The Book of Honor

by Ted Gup

  Redmond had inadvertently become a cause célèbre, an instrument of U.S. propaganda—all of it predicated, of course, upon the simple fiction that he was innocent of the charges of espionage. In virtually every home in Yonkers, and far beyond, Redmond’s name became synonymous with the evils of Communism.

  In Yonkers, resolutions were passed and petitions signed by innumerable civic and governmental groups—the Westchester County Board of Supervisors, local chapters of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, his alma mater, Roosevelt High, and foremost of all, the Yonkers Citizens Committee for the Release of Hugh Francis Redmond. Even New York’s state Senate passed a resolution calling upon President Dwight Eisenhower to renew efforts to win Redmond’s release. It cited “patently false charges of espionage.” It noted that “his continued separation from his family and loved ones constitutes an affront to our sense of honor, decency and human treatment.” Yonkers’s High School of Commerce, where Ruth Redmond was a cafeteria worker, drafted its own resolution for Eisenhower.

  In neighboring Ossining the Knights of Columbus called on “all Americans of all faiths to pray to Almighty God for the deliverance of Hugh Francis Redmond, Jr., and especially that all Catholics offer their Masses, Novenas and Prayers to implore God and His Blessed Mother to encourage and protect him.” Yonkers Mayor Kris Kristensen called on Yonkers’s 160,000 residents to observe a weekend of prayer in which clergy from all faiths would provide petitions to their worshipers. Every petition contained the same phrase: “false charge of espionage.”

  A week after Redmond’s conviction, the State Department cabled instructions to its representative in Geneva, who was then meeting with a Chinese delegation. The directive was unambiguous: “You should protest charges against and sentence of Hugh F. Redmond as unwarranted and unjust, pointing out Redmond was known as legitimate trader, employed by respectable business firm, and that Chinese Communists have unfortunately been in the habit of regarding all foreigners as spies.”

  The U.S. delegation was to ask the Chinese to reexamine the Redmond case. Meeting at the plush Beau-Rivage hotel in Geneva, a member of the Chinese delegation told the U.S. representative that all hope was not lost, “that if Redmond’s future attitude and conduct were found satisfactory by Chinese authorities his case might then be reconsidered.”

  It was a none-too-subtle invitation for Redmond to confess. And indeed, as would become increasingly clear, Redmond held the keys to his own release. If he admitted to spying, the chances were excellent that he would be set free, as had others before him. But then, Redmond was nothing like the others.

  Why he resisted so fervently is not clear. His spy ring had been exposed, its members executed or imprisoned. There was nothing left to compromise or protect. Even within the CIA some were whispering among themselves, marveling at his resistance, but also secretly hoping that he might confess and bring to an end his suffering and that of his family. It had been four years since his arrest. In time, many at the Agency concluded it was nothing more than Redmond’s own foolish sense of honor that blocked his release, and for that they saluted him.

  The ordeal of Hugh Redmond in China mirrored that of his mother, Ruth, in Yonkers. On October 8, 1954, three weeks after his life sentence was handed down, Ruth Redmond wrote a plaintive letter to the State Department. “I have had absolutely no word from my son since later 1950,” she wrote. “He was in prison almost a year when I accidentally read it in the papers. Then I realized why his mail had stopped. It has been just silence since then. It is the silence and the helplessness I feel that is driving me crazy. Is there nothing our State Department can do to send our only son home where he belongs?”

  The CIA was soon to get a second jolt from China. In December 1954 the Chinese announced that two other Americans were about to go on trial for spying. Their names were John Downey and Richard Fecteau—the two CIA men that two years earlier the Agency had quietly declared dead, shot down over China. Downey might well have wished he were dead. For the first ten months of his detainment he was in chains and leg irons and subjected to relentless interrogation.

