Douglas Mackiernan - Final CIA Mission

Final CIA Mission

The armies of Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China were defeated by those of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party during the spring and summer of 1949. On July 29, 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson ordered the US consulate at Tihwa, Sinkiang Province, to be closed. Mackiernan was ordered to stay behind, officially to destroy consular records and equipment and covertly to continue atomic intelligence activities. On August 10, 1949, Mackiernan sent a classified, coded message to Secretary of State Acheson where he acknowledged that he was operating the long range atomic explosion detection equipment. By the middle of September, the forces of Chiang Kai-shek had switched sides, without a fight, and Communist troops were due to enter Ürümqi at any point. Also the Soviets had just completed their first atomic test in nearby Kazakhstan, on August 29, 1949. Mackiernan's work was now finished. Though it was still possible for Mackiernan to have flown out of Ürümqi on a regularly scheduled flight; Mackiernan, and the CIA, chose a different path: through Tibet to India.

Mackiernan may have feared that he would be arrested if he had tried to travel through Communist China, as were other US Consuls during that period. By then Mackiernan's work as an espionage agent was known to the Chinese Communist Party. Whatever his motivation, on September 25, 1949, Mackiernan sent his last telegram, stating that provincial officials had accepted Chinese communist authority, and the communist army was about to enter the city.

Two days later Mackiernan and a Fulbright scholar, Frank Bessac (whom other CIA employees of the period have described as a CIA contract agent, though Bessac denies it), drove out of the main gates of Ürümqi with their gear, which included machine guns, grenades, radios, gold bullion, navigation equipment, and survival supplies. The guards checked Mackiernan's passport and let him through. They met up with three anti-communist White Russian allies, and then rode out to spend more than a month with the Kazakh leader Osman Bator. Mackiernan left gold and a radio with Bator, who was seen by the Chinese as a rebel taking US support; Bator saw himself as a man fighting for the independence of his people.

After a month with Bator, the Mackiernan party embarked on a difficult journey by horseback and camel across 1,000 miles of Taklimakan desert, traveling south-southwest by night towards the Himalayas. Mackiernan carefully recorded positions and landmarks, and radioed their progress to Washington. Records of the radio transcripts have not been released by the CIA or State Department. Mackiernan's log, with additions by Bessac after Mackiernan's death, was declassified in the 1990s, though some alleged that the document had been heavily doctored. By late November, the party reached the 10,000 ft "foothills" of the Himalayas, where they spent the winter with Hussein Taiji of the Kazakhs.

In March, the small group struggled over the mountains, and then trekked across the vast uninhabited Changtang on the Tibetan plateau. They arrived at the first Tibetan outpost on April 29, 1950. Mackiernan sent Bessac over to talk with the Tibetans who were camped nearby. The rest of the party set up tents behind a slight hill. Bessac heard shots and running over the hill, he saw that Mackiernan and two White movement employees, Leonid and Stefan, were dead. Vasili Zvansov was badly wounded. The Tibetan guards realized that they had made a tragic mistake only five days later when they met a group of couriers from the Dalai Lama with a message of safe conduct for the group: the American government had delayed sending its request for permission for the Mackiernan party for so long that it was impossible for the Tibetan government to act in time. On June 11, 1950, Bessac and Zvansov finally reached Lhasa just weeks before the beginning of the Korean War.

Mackiernan's death (as a State Department official) was subsequently reported by the New York Times on July 29, 1950. His work as a CIA agent was first written about in one chapter of a book by Ted Gup, in 2001—without any mention of his work as an atomic intelligence agent. In 2003, Thomas Laird wrote an entire book about Mackiernan's work, and revealed details of Mackiernan's atomic intelligence work for the first time. Mackiernan's CIA employment was not acknowledged by the CIA until 2006, when his name was revealed in the CIA's Book of Honor. However his work as an agent, and his atomic intelligence, was not fully recognized by the CIA until then-CIA Director Michael Hayden described Mackiernan's work during a speech in October 2008.