From personal experience, I know exactly what happened when the BEX office received the senator’s letter—PANIC. This official correspondence was probably as important as any other factor as to why BEX caved and pressured DS to reconsider the denial of Kendall’s security clearance.
Kendall also submitted his own six-page exoneration and explanation letter to BEX. This letter and the senator’s written query to BEX were simply too much for the department’s hiring specialists, who were also feeling heat from senior officials at FSI management who were asking why such a qualified candidate was not on a fast track to full-time employment. The BEX deputy director sent an unclassified letter to DS’s Applicant Review Branch asking DS to review Kendall’s letter before the next BEX meeting. While the deputy director may not have personally reviewed all the pertinent documents or even had a personal hand in the request for reversal, his office is responsible for Kendall overcoming a well-defined rejection by security specialists for his access to classified material.
Out of nowhere, DS reconsidered Kendall’s request for a “top secret” clearance. A DS memo to BEX attached to the granting of Kendall’s clearance, which was signed by the DS director, David Fields, strongly suggested that DS was very unhappy with the pressure put on it to grant Kendall’s clearance (memo contents redacted by the State Department). If you believe that DS reigns supreme in such matters, you are mistaken. Senior career State Department employees, dubbed the “Black Dragons” by the rank and file DS special agents, govern the internal security regulations for the department. Kendall’s “top secret” clearance was granted in 1985.
And then Kendall’s SY File started to unpeel his dark secret. Nothing grabbed my attention more than the revelation that Kendall participated in an FSI-authorized trip to Cuba with two of his FSI colleagues in December 1978. Had I finally uncovered a Cuba connection? I slowly read every single word on the pages that followed.
For years, FSI sponsored a program whereby foreign diplomats assigned to embassies, consulates, and United Nation missions in the United States were invited by FSI, but not necessarily the department, to participate in unclassified lectures that allowed students and professors to engage in candid conversations about diplomatic topics. It was designed as a freewheeling, open forum. One invitee was a first secretary posted to the Cuban delegation at the United Nations in New York City who had lectured at FSI on at least two previous occasions. He was an unremarkable man, average build and height, with short-cropped black hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. In reality, the first secretary was known to the IC as a CuIS clandestine intelligence officer operating inside the United States under diplomatic cover. He would later be identified as co-conspirator “A” in the FBI’s Criminal Complaint. Kendall’s friends identified him as Carlos Ciano.
FSI had never informed DS that it was inviting Cuban “diplomats” to its campus to engage in “friendly” discussions with federal employees. I had to remind myself that President Jimmy Carter, in 1978, had relaxed the rules of travel that had previously restricted Cuban diplomats to twenty-five miles from the center of the United Nations without prior notification and department approval. This ill-advised White House action would have major counterintelligence repercussions.
At the conclusion of one such FSI academic exchange, Carlos Ciano invited any and all FSI professors and students to visit Cuba. Kendall and two senior FSI colleagues contacted their supervisors to obtain authorization to travel to Cuba, and the permissions were soon granted although Kendall and the other FSI professors had to pay for their travel costs. Kendall and his two coworkers coordinated their itinerary with Ciano, who soon after advised them that their arrival was expected in Cuba. Not surprisingly, the proposed travel of three FSI professors had not been relayed to DS for counterintelligence comment.
Upon arrival in December 1978, Kendall and his two FSI colleagues were greeted by low-level Cuban Foreign Affairs functionaries and taken to the decaying Riviera Hotel, a former American mob establishment in Havana.
A Cuban physician, “Mr. P.,” acted as the group’s guide during the trip. He was allegedly a Cuban ministry official and would later be posted to the Cuban UN delegation in New York City. Mr. P. was responsible for arranging meetings between the FSI professors and their Cuban counterparts, and he would later be identified as co-conspirator “B” in Justice’s indictment. Arriving in Cuba just before the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, the group met with members of the local, provincial, and national committees for defense of the revolution. In addition to official meetings, the group was allowed in its spare time to roam the streets and engage in spontaneous conversations with Cuban citizens. The trio took occasional trips outside Havana, including a visit to a sugar mill and cane plantation and a trip to the Bay of Pigs, where they visited the museum dedicated to the April 1961 defeat of the United States and its fifteen hundred so-called mercenary lackeys.
Entries in Kendall’s December 1978 diary, which were quoted in the FBI’s criminal complaint, were revealing:
Cuba is so exciting. I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the [US] evening news is a radicalizing experience. The abuses of our system, the lack of decent medical system, the oil companies and their undisguised indifference to public needs, the complacency about the poor, the utter inability of those who are oppressed to recognize their own condition. . . . Have the Cubans given up their personal freedom to get material security? Nothing I have seen suggests that . . . I can see nothing of value that has been lost by the revolution. . . . [T]he revolution has released enormous potential and liberated the Cuban spirit.
Kendall continued to gush:
Everything one hears about Fidel suggests that he is a brilliant and charismatic leader. He exudes the sense of seriousness and purposefulness that gives the Cuban socialist system its unique character. The revolution is moral without being moralistic. Fidel has lifted the Cuban people out of the degrading and oppressive conditions which characterized pre-revolutionary Cuba. He has helped the Cubans to save their own souls. He is certainly one of the great political leaders of our time.
