Posted 5-16-00
CLEVELAND -- Memorials abound in Washington, D.C., but what struck Ted Gup in 1991 -- while he waited in the lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency -- was the anonymity of some of the more than 60 people who died in the line of duty for the CIA and memorialized on the CIA's Wall of Honor and in its Book of Honor.
Gup, CWRU's Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism and a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post and Time magazine, undertook the daunting task of finding the identities of the more than two dozen unnamed agents and workers. In his new investigative work, The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA (Doubleday), Gup reveals the identities of 25 agents and also tells the story of the CIA over the past five decades through the lives of these men and women.
Like other journalists who have stood before the wall of stars chiseled in stone and looked at the goatskin leather-bound Book of Honor, he found them "powerful and disturbing." It left him with such questions as who are these people, where did they come, did their families know they were in the CIA, did the families grieve in silence, and how did the president deal with their deaths?
At the outset, he contacted the CIA and asked for its cooperation. The agency refused for national security reasons, but Gup says his request went all the way to the director. The agency's response did not surprise him. After six months, he says the CIA began to see he was serious about this project.
"Imagine this wall and its secrets," says Gup. He worked from 1991-96 on uncovering its secrets -- ones that span 50 years and reach five continents. It was the kind of project that every journalist who walks by the wall wants to tackle, but knows it's a daunting task, adds Gup.
He describes the project as the investigative work of his lifetime. He talked to more than 400 current and former CIA employees, as well as family members and friends of the fallen agents. The families cooperated by providing Gup with letters, diaries, and journals that gave voice to those who died.
Contrary to the public's general image of CIA operatives, Gup says these men and women did not die while breaking into a Russian embassy. "Agents put themselves in hazard's way 24 hours a day. Their whole life was a risk," he adds. Many died in airplane crashes on night missions, either shot down or mishaps in landing. Others died in pipe bombings, in terrorists' attacks like the bombing of the Beirut embassy, or in prison.
Gup's first break came with the identification of Larry Freedman, a member of the Delta Special Forces. Freedman died in Somalia in a land mine explosion in 1992, while operating under the guise of the military force.
On a tip from a CIA employee, Gup only knew the fallen CIA operator was the first American causality in Somalia. Gup followed a trail of clues through newspaper clippings, obituaries, records at Arlington National Cemetery, the Freedman family's rabbi, and a list of survivors who talked about the life of the man.
"I still had not confirmed that it was Larry Freedman until I contacted his widow and learned about his involvement in the agency," says Gup.
Other leads on stars left him cold, as he searched for months trying to identify people killed in a plane crash in El Salvador. No one knew about a plane crash. Running up monthly phone bills of $1,500 and borrowing against his life insurance policy, Gup was told by an insider to look for one of the world's hottest action spots -- Africa. Gup found that six agents died in Angola in an L-100-20 Hercules cargo plane that crashed when it clipped a tree during a dark night landing.
Another agent -- one of the CIA's leading Arabists, Matthew Gannon -- died in the Pan Am 103 terrorist bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, while heading home from the Middle East to spend the holidays with family. He took an earlier and unlucky flight to his death.
For the most part, spouses knew their husbands or wives were agents, says Gup. "In some case they were not told the precise nature of the death and what they were doing. Some were lied to," Gup reveals.
The duplicitous life of an agent requires a cover, requiring many spouses to keep silent and hide the knowledge from children and family members.
Douglas MacKiernan's family kept the details of his death a secret for 50 years. His star was the first inscribed on the wall and in the Book of Honor. A spy in China, MacKiernan and two others hiked more than 1,000 miles to the Tibetan border as the communists advanced in China. He was mistakenly shot as a communist as he crossed the Chinese-Tibetan border in 1950.
"Can you image that some of these guys were very smart and had promising futures? They would go to their class reunions where some of these people thought they would become the president of the corporation. Instead they were low-level clerks because they couldn't rise in the hierarchy without attracting attention, and they couldn't have too much responsibility in their cover jobs or they couldn't do their real job," explains Gup.
"Even though many of their lives were brief, one comes away with a sense of how lively they were. The fact is they lived so robustly and fully while alive," says Gup.
Behind the stars, real men and women emerged for Gup. "When people die and are given memorials, the living tend to disbelieve in their existence. They view the individuals through their final achievements either as a hero or villain, which is dehumanizing," he says. "One of the things I wanted to show is that these people when living -- and for all their daring and courage -- weren't a breed apart."
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