KENDALL AND GWENDOLYN MYERS
Why did they spy for Cuba?
BY MICHAEL PUTNEY
putney@local10.com
Why would someone betray his country? More specifically, why would an
American citizen from a distinguished family with a Ph.D. from Johns
Hopkins and a long and seemingly successful career in academia and the
State Department agree to spy for Castro's Cuba? That's the question
I've been wondering about since Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife,
Gwen, 71, were arrested and accused of spying for the Castro regime for
nearly three decades.
Technically, they're accused of wire fraud and being unregistered
foreign agents, but espionage charges are likely to be added. They would
be entirely justified on the basis of the arrest affidavit from FBI
Special Agent Brett Kramarsic, a specialist in counterespionage. His
narrative isn't up to the literary standards of John LeCarre, but then
Kendall Myers isn't Alec Leamas. Myers, however, does appear to be a spy
who wanted to come in from the cold -- into the warm embrace of
communist Cuba. ''Home,'' as he referred to it in a meeting with an
undercover FBI agent in April.
Island was `home'
Myers and his wife, duped into believing the undercover agent was their
Cuban intelligence contact, reportedly told him they were eager to
''sail home.'' They had a 37-foot yacht and the sailing know-how to do
it. A November trip was in the works with no plans to return. ''So, how
is everybody at home?'' Myers reportedly asked the agent when they met
at a Washington, D.C., hotel bar on April 15. This from a man who spent
two decades teaching U.S. diplomats in training and the last 10 years in
the State Department's Intelligence and Research office with a top
secret clearance. The level of deceit and betrayal is breathtaking.
Devastating evidence
Everything the Myers told the undercover agent during two meetings is
said to be on audio and videotape -- and it is devastating. The couple
confirmed their many trips over the years to Latin America and the
Caribbean were really to meet with their Cuban handlers. The Myerses
also reportedly confirmed that they had a shortwave radio with which
they communicated with Havana, as well as through face-to-face meetings
in and around Washington. Gwen Myers said she liked passing secrets at
supermarkets where she'd exchange her cart with the secret info with one
pushed by her Cuban contact. Shades of Graham Greene. Our woman in
Washington.
Why did this erstwhile upstanding American couple spy for Cuba? Not for
money, as far as one can tell. They evidently did it out of love for the
Cuban revolution and disgust with the United States. Kendall Myers kept
a diary after his first trip to Cuba in 1978, and the FBI affidavit
quotes from it at length: ''Cuba is so exciting! I have become so bitter
. . . Watching the evening news is a radicalizing experience. The abuses
of our system, the lack of decent medical system, the oil companies and
their undisguised indifference to public needs, the complacency about
the poor . . .'' Myers' complaints about U.S. society, while
understandable, hardly seem enough to convince a rational person to
pledge his allegiance to a totalitarian regime and agree to spy for it.
Visit with Castro
Ah, but that's not how Myers saw it. He writes in his diary: ''There may
have been some abuses under the present regime, life may be more
complicated by rationing, etc., but no one can make me believe that Cuba
would have been better off if we [had] defeated the revolution. The idea
is obscene.'' Myers also describes Castro as ''brilliant and charismatic
. . . certainly one of the great political leaders of our time.'' Fidel
reportedly returned the favor in 1995 by spending an evening with the
Myerses on a trip they made to Cuba in 1995. Kendall calls Fidel
''wonderful, just wonderful.'' Gwen calls him ``the most incredible
statesman in a hundred years . . . ''
It is all profoundly naive, deeply fatuous and extremely dangerous. Who
knows how much top secret information the Myers provided to the Cubans
or where it wound up? His specialty was Europe, but things he told Cuba
could have been passed on or sold. Not since the arrest in 2001 of Ana
Belen Montes has there been a Cuban spy case this serious.
When Mariano Faget, a U.S. Immigration official, was arrested in Miami
in 2000 as a Cuban spy, I interviewed him and found an ineffectual naif
whose desire for a reunited Cuba was shrewdly exploited by Cuban
intelligence. That also appeared to be the case with FIU professor
Carlos Alvarez and his wife, Elsa, arrested in Miami in 2006 as Cuban
agents.
Motivation elusive
Kendall Myers' motivation is harder to pin down. Well born, well
educated and fairly well to do, it looks like he was a disaffected
liberal who yearned to help an autocratic regime that was creating the
''New Man,'' as Che put it, without the excesses of capitalism. Or
constraints of democracy. One former State Department colleague told The
Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg and Lesley Clark: ''He seems to resemble
this pattern of ideological upper-class obsession for a supposed idyllic
totalitarian system.'' Nostalgie de la boue, the French call it,
nostalgia for the gutter.
That's where Kendall Myers and his wife, if convicted, belong: Prison
for the rest of their lives.
Why did they spy for Cuba? - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com (17 June 2009)
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1100596.html
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