THE BOOK OF HONOR -- THE SECRET LIVES AND DEATHS OF CIA OPER

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: THE BOOK OF HONOR -- THE SECRET LIVES AND DEATHS OF CIA

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 3:27 am

Damage Control

Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

-- SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth


WHAT Debra Spessard remembers clearly is helping her husband, Jimmy, pack on the morning after Thanksgiving 1989. She remembers folding his jeans and T-shirts and laying them out for him to put in his brown leather suitcase. She knew he was going to Zaire and she knew that, even in November, it would be sweltering.

It was a morning like many before it, full of the rituals of leaving. She watched as her husband emptied his wallet of any identification cards that might conflict with the pseudonym under which he was to work overseas. Out came the Social Security card, the credit cards, driver's license, even the family photographs -- anything that might betray him. He sifted through his passports, selecting the right one for this mission's cover story. He was to be a civilian employee of the Defense Department. It was not the first time he had used that cover.

But on this morning he broke from the familiar pattern and removed even his gold wedding band, setting it gently in a small wooden box in his top dresser drawer. Inside the ring were engraved their initials: "DKS to JES." Never before had he done that, and the divergence, slight as it was, unnerved her. Even before that, Deb had sensed some higher element of risk to this mission.

He said he would be gone two weeks. "Is this necessary?" she asked, trying to mask her apprehension. She was still grieving over the loss of her father and was feeling needy. She was dreading Jimmy's absence. "Yes," he nodded, and that was the end of it. She knew not to ask for any particulars.

That morning she would have to steel herself as she and the boys, Jarad, aged five, and Jason, seven, drove Jimmy to the tiny Hagerstown, Maryland, airport to see him off. There he again broke with habit. Once out of the airport door, instead of making directly for the plane, he turned and walked back to the fence where Debra, Jarad, and Jason were waving. He gave his wife a final good-bye kiss. "I love you guys," he said, and boarded the tiny aircraft for the first of several flights on his way to Africa. Jimmy Spessard was not a spy in the traditional mold of the clandestine service. He didn't even work for the CIA's Operations Directorate, which oversaw covert activities. Instead, Jimmy was chiefly answerable to "S&T," the Science and Technology Directorate that kept those in the field supplied with whatever electronics and paraphernalia were needed. After six years in the navy working with Terrier and Harpoon missiles, Jimmy Spessard had emerged as a bona fide "techie."

A small-town boy, he had grown up in a crossroads called Halfway, so named for its position between Hagerstown and Williamsport, Maryland. The son of a railroad brakeman, he had spent mornings before school working at a nearby asparagus farm. He had been an Eagle Scout and an active member of the Grace United Methodist Church and was considered by his pals as something of a good-time Charlie. He joined the navy straight out of high school but was hardly gung ho. He signed his letters home as "POW" and wrote "Go Navy (go somewhere else)." He married his childhood sweetheart and for a couple of years worked as a traveling salesman peddling copy machines and calculators. He lived a life so ordinary it bordered on the humdrum -- until, that is, he linked up with the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1980s.

For the next six years he commuted an hour and a half each way to Warrenton, Virginia, to an office at Computer Data Systems, a company that provided a wide array of high-tech electronic gear to the CIA. His work for the Agency took him to Athens, Amman, Ankara, Bangkok, and innumerable other far-flung outposts. A part of his duties involved the testing, delivering, and installing of complex surveillance systems destined for CIA stations in U.S. embassies abroad. From each trip he would bring back a lapel pin and a miniature flag, gifts for his sons.

Throughout those years he worked for the Field Support Branch on contract to the Agency. His specialty was something called "collection and signal processing equipment." In the summer of 1989 he apparently became a full-fledged employee of the CIA. It was hardly the stuff of spy novels, but a slipup or blown cover could prove messy, even deadly, for himself or those with whom he worked.

In November 1989 Spessard received an unusual set of orders. He was to go to Zaire and then on to Angola, part of a covert mission of particular sensitivity. It was the last chapter in the Cold War. An anemic Soviet Union was so absorbed in its own woes that it was scarcely capable of or interested in meddling in the sort of proxy wars that had come to characterize the post-World War II era. Just two weeks earlier the Berlin Wall had fallen. Bulgaria's dictator had resigned. So, too, had Czechoslovakia's Communist Party general secretary. At Langley there was a mix of disbelief and euphoria, a sense that history and destiny had, at long last, proved them right. But some fires were slower to burn out. Among the most persistent was that which engulfed Angola, where Spessard was headed. It was as if the rest of the world was embracing its future while Spessard was assigned to the past.

The country, which gained independence from Portugal in November 1975, had long been the subject of a brutal civil war. Early on, the CIA heaped covert paramilitary support on an organization known as the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi. Scores of CIA operatives were assigned to the Angola Task Force. But Congress was in no mood for CIA adventurism, fearful that it might lead the United States into yet another Vietnam. Saigon had fallen only months earlier. In June 1976 Congress passed the Clark Amendment banning all covert action in Angola. It was said to be the first direct congressional interference with a covert action and it would stand for a decade.

But the ensuing decade since gaining independence had bankrupted Angola and rendered it one of Africa's most desperate economies, its 10 million people utterly sapped by civil war and outside intervention. During those years the upper hand seemed to shift back and forth between UNITA and the leftist MPLA, or Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. By the early 1980s Soviet aid was said to total several billions of dollars, and an estimated forty thousand Cuban troops were in country. South Africa stood firmly behind UNITA, helping to stave off defeat.

In the summer of 1985 the MPLA with Soviet aid and Cuban support had launched an offensive and UNITA was pushed back. On August 8 of that year, Congress lifted its ban on covert support to Angola. Three months later Reagan signed a presidential finding providing covert lethal assistance to UNITA. The Agency even dispatched one of its operatives to Savimbi headquarters. He would live in a thatched hut for years. Materiel and weapons soon flowed into the country. In February 1986 the National Security Council approved the covert shipment of TOW antiarmor and Stinger antiaircraft missiles to Savimbi.

For years the CIA continued its secret resupply of UNITA, determined not to allow a Marxist regime to prevail. To do this, the Agency relied on the support of Mobuto, leader of neighboring Zaire and one of the world's most corrupt leaders. Mobuto had long enjoyed the CIA's favor and had allowed the clandestine resupply effort of Savimbi to operate out of one of Zaire's remote air bases -- Kamina. It was the same base from which the CIA's John Merriman had taken off in his fatal flight against leftist Congolese guerrillas some twenty-four years earlier. Headed by a CIA base officer, Kamina provided a barracks, showers, and even rental movies to the crew that manned the huge cargo plane that made the perilous nighttime flight into and out of Angola. Still there was an undeniable sense of isolation at the base. There were no telephones. The link to the outside was by radio to Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville.

Spessard's first mission in aid of Savimbi's troops was, after many delays, scheduled to take off on Monday, just three days after his departure from Hagerstown. While the precise nature of the equipment he was to deliver to Savimbi is not known, those familiar with Spessard's work say it would probably have been used to help UNITA locate hostile forces by getting a fix on their transmissions.

The lumbering cargo plane that would take him into Angola was to be one of the "Gray Ghosts," so named for their slate-colored paint. The plane had four seats in the front -- for a pilot, copilot, navigator, and loadmaster. The fuselage was largely open for cargo. On board that night was a seasoned crew of six. Even by Agency standards, it had a distinctly international flavor. Heading the team was Pharies "Bud" Petty, a veteran Agency pilot who, at least on paper, presided over a Florida firm called Tepper Aviation, located in Crestview, just off Eglin Air Force Base. The other crew members were all ostensibly employees of Tepper. The CIA often uses such contracts as a mask to conceal its activities from public scrutiny, suspicion, and ultimately, accountability.

Petty, then forty-nine, was a husky six-footer with a full head of hair, hazel-blue eyes, and an easy, soothing manner He was a shadowy character with an illustrious war record and a deep, some would say unquestioning, trust in government. Whatever his country asked of him be would do. In 1955, at age fifteen, he had joined the navy using a family Bible that contained an altered birth date showing him to be three years older than he was. A year later he stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Badoeng Strait and shielded his eyes from the flash of a nuclear test, part of Operation Redwing in the Pacific Ocean. As ordered, he would dispose of his radiation-contaminated clothes, but never, even years later, second-guess the wisdom of exposing the troops to such a test.

By the time he reached Vietnam he was an army pilot, his dazzling record capped off with a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, and an Air Medal with V Device. As fire team leader with the 334th Armed Helicopter Company he had led a devastating air raid that sank 174 sampans, some of them apparently loaded with ammo. In 1977 he retired as a major. He never spoke of Vietnam thereafter. But for years it invaded his sleep.

In 1981 Petty had gone to work for the Agency, living for a time in Washington, D.C. Later he moved to Florida and set up a series of dummy companies and Agency proprietaries that provided the CIA with planes and crews. During the mid-1980s he played an unseen role in what would come to be known as Iran-Contra. He was a part of that tight-lipped circle of pilots and crew associated with St. Lucia Airways as it ferried missiles to Iran, supplied anti-Communist insurgencies, and engaged in other Agency-sponsored activities.

That November night, as the plane lifted off from Kamina Air Base in Zaire, Bud Petty was in the cockpit as pilot or copilot. There was none steadier. Still, his family had fretted about this mission. "Don't worry," he had told his eldest sister, Joyce, "this is my last trip. I'm tired."

He had seemed to think himself invincible, but he was savvy enough to understand that even the best are at risk. He took what precautions he could, always mindful of security. Several times he had told his sister Losue that if she should ever receive a collect call from someone named Grant Eugene Turner, she would know it was from him. The name was a corruption of his wife's maiden name, Gracie Tyner.

The aviation mechanic that night was thirty-three-year-old George Vincent Lacy. Raised in Lawton, Oklahoma, he had only recently signed on to Tepper. He came from a family in which service to government was a given. His father was a twenty-year army man and his uncle had died in the crash of an air force jet. As with so many others, working for the Agency was a family business. His older brother had spent a career serving Langley. But extended trips overseas were tough on George Lacy and harder still to explain to his fiancee.

Two Germans were also on board that night. One was forty-nine-year-old George Bensch, the other forty-one-year-old Gerhard Hermann Rieger. Bensch was a mechanic. He had moved to the States just two years earlier. Before that he had serviced St. Lucia's planes in Europe as they set out on covert Agency operations. Rieger, the flight engineer, was the father of two sons. Both men had been born in West Germany.

The last member of the crew was a Brit, forty-four-year-old Michael Atkinson. A hulking six feet four, he might easily have passed for the Marlboro Man. Born in Yorkshire, England, he had made his home for over a decade in the British West Indies on the lush island of St. Lucia. Formerly the captain of a three-masted schooner, Atkinson was now a pilot. And though he had flown with St. Lucia Airways, the Agency proprietary, he had little interest in ideology or fighting the Communists. What he lived for was adventure, be it on the sea or in the air. He also had to think of providing support for his two sons, Oliver and Jason, and his wife, Madeleine, then pregnant with a third child.

Also on board were eleven of Savimbi's men and a fuselage full of supplies, including crates of ammo. So secretive was the operation that even at Kamina the men lived under aliases. When airborne, flight records listed them not by name, but by number. The two nightly flights were simply designated "Flight One" and "Flight Two." Even Savimbi was referred to only by an Agency code name. All knowledge of the operation was compartmented on a need-to-know basis.

The destination was a remote gravel airstrip in Angola. Landings kicked up huge clouds of dust. From there, it was nearly an hour to UNITA's base camp. Sometimes Savimbi himself would meet the plane, shake hands, and give out wooden carvings in appreciation. In the past, most such flights had been "touch-and-gos," meaning that the engines were never shut down, and once the cargo had been unloaded, the plane would take off again for Zaire.

Spessard's flight represented the first resumption of the resupply effort in many months. It took off without incident and for the next five hours was tracked closely by the Agency, which was in constant communication with the aircraft. It was an Agency communications officer in Kinshasa who first reported that he had lost contact with the plane.

***

At eight o'clock that Monday night, November 27, 1989, in Hagerstown, Maryland, Debra Spessard was in her kitchen. Her mother was giving her a perm. The doorbell rang. It was a man in a black suit carrying a briefcase. He may or may not have given his name. Debra Spessard cannot remember. What he had to say made everything else melt away. Jim Spessard's flight, he said, was missing.

The next morning at eight he called back. James Spessard, he said, was dead. There was little else he could or would tell her. The area where the plane had gone down was remote. The Agency had not yet been able to reach it.

It was only later that the Agency determined that the Lockheed L-100-20 Hercules cargo plane had been on final approach to the airfield near Jamba, Savimbi's headquarters. It was too risky to turn the runway lights on until the last seconds and the pilot was forced to rely on instruments. In the utter blackness of night, there was no hint of a horizon by which to steer. It was already too late when he discovered he was coming in too low. He attempted to circle but the wing clipped a treetop and the plane cartwheeled into the ground. Almost immediately the fuel and ammunition aboard exploded in a fireball that consumed the aircraft, its crew, and its cargo. One Savimbi warrior, no older than sixteen, had been lying down on the cargo near the tail. He was thrown clear and survived almost unscathed.

Spessard, Petty, Lacy, Rieger, Bensch, Atkinson, and Savimbi's men perished in the crash. Many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition.

Soon after the crash, an Agency team composed of a dozen people -- investigators and medical examiners -- was on-site. They recovered the bodies, the black box, and remains of flight instruments, and scoured the area for anything of a sensitive nature that could prove awkward for the Agency. Anything not consumed by fire was retrieved.

The six coffins arrived at Dover Air Force Base without any of the usual ceremony or public spectacle that awaits many of those who are killed overseas in service to country. A photo would record that a nondescript cargo plane delivered six crates. "Handle with Care" stenciled on their sides and bound by white cord.

Five of the caskets -- those of Petty, Lacy, Bensch, Rieger, and Atkinson -- were flown to Florida via yet another nondescript cargo plane which was promptly taken inside a hangar at Tepper Aviation. The five identical silver eighteen-gauge steel caskets, all of them sealed, were placed in hearses and driven to the Twin City Funeral Home in Niceville, Florida.

For the next two days there were visitation hours as mourners passed by the caskets, each in its own room. Funeral director Joe MacLendon was struck that many of those who passed by the caskets were not attired in the usual black suits but wore instead weathered leather jackets and appeared, to use his word, "tough." They reminded him of the character Indiana Jones. He wondered if some of those in attendance were mercenaries.

From Florida the caskets would go their separate ways. But first there was paperwork to be done and regulations regarding the transfer of bodies that had to be satisfied.

For funeral director MacLendon this was not so easy There were no accompanying death certificates. What scanty records arrived from Dover were largely illegible. Under the entry "Circumstances Surrounding Death" was written "Unknown." So it was with "Place of Death" and "Date of Death." There was no information to be had, no contact with the government, only a check from Tepper Aviation to cover the cost of the funerals.

In an effort to oblige the widows, MacLendon dummied up the necessary documents, made up what information he didn't know, and had them notarized. And with that, the caskets went out.

George Lacy's remains were flown by private plane to Oklahoma and interred in a family plot in El Reno. George Bensch's body was returned to Walldorf Germany. Michael Atkinson's casket was returned to the island of St. Lucia. There, following his widow's request, the Cricks Funeral Home drilled holes in the casket and attached iron weights to it so that it might be buried in the sea he so loved. A small flotilla of fishing boats escorted the coffin three miles out of Rodney Bay. The swells were high and the mourners thought it only fitting that on such a day they would bury a man unfazed by rough weather. Then, with words of blessing from a Methodist minister, the coffin was lowered into the Caribbean.

Petty's and Rieger's final journeys would take an even more unusual twist.

Back in Hagerstown, CIA officers asked the Spessard family to provide dental records to help them identify Spessard's remains. Spessard's family was in the cemetery business, but even for them it was a grim assignment. They asked to view the body. They wanted to make sure that the remains were indeed those of James Spessard. But the Agency refused. The remains, they were told, were in a body bag within the coffin and were simply "not viewable."

But Debra and other family members were insistent. Years earlier Jimmy Spessard had tattooed on his chest the little yellow bird known as Woodstock from the cartoon Peanuts. They asked to see that the corpse had such a tattoo. The Agency refused their request. The family asked if a picture could be taken of the tattoo. This, too, was denied. They could not even pick out the casket.

A day later three Agency employees, two men and a woman, showed up at the Spessard home, which was now filled with mourners. The three arrived in a black car, dressed in black and carrying black briefcases. They asked Debra Spessard and her brother if they could go somewhere where they might be alone and be free to talk. Debra Spessard led them to the basement rec room, where she and her brother took a seat on a sofa.

If the Agency was concerned with Spessard's loss, it was also concerned with just how it was going to conceal the circumstances of that loss from the public and press. Damage control was foremost on their minds. They asked Spessard's widow if she would be willing to tell friends and any reporters who might make inquiries that her husband had been working for a private company and was moonlighting for a few extra dollars at the time he was killed. That way his link to the Agency might remain a secret.

Debbie Spessard said she would not lie about the circumstances of her husband's death. "If Jimmy was going to die for his country," she told them, "it isn't going to be perceived that he died for a paycheck." The woman from the Agency asked again, all the while holding Debra Spessard's trembling hands. Twice more, Debra Spessard refused. She eventually agreed to provide any reporters with a telephone number the Agency had given her which would shunt reporters off the track of the CIA.

At the Pentagon, three days after the crash, briefer Pete Williams was fending off reporters' questions. Williams was asked who was on the flight, what it carried, and which government agency, if any, it was affiliated with. "The only thing I know," he told reporters, "is what the army put out, which is that the person named James Spessard -- S-P-E-S-S-A-R-D -- was an army civilian employee, but that's all I know about it."

The CIA, when asked about the flight, issued its usual line, delivered by spokesman Mark Mansfield: "As a matter of policy, we never confirm or deny such reports," he said.

***

The crash had been catastrophic for the Spessard family. For the Agency, too, it was viewed with grave alarm. The timing could not have been worse. Just two days after the crash, President George Bush was to meet with the Soviets' Mikhail Gorbachev for a much-touted summit in the Mediterranean off Malta.

And only two days prior to the Angola crash the U.S. government had made much of a plane that had crashed in eastern El Salvador that was revealed to be carrying Soviet arms destined for leftist rebels in that country. The twin-engine Cessna that originated in Nicaragua carried some twenty- four SA-7 antiaircraft missiles in its belly. Its crash and the subsequent publicity surrounding it had provided a propaganda bonanza and potential leverage in the upcoming summit.

The United States could argue that the Soviets were still dirtying their hands in anachronistic proxy wars long after America had chosen to take the high ground, repudiating such nefarious intervention in Third World conflicts. An indignant Bush administration had even lodged a formal protest with the Soviet Embassy. Among those most eager to mine the propaganda benefits of that crash was CIA Director William Webster.

The crash in Angola threatened to expose U.S. hypocrisy and put the United States and Soviet Union on an equally equivocal moral footing in the eyes of the world. No one understood this better than George Bush, who as president was acutely sensitive to such developments on the eve of a summit. But as the only president to have also served as Director Central Intelligence he was sympathetic to the risks of covert operations. The CIA and State Department did what they could to mislead and distract the press and to ensure that the Angola crash got only minimal attention.

In the recent past the CIA had been quite successful at that. Just three months prior to the Angola crash, the Agency had lost one of its own in another African plane crash and managed to completely conceal its link to the fatality despite a flood of national and international press attention.

