WASHINGTON -- Retired State Department employee Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, told friends they had summer plans to take their 37-foot yacht north last weekend, up the picturesque coastline to New England.

Instead, the couple waits in a federal jail for trial, charged with 30 years of spying on the United States for the country's longtime antagonist, the communist regime of Cuba.

And friends and colleagues are left to reconcile the gregarious, well-read couple they knew with federal charges that allege a life of duplicity -- of shadowy intrigue involving coded messages to Havana and clandestine contacts with Cuba's spy agency.

''They were always very personable. Gwen told me about the yacht they were having built by this company in the Netherlands, that Kendall had retired,'' said Woody Reagan, who lived upstairs from the couple for more than a decade in The Westchester, a fashionable co-op near the Washington National Cathedral.

''They were planning to sail the Caribbean,'' he said. ``I didn't know they'd be saying hi to Fidel. They never discussed politics.''

Even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered an assessment of any national security damage the couple may have caused, a week of interviews with those who knew them said they never mentioned Cuba.

Myers -- who goes by Kendall -- had two grand passions: Europe and sailing. Gwendolyn was an avid sailor, too.

In court Wednesday, but for matching navy blue jail uniforms, they looked like any other retirees, tan and thin. Kendall Myers had his trademark thick white walrus mustache and a bit of an academician's air. Next to him sat Gwendolyn, petite, with blonde hair turning to gray.

None of those interviewed detected the fawning affection for Fidel Castro ascribed to the couple in court documents -- Myers gushing after a 1978 visit to Cuba that Castro was a ''brilliant and charismatic leader,'' and decades later talking in a sting operation of a desire to sail ''home'' to Havana and teach at Cuba's intelligence school.

The FBI alleges long-standing ties to Cuba, saying in an affidavit that the pair agreed to spy after a Cuban diplomat from the country's mission to the United Nations visited them in South Dakota in 1979 or 1980. He had earlier invited Kendall Myers to visit the island, and Myers did so in 1978, praising the Cuban revolution in a diary the FBI uncovered.

A CIRCUITOUS LIFE

A Washington, D.C., native, Kendall Myers traced his family's roots through Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society, to great-grandfather Alexander Graham Bell, credited with inventing the first practical telephone. At one time, the family had an estate in Coconut Grove near Kampong, the estate owned by renowned botanist David Fairchild.

Myers earned a doctorate in European Studies from Johns Hopkins University's prestigious School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, in 1972. His dissertation: A Rationale for Appeasement, on Britain's policy toward Nazi Germany before World War II.

Records suggest that the years preceding his involvement with Cuba were turbulent. Myers in 1975 crashed his car in Washington, killing a 16-year-old girl, The Washington Post reported. In 1977, he divorced the mother of his son and daughter.

He got a job at the State Department, his on-again, off-again employer for 30 years, working first as a contract instructor at the Foreign Service Institute, a training program that prepares diplomats for overseas assignments with history, politics and language classes.

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