I was going through old photos in Picasa and came across the wonderful scenes we took in the Blue Ridge mountains when we were visiting Howard Hart and his wife Jean. Hart was a legendary CIA operative with an incredible career. He had been George Bush Sr’s man in Afghanistan. He became committed to serving the country when a U.S. paratrooper carried the four-year-old out of the infamous Japanese prison camp in the Phillippines known as Los Banos. He never forgot that rescue.

His dad had been working as a banker in the Phillippines when the Japanese came.



This is Howard's recollection of that day: “I looked up, I had no idea what I was looking at,” he said. “I had never even seen a parachute before. It was as if some magical apparition was occurring in front of my eyes. And before I knew it, an American paratrooper was standing in front of me. He must have been 35 feet tall. He was angry and fired up and ready to kill Japanese. . . . This American paratrooper picked me up under his arm. It was a mile and half to the beach, and the entire time he told me, ‘Kid, I’m gonna get you home. Kid, I’m gonna get you home.’”

Ed and I lost touch with him in recent years and the photos reminded me that I should look him up and I was very sorry to learn that he died a year ago in April, of liver cancer. He was 76. He had sustained serious injuries when he was set upon by the Ayatollah’s thugs in Iran. They neglected to search him and while they were trying to beat him to death in the street, he reached his gun, shot them, and crawled to a safe house. He never reported the incident which caused problems years later when he sought medical help through the Agency for lingering after-effects of that beating.

I am deeply sorry we never saw him again.
There is an obit In the Washington Post.

This is his house built with his sons on a Blue Ridge mountain, the only one of the range allowing houses. It is a marvel of buildings connected by catwalks, and looks over the Shenandoah Valley. You follow a winding single lane path to get there and you hope you don't meet anyone coming toward you because that means one of you has to go all the way back. It is totally self-sustaining, with an infrastructure that includes water and fuel in the ground.

We said "Let's take you to dinner," and he said, we don't go up and down the mountain casually. We'll go out to dinner when you leave.

When he was needed for a consultation the Agency (or a movie mogul) would send a helicopter to pick him up from the top of the mountain. He was mentioned in the book "Charlie Wilson's War".

xx, Teal