On August 7, 1989, a high-profile U.S. congressman, Mickey Leland, a Democrat from Texas, on a humanitarian and fact-finding mission in Ethiopia, had been en route to a refugee camp. His twin-engine plane crashed into a cliff during a violent storm. All sixteen passengers and crew were killed. Among the retinue of U.S. officials accompanying the congressman was twenty-five-year-old Robert William Woods. He was said to be a lowly third-level vice-consul with the State Department in the embassy at Addis Ababa.

But Woods was not what he seemed to be. A brilliant young man, he had attended Harvard as a National Merit scholar, graduated cum laude with a degree in history, was a licensed pilot, and, for the preceding two years, had been a covert officer of the CIA. Woods had volunteered for Ethiopia though he understood well its many dangers.

Just prior to leaving he had asked an attorney to draft a will. The attorney had said he was busy and that surely it could wait until Woods's scheduled return to the States in January -- when Woods was to be married. What, after all, was the rush? Woods was but twenty-five. But he insisted and it was done before his departure. And not long before leaving, Woods took his fiancee, Colleen Healy, for a stroll through the Forest Hills Cemetery in Kansas City, Missouri. "This is where my grandfather is buried," he pointed out, "and this is where I want to be buried, beside him," he said. And so he would be.

But the Agency was intent upon making sure that no one linked him to Langley. The presence of an Agency operative assigned to Ethiopia was seen as extremely sensitive. The United States had withdrawn its ambassador nine years earlier, in 1980, and had operated only a skeleton embassy staff in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia had aligned itself with Moscow and Libya, and the United States had adopted a policy of encirclement, arming Somalia, Kenya, and Sudan.

The Agency had reason to fear that Woods's death might generate unwanted attention given the interest in Leland and the prominence of his family. His father, Dick Woods, was senior vice-president and general counsel to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

But in the end, Woods's death was utterly eclipsed by the attention given Congressman Leland's loss. Woods's name would later be added to the State Department wall, continuing the fiction of his cover story, and another nameless star was written into the Agency's Book of Honor. His family even established a fund in his name at Harvard. But the secret of his CIA employment was intact.

***

Three months later the Agency faced an even more complicated situation in Angola with multiple fatalities and a volatile political situation. But while Langley fretted about keeping a lid on the accident, the Spessard family concerned itself with funeral arrangements for thirty-one-year-old Jimmy Spessard. Given Spessard's six years in the navy and his death in the performance of governmental service, the family had hoped that the Pentagon would provide the services of Arlington's famed Old Guard and a military funeral. But the military cited rules that the Guard would not attend funerals beyond a thirty-mile radius from Arlington. The Spessards were heartsick. They appealed to the Agency. Their concerns went all the way to the top. Director Central Intelligence Webster, a former judge and FBI head, personally got involved and used his clout to persuade the Pentagon to waive its restrictions and to allow the Old Guard to make the long drive up to Hagerstown. They arrived by bus, somewhat bewildered by the distance and the occasion. "I don't know why we're here or who he was," one member of the Guard was heard to say.

When it came time to lift the flag off the casket, fold it, and present it, they mistook Spessard's grandmother for the widow. At twenty-six, Debra Spessard simply seemed too young to be a widow. Spessard's grandmother accepted the triangular flag, then promptly passed it to her daughter-in-law, who sat beside her.

At the funeral, mourners signed a book, a maroon leather-bound volume entitled "Precious Memories." The book contained a number of curious entries. It said that Spessard had died in Zaire, continuing the cover story given to the press. Even odder were the signatures of those who attended the funeral. Many who were covert employees of the Agency simply signed their first name and the first letter of their last name. Others intentionally penned names that were illegible. Among these were three of Spessard's pallbearers who were Agency colleagues.

Spessard was buried in Greenlawn Memorial Park, the cemetery where Debra Spessard works and which is owned by her family. His grave is a few short minutes' walk from her desk. Before his interment, the gold wedding ring he had removed the morning of his departure was allowed to be placed in the coffin.

All along the way the CIA did what it could to conceal its link to Spessard and to the resupply effort of Savimbi. Days after the crash, CIA officers appeared at Spessard's home. They went down to the basement rec room and carted off Spessard's entire computer system. It was never to be returned.

Within a week of the crash a letter arrived at Debra Spessard's home. By all appearances it was a personal letter. It was from a Patsy Hallums and the return address was her home. But Hallums was a CIA employee, and inside the envelope was a letter of condolence from none other than William H. Webster, Director Central Intelligence. It was dated December 11, 1989, and read in part:

"Jimmy was a dedicated and conscientious employee who enjoyed the highest respect and admiration of his colleagues.

"He was one of the most energetic members of the staff who took the time to lend his help to others. Often, this meant going out of his way for a colleague with a work-related or personal problem. He spoke often of his family and was known to his friends as a devoted husband and loving father. Your husband's warm personality and quick smile will be missed by those who share in this tragic loss.

"I hope you will derive some peace and comfort in knowing that he served his country and this Agency well ..."

Later a packet of letters from his Agency colleagues arrived. The return addresses had all been snipped off. Any mail sent by the CIA or its employees carried a stamp. A postage meter carries an identifying number and, along with it, the risk of being traced.

A month after the crash, on the morning of December 19, 1989, the Agency dispatched a van to Hagerstown to pick up the Spessard family and drive them to Langley for a meeting with Director Webster and a memorial service. They were escorted to the director's private elevator and taken to the seventh floor. On the way up, their escort told them a series of peculiar stories about the director's dining room, including one that involved a Saudi official who had requested and was granted a serving of boa constrictor. (Never happened, say senior Agency officials, though several members of the Spessard family recall being told the tale.)

Once inside the director's office, Webster asked how Spessard's two sons were coping. He expressed his regrets, asked if there was anything he might do, and then presented Debra Spessard with the Intelligence Star, awarded for "courageous action."

The citation read: "James E. Spessard is posthumously awarded the Intelligence Star in recognition of his exceptional service to the Central Intelligence Agency from July 1989 to November 1989. His voluntary acceptance of known dangers in the execution of his duties reflected the highest standard of professionalism and dedication to the mission of the Agency. Mr. Spessard's significant contributions to the overall mission of the Intelligence Community are justly deserving of commendation and honor, reflecting great credit on himself, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal service."

Webster said that ordinarily he would not allow such an award to leave the premises, that it would be placed in a vault, but that he had made an exception. Debra Spessard could keep it, so long as she showed it to no one. In a moment of unusual candor he also admitted he did not know Jimmy Spessard.

A moment later Webster was interrupted and abruptly excused himself without explanation. His aide said he had been called away to the White House for consultation. Nothing more was said. The next day the United States launched a military action against Panama and toppled the regime of Manuel Noriega.

But the strangest events were yet to come. Several months after the funeral, two Agency employees paid a visit to the Hagerstown cemetery. In the cemetery office they showed a video of the crash site to Debra Spessard and her brother. The video lasted several minutes and showed that the plane had broken into three parts and that all around it the trees and grass were charred.

While the tape ran, one of the Agency officers read from an official report. "Every third word had a big black mark through it, so much of it was classified," recalls Debra Spessard. "The blacked-out part was like every other line." Afterward she asked if she could keep the tape. That would not be possible, the Agency men explained, and left, leaving nothing behind.

***

On December 7, 1989, in Dothan, Alabama, the body of pilot Bud Petty was said to be laid to rest with full military honors in the Memory Hill Cemetery. Family members had huddled around the flag-draped casket as a twenty-one-gun salute sounded. Then he was lowered into grave number 1, lot 405, in the cemetery's Garden of Chimes. It had been a moving tribute to Petty, as was the obituary that appeared in the local paper. Never mind that the obituary said he had died November 29, two days after his actual death, and that there was no mention of the place or cause of death.

His casket had arrived in Dothan sealed, with instructions that it was not to be opened. Men in black suits came down from Washington with a single message for the Petty family: "Don't talk to anyone from the newspapers." After a while, the Pettys had been told so many varying accounts of the crash that they weren't sure what the truth was. Some even suspected Petty was still alive.

Six months later, in Hagerstown, Maryland, Debra Spessard received a phone call from a woman who identified herself as Teresa Petty, Bud Petty's daughter. She was sobbing and said that she suspected her father's coffin had been empty. She was convinced she had been lied to. She had no proof to back up her accusation, but she was certain she and other family members had been duped. Then her grief gave way to anger. She said that the Agency had concluded that the plane had gone down due to pilot error. She said her father was too good a pilot to let that explanation stand. Later her family challenged that finding and the Agency seemed to amend its findings, in part to mollify Petty's survivors. There was talk of a faulty altimeter or other instrument.

Teresa Petty was not alone in believing that her father's coffin was empty. Bud Petty's eldest sister, Joyce, was also convinced, as was Petty's first wife, Doris, whom Petty divorced in the late 1970s.

But Petty's widow, Gracie, who worked closely with him at Tepper Aviation, will not speak of such matters. She says that she knows nothing of the CIA, that her husband merely worked for Tepper Aviation, and that the company had a "government contract."

"It's not a subject that I talk about," she says. "Bud's been gone ten years. I quit living after that. He was a wonderful man and a wonderful memory and I really don't care to rehash any of it. I wouldn't talk about Bud even if President Clinton called. I have my own memories and that's all I care about. If it don't bring him back I don't care." End of story.

Well, not quite.

In the Byrd Funeral Home in Dothan, Alabama, is a file with Bud Petty's name on it and inside is an affidavit that reads: "Before me this day personally appeared Gracie T. Petty who is being duly sworn, deposed, and says that they have full knowledge that the casket which is being brought to Byrd Funeral Home, Dothan, Alabama is only representative of their next of kin for the express purpose of memorializing their missing relative and that they fully understand there are no human remains or personal artifacts contained within such casket."

What Petty's daughter, Teresa, and others had suspected was true. The casket was empty. "I wanted Bud to be buried with dignity," Gracie would later tell Petty's sister Joyce. The Agency had apparently chosen to tell only Petty's widow. The same grim word would be given to the widow of Gerhard Rieger. His casket, too, was empty.

There was a hard irony to the way things turned out for the Petty family. Bud was not a man given to pithy sayings, but one thing he often told his children was that when adversity struck, it was important to "put it behind you and go forward." The peculiar circumstances surrounding his own death and the subsequent deception proved hard to leave behind.

"My brother was very honest with me," says sister Joyce. "He would not have wanted us to be lied to so that we would go on wondering -- that we would be wondering ten years later if he was alive or dead. He would not want to be mourned for this long. He would have wanted us to get on with our lives and he would know we could not do that if we were not told the truth."

It has been no less hard on Alton Petty, Bud's father, now eighty years old. "Everybody was closemouthed and did what they was supposed to do," he says. "The whole stinking mess was shoved down our throat. All of us are afraid to talk to anybody. Most of it is rumor. I have no facts that I can believe. When you lose a son and you can't prove it, you just wonder and start grabbing at straws."

The Spessards were somewhat more fortunate. In time, they made a kind of peace with Jimmy's death. Debra Spessard later remarried. Some time after her husband's death she received a photograph from one of her husband's Agency colleagues showing a workman chiseling a nameless star into the CIA's Wall of Honor -- a star for Jimmy. To this day her sons do not know that their father was with the CIA and was killed in service to country. The burden of secrecy has been upon them all.

***

There are other memorials to Spessard, Petty, and the other crew members who died aboard the Gray Ghost flight. Shortly after the crash, Jonas Savimbi was said to have erected an obelisk with a plaque dedicated to their memory. There it stands today amid thorn trees and high grass on the Angolan savanna not far from where the plane went down. And at Agency headquarters in Langley, along the path where the statue of Nathan Hale is to be found, the men and women of the CIA's Africa Division planted a small sapling in their honor -- a tribute without names. In the Agency's Book of Honor, each is a nameless star.

But perhaps the most curious memorial service was one the Agency itself observed some two years after the crash. As if to make sure that no public link was forged between the Agency and the dead, the ceremony was held not at CIA headquarters, but rather at the Fort Myer Chapel in Arlington Cemetery. It was 11:30 the morning of August 7, 1991, and the families of the deceased, many of whom had never before met one another, gathered in tribute to their sons and fathers and husbands. Medals and awards were presented.

Petty's widow received a vaguely worded and undated certificate that read: "The United States of America honors the memory of Pharies B. Petty. This certificate is awarded by a grateful nation in recognition of devoted and selfless consecration to the service of our country in the Armed Forces of the United States." Never mind that Petty had been out of the military for a dozen years. But at least it was signed -- "George Bush, President of the United States."

Mildred Lacy, the aging mother of aviation mechanic George Lacy, accepted a round metal that featured an eagle on the front and the words "In Recognition of Distinguished Service." On the obverse was inscribed "George Vincent Lacy 1989."

A short time later she received through the mail a second award, named the Alben W. Barkley Award. The citation reads: "The United States of America presents the Alben W. Barkley Award to George V. Lacy in recognition of distinguished public service to the people and goals of the United States of America. Mr. Lacy is presented this award posthumously following his ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty serving his country. His individual contributions can never be forgotten and his public spirit will live on as a standard of excellence that future public servants will try to emulate. The dedication, selflessness, and commitment with which he served reflect great credit upon himself his family and the United States of America."

What made the award so curious was not only that it made no mention of either the CIA or Lacy's mission but that, according to what Mildred Lacy was told, it was the first and only time the award would be made -- that is, only those six on board the ill-fated Gray Ghost flight would ever receive it. Why it was named for Alben Barkley, Harry Truman's vice-president, was never explained to the relatives of the deceased. And there was an odd irony in suggesting that Lacy's contributions would never be forgotten, that they would become "a standard of excellence" for "future public servants," given that his name, his mission, and his fate were all completely veiled in secrecy.

There was nothing in any of the medals, honors, or certificates that showed the CIA's hand was behind it all. It was as if the bereaved, who had themselves made a stunning sacrifice, could not be trusted with anything that revealed the truth.

"All the medals and the talking will never bring my son or the other boys home," says Lacy's mother, Mildred. "They are gone. All we have is our memories and our thoughts every day of our son and what they had gone through when this happened. That's something nobody knows."

As for the people of Angola, like so many others caught in the undertow first of colonialism and then the Cold War, a happy ending is not yet in sight. A cease-fire between the government and UNITA lasted from May 199l until October 1992, when UNITA refused to recognize the results of an internationally monitored election. A decade after the crash that killed Spessard, Petty, Rieger, Bensch, Lacy, and Atkinson, and two decades after the CIA's involvement in that civil war, Savimbi remains restive. The new millennium dawns with Angola's people facing still more violence and upheaval.

So it was to be for the CIA as well. Africa would soon account for still more nameless stars in the Book of Honor.
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Re: THE BOOK OF HONOR -- THE SECRET LIVES AND DEATHS OF CIA

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 3:28 am

Part 1 of 2

The Last Maccabee

TRUTH, it is said, is the first casualty of any war. But in Somalia truth was the second casualty. Larry Freedman was the first. The Pentagon conferred that dubious distinction upon him when it reported that on December 23, 1992, he had been killed by a land mine and that he had been a civilian employee of the Defense Department. The first part was true enough. Freedman was dead. The second part was a lie.

Back home in the States, Freedman's death was reduced to a terse obituary and a fleeting item on the evening news. Those wary of America's foreign entanglements, especially those labeled "peacekeeping missions," cited his death as a kind of "told-you-so." He had become kindling in the debate, the ante lost in a hand that should never have been played. On the Pentagon's casualty list even his name was misspelled. They left out the "d" in "Freedman."

Of course, Freedman had no interest in geopolitical debates. Never one to question America's role abroad, he had stood ready, decade after decade, to be one of the nation's sharpest, and if need be, most deadly instruments of foreign policy. He lusted after action like he lusted after everything else. As for recognition, he had long since made his peace with anonymity. It went with the territory he had chosen for himself as much as his sniper's rifle and scope. He had lived an explosive life and yet a life of stealth. It was only fitting his exit be one of fire and flash, and steeped in deception.

In the public's mind Freedman was at most a glancing thought, a fifty-one-year-old grandfather who died far from home and close to Christmas. He was just another faceless bureaucrat, a "civilian employee of the Department of Defense." Truth and Freedman now shared a common grave. And that was exactly how the CIA wished it to remain.

***

Mention Larry Freedman's name even today, nearly a decade after his death, and a mischievous smile creeps across the faces of those who knew him. It is as if they suddenly remembered a bawdy story too risque to repeat but too delicious to forget.

Six years after his death, Freedman's longtime friends from Philadelphia gather in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home of his sister, Sylvia Doner. Within moments all semblance of sobriety vanishes, replaced by a convulsive hilarity. Like Freedman, they are Jewish, streetwise, and, even in their mid-fifties, not to be pushed around: Petey Altman, Kenny Gold, Paul Weinberg. Also here is Wynne Crocetto, who first set eyes on Freedman at seventeen and was forever smitten.

Weinberg was the first to meet Freedman. That was in kindergarten. They were both born to raise hell. "We even flunked twice so we could graduate together," Weinberg says. True enough, but it would not have taken much on Freedman's part to fail. Bright as he was, he was no student.

Back then, the gang hung out at the Pit, a bowling alley in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia. To them, Freedman was known affectionately as Gus. At ten he had seen the movie Cinderella and was enamored with the antics of a fat mouse by that name who always seemed to get caught either by the cat or the broom. Freedman could identify with that.

Whatever defied common sense he took to be a personal invitation. A high school gymnast and diver, he was always looking for something more daring. He found it one night at the Ascot Motel in Atlantic City when he dove off a third-story balcony into the horseshoe-shaped swimming pool "The edge was his favorite place," says his sister, Sylvia.

At five feet nine he was powerfully built, coiled like a spring wound a little too tight. He was utterly fearless. He never spoiled for a fight, but woe to the fool that pushed him too far. All such encounters were short and decidedly one-sided. But mostly he tested his body against gravity and his own limits of endurance. Often he would do handstands on the backs of chairs, on balconies and railings. He did it not for the attention, but for the pure rush of adrenaline. He was an odd mix of Tarzan and John Wayne, both of whom he idolized.

As an adolescent he took a keen interest in weapons, particularly bows and arrows, not the kind of rubber-tipped playthings sold in toy stores, but the real deal: deadly steel-tipped broad arrows launched from a fiberglass longbow. He would put paper targets on neighborhood trees and drive the arrow clean through the bull's-eye and deep into the living wood. His eye was unerring, his approach unnervingly silent. These were gifts that would serve him well in later years, but as a boy got him into considerable hot water.

At thirteen he and two of his buddies walked into an Esso gas station on Stenton Avenue and attempted to rob the place. Freedman was armed with his bow and arrow, drawn and trained on the owner, who dismissed the boys with a laugh. Just how many times Freedman ran afoul of the local constabulary is a matter of some dispute. Suffice to say, he could be a handful.

His parents would learn to be flexible but not when it came to attendance at temple. On March 27, 1954, Freedman was bar mitzvahed in a Conservative synagogue. From the pulpit he read from the Talmud with deep conviction. It was no act. In later years he could be vulgar, even downright raunchy, but never profane. About the same year he was bar mitzvahed he and his buddies were summarily kicked out of Boy Scout Troop 99.

