Walter and Gwen Meyers, Treason-Lite
By Larry Johnson on June 6, 2009 at 3:07 PM in Current Affairs
Please do not interpret my sarcasm as a sign that I think spying for the Cubans is okay. It is not. If the affidavit filed in this case is accurate then Walter is a traitor and his wife, Gwen, a willing collaborator. But what if Walter and Gwen were actually cooperating with the FBI during their entire “spying” career? Or, alternatively, what if Walter was on the FBI’s radar from the outset and his activities carefully monitored in order to identify other elements of Cuba’s intelligence network in the United States?
Let’s approach this systematically. You should first read the affidavit. Here’s the link.
Here are some of the things the affidavit does not tell us–when was Walter officially signed up and how did the United States discover that Walter was working for the Cubans?
When Walter became a Cuban recruit he would have received training on how to communicate with his handler. The communication procedures would have included instructions on how to send intelligence reports, how to signal for an emergency meeting and how to recognize other Cuban intelligence. There also would be procedures for receiving money.
Here’s what is odd about the affadavit. First, the U.S. Government claims that an undercover FBI agent approached Walter and Gwen in April and persuaded them he was a Cuban operative. Second, Walter and Gwen were not arrested until Thursday, June 4. Yet the affidavit provides a detailed history of Walter and Gwen’s activities over the last 30 years. The FBI did not just magically come up with that in the last 24 hours.
More importantly, what was the triggering incident in April that inspired the FBI to approach Meyer’s in April? Given the detail provided in the affidavit it appears that U.S. intelligence/law enforcement authorities knew about Walter’s activities long before the FBI undercover showed up in April. There are many possibilities–Walter was on the U.S. radar from the moment he was recruited or a human defector with knowledge of Cuban intelligence activities fingered him or we (CIA or FBI) has penetrated Cuban intelligence or we have a signal intercept.
None of this is good news for the Cubans and certainly is keeping the head of Cuban intelligence service awake over the weekend.
How about the damage inflicted by Walter? (I’m ignoring Gwen because she had no first hand info, had not signed a non-disclosure agreement and only served as an accomplice enabling her husband’s activities.) Prior to joining the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 2001, Walter had little access to critical intelligence but could have identified possible CIA officers who were being trained at the Foreign Service Institute.
Once he joined INR he did have access to Top Secret information, which I assume included access to signals intelligence product. He did have access to information that might have alerted the Cubans to breaches in their own communications’ security. He also had access to Top Secret intelligence reports and analysis. But, unlike previous traitors–Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen–Meyers did not have the means to identify human sources behind these reports. If guys like Ames and Hansen represented a 10 in terms of damage, Meyers at best was probably a 2 or 3 on a scale of ten.
What is really fascinating, if you read the affidavit, is that the U.S. Government was monitoring the communications between the Meyers and their handler (see page 17). The specificity of the communications listed in the affidavit tell me we are sending a strong message to Havana. The FBI is sending them the ultimate “fuck you” message by letting them know we have been on top of this relationship for over 12 years, we have been reading the mail, we have monitored the instructions and, while not stated directly, we have been able to identify other parts of their intelligence network.
At the end of the day I see the arrest of Walter and Gwen a good news story. We’re telling the Cubans that they’ve been played for chumps for several years. I would suspect a bottle of two of champagne has been popped at CIA and FBI headquarters in the last couple of days.
(Release: November 13)
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Who knows what “a while” is. Thirty years? These are clearly minor league operatives but Cuba has to be wondering about whether the stuff being sent by these two was all completely bogus.
It would seem that they were now of no more use to the U.S. so this was, as Larry says, a F.U. to Cuban intelligence.
That document linked above was interesting reading — and it is probably a message to the Cuban Intelligence service.
So the Meyers communicated using short wave radio (the exact unit was specified as being the same as another Cuban agent).
Ah and then the era of the e-mail — and the double meanings. Seems like the government is going to have to prove that the e-mail really does mean something different than what is written. As a juror I would be suspicious of this line of evidence without some solid proof that the underlying meaning of the actual words in the e-mail was different.
As a tax payer I can see that an enormous amount of time and money has been spent to monitor this couple — and that this “spying on the spies” has been extensive. Hopefully the information gained about the methods and operations of the Cuban Intelligence was worth the tax payer’s money.
I wonder how many double agents are involved — Cubans who are really US agents, trying to recruit field agents for Cuba??? It seems like there might be inside information and perhaps that agent has retired or died???
OK — now who is going to make the movie?
This is an FU to CuIS all right. A professional intel officer can gain a great deal of insight into this case from what has been exposed in the document. One question is, though, why reveal this at this time? Usually, counterintelligence types would be perfectly happy to let low level agents like the Myers’ go to their graves unexposed if they continued to compromise elements of their associated espionage mechanisms. FUs are acts of politics and ego, not counterintelligence. What prompted the considerations of politics and/or ego to override those of counterintelligence?
Boring.
Who cares?
Hi Larry, Is there really any useful intelligence we could garner about Cuba? What exactly could Cuba do with any intelligence they might learn from us? Would they sell it to Putin? Or is this a supposed positive development to show the FBI and the CIA in a glowing light to the American public?
The agencies protecting us are taking a lot of negative publicity from the Obama/Pelosi team…
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CB_CUBA_CASTRO_SPIES?SITE=NCBER&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
some of Castro’s response
Here’s a couple articles I found on Castro’s comments.
For Complete Story:
http://tinyurl.com/p56hfo
For Complete Story:
http://tinyurl.com/otnjsy
I’m starting to really hate this spam filter…
An interesting update at cq: possible that Gwendolyn Myers had access to sensitive material
http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/spytalk/2009/06/cuba-spies-riggs-bank-had-more.html#more