Former US state department employee Walter Myers sympathetic to
Cambridge Five ring, says ex-student
Daniel Nasaw in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 June 2009 18.09 BST
A former American official accused of spying for Cuba admired a team of
British cold war spies and believed they acted in what they thought were
Europe's best interests, according to one of his former students.
Former US state department employee and university instructor Walter
Myers, who along with his wife Gwendolyn is charged with spying for the
communist island nation for three decades, appeared in court in
Washington today and was ordered jailed, pending trial.
A prosecutor said the couple had a 37-foot (11-metre) yacht moored
outside Washington and had planned a sailing trip to the Caribbean with
no return date.
"The Myerses, if they are able to get back to Cuba, are a real and
present danger to the United States," Assistant US Attorney Gordon
Harvey said in federal court today.
Walter Myers was an instructor and European intelligence analyst at the
state department until his retirement October 2007.
According to the US justice department, Myers, 72, and his wife
Gwendolyn, 71, had been passing along US secrets to Cuba intelligence
agents since 1978. In addition, beginning in the 1970s, Myers taught
European politics at Johns Hopkins University's school of advanced
international studies.
According to prosecutors, Myers turned to espionage out of sympathy for
the Cuban revolution and the communist ideology espoused by longtime
Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
As an instructor in British politics at Johns Hopkins, he told students
he believed that Kim Philby, Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess, members of
the Cambridge Five spy ring that passed British intelligence to the
Soviet government in the 1950s, had been driven by a desire to keep
peace in Europe, according to Tom Murray, a Seattle management
consultant who took a class with Myers in 1992.
Burgess and MacLean were exposed in 1951 and escaped to Moscow, but
Philby, one of the cold war's most successful spies, stayed undercover
until 1963, when he too fled to Russia.
Murray, who described his experience as Myers' student on
thedailybeast.com website, said Myers also admired Neville Chamberlain,
and once told the class his favourite novel was Rudyard Kipling's Kim,
the tale of espionage in 19th century British colonial India.
"He was talking about Chamberlain doing what he did in order to preserve
Europe and keep it from being torn apart," Murray said after reviewing
his 17-year-old notes from the class. "He believed that Churchill was
representative of the past, of British colonialism and of empire."
US man accused of spying for Cuba allegedly admired British agents |
World news | guardian.co.uk (10 June 2009)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/10/usa-cuba-spy-cambridge-five
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