by Ted Gup
Once across the bridge, Ruth Redmond was taken to Canton. At 6:15 the morning of January 8 she boarded a rickety two-engine plane. There was one other passenger on board, a Chinese woman carrying a large bunch of green bananas. Her name was Mrs. Ling and she would mysteriously appear in the background at nearly every stop during Ruth Redmond’s three weeks in China.
From Canton it was a grueling eight-hour flight to Shanghai. Ruth Redmond shivered from the cold. There were no seat belts and she was not even offered a glass of water. Finally the plane landed in Shanghai and she was taken to the Ward Road prison.
In the hours before Ruth Redmond’s arrival at the prison, the warden had carefully explained to Hugh Redmond that his mother would be arriving, that she would be asking if he was guilty of espionage, and that he should prepare a brief statement of confession so that the sound cameras could record it. Ever defiant, Redmond coolly explained that such a statement would be forbidden under prison rules, which prohibited inmates from discussing their cases before visitors.
Trying to maintain his composure, the warden offered to waive the provision in Redmond’s case. Nothing doing, replied Redmond, who then noted that when Chinese prisoners received visitors there were no cameras present. If he could not see his mother in private, he threatened not to see her at all. The enraged warden was forced to accept a compromise. The cameras and reporters would be present, but they would be kept at the opposite end of the meeting room. And there was no more talk of a confession. Once again Redmond had won.
As Ruth Redmond reached the main gate of the prison, she carried under her arm a homemade sweater, woolen socks, and a carton of Lucky Strikes. She walked past the guards and was led into a large room empty of furnishings but for a single table and chairs. Ringing the room were Chinese reporters and cameramen waiting anxiously to record the event. And there stood Hugh Redmond, the son she had not seen since he had left for China in 1946. They hugged for several minutes under the watchful eyes of guards and interpreters, who monitored every word that was said. Their embrace was featured on the front page of the New York Times.
Redmond was dressed in a business suit, a blue shirt, a tie, and a short woolen coat. It would be the first of seven meetings with his mother. At each meeting, mother and son would hold hands and speak softly. After two hours the guards would begin to fidget and the Redmonds knew their time together was over. Then Hugh would be escorted out of the room, and some five minutes later Ruth Redmond would be led from the prison. Only once were Hugh Redmond and his mother permitted to leave the room together. That was for a momentary walk to the prison’s front gate, where a Chinese official snapped a photo of the two together.
The conversation was limited to talk of family, how Redmond’s ailing father was doing, and news of his own friends back in Yonkers. He could also ask of conditions and fashions in the United States. There was superficial talk of his prison routine. He was living in what had been a caretaker’s house at the far end of the prison. He had a single room, furnished with a bed, a chair, a dresser, and a desk. He was permitted one bath a week. In his room he had a radio and was permitted to listen to one hour a day of classical music. Breakfast consisted of Chinese mush, tea, and bread. He said he had little to read, though he had recently read of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Few of the books Ruth Redmond had sent had been delivered. Redmond said he had written her a letter every month. Ruth Redmond expressed surprise. She had not heard from her son in eight months.
At their last meeting the Red Cross representatives arranged for Ruth Redmond and her son to have dinner together. A special meal was prepared at a local hotel and served in the same sparse prison room where they had been meeting.
The last time Ruth Redmond visited her son he volunteered a cryptic message that she wrote down in the log recording her visit. “He said that he hoped it would not be twelve years before we got together again and that without hope one could not live. He added that I should ‘trust in the airlines’ and he would be seeing me soon.”
Upon her return, Ruth Redmond learned that the Yonkers Board of Education had promoted her in her absence to manager of the cafeteria at Franklin Junior High. It was not much more money, but it was good to know the community was behind her. Meanwhile, in Washington, the CIA quietly continued to accumulate paychecks in her son’s account and to promote him as if he were just another promising covert employee on assignment.
