CIA'S INTELLIGENCE ART COLLECTION - COMMEMORATION OF THE HISTORICAL, INSPIRATION FOR THE FUTURE

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 05460726
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 17
• Document Creation Date: March 9, 2023
• Document Release Date: January 29, 2021
• Case Number: F-2011-00399
• Publication Date: June 1, 2008

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STUDIES IN
INTELLIGENCE
Journal of the America Intelligence Professional
This publication is prepared primarily for the use of US government officials. The format,
coverage and content are designed to meet their requirements. To that end, some
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should not be reproduced or disseminated without permission.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in Studies
in Intelligence are those of the authors. They do not necessarily
reflect official positions or views of the Central Intelligence
Agency or any other US government entity, past or present.
Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or
implying US government endorsement of an article's factual
statements, interpretations, or recommendations.
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CIA's Intelligence Art Collection
Commemoration of the Historical,
Inspiration for the Future
-Toni L. Riley
It is critical that we pass along to our thousands of
new officers the accumulated wisdom and decades of
experience that have made CIA the world's premier
intelligence service.
�General Michael V. Hayden, Studies in Intelligence
Awards Ceremony, 13 December 2006
By the end of 2008, 52 percent of CIA's workforce will have entered
on duty since 11 September 2001. CIA's history and museum programs
provide institutional cohesion to communicate CIA's corporate culture
and identity during this demographic revolution. Recent additions to
the Agency's historical holdings include intelligence-themed paintings
and sculpture that record for posterity the experiences of intelligence
officers in peace and war.
CIA's fine arts program�administered by its Fine Arts Commission
since the 1960s�has benefited over the years from donations of
sculptures and paintings that celebrate historical accomplishments in
intelligence. The commission reviews donation proposals and, when it
finds them appropriate, officially recommends works for acceptance.
Before any work is accepted, however, Agency financial and legal officers,
the Office of Security, and the Office of Public Affairs all consider the
recommendation. The CIA Museum and History Staff of the Center for
the Study of Intelligence advise the Fine Arts Commission on historical
content.
As the following pages demonstrate, the drama of an event can often
be conveyed in a painting or sculpture more powerfully and immediately
than in a written volume. Such art, in addition, can bring to life history
that may be unknown to new employees or that has been lost in time
among veterans. The collection thus helps to illuminate the past and
provide inspiration for the present and the future.
The works shown in the following pages appear in the chronological
order of the scenes they depict.
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Les Marguerites Fleuriront ce Soir
by Jeffrey W. Bass, Oil on Canvas, 2006
Donated by Richard J. Gu,ggenhime
Virginia Hall was a Baltimore native who joined the US State Department
in the 1930s, serving as a clerk with postings in Warsaw, Poland, Venice,
Italy, and Izmir, Turkey. A hunting accident resulted in the amputation of
her left leg and precluded her from overseas assignments with the State
Department, so she resigned. At the outbreak of WW II, she eagerly joined
the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to fight fascism. Her fluency
in French landed her a clandestine assignment in Lyons, where she went to
work developing the area's resistance operations. Over the next 15 months,
every British agent arriving in France passed through her flat for instructions,
counterfeit money, and contacts. In addition, she orchestrated supply drops
and helped endangered agents escape to England. Betrayed in November
1942, she had to use her own escape route out of France, just steps ahead of
her now infamous pursuer, Klaus Barbie, "the butcher of Lyons."
Hall then joined the Special Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic
Services in March 1944 and asked to return to occupied France. OSS promptly
granted her request and reinfiltrated her aboard a British PT boat. Disguised
as a farmwoman, she carried cheese to local villages to count German troops
and identify drop zones for the Allied invasion to come.
The painting portrays Hall in the early morning hours, radioing London
from an old barn near Le Chambon sur Ligon to request supplies and personnel.
Power for her radio was provided by a discarded bicycle rigged to turn an
electric generator, the clever invention of one of her captains, Edmund Lebrat.
