by Ted Gup
Spessard’s flight represented the first resumption of the resupply effort in many months. It took off without incident and for the next five hours was tracked closely by the Agency, which was in constant communication with the aircraft. It was an Agency communications officer in Kinshasa who first reported that he had lost contact with the plane.
At eight o’clock that Monday night, November 27, 1989, in Hagerstown, Maryland, Debra Spessard was in her kitchen. Her mother was giving her a perm. The doorbell rang. It was a man in a black suit carrying a briefcase. He may or may not have given his name. Debra Spessard cannot remember. What he had to say made everything else melt away. Jim Spessard’s flight, he said, was missing.
The next morning at eight he called back. James Spessard, he said, was dead. There was little else he could or would tell her. The area where the plane had gone down was remote. The Agency had not yet been able to reach it.
It was only later that the Agency determined that the Lockheed L-100–20 Hercules cargo plane had been on final approach to the airfield near Jamba, Savimbi’s headquarters. It was too risky to turn the runway lights on until the last seconds and the pilot was forced to rely on instruments. In the utter blackness of night, there was no hint of a horizon by which to steer. It was already too late when he discovered he was coming in too low. He attempted to circle but the wing clipped a treetop and the plane cartwheeled into the ground. Almost immediately the fuel and ammunition aboard exploded in a fireball that consumed the aircraft, its crew, and its cargo. One Savimbi warrior, no older than sixteen, had been lying down on the cargo near the tail. He was thrown clear and survived almost unscathed.
Spessard, Petty, Lacy, Rieger, Bensch, Atkinson, and Savimbi’s men perished in the crash. Many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition.
Soon after the crash, an Agency team composed of a dozen people— investigators and medical examiners—was on-site. They recovered the bodies, the black box, and remains of flight instruments, and scoured the area for anything of a sensitive nature that could prove awkward for the Agency. Anything not consumed by fire was retrieved.
The six coffins arrived at Dover Air Force Base without any of the usual ceremony or public spectacle that awaits many of those who are killed overseas in service to country. A photo would record that a nondescript cargo plane delivered six crates. “Handle with Care” stenciled on their sides and bound by white cord.
Five of the caskets—those of Petty, Lacy, Bensch, Rieger, and Atkinson—were flown to Florida via yet another nondescript cargo plane which was promptly taken inside a hangar at Tepper Aviation. The five identical silver eighteen-gauge steel caskets, all of them sealed, were placed in hearses and driven to the Twin City Funeral Home in Niceville, Florida.
For the next two days there were visitation hours as mourners passed by the caskets, each in its own room. Funeral director Joe MacLendon was struck that many of those who passed by the caskets were not attired in the usual black suits but wore instead weathered leather jackets and appeared, to use his word, “tough.” They reminded him of the character Indiana Jones. He wondered if some of those in attendance were mercenaries.
From Florida the caskets would go their separate ways. But first there was paperwork to be done and regulations regarding the transfer of bodies that had to be satisfied.
For funeral director MacLendon this was not so easy. There were no accompanying death certificates. What scanty records arrived from Dover were largely illegible. Under the entry “Circumstances Surrounding Death” was written “Unknown.” So it was with “Place of Death” and “Date of Death.” There was no information to be had, no contact with the government, only a check from Tepper Aviation to cover the cost of the funerals.
In an effort to oblige the widows, MacLendon dummied up the necessary documents, made up what information he didn’t know, and had them notarized. And with that, the caskets went out.
George Lacy’s remains were flown by private plane to Oklahoma and interred in a family plot in El Reno. George Bensch’s body was returned to Walldorf, Germany. Michael Atkinson’s casket was returned to the island of St. Lucia. There, following his widow’s request, the Cricks Funeral Home drilled holes in the casket and attached iron weights to it so that it might be buried in the sea he so loved. A small flotilla of fishing boats escorted the coffin three miles out of Rodney Bay. The swells were high and the mourners thought it only fitting that on such a day they would bury a man unfazed by rough weather. Then, with words of blessing from a Methodist minister, the coffin was lowered into the Caribbean.
Petty’s and Rieger’s final journeys would take an even more unusual twist.
Back in Hagerstown, CIA officers asked the Spessard family to provide dental records to help them identify Spessard’s remains. Spessard’s family was in the cemetery business, but even for them it was a grim assignment. They asked to view the body. They wanted to make sure that the remains were indeed those of James Spessard. But the Agency refused. The remains, they were told, were in a body bag within the coffin and were simply “not viewable.”
But Debra and other family members were insistent. Years earlier Jimmy Spessard had tattooed on his chest the little yellow bird known as Woodstock from the cartoon Peanuts. They asked to see that the corpse had such a tattoo. The Agency refused their request. The family asked if a picture could be taken of the tattoo. This, too, was denied. They could not even pick out the casket.
A day later three Agency employees, two men and a woman, showed up at the Spessard home, which was now filled with mourners. The three arrived in a black car, dressed in black and carrying black briefcases. They asked Debra Spessard and her brother if they could go somewhere where they might be alone and be free to talk. Debra Spessard led them to the basement rec room, where she and her brother took a seat on a sofa.
