The Cuban spies…
…have come in from the cold.
What I find particularly interesting are the blue-blood origins of Kendall Myers and his wife, and the cozy little place he’d made for himself in elite academia all these years.
There’s also this tidbit from Myers’s recent past:
In November 2006, Myers created controversy by describing the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom a “one sided” “myth”. He said that he was “ashamed” of the treatment by US President George W. Bush toward Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In response, UK MP Denis MacShane said, “After the Republican defeat in the midterm election, every little rat who feasted during the Bush years is now leaving the ship. I would respect this gentleman, who I have never heard of, if he had had the guts to make any of these points two or five years ago.”
The US State Department distanced itself from Myers comments, stating, “He was speaking as an academic, not as a representative of the State Department.”
Such a statement on the part of Myers was nowhere near enough to get him fired from the State Department at the time. Now the revelation that he was a Cuban spy all these years might have finally accomplished that—if he hadn’t already retired in 2007. But fittingly, Myers was arrested outside of his alma mater Johns Hopkins, where he was a professor for many years and is still listed as adjunct faculty.
A little rat, indeed. The Honorable MP Denis MacShane had no idea how very correct he was. And this blogger must be feeling pretty justified, as well.
Finally, a left person who may be criticized without arousing straw man response of “How dare you question his patriotism!?” Finally, a left person who may be called socialist without arousing outraged sputtering.
Let the left’s frenzied tu quoque-arama begin!
Also, how DARE anyone say this was a person of the left! A true progressive applauds the, um, special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K., and is not, um, uh, ashamed of the way Chimpy, uh, Pres. McBush treated PM Blair. Ahem.
And, also, Sotomayor does NOT believe Federal Courts make law.
It’s reported that his comments in 2006 made him something of a celebrity at the State Department. Now one wonders whether those people were simply against Bush or fellow travelers.
What makes this even more disgusting is that this was done for love, not for money; the consequence of a trip they made to Cuba in 1979.
The following should provide some ammunition to fire against any wanna-be Fidelistas. The statistic on milk production is perhaps the most telling.
While Cuba before 1959 wasn’t perfect, it had a lot going for it. 1 MD/1000 population: better than some countries in Europe. Today, Cuba’s life expectancy is 5 years better than Latin America’s. In 1960, life expectancy in Cuba was 8 years better than Latin America’s.
In the 1950s, Cuba was fifth in the world in TVs per capita. IOW, in terms of the leading edge consumer electronic product of the time, Cuba was well covered. By contrast, today Cuba ranks about 190th out of 210 countries in terms of Internet Access per capita. which is perhaps the leading edge consumer electronic product of today. ( World Bank statistics)
http://www1.lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/asce/cuba8/30smith.pdf
I wish that this were surprising.
I read the article, but it neglected to mention the date on which they are going to be executed. I’d hate to miss the celebration.
Also, can we now entertain just a scintilla of doubt about the “patriotism” of leftists? Not to outrage their well-known patriotic fervor or anything, which is only in evidence when someone questions its existence.
They are due, as Americans, a fair trial. The sentence though, if found guilty, should be the firing squad. I have no sympathy, none, for those who would betray my own, my family’s and our nation’s safety.
To be honest, I assume anyone on the left is of questionable loyalty until proven otherwise. Since such circumstances arise rarely, I tacitly assume most Dems are somewhere between squishy two-cheers-for-America patriots (a la Joel Stein, who said he’d be equally happy to live in any Western country) to straight-up traitors.
And to define my terms, any putative American who wishes America be brought low in any substantive matter (e.g., the Iraq War) qualifies as a traitor in my book. Question the wisdom of the policy, criticize it, propose alternatives, by all means; but wish for defeat and harm to come to our troops, and for my money you’re a traitor.
Occam’s Beard:
Question the wisdom of the policy, criticize it, propose alternatives, by all means; but wish for defeat and harm to come to our troops, and for my money you’re a traitor.
