Special Activities Division - Famous Paramilitary Officers

Famous Paramilitary Officers

• Morris "Moe" Berg was a famous Paramilitary Officer from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. He was a Major League Baseball player before he joined the OSS. He was better known for being "the brainiest guy in baseball" than for anything he accomplished in the game. Casey Stengel once described Berg as "the strangest man ever to play baseball". A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School, Berg spoke several languages and regularly read 10 newspapers a day. As an OSS officer, Berg was parachuted into Yugoslavia to gather intelligence on resistance groups the U.S. government was considering supporting. He was then sent on a mission to Italy, where he interviewed various physicists concerning the German nuclear program to assess whether they should be killed. After World War II, Berg worked for the OSS's successor, the Central Intelligence Agency.

• William Francis Buckley. Colonel Buckley enlisted in the US Army as a military policeman after completing high school in 1947 and fought in the Korean War. Following Korean service, Buckley undertook his first 2-year rotational assignment with CIA Special Operations Division, where his assignment is unknown. Buckley left the Army to attend Boston University and subsequently completed Army Officer Candidate School and was commissioned. He returned to CIA for another rotational assignment circa 1960-1963 and probably served as a Paramilitary Officer in Laos. Returning to the Army, he joined the 11th Airborne Division, followed by service in Army Special Forces assigned to the Military Assistance Command Vietnam/Studies and Observation Group (MACV/SOG). While a Green Beret, Buckley commanded both an A Detachment and B Detachment in Vietnam. He joined CIA as a civilian staff Case Officer following Vietnam service in 1969, and served tours in Zaire (1970–1972), Cambodia (1972), Egypt (1972–1978), and Pakistan (1978–1979). In 1983, Buckley volunteered to become Chief of Station (COS) in war-torn Beirut. He was kidnapped by operatives of Hezbollah in 1984 and underwent 15 months of brutal torture before expiring of a heart attack, probably on June 3, 1985. Hezbollah announced Buckley's death in October 1985. Bill Buckley was one of the most highly decorated officers ever to have served in Special Activities Division. His Agency decorations include The Intelligence Star, The Exceptional Service Award and he is one of only about 18 officers to be awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Cross in the 65-year history of the Agency. Buckley's military decorations include the Silver Star, Bronze Star with "V", Purple Heart (2), Meritorious Service Medal, the Combat Infantryman's Badge, the Parachutist Badge and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. Colonel Buckley's remains were repatriated in 1987 and he was buried with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Buckley is honored at CIA with a Gold Star on the Wall of Honor in the foyer of the Original Headquarters Building in Langley, Virginia.

• William Colby was another famous OSS Paramilitary Officer—although Colby never served in SAD/SOG as a PMOO. Colby parachuted behind enemy lines into France and Norway during World War II. He was awarded the Silver Star for his actions. After the war, Colby went to Columbia Law School and practiced law in William Donovan's law firm. He became bored quickly and accepted a position with the CIA, where he ended up serving in many important positions culminating in his becoming the Director of Central Intelligence in 1973. Colby died in 1996 in a boating accident. The circumstances surrounding his death were viewed as suspicious by many.

• Douglas Mackiernan was the first of over 80 officers of the CIA to be killed in the line of duty. Publicly working under diplomatic cover as a State Department employee, he worked as a covert intelligence officer for the CIA in its earliest days after its creation in 1947. His assignment in Tihwa, Sinkiang included the collection of intelligence about Russian nuclear activities in Western China and Chinese intentions on the Korean Peninsula. Mackiernan was killed in April, 1950 accidentally by Tibetan outposts as he was trying to flee into Tibet with information on these intentions.