Kendall also wrote in his diary that as he stared at the beaches where the CIA-trained Cuban exiles stormed ashore, he “came to witness firsthand the evil face of American imperialism.” Kendall’s inspired conversion to the cult of Castro was slowly taking hold. Of course, none of this information was in his SY File.
One can only imagine what “co-conspirator B” and his CuIS cohorts would make of those diary entries if they examined his comments left behind in the hotel room while Kendall visited Havana’s revolutionary museums. The FBI would later assert that Kendall’s trip to Cuba provided the CuIS the opportunity to assess, develop, and eventually recruit Kendall Myers as a spy.
Kendall’s final day in Havana, Christmas Eve, was marked by an unusual sequence of events. One of Kendall’s two FSI companions had departed on an earlier flight to continue his vacation in Mexico, and when Kendall and his other colleague arrived at the Havana airport, they discovered that their connecting flight to Mexico City and Washington, DC, had been cancelled. Fortunately for them, an American attorney from Atlanta happened to be in the airport obtaining his flight clearance to fly home. He’d flown his private plane to Cuba to participate in the annual Havana regatta. He was quickly introduced to Myers and his FSI colleague by their Cuban hosts. The anonymous attorney was more than happy to have two American guests accompany him, and the two FSI instructors left Cuba via a private flight, a means normally prohibited to ordinary travelers, especially American ones. The identity of the Atlanta lawyer has never been determined.
I would discover two years after reading the Myers SY File that Carlos Ciano, while serving as a CuIS clandestine intelligence officer in New York City under diplomatic cover to the United Nations—the same Carlos Ciano, identified as co-conspirator “A” in the FBI criminal complaint, who invited Myers to visit Cuba—had traveled incognito to Pierre, South Dakota, in 1979 unknown to the FBI
or State Department. Excerpts from Kendall’s diary certainly influenced and emboldened Ciano to show up unannounced at Kendall’s and Gwendolyn’s front door. During five days of sightseeing, including witnessing an evening Native American Indian religious ritual, and political discussions, Ciano successfully recruited Kendall to become a traitor to his country. Following Ciano’s recruitment pitch, Kendall accepted Ciano’s offer to become a penetration agent but only on the condition that Gwendolyn agreed to the scheme.
Once Gwendolyn was briefed on Ciano’s true mission, she readily agreed to be Kendall’s clandestine partner. The CuIS now had two brand new recruits in its US stable. Kendall was by 1980 a fully committed penetration agent for the CuIS and needed access to government secrecy to achieve his goals. His attempt to join the CIA in 1981 and, following that rejection, his desperate and eventual successful 1985 campaign to overcome DS’s initial denial for his “top-secret” clearance made complete sense.
I flipped through the old, flimsy, blue copy and white original papers in Kendall’s file until I reached the point in his FSI tenure when he applied for a position as an analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Now my breathing began to slow. INR is the section of the department that sees the most sensitive interagency “top secret” code word information, including communications intercepts and overhead imagery. It also produces some of the best analysis in the intelligence community. My two additions to the “Vision Quest” FBI characteristics hinted that our suspect worked for either FSI, INR, or the department’s Cuba desk. While the Cuba desk connection had been eliminated by my initial analysis, I was now looking at one of the twenty-seven finalists who was a male, married with children, had knowledge of Morse code and radio transmissions, actually worked for both the FSI and INR, and had a Cuban connection thanks to a Cuban diplomat of suspicious background.
Kendall was accepted as an analyst in INR on August 25, 1999, and was processed for a “top secret” Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearance shortly thereafter. Following a review of his SY File and with the concurrence of the CIA, the US government agency that controls the issuance of SCI or “code word” clearances and who had declined to hire him in 1981, Kendall was granted access to “top secret” SCI materials in 1999. He now had his admission ticket to browse America’s most sensitive secrets.
I took a quick break and put the file on the desk, turned on the unclassified computer, and searched Kendall’s name on Google. Jackpot. Kendall, by 2006 a publicly recognized specialist in British-American relations, became an unwitting public figure and lightning rod on November 28 of that year. At a conference organized by the American Consortium on European Union Studies in Washington, DC, he spoke at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, a think tank promoting the European Union.
Talking about the “myth of the special relationship” between American presidents and British prime ministers, Kendall stated “there never really has been a special relationship [between the US and the UK] or at least not one we’ve noticed.” During the course of the lecture on the nature of US–UK relations, Kendall said that foreign relations between Washington and London had been “altogether too one-sided for a very long time. The poodle factor did not begin with Tony Blair; it actually began, yes, with Winston Churchill.” Kendall concluded that for all Britain’s attempts to influence US policy in recent years, “we typically ignore them and take no notice—it’s a sad business.”
Kendall acknowledged at the end of his talk that he “perhaps ought not to say so much.” His comments were prominently reported on November 30 in Britain’s Daily Telegraph and The Times.
