The Book of Honor

by Ted Gup

  On March 10, 1973, the White House announced that Downey would be released so that he could be with his mother, who was then in critical condition in a Connecticut hospital, suffering from a stroke. Two days later, on March 12, the Chinese let Downey go. He, too, walked across the Lowu Bridge to Hong Kong, after twenty years in prison. He cut a stark figure in Chinese blue pants and blue shirt, an overcoat slung across his arm and a black suitcase in his hand.

  At Langley it was a time for quiet celebration and perhaps some soul-searching as well. Privately some within the Agency believed that Downey and Fecteau—and perhaps Redmond too—might well have been released many years earlier, and that their ordeals were avoidable.

  Steven Kiba had been an American radioman in a B-29 when he was shot down over North Korea in 1953. He was briefly imprisoned with Downey and Fecteau in Beijing. Just prior to his release in 1955, a Chinese commissar told him that Downey and Fecteau could be released if the U.S. government admitted they were spies.

  Upon his return to the United States, Kiba was debriefed by CIA officers. During those sessions in downtown Washington he spoke of the Chinese offer to release Downey and Fecteau if the United States would admit they worked for the Agency. Kiba was told never to mention that he had met Downey or Fecteau and was advised to “forget about the whole period.” He was stunned that the CIA officers showed no interest in pursuing the subject. Instead, they told him that “it looked pretty hopeless for them and seemed to indicate they would never get out.”

  Eighteen years later the United States admitted what was clear to the Chinese from the beginning. And just as Kiba had suggested, freedom followed soon after.

  Upon his return to the States, Downey acknowledged that he had told the Chinese what he knew during his imprisonment and interrogation. Still the Agency, in recognition of his ordeal, offered him a position at Langley. Downey declined. “You know I just don’t think I am cut out for that kind of work,” he jested. He dismissed his two decades in a Chinese prison as a “crashing bore.” At age forty-three he entered Harvard Law School. Today he is a judge in Connecticut.

  It is said that he was the last of his Yale class still on the books as an Agency operative. Everyone else had left. One had gone on to become a photographer, another a clothier, and yet another a lobsterman in the Solomon Islands. Downey and Fecteau and Redmond had stayed on the Agency rolls long after most of their peers had departed or retired. It was partly a matter of bureaucratic fiction and partly out of deference for their long suffering.

  Nor was Redmond forgotten. In 1972 Yonkers renamed Cook Field, a thirty-five-acre recreational site, Redmond Park in honor of their native son.

  As for Redmond’s wife, Lydia, she is in her seventies, divorced, and living in a Virginia suburb outside of Washington, D.C. She says the CIA lost interest in her the moment she divorced Redmond. She rails against the Chinese. “They are just butchers, butchers sitting on top of butchers,” she says. “They have never changed.” She has no interest in speaking of Redmond or seeing his letters. “I know all the gruesome details and I have enough letters to last me a lifetime.” She has never been to Redmond’s grave, nor has she an interest in doing so.

  Redmond, Fecteau, and Downey had all paid a profound price for what in hindsight may be viewed as fictions created by government. The United States would not acknowledge what the Chinese already knew: that all three men were spies. Nor would Washington recognize the Communist regime, even if it meant blotting out a quarter of the world’s population. Instead, it acted as if mainland China were represented by the effete and exiled Nationalist government on Taiwan. Covert operations against the mainland had been a part of that greater fiction, accepting the most profound acts of personal sacrifice and heroism in a vain effort to modify Chinese political or military conduct.

  One last lingering remnant of that fiction remains. The U.S. government has yet to publicly acknowledge that Hugh Francis Redmond worked for the CIA. To this day he remains a nameless star in the Book of Honor.

  Only in Yonkers, among the elderly, is his name remembered and revered, and by a nephew who dutifully returns the scant artifacts of Redmond’s life to a small mahogany chest destined again for the basement.

