by Ted Gup
A second stunning surprise awaited her. It was not until she was in high school that the man she called “Father,” Dick Holm, confided in her that he was not with the State Department, as she had been led to believe all those years, but that he was a covert operative with the CIA. Such deception of one’s own children to maintain cover is often the hardest and most exacting act of dissembling a covert officer must face. Suzanne, like countless other children of CIA officers, at first felt deceived and then, for the first time, began to perceive a pattern where before there had been only confusion. Suddenly emerged a logic that accounted for a lifetime of mystery and secrecy.
A decade later, when she was living in Paris and engaged, she wrote a Cornell classmate of her father’s asking if he might share with her some memory of Mike Deuel. That classmate contacted the entire fraternity house, who, one by one, poured out years of memories in letters sent to Paris. By the time Suzanne married she had come to know her father as few daughters ever do.
As for Dick Holm, after the crash no one would have thought any worse of him if he had retired on full disability. Instead, after two years of surgery and rehabilitation he was back in the field as a covert case officer—not to mention a spirited tennis player. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming a respected CIA chief of station. Based in Hong Kong, he ran several covert operations across the border in the People’s Republic of China. For Dick Holm, a man who once contemplated shooting himself to end the unbearable pain, life was once again good, with family, work, and a restoration to health. In a January 16, 1972, letter to Wally Deuel he had written: “All this and interesting work! You can see that life is treating me well. More than ample justification for my determination not to die in that damn Congo.”
Holm’s long-ago ordeal had become a part of the Agency’s lore. Wally Deuel would relate how one day at Langley Dick Holm was speaking to some people in the hall when the director, Dick Helms, passed by, stopped, and said, “Hi, Dick.” Holm’s associates were astonished that the director would stop to say hello and would know him by name. Holm simply laughed it off. “Listen,” he said, “if you’d cost him a million dollars, he’d know who you are too”—a reference to the medical expenses incurred in his two-year convalescence.
Holm was later named head of the Agency’s Counterterrorist Center, overseeing operations to blunt terrorist activities worldwide. As a final plum assignment, prior to retirement, Dick Holm was made chief of station in Paris. It was his fluency in French that had taken him to his ill-fated Congo mission in 1964, and now that same proficiency was cited in rewarding him with Paris.
But in January 1995 a covert CIA operation in France was compromised, as it came to light that a female agent under deep cover had fallen in love with the French official she had targeted. Her mission had been to learn France’s position in upcoming world trade talks. The United States was profoundly embarrassed as the tale of economic espionage against a close ally came to light. In March 1996 Holm was pressured to resign under a cloud. It was widely viewed within the CIA that, after years of loyal, even heroic service, Dick Holm had been made a scapegoat to save face for the Agency. His treatment further lowered morale within the CIA’s covert ranks.
Six months later, in a transparent effort to boost sagging morale and extend an olive branch to Holm, he was invited to return to Langley, where he was presented the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. But by then it was too late. His reputation was stained. He had tried to defend himself publicly but found that while the Agency felt free to blame him publicly, it invoked its own rigid secrecy constraints on him, preventing him from discussing the case or restoring his good name.
Mike Maloney’s father, the colonel, stayed with the Agency until he retired in January 1972. He and his wife moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where he became a eucharistic minister, puttered about in the garden, and let his grandchildren stomp about the house in his leg brace. But Mike’s death continued to cast a pall over his days. “The spark went out of that man’s life,” remembers Mike’s widow, Adrienne. In his last years Mal Maloney was stricken with Alzheimer’s and had to be fed by others. A proud man, he died on August 18, 1994, at age eighty in the Avon Convalescent Home in Connecticut.
As for Mike Maloney’s widow, Adrienne, she would never remarry. Four months after her husband died, on February 20, 1965, she gave birth to a second son, Craig Michael Maloney. She devoted herself to raising her two boys, Craig and Michael. In time, both boys toyed with the idea of joining the CIA. Craig formally applied but later withdrew his application. “I just came to the realization that I was doing it for the wrong reasons,” he would say later. “I was chasing a ghost.” His brother, Michael, filled out a CIA application but missed his interview because of flu. “I took it as a sign from God that I wasn’t supposed to do it,” he concluded. There would be no third generation of Maloneys in the CIA.
Adrienne Maloney, now fifty-seven, never put her young husband’s death fully behind her. She had her wedding ring, which had been inscribed “FOREVER M.A.M. TO A.L.M.,” set into the base of a gold chalice and given to a church to be used in sacraments. A few years ago she gathered up Mike’s letters and put a match to them. Even that could not distance her from the loss. Much of that pain stems from watching her two sons growing up without a father. They knew only that he died in a helicopter crash and that they were not allowed to discuss his death or the circumstances surrounding it with anyone.
Their father’s entire life was shrouded in mystery. Son Craig, who was in utero when Mike Maloney was killed, would lament that he had never seen his father’s face. Adrienne would comfort him by saying that at least his father had felt him kicking inside her and had chosen for him his name.
