Couple Get Sentenced For Spying For Cuba
From a bereft Associated Press:
US analyst, wife sentenced for spying for Cuba
By Pete Yost, Associated Press Writer Fri Jul 16, 2010
WASHINGTON – The 73-year-old great grandson of Alexander Graham Bell was sentenced Friday to life in prison without parole for quietly spying for Cuba for nearly a third of a century from inside the State Department. His wife was sentenced to 5 1/2 years.
Perhaps “quietly spying for Cuba” is not all that terrible.
Retired intelligence analyst Kendall Myers said he meant his country no harm and stole secrets only to help Cuba’s people who "have good reason to feel threatened" by U.S. intentions of ousting the communist Castro government.
How could you harm the US by giving an avowed enemy like Cuba its state secrets?
But U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said Myers and his 72-year-old wife, Gwendolyn, had betrayed America and should receive heavy punishment.
"You never know what the effect will be" from stealing classified information, said the judge. Someone "could be killed."
So it sounds like Judge Walton actually believed that the Mr. and Mrs Myers were only acting with the best of intentions, and that they are just a little naive.
Justice Department prosecutor Michael Harvey said the couple received medals from Cuban intelligence and were flown to the island nation for a visit with Fidel Castro in 1995. They pleaded guilty last November.
The couple’s overriding objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution, Myers told Walton. He said that he and his wife tried to accurately report what U.S. policy was toward Cuba, to warn Cuba and to try to assess the nature of any threat.
"At the expense of the United States," Walton interjected.
Oddly enough, Lee Harvey Oswald also said that he was just trying to help the Cuban people defend their revolution.
In a sentencing memo to the judge, prosecutors said Myers, a descendant of Bell, the inventor of the first practical telephone, was a child of wealth and privilege, attended a private boarding school in Pennsylvania and Brown University and obtained a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.
"Kendall Myers could have been anything he wanted to be," they wrote. "He chose to be a Cuban spy."
According to prosecutors, Myers, who began teaching at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute in 1978, was contacted by the Cuban intelligence service to be a covert agent, and he recruited Gwendolyn in 1979. The couple married three years later. The Cubans referred to him as Agent 202, his wife as Agent E-634.
Myers rose to director of European studies at the Institute, and then in the eight years before he retired in 2007 he was a senior intelligence analyst at State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Prosecutor Harvey said Kendall Myers had daily access to classified information and pursued government colleagues for more.
Luckily, it sounds like Mr. Myers only had access to State Department secrets. Which are probably as useless as the rest of the State Department’s output.
Court documents described the couple’s spycraft changing with the times, beginning with code messages over a short-wave radio and shopping carts exchanged in a grocery. By the time they retired from the work in 2007, they were said to be sending encrypted e-mails from Internet cafes.
Which maybe explains why the Castros finally allowed Cubans to have access to the internet.
At the same time, they were enjoying the fruits of living in the United States, spending inherited wealth on a yacht, said Harvey…
In June 2009, right after the arrests, Fidel Castro questioned the timing — just 24 hours after the Organization of American States voted to lift a decades-old suspension of Cuba’s membership in that group.
"Doesn’t the story of Cuban spying seem really ridiculous to everyone?" Castro asked, without commenting on its validity.
Isn’t it funny how the left always wants to question the ulterior motives when their spies get caught.
There was no immediate reaction from Havana on Friday to news of the sentences…
The couple agreed to forfeit $1.7 million, the amount Kendall Myers was accused of defrauding the government of by receiving a federal salary while working for Cuba.
The US could recoup a lot of money if they started enforcing this rule against all the employees at the State Department.
sweetness-light.com
Wish I could believe this is the only Communist spy in the State Dept, but I suspect there are many others. We'd be better of to fire everyone there and hire people at random to replace them. |
