by Ted Gup
There was a grim irony in the CIA’s choice of cover story, the idea that Deuel and Maloney and other Agency operatives in Laos were working for AID on refugee resettlement issues. The reality was that their real mission was adding to the refugee problem and creating an ever-greater need for AID’s assistance. As the CIA succeeded in attracting more and more indigenous tribesmen into the ranks of its anti-Communist units, there were fewer and fewer men left home to plant and harvest rice and other food crops upon which the villages depended for their survival. In time, so many men were enlisted into the ranks of the CIA-backed units that there might well have been widespread famine had it not been for the intervention of genuine AID missions in the region.
For the Agency it was easy to obscure Deuel’s and Maloney’s deaths. Most of the nation was engrossed in the broader quagmire of Vietnam and Southeast Asia and by the antics of President Johnson, who was then at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from gallbladder surgery. Before being released, he was placed briefly under a sunlamp so he wouldn’t appear so yellow to the awaiting press corps. Once released, he would ham it up for reporters, even baring his midriff to show off his scar.
But at Langley those cleared to know the true identities of the two young men and their fathers were decimated by the loss. On October 14, 1965—four days after the crash—Dick Helms penned a letter to his friends Wally and Mary Deuel:
“That your sadness has no limits is well understood by your friends, especially those who knew you thirty years ago even before Mike was born.
“This loss of an uncommon young man is so pointless, so impossible to rationalize. Yet I cannot help wondering whether Mike has not the best of it if the alternative might have been comparable to the kind of thing Dick Holm is going through. It is perhaps a blessing too that young Judith is pregnant. She has something of Mike which may make it easier for her to face the void immediately ahead.
“To you both there is nothing to say. I can only extend the hand of friendship and support which you so warmly offered me so many years ago . . .”
It was signed, “Sadly, Dick.”
Five days later Helms wrote a second letter, this one to Mike Maloney’s father, Colonel Arthur A. Maloney. “Dear Art,” it began. “All of us are shattered by the death of Michael. Coming so suddenly and so unnecessarily, it had a shock that can only have been worse for you. These events seem so wrong and so unfair. These uncommon young men who are willing to go forth for their country unheralded and unsung are indeed the heroes of our modern age, and I feel sure that some day they will be understood and respected far more than they are now. It was ever thus.”
The Deuel and Maloney families were deluged with such letters of condolence from those within the CIA’s covert ranks. Despite the outpouring, it was a delicate matter, balancing grief with the need to maintain security. Even in such a moment as this, Art Maloney would thank Des FitzGerald for his kind note of condolence but scrupulously avoid any mention of the CIA. “The loss of Mike,” he wrote, “brought forth a reaction by the company for which we will always be extremely proud and grateful.” To the outside world the words “the company” would sound callous and remote. But at Langley there were many unseen tears shed in the days after two of its favorite sons were lost.
On October 24, 1965, the day before Michael Deuel’s funeral, the Reverend Russell Stroup delivered a sermon entitled “Pointing with Pride” to the congregation of the Georgetown Presbyterian Church. By then, America was already in the tumult of the antiwar movement, and Stroup seized the opportunity to show that there were young Americans who were a credit to the country. He remembered Mike Deuel coming to him as a high school student, on his own, saying that he wanted to join the church and to be baptized. It was Stroup who performed the baptism.
“Tomorrow at Arlington we will bury Mike Deuel,” he told the congregation. “But the work to which he gave himself goes on. And there are hundreds and thousands of Mike Deuels who are carrying on the work, and there will be more. Those beautiful Americans. I am not ashamed of America.”
