Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 71, of Washington, were charged a few days ago with having spied for Cuba for the past 30 years. Until his retirement in 2007, Walter was a high-ranking analyst for the U.S. State Department with top-secret clearance. Gwendolyn, who worked in a local bank, allegedly passed along secret documents to other Cuban agents by exchanging shopping carts in supermarkets.
Both have pleaded not guilty. The Justice Department says the information they passed along was “incredibly serious.”
First of all, Myers, a lifetime civil servant, and his bank-employee wife own a 38-foot yacht docked at a marina in Anne Arundel County in Maryland. This was their second yacht. They “traded up,” according to The Washington Post, because the new yacht had “teak decks.”
Spies often seem to live somewhat beyond their means.
Aldrich Ames, an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, got away with spying for the Soviet Union and Russia for at least nine years, even though the CIA was furiously hunting for a mole in the agency.
At a time when Ames had a take-home salary of $38,800 per year, he bought a home for $540,000 in cash, spent $99,000 on home improvements, $7,000 on furniture, $25,000 for a Jaguar and $19,500 for a Honda.
No alarm bells went off at CIA headquarters.
Flash forward. Walter Kendall Myers had been put on a “watch list” by the State Department in 1995, meaning he was under suspicion. But the FBI did not start investigating him until 11 years later. Myers retired from the State Department in 2007, but in his last year there, he accessed more than 200 classified or top-secret documents related to Cuba, even though the documents were unrelated to his job.
