It seems Walter Kendall Myers was arrested today. He and his wife have apparently been spying on the U.S. for the Cubans for the last thirty years.
According to the State press release, Myers taught at the Foreign Service Institute for several years before getting a civil service job at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), State’s intelligence analysis wing.
In 2006, Myers committed a faux pas by saying the American/British special relationship was, “just a myth.” The Telegraph called him a “senior American official” and a “leading State Department advisor.” (An interesting note for those of us who may speak publicly without official clearance!) Click here for an interesting description of the man.
He and his wife (who apparently worked for congress), confessed to an undercover FBI agent that they stole state secrets (classified up to a Secret level) during the last thirty years, even meeting Fidel Castro one evening. I suggest you read this for just the facts.
What I imagine people will say…
- I guarantee we’re going to hear someone talk about how the State Department is diseased with client-itis, and that we should all be fired because we’re all a bunch of left-leaning, pinko, anti-Americans who lost China.
- CNN reports that, “‘We were confident’ at the time of Kendall Myers’ retirement, [a senior State Department official] said, that he had been passing information to Cuban intelligence. Diplomatic security officials ‘let it go for a while’ to see what information might emerge.” It goes on to say, “He had viewed more than 200 classified reports on Cuba in his final months, even though he was at the time an analyst working on European issues, the court document said.” Someone is going to ask why we were allowing a suspected spy have access to classified information, especially since to be classified information would have to be damaging to the United States. Did this unnamed official say that we let that go on as a fishing expedition?
- Walter Myers appears to have donated $250.00 to the Obama campaign. I’d wager someone’s going to mention that too.
My Rant
Anyway, as I prepare to take my home leave to reacclimate myself to the U.S. I’m furious that this continues to go on. Cuba apparently didn’t even pay this guy! He did it because he hated “American imperialism.” What a scum-bag! I get it, readers of this blog know I have a love-hate relationship with Cuba, but come on! How could anybody sell out their own country for a foreign one, especially a foreign one that wanted to use nuclear weapons on us (thank goodness Khrushchev refused!), routinely violates human rights, and refuses to allow people to earn a living to better themselves?! I wish we had a legal system that would allow us to hang these two for treason! Anyway, none of this was terribly professional, but these people are a blight on the State Department, U.S. government employees, and humanity in general.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Heard about this on WMAL radio in DC and luckily found your nice writeup.
I cannot believe these people either but they are of course, everyplace.
Just had a bizarre dating experience and when I tell my intel community buddies about it the first thing they ask me is how sensitive the information I work with is (it isn’t).
The story ends with my date telling me ab0ut a prior relationship, jewelry business partners, who moved their business to the Caribbean”Muhammad (if that is his name, she made a hesitation before using that name) was not bad, he just knew bad people. I have not heard from him in two years. I just began getting easy to google last year. Nations got in the way,” told to me in the courtyard of the Pentagon, smoking zone between corridor 4 & 5 and in there under my cradentials.
Her best friend works for State, not sure what capacity.
I think this is a fascinating espionage case because it seems, so far as we know from the facts in the indictment (see: http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/05/myers.indictment.pdf), that Myers was motivated solely by ideology. You almost have to go back to the 1930s to find a similar case. Even when a captured traitor has claimed, or actually had, some ideological motive, there has usually been some money, compromise or ego involved, as well.
Jonathon Pollard, for example, accepted a rather large amount of money and gifts, including a monthly salary of $1,500, for his espionage on behalf of Israel. Felix Bloch evidently nursed a huge resentment brought on by chafing under the rule of political appointee Ambassadors during his seven years in Vienna, and also had an S&M kink and expensive habits. For example, his Viennese dominatrix - and BTW, I think “Baroness Von Stern” would make a great name for a Viennese dominatrix - claimed he paid her $10,000 a year for the seven years he served in Vienna. Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who apparently warned the Russians that Bloch was under investigation, had a bizarre relationship with a DC stripper, and received $1.4 million for his espionage. Aldrich Ames had a frustrated career, a major drinking habit, and a need for money. And so on. But none of that seems to apply to Myers, who apparently had an impeccable personal and professional life, apart from the matter of espionage for Cuba.
