Ex-Pentagon Lawyer and Husband Convicted of Spying for E. Germany

A onetime Pentagon lawyer and her labor organizer husband were convicted Friday of spying for East Germany after a fellow spy testified for the prosecution and a federal jury rejected arguments that they had been unfairly entrapped in an FBI sting.

Theresa Maria Squillacote, 40, and Kurt Alan Stand, 43, face a maximum of life in prison at their sentencing Jan. 8.

The six-man, six-woman jury also found that the former campus radicals were attempting to spy when Squillacote handed classified Pentagon documents to an FBI agent posing as a South African agent.

Prosecutors described the Washington couple as dedicated communists who hated the United States and were willing to spy for any country.

The couple were recruited while they were students at the University of Wisconsin during the early 1970s and worked for East Germany throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, prosecutors said.

“The defendants now stand convicted of betraying their country over the course of many years,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Randy I. Bellows. “The jury’s verdict makes clear that this conduct will not be tolerated and individuals who engage in such conduct will be brought to justice.”

That the case came to trial at all was unusual. The government usually encourages people charged with espionage to plead guilty and tell investigators what they have done in return for lighter sentences.

However, the proceedings produced no major revelations about the U.S. intelligence system.

“We’re disappointed in the verdict. We thought there wasn’t enough evidence to show [Stand] was really part of this case,” said attorney Richard A. Sauber.

Lawrence S. Robbins, one of Squillacote’s attorneys, told the judge that the defense team plans to move to set aside the verdict. Some of the most important testimony in the three-week trial came from James Michael Clark, 50, who met Stand at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in the 1970s.

Clark, who was arrested in October 1997, the same day as the pair, and subsequently pleaded guilty to conspiracy, testified that Stand arranged for him to travel to Germany and introduced him to a man who later became one of his spying contacts.

Witnesses said the couple reported to the East German contact until 1990, the year East Germany collapsed.

Clark, a private investigator, said he gave East Germany two dozen classified documents that he obtained from two friends at the State Department in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Meanwhile, Stand was working as a maintenance man and later as a union organizer, and Squillacote attended law school and held a series of government jobs. Prosecutors contended that the couple traveled abroad repeatedly for training in using document cameras and deciphering coded messages.

Defense lawyers, however, contended that the couple provided political analysis, not classified information, to East Germany, which is not illegal.