The Book of Honor (7 page)

Little more than a year later, on October 20, 1952, Pegge Mackiernan remarried in a Jesuit cathedral in Bombay. The groom was John Hlavacek, a journalist for United Press.

Among the thousands of pages of State Department records today in the U.S. Archives relating to Mackiernan, there is but one incidental reference to the CIA. Following Mackiernan's death, the CIA's first general counsel, Lawrence Houston, formerly assistant general counsel of the OSS, requested that Undersecretary of State Carlisle Humelsine settle up the Mackiernan estate. That meant drafting a check for $658.90 for Mackiernan's father. Ironically it was Houston that in September 1947 had advised CIA Director Hillenkoetter that the Agency had no legislative authority to conduct covert operations—at the very time that Mackiernan was doing just that.

In late November 1951 the State Department decided to ask the Tibetan government to compensate the Mackiernan family for his wrongful death. The amount sought: $50,000. But the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi argued that Tibet was already in crisis because of the Chinese Communists, and that any such request for money might suggest the United States was hostile to them or deserting them in their hour of need. Concluding the matter was “politically inadvisable,” the State Department dropped the request for compensation.

As for those who resisted the Communists and whom Mackiernan had aided, they fared no better. In February 1951 the guerrilla leader Wussman Bator and one hundred of his followers were arrested in China. Another five thousand “bandits” had been killed, wounded, or captured, according to Beijing. The Chinese government publicly charged that Mackiernan had been “an American imperialist agent,” a spy, who had orchestrated the resistance against the Communists. The State Department dismissed the allegation as “the usual tripe.”

A year to the day after Mackiernan was murdered, Wussman was executed, according to the Chinese, in front of ten thousand cheering citizens. Beijing boasted that when its troops searched Mackiernan's house, they found an entire arsenal—153 charges of high explosives, radio equipment, and 1,835 rounds of ammunition. According to testimony during the public trial of Wussman, Mackiernan had set up a kind of “Revolutionary Committee” with Wussman. Its purpose was to recruit battalions of Kazakhs who would lead a campaign of harassment against the Communists.

Mackiernan's first wife, Darrell, meanwhile was occupied trying to ensure the financial well-being of her daughter, Gail. She persuaded a U.S. senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, to introduce a bill into Congress that would provide $15,000 “as a gratuity to compensate . . . Gail Mackiernan for the loss of her father.” The measure failed to win passage. Instead, the government awarded a portion of Mackiernan's death benefits—$47.15 per month—to Darrell and her daughter.

Mackiernan's body was never returned to the States. The exact location of his grave, somewhere near Shigarhung Lung along the Tibetan border, has long since been lost. Over the course of succeeding decades the few at the Central Intelligence Agency who knew Mackiernan or of his CIA employment either passed away or retired. His name, his mission, and his ordeal were, in time, utterly forgotten, erased as thoroughly as if he had never existed.

He was destined to be the CIA's first nameless star. But there was something Douglas Mackiernan had feared even more than death—imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese Communists. That fate was reserved for another covert operative not long after him.

CHAPTER 2

A Pin for St. Jude

IN A MODEST
working-class neighborhood of Yonkers, New York, Bill McInenly dutifully retrieved from the basement a mahogany box containing what little was left from his Uncle Hughie's life. He placed the small treasure chest squarely on the dining room table and reverently lifted back the lid. Inside, neatly arrayed in a wooden drawer resting on slats, were all the objects Ruth Redmond could salvage of her son's life. A medal from the Boy Scouts. Honors for winning the broad jump and high jump at Roosevelt High. A silver cigarette lighter with the initials “HR” for “Hugh Redmond.” He so loved his smokes.

Here was his weathered Selective Service card. It showed he did not wait for the outbreak of war to be summoned to service, but enlisted on July 1, 1941. He had blue eyes, it said, blond hair, and a fair complexion. He stood but five feet four inches and weighed 155 pounds. Actually his eyes were a pale and gentle blue, his hair thick and wavy, his complexion white as flour. And there was nothing diminutive about him. His frame was broad and taut.

Beside the Selective Service card was a small box holding a collection of military patches, among them the Screaming Eagle from the 101st Airborne. There were also a lieutenant's bars and a sharpshooter's medal.

From the contents of the box it might appear Redmond was among the lucky ones. On June 6, 1944—D-Day—he landed near the Douve River in Normandy. Of the twenty paratroopers in his group, he alone was neither wounded nor killed. Here, in an old box of matches, was a twisted and dark fragment of metal. With it was a note held by yellowing tape. It reads, “Shrapnel dug out of hip in hospital in Brussels, 1944.” This was a personal souvenir of his fight in the Market-Garden campaign in Holland. The date was September 22, 1944. Again he had been lucky.

But Redmond's luck faltered at the Battle of the Bulge. His wounds required a year in a hospital bed. Set into a blue leather box was his Purple Heart “for Military Merit.” A Silver Star. A Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Clusters. Beside it was a certificate of discharge from the military dated October 18, 1945. After that, judging from the contents of this drawer, he simply ceased to exist.

