The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2020 47 Of the 133 employees honored with stars on the Memorial Wall at CIA headquarters, the names of 93 have been publicly acknowledged, but often only years after their deaths. In more than 20 cases, persons later recognized by the agency as CIA employees were working under State Department cover at the time of their deaths and were inscribed (as State Department employees) on AFSA’s Memorial Plaques. They include: Douglas Mackiernan (the first CIA officer killed in the line of duty, 1950); Barbara Rob- ins (a CIA officer, and the first woman whose name was inscribed on the AFSA plaques, 1965); eight CIA officers killed in the 1984 bombing of Embassy Beirut; and Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who were killed during the 2012 attack on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi. —J.K.N. CIA Employees on the AFSAMemorial Plaques ceal the extent of its losses from a rank and file (and a larger public) increasingly skeptical of the purpose and value of the war effort.” It is also true, however, that AFSA had had to go through the steps required to erect a second plaque to hold all the names. AFSA put up the second plaque in 1972 at the east end of the C Street lobby, and took that opportunity to revise the cri- teria to require “heroic or other inspirational circumstances” in place of “heroic or tragic circumstances.” The exchange of one set of vague criteria for another had little practical impact on subsequent inscriptions. The new plaque responded to the scourge of war, but it was the scourge of terror that filled it. The addition in March 1973 of the names of two FSOs assassinated by terrorists in Sudan drew President Richard Nixon to become the first, and so far only, president to speak at the plaques. The next year, AFSA President Thomas Boyatt held the first of what would become annual memorial ceremonies at the plaque on Foreign Service Day. After 1975, terrorism accounted for the deaths of most of those whose names were added to the plaque. By 1983, follow- ing the addition of 13 killed in the bombing of U.S. Embassy Beirut, the 11-year-old second plaque was nearly three-quar- ters filled. Changing Criteria Before 1982, eligibility for inscription was limited to For- eign Service members, Marine security guards, U.S. military personnel assigned to the U.S. Agency for International Development in Vietnam and employees of the Central Intel- ligence Agency under State Department cover at the time of death (see the sidebar, this page). But after terrorists murdered Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ray, assistant army attaché at U.S. Embassy Paris, the AFSA Governing Board expanded the plaque criteria to include all Americans serving under chief- of-mission authority. In making that change, it is unclear if the Governing Board considered the fact that, since World War II, American citizen staffing at U.S. embassies had shifted from being mostly Foreign Service to being mostly employees of other agencies. Thus, only 16 of the 43 names added to the AFSA plaques dur- ing the remainder of the 1980s were members of the Foreign Service. Those 43 names filled the remaining spaces on the second plaque in 1988, and the roll of honor spilled over to four side panels installed in 1985. During the 1990s, victims of terrorism continued to account for most additions to the plaque. Eight names were inscribed in 1998 following the bombing of U.S. Embassy Nairobi. In 1996 many AFSA members objected to adding political appointee Ronald Brown’s name after his death on an over- seas trip, but the AFSA Governing Board did so judging that as secretary of the Department of Commerce, Brown qualified as the head of a Foreign Service agency. As the new millennium began, AFSA had accumulated numerous plaque nominations for Foreign Service members who had died in the line of duty overseas. These nominations would have met the original 1933 criteria for inscription, but did not meet the criteria adopted in 1948. Pressure built from former colleagues to honor them nonetheless, and in 2001 the Governing Board restored authorization for personnel who died overseas “in the line of duty.” AFSA invited members to suggest qualifying cases, and that resulted in the addition of 29 names in three years, all State Department or USAID employees with dates of death ranging from 1959 to 2000. The new plaque responded to the scourge of war, but it was the scourge of terror that filled it.