Redmond for his part continued to write letters, vainly attempting to keep in touch with the realities and icons of a changing America. “Tell Billy and Tommy [nephews] to make sure they do their homework,” he wrote, “and don’t sit up too late watching T.V. or they’ll grow up to be like Elvis. Love to all—Hughie.” This from a man imprisoned so long he almost certainly had never heard a song by Elvis Presley.
At home in Yonkers, Ruth Redmond vowed to return to China one day and to see her son again. In the meantime she and her son would have to content themselves with letters. It was a cruelly superficial correspondence, censored at both ends. Ruth would write nothing that might upset her son, and he knew that his every word would pass before the prison censor. Still, it was the fact of their correspondence more than its content that sustained them for so many years.
Redmond rarely even hinted at self-pity. Instead, he ended almost every letter with the same thought—a request that his young nephews be taken out for ice cream. Over the years, the arrival of a letter from “Uncle Hughie” came to be a joyous occasion associated with a visit to the ice cream parlor. Outside the Redmond home, memories of Hugh Redmond faded. It seemed that Redmond and his Agency compatriots, Fecteau and Downey, were destined to be relegated to history, a somber footnote in the annals of the Cold War. But the ordeals of these three men were far from over.
CHAPTER 5
Faith and Betrayal
How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed?
JOHN F. KENNEDY TO ADVISERS
AT THE AGENCY it was often the elite who made the decisions and the good old boys who paid the price. So it was with Richard Mervin Bissell, Jr., and Thomas Willard Ray. Bissell was an intellectual, the son of Yankee privilege. Born in the Mark Twain House in West Hartford, Connecticut, he grew up in tailor-made shirts and attended Groton, Yale, and the London School of Economics. Ray was from Birmingham, Alabama, the son of a construction worker and a seventeen-year-old bride. A southerner through and through, he was soft-spoken and unassuming—just “Pete,” to his friends.
Bissell was cross-eyed and gangly, a poor athlete, and a man of eclectic interests. He was said to have memorized the nation’s train schedules, its routes, and even the gauge of the tracks. Ray was short and stocky, a guard on the high school football team. His interests included a pet chicken—until it was stolen.
Bissell was a wunderkind who would go on to teach economics at Yale and MIT and helped forge the Marshall Plan for Europe’s recovery. He joined the CIA in February 1954 with the vague title of Chief of Development Projects Staff. Soon after, he sired the U-2 spy plane, revolutionizing intelligence efforts. By July 1956 his eye-in-the-sky was flying over the Soviet Union, providing a long-denied view of that country’s bomber, missile, and submarine production. Next he oversaw development of the sleek SR-71 Blackbird, a titanium spy plane that flew at two thousand miles an hour at a staggering 85,000 feet above the earth. In an hour its cameras could sweep 100,000 square miles of the planet’s surface. And finally Bissell had a major hand in the Corona satellite project, which ushered in a whole new era in reconnaissance.
But in Bissell’s mind his greatest achievement was the broad interpretation he gave to the doctrine of covert action. He had a major hand in the toppling of the government of Guatemala. In 1958 he was made the CIA’s deputy director for plans, the vaunted chief of clandestine services worldwide and heir apparent to the fabled Allen Dulles, Director Central Intelligence.
Pete Ray had no such illustrious résumé. He had joined the Air National Guard not long after turning si
xteen. He had forged his mother’s signature on the enlistment papers. By 1960 he was inspecting aircraft and spending weekends as youth director of a Methodist church. Flying was all he ever wanted to do, be it behind the stick of a lumbering bomber or a gnatlike Cessna.
Bissell was formal. Even his oldest son and namesake found him emotionally inaccessible. “I’m your man-eating shark,” he once said of himself. Ray was down-to-earth. “Tenderhearted,” his mother, Mary, would say of him.
The two were a universe apart. Hard to imagine such divergent paths would cross, but cross they did in a crisis that forever scarred the CIA.
These two lives began to converge in 1960. It was a time of portents that would shake public faith and chip away at the nation’s naiveté. A year earlier, in Birmingham, as elsewhere, Americans were shocked by congressional hearings into the TV quiz show Twenty-One. The audience had been had. The winning contestant had been fed the answers in advance. That same year, even the music became suspect as radio was rocked by a payola scandal. In Pete Ray’s Birmingham, a listless and segregated town of coke and steel, the code of racial separation threatened to unravel.