• John Downey and Richard Fecteau were 25 year-old Agency Paramilitary Officers assigned to China operations and based in Japan when the Civil Air Transport (CAT) C-47 in which they were working was shot down by the Communist Chinese in November 1952. Downey and Fecteau were en route to retrieve an agent inside China at the time of the incident. Both officers survived the crash but the CAT pilot and co-pilot Norman Shwartz and Robert Snoddy perished. The C-47 was equipped with a "cow catcher" rigged to the nose designed to snare a cable attached by harness to the agent on the ground and sent aloft by a small inflated balloon. Once the aircraft snagged the cable, the agent would be lifted into the air and the cable would be cranked up by Downey and Fecteau to retrieve the agent into the cargo bay of the C-47. Unbeknownst to the CIA, the agent network had been compromised by the Chinese, who laid a trap for the retrieval team. Downey had trained this particular agent and had a personal interest in the rescue mission. Downey and Fecteau were presumed dead until 1954, when Red China publicly announced that the two had been captured and convicted of espionage. Downey received a life sentence, while Fecteau was sentenced to 20 years. Despite protests from Washington that Downey and Fecteau were "Department of the Army civilian employees," both endured brutal interrogation and years of solitary confinement. In 1971, following President Richard Nixon's overtures to establish diplomatic relations with China, Nixon acknowledged the CIA affiliation of both men and Fecteau was released. Two years later, John Downey walked across the Wo-Lu Bridge from China into British Hong Kong. During their two decades of imprisonment, CIA placed their salaries in escrow accounts, with interest, granted both men periodic promotions on schedule with their Agency peers, maintained their life and health insurance and assigned Case Officers to look after the welfare of their families. Downey and Fecteau were awarded medals in a ceremony at Langley years after their release. Richard Fecteau became the Athletic Director at Boston University, his alma mater, retiring in 1989. John Downey entered the Connecticut Bar and became a judge. The New Haven Connecticut court house is named in his honor.

• Anthony Poshepny (a.k.a. Tony Poe) was a former World War II U.S. Marine who fought on Iwo Jima and a legendary Paramilitary Operations Officer during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in Asia. Poe was involved in training indigenous forces from Tibet in the early 1950s, landed by sea in Sumatra in 1955 with equally legendary SAD officer Tom Fosmire to command rebel Indonesian troops. He went to Laos in the early 1960s, where he served with distinction, including several years at a remote mountain post near the Chinese border. He is sometimes labeled as the model for the character Colonel Kurtz in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Poe was awarded the Intelligence Star twice, a very rare occurrence. In a post-war on-record and unclassified interview of James "Bill" Lair and Lloyd "Pat" Landry — who were Poshepny's superior officers during his assignment to Laos — both officers stated that they realized early on that Poshepny's Marine Corps background and insistence on strict military discipline made him unsuited to the work of training Hmong tribesmen. This, and Poe's creeping alcoholism and often outrageous behavior, prompted senior Agency officials to transfer Poshepny far away from the main theater of operations in the Plain of Jars region of north-central Laos to a remote base in northwestern Laos close to the Chinese border. There Poshepny successfully organized a tribe of non-Hmong hill fighters to harass the Vietnamese and Pathet Lao while keeping watch on Chinese Army road building projects in northern Laos. It was in this remote stronghold just miles from the Chinese frontier where Poshepny became infamous for collecting the ears of enemy combatants, and for placing the severed heads of his enemies on poles outside his hootch. A considerable number of accounts of Poshepny's life and work for CIA in Laos blow the "Colonel Kurtz" image out of proportion. While it was true that Poshepny shaved his head and that he had married a Laotian royal princess, no individual ever behaved more like an uncouth enlisted non-commissioned officer than Tony Poe. No poetry-writing philosopher-warrior was Tony Poe. On the contrary, his drinking and brawling caused ugly scenes in Vientiane and at the Air America Bar at Udorn. He once seriously insulted a senior female US State Department official who was making an official inspection visit to Vientiane. On another occasion, while in a drunken condition, Poe pulled out his USMC-issue K-Bar combat knife and assaulted an Air America pilot in the Udorn Air America club. Onlookers watched in horror as Poe held the pilot's head in a grip with one hand and proceeded to try to slice the man's jugular vein with the K-Bar in his other hand. Had onlookers not pulled Poe away, he may well have committed murder. Sadly, as Poshepny increasingly fell into the bottle, he was no longer effective but Agency officials were reluctant to bring Poe back to the United States, considering him to have gone completely "Asiatic." In 1968, when Poe earned his second Intelligence Star, the Agency arranged to have him closely escorted back to Headquarters in Washington DC by a couple of burly Security Officers. Upon arrival at National Airport, Poe was placed in a car, driven to Langley, brought up to the 7th floor where he was awarded the medal, then removed from the building immediately and hustled back to the airport. There he was rather unceremoniously placed on an airplane and flown back to Laos. After Vientiane fell to the Communists in 1975, Poe spent the rest of his days with his Lao wife and children living in northeast Thailand. He continued to take occasional contract work as a private bodyguard well into the 1980s. Toward the end of his life, Poe returned to his home town of San Francisco and allowed a rare press interview that was widely distributed. He entered a VA hospital in San Francisco and died there. REFERENCE: "The CIA in Laos," an interview with Bill Lair and Pat Landry, University of Texas at Dallas Library. Poe gained the respect of the Hmong forces with practices that were barbaric even by native standards. The Hmong fighters brought him the ears of dead enemy soldiers, and he mailed the ears to the U.S. embassy in Vientiane to prove the body counts. He dropped severed heads onto enemy locations twice in a grisly form of psy-ops. He was also wounded several times in combat and is still held in very high esteem by the Hmong community in the United States.

