Secrets, romance and betrayal
Ex-Austrian Embassy worker accused of informing for
Cuba
That was five years ago. Today, Austrian prosecutors say he was a spy who romanced and blackmailed her into revealing embassy secrets. She's not sure he was a spy. When he finally got to Miami, he divorced her.
``She was in love, you see,'' said Johannes Blome, one of the Austrian attorneys hired by Gertraud Maria Schroeter, now living in Vienna, to defend her from charges of handing over Austrian state secrets to Cuban intelligence agents.
Schroeter declined to comment on the case and referred The Herald to her Vienna literary agent, Bernt Reitter, who asked for $25,000 for the exclusive rights to her story. The Herald declined.
But her lawyers provided a detailed tale of how Cuban agents framed her to get her to inform on U.S. diplomats and Marines in Havana, how the FBI found her in Miami and how the couple's love ultimately crashed on Calle Ocho.
Schroeter spoke Spanish and already had worked in several Austrian embassies around Latin America when she was assigned to Havana in early 1991 as a secretary in the four-person mission.
``She had a special interest in the people of Cuba. She wanted to meet
Cubans and learn more about the country,'' Blome said in a telephone
interview from Vienna. Dating the doctor
Toward the end of 1991, the couple took a weekend trip to a resort hotel about an hour's drive from Havana, and there her nightmare began: A police officer ``found'' marijuana on De Jongh and threw him in prison.
Three weeks later, a man who called himself Fernando and said he was an agent of the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of all spying inside Cuba, told Schroeter he could order her lover moved to a jail in Havana and even free him if she cooperated.
De Jongh insisted to Schroeter that he was not working with the Interior Ministry but was a victim of blackmail just like her, Blome said.
All that Cuban intelligence wanted at first was for Schroeter to spy on
the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, to sidle up to diplomats and the
U.S. Marine guards and find out their views on Cuba, the lawyer said. A list of dissidents
``Maybe that was just their first contact. Maybe they would have waited to have her as an agent in some other embassy in the future,'' the lawyer said.
De Jongh eventually was released and the couple married Feb. 14, 1993, in one of Cuba's huge ``marriage palaces'' in the Plaza de la Revolucion, a virtual icon of President Fidel Castro's Communist regime.
They lived as husband and wife for exactly 82 days, until May 6, when Schroeter wound up her tour in Havana, left the Austrian foreign service and moved to Miami while awaiting a U.S. visa for her spouse.
Apparently unwilling to wait for his American visa, De Jongh left Cuba in December 1993 for Austria, where he was issued a visa as the husband of an Austrian citizen. He stayed about a month with Schroeter's brother in Vienna.
But by then the romance appeared to have cooled. The couple never met
outside Cuba, and their last direct contact was a telephone call that same
December. FBI comes knocking
It's not clear what they asked or how she replied, but three months later, Austrian security officials opened a file on her.
``Prosecutors here say only that they received information about her and that De Jongh was a `Romeo,' an agent. Frau Schroeter thinks maybe this is not so, but she's not sure,'' Blome said.
Running handsome male agents, known as ``swallows,'' past lonely foreign embassy secretaries was a favorite tactic of Soviet bloc intelligence agencies during the Cold War, honed to a virtual art by former East German spy chief Markus Wolf.
Schroeter, who moved back to Vienna in July 1995, next heard from De Jongh that December: a notice of divorce that he had filed in Dade County's 11th Circuit Court, citing ``irreconcilable differences.''
The divorce became final April 26, 1996.
De Jongh could not be contacted for comment. An aunt in Miami said that
he's living in the Miami area, perhaps working in a hospital, but that she
has not seen him for several months. A note left by The Herald at his last
known address, a seemingly empty house in Coral Gables, went
unanswered. First records in Miami
The lawyer who represented De Jongh in the divorce case said she handled only that case for him and has no idea where he might be living now. The FBI office in Miami did not return Herald phone calls.
Blome said he thinks Schroeter will not be severely punished in Austria, and might even get away without serving a prison term, because the charge of revealing state secrets is several notches below spying.
She turned over only the list of dissidents, he added. And she never went through with the one Cuban intelligence request that might have created a serious security problem.
The agent who called himself Fernando asked her to make copies of all the keys to the embassy, the building as well as internal doors and desks, the lawyer said.
Schroeter went to the government-run key shop in Havana where all diplomats have duplicates made, he said, ``but the shop was out of the right blanks.''
Copyright © 1998 The Miami Herald