Deuel was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in grave 156, section 35, just to the south of the Memorial Amphitheater and the Tombs of the Unknowns. A standard, government-issued stone, it reads:
MICHAEL
MCPHERSON
DEUEL
DISTRICT OF
COLUMBIA
CAPTAIN
USMCR
MAY 13, 1937
OCTOBER 12, 1965
In a letter to his aging mother, Wally Deuel described the funeral:
“Mikie was entitled to be drawn in the casket, covered with a flag, on an artillery caisson, by beautifully matched horses, and with a band playing funeral marches, from the gateway to the cemetery to the grave, and as Mary said, Mikie would have loved it—all by Marines in dress blues—but it was Judy’s wishes that counted, and she said as little pomp as possible, which means no caisson, no horses, and no band, but the flag-covered casket driven in the hearse to the grave. Even so, though, it was almost more than could be endured, with a platoon of Marines lined up on the gentle slope above the grave, and six Marines to carry the casket from the hearse the short distance to the grave. The immediate family sat in chairs quite close to the grave—which was covered over with something green so it looked like grass. There’s three volleys fired by the platoon on the slope above, then taps on the bugle, the six Marines at the casket fold the flag, in accordance with a special set of rules, and the Warrant Officer at the grave hands the folded flag to the widow. He said something to her—more than a few words—but we never have found out what it was.”
As with the graves of so many covert CIA officers buried at Arlington, there was no hint that Mike Deuel had been with the CIA. His cover story went with him to the grave. Behind him, Deuel left a father, a mother, a pregnant widow, and little else—a bank account with $1,869.14 and his beloved 1952 MG valued at $200.
Wally Deuel managed to persuade AID to return to him the last three letters he wrote to his son, which arrived after Mike’s death. In a thank-you note to the AID official, Wally wrote, “God knows what was in them, but probably something ribald or in some other way horribly inappropriate, and I am extremely grateful you didn’t send them on to Judy.”
Six days after the crash, on October 18, 1965, a telegram stamped “Secret” arrived at Langley. It was routed to the director of Central Intelligence, the executive director, the deputy director of plans, and other senior Agency officials. It was from a Philip K. Radnor, chief of station, and recommended that one Karl W. Aufderheide, a GS-11, recently killed in the field, be awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Star. But there was no Radnor or Aufderheide employed by the Agency. These were merely code names. Radnor was really Philip Blaufarb, the CIA station chief in Vientiane running operations in Laos. Karl Aufderheide was Michael Deuel’s code name in the field, a fittingly Germanic name for one born in Berlin.
Blaufarb had been keeping a close eye on Deuel, whom he considered headstrong and a little cocky, but one of the most reliable men he had. He summarized Deuel’s work for the Agency in two paragraphs: “For two years Aufderheide has been in charge of a major paramilitary program involving tribal groups in South Laos. At the time of his death in a helicopter crash in the line of duty his program was expanding faster than any other program in Laos. The number of men under arms had doubled from 1,205 to 2,400 in the past year. As a result of Aufderheide’s imaginative and resourceful direction, several new expansions and probes were underway and territory was being recovered from the enemy. Partially as a result of his efforts enemy morale in South Laos has been deteriorating in recent months and their hold over the indigenous populace weakening.
“Although the tribal elements with which he worked are exceedingly primitive, he succeeded by patient and diligent effort in training many of them to be acceptable and reliable reporters of enemy convoy movement, construction activity, etc. His dynamic and confident leadership was an inspiration to those who worked with him. He was nev
er daunted by difficult or dangerous situations, and it was while visiting one of his teams in a remote mountain area to resupply them and boost their morale that he met his death. His performance of and dedication to duty were in the finest traditions of our service.”
Eight months after the “secret” wire was received, at noon on June 28, 1966, the Deuel family—mother and father, widow and brother— gathered in a small conference room on the seventh floor of the CIA to receive the Distinguished Intelligence Medal on Mike Deuel’s behalf. The medal was presented by Admiral W. F. Raborn, then Director Central Intelligence, but it was far more than a presentation ceremony. It was an assemblage of Agency legends and a gathering of the generations. Among those in attendance were Richard Helms, Desmond FitzGerald, William Colby, Ben DeFelice, Lloyd George, Theodore Shackley, and of course, Dick Holm.
It was later determined that mechanical failure, not enemy fire, had brought down the aged helicopter that killed Deuel and Maloney. Indeed, many of the aircraft in use in Laos were in desperate need of replacement. Not long after the crash, Blaufarb made a formal request that his men receive more modern aircraft. His request was denied.
