Ted Gup | |
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Ted Gup (born September 14, 1950) is an author, journalist and professor known for his work on government secrecy, free speech and journalistic ethics. He is the author of three books, including The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA, which told the stories of previously unnamed CIA officers killed in the line of duty. His work has appeared in Slate, The Guardian, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New York Times, The Nation, NPR, GQ, and numerous other venues.
Gup has been a prolific writer regarding doomsday scenarios and facilities to provide for continuity of government and the preservation of important assets of civilization, [1] including the Mount Weather facility, [2] as well as intelligence issues.
In the 1992 Washington Post Magazine article "The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway," [3] Gup was the first to reveal publicly [4] the existence of Project Greek Island, a large underground bunker at West Virginia's famed Greenbrier Resort to house the Congress of the United States in case of a nuclear attack on Washington, D.C., a revelation still considered controversial two decades after its publication. [5] Those opposed to the revelation note that the exposure rendered the $14,000,000 ($123,382,792 by current standards) taxpayer-funded bunker useless and led to its decommissioning. Gup defended the story in a 2009 interview with Cleveland's Plain Dealer, arguing that the Greenbrier bunker was obsolete in 1992. "We sat on the story for a couple of months making sure it wouldn't harm national security," Gup said. "The bunker mentality that preserved that place was itself a threat to national security. It's exactly why you want an active press." [5]
Gup, a 1968 graduate of Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, [6] was a reporter for The Washington Post and Time Magazine prior to his work in academia. He was the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism at Case Western Reserve University before heading the journalism department at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts and was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2003. [7] He was also a 1980 recipient of the George Polk award in journalism offered by Long Island University. He shared the 1981 Gerald Loeb Award for Large Newspapers, [8] [9] and received an Honorable Mention in the same category in 1984. [10]
For his book, Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life, published by Doubleday he received the 2007 Orwell Award. In this book he contended that the political culture was defined by a misguided desire for secrecy and was undermining the transparency of democratic institutions.
His 2010 book, A Secret Gift, much unlike anything else he had ever written, chronicles the Christmastime 1933 anonymous charitable efforts of his Romanian Orthodox Jewish grandfather, Sam Stone, to help families in Canton, Ohio affected by the Great Depression. [11] [12]
Gup lost his oldest son David, aged 21, to drugs and alcohol on October 18, 2011. David had been diagnosed with ADHD in the first grade and prescribed medication. [13]
In the Michaelmas term of 2015 he was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, where he was affiliated to the St. Cuthbert's Society SCR. [14] He returned to Durham as Writer in Residence at St Cuthbert's in 2017 and again in 2019. [15] [16]
The Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center is a government command facility in the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia, used as the center of operations for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Also known as the High Point Special Facility (HPSF), its preferred designation since 1991 is "SF."
The Greenbrier is a luxury resort located in the Allegheny Mountains near White Sulphur Springs in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, in the United States.
David Corn is an American political journalist and author. He is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Mother Jones and is best known as a cable television commentator. Corn worked at The Nation from 1987 to 2007, where he served as Washington editor.
Hugh Francis Redmond was an American World War II paratrooper who later worked for the CIA in their storied Special Activities Division. He was in Shanghai disguised as an ice cream machine salesman from 1946 to 1951, returning intelligence information on the Chinese Communist Party.
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 is a United States federal law that makes it a federal crime for those with access to classified information, or those who systematically seek to identify and expose covert agents and have reason to believe that it will harm the foreign intelligence activities of the U.S., to intentionally reveal the identity of an agent whom one knows to be in or recently in certain covert roles with a U.S. intelligence agency, unless the United States has publicly acknowledged or revealed the relationship.
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic and executive.
The Intelligence Star is an award given by the Central Intelligence Agency to its officers for "voluntary acts of courage performed under hazardous conditions or for outstanding achievements or services rendered with distinction under conditions of grave risk". The award citation is from the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and specifically cites actions of "extraordinary heroism". It is the third-highest award given by the Central Intelligence Agency, behind the Distinguished Intelligence Cross and Distinguished Intelligence Medal, and is analogous to the Silver Star, the US military award for extraordinary heroism in combat. Only a few dozen people have received this award, making it one of the rarest valor awards awarded by the US government.
Evan Welling Thomas III is an American journalist, historian, and author. He is the author of nine books, including two New York Times bestsellers.
Douglas Seymour Mackiernan was the first officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be killed in the line of duty.
The Distinguished Intelligence Cross is the highest decoration awarded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. It is given for "a voluntary act or acts of extraordinary heroism involving the acceptance of existing dangers with conspicuous fortitude and exemplary courage". Only a handful of people have been awarded this medal in the history of the agency, most posthumously. As a consequence, it is one of the rarest awards for valor in the United States.
Barton David Gellman is an American author and journalist known for his reports on the September 11 attacks, on Dick Cheney's vice presidency, and on the global surveillance disclosure. Beginning in June 2013, he authored The Washington Post's coverage of the U.S. National Security Agency, based on top secret documents provided to him by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. He published a book for Penguin Press on the rise of the surveillance-industrial state in May 2020.
The Worth Bingham Prize, also referred to as the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting, is an annual journalism award which honors: "newspaper or magazine investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served."
The Memorial Wall is a memorial at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It honors 139 CIA employees who died in the line of service.
Tim Weiner is an American reporter and author. He is the author of five books and co-author of a sixth, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
Project Greek Island was a United States government continuity program located at the Greenbrier hotel in West Virginia. The facility was decommissioned in 1992 after the program was exposed by The Washington Post.
Jeffrey Alexander Sterling is an American lawyer and former CIA employee who was arrested, charged, and convicted of violating the Espionage Act for revealing details about Operation Merlin to journalist James Risen. The case was based on what the judge called "very powerful circumstantial evidence." In May 2015, Sterling was sentenced to 3½ years in prison. In 2016 and 2017, he filed complaints and wrote letters regarding mistreatment, lack of medical treatment for life-threatening conditions, and false allegations against him by corrections officers leading to further punitive measures. He was released from prison in January 2018.
Barbara Annette Robbins was an American secretary employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. She was killed in a car bombing of the United States Embassy, Saigon. Robbins was the first female employee to be killed in action in the CIA's history, the first American woman killed in the Vietnam War and, as of 2012, the youngest CIA employee to die in action.
Greystone or GREYSTONE is the former secret codeword of a Sensitive Compartmented Information compartment containing information about rendition, interrogation and counter-terrorism programs of the CIA, operations that began shortly after the September 11 Attacks. It covers covert actions in the Middle East that include pre-military operations in Afghanistan and drone attacks.
David Wise was an American journalist and author who worked for the New York Herald-Tribune in the 1950s and 1960s, and published a series of non-fiction books on espionage and US politics as well as several spy novels. His book The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (1973) won the George Polk Award, and the George Orwell Award (1975).
James Foley Lewis was an American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer killed in the 1983 United States embassy bombing in Beirut, Lebanon.