Coded messages such as "Les marguerites fleuriront cc soir" (the daisies will
bloom at night) apprised Hall of what airdrops to expect from London and
when. After D-Day, a Jedburgh team joined her, and together they trained
resistance forces to wage guerrilla warfare. OSS Director William Donovan
awarded Virginia Hall the Distinguished Service Cross�the only one given
to a civilian woman during that war. Hall later worked for the CIA, serving
in many jobs as one of CIA's first female operations officers.
Forty years after she retired from CIA and almost 25 years after her
death, the painting honoring Hall's work was unveiled in 2006 at the French
ambassador's residence in Washington, DC. Ambassador Jean-David Levitte
read a letter from French President Jacques Chirac. In it, he called Ms. Hall
a "true hero of the French Resistance" and added, "On behalf of her comrades
in the Resistance, French combatants, and all of France, I want to tell her
family and friends that France will never forget this American friend who
risked her life to serve our country."
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Earthquake's Final Flight
by Jeffrey W. Bass, Oil on Canvas, 2006
Donated by the Fairchild Corporation
This painting commemorates air operations of Civil Air Transport,
an Agency proprietary, and its CIA contract pilots in support of
French forces at Dien Bien Phu, Indochina, in 1954, during the final
days of the conflict between the French and Viet Minh. In Fairchild
C-119s with US Air Force markings hurriedly painted over with French
Air Force roundels, 37 CAT pilots volunteered to fly supplies from the
French airbase at Haiphong to the battlefield near the border with
Laos.
Between 13 March and 6 May 1954, the pilots and crews made 682
airdrops to the beleaguered French forces, flying through murderous
antiaircraft fire from guns that ringed the valley at Dien Bien Phu. On
6 May, the day before the Viet Minh overran the French fortifications
antiaircraft fire hit the C-119 flown by legendary CAT pilot James
McGovern (nicknamed "Earthquake McGoon") and co-pilot Wallace
Buford. The pilots struggled to keep the plane airborne despite flak
damage to the control surfaces and the port engine. The plane limped
over the border into Laos and crashed, killing McGovern and Buford
and two French paratroopers. The CAT pilots were thus among the first
Americans to die in the Indochina conflict, which would eventually fully
engage US military forces and end only in 1975.
The painting depicts McGovern's C-119 shortly after it was hit by
flak over the drop zone at "Isabelle,"an outpost of the French garrison
at Dien Bien Phu.
The crash site was located in 2002, and in 2006 DNA testing
confirmed that the remains recovered were McGovern's. He was buried
with honors at Arlington Cemetery on 24 May 2007. Pieces of his C-119
are now in the CIA Museum collection.
When the painting was unveiled at, his residence in 2005, French
Ambassador Jean-David Levitte presented the French Republic's
highest award (the Legion d'Honneur) to five of the six surviving CAT
pilots for their heroic performance in the epic battle that marked the
end of French colonial rule in Indochina.
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Seven Days in the Arctic
by Keith Woodcock, Oil on Canvas, 2007
Donated by Gar and Audrey Thorsrud
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union
competed for every advantage, including study of the Arctic for its
strategic value. For seven days in May 1962, under Project COLDFEET,
the US Intelligence Community pursued an opportunity to collect
intelligence from an abandoned Soviet drift station on a floating ice
island deep in the Arctic. The Soviets had hastily evacuated the station
when shifting ice made its aircraft runway unusable, abandoning the
remote base and its equipment and research materials.
Upon discovering that the station had been abandoned, the
Intelligence Community formed a team of officers from the Office of
Naval Research, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the US Air Force,
and the CIA to develop a plan conceived by a US Navy officer, Leonard
LeSchack, to parachute specialists on to the site and retrieve them using
a unique airborne pickup device, Robert Fulton's Skyhook. The Skyhook
was an adaptation of devices Great Britain and the United States had
used in the 1940s and early 1950s to allow fixed-wing aircraft to pick up
people or objects from the ground without landing. Fulton's device had
been tested, but it had never been used operationally.
