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Walter Kendall Myers, the former State Department analyst who spied for the Cuban regime for nearly three decades, died on March 12 in Springfield, Missouri, at the age of 88, while serving a life sentence in a medical prison. The cause was cancer, as confirmed by his daughter Amanda Myers Klein to the newspaper The New York Times, which published the news nearly two months after his death.
Known to Cuban intelligence as Agent 202, Myers was sentenced in July 2010 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage and two counts of electronic fraud. His wife and accomplice, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers —Agent 123— received a sentence of 81 months. Both were arrested in June 2009 by FBI agents following a three-year undercover operation.
The damage caused by Myers was described as "devastating" by James Olson, former head of counterintelligence at the CIA. "He would have been in a position to provide them with real-time information on what was happening in the intelligence community of the State Department," Olson stated to the Times. Between 2001 and 2007, Myers was a lead analyst on European countries at the Office of Intelligence and Research, with access to hundreds of highly classified compartmented reports.
The couple transmitted information via shortwave radio messages and physical deliveries, which they made by swapping carts in supermarkets. They met with Cuban agents in Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Trinidad and Tobago. In 1995, they traveled to the island under false names and met for four hours with Fidel Castro.
Enrique García, a former officer of the Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence who defected in 1989, revealed that the documents related to the Myers marriage "were of such value that, when they arrived at the analysis center in Havana, they were processed during the night and early morning. In the morning, the head of intelligence would leave with a briefcase to meet with Fidel Castro without going through the Minister of the Interior."
Myers' motivation was strictly ideological. He did not receive payment for his espionage, only reimbursement for equipment. At the sentencing hearing, he testified before the federal court: "We did not act out of anger towards the United States or out of any anti-American sentiment. Our goal was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution." He told an undercover FBI agent that Castro was "simply wonderful."
Olson pointed out that this profile made him particularly dangerous: "Ideological spies are the hardest to catch because there are no conspicuous expenses."
The judge who sentenced him to life in 2010 agreed with prosecutor Michael Harvey, who described him without ambiguity: "He is a traitor. He betrayed his colleagues at the State Department and our nation." Additionally, $1.7 million in assets were seized, equivalent to the federal salary accumulated by Myers over several decades.
The Myers case is part of a series of serious infiltrations by Cuban intelligence into the U.S. government. On March 31, the FBI dedicated an episode of its podcast to this topic and described the regime's espionage structure as "extremely competent," operating "well above its weight." The FBI has revealed that Cuba recruited spies at elite universities, taking advantage of ideological sympathies before the recruits gained access to classified information, following the same pattern observed in the Myers case.
Gwendolyn Myers passed away in 2015 without showing any remorse, as recalled by the FBI. Her husband also died without recanting, thus concluding one of the darkest chapters of betrayal in the recent history of the State Department.
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