CIA Agents Live--and Die--Anonymously

The main lobby of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., displays more than 70 stars honoring and mourning operatives who have lost their lives while on duty. Perhaps half the stars carry no names.

This obsession with secrecy--refusing to identify some officers even after death--has powered the Central Intelligence Agency’s persistent refusal this week to comment on news reports from Nairobi, Kenya, that one of the 12 Americans killed in the terrorist bombing there was a CIA agent.

There is a logic to the stubbornness. CIA agents, often posing as diplomats in a U.S. Embassy, build a network of contacts who gossip and exchange observations without any idea with whom they are speaking.

If these contacts--”assets” in agency jargon--discovered later that their acquaintance was a CIA agent and not the political officer, agricultural attache or commercial counselor that he or she posed as, they would feel betrayed and compromised. Colleagues and neighbors might accuse them of knowingly feeding information to the CIA; their reputations might be marred and their careers crippled. Only silence, according to the CIA code, will protect them.

And yet journalists overseas know that CIA secrecy has gradations. Some agents abhor attention; some don’t mind it; some seem to crave it.

In one celebrated example in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA station chief in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, wore his mask as an embassy political counselor thinly. He drove through town in a James Bond-like sports car, lived in a mansion about as large and elegant as that of the ambassador and threw lavish parties where the guests acted like recruits from Central Casting. Ten or so tables with stylish settings would grace the lawn around his mansion for dinner. At a table one evening sat a German professor, a French Embassy secretary, the wife of the ambassador from Guinea and an American foreign correspondent. After dessert, several Peace Corps volunteers arrived with guitars and sang songs attacking the Vietnam War.

The CIA station chief, of course, never announced his post. But everyone in the embassy winked knowingly when asked what he did. In any case, anyone could figure out his true role with a careful reading of the diplomatic lists and biographical registers published and sold by the State Department.

CIA agents within the embassy were not listed in these public documents as Foreign Service officers like the regular American diplomats; instead, they were classified as reserve Foreign Service officers. The highest-ranking reserve officer was almost always the station chief.

Agents seemed to grow less flamboyant after Philip Agee, a disgruntled former agent, began identifying CIA operatives in a series of publications in the early 1970s.

When Richard S. Welch, the station chief in Athens, was killed by three masked gunmen outside his home in 1975, Agee was vilified by those who accused him of some responsibility. A publication linked to Agee had identified Welch as a CIA agent in his previous posting in Peru. Defenders of Agee, however, pointed out that Welch was living in the same suburban house as his predecessors and was widely known in Greece as the station chief.

Although the CIA refused to acknowledge Welch as its operative, President Ford did so as he condemned the publication that had identified him.

Welch’s assassination was instrumental in persuading Congress to pass legislation in 1982 that made it a crime to divulge the identity of a CIA agent. The bill was fought in vain by the American Civil Liberties Union and press organizations that insisted it would violate the constitutional right to freedom of speech.