If the Agency was concerned with Spessard’s loss, it was also concerned with just how it was going to conceal the circumstances of that loss from the public and press. Damage control was foremost on their minds. They asked Spessard’s widow if she would be willing to tell friends and any reporters who might make inquiries that her husband had been working for a private company and was moonlighting for a few extra dollars at the time he was killed. That way his link to the Agency might remain a secret.
Debbie Spessard said she would not lie about the circumstances of her husband’s death. “If Jimmy was going to die for his country,” she told them, “it isn’t going to be perceived that he died for a paycheck.” The woman from the Agency asked again, all the while holding Debra Spessard’s trembling hands. Twice more, Debra Spessard refused. She eventually agreed to provide any reporters with a telephone number the Agency had given her which would shunt reporters off the track of the CIA.
At the Pentagon, three days after the crash, briefer Pete Williams was fending off reporters’ questions. Williams was asked who was on the flight, what it carried, and which government agency, if any, it was affiliated with. “The only thing I know,” he told reporters, “is what the army put out, which is that the person named James Spessard—S-P-E-S-S-A-R-D—was an army civilian employee, but that’s all I know about it.”
The CIA, when asked about the flight, issued its usual line, delivered by spokesman Mark Mansfield: “As a matter of policy, we never confirm or deny such reports,” he said.
The crash had been catastrophic for the Spessard family. For the Agency, too, it was viewed with grave alarm. The timing could not have been worse. Just two days after the crash, President George Bush was to meet with the Soviets’ Mikhail Gorbachev for a much-touted summit in the Mediterranean off Malta.
And only two days prior to the Angola crash the U.S. government had made much of a plane that had crashed in eastern El Salvador that was revealed to be carrying Soviet arms destined for leftist rebels in that country. The twin-engine Cessna that originated in Nicaragua carried some twenty-four SA-7 antiaircraft missiles in its belly. Its crash and the subsequent publicity surrounding i
t had provided a propaganda bonanza and potential leverage in the upcoming summit.
The United States could argue that the Soviets were still dirtying their hands in anachronistic proxy wars long after America had chosen to take the high ground, repudiating such nefarious intervention in Third World conflicts. An indignant Bush administration had even lodged a formal protest with the Soviet Embassy. Among those most eager to mine the propaganda benefits of that crash was CIA Director William Webster.
The crash in Angola threatened to expose U.S. hypocrisy and put the United States and Soviet Union on an equally equivocal moral footing in the eyes of the world. No one understood this better than George Bush, who as president was acutely sensitive to such developments on the eve of a summit. But as the only president to have also served as Director Central Intelligence he was sympathetic to the risks of covert operations. The CIA and State Department did what they could to mislead and distract the press and to ensure that the Angola crash got only minimal attention.
In the recent past the CIA had been quite successful at that. Just three months prior to the Angola crash, the Agency had lost one of its own in another African plane crash and managed to completely conceal its link to the fatality despite a flood of national and international press attention.
On August 7, 1989, a high-profile U.S. congressman, Mickey Leland, a Democrat from Texas, on a humanitarian and fact-finding mission in Ethiopia, had been en route to a refugee camp. His twin-engine plane crashed into a cliff during a violent storm. All sixteen passengers and crew were killed. Among the retinue of U.S. officials accompanying the congressman was twenty-five-year-old Robert William Woods. He was said to be a lowly third-level vice-consel with the State Department in the embassy at Addis Ababa.
But Woods was not what he seemed to be. A brilliant young man, he had attended Harvard as a National Merit scholar, graduated cum laude with a degree in history, was a licensed pilot, and, for the preceding two years, had been a covert officer of the CIA. Woods had volunteered for Ethiopia though he understood well its many dangers.
Just prior to leaving he had asked an attorney to draft a will. The attorney had said he was busy and that surely it could wait until Woods’s scheduled return to the States in January—when Woods was to be married. What, after all, was the rush? Woods was but twenty-five. But he insisted and it was done before his departure. And not long before leaving, Woods took his fiancée, Colleen Healy, for a stroll through the Forest Hills Cemetery in Kansas City, Missouri. “This is where my grandfather is buried,” he pointed out, “and this is where I want to be buried, beside him,” he said. And so he would be.
But the Agency was intent upon making sure that no one linked him to Langley. The presence of an Agency operative assigned to Ethiopia was seen as extremely sensitive. The United States had withdrawn its ambassador nine years earlier, in 1980, and had operated only a skeleton embassy staff in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia had aligned itself with Moscow and Libya, and the United States had adopted a policy of encirclement, arming Somalia, Kenya, and Sudan.
The Agency had reason to fear that Woods’s death might generate unwanted attention given the interest in Leland and the prominence of his family. His father, Dick Woods, was senior vice-president and general counsel to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
But in the end, Woods’s death was utterly eclipsed by the attention given Congressman Leland’s loss. Woods’s name would later be added to the State Department wall, continuing the fiction of his cover story, and another nameless star was written into the Agency’s Book of Honor. His family even established a fund in his name at Harvard. But the secret of his CIA employment was intact.