• James (Jim) Glerum. James Glerum was among the second generation of Agency Paramilitary Case Officers and he played an integral role in paramilitary operations in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Laos. Widely respected by subordinates and superiors alike, he rose to become the Chief of the Special Activities Division and was a key figure in the division's post-Vietnam era professional development and modernization. Mr. Glerum continued to act in a consulting capacity following his retirement and was also involved in a successful program to collect and organize an enormous body of files and records documenting the 60 plus year history of the Special Activities Division.

• Wilbur "Will" Green. A former Army Special Forces Sergeant from a small rural town in South Carolina, African-American Will Green went to Laos as a CIA Paramilitary Case Officer in the 1960s and served with distinction. Known by his callsign "Black Lion," Green remained in the most dangerous forward Hmong outposts even when ordered to evacuate. From there he directed Hmong troops in heavy combat and was wounded more than once. Ironically, while visiting his home in South Carolina on home-leave, Green became seriously ill and succumbed to a liver fluke contracted while serving multiple tours in Laos. "Black Lion" was a highly respected SAD officer, known for his quiet leadership and personal bravery under fire. In 2008, Green was recognized for his outstanding leadership as a Paramilitary Case Officer by the officers of the Special Activities Division during a ceremony at CIA Headquarters as part of a Black History Month commemoration.

• Tom Fosmire. Fosmire joined SOG in the 1950s and was given responsibility (along with Tony Poe) in training Tibetan tribesmen to fight against the Chinese Communists in the early part of his career. The training occurred first at a base on Saipan in the Marianas islands but was later moved to a colder mountainous climate at Camp Hale, Colorado. One battalion was trained at the Farm, near Williamsburg, Virginia. After the Tibetan operation concludes, Fosmire llanded with Tony Poe in Sumatra, Indonesia to supply and train mutinous forces there in an effort by the Eisenhower administration to destabilize the communist-leaning regime of Sukarno. He and Poe were evacuated from Sumatra by US Navy submarine when the troops they were training fled to the mountains. In the 1980s, Fosmire served in El Salvador and Honduras, training Nicaraguan rebel troops opposed to the Sandanista government.

• Howard Freeman. In 1972, Freeman was assigned to command a remote outpost at Phu Pa Thi (Site 85) north of the CIA base at Long Tieng, Laos where the US Air Force had installed a strategic radar system to enable US bombers to launch more accurate raids on North Vietnam. When the Vietnamese overran the 3,000-foot (910 m) mountain outpost, Freeman and a small security detachment of Hmong rushed to the top of the mountain where they engaged in close combat with the enemy, resulting in Freeman's wounding. Freeman was carrying only a sawed-off shotgun and a side arm when he was hit in the back of the leg. Unable by that time to rescue any of the Air Force personnel, Freeman, and his Hmong team were ordered off the mountain. In his later career, Freeman served with distinction in the Agency's Counterterrorism Center, where he handled some of the CTC's most dangerous assignments.