COLDFEET came to life on 28 May, when LeSchack and Air Force
Major John Smith were dropped on to the abandoned post from a
B-17. The plane belonged to CIA proprietary Intermountain Aviation
and was flown by the company's pilots, Connie Seigrist and Doug
Price, accompanied by a polar navigator borrowed from Pan American
Airlines and other Intermountain crew members to operate the recovery
equipment. On 2 June, under extremely difficult conditions caused
by poor visibility and high winds, the B-17 returned to make three
successful passes with the Skyhook to collect the men and the Soviet
material they had retrieved. The mission yielded information on the
Soviet Union's Arctic research activities, including evidence of advanced
research on acoustical systems to detect under-ice US submarines and
efforts to develop Arctic anti-submarine warfare techniques.
The painting's unveiling at CIA headquarters on 21 April 2008 and
the ceremony honoring COLDFEET participants brought team members
together for the first time in 46 years. Many of the family members who
joined them had never been to CIA Headquarters, let alone heard of the
contributions their relatives had made in an extraordinarily challenging
Cold War mission.
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Untouchable
by Dru Blair, Mixed Media on Illustration Board, 2007
Donated by Daniel K Hilton
No question in the early 1950s had greater implications for US
security than determining the kinds and numbers of strategic weapons
the Soviet Union possessed and how Moscow intended to use them.
The U-2 was built to help answer that question, but the aircraft was
barely in production when it became plain that a radical improvement
was needed, and efforts were begun under CIA supervision in 1957 to
create a new aircraft. The result was the Lockheed "Skunk Works"-
designed A-12, OXCART. Only 15 were built, and only three would
fly operational missions, ironically none over the USSR, before the
aircraft were put in storage to be replaced by the US Air Force version
of the plane, the SR-71.
Unveiled with the presentation of an A-12 OXCART on static display
at CIA's Headquarters during its 60th anniversary in September 2007,
Untouchable depicts the first operational flight of the A-12 on 31 May
1967. Piloted by Mele Vojvodich, the aircraft "Article 131" took off from
Kadena Air Base in Okinawa during a torrential downpour just before
1100 local time that day. The A-12 had never operated in heavy rain
before, but the weather over the target area was forecast to be satisfactory.
Vojvodich crossed the coast of North Vietnam one hour and 14 minutes
later, flying at a speed of Mach 3.1 at an altitude of 80,000 feet. He flew
the planned route in less than nine minutes, refueled over Thailand,
exited near the Demilitarized Zone, and touched down at Kadena in the
rain three hours and 39 minutes after he had lifted off. The mission
was a success, photographing 70 of the 190 known SAM sites and nine
other priority targets, including an airfield, a military training area,
an army barracks, and the port at Haiphong. No surface-to-surface
missile facilities were located. Contrary to some published accounts,
neither Chinese nor North Vietnamese radar tracked the aircraft, nor
were North Vietnamese missiles launched at it. A-12 flights remained
"untouchable" for another four months.
OXCART's 29 operational missions over East Asia in CIA's Operation
BLACK SHIELD provided timely threat assessments of SA-2 SAMs in
North Vietnam; determined that North Vietnam had no surface-to-
surface missiles threatening US and allied military forces in the South;
provided information on key installations in North Vietnam; and located
the intelligence ship USS Pueblo, which had been seized by North Korea;
and confirmed that no further hostilities were imminent there.
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An Air Combat First
by Keith Woodcock, Oil on Canvas, 2007
Donated by Marius Burke and Boyd D. Mesech,er
On 12 January 1968, four North Vietnamese Air Force AN-2 Colt biplanes
lifted off from an airfield in northeastern North Vietnam and headed west
toward Laos. The aircraft were on a mission to destroy a US radar base that
was guiding bombers in attacks against targets in North Vietnam. Known
to the Americans as Site 85, the radar facility was perched atop a 5,800-foot-
high mountain, Phou Pha Thi. Manned by US Air Force volunteers "sheep-
dipped" as employees of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the site had been
in operation only a few months. The mountain, used for many years as a
staging base for CIA-directed Hmong guerilla fighters and American special
operations and rescue helicopters, was only 125 nautical miles from Hanoi.
