Ted Gup The Book of Honor

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Ted Gup The Book of Honor

Сообщение Моргенштерн » 23 окт 2013 16:21

Ted Gup

The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives


The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives by Ted Gup, Anchor Books (1st May 2001)

In the entrance of the CIA headquarters looms a huge marble wall into which seventy-one stars are carved - each representing an agent who has died in the line of duty. Official CIA records only name thirty-five of them, however. Undeterred by claims that revealing the identities of these "nameless stars" might compromise national security, Ted Gup sorted through thousands of documents and interviewed over 400 CIA officers in his attempt to bring their long-hidden stories to light. The result of this extraordinary work of investigation is a surprising glimpse at the real lives of secret agents, and an unprecedented history of the most compelling-and controversial-department of the US government.

Acclaim for Ted Gup’s The Book of Honor
“[Gup] puts a human face on the CIA’s checkered and often tragic history. . . . Is it possible for a book to have it both ways? Is it possible to criticize an agency for its conduct, its values and ethics, its very view of the world, and at the same time admire and sympathize profoundly with its agents? That seems to be what Ted Gup has accomplished in this very fine and compassionate book.” —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
“Ted Gup found out what the Central Intelligence Agency didn’t want him to know, and now he’s going to tell you.” —The Plain Dealer
“Told against the backdrop of Cold War and superpower struggles, Gup’s sleuthing is a remarkable coup, full of high-level intrigue, cover-ups and drama.” —Publishers Weekly
“This is not a pretty story. Real espionage never is. What ace reporter Ted Gup found when he researched the CIA wasn’t suave James Bonds but lively, complex, and heroic Americans lost in a web of agency coverups . . . [an] astonishing exposé.” —American Way

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Inscribed on a wall at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is a quote from the Bible: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). On the other side of the lobby, five rows of stars are etched into the white marble wall, each representing a CIA officer killed in the line of duty. Below the stars is a case containing the "Book of Honor"--"a tome as sacred to the Agency as if it held a splinter of the true cross," writes Ted Gup--and in it are the names of the men and women who gave their lives serving the CIA. Well, not all the names; about half the entries are blank because the CIA says it doesn't want to compromise ongoing operations. Yet, as Gup argues in his own tome, also called The Book of Honor, the truth behind many of the stories that aren't being told threatens nothing--except perhaps the agency's own sense of shame over botched operations.
Gup, a well-known investigative reporter with experience at The Washington Post and Time, interviewed hundreds of current and former CIA case officers to tell the stories behind the stars. "In the aggregate, the stories of the stars form a kind of constellation that, once connected, reveal not only the CIA's history but something of its soul as well," he writes. Yet this is, thankfully, not an indiscrete book. He writes of "a young woman who died a violent and selfless death in 1996 ... her name is withheld from this book. The Agency made a compelling case that to identify her would put others at risk." The bulk of The Book of Honor does, in fact, name names and describe how they died. In this sense, it is similar to the runaway bestseller Blind Man's Bluff, which described the secret history of American submarine espionage during the cold war. Yet what's most striking about Gup's accounts is how many of the deaths were routine or accidental. Many agents merely had the misfortune of being on planes that crashed--hardly the stuff of a James Bond adventure. Throughout, Gup is sensitive to a situation in which, "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." This fascinating book strikes a clean blow for the open society--but it serves a larger purpose as well: telling the truth. --John J. Miller.

