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Walter Kendall Myers, 73 years old, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 72, admitted in court to spending nearly 30 years passing classified information to Cuba's intelligence agency.

He was sentenced after pleading guilty to espionage and wire fraud. She was sentenced to 81 months after pleading to conspiracy to gather and transmit national defense information. She is likely to serve 4½ years.

Their story, coming on the heels of the Russian spy ring, reinforces the assertion of counter-intelligence investigators that foreign spy operations in the U.S. are continuing long after the end of the Cold War.

Prosecutor Gordon Harvey described the couple as "traitors." If they loved the Cuban people so much, Mr. Harvey said, why didn't Mr. Myers just donate his wealth to the underprivileged there? They admired the Castro revolution, but didn't defect because they only wanted to admire the revolution "from a safe distance," Mr. Harvey said.

"We acted as we did for 30 years because of our ideals and beliefs," he said. They weren't motivated by "anti-Americanism," he said, but rather their objective was "to help the Cuban people defend their revolution."

Mr. Myers's voice broke twice—when he described his devotion to his wife and his friendships with African-American prisoners, whose oppressed life he said he came to know behind bars. Mr. Myers quoted from Nelson Mandela as he vowed to help make a difference by tutoring fellow prisoners.