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Douglas Mackiernan


Douglas Seymour Mackiernan (April 25, 1913 – April 29, 1950) was the first officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be killed in the line of duty. He worked as a cryptographer for the United States Army Air Forces and was then posted to China as an Air Force meteorologist during World War II. By 1947, he had quit the Air Force and was employed as a covert intelligence officer by the CIA. As a cover for that work he was assigned the position of Vice-Consul for the U.S. State Department at its consulate in Ürümqi (Tihwa) in East Turkestan (modern Xinjiang). There his scientific talents (he dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after his freshman year) were employed in espionage. Until 2002, the CIA successfully hid the fact that Mackiernan was America's first atomic spy; Mackiernan's collection of atomic intelligence about the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb (tested just across the border at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan) was first revealed by the journalist Thomas Laird, but only confirmed by the CIA in 2008.

In the fall of 1949, Mackiernan led a party of five (including the two men who would survive the trip, Vasili Zvansov and Frank Bessac) out of Ürümqi. They first spent time with Osman Batur and his Kazakh warriors (who would be fighting against the Chinese invasion of East Turkestan) and then traveled on to Tibet by horseback and camel en route to India. Mackiernan was shot dead by Tibetan border guards while crossing East Turkestan into Tibet; the United States government had failed to request permission, in a timely fashion, from the Tibetan government for the Mackiernan party to enter Tibet. The Tibetan guards had standing orders, in the tense spring of 1950, to shoot all foreigners who attempted to enter Tibet. Mackiernan and his party were dressed as Kazakhs; the Kazakhs in China and Tibetans were traditional enemies who raided each other across the border.


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