The suspected Cuban spy in the State Department was lobbying to become the US envoy to Northern Ireland according to the Telegraph, perhaps aiming to tilt US policy toward the IRA. But the fun wouldn’t end there. At the conclusion of his service to Cuba, accused spy Kendall Myers planned to “sail home” to Cuba in order to become “a real and present danger” to the United States. His worst was yet to come. The Telegraph reports:
Kendall Myers, 72, who appeared in federal court in Washington on Wednesday charged with spying for Havana for nearly 30 years, had a fascination with Northern Ireland. The Daily Telegraph has established that as well as seeking the envoy’s post, which carried the rank of ambassador, Mr Myers travelled to the British Isles and met British and Irish officials, senior Northern Ireland politicians and intelligence officers. …
Michael Harvey, prosecuting, described Mr Myers as a man of means who had inherited money from his family and owned a family compound in Nova Scotia. The couple owned a 37-foot sailing boat, kept charts of Cuban waters and told an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence official that they planned to “sail home” to Cuba. Mr Harvey said that if they reached the communist state they would pose “a real and present danger to the United States”.
His external appearance was anything but threatening. Former colleagues of Myers at State described him as a likeable person who was quick with a nautical story.
Mr Myers was a beloved figure in the State Department. “He seemed like an absent-minded professor with a scholarly view of the world rather than being involved in espionage,” said one former colleague.
“Kendall was anti-Bush but 90 per cent of the people in this building are too. He seemed to have a romantic view of the world and he wasn’t interested in promotion. He cared more about what he did rather than where he was. “He was kind, he always helped people out and he had lots of friends. He was like a jovial character out of an English book, always having a fun sailing story. …
In his doctoral thesis, he argued that Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the Nazis was correct. Years later, he would tell students of his admiration for Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess – members of the “Cambridge ring” who betrayed Britain by spying for the Soviets.
What makes a man like that tick? Philby, Maclean and Burgess will endure in memory, long after their specific deeds of espionage are forgotten, as cribs to the decipherment of betrayal. They were archetypes. Indeed, the atmosphere around Philby, for example, seems made of the same stuff that surrounded Myers. The New Criterion, looking back on the Cambridge spies, almost catches the elusive spirit which motivated the three British traitors. What motivated them wasn’t money. Nor was it an illusory conception of what Communism offered. All three were well aware of the rivers of blood which Stalin had shed. It didn’t matter. None of the Cambridge men were the credulous “useful fools” so typical of the lower reaches of leftist intellectual circles. On the contrary, the three seemed to move in a planes so high they were above the morality of mere mortals. What common men would regard as suffering and pain, value as friendship or loyalty, and judge as for good or evil were things to be regarded differently from their Olympian height. They stood above the tragic and the monstrous; those acts were to them beautiful or merely amusing according to their passing fancy and only their fancy.
Well-connected, and educated in the best schools, they were able to take privilege for granted. Burgess and Maclean were thought in chic social circles to be amusingly louche, and many witnesses attest to Philby’s charm, and the stutter that went with it. All three rose to positions either in the British Secret Service or the Foreign Office with access to information valuable to the Soviet Union. In a position to know the facts about Stalinist terror and Gulag, they nonetheless made themselves willing accomplices in Communist crime. The charming Philby had much blood on his hands. He informed the Soviets of an impending high-level defector in Istanbul, and they caught the man and shot him. He gave away clandestine Allied operations in Albania, the Baltic, and Ukraine, leading to the deaths of scores of patriots and agents. Somewhere in the psychological depths where each of these traitors had to answer to himself, deception and self-deception were bewilderingly entangled.
The key to understanding men like Philby is to realize that they can only be answerable to themselves. And such license is not available in a world of rights and all-men-being-equal. They were by definition the elite. And to indulge this destiny, men such as they can only work for an entity that unlike the United States and Britain, is totally unconfined by pedestrian notions like right or wrong; beyond oversight committees and petty lawyers; some confessor to whom it is possible to confide the monstrous thoughts and receive approval. And where else to find it but in the temple of power: the organs of the Party.