The ensuing internal State Department firestorm was all too predictable. Within days, Terry Davidson, the department spokesperson, stated, “The US–UK relationship is indeed a special one. The US and the UK work together, along with our allies in Europe and across the world, on every issue imaginable. The views expressed by Mr. Myers do not represent the views of the US government. He was speaking as an academic, not as a representative of the State Department.”
Deputy spokesman Tom Casey later explained that Kendall was called on the carpet by his INR supervisor and given a dressing down. He added, “The comments [by Kendall], frankly, I think could be described as ill-informed, and I think, from our perspective, just plain wrong.”
I later learned that as a result of Kendall’s academic indiscretions, he was removed from his INR analytical specialty in monitoring English/Irish affairs and shifted to the department’s more general European portfolio—one that would unfortunately give him great access to Cuban intelligence data, as both the Vatican and Spain, among other European nations, have interesting diplomatic relations with Castro. His INR-ordered punishment gave him even greater access to classified information of interest to the CuIS.
Toby Harnden, a British journalist, wrote in 2009 that he had a meeting with Kendall in 2003 at Chef Geoff’s restaurant in Washington, DC, to talk about the ongoing negotiations between the Sinn Fein/IRA and the hardline Unionist politicians. This was a specialty of Kendall’s, but it was unknown if he was authorized to talk to the journalist about such a politically charged topic. Harnden described Kendall: “A tall, imposing figure, I found him to be an erudite and well-read fellow. He was a genial and interesting conversationalist and was much less discreet than most State Department officials. He was clearly no fan of President George W. Bush and seemed to fit the caricature of the pro-European, soft-Left type that is often leveled at the State Department by conservatives.”
No mention of Kendall’s public faux pas at the American Consortium on European Union Studies was reflected in his SY File. After all, public silliness is not a flogging offense. What did intrigue me even then was the possibility that the file on Kendall was wholly inadequate and incomplete. I came to believe that Kendall had unauthorized meetings not only with foreign journalists and diplomats but also some suspected foreign intelligence officers under diplomatic cover, Carlos Ciano for example.
Would they be in INR’s database, I wondered, because INR senior officials must sanction meetings with journalists, diplomats, and foreign intelligence officers in the United States under diplomatic cover? This could be, but INR’s database is not shared with DS by the department because they do not want the department security “knuckle draggers,” a term Kendall himself used in describing DS agents, looking over their shoulders.
My suspicions were later confirmed when Kendall told me that he had numerous luncheons with European clandestine intelligence officers with diplomatic titles in Washington, DC. A nine-month professional sabbatical to the People’s Republic of China, where he had social contact with a French intelligence officer under commercial cover, was not in his SY File.
Kendall was cunning indeed as he carefully avoided DS/CI’s counterintelligence radar scope and never submitted a single foreign citizen intelligence officer contact report to DS as required by department regulation.
About four hours into thumbing through Kendall’s six-inch-thick file, I was 99.99 percent convinced that if the joint FBI/DS “Vision Quest” espionage matrix were correct, Kendall was our only possible candidate. Although math was never my strong suit, everything seemed to add up.
I walked back to Barbara’s office, winked, and said I needed to borrow only one SY File to take back to my office. She smiled and asked if I’d be looking at other SY Files. I said that I would, and she agreed to keep the remaining thirteen for future review.
When I returned to my cubicle, I sent an e-mail on the SIPR net to FBI SA Matt, the case manager, saying, “You need to look at an SY File that I have in my office.” He responded hours later indicating that he would come to DS/CI on June 11. I was not in the office later that afternoon when SA Stowell provided Matt the file.
When I returned to the office on June 12 and confirmed that Matt had reviewed the file, I sent him an e-mail that asked, “Did you find the file interesting?”
He replied almo
st immediately, “Absolutely.”
Walter Kendall Myers’s twenty-year secret career as a Cuban penetration agent was beginning to unravel—but we still had many threads to tie together.
Chapter Three
Our most immediate concern was that Kendall was working inside INR, an office considered by many to be the crown jewel of the State Department. Staffed by career Foreign Service and Civil Service officers and analysts, INR receives classified information, including highly sensitive technical reports, from throughout the IC and our US embassies. The information, which includes CIA, NSA, and DOD “top secret” and so-called “code word” material, is reviewed and transformed into informational papers designed to assist our diplomatic efforts. And although Kendall’s specialty was the US–UK relationship, from personal experience I knew that there was a lot of cross-talk in INR.
We would discover later that through seemingly innocent, random, and casual conversations with fellow INR colleagues, Kendall was able to elicit extremely valuable diplomatic information from the Cuban specialists. As he said during his trial, “I maintained a wide range of contacts in order to obtain information on the US policies toward Cuba.”
In 2011, Robert N. Carhart Jr., an analyst and INR colleague of Kendall’s, stated, “I know I was one of those sources. Kendall would always say something like, ‘How’s our friend Fidel today?’ Kind of a generic question like that to start a conversation where it was easy to pawn off, or after he expressed his so-called fascination with the island. It was a betrayal . . . basic betrayal to the country and to myself for abusing the relationship.”
State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies Page 5