• Richard (Dick) Holm. After serving an initial two-year tour upcountry in Laos, former US Army intelligence officer Holm was assigned to the Congo. Flying as back-seat observer in an agency T-28, he was seriously wounded when the aircraft crash-landed in a remote location hundreds of miles from any large population center. Holm, who sustained 3rd degree burns over his face and much of his upper torso, survived and was evacuated after almost a month in the care of local natives. After a lengthy recovery of several years, Holm went on to a distinguished career as a CIA Case Officer, finishing his career as Chief of Station in a Western European country.

• James William "Bill" Lair. Bill Lair was among the most distinguished officers ever to have served in SOG. In 1952 he was sent to Bangkok to work with the Thai Government in development of a counter-insurgency program. Lair developed, trained and led the Thai Parachute Reinforcement Units (PARU), a highly effective and elite force, which later served as training cadre for the CIA program in Laos, and which also later engaged in direct combat operations there. After some 8 years, Lair was reassigned as Chief of Operations in Laos and almost single-handedly developed the Hmong indigenous forces there to combat the Communist Pathet Lao and the two main-force Vietnamese infantry divisions supporting them. With fellow officers like Lloyd "Pat" Landry, Vint Lawrence and Tony Poe, Wil Green and several others, the Hmong forces developed into an effective army that kept the Pathet Lao from seizing Vientianne and tied up the two Vietnamese divisions for 12 years—departing country only after the US military evacuated South Vietnam. Lair was appointed Chief of Operations in Laos in 1960 and was soon joined by fellow SAD/SOG officer Lloyd C. "Pat" Landry. The two made an effective team. When the Agency proposed to split them up in order to have Landry take charge of operations in the Laotian panhandle, Landry objected and opted to remain as Lair's Deputy Chief of Operations in north-central Laos, where operations focused on control of the Plain of Jars. Prior to joining CIA, Lair had served in the US Army 3rd Armored Division in France and Germany during World War Two.

• Lloyd C. "Pat" Landry. Pat Landry joined CIA in the early 1950s following combat service in the US Army in World War Two. Sent to Laos in 1961, Landry became Deputy Chief of Operations under Bill Lair. Known as a strict disciplinarian, Landry was rarely without his British-style swagger stick, and he used to enjoy walking up behind someone and slapping it down on their desk. When the war in Laos escalated in 1968, command and control of SOG operations was split between the north-central theater centered on operations for control of the Plain of Jars and operations in the southern Laos Panhandle, aimed at controlling the Bolovens Plateau in order to maintain pressure on Vietnamese logistics along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The command center was relocated from Vientiane to Udorn Air Base in northern Thailand. Agency officials wanted Lair to remain in command at Udorn and for Landry to remain in Vientiane to command the southern operations group. Landry refused the promotion in order to remain Lair's deputy at Udorn. The move to Udorn made sense because that large base was capable of supporting an enormous Air Branch flight and maintenance program, as well as serving as the center of Agency theater photo-reconnaissance and photo-analysis efforts in support of SOG special operations in the Laos theater of operations. Udorn housed a large contingent of Air American platforms as well as US Air Force combat resources. In later years, Landry owned and operated several "watering holes" in Thailand, including the Cowboy Bar in Bangkok.

