Talk:Douglas Mackiernan

Errors of Fact in the Douglas Mackiernan article
I am new to Wikipedia but well grounded in Mackiernan. Here are the facts that I notice are wrong when I read the article:

1)"He was eagerly accepted, and by May he was on his way back. He soon found himself recruited for, and ideally suited to, espionage work." He was recruited as a CIA officer before he was posted to Tihwa. He was posted in Tihwa with State Department as cover for his CIA work. See Into Tibet, pgs 22-23.

2)"By the end of August civil conditions had seriously deteriorated, and escape by conventional routes was impossible." Bessac flew into Tihwa on a regularly scheduled flight and those flights continued to run even after Mackiernan and Bessac chose to join Osman. Mackiernan chose to throw in with those viewed as rebels by China and then he chose to go to Tibet-- he could have flown out of China like thousands of other expats. He may have been ordered to join Osman and then go to Tibet by CIA, but he certainly did not 'escape'that way. He had other choices which he did not take. See Into Tibet, pg 103-107, and cited documents in blindnotes

3)"Two days later Mackiernan and a translator, Frank Bessac, sneaked out of the city with their gear," A- They did not sneak out, they drove out the front gate, in a large truck. This is testified to by both Bessac and Zvansov, see Into Tibet, pages 107-115 B-Bessac was not a translator for anyone. Mackiernan did not need that. The retired CIA Officer Fredrick Latrash says that Bessac was a CIA contract agent-- not a CIA officer like Mackiernan. See, Into Tibet pgs 244-245, and associated blindnotes.

4)"Zvonzo" Wrong spelling-- Vasili Zvansov is correct-- as per Zvansov, as cited in Into Tibet

5) "Mackiernan and a small group of associates escaped to Tibet by horseback and camel, with the goal of establishing a base there and providing arms to resist the Chinese."  Base? None of the published material says that Mackiernan intended to set up a base. He wanted to get the Tibetan Government to allow his intelligence agents in Sinkiang, to pass through Tibet to India, with their intelligence after Mackiernan. He may have wanted to discuss the possiblity of arming the Tibetans. But there is no evidence that he wanted to set up a base.  See, Into Tibet. ---

--Twilson100 22:09, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

I will add to the above:

6) Was he in the US Air Force or the US Army Air Corps during WWII?  Hint:  Get ready, America!  The Air Force didn't exist until 1947.  Whoever wrote it (not you Twilson, I know), you fix it.  Past experience tells me that if I fix it I will be accused of vandalism.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.171.176.28 (talk) 21:42, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

bad links
There are so many bad links on http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~tazewell/dsm.htm that I propose removing the url. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ceaser (talk • contribs) 12:22, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Text dump
From CIA memorial wall:

Douglas S. Mackiernan was born in Mexico City in 1913 as the oldest of five sons of a Whaler. Attending a German school, he was fluent in German, English, Spanish and French by the age of eight. His father moved the family to Massachusetts and bought a gas station where Mackiernan worked after school.

A fan of horseback riding, he went on to become a professor at MIT, where he lectured on meteorology, with a specific interest in hurricanes.


 * Actually he dropped out after his first year and became a Research Assistant.

When the Second World War broke out, he joined as an Army meteorologist but was noted for his skill in cryptology, and was named chief of the Cryptographic Cryptoanalysis Section in Washington and advanced to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. There, he also learned to speak Kazakh, Russian and Mongolian. He was later stationed at Tihwa in Western China, where he researched weather patterns to help plan bombing raids over Japan.

In February 1947 he was recruited by the CIA (nice trick, since the CIA did not then exist) to return to the region, under the guise of a State Department secretarial clerk at a salary of $2,160 annually. There he kept contact with anti-Communist Russians, and watched the growing Cultural Revolution in China.


 * Another nice trick, since the Cultural Revolution started in 1966.

He was formally promoted in the State Department to the role of vice-consul, which allowed him the ability to act without oversight. As declassified memos stated, his actions would be "left to him for development without any advice or assistance until completed, decisions during operation depending entirely on his own judgment.", and it would be expected of him to "assist with increasingly heavy load of code work to be expected; make extensive trips, collecting politico military and economic information".

He convinced an American freelance journalist named Pegge Lyons to pose as a tourist and photograph anything that looked military near the border using his Leica camera, and allow him to send the images to Washington, before they were sent to her publishers. The intention was to monitor Soviet aid crossing the border to support Chinese communists.

The pair were married, and on September 30, Pegge gave birth to twins named Mary and Mike, in Shanghai. On November 10, Pegge and the children were ordered to evacuate the country, as Communists began taking power, and she flew back to California aboard a Pan-Am flight.

He was shot trying to cross the border into Tibet with two others, mistaken for Communists by Chinese forces in 1950.


 * Actually he was mistaken for a Kazakh and shot by Tibetan border guards.

{

Life magazine article on mackiernan's death
http://books.google.com/books?id=8ksEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA130#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rajmaan (talk) 21:47, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080704075135/http://www.intotibet.info/ to https://www.intotibet.info/
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20071019051101/http://www.fiu.edu:80/~fcf/ to http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/

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Atomic Spy link does not match his activities
The linked page is for communist spies who compromised the US atomic weapons programme. It is not for US spies gathering information about the Soviet programme. If there is a different page for the latter then it should be linked. I am going to delete the existing link.96.240.128.124 (talk) 03:27, 24 August 2021 (UTC)