Mixed in with the possessions of Hugh Francis Redmond were a few things of his mother's, Ruth's. A small religious pin of St. Jude, her patron saint. On the back is inscribed “Apostle of Hopeless Cases.” No other saint could have understood so well Ruth Redmond's prayers or vigil.

Beneath the drawer was a chest full of old newspapers, a passport, a birthday card to Hugh that was returned. Here and there was a scattering of old Chinese coins.

A box of clues. A life reduced to mystery.

Moments later Bill McInenly went back to the basement and returned with a second, less decorous box. This one was more of a rubber tub, blue and covered with a snap-on lid. It was the kind of container in which one might find beers on ice at a tailgate party. But inside, carefully folded to a perfect triangle, was a musty American flag.

Any telling of Hugh Francis Redmond's life must begin where the contents of his nephew's box ends. It is Shanghai, China, on April 26, 1951—just three days shy of a year after Douglas Mackiernan was gunned down on the Tibetan border. Thirty-two-year-old Hugh Redmond was now living the good life overseas. But that good life appeared threatened as the Communists tightened their stranglehold on activities in Shanghai. All foreigners were under suspicion.

A short time earlier, Redmond had secretly married. His bride was named Lydia, though he affectionately called her Lily. She was a White Russian and a piano teacher, a dark-haired and shapely woman who some would say was a femme fatale. With Redmond's help she had managed to leave China. Now it was his turn. He prepared to board a ship, the USS
Gordon.
But Redmond's voyage was abruptly ended even before it began.

Police from China's dreaded Public Security Bureau boarded the ship, escorted Redmond off, and led him away without explanation. Almost immediately rumors began to circulate around Shanghai and Washington that he had been executed.

The Chinese Communist regime under Mao Zedong had rounded up many foreigners, even missionaries attempting to spread the gospel. But Redmond was a case apart. As a commercial representative of Henningsen and Company, a British concern that specialized in the import and export of foods, Redmond appeared to be little more than a salesman—hardly a threat to Mao's regime. Never one to raise his voice, Redmond seemed so ordinary a fellow that even at the smallest of gatherings he was all but invisible. It was no wonder, then, that when the police pinched him off the ship, he literally vanished.

His parents had grown accustomed to long periods without a letter from him. But even they, in time, began to worry when they didn't hear from him, especially his mother. She was a cafeteria worker in a Yonkers public school. But it was not his personal life or business that kept her awake at nights. No, there were things that she knew about him, things that she had sworn not to discuss with anyone, that gave her ample cause for concern. His very life might depend on her discretion.

Ruth Redmond knew only that her son had joined a shadowy element of the War Department called the Strategic Services Unit, or SSU, and had gone to China on some sort of secret mission. In late August Hugh Redmond had arrived in Shanghai. His work as an import-export trader with Henningsen and Company was merely a cover, providing him the perfect pretext for travel and contact with the Chinese.

Even in the midst of China's tumultuous revolution, he appeared to prosper. On August 22, 1946, he wrote his parents: “I am living in the French section of Shanghai on the Rue De Ratard—a very nice section of town. The house has large grounds and gardens, two tennis courts, a big patio, a bar in the dining room and plenty of recreational equipment— pool tables, etc. Countless Chinese servants are running around to do anything you want.” Unfortunately, wrote Redmond, he would soon have to vacate these opulent surroundings.

“Nothing much to say, everything quiet here except the Communists,” he wrote. In a postscript he added, “May not write for quite a while.”

“A while” stretched on month after month. A worried Ruth Redmond wrote the State Department in September 1949—long before her son's arrest—to see if the government could provide any clue as to his whereabouts. A State Department employee, unaware of Redmond's covert status, cabled Hong Kong and made inquiries of him with his employer, Henningsen and Company. A spokesman for the firm said they had no record of a Hugh Redmond working for them. The State Department concluded Ruth Redmond was confused.

But the response alarmed Ruth Redmond even more. She saw it for what it was, a slipup in the cover story. At her request the State Department made a second inquiry with the British consulate in Shanghai. They confirmed that Redmond did indeed work for Henningsen and that he was just fine. For the moment her concerns were eased.

But her underlying fears persisted. For two years the United States had been urging its citizens to leave mainland China. It could no longer offer them protection or assistance. Red China, as it was known, was not recognized by the United States. There was neither an American embassy in China nor any official U.S. presence there. Anyone who stayed did so at his or her own peril.

Like Mackiernan, Redmond understood that each day he stayed in China the risk increased. Finally his superiors decided it was time to pull the plug on his operation. An encrypted message was sent to his apartment. It read simply, “Enjoy the dance.” But Redmond delayed his departure a brief time longer, tidying up his affairs there.

