Cuba's spies and our interests

Two Americans are arrested and charged with spying for Cuba, and there are calls for the Obama Administration to stop any developments in relations with that country.

I’m reminded of other big espionage cases and the responses that followed from the United States and other countries.

Like when it was discovered in 1985 that the Soviets had placed listening devices throughout the U.S. Embassy building in Moscow while it was under construction – “It’s nothing but an eight-story microphone plugged into the Politburo,” Congressman Dick Armey said – or that in 1987 the Soviets had compromised a U.S. Marine guard at our embassy in Moscow. The Reagan Administration of course responded by breaking off diplomatic relations, President Clinton restored them, only to break them off again when it was discovered that the Russians had bugged a conference room in the State Department.

Or when the United States arrested Jonathan Pollard in 1987. Pollard was working as a naval intelligence analyst, and he was also passing military and intelligence information to Israel. We all remember that the United States downgraded diplomatic relations and cut off economic and military aid to Israel for several years.

And more recently, there was the case of the Chinese presidential airplane, a Boeing 767 that had been refitted in the United States. When the Chinese government discovered in 2001 that listening devices had been placed throughout the aircraft – even in the headboard of the presidential bed – they kicked our ambassador and half our diplomatic staff out of Beijing, and relations went into a deep freeze for five years.

CORRECTION: The espionage stories above are all true, as the links will show. The parts about the governments’ responses, I made those up.

In fact, President Reagan was under pressure to put relations with Moscow in the deep freeze, but he resisted firmly. As TIME reported in 1987:

But Reagan and Shultz would not accede to a Senate resolution calling for the Secretary to postpone his Moscow trip until security problems were resolved. Shultz conceded that the espionage throws a “heavy shadow” over U.S.-Soviet relations. But Reagan declared, “I just don’t think it’s good for us to be run out of town.” The Administration’s priority, he told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, is the “pursuit of verifiable and stabilizing arms reduction.” The President even repeated his invitation to Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev to come to the U.S. for a summit: “The welcome mat is still out.”

Cuba’s intelligence services are good at what they do, they are patient, they play for the long term, and as this AP story points out, their modus operandi makes it particularly difficult to find their agents. The accused spies Walter Kendall Myers and Gwendolyn Myers (profiled here in Saturday’s Washington Post), who have pleaded not guilty, did not work on Latin America and their friends have been quoted saying they can’t recall them ever talking about Latin America. Kendall Myers apparently helped Cuba through his job as a high-ranking State Department intelligence official covering Europe – a post where he had access to intelligence products of all kinds, including those about Cuba. The most interesting information I have seen is in the criminal complaint (pdf) on the Herald’s website. The New York Times reported on Saturday that the Myers were under investigation for three years, but I have seen no reporting that explains what triggered the U.S. government’s suspicions.

Cuban espionage against the United States (and, one presumes, U.S. espionage against Cuba) is a fact of life.

So is the fact that Cuba is a next-door neighbor, like it or not. Cuba is a source of migration to the United States and has been the source of migration crises, its territory can be used to smuggle drugs to the United States, and it’s a place where in the years ahead, offshore oil drilling could go wrong and the Gulf Stream would turn a Cuban spill into a Florida beach disaster in about four days.

Either it’s in our interest to ensure that migration from Cuba is safe and legal, or it’s not. Ditto for drug interdiction and protecting the marine environment. It’s fair to debate, if the Obama Administration one day proposes collaborating with Cuba on these subjects, whether the Administration’s ideas will produce results. But like it or not, the only government with which to engage on these issues is in Havana.

Declining to engage with Cuba on specific issues that affect U.S. national interests – as President Reagan demonstrated when he defended his engagement with the Soviets – will do nothing to stop Cuban espionage, but it would ensure that we leave those interests unattended. The only defense against the world-class intelligence service of this neighboring country is relentless counterintelligence.