  CHAPTER 9

  Honor and Humiliation

  This is neither a Boy Scout game nor a boxing bout fought by the Marquess of Queensbury Rules. It is a job to be done.

  ALLEN DULLES

  BY THE EARLY 1970s more than a decade had elapsed since the Bay of Pigs. Finally it appeared that the CIA might again enjoy some measure of credibility as the Cuban fiasco faded into history. But new and more trying ordeals were already taking shape. Cumulatively they would create a crisis of confidence in the CIA from which it would not soon recover. By 1974 the long-festering war in Vietnam was coming to an end. A short-lived and illusory peace was all there was to show for so much sacrifice. The end would be immortalized as a frantic scurry aboard a final chopper out of Saigon on April 30, 1975, and the spectacle of a Communist takeover.

  On many fronts the public felt it had been deceived. Watergate, the ultimate scandal, had begun on June 17, 1972, with a break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters. It was followed by the arrest of five burglars, all but one of whom had worked for the CIA and whose Agency roots went back to the Bay of Pigs or before. Other former CIA officers would later be implicated, leading many to muse that the curse of the Bay of Pigs was upon Langley still. On August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. With Nixon gone, the CIA would take unwanted center stage.

  Investigators on Capitol Hill and in the press began to unravel the CIA’s most sensitive secrets, digging into a past that would chill even stalwart patriots and challenge time-honored myths of America’s moral superiority. Millions, it was learned, had been spent on toppling duly elected foreign governments. Tens of thousands of Americans had been subjected to illegal CIA scrutiny. Former Agency officers were writing books, threatening to tell all. Détente and its relaxation of tensions with the Soviets undermined support for covert operations and called into question the need for extreme measures.

  As if external wounds were not enough, Langley had long engaged in its own bloodletting. The self-destructive hunt for Soviet moles inside the CIA, led by the brilliant but obsessed James Angleton, was finally brought to an end with his forced retirement in December 1974—but not before the careers of honorable officers had been ruined and vast resources squandered chasing phantoms.

  Ahead lay devastating Senate and House hearings. Out of these would come revelations that would forever alter Americans’ view of the CIA and, in the minds of at least one generation, brand it as a rogue agency—“uncontrolled and uncontrollable,” to use the words of Senator Frank Church. An incredulous nation learned that for years the Agency had been reading Americans’ mail, spying on its own citizens, experimenting with LSD and deadly toxins, plotting to assassinate foreign leaders, and destabilizing other governments. William E. Colby, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, horrified the clandestine service by voluntarily assembling a list of Agency actions that violated its charter. To the outside world it was known as the Family Jewels. Inside the Agency it was called the Skeletons. Nothing so demoralized Langley as the perception that it had been betrayed by one of its own, a career intelligence officer, an OSS veteran, and the overseer of the controversial Phoenix Program.

  Out of that would come a vast expansion of congressional oversight and a prohibition of assassinations. Few would be exempt from accountability. In 1973 a Senate committee asked former Agency director Richard Helms if the CIA had had a role in the coup attempts to bring down Chile’s President Salvador Allende. “No sir,” he replied. Four years later, when the truth emerged, Helms was slapped with a $2,000 fine and a two-year suspended prison sentence for misleading Congress. “You now stand before this court in disgrace and shame,” a federal judge told him. It was a rebuke that, in the public’s mind, might just as well have been meted out
to the entire Agency.

  By the mid-1970s and for decades thereafter, the CIA would be the focal point for every conspiracy theory. The excesses of such accusations were matched only by the CIA’s own bizarre and often harebrained schemes. For those inside the Agency who revered it and remembered those who had recently died in its service in Southeast Asia, the mid-seventies were years of high honor and excruciating humiliation. Many Agency veterans remained unbowed and resentful. Among these was Richard Helms.

