I’m sure that pardons for these two will be in the offing
For three decades, accused spies Walter Kendall Myers and his wife shuffled secrets to their Cuban contacts in such fear of being caught, authorities say, that he memorized top-secret documents rather than bring them into their home.
Their downfall came simply and swiftly, lured by a stranger who offered Myers a cigar.
Obama administration officials say Kendall Myers had access to highly sensitive material while working for the State Department’s intelligence arm, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered a damage assessment of what the couple may have revealed. Their methods of communicating with the Cubans included Morse code on shortwave radio, changing shopping carts at the grocery store and a face-to-face meeting with President Fidel Castro himself, court documents say.
David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, described the couple’s alleged spying for the communist government as “incredibly serious.”
State Department officials say Kendall Myers had been under investigation for three years, since before he retired in 2007.
Hired under Carter. Warnings from their supervisors were ignored under Clinton. It took five years under Bush to get them put on the list to actively investigate.
Foggy Bottom is very likely crawling with these types.
But don’t plug that info into current world events too often. Ammo is just too expensive right now.
This sort of crap has plagued the leaky State Dept offices since before there WAS a Foggy Bottom. Most of the leakiness stemmed from WW2, in FDR’s administration, when we had to operate closely with the USSR as our ally.
Lots of professorly-types were recruited for the dealings with Russia, and not all of them stood down from their russophile stance when the USSR became our enemy.
This was McCarthy’s real damage: he went so far overboard that we quit looking for and rooting out these communist spies for at least ten years, allowing even more of them to take hold in our foreign relations sector.
This is all detailed in the fascinating book about the worst of these spies, “Operation Solo”, by John Barron. It is the story of how one of these turncoats got turned to become a double agent, but mainly, the book shows how pervasive the Kremlin’s tactics were (and maybe still are).
YEs it has and still does. It’s a hangover from the years of kissing Stalin’s butt.