Air America, a CIA-proprietary, provided aerial support for the facility, the
technicians, and the security forces.
The Colts reached Site 85 early in the afternoon, and two began
bombing and strafing passes as the others circled nearby. Coincidentally,
Air America captain Ted Moore, flying a UH-1D Huey helicopter carrying
ammunition to the site, saw the attack ("It looked like World War I," he
recalled.) and gave chase to a Colt as it turned back to the Vietnamese
border. Moore positioned his helicopter above the biplane, as crewman
Glenn Woods fired an AK-47 rifle down on it. The pursuit continued for
more than 20 minutes until the second AN-2 flew underneath the helicopter.
Dropping back, Moore and Woods watched as the first AN-2 dropped and
crashed into a ridge just west of the North Vietnamese border. Minutes
later, the second Colt hit the side of a mountain three miles farther north.
The other Colts escaped, inactive observers throughout. Within hours a
CIA-controlled ground team reached the crashed aircraft and found bullet
holes in the downed planes.
In the mists of the Annamite Mountains and part of a secret war, Air
America employees Ted Moore and Glenn Woods gained the distinction
of having shot down a fixed-wing aircraft from a helicopter, a singular
aerial victory in the Vietnam War. Two months later, North Vietnamese
commandos attacked and destroyed Site 85, inflicting the deadliest single
ground loss of US Air Force personnel of the Vietnam War.
On 27 July 2007, CIA officially received An Air Combat First in an
event attended by members of the Air America Board; pilot Ted Moore;
Sawang Reed, the wife of flight mechanic Glenn Woods; CIA paramilitary
legend Bill Lair; and the donors of the painting, former Air America officers
Marius Burke and Boyd D. Mesecher.
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0 Veryl Goodnight
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The Day the Wall Came Down
by Veryl Goodnight, Bronze, 2004
Donated by Sarah and John Lindahl, Jr.
Veryl Goodnight watched raptly with the rest of the world as the Berlin
Wall fell on 9 November 1989. That night, she says, in a dream, her plan
for a sculpture of five horses racing across a prairie was transformed into
a sculpture depicting the spirited animals leaping to freedom over the
Berlin Wall's ruins. Today, two monumental (1i/i life-size) installations of
her sculpture exist. One is at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library
in College Station, Texas. The other, donated to the German people, is
in Berlin. In 2004, US patrons of the arts, Sarah and John Lindahl, Jr.,
commissioned a one-quarter life-size version for presentation to the CIA.
In explaining their reasons, John Lindahl recalled reading DCI George
Tenet's farewell remarks in July 2004, in which he said, "I am convinced
that if the American people were fully aware of what you do�around
the clock and around the world�they would line up at that front gate in
huge, record numbers, come in here, and say thank you." Lindahl offered
the Goodnight work as such a thank you, coming, he said, "from a sincere
appreciation for the patriotic sacrifice that our fellow citizens (neighbors
and friends) make on our country's behalf. . . . Our hope is that Veryl's
visionary sculpture will add a little balance to the landscape and perhaps
lift a spirit or two along the way." Today, The Day the Wall Caine Down
stands in the entrance of the New Headquarters Building.
