cover image The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA

The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA

Ted Gup. Doubleday Books, $25.95 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-385-49293-5

A former investigative journalist with the Washington Post and Time and winner of a George Polk Award, Gup breaks a longstanding taboo in an expos that reveals the namesDand personal storiesDof some three dozen CIA agents who died in the line of duty and whose identities have been kept secretDsometimes for decades. Gup interviewed more than 400 current and former CIA agents, as well as surviving family members, to pry loose their stories. Among the spies unmasked in these kinetic biographical profiles are Douglas Mackiernan, U.S. vice-consul in China's westernmost Xinjiang province, who fled Mao's revolution only to be shot to death by Tibetan border guards; Pete Ray, an Alabama National Guard pilot killed in the Bay of Pigs invasion; Matthew Gannon, victim of the Pan Am Flight 103 crash over Scotland, a bombing linked to Libyan terrorists; and Hugh Redmond, who refused to crack during 19 torturous years in a Shanghai prison. Gup unveils covert missions from Laos to France, from Angola to Cyprus, providing extraordinary insight into the CIA's day-to-day operations. He also empathetically delves into the ordeals of these fallen spies' grieving families, many of whom were lied to for years as the agency refused to acknowledge the men's CIA ties. Told against the backdrop of Cold War and superpower struggles, Gup's sleuthing is a remarkable coup, full of high-level intrigue, cover-ups and drama. He leaves it to readers to decide whether his subjects are heroes or knaves, and whether the CIA is a rogue agency that should be reined in or an essential survival tool in a treacherous world. (May) FYI: Gup's 1992 expos in the Washington Post of a top-secret government installation buried beneath a West Virginia resort, where Congress would seek shelter in the event of impending nuclear war, led to that underground complex being shut down.