  As the show trial was about to begin, Fecteau was led into the court-room past an array of cameras and lights. Downey, whom he had not seen in two years, was already in the dock. For the cameras Downey had been decked out in a brand-new black padded suit, shoes, and what resembled a beanie hat. The court officer ordered Fecteau to stand beside Downey. Fecteau could see that Downey looked discouraged. He whispered in Downey’s ear, “Who’s your tailor?” and a familiar smile broke across Downey’s face, bewildering the Chinese guards. But the outcome of the so-called trial was never in doubt. Downey was sentenced to life. Fecteau, as his subordinate, got twenty years.

  The United States reacted with predictable outrage. Henry Cabot Lodge, delegate to the United Nations, noted the incident was yet another reason why this “unspeakable gang from Peiping” did not deserve to be admitted into the ranks of that world body. The New York Times wrote a scathing editorial, and a U.S. senator suggested that the United States blockade the mainland. To listen to the U.S. government, Downey and Fecteau were simply innocents caught up in Beijing’s vendetta.

  Behind the scenes, and with a nudge from the CIA, the Labor Department agreed to waive recovery of those moneys already paid out to Fecteau’s children, though certain lump sum payments were recovered. The CIA reclassified the two men as active. Henceforth they would be listed as on “Special Detail Foreign” at “Official Station Undetermined.”

  A year later, in 1955, DeFelice became chief of the Casualty Branch and set about to do what he could on behalf of all who were imprisoned, killed, or missing. He found himself haunted by the fate of Downey, Fecteau, and Redmond. One of his first actions as branch chief was to get permission to invest the ongoing salaries of the men, rather than have them accumulate year after year in CIA accounts. Then he worked out a complex formula that took into account the average career promotions of the men’s peers at the Agency, and on that basis granted regular promotions to Downey, Fecteau, and Redmond, thereby increasing their salaries and benefits. Their cases were handled no differently than if they were still operational in the field.

  DeFelice was in constant contact with the families. For hours on Sunday afternoons he would be on the phone to Downey’s mother, Mary, trying to win the confidence of a woman who was profoundly distrustful of the CIA.

  DeFelice also established what came to be called the Ad Hoc Committee on Prisoners, which met regularly to discuss what steps might be taken to win the freedom of those being held. It was made up principally of representatives of the operational side of the CIA. But its real purpose, as devised by DeFelice, was to set up an ongoing forum that would ensure that the men were not forgotten. That “ad hoc” group met for more than twenty years with DeFelice as the chairman.

  Meanwhile the campaign by Yonkers citizens on behalf of Redmond continued to build, drawing in members of Congress. In the spring of 1955 Ruth Redmond and leaders of the Yonkers Citizens Committee for the Release of Hugh F. Redmond formally asked to see Eisenhower, both to present him with bound volumes of petitions and to call his attention to Redmond’s plight. Eisenhower’s staff expressed reluctance, fearing that publicity surrounding such a meeting would encourage the families of others to demand a meeting with the president. Redmond’s advocates promised the meeting would remain a matter of strict confidence. The State Department drafted a memo encouraging Eisenhower to see Mrs. Redmond. But Eisenhower declined.

  On Saturday, April 16, 1955, Ruth Redmond and William Gawchik, head of the citizens’ committee, met with State Department officials. Eisenhower’s refusal remained a sore point. A State Department memo notes that Gawchik “felt the government had displayed a deplorable indifference to the fate of Mr. Redmond.” State Department officials, among them Edwin W. Martin, deputy director for Chinese Affairs, tried to reassure them that Eisenhower was aware of Redmond’s situation but that the U.S. government had only limited o
ptions. “We might go to war with the Chinese Communists to satisfy national honor and pride but this would by no means assure the return of prisoners, even if we should win the war, since they might be killed in the process,” the State Department official told her.

  But talks in Geneva that resumed August 1, 1955, began to produce unexpected results. Within nine months, twenty-eight of forty-one Americans in Chinese prisons were released. That left only thirteen. Among these were the three CIA agents—Downey, Fecteau, and Redmond. There followed agonizing months of silence.

  Then, in the fall of 1955, the postman delivered a letter to the Yonkers home of Ruth Redmond. She recognized the handwriting instantly and felt her heart racing. The letter was undated and handwritten in ink on air mail stationery. The envelope had been forwarded by the Chinese Red Cross Society in an envelope postmarked September 14, 1955.