The New Criterion notes that “in his own memoirs, My Silent War, published in English in 1968, Philby contradictorily asserted that he had accepted the Soviet invitation to become their spy out of a lust for power : ‘One does not look twice at an offer of enrolment in an elite force.’” Indeed. It was elite in a way that the average man can never understand. Not in the sense of its members being able to run farther or shoot straighter than the members of other secret services; but elite in that it was totally amoral. The KGB was the only home for a certain type of heathen. The kind of heady brew that Philby needed was one his own stodgy country could never supply. Perhaps Myers was being completely sincere when he planned, at the end of employment, to “sail home” to Cuba. Communism was never about crafting a Worker’s Paradise; it was always about creating a place of unlimited power for those who craved it: not the toiler’s Home, but the second rate intellectual’s.
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Or, a sociopath’s.
I read recently an article online about sociopaths, and some doctors’ estimate that as many as 10% of humans are lacking a normal conscience. Most, the author said, are just local sources of pain and annoyance. Only a minority become serial killers. But their moral universe is the same as Philby’s et al.
What a prime example of a where the US is going “never about crafting a Worker’s Paradise; it was always about creating a place of unlimited power for those who craved it” this is where Obama, Al Gore, Clintons and many, many more of the elite liberal Democrat leadership want to be! It is the Godless, amoral world where those like Kendall Myers and Philby can sleep soundly without though of who or how many they sacrifice for their shifting “right and wrong” dictates!
The KGB was the only home for a certain type of heathen. The kind of heady brew that Philby needed was one his own stodgy country could never supply.
But that stodgy country also produced Sir Walter Scott, who could diagnose an evacuated soul:
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.
– Stimulus Concession –
-
Biden tells “Meet the Press” that “everyone guessed wrong” on the impact of the stimulus…
Meyers had the immense advantage that he “looked right” within the State Dept, just as Philby, MacLean, and Burgess looked right in their bureaucracies.
Bureaucracies have an image of what the Ideal Man is. If one seems to fit that image, then you get ahead and are thought well of, regardless of your actual performance. The Nazis and the Soviets enshrined this idea as part of their dogma; both had a “New Man” image of the perfect citizen to serve and be served by the State.
Each of the U.S. military services has their own image of the perfect member. And once again, it is not tied to performance. I even recall hearing one USAF Chief of Staff saying how much he admired the WWII German Luftwaffe; his reign of terror was so devastating that we likely will never recover from it, and he later came out in support of Gore, Kerry, and Obama.
Communism, like all bureaucratically focused ideologies has the ultimate goal of creating one Potemkin village after another. It’s not even simply about putting on a good show; as the Great Bard said, The Show’s The Thing.
Kendall Myers should hang and twitch in the breeze like a mainsail the moment the bow is in the wind but he will likely end up spending the rest of his golden years tacking around a luxury prison penning his memoirs with blood red ink.
I don’t understand this assertion. Who else could any of us be answerable to? Ultimately I must answer to my own conscience, and I’m not Commie traior (nor is there any chance of me becoming so).
It might be more accurate to say “The key to understanding men like Philby is to realize that they don’t care about anyone but themselves.”
I think there was more Walter Mitty to Myers than personal lust for power.
Myers was in the State Department, not any intelligence service. I think he was the milquetoast product of privilege who secretly whispered to himself everyday, “if they only knew my secret identity.”
The easiest way to become famous is to be a wrecker and bask in the attention garnered by what was wrecked.
A non-entity assassinated John Lennon. No talent there, just the choice of a big target. A non-entity would wreck the US.
“How clever am I?” Derail the United States and he carved his name in history in a way that you could never achieve in the State Department. Better yet all the while you can enjoy the luxuries of you compound in Nova Scotia and your upscale associations in the United States.
What a grand scheme. Shift the world’s centers of gravity in the comfort of his own home. In retirement he could take his savings to Cuba and enjoy in excess of 15 minutes of fame.
Low-risk and comfortable. No great skill involved.
