WASHINGTON — 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.
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.
Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 71, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges of conspiracy, being agents of a foreign government and wire fraud.
The State Department and the intelligence community are investigating how much damage the alleged spying might have done. Myers had worked as a European political expert for more than 20 years at the State Department and had been associated with its Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 1988 until his retirement in 2007.
Myers and his wife told an undercover FBI agent during a series of meetings two months ago that they passed along information over a shortwave radio given to them by the Cuban government, and by exchanging shopping carts with handlers in grocery stores, documents said. In recent years, they used encrypted e-mails sent from Internet cafes, they told the agent.
