What should we make of the news that two former State Department employees, Walter Kendell Myers and his wife Gwendolyn Myers, have been revealed as longtime spies for Cuba? I confess to being somewhat bored with the subject, and exasperated at those who would shut off the tiny opening to Cuba the Obama administration has made thus far.

I know, you’re thinking I must have misspoken. The shock and betrayal of American citizens spying right in our midst is many things, but boring cannot be one of them. But in the U.S. – Cuba context, it’s not such a rare revelation. In 2001, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Analyst plead guilty of spying for Cuba. And five Cuban counterintelligence agents who infiltrated Cuban American organizations in Florida during the 1990’s are serving lengthy prison sentences (though none of those agents obtained any sensitive or classified U.S. government information).

The fact is Cuba has one of the best intelligence operations around. Of course, many countries invest in covert intelligence operations, even against their allies. Case in point: Jonathan Pollard, who was a Naval intelligence officer for the United States when he was passing U.S. government secrets to Israel.

So, what’s a government to do when we nab spies for other countries? My colleague at the Cuban Triangle gave it some thought and considered how President Obama’s predecessors have responded in similar situations:

Like when it was discovered in 1985 that the Soviets had placed listening devices throughout the U.S. Embassy building in Moscow while it was under construction . . . The Reagan Administration of course responded by breaking off diplomatic relations, President Clinton restored them, only to break them off again when it was discovered that the Russians had bugged a conference room in the State Department.”

And after Pollard:

We all remember that the United States downgraded diplomatic relations and cut off economic and military aid to Israel for several years.

Wait - what? I don’t remember Reagan cutting off relations with the Soviet Union, and I certainly don’t remember cutting off aid to Israel. Well that’s because the writer made up the parts about responding to espionage to make a point. I couldn’t agree more: spying is a fact of life around the globe. That doesn’t mean we just look the other way; that’s what counterintelligence is for. The appropriate response is to get better at finding the spies and shutting them down.

Or, you might also try to undermine their recruitment in the first place. The folks at Investors.com think they have it figured out – just keep keeping Americans out of Cuba:

[Myers] wormed his way into the State Department after a legal trip to Cuba in 1978 made possible by Jimmy Carter, the president who thought Americans had an "inordinate fear of communism."

The Obama administration is contemplating a similar opening now. It goes hand in hand with talk of lifting the Cuban trade embargo and the already-lifted restrictions on travel and telecommunications. Taken together, all these will be new opportunities for more harm by the Castro brothers.

But none of this has anything to do how the Myers came to be spies: they disagreed with U.S. policies and sympathized with Cuba. Cuban intelligence specializes in recruiting “true believers,” something that makes them more difficult to uncover than spies motivated for other reasons.

Perhaps if the United States were not only to maintain the tiny opening to Cuba the Obama administration has initiated but in fact to throw the doors open, it might help undermine that true believer recruitment strategy. We won’t get all the spies (and I assume they haven’t gotten all of ours either). But to suggest that Americans’ exercising their basic right of freedom to travel to Cuba – the only country in the world to which the U.S. government bans its citizens’ travel - makes them instruments of the Castro government is the equivalent of sticking our national head in the sand. Besides, if we were truly worried about the threat of Cuban spies in the United States, we’d stop welcoming with open arms the thousands of Cubans who arrive illegally in the United States under what’s called our wet-foot dry-foot policy.

Too often, Cuba observers focus obsessively on Castro – Fidel or Raul – and how to prevent the Castro government from doing one thing or anything. But you can never control every variable – and any true expert on Cuba will assure you there is no controlling or predicting the Cuban government. But what we can control is how we engage and influence this country just 90 miles from our shores, and not just the two men at the top but the 11 million other Cubans on the island.