by Ted Gup
Three days later Tibetan soldiers made the arduous trip back to the border to retrieve that which had been looted—including the remaining gold—and to return the heads of Mackiernan, Leonid, and Stephani, that they might be buried with their bodies. The camel head was taken on to Lhasa. While convalescing, Vassily carved three simple wooden crosses to stand above the graves on the Tibetan frontier.
Mackiernan and the others were buried where they fell. The place was called Shigarhung Lung. There was no funeral for Mackiernan, then or ever. His grave was marked by Vassily’s cross. It read simply “Douglas Mackiernan.” He was buried beneath a pile of rocks, not unlike those many simple graves that he had paused to admire along the way and by which he had plotted his own course. Eleven days after the killing, the border guards who had killed him received forty to sixty lashes across the buttocks.
On June 11, 1950, Vassily and Bessac finally reached the outskirts of Lhasa. In the final entry in the log, Bessac wrote, “Good to be here—Oh God.”
In Washington, State Department and CIA officials fretted over how they might keep Mackiernan’s death a secret. They wondered whether, in the glare of public attention, his cover would be compromised. Such worries were overtaken by more pressing events. At 2:00 P.M. Washington time, June 24, 1950, thirteen days after Bessac and Zvonzov reached Lhasa, North Korean troops poured across the 38th parallel. The Korean War had begun.
Far from Washington, along the quiet coast of southern Maine, Mackiernan’s first wife, Darrell, had just been told of Mackiernan’s death. Now she would have to tell their daughter, Gail, not yet eight. It was a warm June day. She knew that there would be no keeping the news from her daughter, that sooner or later it would seep out in the press. Besides, it had been years since her daughter had seen her father. Already Gail’s memories of him were faint. Still the little girl carried inside of her a gnawing pain that she had not heard from him in so long.
She missed him terribly, and though she understood that her parents were divorced, in the way that any seven-year-old may be said to understand, she could not grasp why he had not come back to visit.
Darrell decided that she would take Gail to their special place, that it was there she should tell her of her father’s death. From their home at 47 Fifteenth Street in Old Orchard Beach, mother and daughter drove to Kettle Cove near Cape Elizabeth. She parked in a lot where Gail could look out on Wood Island, the tiny island that as a toddler she had long imagined was China, where her father was working.
The windows were down. The car filled with the sweet sea air. Now Gail’s eyes were again fixed on the island as her mother told her that her father would not be coming back. He had been killed far, far away. The little girl’s eyes filled with tears, her stare still fixed on Wood Island, as if it were there that her father had died.
It was an equally sunny afternoon in Fairfax, California, as Mackiernan’s twins were taking their afternoon nap in the cribs and Pegge Mackiernan was finishing defrosting the refrigerator. There was a knock at the door. It was a gentleman from Washington, a Mr. Freeman. Pegge was embarrassed at the clutter in her living room but showed him in anyway.
He waited until she had taken a seat on the sofa. He was brief and to the point. Doug, he said, had been killed trying to cross into Tibet. Her husband, he said, had already been buried. Freeman was a man with broad shoulders, and from the moment he had entered the room, he seemed to fill it. Now he expressed condolences on behalf of all those in Washington. Before he left, he advised Pegge: “Say nothing to the newspapers. Keep your own counsel. Be so grief-stricken that you can’t speak to anyone, and if you have a problem, let me know.”
Pegge Mackiernan was now a widow with twins. Between changing diapers and caring for Mary and Mike, she barely had time to grieve. A few days later, on June 12, 1950, she made a humble request of the State Department: that her husband’s remains be cremated in Lhasa and then returned to the United States. At least then, she and the twins would have a place to stand in remembrance.
But the U.S government did not convey her request. It concluded that it could not ask this of the Tibetan government, given that the grave was some four weeks’ travel from Lhasa and that the country was already absorbed in a struggle for its own survival against Communist China.