Over a year ago on this blog a troll named L@#$A (so spelled to get past spam filters) wanted evidence that there was ANYONE in the US who wanted defeat for the US in Iraq. I and others easily found a Fox News poll that showed that 20% of Democrats thought the world/things would be better off if the US were defeated in Iraq.
Troll L@#A then denied the validity of anything – poll or or not- coming from Fox News. I provided evidence that other Fox News polls gave results consistent with other pollsters.
TROLL L@#$A and another troll B@#$%R then went on to say, “well it was only 20%.” I cannot say I disagree with them getting banned.
I think most Americans, and maybe even a very large minority of Democrats, would not approve of what Mr. and Mrs. Myers did. But the hard core collectivists, the people most influenced by cultural Marxism, see them as persecuted patriots. Mainstream academia and Hollywood are into the romance of Fidel and Che. They are the heroes fighting against us eeeeeevilll capitalist pig dogs.
Never mind the facts that pre-Castro Cuba was much more prosperous and had a very large middle class. In fact, the average Cuban was better off than the average European, pre-Castro.
These people just hate capitalism and hate their country. They believe they are the savior of humanity and have the superior vision to which we all must defer.
Notice the Myers did not mind living a very comfortable upper middle class life. Just like the rest of their fellow-travelers.
I don’t know about you, but to me these people are contemptible.
Bring back the noose.
I’ll do it. I’ll throw up afterwards, but I’ll do it, because it needs to be done.
Bet they’ll get a presidential pardon? They’ll get it because the president wants good relations with his fellow socialist Fidel. Fidel will make a demand, and the president will agree to it. Mr. and Mrs. Myers will be pardoned and live happily ever after in Havana.
“I think most Americans, and maybe even a very large minority of Democrats, would not approve of what Mr. and Mrs. Myers did”.
Indeed, Fred. My parents were Democrats, old-school, anti-communist Democrats in the mold of JFK and Hubert Humphrey, and if they were alive today, they’d only ask why did it take the FBI so long to arrest Myers and his wife. Like many Dems their age, they loved America and hated traitors. I once asked them about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and my father’s only comment was “good riddance”.
What will be interesting to watch now is how hard the Justice Department presses this case. A good indicator will be who Myers retains as an attorney. If it’s Plato Cacheris, it means DoJ is playing for keeps, has all the evidence it needs, and fully expects a guilty verdict. But with Plato as defense counsel, the case will never go to trial. He’ll plea-bargain and get a reasonably good deal for his client, in return for cooperation in the damage assessment (which I assume is going on as we speak). If Myers retains someone other than Plato, he may think he can beat the rap.
Looks like not much has changed at Foggy Bottom since Joe McCarthy examined the place.
Things like this always remind me of “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers
Still Papa Joe’s State Dep’t.
This is what you get when you take the Yale, Brown, and Wellesley graduating class and install them at State and CIA.
My cousins went there and guess where they worked.
And how’s that SECRET National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nukes working out?
The sentence though, if found guilty, should be the firing squad.
Umm, no. Spies get special treatment.
You hang them.
I have occasionally, on Richard Fernandez’ blog (because he is a Harvard grad) tweaked him a bit about the bad policy of our government’s spy and foreign service agencies relying too much on the elite schools for recruitment. Those institutions were deliberately targeted by the Soviets and later by their Gramscian Marxist proxies, to exert influence and disinformation over the kids.
Because of this, it is increasingly likely that the CIA, State, Homeland Security, etc. are going to bring aboard young recruits and even older academics who have either been turned, placed, or disillusioned.
I think this is a significant danger to national security. No one has yet objected to this viewpoint when I’ve expressed it, including Wretchard.
Any suggestions how to prevent or minimize this problem?
Having taught in the Ivy League, there is no way I’d ever recruit there for sensitive positions. Not so much for loyalty reasons, but for psychological ones. Students there consider the world their oyster. (I once had one (and not a particularly bright one) tell me he wasn’t interested in science, but rather in science policy, because he wanted to tell us what to work on. He himself was much too good to do research.)