And at the CIA it was the golden age of covert action. Emboldened by past successes in Iran and Guatemala, it increasingly saw itself as a source of action, not merely advice and analysis. It had deftly managed to embrace its triumphs and quietly slip its failures.
Notable among the failures was the case of Indonesia. In 1957 President Eisenhower had approved CIA covert actions to support rebel Indonesian army colonels in an effort to oust President Sukarno, who was seen as too cozy with the Communists. One plan involved embarrassing the Indonesian president by distributing photos of a Sukarno look-alike caught in a compromising position with someone posing as a “beautiful blond Soviet agent.” The Agency even had a porno movie made featuring a man wearing a Sukarno mask. Such use of scandal as a psychological weapon dated back to the days of the OSS and remained an integral part of the CIA’s kit to discredit those seen as ideological enemies. (One such ploy involved the distribution of defective condoms passed out in the name of a Philippine senator with leftist leanings.)
And as had happened before, Eisenhower would rely on the doctrine of deniability. He could remain aloof and statesmanlike while others at the Agency did his bidding in the shadows. On April 30 Eisenhower declared with reference to Indonesia: “Our policy is one of careful neutrality and proper deportment all the way through so as not to be taking sides where it is none of our business.”
But the Agency’s plan for Indonesia went well beyond psychological tactics. Arms were supplied to the rebels. B-26 bombers, scrubbed clean of U.S. insignia, were manned by American pilots and flew sorties in support of the rebels. In one instance a CIA aircraft mistakenly bombed a church, killing most of its congregation. On May 18, 1958, Agency pilot Allen Pope was shot down and captured. A week later he was presented at a news conference, along with documents implicating the CIA. Pope would spend four years in prison before Robert Kennedy could win his release. And Sukarno would long remain in power.
The CIA operation in Indonesia came to a close just as Bissell took charge of the division overseeing the clandestine service. Yet the failure in Indonesia was neatly contained and the Agency entered the 1960s full of self-confidence. The hard lessons of Indonesia—presidential denials, a failed ouster, disguised aircraft, downed airmen— were somehow lost on the Agency, though they would soon enough resurface with a vengeance.
In 1960 the CIA prepared to shed the decrepit temporary buildings clustered around the Reflecting Pool on the Mall left over from World War II. Soon it would withdraw across the wide Potomac to Langley, Virginia, and to a grand and gleaming edifice more befitting its new stature and ambitions. The cornerstone had already been laid. An aging President Eisenhower presided over the ceremony. The move represented the end of an epoch in Agency history. The mind-set of World War II and the OSS—that radical threats sometimes required radical solutions—continued on, but now the CIA was wholly a creature of the Cold War. Its new headquarters was a testament to its expanded authority and, as some would suggest, its hubris. No longer at the margins of foreign policy, Bissell’s clandestine service was the primary arrow in the president’s quiver against Communism.
Bissell’s brilliance was beyond question. His projects catapulted the Agency into an entirely new era of intelligence collection. But they also carried with them their own unseen perils. The U-2, Bissell’s crowning achievement, had been emblematic of American superiority and invulnerability, a spy plane assumed to be beyond the reach of the Soviets. Then, suddenly, on May 1, 1960, a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile felled a U-2 at sixty thousand feet. Its pilot, thirty-year-old Francis Gary Powers, did not take the shellfish toxin given him by the CIA and contained in a hollowed-out silver dollar. Instead, he parachuted into the welcoming arms of the Kremlin. Eisenhower vehemently denied the existence of U-2 intelligence overflights, while a NASA spokesman announced it was merely a “weather research plane” gone astray. Then a gloating Premier Nikita Khrushchev paraded about his trophy, the American pilot. It was all too reminiscent of Indonesia, only two years earlier.
Another thirty-year-old pilot, Pete Ray, could not help but take note of the spectacle and watch aghast.
