Kendall’s great-uncle Alphonso Taft co-founded the Skull and Bones Society at Yale, whose future members would include both Presidents Bush and Secretary of State John Kerry.
Living a life of privilege, Kendall left Washington, DC, to complete his high school education at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, which was established in 1893 and proudly boasted of fifty-four Olympians, seven Rhodes scholars, two Academy Award winners, three Medal of Honor recipients, and one Nobel laureate among its former students. As I sat at the table, flipping through Kendall’s folder and skimming his biography, I wondered darkly if the venerable school was about to add “one American traitor” to the distinctions listed on its website.
According to his SY File, Kendall enrolled at Brown University in 1955 and studied European history but left before graduation to join the US Army in 1959. He was assigned to the Army Security Agency where he completed intensive communications training, which would have included a basic course in Morse code, and attended classes to study the Czech language.
He was assigned as a “Voice Interceptor” to a military base in then West Germany where he translated the intercepted radio transmissions of Czech military units.
Familiarity with coded shortwave radio transmissions was one of the FBI’s “Vision Quest” characteristics for which I was searching. Other than department communications officers, I had never encountered a department officer who had mastered Morse code. I started breathing a little faster.
Following his honorable discharge as a specialist fifth class on March 17, 1962, Kendall returned to Brown, graduated with a BA in international affairs in June 1963, and commenced graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS campus. A division of Johns Hopkins University since 1950, SAIS was and is devoted to the study of international relations and foreign policy. As far as the IC was concerned, it was an environment where foreign intelligence agents under diplomatic, business, journalistic, or academic cover were drawn to assess and dissect our future policymakers and leaders. The campus was also a hotbed of leftist intellectual activity. In short, it was an ideal place for spotting and recruiting future agents. Ana Belen Montes, the DIA’s senior Cuban analyst who was arrested in 2001 and eventually convicted of spying for the CuIS, earned her master’s degree in 1988 from SAIS. Montes was recruited by the CuIS with the help of fellow SAIS student, State Department Agency for International Development (USAID) employee and Cuban penetration agent Marta Rita Velazquez. I had worked with the FBI in monitoring Velazquez for many years while she worked for USAID in South America. (Velazquez’s DOJ indictment for espionage was unsealed in 2013. She lives in Sweden with her husband, an official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and cannot be extradited to the United States under Swedish law.)
Was history repeating itself? This item was not one of the characteristics we were looking for, but I still wondered if Kendall’s long-term studies at SAIS revealed a political orientation that could be of interest to a foreign intelligence service. College campuses of the 1960s were centers of opposition to the US government’s policies, and while most students protested peacefully, others such as the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen resorted to violence. Then there were students like Theresa Squillacote, James M. Clark, and Kurt Stand, who were seduced by Marxist ideology, clandestinely recruited by the East German Intelligence Service, and convicted traitors to their country. Had Kendall joined their ranks?
In 1964, Kendall married Maureen Leach, a medical student he had met at Brown. Maureen earned a PhD in microbiology from Georgetown University and became a recognized expert in the treatment of HIV/AIDS patients. The marriage ended in an uncontested divorce in 1977 with Maureen obtaining custody of their two children. Four years later, Kendall was over $3,000 in arrears in his $400 monthly child support, and a $600 lien was placed on his Johns Hopkins SAIS paycheck.
Even more humiliating for the professor, he was ordered by a judge to pay $30,010 for his children’s college expenses. This information did not connect with the investigative matrix and was of marginal interest except to understand his lifestyle and, perhaps, his persona. Was the need for money a motivation for Kendall to become a spy? For the FBI and CIA penetration agents, the answer is yes; for department employees, e.g., Irvin Scarbeck, Steven Lalas, and Geneva Jones, the answer is almost always no.