You’d be the talk of the country club.
Wrichard writes: “On the contrary, the three seemed to move in a planes so high they were above the morality of mere mortals. What common men would regard as suffering and pain, value as friendship or loyalty, and judge as for good or evil were things to be regarded differently from their Olympian height.”
Great column. A fine deliberation on the ‘beyond good and evil’ will-to-power dessications of modern and post-modern thought. Wrichard wields the tools of Nietzsche’s toolkit, learning from that tortured genius without succumbing to the cheap cynicism and traitorous brutalism exibited by Nietzsche’s government expense account epigones. Meyers may be a Mitty-esque character, but the results for the betrayed are not Mitty-esque.
Dante places the traitors at the bottom circle of the Inferno, buffeted by winds from the wings of the arch-traitor Satan, who is encased in ice up to his waist. As PA Cat notes, mere love of country is something that the tratiorous ‘evacuated souls’ will never feel. (On a literary note, a remarkable structural conceit of the Inferno scene is its inversion of the opening of Genesis, i.e. the cold winds from Satan’s wings an inversion of the Spirit, in Genesis, moving over the waters.)
“Olympian heights”? Hmmm. Could Wrichard be alluding to a politician currently considered to be ‘God,’ above the fray, at least in the opinion of a Newsweek denizen?
#1 has it right. Sociopath.
Charming, affable, and absolutely evil.
“Kendall was anti-Bush but 90 per cent of the people in this building are too.”
I think this off hand comment is telling of the State Department and CIA. I am unfamilar with the laws regarding the firing of “civil servents”, but I believe George Bush would have been better served if he had done so. The United State definately would have been better served.
The Cambridge ring were initiated into the world of secrecy and lies and contempt for average people because they started as a homosexual, or in Philby’s case pan-sexual, cabal. In the intervening 75 years discrimination against homosexuals has been officially repudiated with the NY Times of Pinch Sulzberger and Frank Rich leading the charge. One argument for changing official standards is that making people less susceptible to blackmail might actually improve security.
Once I met Admiral Bobby Ray Inman who confirmed to me that when he was in charge of the National Security Agency and it was reported to him that a young man had engaged in practices that could cost him his security clearance the Admiral had the person brought to his office. The Admiral, in front of witnesses, handed the young man the telephone and said “Call your Mother and tell her what you are.” After the painful phone call ended the Admiral said to the employee, “Good, now you can’t be blackmailed. Get back to work.”
However the emotional and cultural standards of Olympian disdain for the common herd that marked aristocratic homosexuals, an expected attribute of any closed sub-culture, has now spread into the larger culture of the educated and professional classes. This sense of superiority is needed for membership in the vanguard groups that socialist enterprises rely on. That is what permits them to experiment on the rest of us like we were laboratory mice. People like The Clintons or the metrosexual poseurs who man the Democratic Party do not get drawn into politics to over for their sexual peccadilloes, except possibly in Hillary’s case. They take sexual license as a perk that comes from their membership in an elite devoted to power.
Myers is an amoral devotee of the machine. His fantasy was to be the quiet friendly little man behind the curtain controlling the belching machine of the Great and Powerful Oz.
Rebecca West, in “The New Meaning of Treason”
speculates as to the motivations of various spies from Lord Haw-Haw to the Profumo scandal.
It is possible to be a true believer in favor of tyrannies against your own democratic nation, but it is not possible to that and be a whole, healthy person as well.
Yes, the offhand comment about the 90% being against Britain is telling. In a “normal” place this guys thesis and his support of the spies would raise red flags, not the white that they did.
And yes he being a traitor should mean a wall, blindfold and a bullet.
Wretchard writes: “Communism was never about crafting a Worker’s Paradise; it was always about creating a place of unlimited power for those who craved it: not the toiler’s Home, but the second rate intellectual’s.”
What’s disturbing about this is, as “Wilderness Calling” notes, is the similarity to today’s ruling elite, especially the party in the White House. Very, very disturbing.