At our request, Goodnight added, as graffiti on the ruins of the wall,
symbols with particular meaning for CIA's workforce. First, she added
the inscription "And Ye Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall
Make You Free," which graces the lobby of the Original Headquarters
Building. Now, employees and visitors entering either portal will
see the inscription drawn from the Bible (John 8:32) that serves as a
philosophical foundation of our work. Also on the wall's fragments is
President Ronald Reagan's famous admonition: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear
down this wall!" Finally, Goodnight added a single white star. Like the
stars on CIA's Wall of Honor that pay tribute to fallen colleagues, this
star honors the fallen. But in this case, it marks the sacrifices of CIA's
foreign agents who gave their lives in a common mission during the Cold
War. The CIA has recognized few such people publicly, but they were
memorialized collectively in November 1999 at a ceremony in front of
Goodnight's statue at the Bush Library attended by many US political
and intelligence leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush,
DCI Tenet, and other former DCIs.
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Cast of a Few, Courage of a Nation
by James Dietz, Oil on Canvas, 2008
Donated by Alan Seigrist and Christopher Exline
In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, the President of the
United States ordered the Director of Central Intelligence to immediately
launch operations against al-Qa'ida and its Taliban supporters in
Afghanistan and to collect intelligence to help pave the way for US military
operations. Within 15 days of the attacks in the United States, the first
team of CIA officers was on the ground and operating in Afghanistan to
make contacts with opposition groups in the prelude to Operation Enduring
Freedom. Under CIA leadership, multiple paramilitary teams composed of
extremely resourceful and courageous people worked alongside every key
opposition tribal group around the country, usually in isolation far behind
enemy lines and away from ground reinforcements.
Cast of a Few, Courage of a Nation was unveiled on 17 April 2008
to commemorate these early operations and the later combined efforts
of US intelligence and military forces, Afghan allies, and coalition
partners in Afghanistan. The painting depicts a CIA-owned, Soviet-built
Mi-17 helicopter conducting a night resupply mission of food, equipment,
operational funds, and ammunition to a team in Afghanistan. The scene,
repeated hundreds of times in Afghanistan, conveys a sense of the perils and
physical difficulty faced by small groups of paramilitary officers working in
the hostile environment. The work resonated strongly for the veterans of
Operation Enduring Freedom who were present at the unveiling. They all
said Dietz's painting has masterfully captured their own personal moments
in the experience.
Unseen but implied is the full range of activity that goes into such
missions, not only in Afghanistan, but in places many miles distant.
Each landing would have included contingency planning and intelligence
collection done months before; planning and coordination of the specific
mission; rapid acquisition of equipment involved in the delivery; and the
assembly and delivery of goods from main bases oceans away. People
engaged in these efforts, but not seen in the painting, would have included
operational planners, intelligence analysts, logisticians, security officers,
indigenous allies, and US military components.
Co-donor Alan Seigrist said that with this donation he has also honored
the contribution to CIA operations over a three-decade period of his father,
Connie Seigrist, who as a CIA contract pilot, logged more than 30,000
hours in Agency aircraft, including the B-17 pictured in the painting of the
COLDFEET mission.
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Looking Ahead
British aviation artist Keith Woodcock will add a third painting of his to
the collection. This one, to be presented by the Air America Board, will depict
Air America search and rescue operations in Laos during the 1960s.
Jeff Bass has also been commissioned to provide a third painting. His
will show a flight of' B-26s flown by CIA contract pilots on a mission to
support ground troops landed in the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961.
Related Readings
Timothy N. Castle, One Day Too Long: Top Secret Site 85 and the Bombing of North
Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
William M. Leary, "CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955-1974," Studies in Intelligence,
Unclassified Edition, (Winter 1999-2000)
William M. Leary and Leonard A. LeSchack, Project Coldfeet: Secret Mission to a
Soviet Ice Station (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996)
Judith L. Pearson, The Wolves at the Door: The True Stool of America's Greatest
Female Spy (Guilford, CT: The Lyon Press, 2005)
David Robarge, Archangel: The CIA's Supersonic A-12 Reconnaissance Aircraft
(Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2007)
Gary C. Schroen, First In: An Insider's Account of How the CL4 Spearheaded the War
on Terror in Afghanistan (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005)
Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam
(New York: Da Capo Press, 2005)
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