American credibility had taken another direct hit. The president had been caught in an outright lie, doubling the humiliation of the event. The CIA faced a barrage of unfamiliar and unwanted questions. Trust in government was shaken, and even the unflappable Bissell was momentarily at a loss. Undaunted, the CIA continued that year to expand its covert operations and to insert itself into myriad faraway places, including the Congo, Laos, and Vietnam. But it was closer to home that the Agency focused most of its attention.
Ninety miles off the Florida coast, Fidel Castro had set up a revolutionary government. Eisenhower had concluded that Castro had begun to “look like a madman,” that he was a Marxist-Leninist intent upon using the island nation to export revolution throughout the hemisphere. On January 13, 1960, a year after Castro had assumed power, Eisenhower resolved that the Cuban leader must be overthrown.
It was nearly a year before that decision in Washington trickled down to Birmingham, Alabama, and to Pete Ray, then on leave from the Alabama Air National Guard to train at nearby Fort Rucker. Ray would be one of nearly one hundred Alabama guardsmen who volunteered for the top secret Cuban assignment. In the dark about the specifics of the mission, he confided what little he knew to his wife, Margaret, and an uncle, Mac Bailey. Several times he traveled to Washington for polygraph and psychological tests. Ray’s mother, Mary, grew increasingly curious. “What are you going to Washington for?” she asked. He did not answer her. His next trip to the capital, she repeated the question. “I am going on a secret mission,” he said. “What, for the CIA?” she joked. Ray answered with nothing but a smile.
That Ray should have responded to such a shadowy appeal from the government would have come as no surprise to those who knew him. Like many in his National Guard unit, he was no ideologue, but he had absolute faith in God and country. If the government said the Communists were atheists bent on world domination, who was he to say otherwise? “If we don’t fight them on their land,” he once said, “we’ll be fighting them in our backyard.” And the charismatic John F. Kennedy’s January 20, 1961, inaugural address seemed to extend to Ray a personal invitation to service. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he had said, “ask what you can do for your country.” That sort of appeal was irresistible to a man like Pete Ray.
A few days before his departure from Birmingham, allegedly to undergo training, he asked his uncle to help him “sanitize” what few belongings he intended to take with him. Together, they took out the labels from his clothes and buffed the brands from his belts. Ray even ground down the heels of his shoes to remove the manufacturer’s name. He was to take nothing that might link him to the United States. Soon enough he would be assigned a pseudonym. He was said to be
going to a special training school.
Before leaving, Ray told his wife, Margaret, that when she wrote him, she should address the envelope to Joseph Greenland. The address was Chicago. Unbeknownst to her, the other men of the Alabama Air National Guard were giving their wives the same instructions. Just before he left, Ray acknowledged there was an element of risk. “If I should stump my toe, take care of the children,” he told her. Should anything happen to him, he said, he would want her to remarry. With that, he kissed his wife, seven-year-old son Tommy, and six-year-old daughter Janet good-bye.
A week later Margaret received the first of many letters from him. None of them disclosed anything of his location or his mission. “This is a very good school but it sure does take all of my time,” he wrote on February 13, 1961. “I have bought two more suits and a hat. It has been very cold. The top coat sure has helped.” These last two sentences were deliberate misinformation. When he returned home for a brief visit, his wife, assuming he had been in a northern clime, was startled to see that he had a deep tan. What he had not told her was that he was at a secret CIA base deep in Guatemala where he was training Cuban pilots.
In that same letter he reminded his wife to file the income taxes, to repair the brakes on the family car, and to “tell Tommy and Janet Daddy loves them and for them to look after you.”
Subsequent letters were postmarked Washington or Birmingham. He again sent his love to his wife, his son and daughter, and even their terrier, Chase. He fretted about his son’s adjustment to school after the move from Fort Rucker back to Birmingham. “I know it is hard on Tommy to keep up in school due to the change, so don’t be too hard on my little man,” he wrote. Ray remembered that he had himself repeated a year of school as a boy, following a similar move.
