Way, way back in 1947!
And they STILL WON'T TALK ABOUT IT!
"A Dead Spy, a Daughter’s Questions and the C.I.A." by ALAN FEUER
He was code-named “Carat,” and, for four years during World War II and after, he played the Great Game in the Middle East as an American spy. He died when his Army transport crashed near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1947 in what a press report called “one of Africa’s loneliest spots.”
In Lebanon, where he had been posted at the embassy, he worked undercover as a State Department cultural attaché. At home, in Massachusetts, he had an infant daughter who was six weeks old and whom he never met.
Now that daughter, Charlotte Dennett, is a 60-year-old woman, a journalist and self-taught lawyer living in Vermont. After a lifetime of mystery and wondering, she began, some 20 years ago, to scratch at a stubborn inner itch: Could there have been something more than accident behind her father’s death?
Her search for the truth has brought her into contact with government archivists, retired spooks and a ream of redacted papers from the C.I.A. — which suggests there may be secrets the agency still wants to keep. Earlier this month, after years of litigation, it brought her to a federal appeals court in New York.
When Ms. Dennett appeared at the courthouse in Manhattan on Oct. 9, it was not to argue about intelligence work or international intrigue. It was about, of all things, a plain white envelope.
In July 2006, a judge in Brattleboro, Vt., cited national security and denied her access to her father’s full file. Two months later, Ms. Dennett, seeking closure and dissatisfied with the blacked-out pages she had already received, filed a notice of appeal.
But she sent the notice to the wrong office in the Burlington federal courthouse and missed her filing deadline by days. The C.I.A. declared her case untimely and, in legal briefs, chided her not only for filing late but accused her of “a cavalier reliance” on the mail.
Kingdoms can be lost for the lack of a nail; so, too, the truth about a loved one for the lack of a proper address. And now this 20-year-old quest has a new hurdle to overcome. When Ms. Dennett appeared before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, she apologized profusely and begged the judges to reinstate her case.
“My primary focus through all of this has been to get information on my father’s last days,” she said over lunch a few days after her appearance. “Where was he going? Who was he talking to? What was he concerned about? It’s clear from his papers he knew foreign powers were on to him. Who were they? I want to know.”
The court has yet to rule on Ms. Dennett’s case, though at the hearing the judges had some tough questions for the government lawyer who appeared on behalf of the C.I.A. The lawyer, Michael Drescher, later had no comment on the case, saying it was still in litigation. The C.I.A. also declined to comment.
All of which has left Ms. Dennett, who lives in a renovated farmhouse with her husband in the tiny town of Cambridge, 50 miles from Burlington, with a shard of hope that she will one day learn the truth about her father and his death.
His name was Daniel Dennett, and he was a Harvard graduate with a major in Islamic studies who, in 1943, was posted as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut as World War II raged. In fact, court papers say, he was a covert agent for the Office of Strategic Services and later for the Central Intelligence Group, two early versions of the C.I.A.
Ms. Dennett had long heard rumors, picked up from retired spies and family friends, that her father was an expert in the oil trade, which, in the postwar years, was just beginning to become a power center in the Middle East.
“I always knew my father was a spy,” she said, largely ignoring her Caesar salad in an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. “I’d heard family stories about what a character he was, but in terms of what he actually did I never really knew.”
On March 23, 1947, The New York Times reported Mr. Dennett’s death in a story with the headline “U.S. Plane Crashes in Ethiopia; 6 Dead.”
After taking off from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, his C-47 transport crashed “in a mountainous, desolate area” between Asmara and Addis Ababa, killing Mr. Dennett, the pilot, three soldiers and the State Department’s “petroleum attaché” from Cairo. The crash occurred in a region so remote that “native runners” had to bring word of the accident to the nearest town, the paper said.
It was 40 more years before Ms. Dennett rediscovered her father’s obituary while flipping through a scrapbook in her brother’s attic. Something fishy swam through her stomach.
“I suspected there was more to the story,” she said.
Working first with the National Archives in Washington, then with the C.I.A., she managed to obtain hundreds of declassified documents. But most were drab personnel records, she said. One was not: a copy of the accident report with pictures of the crash. The report, she said, declared in no uncertain terms that the accident was precisely that.
Yet she had always heard stories, usually in whispers, that the crash was sabotage. Her father’s best friend had always said it. So did a former spy she said she met one day with the help of the government archivists.
“When I told him who I was he said, ‘Oh, Dan Dennett, what a loss.’ Then he said: ‘Of course, I know about the plane crash. We always thought it was sabotage but couldn’t prove it.’”
There was no evidence in the record to suggest foul play — except in the twisting logic of intelligence work, which only seemed to enhance her suspicions. Then there was the fact, Ms. Dennett said, that the documents she had received all seemed to stop around the time of the crash. “Here I am, hot on the trail,” she said, “and just when I’m getting to the juicy stuff there’s nothing.”
At this point, her struggles with the C.I.A. began. Requests for information were filed and then denied. Six years passed in the back-and-forth. In 2005, with what she said was reluctance, Ms. Dennett sued the C.I.A. to obtain the entirety of her father’s secret file.
Within a year, Judge J. Garvan Murtha of Federal District Court in Brattleboro ruled against her, quoting the C.I.A.’s information review officer who said, in papers, that the agency had withheld the file to “prevent disclosure of intelligence methods” — even 60 years after the fact.
Months later, still within her deadline, Ms. Dennett filed an appeal. She looked up the address for the appellate clerk in Burlington in an out-of-date lawyer’s guide. She sent the notice of appeal to the courthouse at P.O. Box 392, which turned out to be the former address of a former district judge who happened to be dead.
When the envelope was returned to her, she had missed the deadline for appeal. She filed a request for additional time to Judge Murtha, who wrote in an order rejecting her request: “What is more basic than ascertaining the correct address to file a document as important and time-sensitive as an appeal?”
So she drove 400 miles from Cambridge to New York. When she stood before the court, it was clear she was nervous. She had forgotten to take her handbag off her shoulder.
“If somebody murdered my father, I’d sure like to know,” she said days later.
“If the judges grant my appeal,” Ms. Dennett added, “I’m going to ask for the redactions to be lifted. This is in the public interest, there’s a war going on, the American people have a right to know. I think there’s a big story here — an important story. That’s what’s been guiding me all along.”
COVER-UPS NEVER END, and they think nothing of KILLING THEIR OWN!!!
Is the thought, then, of an INSIDE JOB on 9/11 in -- the New Pearl Harbor -- so unreasonable then, people?
What with Northwoods, this, and the PNAC Plan?
