by Ted Gup
While the tape ran, one of the Agency officers read from an official report. “Every third word had a big black mark through it, so much of it was classified,” recalls Debra Spessard. “The blacked-out part was like every other line.” Afterward she asked if she could keep the tape. That would not be possible, the Agency men explained, and left, leaving nothing behind.
On December 7, 1989, in Dothan, Alabama, the body of pilot Bud Petty was said to be laid to rest with full military honors in the Memory Hill Cemetery. Family members had huddled around the flag-draped casket as a twenty-one-gun salute sounded. Then he was lowered into grave number 1, lot 405, in the cemetery’s Garden of Chimes. It had been a moving tribute to Petty, as was the obituary that appeared in the local paper. Never mind that the obituary said he had died November 29, two days after his actual death, and that there was no mention of the place or cause of death.
His casket had arrived in Dothan sealed, with instructions that it was not to be opened. Men in black suits came down from Washington with a single message for the Petty family: “Don’t talk to anyone from the newspapers.” After a while, the Pettys had been told so many varying accounts of the crash that they weren’t sure what the truth was. Some even suspected Petty was still alive.
Six months later, in Hagerstown, Maryland, Debra Spessard received a phone call from a woman who identified herself as Teresa Petty, Bud Petty’s daughter. She was sobbing and said that she suspected her father’s coffin had been empty. She was convinced she had been lied to. She had no proof to back up her accusation, but she was certain she and other family members had been duped. Then her grief gave way to anger. She said that the Agency had concluded that the plane had gone down due to pilot error. She said her father was too good a pilot to let that explanation stand. Later her family challenged that finding and the Agency seemed to amend its findings, in part to mollify Petty’s survivors. There was talk of a faulty altimeter or other instrument.
Teresa Petty was not alone in believing that her father’s coffin was empty. Bud Petty’s eldest sister, Joyce, was also convinced, as was Petty’s first wife, Doris, whom Petty divorced in the late 1970s.
But Petty’s widow, Gracie, who worked closely with him at Tepper Aviation, will not speak of such matters. She says that she knows nothing of the CIA, that her husband merely worked for Tepper Aviation, and that the company had a “government contract.”
“It’s not a subject that I talk about,” she says. “Bud’s been gone ten years. I quit living after that. He was a wonderful man and a wonderful memory and I really don’t care to rehash any of it. I wouldn’t talk about Bud even if President Clinton called. I have my own memories and that’s all I care about. If it don’t bring him back I don’t care.” End of story.
Well, not quite.
In the Byrd Funeral Home in Dothan, Alabama, is a file with Bud Petty’s name on it and inside is an affidavit that reads: “Before me this day personally appeared Gracie T. Petty who is being duly sworn, deposed, and says that they have full knowledge that the casket which is being brought to Byrd Funeral Home, Dothan, Alabama is only representative of their next of kin for the express purpose of memorializing their missing relative and that they fully understand there are no human remains or personal artifacts contained within such casket.”
What Petty’s daughter, Teresa, and others had suspected was true. The casket was empty. “I wanted Bud to be buried with dignity,” Gracie would later tell Petty’s sister Joyce. The Agency had apparently chosen to tell only Petty’s widow. The same grim word would be given to the widow of Gerhard Rieger. His casket, too, was empty.
There was a hard irony to the way things turned out for the Petty family. Bud was not a man given to pithy sayings, but one thing he often told his children was that when adversity struck, it was important to “put it behind you and go forward.” The peculiar circumstances surrounding his own death and the subsequent deception proved hard to leave behind.
“My brother was very honest with me,” says sister Joyce. “He would not have wanted us to be lied to so that we would go on wondering—that we would be wondering ten years later if he was alive or dead. He would not want to be mourned for this long. He would have wanted us to get on with our lives and he would know we could not do that if we were not told the truth.”
It has been no less hard on Alton Petty, Bud’s father, now eighty years old. “Everybody was closemouthed and did what they was supposed to do,” he says. “The whole stinking mess was shoved down our throat. All of us are afraid to talk to anybody. Most of it is rumor. I have no facts that I can believe. When you lose a son and you can’t prove it, you just wonder and start grabbing at straws.”
