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by Susan Griffith “I don’t like the idea of anyone not being remembered,” says journalism professor Ted Gup. He proves it with an investigative masterstroke, a book revealing the lives and long-secret identities of fallen CIA agents. As Hugh Redmond boarded a ship home to the United States in 1951, the Red Chinese in Shanghai arrested him. Over the next two decades, Mr. Redmond languished as a political prisoner, subjected to torture at the hands of the Communists and suffering from malnutrition and poor health. His captors spent years attempting to wrangle a confession from him about his involvement in covert spy operations in China. Campaigns by his mother, Ruth Redmond, with the support of his hometown of Yonkers, New York, did little to spur the Central Intelligence Agency to rescue him, much less admit to the Chinese that Mr. Redmond had been an agent gathering intelligence about the communist movement in China. He had done so while operating under the guise of a commercial representative for the British importer-exporter Henningsen and Company. Prior to leaving on his mission, Mr. Redmond hinted to his mother about the motives behind his relocation to China, mentioning he had joined a clandestine arm of the Strategic Services Unit in the War Department. The CIA’s refusal to admit any spy operations in China cost Mr. Redmond years of suffering. Eventually he paid with his life. After his death, the CIA’s refusal to honor him as one of their fallen agents continued to visit a psychological trauma upon Ruth Redmond. Her suffering was not alone, and it still isn’t. Dozens of other families grieve, too, in silence. “Imagine This Wall and Its Secrets” Memorials abound in Washington, DC, but what struck Ted Gup on assignment for Time in 1991—and while he waited in the CIA’s lobby at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia—was the anonymity of some of the sixty-nine people who died in the line of duty for the CIA. Each is memorialized with a nameless star on the agency’s Wall of Honor, but only some have their names recorded in the accompanying Book of Honor. As for the other fallen agents? Only tiny stars, not their names, are recorded in the book. “These were people who had played an important role in America’s history, yet their identities had been erased,” says Prof. Gup (LAW ’78). Case Western Reserve’s Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism and a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post and Time, Ted Gup undertook the daunting task of finding the identities of the more than two dozen unnamed agents and workers. In his new investigative bestseller, The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA (Doubleday), Prof. Gup reveals the identities of many of these 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 marble and looked at the goatskin leather-bound Book of Honor, he found them “powerful and disturbing.” It left him with questions: Who are these people, where did they come from, did their families know they were in the CIA, did the families grieve in silence, and how did the president deal with their deaths? “It took my breath away initially, trying to figure out where to begin, how to start, and how ambitious did I want to make this book,” he says. Each chapter examines a different life. Today the families of Douglas S. Mackiernan, William P. Boteler, Leo Baker, Thomas “Pete” Ray, John G. Merriman, Mike Maloney, Mike Deuel, Hugh Redmond, Dennis Gabriel, Ivan Berl King, James Foley Lewis, Barbara Robbins, Matthew Gannon, James Spessard, Pharies “Bud” Petty, and Larry Freedman can finally tell their friends and extended families the true stories behind the deaths of their loved ones. Prof. Gup’s book provides the long-overdue public eulogy for their sacrifice to their country. “They gave their lives for their country. Whether one agrees or disagrees with their values, or the objectives of specific missions, their sacrifices were absolute,” he says. “Imagine this wall and its secrets,” continues Prof. Gup. He worked from 1991 to 1996 uncovering those secrets—stories that span fifty years and reach five continents. At the outset, he made contact with the CIA and asked for its cooperation. The agency refused, citing national security reasons, but he says his request went all the way to the director. The veteran newsman was not surprised by the agency’s response, thinking it would deflect him from pursuing his investigation. After six months, he says, the CIA began to see his seriousness about this project. Like a bulldog with a bone, Prof. Gup was relentless in his investigation, despite the CIA’s reminders to families about upholding the secrecy of their loved ones’ deaths. He would pursue leads for two or three months at a time without anything developing. And, before he had a book contract with Doubleday, no one was paying him. He was grateful when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation took a chance and awarded him a fellowship to support research for the book. For many of the families, Prof. Gup’s findings brought about the cathartic experience of talking openly for the first time about their loss. When his investigative trail finally led him to the fallen agents’ homes and families, Prof. Gup found the ultimate verification that, yes, these individuals were among the CIA’s unnamed stars. “I don’t like the idea of anyone not being remembered,” says Prof. Gup. He wants the public to know people who go nameless and unrecognized in major historic events. That wish has driven him to write for National Geographic on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and about the people dead in the Parisian catacombs for Smithsonian magazine. “These People Became Real to Me” Ted Gup describes the Book of Honor project as the investigative work of his life. He talked to more than 400 current and former CIA