Wally Deuel would never recover from the loss of his son, though he tried to put up a solid front and find meaning in the tragedy. In a letter to Blaufarb, he wrote on November 5, 1965:
“He [Mike] didn’t want to be a violent-action man all his life, as you probably know. But he was determined to qualify as one, and see what violent action was like, and how good he would be at it, before going on to other things. So he did his damndest to get all the action he could, and the risk of getting killed in the process was, of course, what gave it its most especial savor and attraction.
“Thus there was nothing irrelevant or incongruous in his getting killed in the way he was killed, and, in this meaning of the term, nothing senseless. It was, on the contrary, exquisitely logical, in the bitter logic that always causes the killing of so many of his kind of the best youngest men.
“But of course this is damnably cold comfort to hearts, like Mary’s and Judy’s and mine, that are so very cold just now.”
The outpouring of grief from friends and Agency colleagues was overwhelming. Among these was Ben DeFelice, the man who had taken it upon himself for two decades already to provide comfort to bereaved CIA families, from Hugh Redmond to the Merrimans. “You’ve been magnificent,” Wally Deuel wrote him.
Dick Holm, Bob Manning, and Andre LeGallo, three friends dating back to the days of jungle warfare school three long years earlier, helped organize a trust fund for Deuel’s daughter, Suzanne, born five months after his death. Through it all, Wally and Mary Deuel continued their weekly visits to Dick Holm and reported on his progress to Judy. On one such visit, on November 7, 1965, three weeks after Mike Deuel’s death, Wally found Dick Holm alone in his hospital bed listening to a broadcast of a football game. Deuel wrote his son’s widow:
“The plastic surgeons have operated on his left hand since we last saw him, removing the bent, charred stub which was all that remained of his little finger and which they could not salvage. They also cut down the palm of his hand between the knuckle and the wrist, so that his left hand is now only a three-finger hand, with a palm the width of three fingers, not four . . . The hand and forearm are bandaged up in the shape of a miniature Indian club . . .”
Deuel continued to monitor Holm’s glacial recovery in excruciating detail, forwarding clinical assessments to his son’s widow, Judy, after each such visit. It was as if he could do no less out of memory for his son, or perhaps it was that in some way Dick Holm, who had survived a plane crash and was one of his son’s best friends, had become a son to him.
That was as it should be. On September 1, 1968, three years after Mike Deuel died, his widow walked down the aisle once more in marriage. The groom was Dick Holm. Wally Deuel would write: “The really grand and glorious news of this past year, though, has been that our beloved Judy (our son Mike’s widow) has married one of her and Mike’s and our oldest and most cherished friends, a guy who is everything good you can think of as a husband for Judy, a father for the baby (who adores him) and a son for us.”
Years later Wally Deuel would confide in friends that almost anything could trigger in him a profound and disabling sorrow—the melody of “Taps,” a familiar scriptural reading, even the sound of a young man on the street whistling gaily, as Mike so often did as he approached their Georgetown house. On October 31, 1967, upon learning that one of Mike’s fraternity brothers had named his firstborn son for him, Wally wrote: “Mike will be vastly pleased, in whatever Elysian Fields he now roams, and Mike’s Ma and I were so touched we darned near burst into tears when we got your telegram. Mike’s friends are the noblest band of brothers . . .”
Wallace Deuel retired from the CIA on August 1, 1968, amid a flurry of bureaucratic awards and letters of appreciation from Dick Helms and others. His health deteriorated until he was, in his words, “chair-bound.” He continued to write regularly to Judy and Dick Holm, as he would to a son and daughter. On April 13, 1973, he wrote: “Behold comma it is I exclamation. I will not say I am alive and well and living in Washington D.C., because I sure as hell am not well, but I am alive, sort of, and I’m in Washington D.C.”
He was then in his twelfth year of emphysema and had recently had a pulmonary embolism. But Deuel’s “melancholy,” as he called it, was brought on not only by his own physical deterioration but by a lingering sense of loss and by the spectacle of his beloved CIA in the throes of what appeared to be an act of self-destruction. It was coming under increasing public scrutiny and criticism, as was the entire U.S. government. Watergate had erupted. Ugly accounts of CIA excess were coming to light, an omen of even darker revelations to come. And then there was Vietnam.