  “Some political commentators lamented the fact the CIA was not the Boy Scouts,” an indignant Helms would reflect. “Those of us who worked in the CIA were surprised—we had always assumed that we had been expected to act otherwise. The CIA was damaged, almost crippled, by that dark period in its history.” Citing the patriot Nathan Hale, whose statue graces a CIA walkway, Helms would say, “Intelligence is necessary to the public good, and, by being necessary, becomes honorable.” At Langley “necessary” and “honorable” had been allowed to become synonymous.

  It was against just such a darkening backdrop that CIA officials gathered in the spring of 1973 in an attempt to craft some sort of memorial for the many Agency men and women who had died in the line of service. Up until then, there was no monument, only a secretive gathering of men assembling under the sterile-sounding name of the Honors and Merit Awards Board. It was they who determined who would posthumously receive what, if any, medal or honor. Most such honors and commendations would be presented to the surviving spouse, then quickly retrieved and placed in the deceased’s personnel file, deep within the vaultlike chambers of Langley. Such deaths, shrouded in secrecy, were deemed a private matter between the family and the Agency representative. That was usually a job for Ben DeFelice, who for two decades comforted the bereaved and provided them with whatever bureaucratic and personal assistance might be needed.

  But in the grim days of 1973 and 1974 senior Agency people seized upon the idea that something more was needed, something both to recognize the personal sacrifices of its officers and, equally important, to provide a focal point for the CIA community at large. Such sacrifices in the aggregate, it was thought, might inspire and uplift an increasingly demoralized organization. For a guide, they looked naturally enough to the State Department, which had, over the years, lost scores of men and women in service overseas.

  Adopting State Department rituals and criteria was a first step. But Agency officials soon recognized that most of those the CIA would honor would be from the clandestine ranks. That posed unique security problems. At the State Department there was a large plaque at the end of the main lobby listing its honored dead. For years the CIA had quietly salted in among the ranks of the State Department’s casualties some of its own covert officers killed in the line of duty. Among these were the names of Douglas S. Mackiernan, “Killed by Gunfire Tibet 1950,” and William P. Boteler, “Killed by Grenade Nicosia Cyprus 1956.” It was an odd way to do Agency casualties honor, but the only way that the CIA knew. Besides, since those men and women had died under State Department cover, not to include them on that wall would attract unwanted attention and raise suspicions about their true employer and mission. It was a dilemma that would continue for decades.

  Creating an Agency memorial would require the organization to first define the criteria for inclusion. Those deemed worthy would then be the subject of an elaborate declassification review to determine whose name could be revealed and whose must remain a secret. Like the State Department, the Agency concluded that such a death must be “of an inspirational or heroic character.”

  But at the CIA the precise criteria for inclusion were deemed so sensitive that they were classified and would remain so. Unlike the State Department, the Agency concluded that death need not occur outside the United States, though it must occur while in pursuit of an Agency mission. Excluded were deaths occurring from disease, earthquakes and other natural disasters, and simple auto and plane crashes occurring in the ordinary course of one’s private life. On this they agreed. But such a provision excluded numerous Agency officers who perished in the field from exotic circumstances to which they would not otherwise have been exposed but for their CIA missions.

  Initially they also agreed that those honored should not be limited to CIA staff employees but should include those who died while under contract to the CIA. This was a point of considerable sensitivity in 1973. Scores of pilots and crew members from Air America, the proprietary air wing of the CIA, had died in Southeast Asia while on Agency business. Excluding them from the memorial would have been seen as drawing an untenable distinction between the sacrifices of those who died in service to country, based solely on employment status and bureaucratic hair-splitting. (Yet in the end, such a distinction was invoked, to the consternation of countless Air America families who felt their loved ones’ sacrifices were belittled by the CIA.)

  There was also an early consensus as to the words that would appear above the memorial.

  Finally, after consultation with a noted private architectural sculptor, Harold Vogel, there was agreement that all the deceased would be recognized with a star. Some other instrument, perhaps a book, could provide the years in which the officers were killed. But one thorny question remained: what exactly would such a memorial look like? For this, they relied largely on Vogel.

