Russians Penetrate Czech Generals' Offices

Russian Spy Reaches Czech Generals' Offices - Report
PRAGUE | Tue Jul 27, 2010 4:46pm IST

(Reuters) - Three Czech generals, including a presidential staff member and a NATO representative, were forced to leave the army in 2009 after a Russian spy's contact with their offices, a Czech newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Czech military and counter-intelligence agents have increasingly highlighted Russian agents' presence in the central European NATO and European Union member, and this has been the biggest reported case of infiltration into the military.

Citing an unnamed source, daily Mlada Fronta Dnes said the Russian agent, a Czech state-employed psychologist known as Robert R., befriended a female army major, who had also studied psychology and worked successively as head of staff for the three army generals.

The generals, respectively, worked as head of President Vaclav Klaus's Military Office, the Czechs' NATO representative in Europe, and a deputy general for the Chief of Staff.

The newspaper said it was not clear whether the army major worked for the Russian agent knowingly, nor what information was passed on and if it posed a security threat. Military intelligence agents followed the two for at least five years.

The agent fled to Russia and the major finished in the army.

Josef Sedlak, the general who lost his position as NATO representative, told Mlada Fronta Dnes he felt he had been unfairly treated.

"If some information existed showing one of my colleagues was connected to a spy, then the agency should have told me to protect me. And not follow me like some villain," he was quoted as saying.

The newspaper said another of the generals quit over a disagreement about changes being made in the military, while the third general could not be reached by the newspaper.

The Defence Ministry and counter-intelligence agency BIS declined to comment.

BIS reported last month that Russian spies were increasingly active in the Czech Republic and turning their attention to the energy sector.

BIS said the presence of Russian intelligence operatives among academics and students posed a potential problem for the former Soviet satellite state.

The Czechs are also wary of their dependence on their Cold War master Russia in the energy sector. Russia's Atomstroyexport is among three bidders to enlarge the country's largest nuclear power plant in Temelin.

Last year, the Czech Republic expelled two Russian diplomats, including a deputy to the military attache, on suspicions of spying.Sphere: Related Content

Germany commemorates failed anti-Hitler plot - The Local

Germany on Tuesday marked the 66th anniversary of a failed attempt by army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler in his "Wolf's Lair" military headquarters in a daring bid to end World War II.

Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who had a relative with links to the resistance, led a wreath-laying ceremony at a memorial in his ministry's Bendlerblock courtyard, where some of the conspirators were executed.

Later Tuesday, he and Chancellor Angela Merkel were to observe the swearing-in in front of the Reichstag parliament building of about 420 recruits to the military, which has carefully tended the memory of the July 20 plotters.

"The women and men of the resistance set ethical standards with their actions and became role models," Mayor Klaus Wowereit said at the Bendlerblock ceremony.

The July 20 plot, as it has come to be known, was led by an aristocratic army officer called Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who wore a patch to cover an eye lost in battle.

Stauffenberg placed a bomb under a table in Hitler's eastern headquarters in East Prussia, in modern-day Poland. But the Nazi leader escaped with slight injuries because the briefcase carrying the explosives was moved by chance behind a sturdy oak leg of the table.

Confusion reigned 700 kilometres (435 miles) away in Berlin, with conflicting information about whether Hitler had survived the attack, but it soon became clear that the plot had failed.

Co-conspirator Philipp von Boeselager was meant to return from the Eastern Front with 1,200 men and overthrow the clique at the head of the Third Reich, which had unleashed the catastrophic war and the Holocaust.

Stauffenberg and several others were executed the same evening in the Bendlerblock courtyard, part of a complex of buildings where the plot was hatched.

The episode was turned into a recent movie called "Valkyrie" with Tom Cruise playing the part of Stauffenberg.

Historian Fritz Stern said at the Bendlerblock ceremony Tuesday the assassination attempt had been unique in German history.

"Never before had there been such an uprising for liberation, justice and human dignity in Germany," he said.

That the plot failed is seen as one of the tragedies of World War II as millions more people were killed on the battlefield and in the gas chambers before Hitler was defeated in 1945.

Germany commemorates failed anti-Hitler plot - The LocalSphere: Related Content

American Leftist Spies Won't Enjoy Castro Treatment

A sympathetic treatment from the Washington Post of a story of treason by delusional American Leftist traitors. It's a shame they won't be jailed under the same conditions the Castro brothers have held their enemies since '59.

U.S. Analyst Spying for Cuba Gets Life in Prison; Wife Gets More Than 6 Years

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post
Friday, July 16, 2010; 12:27 PM

A retired State Department intelligence analyst was sentenced to life in prison and his wife got more than six years on Friday for spying for Cuba for nearly 30 years in a screenplay-ready tale of romance and espionage.

Walter Kendall Myers, 73, and Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 72, agreed to forfeit $1.7 million in cash and property, including all of Kendall Myers's federal salary over the years. He did not have to give up 38-foot sailboat he once said they might use in retirement to sail to the communist country.

"If someone despises the American government to the extent that appears to be the case, you can pack your bags and leave," U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said, "and it doesn't seem to me you continue to bear the benefits this country manages to provide and seek to undermine it."