And I wholeheartedly concur with those who call for a hangman’s noose or firing squad. Anything less would be a cop-out. F
Low-risk and comfortable. No great skill involved.
You’d be the talk of the country club.
Kendall Myers and Bernie Madoff are two of a kind.
“”"”"”What a prime example of a where the US is going “never about crafting a Worker’s Paradise; it was always about creating a place of unlimited power for those who craved it””"”"”"”
Indeed. We are now up to twenty “czars” for all sorts of venues, ranging from cars to weapons systems to drugs and intelligence. Every single one of them answerable directly and only to the White House. Also, the White House staff has almost tripled from that of Bush, and often performs duplicate functions of those ordinarily (and by law) delegated to the cabinet.
Sam Shulman in the Weekly Standard is of the opinion that this individual was a failure in expectation. That his pedigree should have led him to success, but only to a mediocre job in State and the adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins. (By my observation there is a lot of mediocrity in the Dept of State)
His family is interesting Alexander Graham Bell, The Grosvenors, William Howard Taft, whose father founded Bones at Yale.
Also Clarice Feldman ties her to Abzourek and Daschle.
See, we’re just the little people. Unable to effect the necessary changes.
This is my perception only, but I have the impression that both the State Department and the CIA are heavily populated with people who disdain the notion of nationhood and sovereignty. Not a healthy thing for the American people. Such people don’t need to be outright spies and traitors, since their actions on our behalf will be colored by bad judgement due to their weak sense of loyalty. A great breeding ground for foreign spies.
Roderick.
A Saudi prince said, some years ago, that if they take care of their retired State friends, they’ll have more friends who are working at State.
Bad form to bribe the guys before they retire, I guess.
But that carrot is some kind of day-glo orange, hanging out there just past retirement.
Richard Aubrey,
You are onto something big. There should be a 5 year ban from their departure date on any former government employee taking any position of profit or receiving any gift, emolument or honorarium funded by any foreign government or blood relative of any foreign King Prince or Potentate, without the express consent of Congress in an an Act containing no other provisions.
Life.
I’ll trump that. Any government employee–POTUS or township building inspector, elected or merely hired, should be subject to forensic audits for life.
Once again let me expound on my favorite theory:
The metality under discussion is what I label as “neo-humanist”. People who have given up on ever perfecting us incorrigibles but who have declared themselves perfected.
Thus they do not view themselves as a higher class of person but as a superior form of being. Therefore they do not think they are bound by the constraints that bind all human beings. Completely amoral, they are drawn to muderous regimes like a moth to flame. That is because those regimes vigorously repress
any and all dissenting viewpoints.
It is not that they ignore those rivers of blood, or even excuse them as temporary abberrations; they positively revel at the prospect of their helping spill all that blood.
Dave, the word “Gnostic” will do, and cut three syllables. They perceive themselves as above morality and therefore as you say, are without it. Only they gave the knowledge (gnosis) that guarantees their divine status. And as we all know, gods can do whatever they like.
I agree with the sociopathic diagnosis, but I’d also suggest a “pure and unmitigated hate” drove him. Hate of his upbringing and family, and ultimately his society…
“Hate is the ultimate factor in revolution, pure unmitigated hate…”
Che Guevara
To #20-21 LOTM and Richard Aubrey:I 100% agree, but how do you get the guys who are already being bribed (congress, among others) to pass laws outlawing other semi-legal methods of bribery (perfected by the Saudis)?
A serious question, but the flip answer that occurs to me…you don’t.
One might say that Philby et al succeeded where Raskolnikov failed, in trying to make themselves new men, above morality. Raskolnikov failed mostly through the intervention of an angel, through the workings of love.
Ah, Wretchard, “looks right” is the key. The weathermen, Phil Agee, the Cambridge Circle (I understand there were at least 5, not 3), the Khymer Rouge and such were all violent, perverted nihilist sociopaths easily discoverable in a polygraph, yet they all “looked right”, “our people” to the elitist, almost racist, aristocracy of our leadership cultures, both liberal and conservative. If he/wife looked like you, he would have been graphed, not BI’ed, and he would have been dinged. He only “looked right”
Doc.
