The Book of Honor (50 page)

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 café 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'être 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. It 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.