The problem is that when their achievement falls short of their expectations – all too likely in the civil service – I’d suspect they’d be prone to embitterment. An embittered, frustrated government employee who feels under-appreciated and who has a top security clearance is not a happy combination.
Put conversely, if I were recruiting agents in the State Department or CIA, I’d look for Ivy League stars who’d fizzled out in the bureaucracy.
Occam,
Why don’t those agencies not recruit people from state universities or even ex military guys in transition who may or may not have degrees (or working on them)? I would think it far more likely (again, not foolproof) you would find men and women who love this country and want to serve it well.
I think with this arrest the FBI is only scratching the surface of the extent of the problem in the State Department. I would imagine that the CIA may be better at handling these problems internally. For example, the CIA may discover an occasional traitor, get the goods on him or her, and maybe turn them into double agents under threat of prosecution. But that’s not usually an option for the State Department, because there are so many people over there at Foggy Bottom who would be happy to “out” a suspected double agent.
We must remember that Mr. Kendall Myers was very popular at the State Department.
FredHjr – I recommend the John LeCarre books for insight into that. Though fictional, the author was a real spook.
It is not only the ideology of the left which appeals to those who want to manage our lives, it is also – as OB notes – congenial to the psychology of many elitists as well. They resent lesser beings gaining status under our system, and believe that a comeuppance would be good for the country as a whole as a result. Foreign intelligence plays off this by identifying those who resent not having proper adulation shown them. It is not at all an accident that our enemies find them at the institutions of the entitled.
I went to an Ivy-wannabe (William & Mary), which had its share of those wishing to ape these attitudes. But even at one step down from elite schools, there is at least some humility. Though schools like mine remain fertile grounds for growing liberals, treason takes an arrogance that fortunately eludes us.
Couldn’t we just please flush the whole damn State Department – followed immediately by a generous portion of the CIA?
I realize there are actually loyal and patriotic citizens at the CIA, and many of them do dirty jobs that need to be done even if their fellow citizens wish to close their eyes on the whole business.
But the CIA AND the State Department seem to have had more than their fair share of spies over the years.
Perhaps a good house cleaning is finally in order, with anyone wishing to keep or regain their job in either of those organizations having to go through the kind of examination normally reserved for the practice of proctology.
If you go back and look at previous spies, they usually had been operating for YEARS before being caught….
Here, here, Scottie! I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we threw out the bathwater and discovered there was no baby but a paunchy fraud sucking on his sinecure like it (or he) was a Cuban.
Fully agree, Scottie. But before doing so, I’d supply State and the CIA with lots of disinformation. We might as well gain some advantage from their perfidy.
To Fred’s question, the answer is I have no idea. I would guess that State and the CIA recruit among East Coast elite universities because…they always have. It’s the spook equivalent of the “no one ever gets fired for buying IBM.”
Frankly, in my estimation, the Ivies are over-rated. Seriously over-rated. As we used to joke when I was an assistant prof, “the answer is home cooking, home $%^&^&ing, and Harvard University.” The question is, “What are the three most over-rated things in the world?”
The Ivies may well be overrated.
Let’s talk about how this is an actionable insight. In other words, so what do we do about it?
Oblio, I think point out that this is the case. Easterners in particular are prone to groveling before graduates of the Ivies. As a westerner, on meeting a Mount Holyoke graduate, I asked her if Mount Holyoke was in New Jersey. (I had no idea, but was just trying to make polite conversation; girls’ schools thousands of miles away were far below my radar).
She was devastated that I was not only not impressed, but that I’d obviously never heard of the place before.
I had a similar experience with a Harrow graduate, who visibly deflated when I asked him if Harrow were near London. How the hell was I supposed to know every goddamned secondary school in Britain?
Well, a big part of the problem at the moment is how difficult it really is at the moment to take any action at all.
State is under the Executive branch, and the legislative branch which should be a check and balance is too deep into it with The Messiah to be critical of Him in any way.
