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Settled for twenty years in Hawaii under a false identity, a couple is suspected of espionage in the service of the former USSR. But the accusation is based on elements as disturbing as they are fanciful.
It’s a very strange case reported by the Star Advertiser in Hawaii. For more than twenty years, Bobby Fort and Julie Montague, a couple in their sixties, led a quiet life on the island of Oʻahu until their arrest a few weeks ago. It turns out that Bobby and Julie are actually called Walter Glenn Primrose and Gwynn Darle Morrison and they stole the identities of two babies who died at birth.
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For the past two decades, Walter Glenn Primrose earned his pilot’s license and worked for the Coast Guard where he had a Level 2 (Secret) security clearance. But it was after the searches at the couple’s home that the story took on a whole new dimension: the police discovered old Polaroids of the two suspects dressed in a KGB uniform, documents written in a secret code, maps indicating the location of military zones and materials for writing in sympathetic ink. In short, the panoply of the perfect little spy… Moreover, while they were waiting to be questioned, Walter would have slipped to Gwynn this enigmatic sentence surprised by the police: “We have the protocols.” Last incriminating element: a letter found at their home and addressed to the couple written by an individual accusing them of being “CIA spies, Bolivian terrorists or even KGB agents.”
In this mishmash of suspicions, it is of course the last hypothesis that the prosecutor chose. According to their lawyer, who argues that false passports and identity theft be the only charges and that his clients can be released on bail, the KGB uniforms were only a disguise and the invisible ink, a simple children’s game that can be bought anywhere. In fact, if the reasons for which the couple changed their identity remain mysterious, this secret agent paraphernalia which seems straight out of a B series of the 50s is puzzling.
Unconvinced by the prosecution’s arguments, District Judge Leslie Kobayashi is nonetheless taken aback: “The only question that interests us is ‘Why’?” It only remains to hope that the continuation of the investigations will be able to solve this enigma…