Within the CIA internal dissension over the conflict in Indochina had taken a profound toll. At the height of the Vietnam War the Agency had occupied three floors of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and dispatched, by one count, some seven hundred employees there. Wally Deuel’s friend Dick Helms, Director Central Intelligence, had been buffeted by years of turmoil and by hostility from Presidents Johnson and Richard Nixon. His analysts’ vision of prospects for Vietnam was deemed too pessimistic. The intense bombing of North Vietnam—even ten thousand sorties a month— would not break the will of the Communists or interrupt the flow of men and matériel, the CIA had concluded. “Not since the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 had the Agency put so much on the line, and lost it through stupidity and mismanagement,” wrote the CIA’s former senior Vietnam analyst, Frank Snepp.
Public suspicion of the CIA deepened. Support for covert activities was waning. Sordid accounts would surface of domestic surveillance under Operation Chaos, of efforts to destabilize the government of Chile’s Salvador Allende Gossens, and of the ruthless Phoenix Program in Vietnam, in which more than twenty thousand were killed. A malaise settled over the Agency from which it would not soon emerge. In February 1973 Nixon sacked Helms as CIA head, appointing him ambassador to Iran. Those who had spent their lives with the Agency and were proud of that affiliation were heartsick and in shock.
Two months after Helms was fired, on April 17, 1973, a disillusioned Wally Deuel wrote Dick and Judy Holm, then stationed in Hong Kong: “As for my former place of employment, not only is there nothing I can do about that, but I don’t even know what’s going on there. So far, I have heard reports only from an incredibly small number of people, people who are all without exception old, decrepit, out of touch as badly as I am—and plunged in the blackest despair . . . A fine basis for my trying to figure out what the hell is happening in Langley, wouldn’t you say?”
Wally Deuel’s health deteriorated rapidly. He passed in and out of consciousness, sometimes mistaking his son Peter for Allen Dulles, his revered leader at the Agency so many years before. On May 10, 1974, Peter arranged to accompany his father on an air ambulance from Maryland to Chicago. “I’m taking you home,” Peter told him. W
ally Deuel had had a tracheotomy and was barely able to speak, but he made his resistance known by shaking his head and whispering a soft “no.” He had had enough.
Somewhere over Indiana, he died. He was cremated and his ashes scattered in a cemetery that borders an expressway. Each time Peter drives by he offers his father a respectful salute.
Mike Deuel’s daughter, Suzanne, was born in the spring of 1966, two years before Judy Deuel and Dick Holm were wed. For them and for Wally Deuel it was a union that closed many a circle. But it was not without its secrets. Suzanne was raised believing that Dick Holm was indeed her biological father. For the first years of her life, the name Mike Deuel meant nothing to her. She had not yet picked up on the hints and anomalies, like the wedding photo of Dick Holm and Judith in which a baby girl is seen in the background.
Intuitively she sensed something was amiss. For years she was visited by a recurring nightmare in which she was speeding down a steep hill on roller skates. On either side of her was a figure in a children’s red wagon. It was Dick Holm, but there were two of him. She knew one to be her father. But the other she knew to be a bomb which would detonate at her embrace. “Pick me,” cried the one, “the other is the bomb.” Suzanne could never tell which was which.
She could not be blamed for feeling as if she grew up in a world of deception. It was not until she was nine or ten that she remembers stumbling across a box of old records and memorabilia in the basement. For hours she dug through the crate fixated on photos of a man whose smile and eyes bore an uncanny resemblance to her own. She found his lighter, his ring, and newspaper accounts telling of a plane crash. She also found references to his burial at Arlington.
When she turned sixteen and got her driver’s license, she secretly drove to Arlington National Cemetery and found her father’s grave. After that, the nightmares ended. But whether because of secrecy constraints or the emotional scars left by Mike Deuel’s premature death, Suzanne never felt comfortable asking her mother or Dick Holm about the man she had come to know as Mike. He would remain a shadowy presence throughout her adolescence, a face she could see hints of in the mirror but would come to regard as something of a taboo subject.