Kendall earned his master’s degree and started work on his PhD at SAIS, continuing his passion for international politics with a pronounced interest in all things British. He was an unabashed Anglophile and proud of it. I later learned that Tom Murray, one of Kendall’s SAIS students in 1992, disclosed in an article that Myers expressed high regard for the notorious Kim Philby and two other Britons—Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess—who were clandestine SVR agents during the Cold War. According to Murray, Kendall suggested that they were called by their sense of duty to save Europe (rather than the British Empire) and that US and UK policies “turned them into spies.” Murray went on to describe how the SAIS student newspaper staff ran a coffee shop in a school basement, named with tongue firmly in cheek as the Alger Hiss Café.
In early 1976, Kendall’s colleagues at SAIS were intimately familiar with the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI), where FSOs were trained in area studies and foreign languages in preparation for their overseas careers. Given Kendall’s background in European History and teaching skills, his SAIS friends recommended that he seek employment at FSI. He did and was hired as a part-time instructor on a contract basis. That same year Kendall was introduced to Gwendolyn Steingraber, a divorcée with four children who worked in Washington, DC, on US senator James Abourezk’s (D-South Dakota) staff. In 1977, Senator Abourezk’s distaste for the Cuban economic embargo was well established on the Hill and, in support of this public position, he had taken several trips to Cuba. Gwendolyn’s main responsibility was to coordinate with fellow staffers the Senate’s vote to extend legislatively the constitutional time limits for states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. That failed. What succeeded spectacularly was Kendall and Gwendolyn’s relationship. The attraction was mutual, immediate, and forever.
I would learn about Gwendolyn’s background later because it was not covered in Kendall’s SY File. The department does not investigate the background of spouses.
Gwendolyn was born in 1938 in Sioux City, Iowa. Her early life was characterized by a young marriage that lasted eighteen years and produced four children. Gwendolyn volunteered at her children’s schools and was an avid tennis player, competing in city and state tournaments and working with several girls’ tennis groups. Apparently bitten by the political bug, Gwendolyn was elected secretary and treasurer of the School of Hope in Aberdeen, South Dakota. In 1971, she was hired by the Brown County Democratic Party, and shortly after that, she volunteered to work as a legislative aide in the Aberdeen joint campaign office of James Abourezk, who was running for a US Senate seat, and George McGovern, the South Dakota senator running for the US presidency. Abourezk’s campaign was successful; McGovern’s was not.
Gwendolyn moved to Denver in 1974 and remarried; this time it lasted barely two years. Her life took a dramatic turn in 1976 when Senator Abourezk transferred her to his Washington, DC, office to work on special projects and as an assistant to the senator’s press assistant. Within months of her arrival, she was introduced to Kendall by one of his roommates. They were soon traveling together on vacations in the United States and destinations overseas. Was Gwendolyn’s political indoctrination now in the hands of Kendall Myers? Or was it vice versa?
In March 1979, Kendall resigned his teaching position with FSI to accompany Gwendolyn to South Dakota so she could care for her ailing mother. Political contacts helped Gwendolyn obtain a job there, and Kendall advised his closest friends that he would now have a perfect opportunity to finish his thesis: “When Business Rolled—A Re-Examination of Neville Chamberlain and British Policy in the 1930s.” I suspect that in reality Kendall could not bear the possibility of
being without the new love of his life following his divorce and years of solitude.
After a year’s sojourn in South Dakota, Kendall and Gwendolyn returned to Washington, DC, along with Gwendolyn’s mother and children. Kendall resumed his teaching duties at SAIS and local universities, and Gwendolyn was hired by Riggs National Bank, where she would work until 2007. The couple led a quiet life that raised no suspicions among family, friends, or colleagues. To outsiders, they looked like an idyllic Ozzie and Harriet married couple.
Gwendolyn played tennis, and they purchased a used sailboat that they moored on Chesapeake Bay. Gwendolyn would eventually take a home study sailing course offered by the Coast Guard Navigation School in Annapolis and would complete a two-day, onboard sailing class with “Womanship” in 1991.