The repubs could possibly find or borrow some testicular fortitude from somewhere, and start hammering away at State Department and demand congressional hearings that could go on forever.
Expect the dems to fight such a move, as the spies tend to be very friendly towards their own party.
A repub presidential candidate who professes the intent on the campaign trail to clean up both State and the CIA could then follow through with their promises if they win without the dems screaming about politically motivated firings as the groundwork would have been long laid that there was a problem, what the nature of the problem was, and what the repub candidate was proposing as a solution to the problem.
Of course, any such candidate would have to envision the full blown assault CIA, State, and the dems would mount against them, so any little sliver of a skeleton needs to be aired long before such a promise is made.
Note I didn’t say a clean candidate – everyone has skeletons, and even the tiniest one can be blown into a full blown problem given enough resources – and the dems, State, and CIA are quite capable of doing so with the full support of the MSM.
If the repub makes it to the white house, ask for resignations of EVERYONE down to the clerical staff, then build all over again from scratch.
With that end game in mind, it would be helpful if the candidate had actually worked up a plan for who would go into what positions long before the election, so the transformation could be almost immediate.
CIA is a tougher problem.
You don’t want to impede any anti-terrorism activities currently underway, but the CIA should not be involved in politics to begin with – and they blatantly did so under Bush as a way of attempting to undermine him during his terms.
Any one with suggestions on how to solve THAT problem, I’m all ears….
Scottie is right. The CIA is a tougher problem because it has formidable powers of institutional self-protection. The same is true of the FBI, as we saw during Watergate: enough, in that case, to take down a sitting President coming off a landslide electoral victory. State is an easier target.
OB, you are also right, to some degree, about the overrated Ivies. I can certainly appreciate that the Harvards in particular hold opinions about their own merit that is not supported by the evidence; that’s what I thought when I was 17, and my opinion is unchanged. I attended a college founded to correct the errors of Harvard. The Princetons are a little harder to dismiss, as they combine tremendous social assurance with a legitimate work ethic. Nevertheless, you do get breadth and depth of talent year after year from H-Y-P and Stanford, and the value of the network of connections grows over time.
But OB, you are right that you meet some people who went to the most highly selective universities, and you ask, “How did that happen?” And Fred is right, that if patriotism were a crime, a lot of Ivy League kids wouldn’t be at any risk.
The story in this case is not about the Ivies, but about the Fall of the Old Establishment and how many of them went communist: Alger Hiss, Corliss Lamont, and Michael Straight are just some of the names. This is the unspeakable truth. And just to add to the Liberal Fascism frisson, let us remember that Corliss’ father Thomas was Mussolini’s banker, and the daughter of another Morgan partner and liberal statesman, Dwight Murrow, married Charles Lindbergh.
Oblio,
Apparently, Kendall Myers was a graduate of Brown University (1958? 1959?) and then was in the Army as an officer for three years after that, stationed in Europe, working to translate Czech broadcasts from that country. So, obviously he worked in intel as an analyst and language specialist. I understand that later on he specialized in European history and got a Ph.D. in it. No one seems to know exactly when in his life he began to turn towards Communism. I highly doubt that it happened on or even shortly before his trip to Cuba in 1978.
He was from a well-off Washington, D.C. family. His father was a heart surgeon, and his mother was descended from a famous family that had Alexander Graham Bell as her grandfather.
Kendall Myers apparently had some tragedy in his life. From what I read, in November of 1975 he was involved in an auto accident in which he hit and killed a pedestrian, something that apparently must have done him in psychologically-emotionally because his first marriage ended in 1977. So, there’s pain in his life. What any of that has to do with his turn towards Communism seems remote to me.
I’m guessing that he was a hard man to read. People seem to have liked him, which means he had a kind of affability to him. Whether that was a studied trait or a genuine one is something none of us here will really ever know. But what is clear is that no one seems to know of anything about him that stood out ideologically – that would indicate that he was a Communist and preferred it. His neighbors say that he hated the Republicans and conservatives, and that they shared his views. D.C. must be a solidly liberal town. I wonder how Ronald Reagan was even able to survive the place.
