Peter Ernest, who led undercover CIA agents during the Cold War for decades and then used that experience as the first executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, died on February 13 at a hospital in Arlington, Virginia. 88.
His wife Karen Rice said congestive heart failure was the cause.
Unlike many former intelligence officers who tend to remain silent, Mr. Ernest spoke skillfully and willingly about his career in the CIA, including years spent in Europe and the Middle East, where he recruited and directed espionage agents. Soviet Union and its satellites. This experience – and his attitude – made him an excellent candidate to run a museum dedicated to international espionage.
One of his favorite stories involves a 1978 assignment to protect and interrogate Soviet defector Arkady N. Shevchenko by moving him undercover from his New York City apartment to a Virginia suburb. Mr. Shevchenko, the UN’s appointed deputy secretary general, had already been spying for the CIA, and the Americans were worried he was about to be caught by the KGB.
For several weeks, Mr. Ernest’s team interrogated Mr. Shevchenko — among his interrogators was Aldrich Ames, who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy himself — and dealt with his endless demands for clothes, girlfriends, and even vacations in the Caribbean. Mr. Ernest paid for all this by handing over the cash to the FBI handlers of the Russian defector.
FBI agents accustomed to strict spending protocols were amazed, he recalled in Business Confidentiality: Lessons in Corporate Success from Inside the CIA (2010), which he coauthored with Marianne Karinch. “They said, ‘No one can distribute that kind of money but God.’
Mr. Ernest’s last position in the agency was that of its chief representative. He demonstrated media dexterity as the CIA weathered the Iran-Contra scandal, the fall of the Soviet Union, and congressional pressure to declassify Cold War material. By many accounts, he was successful, in part because he was trusted by the rank and file of the CIA.
“It’s hard to be a publicist for a company that doesn’t want publicity,” Burton Gerber, who has worked at the agency for 39 years, said in a telephone interview. “We liked Peter because he was one of us.”
And part of the job, according to Mr. Ernest, was fun: for example, he met Harrison Ford after he helped arrange for a film crew to come to the agency’s headquarters to film Patriot Games (1992), the first film made. allowed to film inside the building.
Such experience made Mr. Ernest a natural choice to run the International Spy Museum, a $34 million venture that opened in downtown Washington in 2002. As executive director, he has been involved in everything from exhibitions and lectures to public relations; he spoke to reporters almost as often as he did at the CIA
“Someone once said that if you can convince another person to spy for your country, you can probably sell anything,” said H. Keith Melton, a historian and collector who donated many of the spy artifacts that made up the original funds of the museum. “Peter had such a skill set.”
Mr. Melton, one of the museum’s early board members, was instrumental in hiring Mr. Ernest, and Mr. Ernest later helped convince Mr. Melton donate most of your remaining collectionabout 7,000 items, including the ice pick that killed the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Mr. Ernest also understood the importance of making the museum more than just a tourist attraction. He organized advisory boards that included retired intelligence officials and historians and built both permanent and temporary exhibits on mysteries like spy camera technology and current events like the war on terror.
And he added personality to the museum: among his collection was a coat with a camera in the buttonhole, which he wore while working undercover in Greece and Cyprus.
His efforts paid off. About nine million people visited the museum between 2002 and its retirement in 2017, far exceeding the founders’ initial expectations, despite people having to pay to enter in a city where many museums are free. (Adult tickets are currently $26.95.)
“He was a true spy who believed deeply and passionately not only in transparency, but in helping the public understand what espionage is,” Tamara Christian, the museum’s president and CEO, said in a telephone interview. She added, “He wanted people to stop thinking of espionage as a James Bond movie.”
With a quick wit and dapper sense of style, he has also been a popular guest on television programs such as “Colbert Reportand radio programs such as the NPR quiz show “ask me more”, whose host, Ophira Eisenberg, wondered if spies really like to shake, not stir drinks.
— How do you drink? she asked.
Without wasting a second, he replied, “One after the other.”
Edwin Peter Ernest was born on January 1, 1934 in Edinburgh, where his father, Edwin Burchett Ernest, served as a diplomat at the US Consulate. His mother, Emily (Keating) Ernest, was born in England and was a housewife.
The family returned to the United States in 1939 and settled in Bethesda, Maryland. Peter’s father died of a brain tumor in 1946; then his mother became a US citizen and went to work for the State Department.
Mr. Ernest graduated from Georgetown University in 1955 with a degree in history and political science and immediately joined the Marine Corps, where he was posted to Japan. When he returned, his fiancée Janet Chesney, who was already working in the CIA field office in Washington, convinced his superiors to recruit him.
His marriage to Miss Chesney ended in divorce. He married Ms. Rice, who also worked for the CIA, in 1988. With her, he was survived by four daughters, Nancy Cintorino, Carol Earnest, Patricia Earnest, and Sheila Gorman, all from his first marriage; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
Mr. Ernest worked in the agency’s secret service for 25 years, after which he worked in the agency’s inspector general’s office and Senate liaison. He arrived in the late 1970s to mend relations with Congress after the so-called Church Committee exposed years of CIA involvement in coups and assassinations.
Although Mr. Ernest tried not to embellish intelligence work, he also seemed to like to lift the veil over the life of a spy from time to time.
IN interview for the International Spy Museum, he said that he was assigned to plant a bug in the house of a man whom his superiors suspected of being a double agent. One night, the suspect invited Mr. Ernest and his wife to a small party at his home.
When the owner wasn’t looking, Mr. Ernest, dressed in a tuxedo, slipped downstairs into the man’s office, where he slipped under his desk, drilled a hole, and installed a listening device, placing a handkerchief across his chest to catch sawdust. . He returned to the party unnoticed.
It was his “connection moment,” he said, and it worked: the bug recorded a conversation between the suspect and his handler on the other side.
“But for a moment,” he said, “lying under that desk, I should have thought what my reaction would be if he walked into that office.”