I later learned that in September 1981, shortly following his return from South Dakota, Kendall applied for a position with the Central Intelligence Agency. This fact was not in Kendall’s SY File. In 1982, the CIA declined to offer Kendall a job in large part because he failed the pre-employment background investigation, which includes a personal interview, personal history check, and polygraph examination. He quietly withdrew his application for employment. Kendall, now wise to the world of the IC’s pre-employment checks, would never again take a lie detector test. He decided to return to the only agency within the IC that does not administer pre-employment or random polygraph examinations for its employees with code word “top secret” clearances.
Kendall submitted his application for readmission to FSI and on May 8, 1982, after subtle hints from the DS investigators—this was still the 1980s, and “living in sin” was not encouraged—he married Gwendolyn.
That August, Kendall was rehired by FSI as a contract instructor. Any candidate who applied for and was hired by FSI in the 1980s was issued a “secret” level security clearance by DS based on a personal interview and a National Agency Check—all candidates’ names were vetted against federal databases to include the CIA. The CIA name check came back with no negative results. How could this be?
Did Kendall fail his CIA personal interview? Impossible, he is too glib and intelligent. Did he fail the CIA personal history check? No, in 1981 there was nothing “disqualifying” about his life that would have caused the CIA to reject his candidacy. Did Kendall fail his 1981 CIA polygraph exam? Kendall told a former student, Brian Lagrotteria, to be careful of trying to gain employment with the CIA because “they will give you a lie-detector test, and they will not accept you if you’ve done anything wrong.” Did Kendall fail the CIA polygraph? Why else would the CIA not hire such a highly qualified candidate? If so, did the CIA alert the State Department to this fact when he applied for a job two years later? His hiring by the State Department is almost conclusive evidence that it did not. The CIA had also failed to notify the State Department that Steven Lalas, a State Department telecommunications specialist who was convicted in 1993 of espionage against the United States, had failed his polygraph examination when he applied for employment with State after “washing out” from CIA training. Why wouldn’t the CIA alert the State Department of Kendall’s polygraph failure during the State Department’s background investigations? Were there privacy concerns? Did incompetence play a role here?
Unfortunately we will never know.
As a State Department employee, Kendall’s “secret” clearance did not authorize him access to classified information except in limited circumstances such as when guest speakers conducted classes at the “confidential” level where Kendall was present. Within a year, FSI offered Kendall a permanent position as the instructor and chairperson of Western European Studies, which upgraded his status to that of a fulltime department employee with a “top secret” clearance. According to State Department regulations, a “top secret” clearance could be issued only upon the successful completion of a non-derogatory full-field background investigation.
For the first time since I started to look at Kendall’s official record, I noted a huge anomaly. After FSI forwarded a written application to the State Department’s personnel office requesting that Kendall be hired as a fulltime employee, DS opened a full-field background investigation in 1983. The department’s investigators were now required to verify his claimed service in the US Armed Forces, his college degrees, his time spent overseas, the circumstances of his divorce, his citizenship, and confirmation of his residences for the past fifteen years. Interviews of references, contacts, friends, neighbors, supervisors, and the like would also be conducted. However, unlike applicable requirements for employment by the FBI, CIA, and DIA, polygraph exams for the State Department were not part of the drill, either then or now.
It took almost ten months to complete the investigation and for the report to be submitted to the DS adjudicators, who would determine whether any uncovered information disqualified him on suitability or loyalty grounds and would preclude the issuance of “top secret” clearance.
Here is the surprising detail I discovered: in 1976, Kendall had been convicted for negligent homicide.
On November 26, 1975, while driving up Forty-Ninth Street in the Spring Valley neighborhood of Washington, DC, Kendall struck and killed Susan Slattery, a sixteen-year-old high school student, and broke the legs of her friend Peter Barlerin, who was crushed against a parked car. Another companion, Bryan Wehrli, suffered a shattered femur.
According to police records, Kendall was driving below the posted speed limit, passed a sobriety test, and answered all questions without any attempts at evasion or concealment. At his first court appearance, he pleaded not guilty and requested a jury trial. Kendall’s defense was that at the time of the accident (9:30 p.m.), it was dark when he crossed the intersection of the 3900 block of Forty-Ninth Street, and he saw the teenagers only at the final moment. He stated the victims were carrying dark boxes and were not walking in a designated pedestrian crossing zone. The surviving teenagers explained that they were loading musical equipment in a car parked on the street. This accident appears to be one of those horrible, unforgiving acts of life.