The Spessards were somewhat more fortunate. In time, they made a kind of peace with Jimmy’s death. Debra Spessard later remarried. Some time after her husband’s death she received a photograph from one of her husband’s Agency colleagues showing a workman chiseling a nameless star into the CIA’s Wall of Honor—a star for Jimmy. To this day her sons do not know that their father was with the CIA and was killed in service to country. The burden of secrecy has been upon them all.
There are other memorials to Spessard, Petty, and the other crew members who died aboard the Gray Ghost flight. Shortly after the crash, Jonas Savimbi was said to have erected an obelisk with a plaque dedicated to their memory. There is stands today amid thorn trees and high grass on the Angolan savanna not far from where the plane went down. And at Agency headquarters in Langley, along the path where the statue of Nathan Hale is to be found, the men and women of the CIA’s Africa Division planted a small sapling in their honor—a tribute without names. In the Agency’s Book of Honor, each is a nameless star.
But perhaps the most curious memorial service was one the Agency itself observed some two years after the crash. As if to make sure that no public link was forged between the Agency and the dead, the ceremony was held not at CIA headquarters, but rather at the Fort Myer Chapel in Arlington Cemetery. It was 11:30 the morning of August 7, 1991, and the families of the deceased, many of whom had never before met one another, gathered in tribute to their sons and fathers and husbands. Medals and awards were presented.
Petty’s widow received a vaguely worded and undated certificate that read: “The United States of America honors the memory of Pharies B. Petty. This certificate is awarded by a grateful nation in recognition of devoted and selfless consecration to the service of our country in the Armed Forces of the United States.” Never mind that Petty had been out of the military for a dozen years. But at least it was signed—“George Bush, President of the United States.”
Mildred Lacy, the aging mother of aviation mechanic George Lacy, accepted a round metal that featured an eagle on the front and the words “In Recognition of Distinguished Service.” On the obverse was inscribed “George Vincent Lacy 1989.”
A short time later she received through the mail a second award, named the Alben W. Barkley Award. The citation reads: “The United States of America presents the Alben W. Barkley Award to George V. Lacy in recognition of distinguished public service to the people and goals of the United States of America. Mr. Lacy is presented this award posthumously following his ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty serving his country. His individual contributions can never be forgotten and his public spirit will live on as a standard of excellence that future public servants will try to emulate. The dedication, selflessness, and commitment with which he served reflect great credit upon himself, his family and the United States of America.”
What made the award so curious was not only that it made no mention of either the CIA or Lacy’s mission but that, according to what Mildred Lacy was told, it was the first and only time the award would be made—that is, only those six on board the ill-fated Gray Ghost flight would ever receive it. Why it was named for Alben Barkley, Harry Truman’s vice-president, was never explained to the relatives of the deceased. And there was an odd irony in suggesting that Lacy’s contributions would n
ever be forgotten, that they would become “a standard of excellence” for “future public servants,” given that his name, his mission, and his fate were all completely veiled in secrecy.
There was nothing in any of the medals, honors, or certificates that showed the CIA’s hand was behind it all. It was as if the bereaved, who had themselves made a stunning sacrifice, could not be trusted with anything that revealed the truth.
“All the medals and the talking will never bring my son or the other boys home,” says Lacy’s mother, Mildred. “They are gone. All we have is our memories and our thoughts every day of our son and what they had gone through when this happened. That’s something nobody knows.”
As for the people of Angola, like so many others caught in the undertow first of colonialism and then the Cold War, a happy ending is not yet in sight. A cease-fire between the government and UNITA lasted from May 1991 until October 1992, when UNITA refused to recognize the results of an internationally monitored election. A decade after the crash that killed Spessard, Petty, Rieger, Bensch, Lacy, and Atkinson, and two decades after the CIA’s involvement in that civil war, Savimbi remains restive. The new millennium dawns with Angola’s people facing still more violence and upheaval.