To the outside world Freedman and his ilk might easily have been mistaken for juvenile delinquents, but there was nothing thuggish about them. It was themselves, not others, they usually put at risk. Occasionally they fought with the Oxford Circle boys, but it was nothing more than fists. They covered one another's backs. Between them grew an uncommon camaraderie and a raw but abiding sense of honor.

Freedman was the lead dog, adored, almost worshiped, by his co-conspirators. For all his excesses, he was, at heart, quiet and gentle, capable of casting a spell over other rebels. They would be drawn to him as to an outlaw Pied Piper.

But his parents were not to be envied. Again and again he tried their patience. His father, Leroy, gave him a '54 Buick Special. Freedman could not resist pushing the big V-8 to the max. Soon after, he rolled the car, then secretly had it repaired in a garage at night, at his sister's expense. His father never found out.

But like his patron mouse, Gus, Freedman seldom got away with anything. One day he returned home and announced that he had gotten a part-time job in a neighborhood pharmacy. His parents were elated. At last he was doing something productive. One night the family decided to surprise him and pick him up at work. There they learned Freedman had been fired three weeks earlier. Vintage Freedman.

From high school he went to Kansas State University. It was the only school that would have him. Friends say he majored in class avoidance and bedding coeds, but he did in fact have a genuine interest in veterinary medicine and a soft spot for any suffering animal -- something that would later haunt him.

At college, to the delight of coeds, he would leap from stairwell to stairwell, deftly catching the railing, except when he did not. It was just such a maneuver that once opened his head and left some to wonder whether he really thought he could fly. Such kamikaze stunts won for him a kind of Superman moniker which was later amended to "Superjew," a title he proudly clung to for the rest of his life.

It was about this time that he came upon one of his abiding passions -- motorcycles. There was nothing that gave him more pleasure than endless hours cruising on the open road. Regularly he would ride from Kansas to Philly for nothing more than the excuse of a milk shake, then head back forty-five minutes later. His friends remember him dismounting his thunderous blue Norton and proudly picking the bugs out of his teeth.

He still had the Buick but showed it little respect. One time he drove from Kansas to Philly through a deluge. When he arrived at home he was completely soaked. His family couldn't understand why until they looked out the window. Freedman had sawed the roof off his car to make it a convertible and had been driving something akin to a portable pool.

Ivan Doner, now married to Freedman's sister; remembers the time in 1963 when he first set eyes on Freedman, then twenty-two. He was wearing tight jeans, black boots, a T-shirt with sleeves rolled back to reveal rippling biceps, and long hair slicked back. He was the very picture of a greaser. It was easy to feel intimidated in his presence.

It wasn't long before Freedman flunked out of college. It came as a surprise to no one. Wild and undisciplined, his prospects seemed dim at best. The exuberance of youth, to put a polite spin on whatever it was that torqued Freedman's overheated engine, seemed destined to doom him as an adult. And then something happened that would change the course of his life. He found the army.

***

On September 30, 1965, with the war in Vietnam on full boil Freedman enlisted at a recruiting station in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Within six months he had maneuvered himself into a position as a medic-in-training. Instinctively Freedman had sought out the one unit that would impose upon him the discipline he needed, and yet place him among others who shared his infatuation with the edge -- Special Forces. Twenty-four-year-old Lawrence N. Freedman was about to don the Green Beret.

One of the most wrenching experiences of his entire military career came early on and not on the battlefield. As part of his training as a medic he was to take a puppy that had been anesthetized and remove one of its legs. For a man who had aspired to be a vet it was almost too much to bear. Even twenty years later he spoke of the experience haltingly as one of the most traumatic events in an often violent life.

But whatever focus he had lacked in the civilian world promptly resolved itself in the military. Freedman discovered that he was born to be a warrior. He had at last found a place where his vices could be turned to virtues, his abandon into valor. Even among the elite of the elite, he determined that he would distinguish himself. He saw himself as one in a long line of Jewish warriors -- the last Maccabee.

And distinguish himself he did: two Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, numerous Good Conduct Medals, the Humanitarian Service Medal, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, and a chestful of other decorations.

His first Bronze Star dated back to May 23, 1968. Freedman was a senior adviser heading up a team of Vietnamese civilian irregulars on ambush patrol along a North Vietnamese infiltration route. He and his men suddenly found themselves about to be outflanked.

The citation spells out what happened next. "Sensing the enemy's plans, Sergeant Freedman left cover, and although under murderous enemy fire, ran from position to position redeploying his men and directing their fire. The friendly positions began receiving mortar fire from minimum range.

"Spotting the muzzle flash of the weapon, Sergeant Freedman ran from cover and made his way to within 50 meters of it. Opening fire with his rifle he killed two of the enemy gun crew and caused the remainder to abandon their weapon and run ... Sergeant Freedman's actions prevented heavy friendly casualties and were instrumental in the victory over a numerically superior enemy force. Sergeant Freedman's personal bravery and devotion to duty were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, the Special Forces and the United States Army."

Piece by piece, Freedman assembled all the essential components of the ultimate soldier. In the years ahead he underwent advanced training in parachuting, martial arts, intelligence, and weaponry. He honed his skills as a sniper until he became one of the army's most accurate and deadly long-range shooters.

But Freedman was not immune to the emotional toll of Vietnam. He told one friend, Nick Garber, how he was firing his weapon to repel an attack while all the while drowning a Viet Cong soldier in a shallow rice paddy with his booted foot. Not until the soldier ceased struggling did he raise his foot. Such images were not easy for him to put out of his mind. On his first visit home from Vietnam his family took him to a nightclub. Freedman sat quietly, declining drinks and answering questions with a stiff "yes" or "no."

But through it all, his eye for women never flagged. In Vietnam he had met a slender Vietnamese woman named Thuy, then with two children. He married her, adopted her children, to be named Michael and Linda, and together, they had a third child, David. But the marriage was ill-fated. They had little in common and less and less to say to one another. The marriage ended long before the divorce.

There is no doubt he was an incurable flirt, but his approach, like everything else about him, could be highly unconventional. How he met his second wife, Teresa, is a case in point. It was 1978. He had been checking out a woman who lived in an adjoining lot. She was petite and shapely, with long black curls and green eyes. One day as she was hanging her laundry he perched over the back fence and struck up a conversation with her. She seemed to be wilted as if in pain. He asked how she was doing.

"I just had a hysterectomy," she explained.

"Oh, I just had a vasectomy," he fired back cheerfully. "We'll have to have a sterilization party." He and Teresa married on May 10, 1981, though it, too, would be a turbulent marriage.

With women he was usually the perfect gentleman, romantic to a fault. But he could also be obnoxious and randy. A video captures him chairing a solemn meeting of officers at Fort Bragg. In walks a young lady bearing a surprise birthday cake for him. It is decorated with a menorah made of icing.

"Happy birthday," she bubbles as she places it before him.

"Great Gugamugal!" thunders Freedman, feigning disappointment. "I told her I wanted a blow job!" Even the officers at the table momentarily fainted away in shock.

But it was never Freedman's intent to offend. It was just his way of testing for reactions, of seeing whether the person would pass muster or fold in a fit of embarrassment or pique. Often it was the first step toward a friendship.

***

By the late 1970s Freedman had already established himself as a consummate soldier. But it was now peacetime, a state Freedman was not quite as comfortable with. He preferred action and sought it out at every turn. On March 28, 1978, he became a team member of one of the military's most elite and shadowy units, the recently formed Special Forces Operational Detachment. Today it is known as Delta Force, the legendary counterterrorist group, though the military is still reluctant to acknowledge its existence.

Trained in CQB, close-quarters battle, Freedman's superquick reflexes were refined and readied for overseas hostage rescue and extraction missions. With his medic's skills, his talents as a sniper, and his combat experience, he was a valued component of Delta Force. There are many in the military who are crack shots, but the perfect sniper, of which Freedman was one, is a rarer breed. It is said of Freedman that he could hike for two days through a jungle with a ninety-pound rucksack on his back, set up his scope and rifle without pause, and focus for three days on a window waiting for his target to show himself for a second only. His concentration was unflagging and lethal.

At training exercises he wowed even expert marksmen. At close range his weapon of choice was a Colt .45 that had undergone a "combat conversion," meaning the magazine would load quicker and the trigger was "tuned" to release without unwanted "creep." His body, too, was a finely tuned weapon. Each day he ran five miles, pumped iron, and practiced martial arts.

In Delta Force, Freedman was at last among peers, part of a warrior class, a full cut above the rest. But these soldiers exhibited none of the swagger of a John Wayne. They were content to be known as "the quiet professionals." They strove for invisibility.

Within the subdued ranks of Delta, Freedman maintained a somewhat higher profile. Still known as Superjew, he would literally show up at parties and other affairs wearing a red cape emblazoned with a large Hebrew letter, a gift from sister Sylvia. Freedman's escapades could be counted on to provide welcomed comic relief.

But sometimes he would make a few too many waves. "He pulled some crap on me and I had to hammer his ass," recalls one of his superiors from Delta. But Freedman was too talented to dismiss. Most of his offenses were peccadilloes that momentarily irritated the brass but cumulatively endeared him to them. His commanding officers remember him as a silent tiger in the field, a man ready at a moment's notice to go wherever asked and do whatever was required. "You knew he would always be there," said retired general Richard Potter, who was three years with Delta. "You may not like how he got there but you knew he would be there."

General Peter J. Schoomaker, commander in chief of the United States Special Operations Command, was in the field with Freedman and remembers him with affection and respect. In an otherwise low-key unit he was something of a firecracker. And he had a streak of vanity.

"I would say he was narcissistic," recalls Schoomaker. "He's the kind of guy that always tries to stay pretty, like his fascination with his hair. He was always a lady's kind of guy and always upbeat.

"He was one of the guys you could count on being there and also one of the guys who would have a good time. You had to jerk him up every once in a while to get his attention. He was a confident kind of guy who needed to be led well. Otherwise he'd lead you."

Freedman's missions, all of them still classified, took him to Africa, the Mideast, and the Far East. More than once he undertook covert operations in Ethiopia, a country that was said to be special to him. There was a sketchy story told of him helping a girl in Turkey to come to the United States. He promised to one day look her up in the States. He took out a dollar bill, tore it in half and presented her with one of the halves. Five years later, in the United States, he presented her with the other half of the bill, redeeming his pledge.

He was even consulted in the design of the presidential limo and tested the armor plating on other vehicles used by ambassadors and visiting heads of state. Who better to test such defenses than a man who, given the order, would be the perfect assassin?

Freedman was extraordinarily closemouthed about his missions, but there was one instance in which a personal indiscretion identified his place of operation. Sometime in the mid-1980s he visited his sister, Sylvia, and called aside her husband, Ivan Doner, a physician. "You have to do me a favor," he said somewhat sheepishly. "When I was in Ethiopia I performed a transgression over there."

Doner understood instantly what Freedman was saying. He had had sexual intercourse with a local and now was worried about AIDS. Fearing both the personal and the security repercussions of his actions, Freedman asked that Doner do a blood test and assign him a pseudonym for purposes of the exam. The test came back negative and the usually steely Freedman exhaled a sigh of relief.

The major missions he and Delta Force undertook were often performed in conjunction with the CIA. It was an uneasy relationship between Delta and the Agency. Increasingly the Agency came to view Delta as its paramilitary arm, a role Delta did not relish.

Freedman and the men of Delta knew they could rely on each other. The Agency, on the other hand, had demonstrated a propensity to distance itself from anything that could go awry and seemed to be planning escape routes from responsibility even before operations commenced. "They'll have you crawl way out on a limb and then saw off the branch," said one former Delta Force leader. "They've done it many times." Often, too, Agency intelligence was inadequate or flat- out wrong. Freedman and his teammates came to be deeply suspicious of the Agency -- and yet, when called, they went without hesitation.

It is nearly impossible to judge the efficacy of Delta's missions, so shrouded are they even years later. Sadly the one most daring operation and the one for which Delta will long be associated would come to haunt Freedman as it did the others. The code name was Operation Eagle Claw.

***

It was the spring of 1980. For six months the nation watched with revulsion as fifty-three American civilians were paraded about as hostages, humiliated at the hands of their Iranian captors. With apparent impunity the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers taunted the United States as "the Great Satan." President Jimmy Carter saw his political standing and authority dwindle with each passing day. The crisis would define his presidency, cast America as a kind of impotent giant, and embolden other fanatics to strike at U.S. targets.

But in the deepest, most secure recesses of the U.S. intelligence and defense communities an elaborate plan was afoot to liberate the hostages. It would soon be payback time, a chance to regain face and show that the United States would not abandon its citizens. Perhaps not since the Vietnam War had a covert mission of such daring been undertaken. Completely cloaked in secrecy, a key part of the operation was placed in the hands of the country's most select military unit, Delta Force.

And among those chosen from that crack unit was Larry Freedman.

It was to be Delta's first real mission, a chance to prove its mettle and demonstrate that two years of training had not been for naught. It was the moment that Delta Force had been waiting for. It was the moment Larry Freedman lived for.

On the night of April 24-25, 1980, Freedman was aboard an EC-130, part of a larger group of modified Hercules aircraft and RH-53D helicopters known as Sea Stallions. They were to rendezvous at a prearranged refueling site inside Iran, code-named Desert One.

Dressed in a black field jacket, Levi's, boots, and a naval watch cap, Freedman sat quietly as the massive plane droned on through the night toward its destination. On his right sleeve was a strip of tape concealing a small American flag that he was to peel off once in Teheran as a sign to the hostages that he was part of a rescue team. In his mind he went over and over the welter of intricate steps that lay ahead. He and the rest of the team were convinced that the plan would work. Just get them to Teheran and leave the rest to them.

Freedman had been assigned to the "Blue Element." He was to be a "blocker," making sure that the crowds that could be expected to assemble outside the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, where the fifty- three hostages were being held, did not make it past him. With his sniper's rifle and the support of a machine gunner, he was to provide a delay, if need be laying down deadly fire, while the hostages were removed and led to safety. Few in the operation would be more exposed to risk.

But of the eight Sea Stallions assigned to the mission, three either never made it to Desert One or were stricken with mechanical problems. It was decided that there were no longer enough choppers to make the operation work. The radical change in temperature from the cold of a desert night to the heat of daytime was deemed certain to ground another one or two choppers. That would leave just three to ferry to safety Delta, a Defense Department contingent, the fifty-three hostages, and the assault unit that was to storm the Foreign Ministry Building which housed another three hostages. In all, 178 people would have to be carried out. It was cutting it too close.

The decision was made to abort.

On the ground at Desert One a Sea Stallion was repositioned for its return. Close by was the EC- 130 with Freedman and his fellow Blue team members aboard. As the chopper moved to get into position, its rotors ripped through the cockpit of the EC-130 and instantly set off an explosion, igniting both aircraft. Suddenly the desert went from night to day, and the mission was transformed into a tragedy. Colonel Charles Beckwith would remember the Redeye missiles eerily "pinwheeling" through the desert night as on the Fourth of July.

Freedman and others of his team escaped the flames and leaped to safety, rolling in the sand to put out the flames that licked at their clothes. Freedman returned to the aircraft to help carry away one of the crew who was badly injured and screaming for help. But trapped inside the inferno, now fed by hundreds of gallons of fuel were eight members of the rescue mission.

Four hours and fifty-six minutes after landing at Desert One, Freedman and the others were forced to abandon the site and head for the safety of the Indian Ocean. The flight back was nearly silent. Freedman and his fellow team members sat sullenly, some with tears sliding down their cheeks. They had come to rescue Americans and show that the United States would not abandon its citizens. But behind, on the desert floor, amid the twisted and burned-out wreckage of Sea Stallion and Hercules, were eight charred corpses. It was the most dramatic defeat since Vietnam. The enemy had been sand and night and, perhaps too, a lack of fundamental coordination. America's humiliation was now compounded by horror.

Such was the legacy of Operation Eagle Claw. But while it was an unambiguous fiasco, it also made Delta even more determined to play a frontline role in any future covert rescue and extraction operation. Freedman was convinced that had Delta been in control of the operation, they could have pulled it off. In this he was not alone.

In time, his grief gave way to rage. The aborted rescue mission was a subject he disciplined himself not to dwell on. Rarely would he speak of it and only to those who had played a role in the operation. The pain, the injury to pride and profession, the loss of friends, dogged him as nothing else would.

***

In October 1982 Freedman left Delta Force. His subsequent military record grows more murky with each passing year as he descended into increasingly sensitive and compartmented operations. On November 5, 1982, only weeks after leaving Delta, Pentagon records note he was an "infantry man (special project)." A year later he became a "special projects team member." None of those operations have come to light.

By December 1, 1984, his record clarifies somewhat with the notation that he had been made noncommissioned officer in charge of the Interdiction Branch, a position he held until 1986. In those years he trained Delta and other Special Forces units at Fort Bragg in many of the arcane arts he had mastered. In the "interdiction" course he taught advanced marksmanship, judging distances, camouflage, and concealment techniques, observation skills, and how to "deliver precise rifle fire in support of special operations." It was the Special Forces version of Sniper School.

That same year he attended a birthday party for his old Philadelphia friend Petey Altman, who was turning forty-four. Altman had been smoking pot and was stoned. Freedman avoided him throughout the evening until Altman finally cornered him. Freedman glowered, and it was clear to Altman it was over drugs. "It occurred to me that here he was literally risking his life to stop this stuff and here I was at the other end of the pipeline being the retail consumer," recalls Altman. "That summer I gave it up altogether."

As Freedman approached his forty-fifth birthday, his career took a turn. He temporarily left the field for a classroom at the U.S. Army Sergeant Major's Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas. There, for the first time, he got a great report card. His transcript declared: "He is a true professional of the highest caliber and has exhibited the potential to succeed in any position at any organizational level within the Department of Defense." In August 1986 he returned to Fort Bragg as a sergeant major.

He continued to train Special Forces at Fort Bragg's John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, passing along to the next generation his skills and knowledge acquired over two decades of combat and covert missions.

But he was hardly the professorial type. He ached to get back into the fray. Talking about it was fine but no substitute for the real thing. Still running five miles a day and pumping iron, he was fit and trim and ready for action. But who would deploy a forty-nine-year-old grandfather?

He thought for a time of becoming a mercenary, perhaps working for Israel and the Mossad, the counterpart to the CIA. "You're Jewish, but you're not Israeli," one of his senior officers cautioned him. Freedman next decided to make a run at the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). He had had experience in the field fighting drug operations. It seemed a perfect fit. But the DEA was not interested in someone of Freedman's age for field assignments. Freedman was crushed.

So it was by default that he turned to the CIA. A friend of his from Delta had recently joined the Agency and knew firsthand Freedman's capabilities. On February 31, 1990, Freedman retired from the military after twenty-five years in Special Forces.

With hardly a break in service, he joined the CIA. For the Agency it was something of a coup. There were few employees at Langley that possessed Freedman's paramilitary skills. In 1947 when the Agency was founded, virtually all employees of the clandestine service were veterans of military service. The early 1950s saw an influx of men seasoned in battle on the Korean peninsula.

But by 1990 those in the Agency who had served in the military were in the distinct minority, and many of those still there were either too old or ill-conditioned to meet the physical demands of a covert paramilitary officer. Even at fifty Freedman carried a chiseled physique, a young man's stamina, and a wide array of skills rarely found in one person.

But for Freedman it was not the perfect fit. Once out of the military, he grew a ponytail and sported a full white beard. At Langley he was constantly being pushed to get a haircut. But more than that, something about the culture of the Agency put him off. He continued to harbor some distrust dating back to his days on Delta Force.