On December 30, 1976, Kendall was convicted by a jury of negligent homicide. The following March, a judge sentenced Kendall to three years of unsupervised probation, with no fine or loss of license. Subsequent to the criminal trial, the Slattery family sued for $1 million in a civil action but ultimately settled out of court for $85,000. Kendall was not associated in any fashion with the State Department on that tragic Thanksgiving Eve.
If I were a State Department adjudicator in the 1980s, I would have reviewed the incident with some concern. I do not know of a single State Department employee who has ever been hired with a conviction of negligent homicide except, now, for Kendall.
Kendall’s second encounter with law enforcement was far different. Kendall and Gwendolyn were arrested in September 1979 for possession of marijuana. The facts were outlined in the Supreme Court of South Dakota’s decision dated September 17, 1980, ruling on the state’s appeal of an order of the circuit court granting Kendall’s motion to suppress certain evidence:
Acting pursuant to an informant’s tip regarding drug-related activity, a search warrant was obtained authorizing a search of a residence at 328 North Grand in Pierre. At approximately 7:30 on the evening of September 17, 1979, several law enforcement officers, led by Hughes County Deputy Sheriff Charles Vollmer, undertook to serve the warrant. The officers positioned themselves at various places around the house.
Deputy Sheriff Vollmer opened the screen door without first knocking, whereupon he and the other two officers entered the porch and approached the front door to the living quarters. Finding this door open and observing two occupants in the living room, one in possession of a marijuana pipe and a tray of what appeared to be marijuana, Deputy Vollmer entered the living room, announcing his purpose to execute the search warrant almost simultaneously with his entry, although he could not recall whether the announcement was made before or after he stepped in the room.
Kendall’s
attorneys claimed that Deputy Vollmer’s failure to knock at the open door and unannounced intrusion into the house was an unlawful “no knock” entrance that meant all evidence seized during the raid should have been suppressed during the first trial, including multiple bags of leafy substances, water pipes, and a book entitled Marijuana Grower’s Guide. The leafy substances tested positive for marijuana.
Suddenly the public record involving this case disappeared. I am persuaded that the judge gave Kendall a “suspended imposition of sentence” so that the conviction was eventually expunged from the records. Senator Abourezk wrote a letter to the judge in support of Kendall’s request for no jail time. He has always had well-connected friends in high places.
In 1984, almost one year to the day after the investigation was opened, William D’Urso, chief of the Office of Security’s Applicant Review Branch, forwarded an unclassified memorandum to the State Department’s Office of Recruitment, Examination and Employment (BEX), the department’s office responsible for hiring employees.
Kendall was not eligible for a “top secret” clearance. It was simply not possible in 1983 for any US government agency to grant a “top secret” security clearance to an applicant convicted of negligent homicide and marijuana possession and with public financial difficulties in his or her background. DS’s decision was communicated to FSI senior management, who shared its contents with Kendall. These so-called “eat dirt and die” letters never suggested the candidate had been denied clearance based on loyalty or suitability factors. They simply stated that a “better qualified applicant” (BQA) had been selected for the job. It was an artifice the department had used for years to avoid unpleasantness—a bureaucratic, face-saving device.
Kendall was devastated with the BQA letter and explained the situation to William, a friend at the Department of Commerce, asking if he knew anything that might reverse the department’s decision. Over lunch in a small DC restaurant, William offered to contact a staffer in Senator Sam Nunn’s (D-Georgia) office who could be persuaded to forward a letter, on official senatorial letterhead, to the State Department asking for a “status report” on Kendall’s employment investigation. William knew the bureaucratic apprehension a letter from a US senator’s office would create once received by any department’s personnel office. Kendall readily agreed, and within short order, a letter was sent from Senator Nunn’s office to the BEX office.
State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies Page 4