So it was to be for the CIA as well. Africa would soon account for still more nameless stars in the Book of Honor.
CHAPTER 14
The Last Maccabee
TRUTH, it is said, is the first casualty of any war. But in Somalia truth was the second casualty. Larry Freedman was the first. The Pentagon conferred that dubious distinction upon him when it reported that on December 23, 1992, he had been killed by a land mine and that he had been a civilian employee of the Defense Department. The first part was true enough. Freedman was dead. The second part was a lie.
Back home in the States, Freedman’s death was reduced to a terse obituary and a fleeting item on the evening news. Those wary of America’s foreign entanglements, especially those labeled “peacekeeping missions,” cited his death as a kind of “told-you-so.” He had become kindling in the debate, the ante lost in a hand that should never have been played. On the Pentagon’s casualty list even his name was misspelled. They left out the “d” in “Freedman.”
Of course, Freedman had no interest in geopolitical debates. Never one to question America’s role abroad, he had stood ready, decade after decade, to be one of the nation’s sharpest, and if need be, most deadly instruments of foreign policy. He lusted after action like he lusted after everything else. As for recognition, he had long since made his peace with anonymity. It went with the territory he had chosen for himself, as much as his sniper’s rifle and scope. He had lived an explosive life and yet a life of stealth. It was only fitting his exit be one of fire and flash, and steeped in deception.
In the public’s mind Freedman was at most a glancing thought, a fifty-one-year-old grandfather who died far from home and close to Christmas. He was just another faceless bureaucrat, a “civilian employee of the Department of Defense.” Truth and Freedman now shared a common grave. And that was exactly how the CIA wished it to remain.
Mention Larry Freedman’s name even today, nearly a decade after his death, and a mischievous smile creeps across the faces of those who knew him. It is as if they suddenly remembered a bawdy story too risqué to repeat but too delicious to forget.
Six years after his death, Freedman’s longtime friends from Philadelphia gather in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home of his sister, Sylvia Doner. Within moments all semblance of sobriety vanishes, replaced by a convulsive hilarity. Like Freedman, they are Jewish, street-wise, and, even in their mid-fifties, not to be pushed around: Petey Altman, Kenny Gold, Paul Weinberg. Also here is Wynne Crocetto, who first set eyes on Freedman at seventeen and was forever smitten.
Weinberg was the first to meet Freedman. That was in kindergarten. They were both born to raise hell. “We even flunked twice so we could graduate together,” Weinberg says. True enough, but it would not have taken much on Freedman’s part to fail. Bright as he was, he was no student.
Back then, the gang hung out at the Pit, a bowling alley in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia. To them, Freedman was known affectionately as Gus. At ten he had seen the movie Cinderella and was enamored with the antics of a fat mouse by that name who always seemed to get caught either by the cat or the broom. Freedman could identify with that.
Whatever defied common sense he took to be a personal invitation. A high school gymnast and diver, he was always looking for something more daring. He found it one night at the Ascot Motel in Atlantic City when he dove off a third-story balcony into the horseshoe-shaped swimming pool. “The edge was his favorite place,” says his sister, Sylvia.
At five feet nine he was powerfully built, coiled like a spring wound a little too tight. He was utterly fearless. He never spoiled for a fight, but woe to the fool that pushed him too far. All such encounters were short and decidedly one-sided. But mostly he tested his body against gravity and his own limits of endurance. Often he would do handstands on the backs of chairs, on balconies and railings. He did it not for the attention, but for the pure rush of adrenaline. He was an odd mix of Tarzan and John Wayne, both of whom he idolized.
As an adolescent he took a keen interest in weapons, particularly bows and arrows, not the kind of rubber-tipped playthings sold in toy stores, but the real deal: deadly steel-tipped broad arrows launched from a fiberglass longbow. He would put paper targets on neighborhood trees and drive the arrow clean through the bull’s-eye and deep into the living wood. His eye was unerring, his approach unnervingly silent. These were gifts that would serve him well in later years, but as a boy got him into considerable hot water.
