Thus a neighbor of retired State Department intelligence analyst Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, on the “frustration with U.S. policies” shared by all right-thinking people in the upper-Northwest D.C. bastion of liberalism in which they reside. Still, a little shiver of shock has run through members of this open-minded community as it turns out that the frustrations of Mr. and Mrs. Myers-accused spies for Cuba-seem to have been deeper, if not of longer standing, than their own. “Anyone who knows him finds it baffling and finds this completely out of character,” says a friend of Mr. Myers to the Washington Post. “He has this amazing intellectual curiosity. He is open to all kinds of ideas.” Well, yes, apparently. Adds another friend, “When I heard they were arrested, I felt like they had arrested Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.” And by the way, excellent work on clearances, State Department! Mrs. Myers has allowed as how her husband chose to steal intelligence from a desk at State rather than the CIA on account of not being “a very good liar” (all those pesky CIA polygraph tests), but he was good enough to dupe his bosses and colleagues for nearly three decades. “‘I never heard him say anything about Latin America at all–ever, ever,’ said a retired Foreign Service officer who worked with Myers and who spoke on the condition of anonymity.” What’s more, in all the years during which Santa and Bunny “were allegedly passing information to the Cubans, they never indicated any interest in the island, according to friends and colleagues — even at long dinner parties in which guests discussed world affairs.” Which just goes to show: if you’ve graduated from the right schools (Brown), come from a famous family (Gilbert H. Grosvenor and Alexander Graham Bell), “love to sail and peruse the London Review of Books,” and are as “appalled by the Bush years” as everyone else discussing world affairs at long dinner parties in your neighborhood, you can get a lot of spying in before you get caught.
