Hugh Francis Redmond
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Hugh Francis Redmond was, in John Kiriakou's account, the first officer of the Central Intelligence Agency to die in the line of duty. Kiriakou has said the case had held his attention long enough that he wrote himself an outline for a podcast about it, and he read from those notes when asked about the agency's history in China. Redmond's name, he notes, was declassified only recently, within about two years of his telling it.

Shanghai under commercial cover

Redmond had been a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor organisation, and joined the agency's Special Activities Division, which Kiriakou notes still exists. He was sent to Shanghai in 1946 under deep cover as an ice cream machine salesman. The job, as Kiriakou describes it, was to drive around Shanghai pretending to sell ice cream so that he could observe the Chinese communists and transmit what he learned back to headquarters.

When the communists took control of the country in 1951 Redmond was ordered to evacuate. He had married a Russian woman while in Shanghai, and the couple were ordered onto a ship for San Francisco. Before they could board, the communists arrested him, his wife, and a group of White Russians, Kiriakou distinguishes them from the communist Russians and calls them Mensheviks. His wife was released almost immediately and Redmond was not, which led the CIA to believe that she had informed on him.

Nineteen years

The prisoners were taken to what Kiriakou calls a dungeon and all of them were tortured. Redmond was kept in a tiny cell with no toilet and given rice and chicken blood as his daily meal; Kiriakou lists solitary confinement, torture, starvation and beatings, says his interrogators knocked out literally every one of his teeth, and that he lost some sixty pounds. After four years the other prisoners were released. Redmond was not, and Kiriakou attributes the difference to the fact that they had confessed under interrogation and he alone had refused.

In 1970, nineteen years after the capture, the Chinese sent a diplomatic note saying Redmond was dead and that he had killed himself. The United States asked for the body; the Chinese refused and cremated him. Kiriakou says he spoke to Redmond's nephew, Bill, who told him the family never believed the suicide account, and Kiriakou adds that there is no proof whatsoever that Redmond killed himself. The Chinese, he says, did not notify the United States of the death until Redmond had already been dead and cremated for three months.

The cover outlives the man

Until a few years before Kiriakou's telling, the CIA denied that Redmond had ever been an employee, maintaining to the end the story that he was an ice cream machine salesman. The agency eventually held a ceremony at its Wall of Honor, in the lobby of the old headquarters building, and acknowledged that Redmond was the first CIA employee to die in the line of duty.

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- CIA directorates
- China as mediator