From Publishers Weekly

A former investigative journalist with the Washington Post and Time and winner of a George Polk Award, Gup breaks a longstanding taboo in an expos that reveals the names and personal stories of some three dozen CIA agents who died in the line of duty and whose identities have been kept secret sometimes for decades. Gup interviewed more than 400 current and former CIA agents, as well as surviving family members, to pry loose their stories. Among the spies unmasked in these kinetic biographical profiles are Douglas Mackiernan, U.S. vice-consul in China's westernmost Xinjiang province, who fled Mao's revolution only to be shot to death by Tibetan border guards; Pete Ray, an Alabama National Guard pilot killed in the Bay of Pigs invasion; Matthew Gannon, victim of the Pan Am Flight 103 crash over Scotland, a bombing linked to Libyan terrorists; and Hugh Redmond, who refused to crack during 19 torturous years in a Shanghai prison. Gup unveils covert missions from Laos to France, from Angola to Cyprus, providing extraordinary insight into the CIA's day-to-day operations. He also empathetically delves into the ordeals of these fallen spies' grieving families, many of whom were lied to for years as the agency refused to acknowledge the men's CIA ties. Told against the backdrop of Cold War and superpower struggles, Gup's sleuthing is a remarkable coup, full of high-level intrigue, cover-ups and drama. He leaves it to readers to decide whether his subjects are heroes or knaves, and whether the CIA is a rogue agency that should be reined in or an essential survival tool in a treacherous world. (May) FYI: Gup's 1992 expos in the Washington Post of a top-secret government installation buried beneath a West Virginia resort, where Congress would seek shelter in the event of impending nuclear war, led to that underground complex being shut down.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author: Ted Gup (born 1950), a 1968 graduate of Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, is a writer noted for being the first to reveal publicly in 1992 the existence of a large underground bunker at West Virginia's famed Greenbrier Resort to house the Congress of the United States in case of a nuclear attack on Washington, DC, a revelation still considered controversial almost two decades after its publication. A former investigative reporter for The Washington Post and Time magazine, he has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing as a Fulbright Scholar. He has written for publications and media outlets such as Smithsonian, National Geographic, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, Sports Illustrated, Slate, GQ, Mother Jones, Audubon, the Columbia Journalism Review, NPR, and Newsweek.
Gup, who was a "Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism" at Case Western Reserve University before heading the journalism department at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2003. He was also a 1980 recipient of the George Polk award in journalism offered by Long Island University. Prior to his work in academia, he was a reporter for The Washington Post and Time Magazine. He has been a prolific writer regarding doomsday scenarios and facilities to provide for continuity of government and the preservation of important assets of civilization, including the critical Mount Weather facilities, as well as intelligence issues.
His 2010 book, A Secret Gift, much unlike anything else he'd ever written, chronicles the Christmastime 1933 anonymous charitable efforts of his Romanian Orthodox Jewish grandfather, Sam Stone, to help families in Canton, Ohio affected by the Great Depression. Ted Gup is also the author of the bestseller The Book of Honor, winner of the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book-of- the-Year Award, and Nation of Secrets, winner of the Shorenstein Book Prize. He is a professor at and the chair of the Journalism Department at Emerson College.


To the sons and daughters of the CIA’s stars, named and unnamed alike, and in memory of my father, who told me the only thing a man may hope to leave behind is his good name.

Table of Contents

Prologue
PART ONE TRUE BELIEVERS
Chapter 1. Forgotten Man
Chapter 2. A Pin for St. Jude
Chapter 3. By Chance
Chapter 4. Waiting for Godot
Chapter 5. Faith and Betrayal
Chapter 6. Deception
PART TWO A TIME TO QUESTION
Chapter 7. The Two Mikes
Chapter 8. Homecoming
Chapter 9. Honor and Humiliation
Chapter 10. Privation and Privilege
PART THREE CHAOS AND TERRORISM
Chapter 11. Indestructible
Chapter 12. Deadly Symmetry
Chapter 13. Damage Control
Chapter 14. The Last Maccabee
Epilogue
Afterword
Author's Note and Acknowledgments


Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. -- George Orwell
Secrecy, once accepted, becomes an addiction. -- Edward Teller, Physicist


