Free The Book of Honor by Ted Gup Page B

broad field with poor performance.” Bolstering the ranks with highly trained officers was to be a top priority in the years ahead.
    Adding to that pressure was the very real threat of atomic espionage and the witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy from which not even the Agency itself was exempt. On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, over the Marshall Islands, all but vaporizing the island. It was a none-too-subtle warning to Moscow and Beijing that the United States was not to be taken lightly.
    But anti-Communist hysteria was rampant. Senator McCarthy held the government hostage with his bogus list of Communist infiltrators and his choreographed hearings. The very culture of the country seemed obsessed with “the Red Scare.” In 1952 the film
High Noon
was released. Billed as a cowboy movie, it was a thinly veiled allegory of the plight of liberals and leftists nationwide and of the impact of fear and suspicion on a community.
    The next year the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, were electrocuted for selling atomic secrets to the Soviets. That same year
Casino Royale,
by British author Ian Fleming, was published. It introduced readers to suave and swashbuckling James Bond, Agent 007, who liked his martinis “stirred not shaken.” Redmond and Mackiernan, trained in maintaining invisibility, would have scoffed at such high-profile antics.
    Throughout these early years the CIA was busy trying to keep up with an ever-expanding mandate. Resigned to the fact that it had little chance of actually toppling the Soviet Union or China, it contented itself with sponsoring behind-the-lines acts of sabotage designed to divert and frustrate the two Communist giants who were seen as bent on expansionism. It also resolved that it would blunt any attempt to spread Marxism beyond the Communist states’ existing borders. That meant turning its attention and resources to those regimes and proxy states that tilted even remotely to the left.
    But the Agency’s successes would have been of little consolation to Ruth Redmond. On May 20, 1952, more than a year after her son’s disappearance, she wrote U.S. Senator Herbert Lehman, “My son is one of the Americans held in prison for more than a year and so far nothing has been done to secure his release—one cannot help but ask why a country like ours for which he fought in World War Two can be so lax in behalf of her people. My one ambition is to again see my only son and beseech you to add your efforts in his and the other Americans behalf by appealing to the Dept. of State to take effective action.”
    Month after month Redmond’s name appeared on the State Department’s internal list of Chinese prisoners, always accompanied by the notation “may be executed.” Even if somehow Redmond was alive, his condition was likely to be grim. In July 1952 the State Department interviewed an American attorney named Robert Bryan, who had been in Shanghai’s notorious Ward Road jail—where Redmond, too, would have been held, if he was still alive. Bryan had been living in Shanghai for years and had been arrested just two months before Redmond. He was placed in “the death cell,” given a leaky bucket as a latrine, and branded an “American imperialist pig” by his captors. His treatment gave the State Department a picture of what Redmond, too, might be going through.
    â€œYour hands are stained with the blood of our comrades,” the Chinese had shouted at Bryan. He was subjected to an endless barrage of indoctrination and interrogation. He was beaten with a rubber hose. He was held in solitary confinement and lost forty-six pounds. Twice, he said, he was given a spinal injection of some kind of truth serum. Finally he signed a series of confessions and on June 26 was released and placed on a train to Hong Kong and freedom.
    That summer, eighteen other Americans in prison or under house arrest