• Gar Thorsrud. Thorsrud was a Montana pilot and smoke jumper who was initially contracted by CIA to fly aircraft for the Tibetan insertion operation, encrypted STBARNUM, in the early 1950s, He was subsequently offered a staff position in SOG and, together with Major (later Brigadier General) Heinie Aderholt—who had been seconded to the Agency from the US Air Force—stood up a separate paramilitary air wing—later formalized as Air Branch. SOG/Air Branch (and Thorsrud) subsequently played a major role in virtually every Agency covert action in the Third World during the cold war and beyond. In 1956, Thorsrud established an air operations base carved out of the jungle in a western pacific location and from there he oversaw air delivery of men and supplies to support President Eisenhower's program to de-stabilize the Sukarno regime in Indonesia. When the Soviets abandoned an arctic weather and listening station in the mid-1960s, after the ice pack it was built on broke adrift, Thorsrud organized the air assets for OPERATION COLD FEET, a remarkable joint CIA-US Navy operation that put 2 officers on the floating ice flow to recover a treasure trove of documents, instruments and equipment abandoned there by the Soviets. Thorsrud then successfully extracted the two officers by means of a "cow catcher" attached to a converted B-17 bomber that snagged a line attached to an inflated balloon and connected to the men by harness. This incredible feat in the arctic slowly leaked out and became the basis for the spy thriller film "Ice Station Zebra." During the early years of China operations, Air Branch assumed control of several private Asian cargo airlines and turned them into CIA proprietary companies. These included Civil Air Transport (CAT), purchased from its founder General Claire Chennaul, as well as Air America, and lesser known air props such as Bird Air, and Southern Air Transport.

• George Bacon. After serving several tours in Laos as a PMOO, Bacon left the Agency and went to Angola, where he was killed in action while working as an independent contractor.

• Grayston "Gray" Lynch. Lynch and William "Rip" Robertson led the CIA-trained Cuban exile brigade at the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Lynch had been a career Army infantry officer prior to joining the Agency. He and Robertson were the only Americans who actually went ashore with their charges; both were ordered off the beach and watched in desperation as the Kennedy administration refused to provide air cover for the Cuban brigade ashore. Lynch's memoirs provide one of the few true ground-truth account of the Bay of Pigs operation.

• William "Rip" Robertson. A former US Marine, Rip Robertson had served in SOG for some 10 years before being fired after a sabotage operation he was in charge of in Nicaragua went wrong, resulting in the accidental sinking of a British vessel. Undeterred, Robertson went into private business in Nicaragua, and when the CIA was looking for remote bases to train the Cuban exile 2506 brigade for an invasion of Cuba, Robertson was quietly brought back on board at Langley to engage in training the Cubans at some of his Nicaraguan locations. On D-Day, Robertson and Grayston Lynch went ashore with the Cuban 2506 Brigade and were engaged in close combat with Castro's forces. Both were ordered off the beach and watched, frustrated, as Castro's Air Force—unfettered by President Kennedy's fatal decision to cease air support for the 2506 Brigade—moved in and destroyed the 2506 Brigade and several of its support vessels at the Bay of Pigs.

