Retired State Department Official Pleads Guilty to Espionage

From the FBI press release (Former State Department Official and Wife Plead Guilty in 30-Year Espionage Conspiracy):

At a hearing before Judge Reggie B. Walton, defendant Walter Kendall Myers, 72, aka “Agent 202,” pleaded guilty to a three-count criminal information charging him with conspiracy to commit espionage and two counts of wire fraud. His wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, aka “Agent 123,” and “Agent E-634,” pleaded guilty to a one-count criminal information charging her with conspiracy to gather and transmit national defense information.

As part of his plea agreement, Kendall Myers has agreed to serve a life prison sentence and to cooperate fully with the United States regarding any criminal activity and intelligence activity by him or others. As part of her plea agreement, Gwendolyn Myers has agreed to serve a sentence of between six and seven and a half years in prison and to cooperate fully with the United States.

Both defendants have agreed to the entry of a monetary judgment against them in the amount of $1,735,054. [TSB note: that amount is reportedly the salary Myers was paid over the course of his employment by the U.S. government.] The assets that will be forfeited to the government towards satisfaction of that judgment include: an apartment in Washington, D.C., a 37-foot sailing yacht, a vehicle, and various bank and investment accounts.

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Kendall Myers began working at the State Department in 1977 as a contract instructor at the Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in Arlington, Va. After living briefly with Gwendolyn in South Dakota, he returned to Washington, D.C., and resumed employment as an instructor with FSI. From 1988 to 1999, in addition to his FSI duties, he performed work for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). He later worked full-time at the INR and, from July 2001 until his retirement in October 2007, was a senior intelligence analyst for Europe in INR where he specialized on European matters and had daily access to classified information through computer databases and otherwise. He received a Top Secret security clearance in 1985 and, in 1999, his clearance was upgraded to Top Secret/SCI.

The Washington Post's story on the sentencing (here) reported this courtroom statement by the Myerses attorney:

The couple's attorney, Bradford Berenson, said in a statement after the hearing that the Myerses were not motivated by greed but spied "out of conscience and personal commitment."

"They always understood that they might someday be called to account for that conduct and always have been prepared to accept full responsibility for it," the statement said. "They have done so today."

I'd like to learn more about the "conscience and personal commitment" that compelled this haute bourgeoisie couple to commit espionage for Cuba. What was going on in the United States in 1978, the year the Myerses began their espionage, that so offended their consciences? Did they find the Carter administration to be an unbearable capitalist imperialist warmongering hegemon? Unlikely.

Why would the Myerses be personally committed to serving the communist regime in Cuba? Surely they didn't think that would make the world a better place, since by 1978 there were really no Marxist true believers left in America. The Marxist idea was already undergoing autopsies by radical historians who had been left behind when its intellectual tide receded after the events of 1968 and, particularly, the crushing of the Prague Spring. See this 1976 collection of dispirited essays on radical Visions of History, for example.

Perhaps Kendall Myers was a fan of Eurocommunism, that last great hope of leftist academics during the 70s, although even that somewhat more presentable version of Marxism was already losing its appeal by 1978. See, for example, this article by Jean-François Revel. Eurocommunism was not exclusively a European product, of course, and it could just be that the Myerses thought they had found in Castro the last possible chance to validate their self-concept as the Vanguard of the Proletariat. I don't know. But I wish I had a chance to ask them.

If I were the judge in their case, I wouldn't send the Myerses off to spend their Golden Years at some Club Fed of a penitentiary. No, I'd sentence them to serve as an exhibit at Washington DC's International Spy Museum, so that the public could experience these living political fossils for themselves and wonder about the thought processes that motivated them.

Septuagenarian Spy Discovered at State Department

The news that a 72-year old retired State Department analyst and his wife have been arrested for espionage on behalf of Cuba - serious matter though it is - has a nostalgic 1930s flavor, I think. From the facts released so far in the indictment and the State Department and FBI press releases, this is one of the very rare instances of genuine ideological motivation. That's something we haven't seen much of in Washington since the days when Communist Party members read the New Masses and raised volunteers for the Spanish Civil War.

Money, compromise/coercion, or ego normally play a big part in motivating espionage. They certainly did in the case of this seething mass of resentment, paraphilias and greed who was the last State Department official to be fired - but not prosecuted - for espionage. However, none of that appears to have played a role with Walter Kendall Myers, or with Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, who was the Natasia to his Boris. All indications are that the Myerses are a sober and straitlaced happily married couple who lived within their means and never did anything on the wild side, apart from espionage, that is, which they evidently approached as a charitable work.

Even their tradecraft was straight out of the 1930s. Getting messages in Morse code over a shortwave radio, taking notes on water-soluble paper, and making brush passes in grocery stores to transmit their notes to the Cubans, is all stuff that Alger Hiss might have done. Oh, towards the end they were getting into the Internet age by sending e-mail to Havana, but it looks like that switch to modern technology played a part in their downfall. The FBI agent who scammed the Myerses into thinking he was sent by the Cubans presented himself as the espionage computer help desk guy:

Authorities say [Gwendolyn's] comments came during a series of meetings with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban spy in April. The Myerses fell for the ruse, authorities say, sharing with the agent their views of Obama administration officials that had recently taken over responsibility for Latin American policy and accepting a device to encrypt future e-mail.

Maybe they should have stuck with that shortwave radio, after all.

We'll see whether there is any more to the story when the Myerses go to trial, but so far they look just like a replay of Lona and Morris Cohen.