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Cuba spy case shows flaws in US counterspy efforts, just like other recent spy cases
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The latest Washington espionage arrest replays the same old story of a senior intelligence official getting away with decades of spying against the US. Will US security officials ever fix their broken spy catching system?
A weekend ago, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had arrested longtime State Department employee, Walter Kendall Myers, along with his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, on charges of spying for Cuba.
According to the charges, Cuban intelligence recruited Mr. Myers back in the seventies while he was working as a contract instructor at the Foreign Services Institute, which is State Department’s training arm.
Mr. Myers then joined the State Department as a government employee. He worked his way up to a senior position in State’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, where he had access to Top Secret intelligence information. He fed his Cuban handlers secrets for two decades, and even boasted to an undercover FBI agent that he and his wife once dined with Fidel Castro.
Meanwhile, the American Thinker’s Clarice Feldman and Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein reported that Mrs. Myers very likely had access to secrets of her own—though not as a government employee. She worked in the IT department of Riggs Bank, a now-defunct Washington DC bank that has long been reputed to be CIA’s “Spook Bank.”
Mrs. Myers’ access there would have afforded her a view into spy agency financial activity—undoubtedly of interest of Mr. Myers’ Cuban handlers.
So maybe the real culprit in the Myers spy case might never have even had a clearance or subjected to investigative scrutiny.
The Riggs connection was not mentioned in documents associated with the Myers’ arrest, and other key elements of the Myers arrest raise doubts about whether the guardians of America’s secrets are blind to their own failures.
If the allegations prove correct, Myers spied for twenty years without getting caught. During that time, he was likely to have been subjected to between six and ten background investigations, possibly including polygraph interviews. Myers and his wife also reportedly traveled overseas—secretly, of course—to meet with Cuban handlers and even Castro himself. The investigation into Myers and subsequent arrest took place after his retirement.
So much for the vigilance of the FBI and State Department’s crack Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
From the Cuban perspective, Myers is undoubtedly regarded as a successful intelligence operation: he was a high-level, productive human intelligence source who could also act as an agent of Havana’s influence through his position as a trainer or as a senior intelligence advisor to US diplomats.
For Myers’ Cuban handlers, standard U.S. government security practices, such as security clearances, periodic reinvestigations, and requirements like reporting foreign travel and foreign contacts, were little more than speed bumps.
These tired old security practices didn’t stop Myers. Or his notorious predecessors, either, such as Robert Hansen, the FBI agent who spied for Russia for decades, or Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer who also spied for Russia for nearly a decade. Most experts agree that there are very likely active moles selling American secrets right now—despite clearances, classification markings, polygraphs, safes, and controlled entry to government buildings.
Will the intelligence community ever learn that its security is out of step with reality?
Probably not anytime soon.
Old security hands at the intelligence agencies think their practices work just fine, and see no need to fix what ain’t broken, even when confronted with cases like the Myers’. If anything, the clearance process is keeping sought-after employees out of intelligence, such as badly-needed native foreign language speakers who have foreign relatives and friends, or computer experts who may have downloaded a pirated file or two.
Policymakers probably aren’t going to insert themselves into the security thicket, either. Bush administration efforts at security clearance reform promised much, but merely tweaked the status quo Currently, Obama national security leaders have shown little inclination to take on old-school, entrenched intelligence community interests.
And these security people, with their polygraphs, fear of gay people, and insistence on sticking with a system designed in the 1940s to weed out closeted Ivy League Bolsheviks—they’re about as entrenched an intelligence community interest as there is in Washington.
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