At the time of Redmond's arrest in the spring of 1951, there were an estimated 415 Americans still in mainland China. On April 30, 1951, four days after Redmond's arrest, the State Department compiled a secret list of Americans believed to be imprisoned in China. There were then thought to be twenty-three, eighteen of whom were missionaries. Beside Redmond's name was this notation: “may be executed.” Four months later an embassy memo from Hong Kong to Secretary of State Acheson reported that “it was common belief among Chi [Chinese] and foreigners that Commies had proof against him and had executed him for espionage.” The rumors were credible enough. Virtually any American still in China was suspected of spying.

There was no way of knowing if Redmond was still alive. Americans in Chinese prisons were held incommunicado. They had no right to a lawyer. Some were tortured. Few had been formally charged, though many had been accused of a wide range of offenses—plotting against the government, spreading rumors, illegal possession of radios, currency violations, fomenting disorder, and even murdering Chinese orphans.

The U.S. government kept silent on Redmond's fate, as it did with nearly all those believed to be imprisoned in China. Taking the issue public might make the Chinese even more resistant to the idea of eventually releasing them. It might also endanger their lives. Behind the scenes, the State Department persuaded Britain and eight other nations to inquire about the well-being of Redmond and other prisoners and to work for their release.

On October 19, 1951, the secret list of Americans held by the Chinese—which included Redmond's name—was provided by Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk to U.S. Senator William Knowland at the senator's request. Knowland had pledged that the list would remain confidential. But on December 8 Knowland released the names to the press and issued a blistering denunciation of the Chinese. The next day Redmond's name surfaced publicly for the first time in front pages around the nation.

And that was how Ruth Redmond first discovered that her son had been imprisoned, or even executed. Given what she knew of her son's covert employment with the government, she was horrified that no one from the intelligence service had informed her of her son's situation. She might have been even more disturbed if she had known that by then her son had been largely forgotten by those in the recently reorganized clandestine service.

On December 18, 1951, she penned a letter addressed simply “State Department, Washington D.C.” It read: “Dear Sirs, I have a son in China for the last few years. I naturally have been worried about him continually but was shocked beyond words to read in the newspapers that he has been in prison in Shanghai since April 26, 1951. This is the first news of any kind I have had of him. For obvious reasons he was listed as a businessman. After three years on the battlefield in Europe and now this—is there any hope for my only son? Is it possible to find out if he is well, if he is hungry, if he is mistreated. Can we write to him, can he receive any packages from us and is
anything being done to secure
his release?
Thank you for any information you may have. I am sincerely, Mrs. Ruth Redmond. My son's name, Hugh Francis Redmond.”

There can be little doubt that Hugh Redmond understood the risks of his assignment. On July 24, 1946, just nine months after he had left the army, he joined a top secret intelligence organization within the War Department. Like many highly decorated veterans of World War II, he was eager to continue his service to country, but he had suffered grave wounds in the war. It was doubtful that he would have been eligible for active military duty. And so, like many other casualties of war, he sought out the next closest thing—the clandestine service. In those early days the corridors of the clandestine service had more than their share of men with limps, eye patches, and other tokens of war.

Redmond had joined the Strategic Services Unit, the SSU. After President Truman ordered the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to be dismembered as of October 1, 1945, critical elements of that organization, particularly the Secret Intelligence and Counter-Espionage branches, were assigned to the SSU. The unit was initially under Colonel John Magruder, who had been Wild Bill Donovan's deputy director of intelligence at the OSS. SSU's role was to maintain networks of foreign agents, safe houses, and other vital elements of the intelligence apparatus in both Europe and the Far East. What remained from the glory years of the OSS was little more than a skeletal secret service. SSU would later be folded into the Central Intelligence Group, or CIG (created on January 22, 1946), and would finally become part of the Central Intelligence Agency when it was created in 1947.

With each change in name and function, the intelligence corps and its mission became more muddied, the bureaucracy more mired in paperwork and interservice rivalries. By the time of Redmond's arrest in April 1951, it had undergone so many transformations that Hugh Francis Redmond had been all but forgotten. His supervisors had been shuffled about from place to place, and Redmond, already out of country for four years, was at best a vague memory, a series of dusty file jackets in the bowels of a confused bureaucracy.

From the start his mission had been high-risk. Some might say foolhardy.

In January 1951, four months before Redmond was seized, the CIA drafted a secret memo for the National Security Council and the president. It laid out what it knew of Mao Zedong's China and the prospects for dislodging him. Titled “Position of the United States with Respect to Communist China,” it was a sober read. “For the foreseeable future,” the memo began, “the Chinese Communist regime will retain exclusive governmental control of mainland China. No basis for a successful counter-revolution is apparent. The disaffected elements within the country are weak, divided, leaderless and devoid of any constructive political program.”

The only opposition remaining, the Agency concluded, was bandits, some minor peasant uprisings, and “actual guerrilla forces, made up of Nationalist remnants, Communist deserters, adventurers, and a few ideological opponents of the regime.” It was a dire take on events in China. The best that CIA clandestine operatives could hope for would be to create diversions that, for the time being, might distract if not contain the Chinese military. Seen in that light, Hugh Redmond was a double casualty. He had been sent into an impossible situation and then had fallen through the bureaucratic cracks.