Wizblog

True Believers - The Myers Case

I didn't pay a lot of attention Friday when the news broke of the arrests of long-time State Dept. analyst Walter Kendall Myers and his wife on charges of spying for Cuba for 30 years. So much Internet...so few hours in the day and all.

But tales of Americans driven to treason by the utopian impulse are irresistible to me...such is my curiosity about this alien sentiment, I guess. And this one turns out to be a "truth is stranger than fiction" type of spy story.

In a fascinating piece at AT, Clarice Feldman reveals Myers as a true Washington D.C. blue blood, and a fawning fellow traveler who was identified and recruited by the Cubans early on in his government career.

The circumstances of how he got from Washington DC to South Dakota for a year or two in the late 70's are unclear, but that's where he met his second wife Gwendolyn, who was working there as a staffer for Sen. John Abourezk, a renowned Friend of Fidel, and she had presumably traveled with the senator on his two trips to Cuba in 1977. Feldman speculates that she might have been working with Cuban intelligence even before she met Myers. Maybe it's why she met Myers.

Plenty of intrigue in the man's background...a criminal matter in South Dakota....a tragic incident in his car when he struck and killed a 16-year old girl....but what seems clear is that Myers spied for the Communists because he believed in the cause, and not necessarily because they had something on him. And he's still a true believer. Read the whole thing.

The Washington Post account of the arrest somehow manages to work an anti-Bush quote from a 'neighbor' of the Myers into an article about a man who sold out the United States during the Carter administration 30 years ago. That's not easy.

Also at AT, are there More Cuban Spies?

Is this the Castro brothers reacting?

Hillary's on it.

Posted by dan at June 7, 2009 11:28 AM | TrackBack