Even after Mackiernan’s death, the CIA and State Department considered the incident extremely sensitive. A memo stamped “Top Secret,” dated July 13, 1950, notes that “survivors of the Mackiernan party as long as they are in Tibet are in danger of assassination by Communist agents if latter have opportunity.” But word of Mackiernan’s death reached the world in a July 29, 1950, front-page article in the New York Times, date-lined Calcutta. The story reported that Mackiernan, the vice-consul of Tihwa, had been shot at the border.
That same day, the State Department issued a press release announcing Mackiernan’s death. Immediately after, the killing of Vice-Consul Mackiernan was carried in newspapers across the country. But there would be no reference to the Central Intelligence Agency, or to the true nature of his mission.
Even as the CIA and State Department prepared to sort out the death benefits due Mackiernan’s widow and children, there was a growing concern that Tibet itself would soon be lost to the Communists. On August 7, 1950, the U.S. embassy in New Delhi cabled Washington, warning that Tibetan officials were extremely anxious about their fate and were unsure whether to negotiate with the Chinese Communists or to resist invasion. The cable noted that a Tibetan oracle had advised that they should resist, and Tibetan forces were experiencing some success in border clashes, emboldening them.
New Delhi referred to “wild rumors” circulating that the Chinese were massing along the border ready to invade. Tibetan nobles had fled. Food and fuel in the capital were already scarce. The Tibetans were feeling abandoned and ignored by both India and the United States.
It was this moment that news of Mackiernan’s murder swept through the capital of Lhasa. There the Mackiernan incident was interpreted not merely as a tragedy or border mishap but as a grim omen. “They seem to be extremely sad at the turn of events and are now attributing the incident to the destiny of Tibet,” the report from New Delhi observed.
Tibetan officials seized upon the arrival of Bessac as an opportunity to send a message of desperation to Washington. No sooner had he arrived than Bessac became a kind of diplomatic courier carrying a plea for military support to hold off the impending Chinese invasion. On August 30, 1950, Bessac arrived in New Delhi. With him he carried a letter from the Tibetan government addressed to Secretary of State Acheson and stamped “Top Secret.” The letter was an urgent request for howitzers, cannons, machine guns, and bazookas. It implored Acheson to approach President Truman on Tibet’s behalf.
And in a bid to mollify the United States, the Tibetan government dispatched a photographer to take a picture of Mackiernan’s grave. It was sent along with a letter of condolence to the State Department to be forwarded to his widow, Pegge. But the letter and photo were never forwarded. Instead, they ended up in a dusty box at the U.S. Archives.
In late September Mackiernan’s personal possessions were removed from a government safe and returned to his widow. Among the few items were twenty-seven war savings bonds, a Mongolian dictionary, his divorce decree from Darrell, a bill of sale for a 1941 Mercury coupe, and a photo of the twins. There were still many loose ends. Mackiernan had died without a will.
But he was not forgotten. On October 18, 1950, Secretary of State Acheson honored some fifteen diplomats during an hour-long ceremony in the department’s auditorium. A single posthumous medal of service was presented to Douglas Mackiernan, Vice-Consul, Tihwa. On the west wall of the State Department’s lobby, his name was inscribed among the columns of diplomats killed in the line of service. In death as in life, he would be remembered only by his cover story. His name would be the first CIA officer remembered on the State Department tablets, but it would hardly be the last.
Two days after the cere
mony, L. T. Merchant, a State Department official from the Far East Division, met with Pegge Mackiernan. Later he expressed the department’s “deep regret over the tragic death of her husband but told her that she and her children should take comfort from the fact that he had truly died a hero’s death for his country.”
Merchant asked if there was anything he could do for her. Pegge said she would need a job. As a former newspaperwoman, she wondered if she might work for the State Department as an information officer. And she wanted to return to that part of the world she and Doug knew best—Asia. In particular, she hoped to be close to where her husband had fallen.
The department was eager to help the thirty-one-year-old widow and her two-year-old twins. On March 15, 1951, the State Department could claim another “Vice-Consul Mackiernan,” as Pegge Mackiernan was assigned to Lahore in northern Pakistan. It was the State Department’s closest posting to where her husband had been killed. The twins would, for the time being, stay with Mackiernan’s parents.
