Kendall Myers Redux

We wrote here and here about Kendall Myers, the senior State Department intelligence official–he was in charge of European intelligence for the State Department–who turned out to be a Cuban spy. The remarkable thing about Myers is that he made no effort to conceal his anti-Americanism, but apparently fit right in at the State Department nevertheless.

Michael Rubin points out this news story from the Telegraph in 2006: “Britain’s special relationship ‘just a myth.'”

A senior American official has spoken of “the myth of the special relationship” between the United States and Britain, arguing that Tony Blair got “nothing, no payback” for supporting President George W Bush in Iraq.

Kendall Myers, a leading State Department adviser, suggested that Mr Blair should have been ditched by Labour but the party had lacked the “courage or audacity” to remove him.

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, was “shrewd, astute” to have distanced himself from America.

In candid comments that will embarrass Mr Bush and Mr Blair, the veteran official said America “ignored” Britain, and he urged Britain to decouple itself from the US. …

“It has been, from the very beginning, very one-sided. There never really has been a special relationship, or at least not one we’ve noticed.”

There is much more. The Telegraph is quoting from a “public lecture” that Myers gave while he was a senior analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Analysis and Research. It’s easy to say, sure: we know now that he was a Communist spy. But what on earth was the State Department thinking? The entire speech, as recited by the Telegraph, was anti-American drivel of the sort that we associate with the Daily Kos. Myers’s evident purpose in giving the speech was to damage our relationship with Great Britain.

So one wonders: what if Myers had not been a Communist spy, but only a Kos-style anti-American ignoramus? Then it would have been OK? What, in other words, does it take to get fired from the State Department? Or do the people who run the State Department believe that undermining our relationships with our allies is consistent with the Department’s mission?

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