Spies of Arlington National Cemetery
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On the Walk With History podcast, John Kiriakou, author of Remains of the Day: A Definitive Guide to Washington D.C.'s Historic Cemeteries, walked through Arlington National Cemetery and discussed the graves of figures connected to American intelligence history, several of whom he knew or whose stories he witnessed firsthand.

The creation of the CIA

Kiriakou recounted how the CIA came to exist independently. When Truman pushed the National Security Act of 1947, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opposed creating a separate agency, arguing that if one were created he should run both it and the FBI. Truman called Hoover into the Oval Office and told him the bill would make the CIA a division of the FBI. That was a lie. Hoover believed it and withdrew his objections; the CIA was created independently, and William Donovan became its natural first leader.

The figures buried there

Kiriakou's tour covered OSS founder William "Wild Bill" Donovan; deputy CIA director and secret Nixon envoy Vernon Walters; codebreakers William and Elizabeth Friedman, whose work led to the founding of the NSA; slain Athens station chief Richard Welch; Beirut station chief William Buckley, tortured to death on videotape; U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers; and Mike Spann, the first CIA officer killed after the September 11 attacks.

The book behind the tour

The tour is a by-product of a book Kiriakou wrote for himself, having already written seven about intelligence and the CIA, and which he expected to become one of his most popular. He wrote it in six weeks, starting the day after Thanksgiving, finishing the day before Christmas, working until half past two in the morning, and describes it as the fastest he has ever written anything, fast enough that he got ahead of his own picture research.

The interest is older than the book. At nine, hunting salamanders under rocks in a cemetery near his childhood home, he found the grave of a man of the 4th Pennsylvania Infantry who had captured a Confederate battle flag at the Battle of Petersburg, was given the Medal of Honor, and went home to New Castle, Pennsylvania to farm until his death in the 1890s. What held him was that this was a common farmer who had done something very brave, not the men in the giant nineteenth-century mausoleums who had owned the tin mill, the steel mill or the coal mine. He says a cemetery is the only place he finds peace, and that the appeal is the architecture, the symbolism, and the fact that everybody has a story, you do not have to be famous to be interesting.

The method was months of wandering every cemetery inside Washington, using findagrave.com as a hint that someone might repay research, and it produced about 250 people he describes as the most fascinating you have never heard of. Dozens of books had been written about Arlington alone, and it shocked him that nobody had written a field guide to the city's cemeteries as a whole. The Smithsonian, he says, expects it to do well in the gift shop, and the publisher commissioned three sequels: the Mafia graves of New York City, the historic cemeteries of Chicago, and the country-western graves of Nashville.

Beyond the spies

Arlington's own procedures turn up in the same material: a burial in the ground carries a six-to-eight-week wait, and Kiriakou notes the oddity of a friend who died in 2021 not being interred until 2023 even though he had been cremated and placed in the columbarium. The man had been entitled to a twenty-one-gun salute and had asked in his will that there be none, so that his antipathy to violence would be carried forward in death.

The wider project turns up finds of a different kind. At the Old Soldiers' and Sailors' Home National Cemetery, at the top of North Capitol Street, Kiriakou walked some 15,000 burials and found the Medal of Honor recipients the least interesting of them, their citations reading, again and again, that they had killed lots of Indians. One grave he stopped at out of curiosity turned out to belong to a woman whose photograph, love letters and scrapbook are now held by the Hemingway Museum in Key West, which is, he says, why anyone knows her name at all. At Congressional Cemetery he found J. Edgar Hoover buried thirty feet from Clyde Tolson, at the centre of what he calls the only officially gay section of any cemetery in America.

See also

- William Donovan
- Vernon Walters
- William and Elizabeth Friedman
- Richard Welch
- Bill Buckley
- Francis Gary Powers
- Mike Spann
- J. Edgar Hoover