Not long after, Pegge Mackiernan traveled to Bombay, India, and sought out Angus Thurmer, the CIA’s chief of base there. She entered his embassy office and closed the door behind her. “I have reason to believe my late husband, Doug Mackiernan, was not only a State Department officer but had other allegiances,” she said quietly. “Among his effects I found this and I thought you could send it to the proper place.”
With that, she unwrapped a hand towel and produced the largest revolver Thurmer had ever seen. The long barrel reminded him of one of those old six-shooters from the Wild West. Thurmer disassembled the gun, placed it inside an Agency sack, and put the package inside the diplomatic pouch to be returned to CIA headquarters. He also sent a cable giving the Agency a heads-up that the revolver was on its way. He had never met Mackiernan. He had only heard rumors that one of their own had been killed on the Tibetan border.
Little more than a year later, on October 20, 1952, Pegge Mackiernan remarried in a Jesuit cathedral in Bombay. The groom was John Hlavacek, a journalist for United Press.
Among the thousands of pages of State Department records today in the U.S. Archives relating to Mackiernan, there is but one incidental reference to the CIA. Following Mackiernan’s death, the CIA’s first general counsel, Lawrence Houston, formerly assistant general counsel of the OSS, requested that Undersecretary of State Carlisle Humelsine settle up the Mackiernan estate. That meant drafting a check for $658.90 for Mackiernan’s father. Ironically it was Houston that in September 1947 had advised CIA Director Hillenkoetter that the Agency had no legislative authority to conduct covert operations—at the very time that Mackiernan was doing just that.
In late November 1951 the State Department decided to ask the Tibetan government to compensate the Mackiernan family for his wrongful death. The amount sought: $50,000. But the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi argued that Tibet was already in crisis because of the Chinese Communists, and that any such request for money might suggest the United States was hostile to them or deserting them in their hour of need. Concluding the matter was “politically inadvisable,” the State Department dropped the request for compensation.
As for those who resisted the Communists and whom Mackiernan had aided, they fared no better. In February 1951 the guerrilla leader Wussman Bator and one hundred of his followers were arrested in China. Another five thousand “bandits” had been killed, wounded, or captured, according to Beijing. The Chinese government publicly charged that Mackiernan had been “an American imperialist agent,” a spy, who had orchestrated the resistance against the Communists. The State Department dismissed the allegation as “the usual tripe.”
A year to the day after Mackiernan was murdered, Wussman was executed, according to the Chinese, in front of ten thousand cheering citizens. Beijing boasted that when its troops searched Mackiernan’s house, they found an entire arsenal—153 charges of high explosives, radio equipment, and 1,835 rounds of ammunition. According to testimony during the public trial of Wussman, Mackiernan had set up a kind of “Revolutionary Committee” with Wussman. Its purpose was to recruit battalions of Kazakhs who would lead a campaign of harassment against the Communists.
Mackiernan’s first wife, Darrell, meanwhile was occupied trying to ensure the financial well-being of her daughter, Gail. She persuaded a U.S. senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, to introduce a bill into Congress that would provide $15,000 “as a gratuity to compensate . . . Gail Mackiernan for the loss of her father.” The measure failed to win passage. Instead, the government awarded a portion of Mackiernan’s death benefits—$47.15 per month—to Darrell and her daughter.
Mackiernan’s body was never returned to the States. The exact location of his grave, somewhere near Shigarhung Lung along the Tibetan border, has long since been lost. Over the course of succeeding decades the few at the Central Intelligence Agency who knew Mackiernan or of his CIA employment either passed away or retired. His name, his mission, and his ordeal were, in time, utterly forgotten, erased as thoroughly as if he had never existed.
He was destined to be the CIA’s first nameless star. But there was something Douglas Mackiernan had feared even more than death—imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese Communists. That fate was reserved for another covert operative not long after him.