Three months later the Agency faced an even more complicated situation in Angola with multiple fatalities and a volatile political situation. But while Langley fretted about keeping a lid on the accident, the Spessard family concerned itself with funeral arrangements for thirty-one-year-old Jimmy Spessard. Given Spessard’s six years in the navy and his death in the performance of governmental service, the family had hoped that the Pentagon would provide the services of Arlington’s famed Old Guard and a military funeral. But the military cited rules that the Guard would not attend funerals beyond a thirty-mile radius from Arlington. The Spessards were heartsick. They appealed to the Agency. Their concerns went all the way to the top. Director Central Intelligence Webster, a former judge and FBI head, personally got involved and used his clout to persuade the Pentagon to waive its restrictions and to allow the Old Guard to make the long drive up to Hagerstown. They arrived by bus, somewhat bewildered by the distance and the occasion. “I don’t know why we’re here or who he was,” one member of the Guard was heard to say.
When it came time to lift the flag off the casket, fold it, and present it, they mistook Spessard’s grandmother for the widow. At twenty-six, Debra Spessard simply seemed too young to be a widow. Spessard’s grandmother accepted the triangular flag, then promptly passed it to her daughter-in-law, who sat beside her.
At the funeral, mourners signed a book, a maroon leather-bound volume entitled “Precious Memories.” The book contained a number of curious entries. It said that Spessard had died in Zaire, continuing the cover story given to the press. Even odder were the signatures of those who attended the funeral. Many who were covert employees of the Agency simply signed their first name and the first letter of their last name. Others intentionally penned names that were illegible. Among these were three of Spessard’s pallbearers who were Agency colleagues.
Spessard was buried in Greenlawn Memorial Park, the cemetery where Debra Spessard works and which is owned by her family. His grave is a few short minutes’ walk from her desk. Before his interment, the gold wedding ring he had removed the morning of his departure was allowed to be placed in the coffin.
All along the way the CIA did what it could to conceal its link to Spessard and to the resupply effort of Savimbi. Days after the crash, CIA officers appeared at Spessard’s home. They went down to the basement rec room and carted off Spessard’s entire computer system. It was never to be returned.
Within a week of the crash a letter arrived at Debra Spessard’s home. By all appearances it was a personal letter. It was from a Patsy Hallums and the return address was her home. But Hallums was a CIA employee, and inside the envelope was a letter of condolence from none other than William H. Webster, Director Central Intelligence. It was dated December 11, 1989, and read in part:
“Jimmy was a dedicated and conscientious employee who enjoyed the highest respect and admiration of his colleagues.
“He was one of the most energetic members of the staff who took the time to lend his help to others. Often, this meant going out of his way for a colleague with a work-related or personal problem. He spoke often of his family and was known to his friends as a devoted husband and loving father. Your husband’s warm personality and quick smile will be missed by those who share in this tragic loss.
“I hope you will derive some peace and comfort in knowing that he served his country and this Agency well . . .”
Later a packet of letters from his Agency colleagues arrived. The return addresses had all been snipped off. Any mail sent by the CIA or its employees carried a stamp. A postage meter carries an identifying number and, along with it, the risk of being traced.
A month after the crash, on the morning of December 19, 1989, the Agency dispatched a van to Hagerstown to pick up the Spessard family and drive them to Langley for a meeting with Director Webster and a memorial service. They were escorted to the director’s private elevator and taken to the seventh floor. On the way up, their escort told them a series of peculiar stories about the director’s dining room, including one that involved a Saudi official who had requested and was granted a serving of boa constrictor. (Never happened, say senior Agency officials, though several members of the Spessard family recall being told the tale.)
Once inside the director’s office, Webster asked how Spessard’s two sons were coping.
He expressed his regrets, asked if there was anything he might do, and then presented Debra Spessard with the Intelligence Star, awarded for “courageous action.”
The citation read: “James E. Spessard is posthumously awarded the Intelligence Star in recognition of his exceptional service to the Central Intelligence Agency from July 1989 to November 1989. His voluntary acceptance of known dangers in the execution of his duties reflected the highest standard of professionalism and dedication to the mission of the Agency. Mr. Spessard’s significant contributions to the overall mission of the Intelligence Community are justly deserving of commendation and honor, reflecting great credit on himself, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal service.”
Webster said that ordinarily he would not allow such an award to leave the premises, that it would be placed in a vault, but that he had made an exception. Debra Spessard could keep it, so long as she showed it to no one. In a moment of unusual candor he also admitted he did not know Jimmy Spessard.
A moment later Webster was interrupted and abruptly excused himself without explanation. His aide said he had been called away to the White House for consultation. Nothing more was said. The next day the United States launched a military action against Panama and toppled the regime of Manuel Noriega.
But the strangest events were yet to come. Several months after the funeral, two Agency employees paid a visit to the Hagerstown cemetery. In the cemetery office they showed a video of the crash site to Debra Spessard and her brother. The video lasted several minutes and showed that the plane had broken into three parts and that all around it the trees and grass were charred.
