Barbara Robbins: A Slain CIA Secretary’s Life and Death
The story of a 21-year-old who was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War. For years the CIA refused to acknowledge that she worked for the agency:
“It is Warren who inherited from his dead parents the one thing that most illuminates his sister’s time in Vietnam: a trove of 30 letters she wrote home, dating from her arrival in Saigon to the week before her death.
“The letters offer a glimpse into the life of a young woman supposedly working for the State Department as she launched her career and looked for love amid Vietnam’s escalating violence.
“‘Reading these letters,’ said Warren, 65, a retired airline mechanic, who hadn’t looked at them since he was a kid, ‘it’s like I got to know her all over again.’
“August 6 1964: Dear Mother, Dad & Warren , I think I’m going to really enjoy working for the State Dept. Security-wise we do have to be careful — but you’d never feel that way right here in Saigon if it weren’t for the Vietnamese Police all over the city.“
CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split
When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation:
“The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. His CIA job, she said, poisoned their five-year-old marriage.
“‘[He] used me and our daughter . . . to run cover for his undercover operations . . . I never felt safe, never knew who people were or why they were interested in us or why they were photographing us,’ wrote the woman, who is in her 30s, in December. ‘As a result of [his] different assignments I never had a good support network of people I could trust or rely on to help out.’ And, she claimed, her spy-husband had little interest in household chores. ‘[He] never so much as washed or folded a load of laundry, swept or mopped one floor, or changed one dirty diaper.'”
How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA
At CIA headquarters in Langley, one of the newest artifacts in the agency’s private museum is a message from a father to his 3-year-old son. The gold-embossed letterhead features a swastika and the name Adolf Hitler.
“Dear Dennis,” the seven-sentence letter begins. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe — three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”
