The spies who loved me – Fidel Castro
This isn’t the first time foreigners have been hypnotized by the mystique surrounding Fidel Castro. The surprising aspect of this case is just how long Walter Myers and his wife Gwendolyn Myers allegedly managed to remain operatives of the Cuban intelligence while seemingly managing their lives as Agents for the US and nobody there being any wiser. After all, the US claims to have the best intelligence apparatus in the world but did not detect 3 decades of trips by the couple to abstract locations including the prohibited island of Cuba. One would beg to think something that may never be made public, at least until the trial that is, that these people were also agents for the US who decided to become double agents for both countries. What can only be described as a significant embarrassment for the US.
The US Justice Department charged Friday that a former State Department worker and his wife worked as spies for Cuba for nearly 30 years, using a short-wave radio to pass on secret diplomatic information to their Cuban handlers.
Officials said the couple, Walter K. Myers, 72, and Gwendolyn S. Myers, 71, received little in the way of compensation from the Cubans except for the short-wave radio and some travel expenses. Rather, the officials said, the couple appears to have been driven by their strong affinity for Cuba and their bitterness toward “American imperialism.”
“We think they did it because they love Cuba,” said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.
The Myerses, who live in Washington, were arrested on Thursday and charged in a grand jury indictment unsealed Friday with serving as illegal agents of the Cuban government and wire fraud. A defense lawyer declined to comment on the charges.
The case had been under investigation for three years but intensified two months ago, when an undercover agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, posing as a Cuban agent, approached Mr. Myers. That led to a series of meetings in which the Justice Department said that Mr. Myers and his wife made incriminating admissions about their decades-long work for Cuba.
Mr. Myers began working as a contract instructor at the State Department in 1977 and rose to the position of senior analyst with top-secret security clearance, specializing in European affairs. He retired from the department in 2007.
In the indictment, the Justice Department said that Mr. Myers examined some 200 intelligence reports that dealt with Cuba in 2006 and 2007, many of them classified or top-secret reports that were unrelated to his own duties at the State Department.
While some of the material that the government says the Myerses passed on to Cuba apparently related to State Department personnel and internal policy matters, the indictment does not detail the bulk of the material or the sensitivity of it.
David Kris, the assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department, called the Myerses’ activity for Cuba “incredibly serious.”
The indictment and the government’s supporting material say the Myerses were recruited as spies during an academic trip to Cuba in 1978.
In a diary entry that the Justice Department said Mr. Myers wrote at the time of the trip, he expressed his passion for Cuba and its Communist revolutionary goals and his distaste for “American imperialism” and the United States’ indifference to medical care, the poor and other basic public needs. “Cuba is so exciting!” he wrote, adding that “the revolution has released enormous potential and liberated the Cuban spirit.”
The government alleged that soon after their return to the United States, the Myerses began using Morse code, encrypted messages and the short-wave radio to pass sensitive diplomatic information to Havana. They met Fidel Castro on a clandestine trip to Cuba in 1995 and made trips over the years to meet Cuban contacts in Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Jamaica, the government charged.
It appears from government documents that suspicions among American counterintelligence officials about a possible security leak within the State Department first led the authorities to focus on Mr. Myers two or three years ago.
This April, an undercover agent from the F.B.I., posing as a Cuban official, approached Mr. Myers outside the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, where he taught. The agent said he had instructions to contact him concerning the thawing diplomatic changes in the air between Cuba and the United States. The agent offered Mr. Myers a cigar and wished him a happy birthday.
The agent directed Mr. Myers to search out State Department information about Cuba, and at one in a series of follow-up meetings, Mr. Myers and his wife told the agent that they hoped to “sail home” to Cuba some day on their sailboat, the government said.
The couple also expressed some mixed emotions, saying that they were “burned out” by their clandestine activity yet wanted to continue to help Cubans because of their strong ties.
“It’s forever,” the affidavit quoted Mr. Myers as telling the agent. “You know, it’s like Fidel. It’s forever.”
