jail and they're never getting out. And I remember walking into the room and realizing he's a very tall guy, very slender, very soft-spoken, and highly educated. You're sitting across from this imposing figure, stripped of all his freedom.

Because of your relentless work. Because... of you. Of course you feel justified in putting him there, but he certainly doesn't see it like that. Yet here, right now, in this moment, if you don't connect and develop some kind of rapport, you'll never learn his secrets. Gone. Forever. How he inveigled himself into a position of power. How he obtained information. How he smuggled it out from under your nose. How he evaded capture.

Getting all that information is going to require him wanting to spend time with you. And you desperately need to learn his secrets so you can protect future US intelligence from getting into the hands of people like him. This is exactly the kind of information that saves lives. But first of all though, you have to form a kind of connection. But how? What do your years of experience tell you? How do you get him to want to sit down with you?

Uh, Kendall Meyer enjoyed talking to me because I let him talk. I fed to his ego. I always reminded him how good he was, how successful he was, and explained how he did it. So he was willing to talk to me. Feeding his ego. He was getting terrible prison food, so every time at lunch break, I knew he liked carrot cake and hot pastrami sandwiches, which he will never get in prison. So during the break, I'd walk down to the local deli.

I'd get a carrot cake and a pastrami sandwich, and then we'd go off record and we'd talk for 15, 20 minutes about life in general. And then he'd have his carrot cake and his pastrami sandwich in his belly, and we'd get the recording devices up and he would talk. There was no acrimony between him and I. We sat down and I got on with my business, he got on with his business.

What we eventually learned was that when he traveled to Cuba as a guest of the Cuban government, he had kept a diary with him of what it was like to live or stay a couple of weeks in Cuba. The Cuban intelligence services went into his hotel room and they read his passages and they saw that he was enamored with the Cuban revolution. Now, they could have taken a guess that it might have been a provocation,

that he was looking to be recruited because he actually worked for the intelligence services. But eventually they would conclude that the entries in the diary were genuine and it gave them the opportunity to eventually approach him in the United States by knocking on his door and inviting themselves inside his house

And at that point, they pitched him to become a spy for the Cuban intelligence service. His wife, she was a full-time 100% co-conspirator. She had first been exposed to Cuba when the office of the Senate whom she worked with, Senator Abrazov, was someone who believed in rapprochement with the Cubans. So it was there she started to develop and gain the same sentiments towards Cuba.

that her husband shared. Having learned the story of how Kendall and Gwen were recruited, they moved on to how Kendall and Gwen operated as a partnership, obtaining the secret information and then smuggling it out of the U.S. to Cuba. How Kendall took the information out of the State Department and got it to Gwendolyn was fascinating. He was very scared of ever being caught taking documents out of the building, maybe an unexpected search by the guards.

So what Kendall did is he learned to memorize very well. He learned to write down keywords on a piece of paper, which he'd put in his pocket when he left the building. He would then go home. Gwendolyn would break out the laptop computer and based off his memory and keywords he'd written down on a piece of paper, he was able to recreate whole conversations and classified documents and spoke them out. Gwendolyn would type them up on a computer

Download the information to a flash drive, take the flash drive to Internet Cafe, and then send the messages to a handler, a guy named Peter, in Mexico City for onward transmission to Cuba. Robert and Kendall talked. Hours passed. And Robert started to recognize some familiar traits in the motivations for his betrayal.

It's kind of hard to believe that someone would spy for, let's say, Cuba or China, given the human rights record that they have. The two primary reasons are for money or for ideology. When an intelligence service attempts to recruit an American, they do a full profile of that American. And one of the best reasons you can recruit an American is for money.

and that they identify people who need money or those American citizens will approach the Foreign Intelligence Service clandestinely saying, "I will give you information for money." Almost every one of these people share something in common, and that is their ego. We have an acronym which we call MICE, M, MONEY, I, IDEOLOGY, C, COMPROMISE, E, and EGO.

and that all share the ego thing. They believe they're smarter than anybody else. They believe they know more than anybody else. They're arrogant, they're deceitful, they're narcissists, and in the end, they're unrepentant.

So it's an interesting phenomenon. But nowadays, most Americans who are recruited do it for monetary reasons. The other reason why foreign intelligence services have been able to recruit State Department people specifically is for ideological reasons. And Robert had discovered that it wasn't the motivation of money that made Kendall a turncoat. It was ideology that had turned him against his country. He didn't take a penny.

Kendall Myers didn't take a penny. An ideological spy is no different to me than one who accepts money. It's the betrayal. The fact that they have taken a trust, they've taken an oath, and then they betray it. And the thing that got me about Kendall Myers and Ana Montes and others, if they were so enamored with Cuba, why didn't they just get up and go and live there? So that was always something hard for me to understand.

