Some Of The Lives Behind CIA's Wall Of Honor

Mike Maloney: `chasing a ghost'

Maloney joined the CIA right out of college, hoping to emulate his father, a decorated paratrooper in World War II and a CIA covert case officer from 1947 to 1971.

He didn't get much of a chance. In September 1965 Mike Maloney, his wife, Adrienne, and their 11-month-old son, Michael, moved to Bangkok. She was pregnant. In early October, Maloney kissed her goodbye and set out for his inaugural mission in Laos.

On Oct. 12, 1965, Maloney boarded a helicopter operated by Air America, a CIA-run company. He was to train Laotian "roadwatchers" to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The chopper crashed. All aboard died.

As adults, Mike Maloney's sons coped with uncertainty about who he really was. The family's grief was enveloped in secrecy. "Mom has always been very tight-lipped about the agency," recalls his son Michael.

It was particularly hard on Craig, born four months after Maloney died. "Because his father had never seen him, it affects him," says Adrienne. "I always made a big deal out of the fact that his father had chosen his name and could feel him kicking in me."

At one time, both sons considered joining the CIA. Michael, 32, caught the flu and missed his interview. "I took it as a sign from God that I wasn't supposed to do it," he says.

Craig, 31, applied to the agency - then reconsidered. "I just came to the realization that I was doing it for the wrong reasons," he says. "I was chasing a ghost."

Maloney is an anonymous star in the CIA Book of Honor. Following the release of this article Sept. 5 to news organizations, the CIA informed the Maloney family that his name would be added. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said there was no connection between the article and the agency's decision.

Barbara Robbins: secretary, not a spy

Barbara Annette Robbins would not have had a leading role in the novels of Ian Fleming or Tom Clancy.

She was a workaday secretary for the CIA, a GS-5. She limped and wore a metal brace on her foot, the legacy of being hit by a car as a little girl in Denver.

Robbins attended Colorado State University and in 1963 was recruited by the CIA. She volunteered for Vietnam. Her father, Buford Robbins, asked: "Hey, why Vietnam? That's kind of a mess over there." She expounded on the "domino theory" that communism would march from one nation to the next. "When they get to West Colfax (a Denver thoroughfare), Mister, you'll wish you'd done something," she told him.

On Aug. 5, 1964, six weeks after her 21st birthday, she arrived in Saigon as a CIA secretary in the U.S. Embassy. Her cover was as a State Department employee. But her life in Vietnam was devoid of intrigue.

At 10:55 a.m. on Monday, March 30, 1965, a black Citroen parked beside the embassy. A policeman ordered the driver to move on. Shots were fired. Robbins heard the commotion and rushed to the window. At that moment, 250 pounds of explosives detonated. The car bomb left 22 dead and 186 wounded. Robbins was one of two Americans killed.

Robbins was the youngest person honored with a star at the CIA. But three decades after her death, her name was still not inscribed in the Book of Honor. "I asked about that," says her father. "They said certain things had still not been declassified. It's a little strange."

Richard Spicer: still alive?

It rained on the October day in 1984 when they lowered Richard Spicer's mangled body into the grave. The rain washed everything clean. So did the CIA.

"The government man who came here told me not to mark the grave," at least for a time, recalls funeral director Donald McKinney of Youngsville, Pa.

The local obituary noted that Spicer was 53 and had died in "southern Florida." McKinney remembers being told by "the government man" that Spicer had died in a car crash in Miami.

It was really a plane crash in Central America.

Spicer and three men with him were the first known U.S. casualties of the Reagan administration's secret war effort in Nicaragua.

The CIA acknowledged that two men on the plane, Scott Van Lieshout and Curtis Wood, were its employees. Their names would later be inscribed in the Book of Honor. But Spicer's death was different. He had been covert.

After attending a memorial service at Langley, Va., Spicer's son Richard was promised he would receive a photograph of Spicer's widow holding an award certificate his father received posthumously. When the picture arrived, he says, it had been doctored so that the words on the certificate were not legible.

Spicer's family describes him as unemotional, arch-conservative and private. But he confided in his younger brother, Carroll.

"They were to fly over Nicaragua using infrared sensors, look for pack trains, mules, horses - and X-ray them to see what they were carrying, if it was, in his words, `contraband,' " Carroll Spicer says. "They also had listening devices" to intercept conversations on the ground.

The CIA took care of all funeral arrangements, shipping Spicer's body, already embalmed, to Youngsville. Everything was prepaid. With the casket arrived a neatly folded U.S. flag.

But Carroll Spicer does not buy the agency's explanation that his brother, a crack pilot with 27,000 air hours, crashed the plane into a mountainside. He isn't even convinced his brother is dead. He wonders if Spicer is not somewhere on assignment under deepest cover.