Disdain for U.S. Policies May Have Led to Alleged Spying for Cuba

If only their could have waited to spy until Obama took over.

He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. "We were all appalled by the Bush years," one said.

What Walter Kendall Myers kept hidden, according to documents unsealed in court Friday, was a deep and long-standing anger toward his country, an anger that allegedly made him willing to spy for Cuba for three decades.

"I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the evening news is a radicalizing experience," he wrote in his diary in 1978, referring to what he described as greedy U.S. oil companies, inadequate health care and "the utter complacency of the oppressed" in America. On a trip to Cuba, federal law enforcement officials said in legal filings, Myers found a new inspiration: the communist revolution.
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Myers, who goes by Kendall, grew up in Washington, the eldest of five children. His father, Walter, was a renowned heart surgeon; his mother, Carol, was the daughter of Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the longtime former president of the National Geographic Society, and was the granddaughter of inventor Alexander Graham Bell.

Myers went to prep school at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania and graduated from Brown University. He went on to get a doctorate in European history from the Johns Hopkins SAIS.
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In 1978, Myers visited Cuba for two weeks, authorities said. He told his supervisors that he had been invited there for an academic trip by the country's United Nations mission. But his guide while on the island was a Cuban intelligence officer, authorities said.

The son of privilege fell in love with the communist revolution, according to diary entries released in court.

"Everything I hear about Fidel suggests that he is a brilliant and charismatic leader," Myers wrote, according to the documents.
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An official from the Cuban mission visited the couple in South Dakota and recruited them, officials say. He asked Myers to join the State Department or the CIA, authorities said. Gwendolyn Myers would later tell an undercover FBI agent, posing as a Cuban operative, that her husband chose State because he was not "a very good liar." The CIA required regular polygraph tests, Myers said.
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The couple had found an outlet from stress in recent years. They would drive to a marina in the Anne Arundel County town of Galesville on weekends and set out on their yacht. Two years ago, they traded up to a boat with teak decks, according to Nancy Bray, general manager of Hartge Yacht Harbor.


"Every weekend and holiday, they were off sailing," said Jacqui Gallagher, a neighbor of the Myerses'. The couple worked out frequently so they would be strong enough to manage their boat, she said.

Despite what the couple described as their paranoia about detection, court documents reveal that they readily opened up to an FBI undercover agent who approached Kendall Myers on Massachusetts Avenue NW in April. The agent told Myers that a Cuban intelligence agent had sent him. They went on to meet another three times, along with Myers's wife.

The couple told the agent they eventually wanted to sail to Cuba, according to the court documents.

"Our idea," said Kendall Myers, "is to sail home."

They were such a lovely couple; smart, sophisticated, NY Times readers.