The Book of Honor by Ted Gup Page B

had died without a will.
    But he was not forgotten. On October 18, 1950, Secretary of State Acheson honored some fifteen diplomats during an hour-long ceremony in the department’s auditorium. A single posthumous medal of service was presented to Douglas Mackiernan, Vice-Consul, Tihwa. On the west wall of the State Department’s lobby, his name was inscribed among the columns of diplomats killed in the line of service. In death as in life, he would be remembered only by his cover story. His name would be the first CIA officer remembered on the State Department tablets, but it would hardly be the last.
    Two days after the ceremony, L. T. Merchant, a State Department official from the Far East Division, met with Pegge Mackiernan. Later he expressed the department’s “deep regret over the tragic death of her husband but told her that she and her children should take comfort from the fact that he had truly died a hero’s death for his country.”
    Merchant asked if there was anything he could do for her. Pegge said she would need a job. As a former newspaperwoman, she wondered if she might work for the State Department as an information officer. And she wanted to return to that part of the world she and Doug knew best—Asia. In particular, she hoped to be close to where her husband had fallen.
    The department was eager to help the thirty-one-year-old widow and her two-year-old twins. On March 15, 1951, the State Department could claim another “Vice-Consul Mackiernan,” as Pegge Mackiernan was assigned to Lahore in northern Pakistan. It was the State Department’s closest posting to where her husband had been killed. The twins would, for the time being, stay with Mackiernan’s parents.
    Not long after, Pegge Mackiernan traveled to Bombay, India, and sought out Angus Thurmer, the CIA’s chief of base there. She entered his embassy office and closed the door behind her. “I have reason to believe my late husband, Doug Mackiernan, was not only a State Department officer but had other allegiances,” she said quietly. “Among his effects I found this and I thought you could send it to the proper place.”
    With that, she unwrapped a hand towel and produced the largest revolver Thurmer had ever seen. The long barrel reminded him of one of those old six-shooters from the Wild West. Thurmer disassembled the gun, placed it inside an Agency sack, and put the package inside the diplomatic pouch to be returned to CIA headquarters. He also sent a cable giving the Agency a heads-up that the revolver was on its way. He had never met Mackiernan. He had only heard rumors that one of their own had been killed on the Tibetan border.
    Little more than a year later, on October 20, 1952, Pegge Mackiernan remarried in a Jesuit cathedral in Bombay. The groom was John Hlavacek, a journalist for United Press.
    Among the thousands of pages of State Department records today in the U.S. Archives relating to Mackiernan, there is but one incidental reference to the CIA. Following Mackiernan’s death, the CIA’s first general counsel, Lawrence Houston, formerly assistant general counsel of the OSS, requested that Undersecretary of State Carlisle Humelsine settle up the Mackiernan estate. That meant drafting a check for $658.90 for Mackiernan’s father. Ironically it was Houston that in September 1947 had advised CIA Director Hillenkoetter that the Agency had no legislative authority to conduct covert operations—at the very time that Mackiernan was doing just that.
    In late November 1951 the State Department decided to ask the Tibetan government to compensate the Mackiernan family for his wrongful death. The amount sought: $50,000. But the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi argued that Tibet was already in crisis because of the Chinese Communists, and that any such request for money might suggest the United States was hostile to them or deserting them in their hour of need. Concluding the