employees and family members and friends of the fallen agents. The families cooperated by providing Prof. Gup with letters, diaries, and journals that gave voice to those who died. “These people became real to me. Every one of them had an aspect of their character that touched me,” explains Prof. Gup. Contrary to the public’s general image of CIA operatives, Prof. Gup points out that these men and women did not die, say, while breaking into a Russian embassy. “Agents put themselves in hazard’s way twenty-four hours a day. Their whole life was a risk,” he says. Many died in airplane crashes on dangerous night missions, some by being shot down. Others died by pipe bombings; terrorist attacks, such as the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut; or in prison. Prof. Gup’s first break came with the identification of Larry Freedman, a member of the Delta Force. Mr. Freedman died in Somalia in a land mine explosion in 1992, while serving as a member of an intelligence-gathering team sent as the first part of an operation to bring order to the hunger- and war-torn country. On a tip from a CIA employee, Prof. Gup knew only that the fallen CIA operator was the first American casualty in Somalia. He followed a trail of clues through newspaper clippings, obituaries, records at Arlington National Cemetery, Mr. Freedman’s 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 Prof. Gup. Other leads on unidentified stars went nowhere. In one case, he searched for months trying to identify people killed in a plane crash in El Salvador. Running up monthly phone bills of $1,500 and borrowing against his life insurance policy, Prof. Gup finally was steered by an insider to look to one of the world’s most unstable spots—Africa. The tip led him to the discovery of six agents who died in Angola in 1989 when their Lockheed L-100-20 Hercules cargo plane crashed after clipping a tree during a dark night landing. Another agent—one of the CIA’s leading Arabists, Matthew Gannon—died in the 1988 Pan Am 103 terrorist bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, while heading home from the Middle East to spend the holidays with family. For the most part, spouses knew their husbands or wives were agents, says Prof. Gup. “In some cases, they were not told the precise nature of the death and what they were doing. Some were lied to,” he reveals. Some wives stood beside graves where empty caskets were lowered into the ground as friends and acquaintances watched and mourned. Many children in pursuit of information about their parents met the same resistance that Prof. Gup did in his search. “The whole life of an agent is duplicitous and is a cover. Life depends on the sustainability of that cover, and, in death, it is maintained. Being in the agency requires not only the agent but the spouse and children remaining silent,” he says. But how long does that silence need to continue? Some spouses pleaded with the CIA to recognize the deeds of loved ones, such as the wife of Mike Maloney, who died in Laos in 1965. Finally, in 1997, the CIA relented, telling her that Mike Maloney’s name would be added to the Book of Honor. The call had come the same day the Washington Post published a story, written by Prof. Gup, that named her husband and six other agents as being among the nameless stars. As his investigation progressed and more names surfaced, he began to see a pattern emerging in the agents’ lives. “They shared common traits. They lived on the edge, but they weren’t the Gordon Liddy types or the kind of people who would put their hands in the flames to be macho and attract attention,” says Prof. Gup. “Most of them were not flamboyant—yet each in his or her own way was playful and joyful.” “They Lived So Robustly” Prof. Gup has revealed all but one name. The CIA made a strong case to keep that name secret in order to prevent harm to others in the field. Otherwise, the CIA’s silence on those agents he found, he says, indicates that these people no longer jeopardize covert operations of other agents. Douglas Mackiernan’s family kept the details of his death a secret for fifty years. His star was the first inscribed on the wall, and he’s the first star in the book. A spy in China, Mr. Mackiernan and two others hiked more than a thousand miles to the Tibetan border as the Communists advanced in China. Almost reaching safety, he was mistakenly shot as a Communist as he crossed the Chinese-Tibetan border in 1950. But, Prof. Gup asks, what use did the fifty years of silence serve the country or the family? “Everyone knew Mackiernan was a spy,” he notes. “Can you imagine 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 Prof. Gup. “So their careers from the world’s point of view are arrested at entry-level positions. They had to swallow any pride in order to do the job. “Even though many of their lives were brief, one comes away with a sense of how lively they were,” he continues. “The fact is they lived so robustly and fully. When you read a chapter, you know how it’s going to end, but you don’t know how they lived.” Behind the stars, real men and women emerged for Ted Gup. As he jogs five miles a day through his Pepper Pike neighborhood, he often feels an affinity to Larry Freedman, who kept in shape by running, was Jewish, and just past fifty. The writer, too, recently celebrated his half-century birthday. Others, like Douglas Mackiernan, lived in China as Prof. Gup has done. Reminders of the agents abound for Prof. Gup. He would drive by Bill Boteler’s home in Washington, for example, not far from where he previously taught at Georgetown University. He says, “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. 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.”  Susan Griffith is a media relations specialist in the CWRU Office of University Communication and a regular contributor to the magazine. |
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