[NYTr] A Dead Spy, A Daughter's Questions and the CIA

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times - Oct 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/nyregion/23spydad.html


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.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company