Like Freedman, the Agency itself was going through a period of self-doubt and reexamination. In 1991 William Webster resigned after four years as head of the CIA. The Agency had come under criticism from both the Bush White House and Congress. Specifically cited were intelligence failures connected to the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, the collapse of the Soviet economy, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a year later. In November 1991 Webster was replaced by Robert M. Gates, a veteran Agency analyst known as something of a hard-liner.
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Re: THE BOOK OF HONOR -- THE SECRET LIVES AND DEATHS OF CIA

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 3:28 am

Part 2 of 2

For Gates and the Agency there was little time to reflect on the past or celebrate the collapse of its archenemy, the Soviet Union. The CIA was faced with nothing less than redefining its future. Its raison d'etre -- the Cold War -- was history. If Langley did not quickly embrace a new mission, it risked being identified as an anachronism and disemboweled, not unlike the fate of the OSS in the immediate aftermath of World War II. That was the same situation Larry Freedman found himself in as a warrior in middle age having consecrated himself to fighting Communists.

But Gates was an unabashed believer in the CIA's accomplishments. He counted the Agency's multibillion-dollar support of the mujahedin against the Soviets in Afghanistan as one of its finest hours. Even Angola, decimated by war and superpower intervention, he put in the Agency's win column, as one more strain on the Kremlin. That the Agency helped prop up, even install, many despotic regimes was simply a necessity of containing Communism. He would later muse that the CIA had "ended up with some strange and often unsavory bedfellows. Most you wouldn't bring home to Mom." But it was the future, not the past, that preoccupied Gates and the thousands of overt and undercover Agency employees. The CIA's resources, once directed against Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, now were increasingly being deployed to gather economic intelligence and to fight terrorism, international crime syndicates, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction -- biological, chemical, and nuclear -- and the international narcotics trade. Each of these areas was affected by the demise of the Soviet Union. If "the evil empire" was gone, so, too, was the restraint and stability with which it held sway over its client states in the long era of superpower rivalry. In its absence, age-old strains of nationalism and ethnic conflict erupted, drawing the CIA into them.

For Langley and for Freedman it was an unfamiliar world, one in which containing chaos, not Communism, often seemed to be center-stage. Both wondered how they would fit in and what their new role would be. Freedman did not have to wait long to find out. He was repeatedly dispatched to Africa, primarily in the north, returning again to Ethiopia. He also is said to have been sent to Poland. That mission, too, remains a mystery.

It had been almost more than Freedman could bear that he was not sent to the Gulf War in 1991, but had to sit by and watch as Desert Storm unfolded.

"Haven't you had enough?" his lifelong friend Paul Weinberg asked him.

"No," Freedman fired back. "One more war. I could go for a good war."

Years of Special Forces training had sharpened his skills but had also implanted in him a wariness and hair-trigger reaction that sometimes frightened those around him. And with reason. He could be the perfect killing machine and was now paying a price for his expertise. A hunter so long, he had come to know a little too much about what it was to be hunted.

He would not sit before windows or doors, aware that snipers like himself looked for just such opportunities to fell their prey. Always, he insisted on sitting with his back to the wall where he could survey everything and everyone around him. As his training increased, so, too, did the ferocity with which he reacted to perceived threats. In his profession deliberation meant death.

Late one evening in 1990, while on leave, he was staying with his sister, Sylvia. Sitting in a black leather chair, he was watching television. Even in Sylvia's suburban living room, he had strapped to his ankle his .357 Smith & Wesson with a two-and-a-half-inch barrel. It was loaded with special Teflon-pointed bullets. Sylvia entered the room a little too quietly, padding about in her slippers. She came upon him from behind and gently placed her hand upon his shoulder.

Before she knew it, Freedman had leaped over the back of the chair and was an instant away from delivering a potentially fatal strike. "I saw the look in his eyes and I learned never to do that again," Sylvia would say. After that she announced her entrances. Others of Freedman's friends had their own such encounters. They knew to approach him face-to-face and never to surprise him.

The Larry Freedman that Wynne Crocetto knew was a man who pulled the chair out for her, never cursed, and through the years remembered her on birthdays and Valentine's Day. But she, too, caught a terrifying glimpse of the other Larry Freedman, the master of close-quarters combat. "I'm really sorry," he told her. "I'll never do that again."

But it was not something he had control over. The skills that kept him alive in times of peril stalked him in times of peace. Even waking him could unleash the warrior's fury.

But there were by now other, more pressing problems in Freedman's life. His marriage to Teresa had worn hopelessly thin. Freedman wanted out. He may well have loved her but he could not live with her any longer. He took an apartment in Arlington, Virginia. Teresa remained in Fayetteville. He called it "a separation." It was headed inexorably toward divorce.

He still had a roving eye but little expectation of meeting someone special. He had had enough of marriage. But a year after he joined the CIA, in 1991, he found himself enamored with one of his female colleagues, a thin and athletic divorcee. She had even accompanied him on the back of his blackberry-colored Harley FXRT to Sturgis, South Dakota, where annually tens of thousands of bikers gather. It was the first time he had been with a woman who both understood and shared his passion for action and intrigue. At fifty Freedman had found a soulmate.

Freedman was even giving some thought to what life might be like in retirement. He and his buddy Larry Walz had spoken of buying Harleys in Anchorage, Alaska, and driving them for a year all the way to the tip of South America.

But he was also conscious that between now and retirement his life was fraught with risk. Late one afternoon Freedman was in his sister's backyard, rocking slowly in the hammock. Sylvia pulled up a lawn chair and they began to talk. He said that when he died he wanted to be buried in Arlington Cemetery and to have the complete military ceremony and even the small white government-issued tombstone. "I deserve that," he told her, "and I want to be among my peers."

By December 1992 Freedman's bona fides as one of the CIA's premier paramilitary operatives were well established. He had become one of the Agency's "go-to" players, someone who could be counted on to perform well even in the most hazardous of situations. One such situation was quickly taking shape in an area already familiar to Freedman -- the horn of Africa.

***

The country of Somalia was virtually disintegrating before the eyes of the world. Warlords and factionalism had plunged it into a hellish chaos in which even the most dedicated relief workers could not get food and medicine to the country's 8 million people. At the White House, President Bush had determined that the United States would not sit by while countless Somalis starved to death. A decision was made, on humanitarian grounds, that the U.S. would send a military force into the country to reestablish some semblance of order so that the "nongovernmental entities," or NGOs, could go about their work of bringing relief to the country. Already some 350,000 people had died from hunger or fighting.

As a preface to such military intervention, the National Security Council (NSC) decided it wanted the CIA to send operatives into Somalia to ensure that the airports would be open and secure They did not want the NGOs to return only to become targets or to have their food looted or taken by militias. The CIA team could also provide U.S. troops with a clearer idea of what they might expect in country.

The Agency officers, operating under cover, were to arrive in advance of the military. It would be a risky operation because CIA operatives would be inserted into a conflict in which there was no way to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. All sides were heavily armed.

The call for a CIA team went to Tom Twetten, then deputy director for operations, the man who oversaw the Agency's clandestine service. He understood only too well the risk of deploying people in areas where factionalism was rife.

It was not that Twetten was squeamish about putting his officers into the field when it was necessary, but he was skeptical about the need for Agency people in Somalia. He had good reason to have his doubts.

Over the years, demands on the Agency increased while its budget remained the same or shrank. Cuts were made in personnel and operations. Resources had to be husbanded. An internal CIA study was conducted to identify those countries in Africa in which the United States had little or no political, economic, or strategic interests. The idea was that in those countries the Agency could afford not to have a presence. The study was undertaken in the aftermath of the Cold War and was completed in 1991.

It concluded that there were four countries in which the United States had no significant interests and that the Agency would therefore cease collecting intelligence on those nations. That list was forwarded to the State Department and the NSC.

"The Cold War was over and there was no more interest in those countries," recalls Twetten. "There was no U.S. presence there. They were essentially off our screen. We were trying to remold ourselves, so we were going to drop off what was least important and we listed those four countries in rank order and at the top of the list, that which was least important, in which there was no embassy, no American presence, and nobody had asked any question about for the last year -- the name of that country was Somalia."

Now the Agency was being asked to put its officers at risk in a country it had determined was not even worthy of routine collection efforts. Twetten had a second reservation about Agency involvement. He viewed it as a request for military assistance, something the CIA tried to avoid unless there was a presidential finding. In Twetten's view it was the military who should fill the need.

Unspoken was yet a third reason. The Panama operation three years earlier had left some residual "bad blood" between Langley and the Pentagon. Twetten politely declined what he took to be an invitation for assistance and heard no more on the matter for a short time.

But a week later a second call came in. This time the NSC spoke to the Director Central Intelligence, Robert Gates. This time it was no longer a request, but a directive. The Agency was to field a team in Somalia. End of discussion.

"I was given the instruction 'You will do it,' recalled Twetten. "The director of operations will organize an intelligence-gathering effort in several villages including Bardera and you will confirm that the airports are secure so that the NGOs can arrive. You will do that by working with the local authorities, whoever is in charge of the area. You have to go out on the ground and figure out who that is."

There was little discussion about who would be the right person to send. "Freedman was a character and really well known for his bravery and audacity," remembers Twetten. Besides, Freedman knew the landscape of the country, had the requisite skills, and was, as always, itching to go. A desk in Langley had never agreed with him. This was what he had joined the Agency to do. Twetten spoke with him personally as he readied himself for the assignment.

But Freedman was to be part of a second phase of the CIA operation. Even before he was to go into Somalia, the Agency had hired some bush pilots in Kenya to bring in pre-positioned Agency officers who had previous experience in Somalia. Once in country, the CIA case officers contacted Somali agents they had known from earlier operations and assigned them to collect intelligence on specific airports. Only then was Freedman to go in as part of a combined CIA and U.S. Army reconnaissance squadron.

A few days before Freedman was to leave he flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit a longtime friend, Gale McMillan. It was part business, part pleasure. McMillan was a specialty weapons maker who had outfitted elite Special Forces units. Freedman was there to pick up a ten-power sniper's scope to fit his .308 rifle.

But McMillan was much more than just a source of weapons. Freedman had known him since his days on Delta and had come to view him as a surrogate father. "He was kind of like a third son," said McMillan. One of the nights Freedman was in town McMillan put on a demonstration of his night scopes at the local police firing range and turned to Freedman to prove the accuracy of the rifle and scope. In the blackness of night Freedman set up his rifle, poised on a bipod that rested on a table. He sighted the target and squeezed off five shots at a target the distance of two football fields away. All five shots found their mark, dead center -- all within three-tenths of an inch of each other. The police had never seen such a thing before.

The next morning Freedman was to fly back to Washington and then on to Somalia. McMillan met him for breakfast in the coffee shop of the local Sheraton. Freedman seemed ebullient. He was headed for action. He was also, he said, deeply in love with someone from the Agency. "I don't have to justify my work to her," he said. McMillan sensed that Freedman was thinking marriage.

McMillan just listened. He knew not to ask Freedman where he was headed or what he was going to do. Besides, Freedman would not have told him. Anyone he counted a friend understood that such questions would be unwelcomed. But McMillan had something he wanted to say to him, something he knew Freedman would not want to hear.

"Go in the rest room," McMillan told him, "and look at all the white in your hair. It means you better start slowing down and let the young guys take the risk."

Freedman shrugged it off.

"Mac," he said, "you know I'm doing what I love to do. If I have to go, what better way to go?"

When Freedman arrived in Somalia in December 1992, he was dressed in faded blue jeans and a khaki field jacket. He wore a tan Harley-Davidson hat that could not contain the cascades of long curly white locks that broke down his bull-like neck. His beard was nearly all white, and his eyes were hidden by a pair of dark aviator sunglasses.

A photo of him taken on December 18 captures him in a moment of impish delight, a black automatic weapon slung across his wide chest, a field radio pressed to his ear, and the broad grin of someone hamming it up, enjoying every moment. But for his age, he might easily have been mistaken for a kid at camp rather than a CIA operative in the vanguard of Operation Restore Hope.

Not long after he arrived, he and a team of three other combat-seasoned men set out to examine the situation around Bardera and its airport, some two hundred miles to the west of the capital, Mogadishu. It was of little strategic value but was squarely in what had become known as the famine belt. Feuding warlords and gun-toting thugs had completely disrupted the flow of relief. Some three hundred people a day were dying of hunger there.

The date was December 23, 1992. Freedman sat behind the wheel of a civilian vehicle as the four- member team took to the road. Along the way, Freedman stopped the vehicle and walked out to the edge of the bush to relieve himself. Someone snapped a picture of him from behind. Freedman laughed. He was in high spirits.

The journey resumed. But on a remote and dusty stretch of road outside Bardera at just about nine o'clock that Wednesday morning, the vehicle hit a land mine. In one hellacious nanosecond, fire and black smoke, red-hot shards of metal and a deafening concussion filled the air.

And when it settled and the quiet returned, Larry Freedman lay dead.

He had suffered a massive head wound, his lower right leg had been blown off; and the right side of his chest was opened. Death had been instantaneous as surely as if one of Freedman's own sniper bullets had unerringly found its mark. The other men were wounded but alive.

Freedman's body and the three survivors were flown by chopper to the USS Tripoli, a helicopter carrier off Mogadishu. There Lieutenant Commander David A. Beatty, a U.S. Navy doctor, filled out the death certificate for Freedman. It listed Freedman as a civilian employee of the Department of Defense, a GS-12. His next of kin was listed as "unknown", as was his Social Security number.

So flamboyant a life was now masked in the cover language provided by the Agency. Those responsible for concealing Freedman's Agency identity and the identities of the other three men disseminated a mix of fact and falsehood. It was said the three survivors had been State Department security officers. Doubtful. Their names were never released. Nor was the nature of their mission. The mine was described as of Russian origin, an older model. How long it had been there was anyone's guess. Later it was whispered at the CIA and Delta that Freedman had been warned not to take that road, that it was not safe. And yet he chose to take it anyway. Maybe it was true, maybe not. It just seemed to fit into the myth that was already taking shape around Larry Freedman.

The day after Freedman was killed a battalion of marines entered Bardera and prepared to distribute food to the thousands of starving Somalis who gathered about. They would later spend Christmas Eve on the airstrip that Freedman had been assigned to.

Most of the marines had no inkling who Freedman was, but one senior officer did attempt to express his appreciation and debt to him. Lieutenant General R. B. Johnston of the Combined Task Force Somalia sat down and typed a letter addressed "To the Larry Freedman Family."

"There are many young Marines and Soldiers who can take credit for the early success of our operation in Somalia," he wrote. "But there are also a number of very special people like Larry who made the most significant contribution by performing missions that gave us the highest possible guarantee that our troops could enter the major relief centers safely. I cannot underscore how important was the performance of Larry and his fellow team members. They courageously put themselves in harm's way and took personal risks on behalf of our entire force. I know I speak for every man and woman in uniform here in Somalia in expressing to Larry's family our deepest sympathy."

The letter was dated December 24, 1992. That was the day Freedman's name was released to the press. At the CIA in Langley his colleagues were reeling from the loss. No one was more devastated than the woman Freedman had hoped to spend the rest of his life with.

But if December 24 was a day of mourning for some at Langley, it was a day of celebration for others. That very day, President George Bush, former head of the CIA, granted pardons to three Agency officials -- Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, and Clare George -- for their role in the Iran- Contra scandal. Bush had effectively put an end to further inquiries into the affair. That was just fine with the CIA.

***

On December 29, 1992, Freedman's funeral was held at the Fort Myer Chapel at Arlington National Cemetery. Even before the funeral got under way, Colonel Sanford Dresin, the officiating chaplain and a rabbi, assembled the family for a ritualistic rending of black cloth, a Jewish custom symbolic of grief and remembrance. But there was no black cloth to be found in the chapel and no pins with which to fasten it. So the rabbi had to make do with black construction paper which was torn into strips and attached to lapels with paper clips. Freedman, he observed, was an expert in resourcefulness and would have appreciated such field expediency.

Those who gathered in the chapel might just as well have come from a series of diverse Hollywood sets. Senior government officials arrived by limousine. From Langley came representatives of the Agency's clandestine service, men and women in black suits and silvered sunglasses. From Fort Bragg came beefy Special Forces types -- Green Berets and Delta Force. Bikers from who knows where arrived on Harleys and Nortons. From Philadelphia came the old gang from the days at the Pit.

One of those was Petey Altman. He and his pals slowly walked behind the gleaming black caisson drawn by six white stallions as it made its way through the twisting paths of Arlington carrying Freedman's coffin. It came to a stop at the corner of Patton and Eisenhower where Freedman was to be buried. Four of the horses were mounted by soldiers, two were riderless, and one bore reversed boots in the stirrups, for the one who had brought them all together and was not here.

It was a cold Tuesday that threatened rain. Freedman's flag-draped coffin was protected by a plastic sheet. His family took their places in velvet-draped chairs as the rabbi, under shelter of a canopy, began the graveside service.

Freedman would have liked this. In a way, his final cover story -- that he was a "civilian employee of the Defense Department" -- was closer to the truth than even the Agency knew. Yes, he was CIA, but he had never seen himself as an Agency man. He was a soldier and he was going out that way.

Only the stone that Teresa had picked was, perhaps, at variance with what he would have wanted. Instead of one of the simple white stones the government provides and that dot the verdant hills in dizzying numbers, she selected a block of jet-black granite. She had her reasons. Where she had gone to look at markers, she noticed that the men cutting the stones were Harley bikers. She took this as a sign that they were meant to inscribe her husband's headstone. On it is a Star of David, a Green Beret, and a paratrooper's wings. Inscribed are the words:

Lawrence N. Freedman
Sergeant Major
April 13, 1941-Dec 23, 1992
"The Life of the Dead is Placed in the
Memory of the Living"

The day after the funeral, on the afternoon of December 30, 1992, a memorial service for Freedman was held in the John F. Kennedy Memorial Chapel at Fort Bragg. There Brigadier General Richard Potter gave the eulogy to a chapel spilling over with Freedman's friends from Delta and other Special Forces detachments, as well as those second-generation combatants he had trained. General Potter cited a passage from Isaiah to explain what he called Freedman's "warrior ethic," his willingness to serve wherever, whenever:

And I heard the voice of the Lord say "Who shall I
send and who will go for us?" and I answered,
"Here I am, send me."

Years later, in retirement, General Potter mused over the fuss shown over Freedman's passing and the interest of an inquiring journalist. "I will tell you that wherever Larry is in Valhalla up there with all the other warriors, he would probably be laughing that we are having this conversation."

***

Remembering Larry Freedman would take many forms:

In Buundo, Ethiopia, a bridge built by U.S. troops that supported tons of food for the starving bears his name. On a steel plate, in white paint, is stenciled "Lawrence R. Freedman Bridge." Never mind that his middle initial was "N" not "R."

In Keystone, South Dakota, just below Mount Rushmore, is a small wooden plaque that reads, "In Memory of Larry Freedman." It is affixed to a picnic shelter where Freedman often escaped the August heat on his annual pilgrimage to the Sturgis motorcycle rally.

In Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the Special Forces Memorial Plaza, his name appears on a plaque dedicated to those who died in the Somalia campaign, though here the CIA's cover story became entangled in yet another cover story. He is listed as an employee of the State Department, not the Pentagon.

And not far away, in the JFK Special Forces Museum, is a small stage named for him: the Larry "Superjew" Freedman Theater, a fitting tribute to a man with a keen sense of theater.