Under current circumstances, you don’t. But if a newbie is running, maybe you could convince him that it’s the right thing to do.
If he drops out, it was.
If he stays in, support him.
Eventually, we might have the numbers.
Oh, Bother #24: You are right, of course.
However, gnostic sounds awfully close to agnostic and I think that people who hear
that terminology think you are talking about
purely theological disputes (Protestant vs Catholic, say). Then they fail to grasp that you are talking about a tangible form of
(undesirable) human behavior, (with theological roots).
If you encounter person or persons who seem lost at what you are saying, it may be that my 5 syllables will help clarify things.
At any rate, thanks for your input. Think that between us we may have “Illuminated” the
Belmont Club?
Uh, most real Christians know about gnosticism. It’s a routine topic in New Testament studies. The motivations of the the gnostics are subject to speculation: that is, whether they were self-deluded or aware that they were fabricating doctrine out of thin air.
The key feature of the Cambridge spies and Myers is pointed out at the end of Wretchard’s New Criterion quote: “…deception and self-deception were bewilderingly entangled.” How much do you believe your own lies?
While most posts have assiduously avoided the topic of homosexuality, #12 by LifeoftheMind discusses it in regard to being blackmailed. As if that’s the only thing that matters. A pattern of life that features deceiving others and self-deceit can continue even when you’re “out of the closet.” From personal experience, I don’t trust homosexual men regarding anything I can’t verify. If that makes me a bigot, fine. Regarding Myers, it’s not much of a reach from effete to effeminate. It’s no accident that many of the same mannerisms and habits bond these types into the same social circles and patterns of moral bankruptcy.
Evanston1,
Was I unclear or did you misread my comment? I discussed the role of blackmail as one justification for relaxing legal and societal constraints but clearly indicated that the milieu of deceit and manipulation that mark homosexual behavior probably goes much deeper than a simple reaction to discrimination. The extent if any to which homosexuals are more prone to such conduct than members of other self defined minority communities who see themselves as vulnerable elites could be the subject for further study and comment. We have medical practitioners among the visitors to The Club who may have a valuable perspective from which to contribute. Also please note that I did speculate on the related behaviors of homosexuals and allied elite groups.
Dave @23,
I like your explanation the most. Wretchard is on to something as well. Clearly, these are people who do not view other human beings as having a moral claim on them, because they consider themselves our betters. But let us not forget that all traitors, while they may share some common characteristics, also are marked by their individuality and differing motives. Indeed, some sell us out for money (and amazingly small amounts of it!). Some do it because they want revenge on their country for some slight.
Let us not forget that Myers did have that diary entry around the time of his visit to Cuba where he gushes about the Socialist Paradise down there. Is that diary entry a window into a part of his motivation?
I think Kendall Myers hated his country deeply, and hid it well. We don’t know why he hated his country.
And that’s the thing about these kinds of characters. Unless we can get more information and clues about their lives, we cannot profile them properly without looking like idiots. We may think we know, but indeed we may not. I think it’s fairly obvious that they are selfish people – and generally cowards. That they lack a conscience is generally the case. But any person can and often does remain a mystery to us all, and even to himself.
The thought that at least 90% of the people in the State Department hating the traditional views of most Americans is creepy. It may not be as high over at Langley, but I’ll bet that over half of them also share a similar elitist outlook. In any event, it is a serious flaw in the system that our agencies and departments seem to heavily recruit from the same elite institutions. In so doing, they put the nation into the hazard because one is more likely to select people who think very highly of themselves.
Whether it’s Langley or State, they get to do things, on the public dime, the rest of us don’t get to do.
And, for the most part, they know we don’t know what they’re doing.
And it’s all So Important.
Of course they’d feel superior, especially the careerists.
So superior that they feel it right–or maybe just fun–to thwart the elected officials and by extension the rest of us.