The information that Robert was able to extract from Kendall had crucial implications for how the U.S. defends secret information. There were a couple of primary themes that I got, and one was the ease by which Kendall was able to get information physically out of the State Department. That was just stunning. It's all little pieces of paper in his mind. The second thing was how easy he was to seduce his colleagues physically.

into having them reveal information that they otherwise should not have been revealing. As I was interviewing him, realizing how easy it was for Kendall to do this, to go to a fellow colleague, to the Cuban specialist guy by the name of Jim, and he said, "Oh, how's our buddy Fidel doing today?" Jim, wanting as any colleague would do, said, "Oh, you know, this is what we see Castro doing. This is what we see the Cuban government doing."

and literally give a 10-minute synopsis of what our office and what the intelligence community was thinking. He would write down key words to what Jim had told him on a piece of paper, and then go home and recreate Jim's entire conversation. And that point we realized Kendall was revealing incredibly sensitive information to the Cuban intelligence service. Just picture Robert, sat across from Kendall in that tiny room,

Kendall relaxes into the conversation as he talks with increasing abandon about the depths of his treason. And Robert? Outwardly passive. Interested, but calm. Always polite and friendly. But inside? How would you feel? If, like Robert, you devoted your entire professional life to helping the US government, hearing the extent of this treachery revealed by someone who seems proud of what they have done,

As he's disclosing this and we're understanding it, you do get angry because he has betrayed your country. He took the same oath I did. And if you really disagree with the government and the way they're doing something, then my attitude is you just resign. You retire. But that personal feeling you have to let go. You've got to sit there. Professionally, whether you like to admit it or not, you have to admire the fact that this guy was a good spy.

For what he wanted to do, he was very successful, and he almost got away with it. So professionally, there's a bit of admiration. He did his job. This is my professional adversary. So give him his due. I mean, afterwards, when it was all said and done, you know, it's still really hard to accept the fact that...

The only difference between him and me was he became, is that he became a spy. I mean, he, he, had I seen him at a State Department function, I would have accepted him as a good man. A good man? Well, it turned out Kendall's deceptions had not stopped at the point of his arrest. Oh, I did not get the full truth out of him during the debriefing at all. Oh, I know he lied to me on several occasions.

We have a videotape of him doing something on the final day he was in the State Department. I have it on videotape, I've seen it, that when I questioned him obliquely about it, he denied everything. It puts it into perspective that he still is an intelligence officer now. He may be an exposed intelligence officer, but he's not about to give up all his secrets.

At the conclusion of the 18 hours, I think I said, you know, I want to thank you for cooperating this, although I know he lied to me in it. We stood up. We did not shake hands. And I said, good luck. And I meant that sincerely because where he was going, his life is pure hell. It's hell on earth.

After Kendall and Gwen had pled guilty, as part of the plea bargain agreement, he agreed to get life in prison without the possibility of parole, and he would participate in the debriefing if Gwen got 80 months. He ended up in Florence Supermax, which is the most restrictive prison in the United States, where he is now and where he will be for the rest of his life. Robert's involvement in the life of Kendall and Gwen Myers had finished. Another case closed.

In the dark, dark world of turncoats and American betrayers, another double agent brought down. And for Robert, after a career of spy hunting, after the fact, maybe their betrayal felt more sadly inevitable than shocking. But what about those close to the Myers? Who knew them as just a quiet, friendly and loving couple about to begin a long, happy retirement together?

How would you feel if you found out that people close to you who fit that description were, in fact, spies? None initially could accept the fact that Kendall was a spy. They all thought it's not possible that we had got the wrong person. One of the things you must do upon the arrest of a spy is you have to do interviews. And like I said earlier, this is something I felt I was pretty good at.

And I remember the first person I talked to was the former ambassador to Bulgaria or Romania. She actually was my boss in Paris, France. Her name was Avis Bolin. And when I went to talk to Avis, because we knew from following Kendall who his friends were and socially and professionally, and because I knew Avis, I felt very comfortable going to talk to her. And I remember going into her office and

And I said, "I haven't seen you in some time." We knew each other and I said, "Well, I'm here because of the arrest of, you know, Kendall Myers and I understand you knew him." And she looked at me and said, "You know, Robert, he's only a suspect. I mean, you know, he's not been convicted of anything." And I looked at her and I said, "Even now, even after the arrest, and arrests are only allowed after the Department of Justice has carefully examined the information.

She could not believe that this friend of some 20, 30 years was in fact a spy. Other State Department employees who I interviewed, and they're interviews and debriefs. The reason why I think it is because first, they cannot believe that a friend that they have had, a colleague, both either professionally or socially, for so long, someone who's glib, cheerful, thoughtful, intellectual, intelligent,

shares the same values, could possibly have a double or secret life. It's just not possible. And worse is then they start to think about some of the conversations they've had in the past with him. They start to think about some of the questions he may have asked, what he was talking about. And all of a sudden, all those activities now fall under suspicion. So then they realize their entire life

lives or social interaction with him may have only been motivated by his conceit and his spying activities. That is a terrible revelation. It's an incredible betrayal. So does that incredible betrayal fade away as the dust begins to settle on another closed case? Can you just turn it on and off? That highly tuned sensitivity to the honesty and integrity of actions of those you spend your time with?

If your entire working life was spent second-guessing people's loyalty, how could you trust anyone, knowing what you know about deception? Yeah, it's always there. It's always hard to believe it. But if I have to trust people...

And so you can't let that guide your relationships. Trust but verify, I think is what President Reagan said a long time ago. I think that, you know, if you have access to top secret information, you're always going to be a target, targeted by a foreign intelligence service. I think that, you know, you have to make judgments about a lot of people. In my life, I mean, I trust my wife and my daughter. There's nothing they hide from me. I mean, but the betrayal that comes from

a colleague who is a government employee, someone who shares a top secret information, someone who's taken an oath of loyalty to the government. Deep in the back of my mind, I always have to say, could this person be a spy? I'm Hayley Atwell. Join us next week for another rendezvous with True Spies. True Spies

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