But it was the Agency's memorial service to Freedman the morning of January 5, 1993, that his family remembers best. The CIA assembled Freedman's colleagues and family in "the Bubble," the auditorium across from the headquarters building. Just inside the entrance was a life-sized portrait of Freedman set upon an easel. The room was filled with covert operatives and Agency brass. Even Colin Powell was there. Director Bob Gates spoke briefly, and then one of Freedman's colleagues offered a few remarks about the friend he missed:

"He was blessed with a sense of street savvy, which numbered Larry in that small handful whom, without hesitation, you can trust with covering your six o'clock when you walked into the woodline on a tactical mission ... Pick a continent, pick a decade, Larry was there ..."

Moments later the lights were lowered. Bette Midler's rendition of "The Wind Beneath My Wings" was played, and from floor to ceiling was projected a giant picture of Freedman against the left wall. It was a touch of drama Freedman could only have applauded.

Three days after the ceremony, on January 8, 1993, President George Bush, fresh from a trip to Somalia, visited Langley and addressed CIA employees. Langley was a special place for Bush and he could count on receiving a warm welcome there. It was not so with many of his successors. These were troubled times for the Agency.

"Last November," Bush told them, "when Bob [Gates] became director, I noted that the men and women of the intelligence community faced a new mission in a dramatically different world ... I wish all of you could have been with me on this visit to Somalia. It was very moving. And we are doing the right thing." It was to be a pep talk designed to inspire the Agency personnel at a time when there was an increasing chorus of voices questioning the need for a CIA in a post-Cold War environment.

"The dangers that we face are real," Bush told them. "I still get emotionally convinced of that when I see the stars out in the hall of this building ... So I came to say thank you." No reference was made to Freedman. Not long after, a nameless star was added to the wall and to the Book of Honor.

***

For some, Freedman's death remains a dark tragedy. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, his widow, Teresa, has created a kind of unseen shrine to him. She has kept his heavy black Harley-Davidson jacket with fringe sleeves as well as the dress uniform she had pressed in the belief that he could be buried in it. That was before she was told the coffin could not be opened. Behind the headboard of their king-sized bed are boxes and boxes of medals and memorabilia -- Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, pins and service ribbons, the otoscope of a medic, a piece of a gun, an old buck knife, dog tags from Vietnam, a Star of David, and a sterling-silver "Chi," Hebrew for "life." Here, too, hidden away, is the palm-sized gold medallion that reads, "Central Intelligence Agency For Valor: Lawrence N. Freedman 1992." It was awarded by CIA Director Robert Gates only eight days after Freedman's death. But it took three years before the Agency would consent to send the medal to Freedman's widow. It is an honor that even now she is not to put on display.

But if there are those who are still in mourning, there are others who find such solemnity ill-suited to one as lusty and vital as Larry Freedman. It seemed somehow fitting when his sister, Sylvia, and his rowdy friends from Philadelphia decided to throw a party in Larry's memory. It was a raucous evening. As the video camera rolled, each friend outdid the other with outrageous stories of Freedman. In the background was a huge cake with the name Gus on it and a life-sized portrait in icing of Freedman, complete with his rakish smile and the desperado's mustache. No one dared cut a slice anywhere near his face. To this day, it remains in a Philadelphia freezer.

Sylvia still can't quite bring herself to believe that her brother is dead, only that he is not coming back. "My great fantasy," she says, "is that he went off to be James Bond and just didn't know how to leave us."
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Re: THE BOOK OF HONOR -- THE SECRET LIVES AND DEATHS OF CIA

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 3:29 am

Epilogue

... the courage to bear great grief in silence ...

-- DIRECTOR CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE GEORGE TENET


FROM AROUND the nation they came, arriving at CIA headquarters shortly before 11:00 A.M. -- mostly widows, fatherless sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, dressed in the somber colors of grief and remembrance. Some cradled flowers, others photographs of long-departed loved ones. What they had in common was that their losses were now represented with a star on the Wall of Honor. It was May 14, 1998, a cloudless and sticky-hot Thursday. This was the Agency's twelfth annual memorial service to its own.

Family members had been told not to bring cameras or recording devices. There would be no reporters, no foreign dignitaries, no curious outsiders. Indeed, if the Agency had its way, no one beyond Langley's 258-acre compound would ever know such a convocation had taken place. No one was to speak of it afterward. A year later a warning was added to the program: "Due to cover considerations, we ask that no details of this ceremony be discussed outside of this building."

The invitations had gone out six weeks earlier in plain envelopes, sent by the CIA's Office of Protocol. Family members were met at the entrance and led to the rows of folding chairs that had been set up in front of the Wall of Honor inside the cavernous marble lobby. Already Agency staffers had begun to congregate in the upper lobby. They would have to stand -- a token of honor due those assembled below.

Among the earliest to arrive was the family of John Merriman. His name appears in the Book of Honor beside the year 1964. It was Merriman whose plane was shot down in the Congo and whose injuries went untreated for days while he waited for the Agency to rescue him from a remote air base. To this day his death certificate records that he died in a car crash in Puerto Rico.

On this morning his widow, Val, carried an arrangement of pink lilies, white and lavender delphiniums, and three large mums. In her other hand she clutched a photo of her husband dressed smartly in a commercial pilot's uniform.

Sons Jon and Bruce, now adults, stopped in the men's room to wash up. A man with a trumpet wandered in and practiced playing "Taps," his instrument muted with a cap. When they left the bathroom, they noticed the clock on the wall said 3:45. They wondered if it was broken or perhaps it was the time in Moscow or Beijing. Then the Merriman brothers took their seats some eight rows back.

Soon after, Michael Maloney's widow, Adrienne, and sons Michael and Craig arrived and quietly took their places in the second row of the middle section. Michael Maloney had died in a chopper crash in Laos in October 1965. For thirty-two years his death was marked by an anonymous star. His widow had asked that his name be inscribed in the Book of Honor, but her requests always seemed to get lost in the bureaucracy. Now she had come from Connecticut to at last hear his name read aloud, a final tribute to Michael Maloney and a final act of emancipation from the secrecy that had smothered them all.

But the CIA's secrecy often defied explanation. There was no such lifting of the veil on the identity of the man who sat beside Michael Maloney on that fateful helicopter mission in Laos. For yet another year Mike Deuel's name was to remain in the limbo that befalls most nameless stars. Not until 1999 was it added to the book. Dick Holm, one of Deuel's closest friends and Agency colleagues, and the man who later married his widow, attended the ceremony in remembrance of Deuel. It was Holm who was himself disfigured in a fiery plane crash in the Congo but whose scars now seemed to melt away after a moment's conversation. He had gone on to a distinguished CIA career clouded at the last by a bungled covert operation in Paris.

Not far off sat Janet Weininger. She was seven when her father, Thomas "Pete" Ray, and three other Alabama Air National Guardsmen lost their lives in the fiasco known as the Bay of Pigs in 1961. For thirty-six years she had waited for the Agency to acknowledge that her father and the others had flown for the CIA and to publicly pay homage to their sacrifice. For decades the government lied and dismissed them as mercenaries. Now at last, the Agency was about to speak the truth, to recognize that he and the others had died in service to country and to the Agency in particular. She and her children had come from Miami just to hear her father's name read aloud.

Sitting close to the podium was Page Hart Boteler, sister-in-law of Bill Boteler, the handsome twenty-six-year-old covert operative killed by a pipe bomb in a cafe in Nicosia in 1956. Odd memories flooded her mind -- the four wisdom teeth he had pulled, his jazzy little sports car, a last dinner together. Now he was one of the named stars, though like so many others, his name would mean nothing to those who daily passed by the wall.

Page Boteler introduced herself to a young woman who sat behind her. The woman said her last name was Bennett and that she was two years old when she lost her father. William E. Bennett had been a thirty-six-year-old covert operative working under cover as a political officer in Vietnam. He was reported killed on January 7, 1975, in an explosion at his home in Tuy Hoa on the central coast.

Many family members either could not make it to the ceremony or did not receive invitations. Sylvia Doner, sister of Larry Freedman, who was killed by a land mine in Somalia in 1992, spent that morning at her office desk. Antoinette Lewis, mother of James Lewis, who died in the 1983 bombing of the Beirut embassy, was at home in San Diego, having her morning coffee and toast. On son Jimmy's birthday and on the anniversary of his death, she has the priest read Mass for him and his wife, Monique, who died with him in the blast. Nor was anyone at the ceremony to represent the family of Richard Spicer, a nameless star killed on October 19, 1984, in a plane crash in El Salvador while on a covert mission. It was said at the time that he died in a car crash in Florida. Few were fooled.

Buford Robbins, a Denver butcher, had hoped to live long enough to have daughter Barbara's name inscribed in the Book of Honor, replacing the nameless star that tormented him. The twenty- one-year-old CIA secretary had been killed in the 1965 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Three weeks before this memorial service, on April 22, 1998, he died of liver cancer. "I wish I had an answer," his widow, Ruth, would say. "It sounded like they were still trying to protect someone or something. I didn't know how to interpret it. If they have a good reason, I guess it's something we will never find out."

At precisely 11:30 the memorial service began. As Director Central Intelligence George Tenet took his seat, many in the audience sensed that the air-conditioning had finally come on. An African American woman, Keesha Gibbons, moved slowly to the front of the room and sang a gospel song, "Beams of Heaven." A soprano, she sang a cappella and the power of her voice brought all whispers to a halt. Then Jack G. Downing, deputy director for operations and overseer of the clandestine service, introduced Director Tenet.

This was not a day that Tenet looked forward to. An emotional man, he knew it would be hard to get through the service. Some of those in the Book of Honor behind him were much more than mere names to him. Four of the stars, two named and two nameless, had been lost on his watch.

"We stand together before this sacred wall of stars," he began, "united in fellowship as we remember our fallen colleagues. This silent constellation is the most eloquent testament we can give to CIA's half century of devoted service to the nation.

"We will never forget that each one of these stars also symbolizes a family's loss -- the irreparable loss of a parent, a husband, a wife, a brother, a sister, a child, a grandparent.

"Each star, too, represents the loss of a friend, a colleague, a mentor."

While he spoke, an Agency camera mounted on a tripod was recording the event. It focused not on Tenet, but on a woman dressed in pink who was using her hands to capture Tenet's words in sign language for the deaf.

Then Tenet spoke of those singled out for honor this day. He mentioned a young man, an Arabist named Matt, who sported a roguish mustache, detested filling out travel vouchers, and was once arrested for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. There would be no last name offered. His identity was still cloaked in secrecy.

But the Matt of whom he spoke was no secret to the family of Matthew Gannon who sat arrayed before Tenet -- eight brothers and sisters, his mother and father, his widow, Susan, and his daughter Julie. It was Matthew Gannon who had lost his life in the bombing of Pan Am 103. Tenet nearly choked on his prepared remarks as he read that Matt's young widow, Susan, had insisted that he open his Christmas presents before he left for Beirut.

With the Gannons sat Tom and Kay Twetten. It was hard for them to hear about Matt, the polite young case officer who had married their daughter. Tom had come from his quiet home in the far north of Vermont to be here in this place where, only a few years before, he had overseen all covert operations.

Among the Gannon brothers was Richard, who had himself survived the bombing of the Beirut embassy. He sat next to a small woman leaning on a cane. They introduced themselves to each other. "Hello," she said softly, "I'm Christina Welch and my husband was Richard Welch." Her husband, the CIA station chief in Athens, had been ambushed outside their home in 1975.

Tenet completed his remarks about "Matt," then spoke of the newest star on the wall. It belonged to a Japanese American named Chiyoki "Chick" Ikeda, killed in the explosion of Northwest Airlines flight 710 on March 17, 1960, over Indiana. A few hours after the plane took off an anonymous caller claimed a bomb was on board. Ikeda, one of sixty-three fatalities, was listed simply as a civilian employee of the army. Tenet noted that Ikeda had been a veteran of the OSS, but he would say nothing of his work with the CIA, even thirty-eight years later.

"The work Chick did building strategic liaison relationships for the Agency," he said solemnly, "must still remain unspoken, for it continues to yield valuable dividends today."

What Tenet did not say was that on the day Ikeda was killed he was escorting a prominent Japanese visitor named Masami Nakamura, chief of the security division of Japan's national police, who was also on the Chicago to Miami flight. In the spring of 1960 the United States fretted deeply about Communist activity in Japan. Nakamura was in the United States for training, presumably in methods of crowd suppression and control, as well as intelligence-gathering techniques. At that very moment, Khrushchev's agents were believed to be busy in Tokyo preparing to disrupt a long-planned visit by President Eisenhower. In June 1960 the presidential trip was scuttled for fear of Communist demonstrations.

None of this was in Tenet's remarks. And none of it mattered to Ikeda's widow, Mildred, and two sons, John and George, who sat in the front row closest to the door. For Mildred Ikeda it was enough that her husband had finally been recognized.

Tenet was nearing the end of his remarks. His voice cracked with emotion.

"The families of our seventy-one heroes and heroines have to show courage in equal measure to that of the ones they lost -- the courage to go on after a devastating personal loss, the courage of a single parent, the courage of a child growing up without a father or a mother, the courage to bear great grief in silence, and the courage to keep faith with our government for years, if necessary, until their loved ones' contributions can be acknowledged.

"In truth, we may never be able to reveal the name behind every star."

His remarks were then addressed to the Agency employees now clustered in the upper lobby.

"And so I say to the busy men and women of this Agency:

"Do not hurry past this Wall of Honor. Do not lower your eyes when you walk by. Slow your pace, pause for a moment, and gaze up at these shining stars.

"Take it from me, your worries will recede into perspective, you will feel even closer to your families and your colleagues, and you will return to work with a deepened sense of purpose. And before you continue on your way, linger just one moment more and say a silent prayer. Say to the men and women behind those stars.

"'Thank you, friends. While I have the power to live and act, may I be worthy of your sacrifice.'"

With that, Tenet took his seat. His impassioned final words had been more than a rhetorical flourish. He was reaching out to the entire Agency community, much of which was laboring under a malaise of uncertainty and doubt. The Cold War had brought the Agency into existence in 1947 and now was relegated to history. Many believed the Agency might soon meet a similar end. What was to be its raison d'etre in an era in which America was the sole superpower, in which Communism had not spread but imploded, and in which Moscow had been reduced to a wary but needy ally?

Against the backdrop of the Wall of Honor, Tenet's words were intended to counter a withering barrage of criticism. The Agency's mission, its competence, and its loyalties were all being questioned. The day before the memorial service, the headline in the Washington Post read, "CIA Missed Signs of India's Tests, U.S. Officials Say." Satellite imagery was said to show that a nuclear test was afoot, yet no one at the Agency issued a warning. The White House and Congress were flabbergasted.

Other intelligence failures followed. On August 20, 1998, the United States launched a cruise missile attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The assault was based on CIA claims that soil samples gathered at the site offered incontrovertible evidence that the plant was used to manufacture deadly chemical agents. Within days of the deadly attack, doubts began to surface. Had the United States mistakenly obliterated a legitimate pharmaceutical plant? Agency analysts privately began to distance themselves from what increasingly appeared to be a questionable call.

The worst was yet to come. On May 7, 1999, at the height of NATO's assault on Yugoslavia, U.S. planes dropped laser-guided bombs on a Belgrade building said to be the Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement. The decision was based on CIA maps and intelligence. It turned out that the building had for years been the Chinese Embassy. At least three people were killed. Twenty were wounded. Beijing was livid. 1t was a foreign policy disaster and an intelligence failure of the first magnitude. The CIA's George Tenet could speak only of "faulty information." This was paired with scandalous accounts of Chinese spying at U.S. nuclear weapons labs and the wholesale theft of America's most sensitive secrets.

A string of internal betrayals also shattered public confidence in the Agency. CIA officer Aldrich Ames's treachery is believed to have led to the execution of at least a dozen foreign agents who had served the Agency. The CIA's Douglas F. Groat attempted to blackmail the Agency, demanding $1 million in exchange for not disclosing how the United States intercepted foreign communications. Senior CIA officer Harold James Nicholson also sold out to Moscow. For all its obsessive secrecy -- indeed, perhaps because of it -- the CIA could not protect its most sensitive secrets. "If we guard our toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal," once observed former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, "we will lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds." As if to prove that very point, even a former director of Central Intelligence, John M. Deutch, had to be stripped of his security clearance in the summer of 1999 after it was discovered that he had placed sensitive national secrets on his unsecured home computer.

Public trust of the Agency remains at a low point. Allegations in the press, no matter how spurious, implicate the Agency in the introduction of crack cocaine to South-Central Los Angeles.

In the midst of such turmoil the Agency is attempting to rebuild itself. Since 1991 thousands of its most experienced officers, a quarter of its workforce, have retired or quit. New recruits were suspect. Many seemed as concerned with benefits and retirement plans as service. Old hands in the clandestine ranks mused that they never assumed they would live long enough to enjoy such rewards. The Agency seemed rudderless, losing four directors in six years.

That was why George Tenet urged Agency employees at the memorial service to linger at the Wall of Honor, hoping that they might draw strength from the collective memory of the Agency's past. A year earlier the CIA had put in a reflecting pool and garden dedicated to those killed in service. But its real purpose was to offer a place of refuge to an increasingly troubled cadre of employees.

Ironically the secrecy that had failed to protect the Agency from Soviet penetration had prevented Americans from coming to terms with their own past. In 1995 President Bill Clinton vowed to declassify vast amounts of Cold War documents, but three years later the C1A reneged on its promise to release accounts of major operations from that very period. The State Department, too, chastised the Agency for withholding materials vital to America's diplomatic history. The U.S. Archives has next to nothing from the Agency, which seems bent on controlling what little of its history it chooses to reveal.

In the Agency's own archives are an estimated 65 million classified documents more than twenty- five years old. That same compulsive secrecy enshrouds the Book of Honor. Douglas S. Mackiernan was killed on the Tibetan border in 1950. His star remains nameless. So, too, does that of Hugh Francis Redmond, who died in 1970 after nineteen years in a Chinese prison. In both instances the Chinese knew they were C1A spies. Only the American public did not.

In Washington the demand for Agency reform grows. Some call for its dismantlement. But though the Cold War is over, it is not a safer world. In lieu of the Soviet Union, the CIA continues to monitor foreign powers hostile to the United States but also targets the four "counters"-- international narcotics, crime, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. Its mandate is broader than ever; some would argue too broad to be effective.

But this was a day not for recriminations, but for remembering. Tenet completed his remarks and returned to his seat. "Would you please rise for the roll call?" asked Jack G. Downing, the CIA's spymaster. One by one, the names of those inscribed in the Book of Honor were read aloud:

Jerome P. Ginley, William P. Boteler, Howard Carey, Frank C. Grace, Wilburn S. Rose, Chiyoki Ikeda, Thomas "Pete" Ray, Riley Shamburger, Wade Gray, Leo Baker, John G. Merriman, Eugene Buster Edens, Edward Johnson, Mike Maloney, Louis A. O'Jibway, Walter Ray, Billy Jack Johnson, Jack Weeks, Paul C. Davis, David Konzelman, Wilbur Murray Greene, William E. Bennett, Richard Welch, James S. Rawlings, Robert C. Ames, Scott J. Van Lieshout, Curtis R. Wood, William F. Buckley, Richard Krobock, Lansing H. Bennett, Frank A. Darling, James Lewek, and John Celli.

