Wall of Honor

My pal Alan Katz and I are toying with a possible podcast series. This would be either Episode 2 or the beginning of Season 2 of Wall of Honor. Let me know what you think.

The CIA’s Wall of Honor, or Memorial Wall, is immediately inside the entrance to the Agency’s original headquarters building in Langley, VA. There are 125 stars carved into the white Alabama marble wall, each one representing an employee who has been killed in the line of duty. A black Moroccan goatskin-bound book, called the Book of Honor, sits in a steel frame beneath the stars, its steel case jutting out from the wall. Of the 125 stars, only 91 are accompanied by names in the Book of Honor. The 34 remaining CIA heroes must remain anonymous, even in death, as their work remains classified. Their entries in the Book of Honor show only a blank line.

Jennifer Matthews was a career analyst who worked hard to make herself valuable in the dangerous and unpredictable world of counterterrorism. Although the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was, technically, an operational office, it also was something of an experiment for the CIA, a “fusion center,” where employees of all of the CIA’s directorates, as well as other agencies, worked together to disrupt terrorist attacks. Matthews devoted years of her life and career to CTC, becoming one of the world’s leading analytic experts on al-Qaeda.