  In some ways he was the perfect choice. An experienced sculptor, he was widely respected and had the sort of forceful vision that would cajole the Agency into reaching a firm conclusion as to the design. Even more important, Vogel brought to the project the sensitivities of a man only too familiar with the causes and values for which these covert operatives had been said to have given their lives.

  The son of German immigrants, he was born in the United States. But following the stock market crash of 1929, he and his family returned to Germany. As a teenager Vogel grew up under Hitler’s Third Reich. When it was discovered that his father carried a U.S. passport, his mother was locked up, his father dispatched to Russia, and he, though only fourteen, was interned at a labor camp near Nuremberg. There Vogel was assigned to assist a Russian explosives expert whose job it was to dismantle Allied bombs that failed to detonate. Vogel knew he was utterly “disposable.” Another lad forced to perform the same task completely disappeared after a bomb he was dismantling went off.

  It was unimaginable to him then that he would survive those years, much less return to the United States and eventually design the frame that held the Declaration of Independence at the Capitol, an LBJ memorial, and other prominent public commissions. But none would prove more challenging than that at the CIA. Problems arose early on. Months after the Agency contacted him, he heard nothing from them and assumed that they had selected someone else. In fact, the Agency was conducting a security check of Vogel and was troubled when it was discovered that he had relatives living in East Germany. Only when the Agency satisfied itself that he was not a security threat did they contact him again. That was in the spring of 1974.

  Then came the conundrum of how to pay homage to people whose identities were, due to compartmentation, largely unknown even within the CIA itself. Early on, Vogel, unfamiliar with the Byzantine ways of the Agency, felt as though he had stumbled into some sort of Alice in Wonderland landscape.

  Much of the idea for a “book of honor” in which to record the names of the fallen must be credited to Vogel. But as originally envisioned by some at the Agency, the Book of Honor was to contain not just some of the names but all of them. For this reason, Vogel would be asked to design a way to display the volume, albeit closed and under lock and key.

  Vogel designed a lecternlike affair of Carrara marble to be fastened with rods into the wall. The book would be placed within the lectern and sealed with a bulletproof plate of glass secured with a stainless-steel frame and a solid lock. Each of four sets of keys would be carefully accounted for. The lectern itself was constructed on a slant so that those who were in wheelchairs could appreciate the beauty of the volume. But because
the book was to remain closed, a premium was placed on its outward appearance.

  For this Vogel went to New York and selected the finest black Moroccan goatskin for a cover. This he embossed with a 22-karat gold-leaf emblem of the Agency. The cost of the book was $1,500, the lectern $4,300, plus thousands of dollars caused by subsequent Agency revisions.

  But there was a problem. Who, the Agency representatives asked, would record all the names, including those still classified? Vogel did not possess the requisite security clearance. Indeed, because the identities were compartmented on a need-to-know basis, no one individual might be entrusted with them all. So the Agency gathered together three of its in-house calligraphers and decided to divide the names among them. But when the calligraphers were informed that they could not make a mistake on the one-of-a-kind handmade rice paper, they withdrew from consideration. That left Vogel.

  “Well,” said Vogel, attempting to make light of the situation, “you could blindfold me and then I wouldn’t know what the hell I wrote.” The Agency representatives were less than amused. The entire concept underwent yet another revision.

  This time it was decided that only those names cleared for release would be included in the Book of Honor. The others would be marked only by a star and the year of death. No other clues to identity or mission or circumstances of death would be included in the book. Now the concept called for the volume to remain opened, and the costly cover would be unseen. On the top two pages, hand-lettered in black India ink, were to be written the names and stars. Beneath these two pages and supporting them was a series of blank sheets to give the book heft. With each passing year, as more and more names were to be added, a blank page would be taken from the bottom, inscribed, and placed on the top.