Ben DeFelice, 79; CIA Official Consoled Relatives of Imperiled Agents

Ben DeFelice, who spent two decades handling one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most delicate assignments -- consoling relatives of CIA employees who were missing, captured or killed in the line of duty -- died of cancer April 5 at a hospital in Arlington, Va. He was 79.

As chief of the casualty affairs branch and then deputy director of personnel, DeFelice helped create a system to look after the financial interests of employees who were detained or missing while on assignment for the CIA. He also was the agency’s liaison with those agents’ families, and used frequent phone calls and personal visits to smooth over relations with relatives who viewed the CIA with distrust.

Working with the Red Cross and the State Department, DeFelice helped get food packages to captive CIA employees and arrange for family visits. He served 20 years as chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on Prisoners, composed largely of CIA employees with operational experience.

“But its real purpose, as devised by DeFelice, was to set up an ongoing forum that would ensure that the men were not forgotten,” Ted Gup wrote in his book “The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA.”

CIA Director George Tenet said in a statement that DeFelice “set the highest standards in care and compassion.”

DeFelice played a role in several well-publicized espionage cases. He handled the personal affairs of Francis Gary Powers when the Russians shot down his U-2 surveillance plane in 1960 and held him for two years. Powers was released in exchange for jailed Soviet operative Rudolf Abel.

DeFelice also was involved in the case of Hugh Redmond, a CIA officer who was arrested in China in 1951 for supporting anti-communists. Redmond died in jail in 1970, and Chinese authorities claimed he had killed himself with a razor.

DeFelice saw a better outcome in the matter of Richard Fecteau and John Downey, two CIA employees whom the Chinese government shot down over Manchuria in 1952 during the Korean War. For two years, their fate was unknown, and the CIA declared them dead.

Then in 1954, the Chinese tried them for espionage and gave Fecteau a 20-year sentence and Downey a life term. In a prelude to President Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China, Fecteau was released in 1971. Downey was freed in 1973.

Fecteau, now 76, and Downey, 73, both said this week that DeFelice had been especially sensitive in dealing with their mothers throughout their detention.

A native of Providence, R.I., DeFelice was a 1949 graduate of Georgetown University’s foreign service school and a 1954 graduate of Georgetown’s law school. He began working for the CIA in 1953, became chief of the casualty affairs branch in the mid-1950s and was deputy director of personnel from 1973 to 1983. He retired in 1987 as director of information services. In 1997, when the CIA celebrated its 50th anniversary, DeFelice was named one of 50 officers who had made defining contributions to the agency.

Survivors include his wife, three children, two brothers and three grandchildren.