At thirteen he and two of his buddies walked into an Esso gas station on Stenton Avenue and attempted to rob the place. Freedman was armed with his bow and arrow, drawn and trained on the owner, who dismissed the boys with a laugh. Just how many times Freedman ran afoul of the local constabulary is a matter of some dispute. Suffice to say, he could be a handful.
His parents would learn to be flexible but not when it came to attendance at temple. On March 27, 1954, Freedman was bar mitzvahed in a Conservative synagogue. From the pulpit he read from the Talmud with deep conviction. It was no act. In later years he could be vulgar, even downright raunchy, but never profane. About the same year he was bar mitzvahed he and his buddies were summarily kicked out of Boy Scout Troop 99.
To the outside world Freedman and his ilk might easily have been mistaken for juvenile delinquents, but there was nothing thuggish about them. It was themselves, not others, they usually put at risk. Occasionally they fought with the Oxford Circle boys, but it was nothing more than fists. They covered one another’s backs. Between them grew an uncommon camaraderie and a raw but abiding sense of honor.
Freedman was the lead dog, adored, almost worshiped, by his co-conspirators. For all his excesses, he was, at heart, quiet and gentle, capable of casting a spell over other rebels. They would be drawn to him as to an outlaw Pied Piper.
But his parents were not to be envied. Again and again he tried their patience. His father, Leroy, gave him a ’54 Buick Special. Freedman could not resist pushing the big V-8 to the max. Soon after, he rolled the car, then secretly had it repaired in a garage at night, at his sister’s expense. His father never found out.
But like his patron mouse, Gus, Freedman seldom got away with anything. One day he returned home and announced that he had gotten a part-time job in a neighborhood pharmacy. His parents were elated. At last he was doing something productive. One night the family decided to surprise him and pick him up at work. There they learned Freedman had been fired three weeks earlier. Vintage Freedman.
From high school he went to Kansas State University. It was the only school that would have him. Friends say he majored in class avoidance and bedding coeds, but he did in fact have a genuine interest in veterinary medicine and a soft spot for any suffering animal—something that would later haunt h
im.
At college, to the delight of coeds, he would leap from stairwell to stairwell, deftly catching the railing, except when he did not. It was just such a maneuver that once opened his head and left some to wonder whether he really thought he could fly. Such kamikaze stunts won for him a kind of Superman moniker which was later amended to “Superjew,” a title he proudly clung to for the rest of his life.
It was about this time that he came upon one of his abiding passions—motorcycles. There was nothing that gave him more pleasure than endless hours cruising on the open road. Regularly he would ride from Kansas to Philly for nothing more than the excuse of a milk shake, then head back forty-five minutes later. His friends remember him dismounting his thunderous blue Norton and proudly picking the bugs out of his teeth.
He still had the Buick but showed it little respect. One time he drove from Kansas to Philly through a deluge. When he arrived at home he was completely soaked. His family couldn’t understand why until they looked out the window. Freedman had sawed the roof off his car to make it a convertible and had been driving something akin to a portable pool.
Ivan Doner, now married to Freedman’s sister, remembers the time in 1963 when he first set eyes on Freedman, then twenty-two. He was wearing tight jeans, black boots, a T-shirt with sleeves rolled back to reveal rippling biceps, and long hair slicked back. He was the very picture of a greaser. It was easy to feel intimidated in his presence.
It wasn’t long before Freedman flunked out of college. It came as a surprise to no one. Wild and undisciplined, his prospects seemed dim at best. The exuberance of youth, to put a polite spin on whatever it was that torqued Freedman’s overheated engine, seemed destined to doom him as an adult. And then something happened that would change the course of his life. He found the army.
On September 30, 1965, with the war in Vietnam on full boil, Freedman enlisted at a recruiting station in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Within six months he had maneuvered himself into a position as a medic-in-training. Instinctively Freedman had sought out the one unit that would impose upon him the discipline he needed, and yet place him among others who shared his infatuation with the edge—Special Forces. Twenty-four-year-old Lawrence N. Freedman was about to don the Green Beret.