CHAPTER 2
A Pin for St. Jude
IN A MODEST working-class neighborhood of Yonkers, New York, Bill McInenly dutifully retrieved from the basement a mahogany box containing what little was left from his Uncle Hughie’s life. He placed the small treasure chest squarely on the dining room table and reverently lifted back the lid. Inside, neatly arrayed in a wooden drawer resting on slats, were all the objects Ruth Redmond could salvage of her son’s life. A medal from the Boy Scouts. Honors for winning the broad jump and high jump at Roosevelt High. A silver cigarette lighter with the initials “HR” for “Hugh Redmond.” He so loved his smokes.
Here was his weathered Selective Service card. It showed he did not wait for the outbreak of war to be summoned to service, but enlisted on July 1, 1941. He had blue eyes, it said, blond hair, and a fair complexion. He stood but five feet four inches and weighed 155 pounds. Actually his eyes were a pale and gentle blue, his hair thick and wavy, his complexion white as flour. And there was nothing diminutive about him. His frame was broad and taut.
Beside the Selective Service card was a small box holding a collection of military patches, among them the Screaming Eagle from the 101st Airborne. There were also a lieutenant’s bars and a sharpshooter’s medal.
From the contents of the box it might appear Redmond was among the lucky ones. On June 6, 1944—D-Day—he landed near the Douve River in Normandy. Of the twenty paratroopers in his group, he alone was neither wounded nor killed. Here, in an old box of matches, was a twisted and dark fragment of metal. With it was a note held by yellowing tape. It reads, “Shrapnel dug out of hip in hospital in Brussels, 1944.” This was a personal souvenir of his fight in the Market-Garden campaign in Holland. The date was September 22, 1944. Again he had been lucky.
But Redmond’s luck faltered at the Battle of the Bulge. His wounds required a year in a hospital bed. Set into a blue leather box was his Purple Heart “for Military Merit.” A Silver Star. A Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Clusters. Beside it was a certificate of discharge from the military dated October 18, 1945. After that, judging from the contents of this drawer, he simply ceased to exist.
Mixed in with the possessions of Hugh Francis Redmond were a few things of his mother’s, Ruth’s. A small religious pin of St. Jude, her patron saint. On the back is inscribed “Apostle of Hopeless Cases.” No other saint could have understood so well Ruth Redmond’s prayers or vigil.
Beneath the drawer was a chest full of old newspapers, a passport, a birthday card to Hugh that was returned. Here and there was a scattering of old Chinese coins.
A box of clues. A life reduced to mystery.
Moments later Bill McInenly went back to the basement and returned with a second, le
ss decorous box. This one was more of a rubber tub, blue and covered with a snap-on lid. It was the kind of container in which one might find beers on ice at a tailgate party. But inside, carefully folded to a perfect triangle, was a musty American flag.
Any telling of Hugh Francis Redmond’s life must begin where the contents of his nephew’s box ends. It is Shanghai, China, on April 26, 1951—just three days shy of a year after Douglas Mackiernan was gunned down on the Tibetan border. Thirty-two-year-old Hugh Redmond was now living the good life overseas. But that good life appeared threatened as the Communists tightened their stranglehold on activities in Shanghai. All foreigners were under suspicion.
A short time earlier, Redmond had secretly married. His bride was named Lydia, though he affectionately called her Lily. She was a White Russian and a piano teacher, a dark-haired and shapely woman who some would say was a femme fatale. With Redmond’s help she had managed to leave China. Now it was his turn. He prepared to board a ship, the USS Gordon. But Redmond’s voyage was abruptly ended even before it began.
Police from China’s dreaded Public Security Bureau boarded the ship, escorted Redmond off, and led him away without explanation. Almost immediately rumors began to circulate around Shanghai and Washington that he had been executed.
The Chinese Communist regime under Mao Zedong had rounded up many foreigners, even missionaries attempting to spread the gospel. But Redmond was a case apart. As a commercial representative of Henningsen and Company, a British concern that specialized in the import and export of foods, Redmond appeared to be little more than a salesman—hardly a threat to Mao’s regime. Never one to raise his voice, Redmond seemed so ordinary a fellow that even at the smallest of gatherings he was all but invisible. It was no wonder, then, that when the police pinched him off the ship, he literally vanished.
