The spies from SAIS

Why is it that the most notorious Cuban spies in Washington have a connection with the same graduate school of international affairs?

Ana Belen Montes (pictured at left), the convicted Cuban spy who infiltrated the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Former SAIS Professor Walter Kendall Myers (pictured at right) has a PhD from SAIS, and was a faculty member there from 1971 until his arrest on June 4, 2009.

Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, were open sympathizers with the Castro government, as was Montes.

A Myers lecture at SAIS raised suspicions about him.

Of course, thousands of patriotic Americans have graduated from or taught at SAIS, so there might not be any connection at all. But one has to wonder: Why would a place that fancies itself as the premier graduate school in international affairs not offer a counterintelligence studies program? Why would a school like SAIS not prepare its graduates to defend themselves against recruitment by hostile foreign intelligence services?

A look at the Johns Hopkins University course catalog shows that the institution does not offer counterintelligence courses. The only mention of counterintelligence in the course catalog is part of a course on "Competitive Intelligence," but that offering is at JHU's Carey Business School, not SAIS.

The only advanced school I know about that offers counterintelligence studies for its international affairs grad students is the Institute of World Politics, where I teach. Our founder and president, by the way, holds advanced degrees from SAIS. But then, SAIS wasn't interested in his counterintelligence curriculum.

Makes me worry about the integrity of the SAIS program in Nanjing, China, and how the school is working to protect its students from being exploited by Beijing's aggressive espionage service. My hunch is that SAIS is doing nothing substantive to help its students defend themselves from being compromised or recruited by Chinese spies.

Why would any prospective American diplomat, intelligence officer, military officer or public official invest their time and money at a school that doesn't offer education in counterintelligence? And why would any grad school not want to educate their students to be aware of the counterintelligence threats out there? These are questions that potential graduate students should be asking when searching for a place to study for a master's degree or PhD.

Comments

[Matthew]

Unfortunate, it sounds like an interesting program they have.

[RegularJoe]

It really is upto the agencies themselves to train people, and also not recruit people who might compromise national security. It has more to do with psychology, and personality, and no academic program can really train for that. It is like the "ethics" programs in the top MBA programs, did not have much effect on the Wall Street carnage.

[Lance]

The mere consciousness of espionage-related activities and knowledge of the history of such activities can go a long way in promoting a passive, "concerned citizen" type counterintelligence (CI) environment in academic institutions (and elsewhere). Places of higher learning, like the Institute of World Politics, actually do teach students these subjects and give them the foundation, without formal CI training, to spot suspect activities that might in fact be espionage. I would disagree with "Regular Joe" in his comparison to Wall Street. Many of the unethical practices on Wall Street are in fact legal practices. Espionage is not just unethical; it is a crime and one punishable by life imprisonment or death. We will never be able to remove the motivation for committing espionage, thus we must have institutions like the one listed above that help in identifying and reporting such behavior. Based on the sheer volume of CI threats to this nation, we cannot rely on official domestic security apparatuses to carry the entire burden of CI. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."