It was a grim ending to the Myerses' idealistic embrace of the Cuban revolution, with one slight comfort. Handing down punishment for Walter Myers's guilty plea in November to conspiracy to commit espionage and two counts of wire fraud, Walton endorsed the couple's request to be incarcerated near each other with easier access to their siblings, children and grandchildren.

The judge's sentence for Gwen Myers fell halfway between the 72 months to 90 months she had agreed to in her deal with prosecutors, for gathering and transmitting national defense information. Her lawyers cited her age, failing health -- including a heart attack since her June 2009 arrest -- and secondary role in the scheme. The couple, wearing blue jumpsuits over long-sleeved white shirts, held hands while the sentence was read.

"We did not act out of anger toward the United States or from any thought of anti-Americanism," Myers said in at 10-minute statement in seeking leniency for his wife. "We did not intend to hurt any individual American. Our only objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution. We only hoped to forestall conflict" between the countries.

The sentencing continues Washington's summer of serial spy intrigues. Barely a week after the United States and Russia completed the exchange of 14 agents allegedly planted in each other's country in a diplomatic maneuver reminiscent of the Cold War, the Washington couple's sentencing cast a reminder of unresolved tensions across the 90-mile-wide Straits of Florida.

Myers, an Ivy League-educated Europe specialist who made his home in Northwest Washington's diplomat-friendly precincts, began working for the State Department as a contract instructor in 1977 before joining full time in 1985 and becoming a senior analyst with a top-secret clearance in the department's sensitive bureau of intelligence and research.

Starting in 1978, however, the recently divorced Myers visited Cuba for two weeks and was soon recruited by a Cuban intelligence agent. When Myers spent a two-year-long sabbatical in South Dakota, where he was living with then-Gwendolyn Trebilcock, a former aide to senator James Abourezk, the agent met Myers again, an he agreed to become a spy.

Over the next three decades, the couple would communicate with their Cuban handlers via shortwave radio, exchanging shopping carts in a grocery store and sending encrypted e-mails from Internet cafes. Traveling overseas, they met clandestine Cuban operatives in Brazil, Ecuador, Jamaica, Italy and Cuba via Mexico.

Myers, code-named "202," and his wife -- "123" -- never accepted money but would pass along secret information that he later said earned him several medals and a trip to meet Fidel Castro himself in 1995.

"Everything I hear about Fidel suggests that he is a brilliant and charismatic leader," Myers wrote in his journal in his 1978 Cuba visit, where he also rued the "systematic and regular murdering of revolutionary leaders" by the United States. His enthusiasm seemed undimmed 31 years later, when he confided to an FBI agent posing a Cuban contact, "Fidel is wonderful, just wonderful."

Tipped off to the presence of a Cuban spy in 2006, U.S. investigators by April 2009 tracked down Myers outside Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, where he was a part-time faculty member. It was Myers's 72nd birthday, and an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence emissary gave him a cigar. The gift led to a string of recorded meetings, revelations and the couple's ultimate confession and sentencing Friday, which happened to fall on Gwen Myers's 72nd birthday.

The State Department and intelligence community officials have not publicly assessed the damage done by Myers to the U.S. government, but experts said he would have had years of access to intelligence reports from the U.S. and its allies, as well as to databases with information from the CIA, the National Security Agency, the military and U.S. embassies. In the last 15 months before his retirement in 2007, Myers amassed more than 200 sensitive or classified intelligence reports in his computer.

After the couple's arrest, Castro was quoted in a Cuban media report stating his admiration for "their disinterested and courageous conduct."

The FBI said that although Myers generally was cooperative in more than 100 debriefing sessions, he at times gave inconsistent answers or withheld information, adding that the "limited value of defendants' cooperation" did not warrant lighter sentencing of Gwen Myers.

"For nearly 30 years, Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers committed one of the worst crimes a citizen can perpetrate against his or her own country -- espionage on behalf of a long-standing foreign adversary," Ronald C. Machen Jr., U.S. attorney for the District, said in a brief urging the judge against leniency.

The Myerses felt no remorse, motivated by communist sympathies and a "rose-colored picture" of Cuba, Machen said.

"Kendall Myers was born into this world with every conceivable advantage," Machen wrote, describing the son of a heart surgeon, grandson of the National Geographic Society's head and great-grandson of inventor Alexander Graham Bell as a child of privilege. Machen added, "Kendall Myers could have been anything he wanted to be. He chose to be a Cuban spy."

In their behalf, the Myers presented statements from relatives, colleagues and friends describing them as kind and deeply idealistic.

Myers's offense, his lawyers wrote, "was born not of hatred, greed, vengeance or desire for power, but of compassion for a struggling people desperately seeking to throw off the legacy of a brutal and corrupt dictatorship and chart an independent path to social justice."

His lawyers asked that Myers be allowed to teach inmates and continue his writings, including a biography of former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Whether misunderstood or misguided, Myers told the undercover FBI agent in 2009 that the couple missed their spying days. "You, speaking collectively, have been a really important part of our lives, and we have felt incomplete," Myers said, according to the government. "I mean, we really love your country."Sphere: Related Content