They died in places far away and unnervingly close to home -- the China Sea, Cyprus, Germany, Nevada, Indiana, Cuba, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, China, Greece, Lebanon, El Salvador, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia. Lansing Bennett and Frank Darling had been cut down at the Agency's front gate in Langley, murdered on their morning commute by an AK-47-toting Pakistani named Aimil Kansi. The date was January 25, 1993.

Of the seventy-one stars, only thirty-three names were read aloud. The identities of the other thirty-eight remain classified.

Among those nameless stars is one representing Freddie Woodruff; who was shot to death in August 1993 in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The forty-five-year-old son of a professor, he was an ordained minister who could read ancient Greek and speak Russian, German, Turkish, Armenian, and several other tongues. He had been in Georgia under cover as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy. His mission was to train the security force assigned to protect that nation's embattled leader, Eduard Shevardnadze.

Also unnamed was a young woman who died a violent and selfless death in 1996. An anonymous star in the Book of Honor, her name is withheld from this book. The Agency made a compelling case that to identify her would put others at risk.

After the reading of names, a wreath was set before the wall. Then came a moment of silence and, finally, the mournful sound of a trumpet playing "Taps." When the last note had faded, it seemed that no one knew what to do next. Families fidgeted nervously, awaiting some cue. At last, someone took to the podium and indecorously declared "It's over," and with that came an awkward laugh and a sigh of relief.

Afterward, some family members posed before the Wall of Honor as an Agency photographer took their pictures. Each person offered to give the photographer his or her name and address. But the photographer declined, smiling coyly. "We'll get them to you," he said. "We know who you are." In the past, some photographs arrived blurred or doctored so that individuals were not identifiable.

Following the ceremony, the families attended a brief reception on the upper lobby, sipping lemonade and nibbling on crackers and cubes of cheese, star fruits and grapes. Then the families went their separate ways.

Some went to the Agency museum and saw a tiny camera disguised as a matchbox, a walking cane that fired .22-caliber rounds, and an alarm clock once attached to a bomb that never went off. Its intended victims were CIA officers in the Mideast.

Others went to the employee store and bought souvenirs -- a key chain, a shot glass, a paperweight, all bearing the Agency seal.

Many found time to walk along the gallery corridor pausing before the formal oil portraits of the Agency's past directors, each presented in a statesmanly pose. With pipe or spectacles in hand, these former directors looked almost infallible. These were the men in whom their loved ones had entrusted their lives They were cordoned off by a velvet rope, their reputations only as secure as the secrets they kept.

Some family members planned to lunch together. They shared photographs and memories, exchanged addresses and phone numbers. On this day they could find some measure of relief as if the silence to which they had been sentenced had been momentarily commuted.

Before leaving, most paused to take a final look at the Book of Honor, to press their finger against the glass, intone a silent prayer, or whisper a parting message to the star for which they had come so far.

Much of the story of the CIA is contained within these stars, but it is a story the Agency holds to itself. In the end the CIA and the families who gathered this day are both hostages to history. Whether the Agency will ever release its past and whether it will find for itself a meaningful future are both in some doubt. As from the beginning, the dilemmas it faces are not entirely of its own making. Those who daily enter the old headquarters lobby must still pass between the scriptural verse etched into the marble -- "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" -- and the cautionary Wall of Honor across from it. Between these two walls, between the values of an open society and the demands of a craft rooted in deception and betrayal, the CIA is asked to steer an uneasy, often irreconcilable course.
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Re: THE BOOK OF HONOR -- THE SECRET LIVES AND DEATHS OF CIA

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 3:29 am

Afterword

Nine months have passed since The Book of Honor was published. In that time, much has happened, both to the families of the nameless stars and to the Agency itself. Publication provided a long-awaited lifting of the veil of secrecy, a chance for family members to revisit the events and, in some cases, to learn what really happened and to finally speak openly of both their grief and their pride. The book was the product of the families' collective courage in defying the CIA's edict of silence. It is only right, then, that they should finally be able to talk openly about their experiences.

Among those deeply affected was Losue Hagler. She is the sister of Bud Petty, who died in 1989 attempting to resupply Jonas Savimbi, Angola's rebel leader. The CIA, after a decade of ignoring her inquiries, invited her to attend the annual memorial service. It also promised to at last answer questions about her brother's death, But first she was required to pledge that she would not disclose whatever was revealed to her. This she reluctantly did. In the end, the Agency told her nothing new.

For the children of the nameless stars, the book provided the first credible account of what happened to their lost parents. Debbie Spessard's two sons, Jarad and Jason, were five and seven respectively when their father, James, was killed in the same mission that claimed Bud Petty's life. Now they are teenagers. She called them into a room, sat them down, and had them read the chapter on their father. Then they talked about James Spessard's life and death, what they had learned, and what it meant to them.

I was also contacted by someone on behalf of Paul Weinberg, a lifelong friend of Larry Freedman, who was killed in Somalia in 1992. Weinberg had been of inestimable help in coming to understand Larry Freedman. I was asked to provide an advance copy of the book though the release date for publication was only a week away. Weinberg was dying of cancer. Unfortunately, he passed away only days later.

No meeting moved me more than that with Val Merriman. She was the widow of John Merriman, who was shot down over the Congo in 1964. For decades she had been lied to, told her husband died painlessly in a Puerto Rican hospital after receiving the best of medical attention. Nothing in the Agency's account was true. Val Merriman, together with her son Jon, met me at a book signing in Washington and presented me with a dozen long-stemmed red roses. "My family loves you," she said.

Nor will I forget what transpired in the minutes prior to the taping of ABC's Good Morning America, which did a segment on the book. The network had flown a dozen family members of the nameless stars to New York from around the country. Before taping, the families mingled outside a Manhattan restaurant. They were meeting for the first time. There were widows and sisters and brothers and nephews. Each had assumed that they alone had suffered the crushing effects of secrecy that had come to define their lives. Now they were no longer alone.

For others, the past months have not brought peace. The family of Matthew Gannon, together with the families of other victims of the bombing of Pan AM 103, endured a second kind of horror as two o Libyan defendants were brought to trial in the Netherlands. The consensus of court observers was that the CIA had profoundly bungled the investigation, built its argument upon an informant of highly dubious character, and, in so doing, jeopardized the entire case. It was not only the C1A's witness whose credibility was shaken. So too was the Agency's. In the end, one of the Libyans was convicted of mass murder, the other walked.

In the weeks and months prior to and following publication of the book, the CIA inscribed into its own Book of Honor the names of several of those anonymous stars identified in my book. Among these were Mike Deuel, Wayne McNulty, Ray Seaborg, and John W. Kearns. They had perished in Vietnam or Laos decades earlier.

But the CIA did not undergo any fundamental reexamination of its culture of secrecy. Nor did I expect it to. Officially, the CIA maintained its silence about my book. When reporters asked about it, Agency spokesmen replied with the usual mantra, "We will neither confirm nor deny ..."

Though the book was on the Washington Post Bestseller List and was a frequent topic of conversation among Agency employees, it was not to be sold within the CIA's own store. There, the shelves are lined with books that have been vetted by the CIA or are deemed to promote its interests. It is as if by keeping my book from its shelves the Agency could ignore the truth of the stories contained therein and the tragedies it chronicled. That capacity to embrace fiction over fact, to adopt a kind of see-no-evil mentality, is not without precedent at the CIA.

Since publication, seven more stars have been added to the Agency's Book of Honor, four of them nameless. Two of the named stars belong to Norman A. Schwartz and Robert C. Snoddy. The two were killed on November 29, 1952, on a mission to snatch from Mainland China an operative named Li Chun-ying. The Chinese lay in wait ready to foil the attempt. Snoddy and Schwartz were killed as the plane came in. They were buried on the spot.

The families were told the plane went down in the Sea of Japan. Two decades passed before the incident was even acknowledged. In July 2000, three months after the CIA's memorial service, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, Schwartz's hometown, dedicated a simple limestone bench in a park as a place to meditate upon his loss and that of others A brass plaque reads: IN COMMEMORATION OF PILOT NORMAN A. SCHWARTZ, WHO GAVE HIS LIFE FOR THE PRESERVATION OF PEACE, AND IN RECOGNITION OF ALL MEN AND WOMEN WHO SERVED IN THE COLD WAR (1945-1991). Relatives of Schwartz are pressing the Chinese to return the airman's remains. Also on board that same aircraft had been two young CIA operatives, John Downey and Richard Fecteau. They would spend two decades in a Chinese prison.

But even as the CIA's Book of Honor belatedly closes the chapter on the Cold War, it reflects the perils faced by today's clandestine operatives. Among the anonymous stars recently added to that tome are fresh victims of terrorism.

How long will they too remain faceless? Half a century later, the identity of the first star -- the star that represents Douglas Seymour Mackiernan, gunned down in Tibet in 1950 -- remains a state secret. So too do the identities of Barbara Robbins, Hugh Redmond, John Peterson, Raymond Rayner, Ivan King, Dennis Cabriel, Matt Gannon, Larry Freedman, Fred Woodruff; the victims of the 1983 Beirut Bombing and the 1989 Angola operation. As of this writing, there are seventy- seven stars in the CIA's Book of Honor. Thirty-five have no name.

***

By the end of 2000, the CIA seemed largely immune to the sort of tough congressional scrutiny that alone may hold it accountable. It had survived a series of disturbing fiascoes -- the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, the targeting of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, the bungling of the investigation of John Deutch's security violations, the failure to spot India's impending nuclear test, the mishandling of the Pan Am 103 probe. And still, Director CIA George Tenet and his agency appeared to enjoy the support of both the outgoing Clinton administration and the incoming Bush administration.

Tenet has been popular within the CIA and on Capitol Hill. He defends his Agency vigorously and is politically savvy. He has brought stability after years of turbulence and has overseen recruiting efforts designed to offset the hemorrhaging of experienced officers who have retired or resigned. Though he has steadfastly refused to speak with me, I know him to be a congenial figure and, by all accounts, a decent man. But his capacity to shield his Agency from the full brunt of operational and intelligence failures also reflects the vagaries of Washington's Old Boy Network. As the former senior staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Tenet's links to Capitol Hill, and the residual loyalties that go with them, have protected him from what might have been a more withering criticism from his former colleagues.

So too it has been with the House oversight committee. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is headed by Porter J. Goss, a conservative Florida congressman who seemingly cannot do enough to promote the interests and ambitions of Langley. Before becoming a congressman, Representative Goss was himself a CIA case officer. Such pervasive CIA influence also contributes to public cynicism and the perception that the Agency's tentacles of power render it answerable to no one.

Most ominous was a sweeping provision requested by the CIA and championed by Goss that Congress attached to the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2001. That measure, passed behind closed doors and without a public hearing, would have made it a crime punishable by three years in prison for any official to disclose classified material. It was a thinly disguised antileak provision aimed at silencing those who talk to the press or who would challenge the near-absolute control that the U.S. national security apparatus exercises over what and when the public learns of its activities.

The bill was ultimately vetoed by President Clinton, but only after a concerted campaign by the nation's foremost news publications to sound the tocsin. Such a measure would have had dire consequences for the First Amendment and for the ability of reporters like myself to inform the public. Had such a provision been law at the time of my research for The Book of Honor, some four hundred current and retired covert operatives -- all who spoke with me -- might well have gone to prison. Of course, the more likely outcome would have been that the chilling effect of such a measure would have blunted my efforts to identify the anonymous stars.

In either case, there would have been no The Book of Honor. The measure would have created the perfect chokehold on the public's access to information concerning the conduct of foreign affairs and covert operations. It bears watching whether the new Bush administration will be emboldened to resurrect that measure.

Even as the bill made its way through Congress there was evidence aplenty that government secrecy had already gone too far rather than not far enough. The ordeal of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese American scientist accused of security breaches at Los Alamos National Laboratory, finally came to an end, but not before his reputation and career were in ruins. Federal prosecutors never produced any evidence to support the allegation of espionage.

Then too there was the case of Mazen Al-Najjar, held in an American prison for three and a half years without being charged with a crime. He was seen as a security threat and held on "secret evidence" to which neither he nor his lawyers had access. His recent release would have been cause for celebration by civil libertarians were it not for the fact that so many others are still being held on "secret evidence."

We are forced to wonder whether it is not lax security but excessive secrecy that poses by far the greater threat to the interests of the American people.

A final word. In the wake of publication, the book was widely and favorably reviewed, but among the reviews were two recurrent observations with which I would take exception. First, that the men and women of whom I wrote understood that if they were killed their sacrifices would remain anonymous. Such is the nature of espionage, it is argued. Granted, these men and women accepted that if they were killed, security concerns would prohibit their roles and identities from being made public so long as security sensitivities remained. But it is equally true that in service to government they had every right to expect that when common sense dictated that such security concerns were no longer applicable, the strictures would be lifted and their surviving family members would no longer be made to suffer the cruelties of what would then be a blind and obsessive secrecy. In short, they could expect the government in whose service they gave their lives to behave humanely and not to use secrecy as a way to escape accountability.

The second criticism was that those whose deaths are recorded in this book died for naught, that their missions were failures and therefore their lives were wasted. It is true that in some cases these lives might have been saved and that in others the missions accomplished little. But I do not believe that it follows that their lives were wasted or devoid of meaning. Though I do not share many of the agendas in whose service they were deployed, I believe that in most instances these men and women were doing that which was most important to them. I am uncomfortable judging the value of another's life or sacrifice by outcome alone. I would not want my own life to be measured against such a standard. These men and women understood the risks attendant to their chosen careers. They acted out of love of country. If the wisdom of their missions was suspect -- as often it was -- then it casts a shadow not upon the individual but upon the institution that dispatched them.

What we, the living, can do, is honor them both by remembering them and by insisting that the very secrecy under which they died is not permitted to threaten the values for which they lived.

-- Ted Gup
January 2001
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Re: THE BOOK OF HONOR -- THE SECRET LIVES AND DEATHS OF CIA

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 3:29 am

Author's Note and Acknowledgments

A decade ago, when I first stood before the CIA's Wall of Honor and contemplated a book that would attempt to identify the nameless stars, I knew that I would meet with stiff resistance from the Agency. In this the Agency did not disappoint me. What I could not have foreseen was the courage of those CIA families who chose to defy Agency pressures and who broke years of silence in the belief that the stories of their loved ones' lives and deaths could be told without jeopardizing national security. Many of these families came to believe, as I did, that the accounts of those who died on covert missions were not the sole property of the government, that they belonged to history. For allowing me to be the one to tell those stories I am deeply grateful and hope that in this work they will not find me unworthy of that trust.

I would also thank the more than four hundred current and former employees of the CIA who were willing to speak with me, even when the institution for which they worked forbade it. They had nothing to gain and much to lose. Deciphering the motives of those whose profession it is to deceive others is a fool's errand. But at the risk of sounding naive, I believe they shared a common interest in recognizing the sacrifices of former colleagues and in providing the public a more human, if not more vulnerable, side of America's clandestine service. Thanking them by name would be seen as a consummate act of ingratitude.

On a personal note I would thank several colleagues and friends without whom this book would in all likelihood have been stillborn. Len Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, and Steve Coil, the paper's managing editor, are among these. I am also grateful to my former editor and colleague Bob Woodward, who taught me that there was nothing sacrosanct about secrecy, that often it was merely a way to avoid public scrutiny. Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Post, was the first to show me that there was nothing higher than being a reporter and nothing more humbling.

After spending three years with spies I came to think like a spy, demonstrating my own brand of obsessive secrecy. I compartmented my information and developed a kind of cover story for outsiders, telling them simply that I was writing a history of the CIA. The few with whom I felt comfortable sharing my true objectives and who did not unduly make fun of my paranoia deserve praise. First to mind comes Mike Riley, editor of the Roanoke Times, who gave me great support and sage advice along the lines of "get a life." Other friends to whom I am indebted include Ira Abrams, Barbara Feinman, Dick Thompson, and Tom Ewing.

I must also express my deep appreciation to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Their generosity in the form of a grant provided the seed money with which this research was undertaken. Their willingness to accept so unorthodox an investigative project when other foundations shied away will not be forgotten.

This was my first book and I was spoiled to have David Black as my agent and Bill Thomas of Doubleday as my editor. David understood what I was attempting to do long before I did. His devotion to words and story, not just making a sale, and his friendship in times of doubt will not go unpunished -- I shall come to him as often as he will allow. Bill Thomas shared my passion for the subject and contributed both vision and discipline. He was the perfect editor, at times an ally, at times an adversary, and always at the right times for each. Never did he let me down.

Anya Richards, my researcher, proved to be an invaluable resource and friend.

As for my family, my wife, Peggy, and sons David and Matthew endured three years of intermittent absence and inattention. I am looking forward to making good on that debt.

Finally, I cannot take credit for the book's strengths, if any. That belongs to those whom I have cited above. Its shortcomings are mine alone.