Since he likes Cuba so well, how about a little R&R at Hotel Gitmo?
I’m speculating that Myers’ hatred of Republicans and Conservatives goes back to Nixon(!) and the Vietnam War. It is possible that he was influenced by anti-McCarthyism in the 50’s. He would have been at an impressionable age. Was he aware that he moved by degrees from pro-Democrat to anti-Republican to “anti-anti-Communist” to pro-Communist to traitor (assuming the charges against him are true)?
errata: I apologize for typing too fast and proofreading poorly last night. It was Dwight MORROW who was a Morgan partner, Ambassador to Mexico, and finally US Senator from New Jersey. There is also a lack of agreement in a sentence in my second paragraph. It should read “the Harvards in particular hold opinions about their own merit that are not supported by the evidence.” I should get that right before throwing any stones at the Harvards!
The not so honourable Dennis McShane MP (we don’t call them that as the hon. means something else and the Rt Hon., which he may well be is member of the Privy Council) would rather like this guy. Kendall Myers is on record as being a rather nauseating supporter of the European Union (as is McShane).
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/06/by-company-you-keep.html
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/12/so-where-was-story.html
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/11/shoddy-pieces-of-work.html
As can be noted from the last comment, he also took money and position from the European Union. Also not America’s friend, which is why many of us want out.
Scottie, the only way I can think of to geld State and the CIA is somehow to establish parallel organizations and then gradually feather the corrupt doppelgaenger by shrinking it and relegating it to less and less critical tasks until finally organizationally subsuming it into the healthy one (but firing most of the personnel).
How one would actually do this I have no idea.
Occam,
Exactly how many government agencies have been eliminated in the past?
I understand the logic behind your suggestion, but I think realistically we’d end up with 2 organizations doing the same job.
Since we are focusing on “spies”, how about looking into the “TERRORISTS”, assassins, and killers being harbored in Little Havana ??? The likes of Luis Posada Carriles (“South America’s Bin Laden” who blew up Cubana Flight 455 in 1976), Orlando Bosch (his partner in crime), Felix Rodriguez (point man for Oliver North in Iran/Contra, trained central American death squads, ordered execution of Che Guevara), Alpha 66 (Gusano Al Qaeda) etc
This U.$. backed & harbored ‘Latino-Hezballah’ of South Florida terrorizes Cuba, blows up hotel lobbies, hijacks ferries and planes, strafes Cuban beaches with gun fire, drops poisonous pathogens on Cuban crops, poisons Cuban water supplies, etc
Go to Versailles restaurant in Miami where these blood soaked “butchers” will be sitting right up front. = That is why Cuba NEEDS spies in the U.$.
Jorge,
Viva la revolucion!!! Viva Castro!!! Death to the Yanqis!
Regarding Jorge’s assertion of Guevara being executed on orders out of “Little Havana”, be advised that this a$$hole’s death was ordered by the President of Bolivia, and carried out by a Bolivian Army officer who apparently volunteered for the task after this murderer was wounded and captured in a firefight with Bolivian Special Forces fighting a communist insurgency.
The rest of the assertions made have about as much merit and are not worth wasting time with….
Since the US is so bloodthirsty, perhaps the good Jorge should emigrate to Cuba?
Scottie,
I hope you caught my sarcasm in my last post.
Across the blogs in recent months I’ve seen a lot of people like Jorge coming out of the woodwork. The collectivists are emboldened and are on the move. Some of these are Hard Left. Others are a tad removed from the Hard Left, and spout similar memes.
All of the conservative blogs are being barged into by these people. It is so persistent and widespread that I think it there are orders from certain organizations to go forth, pester, be obstreperous and boastful, and so forth. I think their aim is to demoralize us and make us think that what is happening is inevitable and there is nothing we can do about it.