Cuba's revolution said to to have inspired state department analyst, writes MARY BETH SHERIDANand DEL QUENTIN WILBER.
HE WAS a courtly US state department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books.
Occasionally, he would voice frustration with US policies, but to his liberal neighbours in northwest DC this was not out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” says one.
What Walter Kendall Myers kept hidden, according to documents unsealed in court last Friday, was a deep and longstanding anger towards his country, an anger that allegedly made him willing to spy for Cuba for three decades.
“I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the evening news is a radicalising experience,” he wrote in his diary in 1978, referring to what he described as greedy US oil companies, inadequate healthcare and “the utter complacency of the oppressed” in America.
On a trip to Cuba, federal law enforcement officials say, Myers found a new inspiration: the communist revolution.
Myers (72) and his wife, Gwendolyn (71), pleaded not guilty last Friday to charges of conspiracy, being agents of a foreign government and wire fraud. Their arrest left friends and former colleagues slackjawed, unable to square the man depicted in the indictment with the witty intellectual with a prep-school background they knew. The Myerses never talked about Cuba or gave any hint of subversive activities, acquaintances say.
“Anyone who knows him finds it baffling and finds this completely out of character,” says David P Calleo, director of European studies at the Johns Hopkins University school of advanced international studies (SAIS), a friend of Myers for almost 40 years. “He has this amazing intellectual curiosity. He is open to all kinds of ideas.”
Larry MacDonald, who lives at the marina in Anne Arundel County where the Myerses docked their 38ft boat, says the couple were admired for their intelligence and graciousness: “When I heard they were arrested, I felt like they had arrested Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”
In an article published on the internet, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro mocked the case – but stopped short of confirming or denying anything.
“Doesn’t this Cuban espionage comic strip seem pretty ridiculous?” he wrote.
“Those who in one form or another have helped to protect the Cuban people from the terrorist plans and assassination plots organised by various US administrations have done so at the initiative of their own conscience and are deserving, in my judgment, of all the honours in the world.”
The state department and intelligence community are investigating how much damage the alleged spying may have done.
Myers had worked as a European political expert for more than 20 years at the state department, and had been associated with its bureau of intelligence and research from 1988 until his retirement in 2007.
James Cason, who headed the US interests section in Cuba from 2002 to 2005, says the case is serious because Myers had one of the highest clearances.
“If you can get someone into the intelligence bureau, you can have access to everyone’s intelligence, not only ours but of allies. The question is, what did they [Cuba] do with it?” he says. “Did it stay with them, or was it given to other countries as well?”
But an official who previously worked in the bureau says the case is probably not as damaging as that of Aldrich Ames, the CIA counter-intelligence chief who passed along extensive information about US intelligence operations to Russia. Myers would not have had access to the names of US spies in Cuba, the official says.
Myers grew up in Washington. His father was a renowned heart surgeon; his mother, Carol, was the granddaughter of inventor Alexander Graham Bell.
Myers graduated from Brown University and obtained a doctorate in European history from Johns Hopkins SAIS.
He got a taste of spying while serving in the US army from 1959 to 1962. Fluent in Czech, he was stationed in Germany, where he monitored Soviet broadcasts.
He went on to teach at the SAIS and in 1977 became an instructor at the state department’s foreign service institute.
During those years, his life was rocked by tragedy and difficulties, friends say. Late one November night in 1975, Myers was driving a car that hit a 16-year-old girl, killing her. His marriage to his first wife, Maureen Walsh, ended in divorce in 1977.
In 1978 Myers visited Cuba for two weeks, authorities say. He told his supervisors he had been invited there for an academic trip by the country’s UN mission.
The son of privilege fell in love with the communist revolution, according to diary entries released in court. “Everything I hear about Fidel suggests that he is a brilliant and charismatic leader,” Myers wrote. The following year, Myers moved to South Dakota, apparently to teach.
He lived with a woman who would soon become his second wife, Gwendolyn Trebilcock, a legislative aide for a Democratic senator.
An official from the Cuban mission visited the couple in South Dakota and recruited them, officials say. He asked Myers to join the state department or the CIA, according to authorities.
Gwendolyn Myers would later tell an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban operative that her husband chose the state department because he was not “a very good liar”. The CIA required regular polygraph tests, Myers said.
The couple told the FBI agent two months ago that they were worried about being caught and that living under such secrecy had taken its toll. Kendall Myers had been worried for some time that his name was on a list of suspect employees. In fact, it was not until 2006 that the FBI approached the state department with word of a suspected spy. By the time Myers retired, authorities had strong suspicions. – ( LA Times- Washington Post service)