-- T.S.G.
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Re: THE BOOK OF HONOR -- THE SECRET LIVES AND DEATHS OF CIA

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 3:30 am

Index

Abadie, Clarence, 244-45
Acheson, Dean, 9, 22-23, 39, 47
Achille Lauro, 302-3
Afghanistan, CIA operations in, 285,
351
Africa and CIA operations, 140, 337,
355-56. See also Congo (Zaire);
Ethiopia; Libya; Somalia
Agency for International
Development (AID), 163,
192-93, 195
Air America, 138, 184, 243-45, 255
Alabama Air National Guard and
Cuban invasion, 112, 113,
117-23, 125, 367
Albania, 30
Allende, Salvador (Gossens), 199, 223
Al-Najjar, Mazen, 380
Alsop, Stewart, 14
Altman, Petey, 339, 350, 360
Arnes, Aldrich, 372
Arnes, Robert C., 261, 279, 280-81,
284
Ammundsen, Burton, 191
Anderson, Terry, 306
Angleton, James, 222
Angola. CIA operations in 320, 324,
335, 337; Cuban troops in, 321;
UNITA and Savimbi, 320-21,
324, 325, 335, 336-37
Arms race, 24,33; Soviet A-Bomb,
24, 50; U.S. H-Bomb, 50-51, 97
Arnold, Dan, 184
Atkinson, Michael, 323-24, 325,
326
Averoff, Evanghelos, 93

Bailey, Mac, 112
Baird, Matt, 70
Baker, Leo, 118-19, 141
Ba1dwin, Larry, 274
Bane, Jack, 91, 92, 95
Bator, Wussman, 17, 25-26, 41
Beatty, David A., 358-59
Beckwith, Charles, 349
Bennett, Lansing, 373
Bennett, William E., 367
Bensch, George, 323, 325, 326
Bessac, Frank, 25, 34, 35-36, 39
Birch, John, 14
Bissell, Richard Mervin, 108-9 , 111 ,
112, 140, 145, 170; Bay of Pigs
and, 114-16, 116-23, 125-27,
140; death of 127-28; visit from
Janet Ray Weininger, 126-27
"Black" effort (disinformation), 176
Blaufarb, Philip, 195-96, 197
Bolivia, 140
Bonano, Joe, 116
Boteler, Charles, 69, 87
Boteler, Page Hart, 367
Boteler, William Pierce, 68-96;
character and personality, 68-70,
78-79; cover, 71-72, 80-81;
death of, 92, 367; funeral and
memorial service, 94-95; in
Germany, 70-71; in Nicosia,
Cyrus, 79, 80, 84-92;
Paffenberger, Anne, and, 81-84,
88-89, 92-93, 96; reactions to
death of 92-93; recruitment by
CIA, 68, 69; secrecy and death
o£ 93; in Seoul, 71-73, 78; State
Department honors, 95, 224
Book of Honor: Alabama Air National
Guardsmen in, 129; in CIA
headquarters, 2; convocation at
Wall of Honor, 1998, 365-75;
creation of 223-29; decisions
about who should be honored on,
225, 227; Laos secret war and,
205; Maloney, Michael's name
revealed and inscription in, 204-5;
named personnel in, 2, 161;
named personnel, list of, 373;
nameless stars, 2,3, 129, 204, 205,
220, 229, 286, 315, 329, 335,
363, 367-75, 377, 379; questions
raised by, 3; security and, 4
Brezhnev, Leonid, 235
Britain, in Cyprus, 79, 84-92
Bryan, Robert, 52
Buckley, William F., 2, 286, 306-7
Bundy, McGeorge, 158, 176, 372
Burke, Arleigh, 118
Bush, George as CIA Director, 55,
240, 241; pardons issued, 360; as
President, 328, 355, 363
Butterworth, Walton, 21-22

Cabell, Charles Pearre, 93-94
Camp Hale, 250
Camp Perry (the Farm), 76, 180, 250,
293
Canal Zone Jungle Warfare Training
Center, 180-81
Carter, Jimmy, 347
Casey, William J., 283,284, 287, 306,
307; CIA expansion under,
284-85
Casino Royale (Fleming), 51
Castro, Fidel, 127; American policy to
overthrow, 112, 170-171; CIA
assassination plans, 115-16
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Ad
Hoc Committee on Prisoners, 65;
Africa Division, 335; agents,
defined, 50; Air ,America pilots
and, 245; airlines of proprietary,
53, 138, 239, 243-45, 321-23;
Angola crash and security,
328-30; archives and classified
documents, 373 assassinations
and, 115-16, 145, 223; Bay of
Pigs, see Cuba; Beirut embassy
bombing and, 282-84,291;
betrayals, internal, 371-72;
Bindery, 228; Book of Honor, see
Book of Honor; budget, use o£
74, 314; career trainees (CTs),
76; case officers, 49-50; Casualty
Affairs Branch, 54; "the
Company," 10; compartmented
information, 71, 76, 115, 226,
241; Congressional supervision
and constraints, 207-8, 221-23,
292, 307, 320, 351 ; Contact
Division, 56; contract workers,
142,225; convocation at Wall of
Honor, 1998,365-75;
Counterterrorist Center (CTC),
202, 291-92, 306, 309, 311;
creation of agency, 1947, 15, 49;
criticism of external, and loss of
credibility, 117, 120-21, 140,
177, 199, 207, 221-23, 351, 371;
criticism of, internal, 101, 222,
241; Cuban pilots and, 142,
143-56, 161,186-87; decision-
making and accountability, 108,
120-21, 140, 22), 307;
deniability and, 75, 110, 114,
121-22,128,150; Deputy
Director of Intelligence (DDI),
72; Deputy Director of Plans
(DDP), 72, 90, 109, 145,157;
Development Projects Staff: 109;
directors, see specific directors;
domestic activities, 1967, 207 ,
274-76; ethics and, 16,74-75,
222, 292; expanded authority o£
1960, 111; expansion, 67-68,
73-74, 140-41, 284-85; as
extended family and family
company, 160, 187-88, 193-94,
230, 249, 296-97, 303-4, 323;
Family Jewels or Skeletons, 222;
FBI rivalry with, 15; Foreign
Intelligence/ Requirements, 176;
front companies, 142, 181, 230,
320; gold provided to agents, 25;
headquarters, early, Tempo
Buildings, 15, 56; headquarters, E
Street, 67,71; headquarters,
Langley, Virginia, 1-2, 111, 121;
Honors and Merits Board,
223-24; humint (human
intelligence), 72, 240; intelligence
failures, 1990s, 371, 379;
intelligence failure, Soviet atomic
bomb, 24, 50; junior-officers-in-
training (JOTs), 76, 180-81, 296;
KU CLUB, 90; Mafia and,
115-16, 170; memo on China,
1951, 49; mind control and LSD
testing, 58, 241; misinformation
released to the public, 3,93, 119,
134, 192-93, 235, 338-39, 366,
367; mission, anti-Communist, 4,
16, 30,51,73-74,76,291, 370;
mission, antiterrorist, 291-92
299; mission, redefining, 351-52,
363; mission statement, 74;
morale low in, 199-200, 202,
222-23, 240; Near East Division,
305; nuclear war and, 78; "official
cover" or "nonofficial cover"
(NOC), 50, 71-72, 90, 163, 181,
224,262,309; Office of
Communications, 230; Office of
Security, 56; Office of Training,
167; Operations Directorate and
DDO, 293, 298, 309, 314; OSS
legacy seen in, 14, 140; personnel,
father to son legacy of, 159-60,
163-206, 229; personnel, early,
387 index
military background, 14-15, 16,
48, 140, 165-70, 173,3!2;
personnel, 1950s, college, (58,
69-70; pseudonyms, use of 72,
76, 113; public image of 5, 6,
199, 223, 372; recruitment,
52-53, 68, 69, 76, 139;
recruitment, IU Jewel program,
249, 267; recruitment, 1990s,
372; reduction of size and power,
141, 207, 240-41, 355; secrecy
and security, 4,5, 56, 57, 128-29,
134, 139, 157, 160, 163, 205,
224, 238-39, 249, 281-82, 287,
297, 298, 324, 326-30, 336, 359,
366, 372-73; Special Operations
Group, 240, 245; Task Force W,
171; TDYs (temporary duties),
73; Technical Services (TS), 73,
228, 304, 319; training, 70,
76-78, 180-81, 293; use of
scandal to discredit enemies, 110;
War Plans Division, 167
Central Intelligence Group (CIG),
48-49
Chapell, Mack, 237-38
Chiang Kai-shek, 19, 100-101
Child, Julia, 14
Childs, Marquis W., 192
Chile, overthrow of Allende, 199, 223
China Americans imprisoned in, 47,
51, 53, 58-59, 65-66, 98, 217,
218; anti-Communist resistance,
Kazakh peoples, 17, 20, 25-26;
CIA covert activities and, 9-11,
16-25, 44-46, 52-53, 61, 100,
141, 217, 230; Communist
takeover, 9,19-26; death of
Hugh Redmond and release of
James Walsh, 214-15; evacuation
of U.S. personnel, 23-24; Nixon's
improvement of ties with and
release of Americans, 215,
216-18; Ping-Pong diplomacy,
216; Soviets in, 11; Tihwa, 9-10,
17-23; treatment of American
prisoners, 52,53, 58-60, 66, 98,
101, 105, 208-9, 211-12; US,
support of Chiang Kai-shek,
100-101, 219
Chou En-lai, 217, 218
Church, Frank, 222
Civil Air Transport, 53, 138
Clinton, Bill, 372
Coastal Air Services, 239
Colby, William E, 196, 222
Cold War, China and, 11, 50; CIA in,
16, 75, 291, 320; declassifying
documents, 372-73; end of, 351,
355; National Security Council
Directive 68 and, 33; Redmond
case as hallmark of 99-100
Coleman, Jim, 91
Colombia, CIA operations in, 140
Communism: American hysteria,
1950s, 30-31, 50-51, 99;
American opposition to
expansion of 33, 138; in China,
9, 19-26; CIA's mission to stop,
15-16, 30, 73-74; Domino
Theory, 97; in Laos, 205-6; in
Tibet, 38, 39; in Vietnam, 205,
See also Cold War; Soviet Union
Company, the. See Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Computer Data Systems, 320
Congo (Zaire) : assassination plans for
Lumumba, 145; CIA in, 138, 144,
145, 158-59, 185-87, 318;
Kamina Air Base, 146-47, 321,
323, 324; risk to pilots in and
atrocities, 147; top secret mission
in and crash of Merriman, 143-56
Courtney, Raymond F., 89
Cragin, Harold "Hal," 68, 70, 94
Crocetto, Wynne, 339, 353
Cuba: Angola and, 321; Bay of Pigs,
108, 113, 114, 116-23, 128-29,
141, 142; Castro assassination
plot, 115-16, 170-71;CIA
espionage and, 170-72; exiled
pilots and CIA, 142, 143-56,
161, 186; missile crisis, 171, 211;
U.S. policy and, 112
Cunningham, Hugh I, 94
Cyprus, 79-80, 84-92, 93, 95, 96;
bombing of Little Soho
restaurant, 89-92,95,367; C1A
operatives in, 90-92

Dace, Jim, 91, 92, 95-96
Darling, Frank, 373
DeFelice, Ben, 54, 55, 64-65, 98, 104,
196, 197, 217, 224
Demetriou, Andreas, 84
Deuel, Mary, 197
Deuel, Mike, 163-65, 172; and Book
of Honor, 378; character and
fearlessness, 177-79, 196, 206;
chopper crash and death,
190-91,366-67; CIA training,
180-82,296-97; cover, 181,
192-93; daughter Suzanne born,
197; Doherty, Judy, marriage to,
183-85; father, Wally, and, 184,
193, 195; funeral and burial,
194-95; Holm, Richard, and,
181-82, 182, 185, 187-89, 196,
367; in Laos, 182-85, 189-91;
Marine Corps, 179; posthumous
medal, 195-96
Deuel Peter, 200
Deuel Wallace "Wally," 172-77;
character and intellect of 172;
chief of Foreign
Intelligence/Requirements, 176;
death of 200; depression over
declining CIA, 199-200; Helms
friendship, 173, 176, 193, 196;
Holm, Dick, and, 188, 197-98;
joins CIA, 175; as
newspaperman, 172-73, 174;
retirement from CIA, 198; son's
death and, 197-99; in OSS,
173-74; White House stint, 176
Deutch, John, 204
Devlin, Lawrence, 144, 159
Dillon, Robert S., 278, 280
Dodge, David, 278
Doherty, William, 94
Doner, Ivan, 342, 346
Doner, Sylvia, 339, 346, 353, 364,
367
Donovan, William "Wild Bill" 14,
173-74
Doolittle, James, 74
Downey, John T,. American China
policy and, 100-101, 102;
background, 52-53; confession to
Chinese and CIA debriefing of
219; crash and capture of, 53,
378; declared dead, 54,55;
discovery of imprisonment o£
63-64; imprisonment of 66;
mother's visit, 103-4; Nixon's
China trip and release of 218;
post-release legal career, 219;
salary paid and invested by
DeFelice, 64; US. denials
regarding, and continued
imprisonment, 99-100
Downey, Mary V, 65, 103
Downing, Jack G, 373
Draper, Theodore, 121
Dresin, Sanford, 360
Dulles, Allen Welsh as CIA director,
55, 58, 73-74, 75, 94, 109, 120,
140, 145, 175, 221, 241, 298;
death of 250; in OSS, 14, 173
Dulles, John Foster, 74, 75, 93

Edwards, Sheffield, 57
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 65, 74, 78,
97, 111, 112, 145, 169
El Salvador, CIA operative's death in,
367
Espionage (spycraft). black-bag jobs,
72,76; caching, 77; courage and
tradecraft, 72, 76; demolition and
sabotage, 77; flaps and seals,
76-77; picks and locks, 76; spy
planes, 109; surveillance and
drops, 77-78; training, 76-78
Ethiopia. CIA operations in, 329,
346, 351; crash of Congressman
Leland and CIA officer, 328-29,
Freedman memorial, 362
Evergreen Airlines, 138

Families of CIA operatives. Book of
Honor and, 3, 161, 204-5,
365-75; clandestine culture of,
164-206, 230-31, 236, 303-4;
compensation to, 41, 64, 120,
156; convocation at Wall of
Honor, 1998,365-75; DeFelice
and, 54, 55, 65; efforts to
uncover information about loved
ones' deaths, 123-29, 160-62,
203-4, 247-48, 326-27; fear,
threats, or surveillance after
relative's death, 118-20, 122,
247-48, 326-27,333;
employment found for, 57;
generations joining CIA, 159-60,
163-206, 229; lack of
information provided to, 47; lies
told to, 135,155, 333-34; medals
for deceased and secrecy, 55,
123, 195-96, 283, 331-32, 335,
363; in Marana Air Base, Arizona,
139-43; in Monrovia, Liberia,
232-36; notification of deaths,
54-55, 92, 119, 155, 190, 308-9,
324-25; secrecy maintained by,
55, 134, 155-56, 171-72, 195,
236, 270, 286, 326-27, 330,334,
335, 366, 370
Faraci, Phyliss, 262, 279, 280-331
Farm, the. See Camp Perry
Fecteau, Jessie, 103-4
Fecteau, Richard G.: American China
policy and, 100-101, 102;
character of 53, 64; children o£
53, 64, 217; crash and capture o£
53, 378; declared dead, 54, 55;
discovery of imprisonment o£
63-64; imprisonment of 66;
mother's visit, 103-4;
readjustment to American
society, 217; release of 215, 217;
salary paid and invested by
DeFelice, 64,217; U.S. denials
regarding, and continued
imprisonment, 99-100
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
Hoover's resentment of CIA, 15,
56
FitzGerald, Desmond, 188, 196
298-99
Flint, Lloyd "Red," 228-29
Folkins, David, 160
Folkins, Val Merriman, 134-35, 153,
154-62, 366
"For the Fallen" (Binyon), 256
Freedman, Lawrence N. "Gus,"
"Superjew," 338-64, 379, Army
Special Forces and Delta Force,
342, 344-49, 362; character and
personality, 338-40, 345-46,
353-54, 356; children, 34:1-44;
in CIA, 351-59; CIA girlfriend,
354, 357, 359; cover, 338, 359,
361; death of 358, 377; early
years, 339-42; Ethiopia and, 346,
351 ; funeral and burial at
Arlington, 360-61; Harleys, love
of 341, 354, 361; medals, 343;
memorials, honors, and eulogies,
359, 361-63; Operation Eagle
Claw, 347-49; posthumous
medal, 363; in Somalia, 338, 354,
356-58; Teresa, second wife, 344,
354,363; Thuy, first wife,
343-44; in Vietnam, 343;
women, love of, 343, 346
Freeman, Fulton, 27
Friedman, Sol, 57, 213, 216

Gabriel, Dennis "Denny," 248-52,
379; background o£ 248-49;
cover, 252; medal, 250; Mideast
missions, 251-52; personality,
249,252; plane crash and death
of 237-39, 252; Renier, wife,
249; recruited by CIA, 249;
Thailand and Air America,
250-51; Tibetan resistance, work
with, 250; training, 250; in
Vietnam, 250; watch from King
Hussein,251-52
Gabriel, Ron, 252, 257
Gadhafi, Muammar, 297,298
Gambino, Robert, 157
Gannon, Matthew Kevin, 289-305,
309-14, 377, 379; as Arabist, 289,
293, 294-95, 304, 314; in Beirut,
306, 308; burial in Arlington and
gravestone, 309; in Cairo, 293;
character and personality, 292,
295-96; claims Klinghoffer's
body, 303; cover, 309; daughters
of 290, 308; death and body
recovery, 292,308, 311; devotion
to, rise in CIA, 300-302, 303-4,
305; early years, 292-93;
eulogized, 1998, 369; joins CIA
and Operations Directorate, 293;
in Jordan, 296, 299-301; marriage
to Susan Twetten, 290, 300-302;
memorial service, 313-14; on Pan
Am Flight 103,289-91, 308, 311,
369; in Sanaa, Yemen, 294; in
Syria, 302; TDY in Beirut,
289-90; and Twetten, Tom, 296,
299-300,301, 303-4,305,315
Gannon, Richard: appearance and
personality, 277; in Beirut, 302;
brother Matthew and, 293,
294-95, 300-302, 310, 311, 313,
317, 369; Lockerbie pilgrimage,
311; in Moscow, 316-17; Pugh,
Robert, and, 310; RSO in Beirut
embassy and bombing, 277-80,
287-88
Gannon, Susan Twetten, 290,
300-302, 304, 309, 314
Garber, Nick, 343
Garcia, Rene, 146, 147-50, 153-54,
159
Garland, Myron S., 92
Garrison, Bud, 68, 69, 70, 71, 94
Gates, Robert Michael, 285, 351-52,
362, 363
Gawchik, William, 65
Gearke, Don, 142-43, 155, 157
Genebra, Mario, 147
George, Lloyd, 196
Georgia, Republic of CIA, in, 374
Germany Berlin discotheque
bombing, 304; CIA in, 70-71,
101; fall of Berlin Wall, 320
Gilbert, Harry T, 70
Glerum, James, 239-40, 245
Godley, McMurtrie, 150, 151, 152-53
Gold, Kenny, 339
Goldberg, Arthur, 14
Goldwater, Barry, 139
Gomez, Fausto, 147
Goss, Porter J, 379
Gottlieb, Sidney, 144-45, 159
Gray, Wade, 118
Greenbrier, West Virginia, secret
installation, 4
Gresinger, Susan, 192
Grivas, George, 80, 95
Groat, Douglas F., 372
Groff, Chuck, 91
Gup, Ted Book of Honor project,
4-6; Greenbrier story broken by,
6; at Langley, 1-4; Maloney,
Michael, revealed as nameless
star, 204-5
Guatemala. CIA training base in, 113;
toppling of government, 74, 109,
110
Guzm:in, Jacobo Arbenz, 74

Haas, Kenneth Eugene, 262, 278,
280-81, 286
Halpern, Sam, 170
Harding, John, 85,93
Healy, Colleen, 329
Helms, Richard "Dick" CIA career,
58, 176, 188; as CIA Director,
55, 139, 141, 196, 199, 202, 208,
241, 299; defense of agency, 223;
firing of, 199; letters to Wally
Deuel and Mal Maloney, 193; in
OSS, 14, 173; Senate committee
appearance and subsequent fine
for lying, 223
Herter, Christian A, 95
Hibbard, Ed, 68, 69, 94
High Noon (film), 51
Hillenkoetter, Roscoe Henry, 19
Hiss, Alger, 30
Hixon, Deborah M, 262, 279,
280-81
Hlavacek, John, 40
Holm, Judy Doherty Deuel,
183-85, 187, 188, 367; cover,
183; death of husband Mike
Deuel, 190, 191-92; daughter
Suzanne born, 197; marriage to
Dick Holm, 198
Holm, Richard "Dick" adopts
Suzanne, 200; CIA career post-
injuries, 201-2,256; in Congo,
185; Deuel, Mike, and, 181-82,
192, 196, 367; in Hong Kong,
199, 201; in Laos, 182, 185;
Maloney, Michael, and, 204;
marries Judy Deuel, 198; medal,
202; in Paris, as Chief of Station,
202; plane crash and injury,
186-89, 202, 256; recovery,
197-98; resignation under cloud,
202
Holm, Suzanne, 197, 200, 205; search
for information about biological
father, 201; secrecy and real
father, Mike Deuel, 200-201
Hong Kong, CIA in, 101, 199
Hoover, Herbert, 83
Hoover, J. Edgar, 15, 56
Houston, Lawrence, 40-41
Hudson, Bobbie, 239
Humelsine, Carlisle, 41