There was one moment when the CIA seemed to relent in its otherwise all-encompassing invocation of secrecy. In 1993 the Maloney sons were permitted on one occasion to visit the Agency and were shown a scant few records, many of them heavily redacted, from their father’s personnel file. Though the file jacket was stamped “Top Secret,” it shed no light on either their father’s life or his death. Anything sensitive had been removed. What was left were his college transcripts, his essay on why he wanted to join the CIA, and a few perfunctory application materials. But the visit meant something to the Maloney sons nonetheless. So, too, did the fact that their guide and companion at the Agency that afternoon was none other than Dick Holm. No one had to explain to him how much had been lost that October day in 1965.
For years Adrienne asked the CIA to inscribe her husband’s name in the Book of Honor, believing it was something she should do for her two sons and for her husband’s memory. As recently as 1996, while at an Agency memorial service, she asked then CIA Director John Deutch if he would examine the Maloney file and reconsider adding her husband’s name to the book, thereby releasing her and her sons from the onerous burden of silence they had endured. “Why,” she asked Deutch, “must it all be kept a secret after more than thirty years?”
“Why don’t you write me a note?” Deutch told her. “Don’t put down any explanation, no song and dance, just a note.”
Adrienne Maloney did just that and sent it registered mail. Then, as before, the CIA did not respond to her request. Each time she attempted to follow up with a letter or phone call, the Agency told her that her letters had been lost.
Son Michael even wrote a poem for his brother, Craig, about their father and the burdens of a life enshrouded in secrecy. That poem now hangs on Craig Maloney’s wall. It reads in part:
Faded Stories, Secrets Told,
A Marble Star To Behold,
Her Pictures Gathered In One Place;
To Suffice For One So Bold?
Track the Ghost Who Wears Your Face
Through The Halls of Time and Space.
“It’s thirty years ago,” says son Craig Maloney, “and I can’t help but think of what kind of rhetorical crap and political crap it is that they can’t release his name. His name deserves to be there
. We write letters and they never go where they should. I think it’s completely unjust.”
Finally, in September 1997 an article in the Washington Post by this author identified Mike Maloney as one of the nameless stars. The same day the article was released, Adrienne Maloney received a phone call from the Agency informing her that the CIA had reconsidered her request and had decided that her husband’s name could at last be inscribed in the Book of Honor. A short time later his name was added to the book.
But nowhere in the Book of Honor appeared the name of Mike Deuel, who sat beside Maloney on that same fateful helicopter on that same covert mission some thirty-five years ago. His daughter, Suzanne, and other family members had to content themselves with an unnamed star and shoulder the burden of an arbitrary code of secrecy. In this they were not alone. So, too, did the families of John “Lone Star” Kearns, Wayne McNulty, and John Peterson—all of them still nameless stars from the long-ago secret war in Laos.
That secret war dragged on for more than a dozen bloody years, but it was a secret for a short time only. So many men and supplies could not long be concealed. To some degree it was an act of legerdemain practiced upon the American public, whose patience and support of the Vietnam conflict were already flagging. To some degree, too, it was a feeble attempt to avoid international condemnation for violating a promised neutrality— one already flagrantly breached by the other side.
The two Mikes, Deuel and Maloney, were neither the first nor the last of the CIA paramilitary officers killed in the conflict. And like Deuel and Maloney, their Agency affiliations would be covered up.
Even as the two Mikes’ brief collaboration ended, the Communists were expanding their vast network of roads and resupply routes, creating a major artery for the North Vietnamese war effort. A “Secret” CIA intelligence assessment provided to Lyndon Johnson seven weeks after Deuel and Maloney were killed notes that the Communists were moving largely at night and that they had concealed the roads with overarching trellises and vines, making them virtually invisible.
Even years later Dick Helms and other senior Agency officials would extol the efforts of its men and women in Laos and speak of the CIA’s costly campaign as if it had been a success. And those in the jungles and mountains who fought the covert war in Laos continue to say “We won our war,” contrasting it with the Vietnam conflict, which was bitterly lost to the Communists following an unseemly withdrawal.
But in the eyes of history it is a meaningless distinction, an expression of wounded pride. No sooner did Vietnam fall than Laos followed suit. On December 3, 1975, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic formally came to power.
Many could argue—and did—that Mike Deuel and the others who died in Laos died for naught, that their efforts failed to sway events. But though the mission ultimately failed, their grit is still quietly celebrated at Langley by the aging few who knew them, particularly those from the Agency’s class of 1961. They remember Mike Deuel not as a casualty of war, but as the standard-bearer of their class and generation. “I want to make a difference,” Mike Deuel would often say. In that, he spoke for them all.
CHAPTER 8
Homecoming
IT WAS dubbed “the Summer of Love,” though it began in the spring. That April 15, 1967, some 300,000 demonstrators, among them Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., activist and pediatrician Benjamin Spock, and folk singer Pete Seeger, came together for a peace march through New York City in protest of the undeclared war in Vietnam. For the CIA it was to be a particularly trying year. An article in a magazine called Ramparts drew national attention to the CIA’s secret funding of American student groups, educational foundations, and voluntary organizations operating overseas. In response to the public outcry that followed, President Lyndon Johnson set up a commission to investigate the scope of CIA involvement in such groups. It would be the first of many such revelations to rock the Agency, whose natural instinct was to close ranks, further isolating it from the mainstream of American culture.
