giovedì 14 gennaio 2010

 

Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, has not mentioned the names of Dane Clark Paresi, Scott Roberson, Harold Brown, Jr., Jeremy Wise, or Elizabeth Hanson in public, even though he has given their families permission to speak openly about their identities. Nor has he released the names of the three other CIA officers who died along with them in the December 2009 suicide bombing attack on Forward Operating Base Chapman near Khost, Afghanistan. It is also highly unlikely that we will hear these names spoken by many other employees of the CIA. To be sure, when they are within their own walls at the compound in Langley, Panetta and his employees will say the names of their slain colleagues and friends. The CIA will host multiple memorial services to honor all seven of the victims of the attack, including an annual Memorial Day ceremony during which the CIA members who have died on the job are remembered and honored; but when they drive past the entrance gate and into the world, most will jealously guard the identities of those slain.

 

Those unfamiliar with the culture of the CIA do not understand. If these names have been published in newspapers and on the internet, why would the CIA refuse to acknowledge them? Does naming them put any of their colleagues, informants, or family members in jeopardy? There is some debate on this subject, but to understand why the CIA is reluctant to release the names of those who die undercover, we must ask a different question.

 

We honor the dead by publishing their names. Flipping through the gory battle scenes in Homer’s Iliad, we discover name after name of otherwise anonymous soldiers, such as Pedaeus, tenderly remembered in death:

 

Meges killed Pedaeus, Antenor’s son, a bastard boy but lovely Theano nursed him with close, loving care like her own children, just to please her husband. Closing, Meges gave him close attention too– the famous spearman struck behind his skull, just at the neck-cord, the razor spear slicing straight up through the jaws, cutting away the tongue– he sank in the dust, teeth clenching the cold bronze.

 

The practice of naming fallen soldiers continues today, on one war memorial after another, where the names of the dead are carved into stone monuments (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. is a famous example). At the CIA, however, the monument to slain members has an entirely different character. In the entrance hall of its main building, a collection of black stars has been carved into the white marble wall. Attached to the wall, beneath the stars, a black Moroccan goatskin-bound book, called the "Book of Honor," rests in a steel frame, topped by an inch-thick plate of glass. A list of years (1947, 1948, etc. and sometimes a year is listed more than once) is printed down the left margin of the visible page. Beside each year, the heavy linen paper has been stamped with a black star, and occasionally a name appears to the right of a star.

 

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