Ikeda, Chiyoki "Chick," 369-70
Indonesia. chaos in, 232; CIA failure
in,110-11
Intelligence Authorization Act, 380
Intermountain Aviation, 138, 155
Iran: American hostages in, 307,
347-49; -Contra, 307, 323 360.
downing of Airbus 300 306;
ouster of premier, 74, 110
"Irish Airman Foresees His Death
An" (Yeats), 133

Jacobsen, David, 306
Johnson, Lyndon, 145, 157-58, 193,
199, 205, 207
Johnson, Miles and Shep, 142
Johnston, Frank J., 262, 279 280
Johnston, R. B, 359
Jonson, Ben, elegy by, 163

Karaolis, Michael, 84
Kearns, John "Lone Star," 205; and
Book of Honor, 378
Kennedy, John F., 108, 112-13, 116,
117, 120, 121, 123, 145, 170
176, 182
Kennedy, Robert, 110, 170
Khrushchev, Nikita, 111
Kiba, Steven, 218
King, Clarence, 243, 244, 247-48
King, Ivan Berl, 241-48; Air America
and, 243-45; background of
241-43; character and
personality, 241, 243; CIA hiring
of 245; death of brother, David,
244, 247; eulogy delivered by
Rhyne, 245, 246; as pilot, 243,
246; plane crash and death,
237-39, 241; secrecy and, 244,
247, 379
King, Mabel, 242, 246
King, Velma, 244, 247-48
King, William Isiah, 242, 246-47
Kissinger, Henry, 217
Klinghoffer, Leon, 302-3
Knowland, William, 47
Korea, CIA in Seoul, 71-7:3
Korean War, 36, 50, 58, 67, 74
Kreinheder, Dorothy "Dot: 134, 155
Krychkov, Vladimir, 285
Kuwait, 286; Iraqi invasion of 351

Lacy, George Vincent, 323, 325, 326,
335-37
Lacy, Mildred, 336
Landry, Pat, 184
Laos CIA paramilitary efforts in, 138,
182-85, 189-93, 196, 205, 243,
244-45, 267-68; nameless stars
in Book of Honor and, 205; as
"the secret war," 182, 205, 250
Laubinger, Frank, 72-73, 83, 94
Lebartarde, Luis, 239
Lebanon American hostages in, 286,
306, 308; CIA operations in,
261-62, 278, 289-90, 306;
Deuel, Wally, in, 176; Israeli
conflict with, 277-78; kidnapping
of David Dodge, 278; murder of
Buckley, 2, 286, 306-7; U.S.
embassy in Beirut, 262, 278-79,
291; U.S. embassy bombing,
261-62, 277, 279-82, 291; U.S.
Marines barracks bombing, 286
Lee, Wen Ho, 380
LeGallo, Andre, 181,182, 197
Lehman, Herbert, 51
Leland, Mickey, 328-29
Lewis, Antoinette Pittman, 263, 265,
270, 287, 367-68
Lewis, Donald, 287
Lewis, George, 265
Lewis, James Foley, 261-77;
appearance and personality,
262-65; army, Mike Force unit
and Vietnam, 265-67; in
Beirut, Lebanon, 261-62,
276-77; bombing of embassy and
death of with wife Monique,
279-82, 287, 367; Chicago
operations by, 274-76; CIA
memorial ceremony, posthumous
medals, and condolence letters,
282-83,367-68; CIA
recruitment o£ under Jewel
program, 267; code name, 267;
cover, 262; father's abandonment
and, 263; in Laos, 267-68; letter
to father 271-73; prisoner in
Vietnam, Sontay prison, 268-70;
reentry into society after
imprisonment and CIA
debriefing, 273-74; release from
prison, 270; training for Mideast,
276; wife, Monique, 261, 262,
274, 275, 276-77
Lewis, Susan, 264, 271, 275, 287
Liberia, 232; Monrovia, CIA posting
in, 231-36; WAWA (West Africa
Wins Again), 233, 235
Libya. Benghazi embassy attack,
297-98; CIA and Gadhafi,
298-99, 316; Gadhafi takeover
of 298; Pan Am 103 bombing
and, 312-1:1; U.S. strikes on,
304-5
Lockerbie, Scotland, Pan Am 103
bombing, 289, 291, 308, 369;
Libya responsible for, 311-13;
remains and recovered
possessions, 311, 313
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 64
Long, Dick, 137
LSD, CIA experimentation with, 58
Luce, Clare Booth, 22, 56
Lumumba, Patrice, 145, 176

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 318
Mackiernan, Angus, 12
Mackiernan, Darrell Brown, 11,
13-14, 18, 36-37, 41
Mackiernan, Douglas Seymour, Jr.,
9-42, 49; anti-Communist
resistance, Kazakh peoples, and,
17, 20, 25-26; Brown, Darrell
(first wife), and, 11,13, 18,
36-37; character and personality,
11; childhood, 12; CIA mission
of, 49-50; cover as Vice-Consul,
9-10; daughter, Gail and, 11,
13-14, 36-37; death of 35;
education, 13; escape from
Tihwa, 24-35; estate, settlement
o£ 39, 41; Lyons, Pegge (second
wife), and, 17-23, 27;
memorialized by State
Department, 224; posthumous
medal, 39; secrecy regarding
death of 36, 38, 39, 379; State
Department commendation, 14;
Tihwa, Cryptographic
Cryptoanalysis Section, Army Air
Force (in World War II) , 13;
Tihwa, life in, 17-23; twins,
Michael and Mary, 18; White
Russian friends, 16
Mackiernan, Douglas S., Sr, 12,
28-30
Mackiernan, Duncan, 12
Mackiernan, Gail, 11, 13-14, 36-37,
41
Mackiernan, Malcolm, 12
Mackiernan, Mary, 18, 37, 67
Mackiernan, Michael, 18, 37, 67
Mackiernan, Pegge Lyons, 17-23, 27,
37-38, 39, 40, 67
Mackiernan, Stuart, 12
MacLendon, Joe, 325-26
MacPherson, Alex., background, 255
in Beirut, 281; covert career of
ultimate paramilitary officer,
253-56; Holm and, 256; medals
and awards, 254; North Carolina
plane crash, 237-40, 252-53;
prayer before missions, 256;
secrecy maintained by, 254, 255,
257
Maloney, Adrienne La Marsh, 189,
191-92, 203, 204-5, 366
Maloney, Arthur "Mali" 165-70; Cuba
and, 170-72; family's harrowing
flight to Hawaii, 167-68; joins
CIA, 167; medals, 166, 169;
retirement from CIA, 202; son's
death and, 190, 193-94, 203; war
injuries, 166-67, 168, 169
Maloney, Craig Michael, 203, 204,
366
Maloney, Mary Evangeline Arens,
165, 167-68
Maloney, Michael Arthur "Mike,"
163-66; Adrienne, wife, 189,
191-92, 203, 366; children of
189, 203, 366; chopper crash and
death, 190-91, 366; CIA and
military heritage of 166; cover,
192; in Laos, 189-90; name
revealed as one of the Book of
Honor's nameless stars, 204-5,
366
Maloney, Michael, Jr., 189, 203, 204 ,
366
Manning, Robert, 181, 197
Mansfield, Mike, 327
Mao Zedong, 9, 19, 26, 49, 218
Marana Air Base, Arizona, 139-43,
250
Marcuse, Herbert, 14
Martin, Edwin W., 65
McCann, Murray J, 262, 281, 287
McCarthy, Joseph, 30-31, 50-51, 56,
97
McCleskey, Walter S., 239
McCone, John, 157
McCord, James W, 56
McInenly, Bill, 43, 44, 220
McLean, Ralph, 181, 182
McMillan, Gale, 357
McNulty, Wayne, 205; and Book of
Honor,378
Merchant, L T., 39-40
Merriman, John Gaither, 133-62;
Alaskan rescue by, 136-37;
background of and piloting
skill, 135-38, 139, 142-43;
character of, 135, 139, 146;
Cuban pilots' friendship and
efforts to obtain care for John,
142-54; funeral, 133-35
155-56; hired by CIA
proprietary airline, 138-39;
lies about death, 134, 135, 155;
at Marana Air Base, 139-43;
medals, 137, 157; neglect of
and death, 150-55, 161;
recruitment by CIA, 139;
secrecy and, 136; sons of, 134,
154, 159-60, 366; top secret
Congo mission and crash,
143-56,366; Val, wife, 134-35,
153, 154-62, 366, 377
Miller, Bill, 249
MKULTRA, 58
Mobuto, Joseph, 143, 158-59 321
Monroe, Timmy, 238
Mulvey, Donald P., 91
Mussadegh, Muhammad, 74

Nassar, Gamal, 297
National Security Act of 1947, 15
National Security Council: Directive
68, 33; Directive 10/2, 75
NATO, 80, 85
Nicaragua. American operations base
in (Happy Valley), 117, 141; CIA
support of Contras, 285, 307
Nicholson, Harold James, 372
Nixon, Richard M., 199, 215, 216,
217-18, 222
Noriega, Manuel, 332
North, Oliver, 314
North Pole expedition, 1903, 28-30
Nosenko, Yuri Ivanovich, 241

Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
14; disbanding of 14; personnel,
former, 14, 101. See also
Donovan, William "Wild Bill"
Olson, Frank, 58
Operation Ajax, 74
Operation Alert, 78
Operation Eagle Claw, 347-49
Operation Mongoose, 170-71
Operation Restore Hope, 358
Operation Success, 74
Orwell, George, ix

Paffenberger, Anne, 81-84, 88-89,
92-93, 96
Palacios, Alberto, 59, 60
Palestine Liberation Front, 303, 312
Palmer, Joe, 298
Panama, toppling of Noriega, 332,
351, 356
Parmly, Eleazar, 267
Paxton, John Hall, 23
Peron, Juan, 186-87
Peru, CIA operations in, 140
Peterson, John, 205, 379
Petty, Alton, 334
Petty, Joyce, 323, 333
Petty, Losue, 323
Petty, Pharies "Bud" background, 322;
body, questions regarding, 326,
333-34; as CIA contract
personnel, 322-23; death of 325,
376, 377; Doris, first wife, 333;
Hagler, Losue, sister, 376; medals,
322,335; memorials to, 335;
saying of 334; widow, Gracie,
333-34, 335
Petty, Teresa, 333-34
Pewitt, Harrym, 239
Pittman, James Forrest, 263, 271-73
Plausible deniability, 75, 110, 114,
121-22, 128, 150
Ponzoa, Gus, 142, 143, 146, 147-50,
152, 159
Pope, Allen, 110
Popovich, Eli, 180-81
Potter, Richard, 345, 361
Powell, Colin, 363
Powers, Gary, 111
Pudlo, Fran, 125
Pugh, Robert and Beirut embassy
bombing, 279, 281, 287; death of
wife, Bonnie, in UTA flight 772
bombing, 310, 312; letter to
Dick Gannon, 310; in retirement,
87; on terrorism, 284

Quemoy and Matsu, 230

Radio Free Europe, 30
Ramparts, 207
Raven Rock, 78
Ray, Margaret, 112, 113, 118-20,
122, 125
Ray, Thomas Willard "Pete," 108, 109,
111; Bay of Pigs and, 115,
116-23, 141; daughter Janet and,
114, 120, 122-29, 367; death of
118-19, 124, 367; death of and
secrecy, 119, 123-29;
posthumous medal, 123; remains
returned from Cuba, 124; son
Tom and, 113-14, 120, 124;
training for Cuban assignment,
113-14; volunteer for Cuban
assignment, 112-13; wife
Margaret and, 112, 113, 118-20,
122, 125
Rayner, Barbara Ann, 230, 231
Rayner, Margaret Mary "Peggy,"
230-36
Rayner, Raymond Carlin, 229-36,
379; attack on and death of
234-35; character and
personality, 229-30, 231;
children of 231, 236; CIA job
obtained through brother, 230;
cover, 232; marriage to Peggy,
230-35; in Monrovia, Liberia,
231; posts, various, 231; on
Quemoy and Matsu, 230; secrecy
about position, 230-31, 236
Rayner, William "Bill," 230, 231
Reagan, Ronald, 305 support for
CIA, 284-85, 321
Redmond, Hugh Francis, 43-66;
American China policy and,
100-101, 102; arrest and early
imprisonment of; 45, 47-66, 67;
ashes sent home, 214; character
and morale of 60, 63, 101-2,
104-5, 106-7; CIA mission of
49-50; condition of in prison,
58-59, 66, 98, 101, 105, 208-9,
211-12; cover, 45; Cultural
Revolution and, 208; death
reported, 214; first letter
received from, 66; imprisonment
and fading efforts for release,
97-107, 209-13; lawyer,
Friedman, hired for, 57; letter,
July 4, 1967,208; Lydia (wife)
and, 45, 57, 103, 209-11;
memorials to, 215-16; mother's
visit, 103-6; park named for, 219;
ransom plan for release, failure
of 213; secrecy maintained in
case of 219-20, 379; in
Shanghai, China, 44-46, 49; trial
and conviction of 60-61;
Westrell and Redmond case,
55-57, 58; in WWII, 44; Yonkers
Citizens Committee for his
release, 61-62, 65, 97, 98, 213
Redmond, Lydia "Lily," 45, 57, 103,
209-11, 219
Redmond, Ruth, 43, 45,46, 47-48,
51, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65-66, 98,
106-7; deteriorating health of
212, 215; final efforts on behalf
of son, 213; first China visit,
103-6; and Lydia, 209-11 ;
second China visit, 211-12
Rhyne, Jim, 244, 245-46
Rieger, Gerhard Hermann, 323, 325,
326, 334
Robbins, Barbara, 286-87, 367, 379
Robbins, Buford, 286-87, 367
Roberts, Dave, 277, 280
Robin Sage (mission), 239
Rostow, Walt, 14
Rusk, Dean, 47, 116, 150, 174-75

St. Lucia Airways, 323, 324
Savimbi, Jonas, 320-21, 325, 335
Schind1er, Robert, 234-35
Schlesinger, Arthur, 14
Schoomaker, Peter J., 346
Schwartz, Norman, 53; and Book of
Honor, 378
Seaborg, Ray, 378
Seigrest, Connie, 142
Shackley, Theodore, 196
Shamburger, Riley, 118
Shanghai, China, 44-46, 49
Sheil, William Richard, 262, 279,
280-81,282
Shirer, William L., 172
Shutov, Leonid, 25, 26, 31, 34-35
Sichel, Peter, 101
Smith, Margaret Chase, 41
Smith, Paul F., 167
Smith, Walter Bedell, 50
Snepp, Frank, 199
Snoddy, Robert, 53; and Book of
Honor, 378
Somalia. CIA in, 338, 354, 355;
famine and upheaval, 354-55;
Freedman death in, 338, 354,
356-58
"Sources and methods," 4
Soviet Union: in Afghanistan, 351 ;
atomic bomb and, 24, 50; in
China, 11; detente and, 222, 235;
downing of Korean airliner, KAL
007, 285; fall of 320, 351; fear of
U.S. preemptive nuclear strike,
1983, 285; influence, expansion
of 74, 140; unwritten agreement
not to kill US. CIA operatives
and vice versa, 285-86
Spessard, Debra, 318-19, 324-25,
327, 330-32, 335, 376-77
Spessard, James "Jimmy," 318-33; in
Angola, 320, 321-22; body
return and funeral, 325-27,
330-31; CIA concealing of links
to, 330-32; in CIA S&T, 319,
320; cover, 318; early years, 319;
memorials to, 335; posthumous
medal, 331-32; sons Jared and
Jason, 319, 335, 376-77 wife,
Debra, and, 318-19; in Zaire,
318, 320
Spicer, Richard, 367
SR-71 Blackbird, 109, 125
Steere, Peter, 68-69
Stembridge, Syd, 135, 154-55, 157,
160
Stevenson, Adlai, 117, 174, 175
Stolz, Dick, 309
Strategic Services Unit (SSU), 48
Sukarno, President of Indonesia, 110
Sutherland, Thomas, 306
Syria, C1A operations in, 302

Teasley, Barbara, 235
Teller, Edward, ix
Templesman, Maurice, 159
Tempo Buildings, 15
Tenet, George, 367-71, 372, 379
Tepper Aviation, 322, 325, 333
Terrorism, 290; Achille Lauro, 302-3;
Berlin discotheque bombing,
304; Buckley killing and, 286,
306-7; CIA's post-Cold War
priority, 285-86, 299; Cyprus
(EOKA), 84-92, 95; embassy
bombings, 261-62, 277, 284,
286, 297; hostages taken in
Beirut, 286, 306, 308; hostages
taken in Iran, 307; Lockerbie,
Scotland, Pan Am 103 bombing,
289, 291, 308, 311-13; murders
in front of Langley, 373; U.S.
military barracks bombing, 286;
UTA 772 bombing, 310, 312
Thailand Air America in, 250; C1A
office in Bangkok, 183
Thorsrude, Gar, 141, 143, 155, 159
Thurmer, Angus, 40
Tibet. Chinese takeover, 38-39; Dalai
Lama and, 33; Mackiernan's
escape to and death in, 26-35 ;
resistance aided by CIA, 141,
250
Tihwa (Urumchi), Xinjiang
(Sinkiang), China, 9-11, 17-23
Time magazine, 1
Truman, Harry, 15, 24, 30, 33, 93
Tunon, Juan, 186
Turner, Stansfield, 240-41
Twetten, Tom, 296; Benghazi embassy
attack and, 297-98; chief of TS,
304; deputy chief Near East
Division, 305; deputy director for
operations, 314-15, 355; death of
Matthew Gannon and, 308-9,
369; early years, 296; Gadhafi
and, 297, 298; joins CIA, 1961,
296; Lockerbie bombing and,
312; on MacPherson, Alexander,
254; nepotism, avoidance of, 301,
305, 306, 309; retirement,
315-16; Somalia operations and,
355, 356; wife, Kay, and, 309,
314, 369

U-2 spy plane, 109, 111
United Fruit Company, 181
United States State Department. CIA
agents cover and memorials, 39,
95, 224, 287, 329; on Congo,
176; Cuban invasion and, 116;
memorial, 224
UNITA, 320-21, 324
UTA 772 bombing, 310, 312

Vandervoort, Ben, 169
Varela, Jack, 146, 147-48, 159
Vetch Book Shop, Beijing, 25
Vietnam. American prisoners, Sontay
prison, 268-:70; CIA covert
operations in, 138, 199,243,
250, 265-67, 286; Dien Bien
Phu, 97; fall of 205,221,
268; Phoenix Program, 199,
223
Vogel, Harold, 225-28

Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 97
Wall, Jack, 142
Wallace, George, 125
Walsh, James Edward, 214-15
Walz, Larry, 354
Washington Post, 4, 204, 378
Watergate, 56, 199, 221-22
Webster, William H., 307, 328, 330,
331,332, 351
Weeks, Sinclair, 137
Weinberg, Paul, :339, 352, 377
Weininger, Janet Ray, 114, 120,
123-29, 161, 367
Welch, Richard, 2, 369
Western Enterprises, 142
Westrell, Harlan, 55-57,58
White, Lawrence K. "Red," 169
Williams, Pete, 327
Wisner, Frank, 298
Woodruff: Freddie, 374, 379
Woods, Robert William, 329

Yale University, CIA recruitment at,
52-53, 219
Yanuishkin, Stephani, 25, 26, 31,
34-35
Yemen, CIA operations in, 294

Zaire See Congo (Zaire)
Ziegler, William., 28, 30
Zvonzov, Vassily, 16-17, 24, 25, 26,
28, 31, 32, 34-36
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