That same year, budgetary cutbacks at the State Department reduced the number of cover positions available to CIA case officers. Congress was taking an ever-greater interest in intelligence matters. Concern was growing over the Agency’s ability to conceal its more ambitious covert operations. Though more than half the Agency’s personnel and budget continued to go to the clandestine service, the era of expansion was coming to an end. In June 1966 Richard Helms had been named Director Central Intelligence, but his attentions and energies would be largely consumed by the steadily unraveling situation in Southeast Asia. And not even Langley was immune to the upheaval in political and social values that was sweeping the country.
In such times it was easy to forget the fate of Hugh Redmond, John Downey, and Richard Fecteau, who, a generation earlier, had disappeared behind China’s dreaded “bamboo curtain.” They had long before been consigned to history. But for Redmond’s family the summer of 1967 would be remembered as the summer they received his last letter.
There was nothing foreboding or even memorable about the two-page letter, except, perhaps, as the family would later observe with grim pride, that it was dated July 4, 1967. “It just dawned on me that today is the Fourth of July when I wrote the date above,” Hugh Redmond wrote. “Did you have a big celebration with fireworks and all?” It closed, as his letters so often did, with a gentle reminder: “Don’t forget to buy ice cream for the children. Very best regards to you all, Love Hugh.” And there was this final postscript. “Please send a bottle of aspirins.”
As months passed without further word from him, his mother, Ruth, and sister, Ruthie, grew despondent. They feared that something terrible had happened to him. But if something terrible was happening to Redmond, it was also happening to all of China. It was called the Cultural Revolution. The convulsions it caused China made the unrest in America look tame by comparison. Its object was to foment revolutionary fervor, as millions of Red Guards waving Mao’s Little Red Book unleashed their fury against any and all institutions that promoted stability or the preservation of cultural values. Redmond was an incidental victim of that typhoon. He was sentenced not to death, but to silence.
But long before that last letter, there was evidence that the years of imprisonment, many of them spent in solitary confinement and shackles, had taken their toll. Redmond could still fend off the crude attempts at indoctrination, but he was now more vulnerable to the corrosive realization that day by day his life was trickling away. His father had died an invalid in 1959. Redmond’s own body, despite a strict regimen of exercise, was deteriorating, and his knowledge of the world beyond his cell was increasingly gleaned from books. With so much time on his hands, worries were magnified into obsessions.
Not the least of these centered on his wife, Lydia, or Lily, as he called her. She appeared to have inexplicably stopped writing in July 1959. Whether any letters from her were among the correspondence intercepted by the Chinese is not known. Month after month Redmond waited to hear from her. Finally he wrote his mother asking her to find out what had happened to his wife. Ruth Redmond knew the answer. Lydia Redmond had divorced her son. But his mother could not bring herself to tell him. She feared it would shatter him. Instead, she chose to ignore his inquiries and avoided the subject completely.
But the more he pressed, the more she was forced to hint at the answer. She had always detested her daughter-in-law, a woman whom, no matter how irrational her judgment, she secretly blamed for her son’s imprisonment. Two years would pass without a word from his wife. For Redmond these were years of anguish.
Then, on November 28, 1961, Lydia sent Redmond a letter and a belated birthday card. She told him she was living in Washington, D.C., working on her music and teaching. Redmond drew little comfort from her words. “From her letter,” he wrote his mother, “everything is the same as it was and she is still my wife, no mention of divorce, etc. etc. Naturally I am more confused than ever and do not know what to think. Please make a new investigation. This thing mu
st be cleared up. I can’t tell what the score is. All she said in her letter was that she was sorry for not writing for so long . . . I don’t like this in between, in again, out again, off again, on again game.” By February Lydia was again writing regularly, with what Hugh Redmond viewed as nothing more than a casual apology for the two-year hiatus. The silence had driven Hugh Redmond to the brink of despair.
Each of Redmond’s monthly letters to his mother was now spent pleading with her to find out the truth about Lydia and whether she was in fact still his wife. He was losing patience and uncharacteristically lashed out at his mother and at the world at large. In a June 1, 1962, letter he berated her for sending him a copy of Redbook magazine. “This is a disgusting magazine,” he wrote. “For addled-brained adolescents and harebrained women. Some of the books you send are very poor. I know that you don’t read them yourself, but please ask that the book shop use a little discretion. No more books about queers and fairies and pansies if you don’t mind. I don’t know why those kinds of books are even published.”
His anxiety over Lydia was compounded by myriad other frustrations and by the awareness of how little control he had over his own life. He had entered prison a proud young man. Now he was destitute, reduced to a single pair of tattered underpants, shoes nearly without soles, and a relentlessly insipid diet. He inhabited a vacuum. For months he had been asking his mother for vitamins, unaware that she had been including them in each package but that they were being pilfered by the Chinese. This, too, infuriated him.
But the underlying cause of his angst remained the status of his marriage. “Please let me know what happened to Lily,” he wrote. “Is she remarried? If so what is her new name? I have been waiting now for nine months to find out. Don’t you think that it is about time that you let me know what is going on?”
