New York Times Editors Find Spying "Romantic" and the Story of Traitors Spying on the United States a "Romance" That Reads "Like a Novel"

In the New York Times, Ginger Thompson's article is soberly titled Couple’s Capital Ties Said to Veil Spying for Cuba, but in its sister publication, the International Herald Tribune, Paris-based NYT editors correctly read (and share) the journalist's passions and rosy views (coupled with disdain for America's foreign policy) and retitled the article Romance of spying lured couple, subtitled it The government's case against the Myers reads in parts like a novel, and make their espionage for Fidel Castro sound like a personal path of self-discovery.

Together, Gwendolyn and Kendall Myers set out to give the second half of their lives new meaning. At first … they embraced a counterculture lifestyle, even growing marijuana in the basement. They marched for legalized abortion, promoted solar energy, and repaired relations with six children from previous marriages.

With phrases like "the thrill of espionage returned", the rest sounds adventuresome and even heroic.

When the wide-open spaces of the West quickly grew too small, the couple returned to Washington a year later, renewing their ties to the establishment that they had rejected.

…It appears that the Myerses were not motivated by money. The authorities said that other than being reimbursed for equipment, the couple were not paid for spying. On the contrary, according to the statements cited in the complaint, which one federal magistrate said made the case against the couple “insuperable,” the couple felt disdain for America’s foreign policy — Mr. Myers’s diary described watching the television news as a “radicalizing experience” — and a romanticized view of Cuba’s Communist government.

And, just months after Mr. Myers’s retirement supposedly ended the scheme, they hinted that spying provided adventure to what seemed to have otherwise been a relatively mundane life. “We really have missed you,” Mr. Myers said in April to the undercover F.B.I. agent who was posing as a Cuban intelligence official. “You, speaking collectively, have been a really important part of our lives, and we have felt incomplete.”

…A homemaker and a mother of four [as well as an aide to Senator James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat who was one of the leading proponents for ending the United States embargo against Cuba, Gwendolyn Steingraber] had been George McGovern’s anti-Vietnam War movement of the Democratic Party and began volunteering in political campaigns.

…Peter Stavrianos, another former colleague, added, “She was not remarkably different than dozens and dozens of other people that you ran across in the 1970s who were McGovernites that got into politics for reasons other than to make a lot of money.”

Mutual friends introduced Mr. Myers and Ms. Steingraber, who soon became inseparable.

“I have yet to meet a couple who are more in love than the two of them,” said Amanda Myers Klein, 40, Mr. Myers’s daughter. “They are beautiful together.”

You won't believe this, but the husband spying for Havana, who referred to Cuba as “home” and who was a university professor (!) working part-time as a teacher at the School for Advanced International Studies, once

worked on a biography of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, whom Mr. Myers admired for his policies [sic] toward the Nazis.