Prologue

I remember the first time I stood before the Central Intelligence Agency's Wall of Honor. It was during the Gulf War, February 1991. As a reporter for Time magazine, I had come to interview an Agency analyst, a specialist on Iraq. The interview was to be on deep background. I was not to reveal the analyst's name or link him to the CIA.
I arrived a few minutes early. The guards at the entrance to the vast 258-acre compound in Langley, Virginia, had been expecting me. They keyed in my Social Security number, issued me a plastic badge, and pointed me in the direction of the headquarters building. Stern-faced guards, a hedge of steel spikes in the roadway, and a landscape bristling with half-concealed monitors encouraged me to stay on course.
I remember entering the Stalinesque headquarters building, some 1.4 million square feet of marble and pillars and row upon row of recessed lights. The lobby was cavernous and cool, almost sepulchral. I had written about the CIA before, but this was my first visit to its headquarters. Set into the floor of the lobby was a huge medallion of the Agency seal featuring a vigilant eagle and a compass rose whose radiating spokes represented the CIA's worldwide reach.
Inscribed overhead, on the south wall, were words from Scripture, John 8:32: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." There was no hint of irony about it, though daily, covert officers trained in deception pass through the lobby, their identities a construct of lies intended to produce some greater truth.
It was the north wall, though, that caught my eye. There, rising before me, was a field of black stars chiseled into white Vermont marble. To the left was the flag of the nation, to the right, the flag of the Agency. I drew nearer. Above the stars were engraved these words: "IN HONOR OF THOSE MEMBERS OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE SERVICE OF THE COUNTRY."
There were five rows of stars. One by one I counted them. Sixty-nine in all. Below the field of stars was a stainless-steel and glass case. It was locked. Inside was a book.
The Book of Honor, it was called, a tome as sacred to the Agency as if it held a splinter of the true cross. It was a thin volume of rough-cut pages, opened to the center, a black braid, tasseled at the end, tucked into the valley between the open pages. In neat black letters were written the years that each CIA officer died. Beside the year, in some twenty-nine cases, were inscribed the names of the fallen. I recognized two: Richard Welch, gunned down in front of his house in Athens in 1975, and William F. Buckley, the Beirut station chief tortured to death in 1985. His remains were found in a plastic sack beside the road to the airport.
But beside most of the years, there were no names, just stars. Forty nameless stars, tiny as asterisks, each representing a covert officer killed on a CIA mission.
These nameless stars spanned half a century. There was nothing to provide even a hint as to their identities -- no month or day of death, no country or continent where they fell, and not a word to suggest the nature of their mission. All was veiled in secrecy.
I stood transfixed as scores of CIA employees swept past me on their way to or from the security desk, oblivious to the quiet memorial. In the minutes before my Agency escort arrived to take me to my interview, I took out a notebook and scribbled down the names and dates and stars in the Book of Honor. Who were these stars? I wondered. How and where had they died? What missions claimed their lives?
The first nameless star had died in 1950. What secret could be so sensitive that after five decades his or her identity still could not be revealed? I wondered, too, about the families these covert officers left behind, whether they were free to speak of the loss of a loved one or whether they were forced to grieve in silence. Were they told the truth of what had happened to their husbands or wives, sons or daughters? Did these stars, named and unnamed alike, represent unsung heroes, or were they, perhaps, saboteurs and assassins ensnared in their own schemes? And what, if anything, had the American people been told of these casualties? Had the U.S. government, perhaps the president himself, lied about their fates?
I had seen many such memorials before. The FBI, DEA, State Department, and even Amtrak have memorial walls to those who died in service. But all of these identify their fallen and celebrate their sacrifices. The CIA's is different, a memorial to men and women who are faceless. How, I wondered, could a memorial purport to remember those who are unknown to all but a few? And what sort of person would be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice -- the loss not only of life but of identity as well?
It was that notion of anonymity even in death that moved me. When I had finished jotting down the dates and names and stars, I tore the pages out of my spiral notebook and tucked them into the pocket of my jacket.
I suspected even then that this wall, this Book of Honor, and these nameless stars would stay with me, that I would revisit them again and again until I had unraveled their secrets. But I also knew that scores of Washington reporters, all who covered the intelligence beat, had walked past this same memorial and had similar ambitions. The Book of Honor was one of Washington's most abiding mysteries. There was a reason the secret of the stars remained intact.
A moment later a hand gently tapped me on my shoulder. It was my escort, ready to take me through the security turnstile, and to my interview. As we walked down the corridor, I asked him about the nameless stars. He seemed amused and deftly fended off my question. He had had this conversation before. In my asking, I had revealed that I was a newcomer to the beat.