The Myers case is like a throwback to an earlier era, complete with Old School tradecraft. A shortwave radio to receive messages in Morse code? Brush passes in grocery stores? That stuff would have been state-of-the-art for Alger Hiss’s circle.
TSB,
“You almost have to go back to the 1930s to find a similar case. Even when a captured traitor has claimed, or actually had, some ideological motive, there has usually been some money, compromise or ego involved, as well.”
I thought this was much more common, but you sound like you have more knowledge than I.
Wasn’t that “Falcon & Snowman” case ideology on the part of “Falcon” and “Snowman” was the only one wanting money?
Sorry about my date train wreck story, there is a lot more to it than what I put up earlier. But I do believe it is the hands-down winner, at least when I tell the whole story to people when I am out and about. Certainly the winner at “The Muhammad Story” smoking pit in the Pentagon.
John Tagliaferro,
Re: the Falcon and the Snowman, I think the Falcon half of the partnership had some father issues (his father was an ex-FBI agent and the security manager for an aerospace contractor, and got the Falcon the job that gave him access to classified). I heard him speak to a congressional committee in the 1990s, and he didn’t mention ideology. But, motives are usually mixed, and he might well have been influenced by Watergate-era dissafection.
I am surprised to read the following comment in your rant: “I wish we had a legal system that would allow us to hang these two for treason!” You are, after all, a diplomat and I find it strange that you seem to be taking this issue so personally. Espionage is one of the oldest forms of statecraft and has existed since the dawn of human politics. We have had numerous espionage cases in American history and most are more egregious and pose a much greater security risk than this one. I find it strange that you harbor such sentiment.
TSB,
My inaccuracy/mistaken thought may be from the movie. He was having an issue with US involvement in countering Communist backed candidates someplace. Might have been countering Communist influences on unions.
John,
You’re not mistaken. Christopher Boyce saw a message from the CIA (that had been inadvertently sent to his TRW contractor facility) about covert U.S. involvement in an Australian election. I don’t think he cared much about Australian elections, or politics in general, but that message was the triggering event that made him realize he could sell his access to classified to the Russians.
As I recall, the Russians urged Boyce to go back to college, major in some foreign relations related field, and then join the CIA or State Department where he could be a productive spy. But he was too much of a slacker to go that route, which makes me thing he really wasn’t all that serious when he claimed to have political motivations after he was arrested in 1977. The Cubans (which probably means the Russians, as well) urged the same deal on Kendall Myers in 1978. Unlike Boyce, Myers was sincerely interested in politics, and he took them up on it.
Anon,
Thank you.
I just hope that some pinhead doesn’t start calling for routine polygraphs.
As far as Boyce’s statements about the CIA cable he supposedly saw, I always that was rationalizing after the fact. I think he just had some axes to grind.
I think it’s amusing that someone who was supposedly solely motivated by ideology was working for the one branch of the US Govt. that actually tends to be the most leftist! Then again, maybe it was exacerbated by the fact that he saw the State Dept. trying to “fix things” and then being held back by the other branches.
Who knows.
I think it is important that the Myers were not Cuban-Americans or even Hispanics. As usual, they were the sort of good White Christian Straight Americans that routinely get security clearances. While the incident will no doubt lead to a security clearance crackdown on Hispanic Americans, just as Pollard led to a security clearance crackdown on Jewish Americans, to me the incident serves as a reminder that the Myers, Amses, Hansons, and five-dozen others who have spied against the US since WWII have been overwhelmingly not members of any of the minority groups routinely viewed with suspicion in the clearance process.
Some claim that the reason why most spies are not minorities is precisely because minorities are so often denied access to classified information. I would counter that with the fact that by many other standards (enlistment in the military, participation in the political process, donations to charity etc) minorities consistently show a great deal of patriotism to the US - the country to which they came by choice when they voluntarily left their old country behind.
The whole thing shows that the entire security clearance process needs updating to reflect the demographics of 21st century America, rather than the America of the WWII era.