What I can’t figure out is why the military doesn’t feel the same. I mean, the greenest trainee gets to expend a substantial amount of public money down range, while fuel and trucks and all kinds of expendables are expended on him. Once he’s in a line unit, the expenditures by him and on his behalf is staggering, even if he’s not in combat. Sample question? What percentage of the soldier’s parents’ family budget is expended on his training…ammo alone…by the time he finishes Infantry AIT?
But soldiers remain real.
There’s a lesson there, someplace. Wish I could figure out what it is.
RA, LotM, #20-22; Bill Clinton is way ahead o ye –his persiadential lieBerry in Acornsas being a foundation, it takes in the money he raises with cover-story million dollar speeches which is really for rendered or to be rendered services of a nature unspoken, and tho he never takes technical ownership of da dough, it’s Buffalow Bill’s to infest in whatever future projects he thinks will do the most harm to human decency. Think Nomenklatura, the black sea dachas, long limos worth dozens of dollars each, staffs of personal assistants in every unsuspecting locus of power worldwide, fine accoutrements & armies, and all properties of the state, which is represented by them and their secret police and traditionally includes as much geography as they can get away with murder within.
RA/35; you’re right –something is transposed between the two. maybe one must be willing to fight, and the other must fight to be willing?
LifeoftheMind, I agree with most of your original post. If you re-read it, you seemed to qualify your remarks by referring to “aristocratic” homosexuals. My comment was obviously more broad-brush. And I do not share your deference for “medical professionals” in moral matters. No doubt they can produce statistics and fancy labels, but anyone who has lived an adult life already knows what male homosexuals (again, broad-brush) are like. But neither my original comment, nor this one, were intended as a criticism of what you wrote. I was surprised that no one else had addressed the issue (and so I did — I generally prefer reading others’ thoughts).
Richard Aubrey, you answer your own question. I attended UVA with diplomats’ kids, had one as a roommie, even took the Foreign Service Exam on a lark (and only fell short in English — probably missed some of the more obscure grammar rules that we all forgot after high school). Anyway, to pay for college I was in NROTC and ended up as a career Marine Corps officer. So the answer you gave yourself was “TRAINING.” The Corps excels at building a new identity in its recruits, and all the other services still do this to some degree. The Foreign service wannabees I knew already believed they were in the elite, and were chosen for that reason. Military folks generally believe (though there are some exceptionally large egos) that they were made into an elite group through training. That is, they have some sense of humility and gratitude. There is also lip service to the notion of self sacrifice in the Armed Forces, often a joke but sometimes it’s genuine. Normal (that is, non-Agency) diplomats are good for getting American tourists out of drunk tanks, other than that they’re useless.
Evanston.
That reminds me of a fraternity brother I had who was absolutely brilliant, well-educated, had boatloads of common sense.
He failed the foreign service entrance procedure, which caused me to wonder what kind of brainiacs actually pass these things.
Then, in 1987, I went to Central America with a group which had some access. Talked to US diplomats in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.
I concluded my buddy was busted out of the entrance process because he was too bright and had too much integrity. He threatened the clowns already in the FS.
I asked one moron–with apologies to morons everywhere–in the US embassy in Nicaragua how long before the revolt against Somoza the US figured out the people were terminally pissed.
As I recall, he said they had never known.
My suggestion was to give a couple of jarheads a handful of local currency and two days pass. Debrief them after the hangover wears off and you’ll know a hell of a lot more than you would otherwise.
To Aubrey and Evanston: All that training and tax money spent on the servicemember does tend to remind him or her that he or she is
mortal and is there for the purpose of going in harm’s way——-and harming the other side.
This even helps to moderate the inevitable tendency for each branch of the service to
enhance its own budget at other’s expense.
Teaches a fellow some humility.
And as the Old Man said in his “Pragmatics of Patriotism” address at Annapolis: the ovveriding principle is: “Women and children first!” They are more important than you are. Some other places there is a tendency to regard those indispenable persons as expendables, if not chattel.
BTW: The latter are those who simply could not stand George W. Bush. He epitimizes the essential ethic they need to destroy.
PA Cat/3; Say that was a pretty pointed a poetry pick!