  Inside were the first words from her son in the more than five years since he had been arrested. “I am very well,” he wrote, “and I hope that everyone at home feels as good as I do right now.” But Mrs. Redmond already knew something of her son’s failing health and that anything he wrote would have had to clear the prison censor. Even so, there was a suggestion that not all was well with him. “Where I am right now,” he penned, “there is a hospital, and I am receiving adequate care.” He wrote that he no longer needed medicine for his beriberi or ointment for the inflammation that afflicted his eyes. His only request: heavy woolen clothes. Winter was fast approaching.

  The brief letter ended with these words: “I’m sending all my love to you and everybody back home. Keep your fingers crossed for me. Love, Hughie.” That he had been allowed at long last to write she took to be evidence that the Chinese were not without feelings. It was, perhaps, the sign she had been praying for that her son’s deliverance was not far off. Even those at the CIA who monitored Redmond’s case felt a tinge of optimism.

  But for the Redmond, Downey, and Fecteau families, a long time— seemingly an eternity—would pass before their loved ones’ fates would be resolved.

  CHAPTER 3

  By Chance

  IT WAS June 1951. Little more than a month earlier Hugh Redmond had been dragged off in shackles to a Shanghai prison. John Downey was graduating from Yale and looking forward to a long career with the CIA. Doug Mackiernan’s widow, Pegge, was settling in to her new job as vice-consul in Pakistan. The Mackiernan twins, Mike and Mary, not yet two, were spending the summer with Doug Mackiernan’s parents in Massachusetts, playing on the long and sloping front lawn.

  In Washington, D.C., at 2430 E Street NW—once OSS and now CIA headquarters—the specter of a third world war against one or both of the Communist titans, the Soviet Union or China, appeared to be less a matter of if than when. Chinese troops were pouring across the Korean peninsula. Americans under arms numbered nearly 3 million. And the CIA, just four years old, was embarking on one of its most ambitious periods of expansion. It set its eyes upon a whole new generation of Americans, those too young to have served in World War II but who were imbued with the same unvarnished patriotism that moved their parents and older siblings to enlist. The CIA’s clandestine service, to the few who even knew of its existence, still carried the cachet of an elite and gentlemanly pursuit.

  The Agency had recruiters everywhere—among professors, administrators, and employers—each one strategically positioned to flag young people possessing the requisite character and skills. A premium was placed on those with a knowledge of foreign languages or history as well as the sciences, in particular chemistry, engineering, and physics. But in the late spring of 1951, as a new crop of college graduates emerged, the Agency was the indirect beneficiary of yet another factor—the military’s draft. More than a few of those who did not relish the idea of spending a Korean winter in a foxhole thought the CIA an attractive alternative. Not surprisingly, not long after graduation ceremonies ended, the Agency’s ranks began to swell.

  Among those to sign on in June 1951 was one William Pierce Boteler. Known to his friends as Bill or Botz, he was but twenty-one years old. He had joined to become a covert operative.

  Only a few months earlier the girls at Bryn Mawr had thought him a genuine Adonis. He stood just over six feet, had thick black hair, a swarthy complexion, and incandescent eyes of hazel. The coeds melted in his presence, though he was as yet unaware of his effect on them. He was neither vain nor overly self-assured, but possessed a quiet confidence rare in one so young.

  He had just graduated from prestigious Haverford College on June 9, 1951. There he had immersed himself in literature, philosophy, history, and French. Often he could be found reading poetry, much of which he had committed to memory. His marks were, like everything else about him, rock solid. Studies had come easily for him—so easily, it sometimes irked his friends, who had to spend long hours in the library while Boteler went out for a beer or burger.

