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Secret battles, secret deaths

Cold War espionage death toll will never be fully known

By Bruce Kennedy
CNN Interactive

When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today.
-- inscription at a British military memorial in India

A famous spy is, by definition, a failure.

For intelligence operatives to succeed, they must accept the anonymity that comes with their jobs. Their stories and exploits may come out later, long after the fact. But what about the secret Cold War casualties -- the ones involved in intelligence who, because of their jobs or untimely ends in hostile places, never had their true stories told?

In the entrance of CIA headquarters just outside of Washington is a unique memorial. On one wall of the lobby are more than 70 stars, one for each of the CIA members who died "in the service of their country." The stars have no names.

A glass-contained "Book of Honor" below the memorial gives the names of 29 of those casualties whose identity the CIA has chosen to reveal. Most of the 29 were publicly recognized CIA employees -- or people like William F. Buckley, the agency's station chief in Lebanon who was kidnapped, tortured and killed by terrorists in the mid-1980s.

Dead spies unmasked

But most spies who die on the job remain unknown. In 1997 Ted Gup, reporting for the Washington Post, was able to discover the names and fates of several previously unknown CIA agents whose nameless stars appear on the agency's wall.

Among those named in Gup's article were:

Douglas S. Mackiernan, a meteorologist, linguist and encryption expert. Using his cover as a State Department official at the U.S. consulate in Tihwa (now known as Urumqi) in northwest China near the Soviet border, Mackiernan kept contact with anti-communist White Russians -- and may have obtained data on the first Soviet atomic test in 1949.

Mackiernan left Tihwa soon after the Soviet detonation and attempted to escape the deteriorating political and military situation in China via an overland route to India. He traveled by foot and horseback for eight months in the company of another American and several Russians.

As they approached the relative safety of the China-Tibet border in April 1950, the group came under fire. Tibetan border guards -- unaware their government had, after contact with U.S. officials, granted safe passage to the group -- shot and killed Mackiernan and two of the Russians. They were buried where they died.

Thomas Willard "Pete" Ray, a casualty of the CIA's botched Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. Ray, a pilot in the Alabama Air National Guard, joined the operation to invade Cuba with a force of anti-communist Cubans in the hopes of sparking a popular uprising against the Castro regime.

Ray's family was informed of his death in 1961 and held a funeral without his body. Ray's daughter, Janet, spent years trying to find out the circumstances surrounding her father's death. In 1978, the CIA admitted Ray had been shot down during the Bay of Pigs, survived the crash, and was later shot to death. Ray's body was kept frozen in a morgue by the Cuban government until it was released to his daughter in 1979.

Barbara Annette Robbins, working for the CIA at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon under the cover of a State Department employee. She was killed on March 30, 1965, by a car bomb parked outside the embassy.

'It wasn't gentlemanly'

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War also brought to light new information on the fate of other intelligence operatives. David Murphy, for several years CIA station chief in Berlin, recalls that the shadow warfare between Eastern and Western intelligence agents rarely led to bloodshed.

"It wasn't gentlemanly, it was just that people didn't kill each other," he says.

However, in "Battleground Berlin," a book Murphy co-authored with reporter George Bailey and Sergei Kondrashev, the former head of the KGB's German Department, it's obvious the spy game in the divided city could be fatal.

In 1957, Soviet Lt. Col. Pyotr Semyonovich Popov became an important CIA source. "The United States owed Popov a great deal," according to the book. "For several years he was the nation's best guarantee of 'early warning,' and he produced the most valuable intelligence on the Soviet military of any source in that period. Because of him, Soviet military intelligence became an open book."

A coded letter to Popov, sent by the CIA and intercepted by the KGB, led to his arrest and execution by Soviet authorities in 1960.

Gathering 'elint'

While information about the casualties of traditional spycraft are only now starting to surface in the post-Cold War years, more can be found regarding those who died attempting to gather "elint" -- electronic intelligence -- or during photo reconnaisance flights.

"You can get a very high number [of known deaths] if you include all the [spy] planes shot down," says Thomas Allen, co-author of "Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage," "and a low number if you restrict it to what were classically considered spies."

Not counting those who died during "paramilitary" intelligence missions, flown during conflicts such as Korea and Vietnam, "Spy Book" estimates that 150 U.S. fliers were killed during Cold War spy missions.

In recent years, Russian President Boris Yeltsin has revealed that 12 U.S. fliers, shot down and captured on intelligence flights, were held secretly by the Soviets. None of those prisoners was believed to be alive when the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991.

And in 1998, the bodies of 11 U.S. Air Force personnel -- killed on a spy mission 40 years earlier when their plane was shot down by MiGs over Soviet Armenia -- were returned to the United States and buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

The story of Shadrin

Perhaps one of the most poignant stories to have surfaced about lost Cold War spies appears in "Spy Book" -- the fate of Nicholas George Shadrin. Born Nikolai Fedorovich Artamonov, he was a Soviet naval officer who defected to the West with his Polish girlfriend (later wife) in 1959.

Taking the name Shadrin, he became a U.S. citizen and worked for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. Shadrin testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in September 1960 before a visit to the United States by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Shadrin received a doctorate in international affairs from George Washington University in 1972. Even though he had been tried and sentenced to death in abstentia by Soviet authorities, Shadrin was contacted by the KGB in 1966. At the FBI's direction, Shadrin became a double agent.

While on a trip to Vienna in the mid-1970s, Shadrin was kidnapped by KGB agents. CIA officers, assigned to protect him from such an incident, failed. For a decade, until 1985, Shadrin's fate remained unknown in the West. But Soviet defector Vitaly Yurchenko brought with him the final chapter on Shadrin -- he had died from an accidental chloroform overdose while fighting with his kidnappers in the back of a car in Vienna.