Later, sitting across from him in a small conference room, I raised the subject once more. "Can't be of much help," he said, and invoked the CIA's most revered words: "sources and methods." It is a catchall phrase that encompasses the myriad ways in which the CIA gathers its knowledge of the world. It goes to the very core of the Agency's mission. Identifying the nameless stars, he said, could compromise ongoing operations, expose Americans and foreign nationals to grave risk, and reveal secrets adverse to U.S. interests. In short, it would harm America's national security.
I had been put on notice. The Book of Honor and its nameless stars were not to be trifled with. Any attempt to unmask them would be viewed as a kind of larceny, a theft of the Agency's family jewels.
The inch-thick bulletproof glass and tidy lock that protected the book of Honor were only tokens of the security that safeguarded the secrets of the nameless stars. A hundred other unseen locks and keys, oaths of secrecy, and cryptonyms stood in my way. I asked my escort about two or three of the named stars. Surely he could discuss those. Wrong.
That evening when I returned home, I slipped the pages from my pocket into a manila folder and scribbled the words "CIA Stars" on the flap. Now and again, in the months and years after, I would pick at the story in my spare time. I made little progress.
Caught up in the press of events, I left the story of the CIA's stars for some indeterminate future. It would be five years before I could devote myself to it fully. I thought that I had been drawn to the story for the sheer journalistic challenge of it. This was, after all, the ultimate secret, the forbidden. I had broken secrets before, some of them extremely sensitive and hard to ferret out.
In 1992, for example, I uncovered the existence of a top secret government installation buried beneath an exclusive West Virginia resort, the Greenbrier. It was there that Congress was to go as a kind of government-in-exile in the event of an impending nuclear war. It had been one of the nation's most closely guarded secrets since its construction during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations four decades earlier. My article in the Washington Post led to its closure and considerable embarrassment to Congress which, but for a handful of senior members, had not been deemed trustworthy enough to have been informed of its existence.
That and other stories like it had convinced me that all too often government had used secrecy to conceal a multitude of other sins it did not want to come to light. I had seen how secrets could take on a life of their own. In time, it was not foreign enemies but domestic disclosure that the guardians of those secrets often feared most.
But my fascination with the CIA's Book of Honor went well beyond the mere challenge posed by secrecy. The nameless stars weighed upon me in ways I did not yet understand. I felt a need to restore the names to those marked only by a star. I imagined myself to be their instrument. The notion that such profound individual sacrifice could pass into oblivion disturbed me, doubtless more so than those represented by the nameless stars.
For three years I immersed myself in archival records, death certificates, casualty lists from terrorist attacks, State Department and Defense Department personnel lists, cemetery records, obituaries, and thousands of pages of personal letters and diaries, all in search of the identities of these nameless stars. I interviewed more than four hundred current and former covert CIA officers.
One by one, I learned the names of those behind the stars. But it was their lives as much as their deaths that intrigued me most. In the course of those three years I found myself looking not only into the individual faces of the nameless stars but also into the eyes of the CIA itself. In the aggregate, the stories of the stars form a kind of constellation that, once connected, reveal not only the CIA's history but something of its soul as well.
I am of that generation whose vision of the Agency is clouded by revelations of twenty, even thirty years ago. When I spoke with friends about my efforts to uncover the identities of the nameless stars, more than a few asked me if I feared for my life. They assumed my project would mark me out as a target for domestic surveillance and retaliation.
Their concerns represented a sad commentary on how the public perceives the CIA and, by extension, the tens of thousands of men and women who have worked there over the decades. No other arm of government has so sinister a public image or offers such fecund ground for conspiracy theorists. This is largely the Agency's own doing, part of a legacy that includes historic misconduct and ongoing efforts to prevent that past from surfacing.
But in the public's mind the CIA has always been seen less as an instrument of government than as a mythical creature dwelling among us. We yearn to know its secrets but wince at what they reveal about us as a people and a nation. I tried to draw a distinction between the individual and the institution, believing that what is noble in one can be put to ignoble ends by the other. Whether these stars, named and nameless, are heroes or villains, whether their courage was spent wisely or squandered in folly, is for others to decide. It is enough for me that their names be made known and their stories told.
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Re: Ted Gup The Book of Honor

Сообщение Моргенштерн » 28 окт 2013 14:43

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