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By Evan Thomas
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BACK IN THE 1960S AND '70S campuses clanged with chants like ""Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! NLF is going to win!'' and ""Si Si Sihanouk! Rotcee building's gonna cook!'' Many students denounced their government, but few actually spied for communist countries. Last week the FBI arrested three who allegedly did: James Michael Clark, Theresa Marie Squillacote and Kurt Alan Stand, suspected of acting as agents of East German intelligence for nearly two decades.
The latest in a series of post-cold-war spy stories, this one has a different twist. According to the FBI, the three suspects were paid as much as $40,000 by their East German spymasters during one four-year period, but unlike with recent traitors who sold out for cash, ideology seems to have been a more important motive. The key to this story is family loyalty, a sad tale of trying to please one's parents by keeping faith with communism--while committing treason.
A tall, rail-thin student radical who chain-smoked and spouted Marxist rhetoric, Kurt Stand used to describe himself to his professors at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in the mid-'70s as a ""red-diaper baby.'' The FBI says he had been indoctrinated as a communist by his father, Maximillian, whose family fled Hitler during the 1930s. Stand had even been sent away to a youth camp in East Germany in 1965, where, as a 9-year-old, he learned Leninist slogans. In 1972, Stand later told an FBI agent, his father ""introduced'' him to East German intelligence. (Stand's father is a chemical engineer and an inventor who settled in the Bronx, N.Y., after serving as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army during World War II.)
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Not yet 18, Stand was tapped by the East German spy service to recruit other American students, the FBI says. In 1976 he took a fellow radical at the University of Wisconsin, Clark, to East Germany, where Clark allegedly signed on as an agent and was sent back to graduate school in the United States to become a government mole. Stand's next recruit, in 1980, was his own wife, Terry Squillacote, who had been born missing a leg and with a deformed hand. The three alleged agents made 30 trips abroad to meet with their handlers. They were told how to use a minicamera and how to receive coded signals on a shortwave radio. According to the Feds, they called the East German security service their ""family'': headquarters in Berlin was ""Tante [Aunt] Klara'' and Stand's code name was ""Junior.'' Their work for the communists was ""the Faith.''
The alleged spies slipped documents to the East Germans concealed in books and dolls, but the stolen secrets weren't worth much. Clark's only government job was as an army paralegal, and though he gained access to papers on nerve-gas production, his East German handlers weren't interested. Squillacote became a procurement lawyer at the Pentagon, but her access to really useful secrets was limited. Stand remained outside the government as a labor organizer.
When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, the trio tried unsuccessfully to get work from the Russian KGB. Almost desperately in 1995, Squillacote, the FBI says, wrote a South African Marxist hoping she could somehow continue to spy for the cause. When he wrote back encouraging her, she wept with joy. She did not know that the South African had squealed on her to his own government in Johannesburg--which promptly contacted Washington. The FBI set up a sting, with a G-man posing as a South African diplomat.
The FBI's secret tape recordings of the meetings between Squillacote and the undercover agent depict her as a bitter woman. Though Squillacote won an award under Al Gore's ""Reinventing Government'' program, she refers to the Pentagon as a ""hellhole.'' Her husband, she says, is not showing enough commitment to their espionage, possibly because he resented being ""force fed'' ideology as a teenager. Though the FBI alleges that she had an ""intimate personal relationship'' with one of her East German handlers, she complains of being treated as a ""baby commie'' by ""daddy commies.''
While she was prattling on, her comrades were beginning to feel the heat. Suspecting that he was under surveillance, Clark threw his spy camera into the Potomac. An FBI bug planted in his apartment records him, inebriated and alone, muttering, ""Oh, yes, I think we should. Let's have another. I was an agent for a long time for the communists . . . ah, FBI, you're under arrest.''
Clark, Squillacote and Stand, who have yet to plea, could face life in prison. Last week Stand's father said the charges against his son were ""all horse s--t.'' Though FBI sources tell NEWSWEEK Stand Sr. has himself long been suspected of, though never charged with, working for East German intelligence, Stand said, ""I'm just an ordinary guy.'' His family saga is anything but.
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