[Marxism] Spies for Cuba motivated by hatred for injustice

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 6, 2009
U.S. Charges Couple With Spying for Cuba
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department charged Friday that a former State 
Department analyst 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.”




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