• Felix Rodriguez. Cuban-born, US-educated Felix Rodriguez was recruited as an intelligence asset by the Cuban Task Force of CIA's Latin America Division to conduct espionage missions in Cuba in advance of the 2506 Brigade's abortive invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Following the Bay of Pigs, he was employed in an assortment of espionage and sabotage missions against the Castro regime, rising from recruited asset to Contract Agent by the mid-1960s. In 1967, he was assigned to assist La Paz Station with the task of setting up and training a Bolivian Army Special forces unit and then serving as primary US liaison officer with that unit in a major effort to locate Ernesto "Che" Guevarra, who (with his East German common-law wife and several other Communist agents) were operating from remote mountain bases in Bolivia after failing to incite a Communist insurgency in the country. Rodriguez accompanied the Bolivians on forays into the mountains in pursuit of the elusive Che. The operation received a major boost when it was discovered that a stranger was making occasional visits to a mountain village, where he would spend a few days at a time in a hotel. Suspecting this pipe-smoking stranger might be Che or one of his operatives, the Station recruited a member of the hotel staff to report on the stranger's comings and goings. Using a surrepticiously deployed technical system, Rodriguez and his Bolivian Special Forces team were able to track the stranger-- a very professionally disguised Che-- back to his mountain hideout. Mounting a capture operation, the Bolivians-- accompanied by Rodgriguez with orders to take Che alive and interview him-- successfully pinpointed the insurgents' mountain hideout. The Bolivians surrounded the camp and Guevarra was taken into Bolivian custody without incident. The Bolivian troops handled Che roughly and repeatedly threatened him. Finally, they announced to Che that he would be executed. Rodriguez, desperate to prevent this execution, began negotiating with the Bolivians to buy time and also reported this development by radio to his superiors. Senior authorities ordered Rodriguez to do all in his power to prevent the execution and to convince the Bolivians to bring Che in alive. Rodriguez later reported that he interviewed Che several times in between his heated negotiations with the Bolivian Army sergeant in charge of the team. At the last interview, Che told Rodriguez that he knew he was to be executed by the Bolivians, thanked Rodriguez for his kindness and civility, and gave Rodriguez his wrist watch as a gift for his consideration and efforts on his behalf. Against Rodriguez's strong protest, the Bolivian Army Sergeant in charge of the team shot and killed Che. The body was then beheaded and his hands were severed in order to provide physical proof of his capture and death. In 1969, Rodriguez joined the US Army and subsequently became a US Citizen. After leaving the Army he rejoined CIA as a paramilitary officer in the Special Operations (later Special Activities) Division and served tours in Vietnam and Africa. Even later he served as a paramilitary advisor training indigenous counterinsurgency forces in Central America during the 1980s. In later years, he has enjoyed telling his war stories and has frequently held court in Little Havana, Miami, where he is treated as a hero and celebrity by the Cuban-American community. In 1989, he published his very readable autobiography, "Shadow Warrior." In 2004, Rodriguez became President of the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association.

• William Billy Waugh, Sergeant Major, U.S. Army-Retired (born December, 1929), is a highly decorated American Special Forces soldier and Central Intelligence Agency Paramilitary Operations Officer who served in the United States military and CIA special operations for more than fifty years. Billy Waugh was a Special Forces soldier and served in the Korean War. When the Vietnam War began Waugh was a member of 5th Special Forces Group and joined the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). While working for US ARMY MACV-SOG (not to be confused with SAD/SOG), Waugh helped train Vietnamese and Cambodian forces in unconventional warfare tactics primarily directed against the North Vietnamese Army operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He received a Silver Star, four Bronze Stars for Valor and eight Purple Hearts. Waugh joined the CIA as a low-level and limited duty employee in 1961, however when the Agency re-tooled SAD in the early 1970s to require all Paramilitary staff to either take training as formal Case Officers or lose their employment, Waugh never received his professional certification as a Core Collector and left the Agency along with some 300 similar employees at the end of the Vietnam War. His later work for the Agency in the 1980s was as a surveillance team member for CTC—a low-level para-professional position that also included dozens of ex-cops, Army officers, house wives and veterans of assorted other common occupations.. The most significant of these surveillance operations was in Sudan and included spotting Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden. At the age of 71, Waugh asked to be assigned to one of the later SAD/SOG Jawbreaker teams to enter Afghanistan, but he was accepted only with great reluctance by both SAD and CTC due not only to his age but also due to his lack of Case Officer training and certification. In his self-serving autobiography, Waugh admits that he was unable to withstand both the rigors and the climate of Afghanistan and he himself requested to be sent home well short of tour.

• Michael G. Vickers (born 1953) is the United States Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. He is a former Army Special Forces officer, and CIA paramilitary operations officer from their elite Special Activities Division. While in the CIA, he played a key role in the arming of the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and is considered the architect behind the program that gave the Soviets a significant defeat in the Cold War. His role is featured in George Crile's 2003 book Charlie Wilson's War, and in the 2007 movie adaptation in which he is played by actor Christopher Denham, who is best remembered in the film as the character playing chess with several individuals at once.