  On the playing field, too, Bill Boteler excelled. There was no bravado, just unwavering determination. He played receiver on the varsity football team and a catcher on the baseball team, of which he was co-captain. His closest friends were his teammates. It was Boteler who formed the nucleus around which other friendships took shape. There was Harold “Hal” Cragin, the catcher, Bud Garrison, quarterback and short-stop, Ed Hibberd, who played backfield, and roommate Peter Steere, a guard. All silently admired Boteler. Among them coursed an abiding affection that promised to endure long after college.

  In the classroom Boteler was serious. Around his friends he was playful. The summer before graduation he and his chums Ed Hibberd and Bud Garrison worked as “social directors” at the fashionable Hotel Dennis in Atlantic City, on Michigan Avenue and the Boardwalk. Their job was to dance with the ladies, run the bingo games and volleyball, and walk the beach making sure no one felt left out. One Saturday evening, during an intermission between dances, Boteler and his friends strutted across the hotel stage in drag. It was a faux beauty contest judged by the former director of the Miss Atlantic City pageant. Boteler, his cheeks rouged, his lips ruby red with lipstick, won the contest. He was always a formidable competitor, and on this night he had particularly good reason to want to win. The prize was a date with the real Miss Atlantic City.

  Boteler neither swore nor allowed himself to lose his composure. He was a proper gentleman, maybe even a little too preppy. His close friends thought he sometimes kept his feelings too bottled up inside. But he was never cold, just reserved. He dated widely but seemed immune to the crushes that afflicted his classmates.

  He was close to his father, an insurance salesman in Washington, and was distressed over his mother’s spiraling illness—something he didn’t talk about. He worshiped his older brother, Charles. Though seven years his senior, Charles’s tenure at Haverford overlapped with Bill’s. Like many on college campuses in those immediate postwar years, Charles had interrupted his college education for military service in World War II. Charles would go on to be one of Haverford’s finest football players, even declining an invitation from the New York Giants.

  As graduation approached, no one had to remind Boteler or his friends of the military draft that awaited them. Bud would enter the army’s Counterintelligence Corps, as did Boteler’s roommate, Peter Steere. Cragin had already served in the army’s Military Police before college.

  But Boteler, a child of Washington, D.C., was fascinated with the CIA. The first person he approached with Agency contacts was Frank Campbell, a Haverford alum, thirty years his senior and quite patrician. Campbell encouraged him and vowed to keep an eye on his Agency career. That was how it was done, how the old-boy network worked. It was less an act of recruitment than an anointing. In those early years one could be forgiven for mistaking the CIA for a kind of secret fraternity where new pledges had to be vouched for by those already accepted.

  Shortly after signing up, Boteler found himself in the CIA’s basic training program, then headed by the legendary Matt Baird, a Princeton man. But it fell to Harry T. Gilber
t to mold the young Boteler into a first-rate case officer. Gilbert was a man of eclectic credentials. He served for a time at Los Alamos, was on General Patton’s staff, and had taken part in the Normandy invasion. He would remember the fresh-faced Boteler as a standout, a sterling recruit.

  Boteler was one of some thirty novitiates in that class. Under Gilbert’s tutelage, he would learn to think like a case officer and acquire the essential skills of intelligence-gathering. He would also be instructed in how to keep himself and those who depended on him alive.

  It was not long before Boteler got his first overseas assignment: Germany. A few weeks before departing, Boteler contacted his Haverford classmate Hal Cragin, who was then selling insurance in Philadelphia. Over lunch Boteler explained to Cragin that he needed a $5,000 life insurance policy. He never said he was with the CIA, only that his work would take him overseas and that it could involve some risk. Boteler knew he would have to pay higher premiums. There were some awkward moments as he filled out the form under his friend’s watchful eye. Boteler could not reveal the nature of his work but neither could he write down anything false that might later nullify his policy on grounds of fraud. Cragin did not ask any more questions than he had to.

  In the fall of 1951 Boteler packed his bags and went off to Germany. Precisely what he was doing there remains something of a mystery, though Agency colleagues say he was part of an effort to recruit Eastern European refugees there and dispatch them back behind the Iron Curtain to gather intelligence and engage in activities designed to disrupt and confuse the Communists.