Re: [Marxism] Spies for Cuba motivated by hatred for injustice

[Jeffrey Thomas Piercy <mqduck@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Does anyone have any photographs of these two?

Louis Proyect wrote:
> 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.
> spy
> 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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-- 
Human: An animal so lost in loathing contemplation of what it thinks it
is as to overlook what it ought to be.

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