• Johnny Micheal Spann, the first American casualty in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, was a Paramilitary Officer in Special Activities Division and former United States Marine. Officer Spann was killed in a prison uprising at the Qala-i-Jangi compound at Mazari Sharif. He was killed after interviewing John Walker Lindh who was being held at the same compound. Officer Spann fought off hundreds of prisoners with his rifle and pistol, before running out of ammunition and resorting to hand-to-hand combat. His actions allowed other outnumbered U.S. and Northern Alliance individuals to escape. These forces returned with the British Special Boat Service and Army Special Forces to recover Officer Spann and to defeat the uprising. Officer Spann was awarded the Intelligence Star for his actions.

• Ernest "Chick" Tsikerdanos. A veteran of OSS, 82nd Airborne Sergeant Chick Tsikerdanos served with Chiang Kai Shek in Kunming, China and later in Burma with the famous OSS Detachment 101. Tsikerdanos had a close relationship with General and Madame Chiang and was held in high esteem by them and other Chinese Nationalist leaders. On the last day of the war, August 9, 1945, Tsikerdanos was wounded in the right eye by a Japanese mortar shell fragment when his battalion of Burmese irregulars were ambushed while moving across a valley. After leaving the service, Tsikerdanos joined CIA and was assigned to Taiwan where he ran cross-channel reconnaissance and harassment operations into Red China from Nationalist-held islands. A legend in his own lifetime, he later served multiple tours in Greece, and later was entrusted with the difficult assignment of cleaning up the large mess of internal "dirt" files collected over twenty-five years by the paranoid former CI Chief—James Jesus Angleton—after Angleton's forced retirement. After his own retirement, Tsikerdanos returned to CIA as a Contract Case Officer, working with distinction in the Agency's Counterterrorism Center for several years. He was personally engaged against some of the most dangerous terrorist suspects in Europe. Ernie Tsikerdanos is warmly remembered for his outrageous sense of humor, his integrity and his trade-mark stogie, which he rarely went anywhere without.

• William (Bill) Young was the son of American missionaries and was born in Thailand and raised there and in Burma. Young's father, Harold, aided CIA with intelligence gathering trips into Southern China during the late 1940s and 1950s. Son Bill followed in his father's footsteps by joining CIA following a hitch in the US Army in the early 1960s. Young's knowledge of the region and command of indigenous languages made him an ideal candidate for service in the CIA's paramilitary wing—then known as the Special Operations Division. Young—along with Bill Lair, Vint Lawrence, Tony Poe, Jim Glerum and others—was a key officer involved in the formation of the guerrilla army of Hhmong (Meo) hill tribesmen and in using that force to mount harrassment and interdiction operations against the Communist Pathet Lao forces and their North Vietnamese sponsors. In 1968, Mr. Young strongly objected to proposals to widen the conflict with the introduction of US military resources—including widespread US Air Force carpet bombing in the Plain Des Jarres region of northcentral Laos and along the Bolovens Plateau and the Ho Chi Minh trail in southern Laos. Young's strident objections to this new US strategy resulted in the unfortunate termination of his employment. The loss of Bill Young was a significant blow to the program, for few of his peers possessed such deep insight into the culture of the locals. Mr. Young remained in Thailand for the rest of his life, with the exception of a brief period of a few months when he worked in the corporate world in the United States. He soon returned to Thailand. Serious health problems beset him during his final years and he died by his own hand on April 1, 2011. When Thai Police discovered the body of Mr. Young, they discovered a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand and a Crucifix in his left hand.

• On October 25, 2003, paramilitary officers Christopher Mueller and William "Chief" Carlson were killed while conducting an operation to kill/capture high level al-Qa'ida leaders near Shkin, Afghanistan. Both these officers were honored with Stars on the CIA Memorial Wall at their Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. "The bravery of these two men cannot be overstated," Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet told a gathering of several hundred Agency employees and family members. "Chris and Chief put the lives of others ahead of their own. That is heroism defined." Mueller, a former US Navy SEAL and Carlson, a former Army Special Forces soldier, Delta Force operator, and member of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, died while on this covert operation. Both officers saved the lives of others, including Afghan soldiers, during the engagement with al-Qa'ida forces. In Oliver North's book American Heroes in Special Operations, a chapter is devoted to their story.