B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, MARCH 1 , 2022
obituariesBY HARRISON SMITHPeter Earnest, a veteran of the
CIA’s C old War clandestine opera-
tions who ran agents in Eastern
Europe and the Middle East, then
helped promote and preserve the
history of espionage while serv-
ing as the founding executive
director of the International Spy
Museum in Washington, died
Feb. 13 at a hospital in Arlington,
Va. He was 88.
The cause was congestive
heart failure, said his wife, Karen
Rice.
Through his speeches, books,
interviews with journalists and
leadership of the Spy Museum,
Mr. Earnest helped demystify the
world’s second-oldest profession,
introducing people to the tech-
niques, influence, triumphs and
shortcomings of intelligence
gathering around the globe.
“Unlike what you would typi-
cally expect from someone in the
intelligence/spy community, in
many ways he was more of an
extrovert than an introvert,” said
Mark S. Zaid, a national security
lawyer who got to know Mr.
Earnest while appearing at mu-
seum events. “When he was doing
the programming, he came
across as very warm, knowledge-
able and inviting — all the things
you wouldn’t want for a spy
agency, but you would want for a
museum about spying.”
Indeed, Mr. Earnest acknowl-
edged that his personality some-
times made it difficult to spend
years working undercover. “It’s
hard when you’re an open person
by nature,” he told Washingto-
nian magazine in 20 13. “In some
cases, people say, ‘ You don’t seem
like a spy.’
“The best spies don’t seem like
spies.”
Mr. Earnest worked at t he Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency for 36
years, serving for more than two
decades as a case officer in the
clandestine service. He ran and
recruited agents, conducted co-
vert operations and in the late
1970 s helped safeguard Arkady
N. Shevchenko, a top U.N. official
who became the highest-ranking
Soviet diplomat to defect to the
United States.
Mr. Earnest later came out of
the shadows to serve as the agen-
cy’s media relations director and
spokesman, trying to strike a
delicate balance between trans-
parency and the protection of
government secrets. A few years
after his retirement in 1994, he
was recruited to join the Interna-
tional Spy Museum, which offi-
cially opened in downtown Wash-
ington in 2002.
“The message here is that spies
change history,” he told the Chi-
cago Tr ibune that year. “We don’t
see ourselves as representing the
American intelligence communi-
ty or defending it as such,” he
added. “The intent here is not to
glorify espionage or celebrate
spies but to depict them. We’re
simply saying, ‘Here they are.
This is what we did.’ ”
Founded by media magnate
Milton Maltz, who helped bring
the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to
Cleveland, the museum showcas-
es thousands of years of espio-
nage history, offering informa-
tion on the ancient Chinese gen-
eral Sun Tzu, U-2 spy plane pilot
Francis Gary Powers and the
workings of the Nazi Enigma
code machine, as well as the
gadgets of fictional spies such as
James Bond and Austin Powers.
“We’re not trying to teach peo-
ple how to spy,” Mr. Earnest told
the New York Times in 2002.
“We’re saying this is the true
nature of a discipline which is
trying to get information that is
being denied or not available.
How do you go about finding
things out?”
During his tenure as executive
director, the museum hosted
more than 9 million visitors,
launched a podcast, transitioned
to a nonprofit institution and
broke ground on its new home in
L’Enfant Plaza. The building
opened in 20 19, a year after Mr.
Earnest retired from the job,
shifting to a role on the museum’s
board of directors.
“He had a huge role in whichstories we would tell and how we
would tell them,” museum Presi-
dent Tamara Christian said in a
phone interview, crediting Mr.
Earnest with shaping immersive
exhibitions such as “Operation
Spy,” in which visitors assumed
the role of covert operatives.
Edwin Peter Earnest was born
in Edinburgh, Scotland, on New
Year’s Day, 1934. His father was a
U. S. Foreign Service officer who
died of a brain tumor when Mr.
Earnest was 12. His mother, who
was English, became a natural-
ized U. S. citizen and joined the
State Department, rising to be-
come a consular affairs officer.
Mr. Earnest grew up in Bethes-
da, graduating from nearby
Georgetown Preparatory School.
He studied history and govern-
ment at Georgetown University,
received a bachelor’s degree in
1955 and served in the Marine
Corps, doing a tour in Japan.
His then-fiancee, Janet
Chesney, worked at a CIA field
office in Washington and told
colleagues that Mr. Earnest was
getting out of the service, leading
an agency official to approach
him about joining the CIA. He
signed up in 195 7 and was soon
dispatched overseas.
“My wife and I were young and
naive — we took what came. If
we’d known certain things before
we went, maybe we wouldn’t
have gone,” he told Washingto-
nian. “There was a great sense of
serving the country. That has a
certain redeeming quality, think-
ing, ‘This is hard, and these are
the risks. There is a purpose to
this.’ If you’re disappointed in
that regard, then it could easily
lead to depression.”
In a v ideo interview for the Spy
Museum, Mr. Earnest described
what he called “my Bond mo-
ment” at the CIA, in which he
slipped out of a black-tie recep-
tion at the home of an asset and
bugged the person’s office. Lying
on his back, with a handkerchief
positioned on his chest to catch
the shavings, he drilled small
holes in the bottom of the target’s
desk and installed a recordingPETER EARNEST, 88
Veteran CIA o∞cer helped launch
International Spy Museum in D.C.
device.
“No one had noticed that I was
missing. No one asked where I
had been,” he recalled. The bug
revealed that the asset was work-
ing as a double agent, leading Mr.
Earnest to “terminate” their rela-
tionship, as he put it.
Mr. Earnest was working at
agency headquarters in Langley,
Va., when he became closely in-
volved with Shevchenko, a Soviet
diplomat and U.N. undersecre-
tary general who had been secret-
ly working for the CIA before he
defected in 1978.
Whisked away t o safe houses in
New York and in the Washington
area, Shevchenko was debriefed
and protected by a joint CIA-FBI
team that was supervised by Mr.
Earnest, according to his friend
David G. Major, a retired FBI
agent who worked on the opera-
tion.
In a phone interview, Major
recalled that he playfully nick-
named Mr. Earnest “God” after
watching in surprise as the CIA
officer whipped out $3,000 in
hundred-dollar bills while ar-
ranging for Shevchenko to take avacation to the Caribbean. “I said,
‘Only God can do that.’ Because
the FBI couldn’t: We had to do all
kinds of paperwork, get approv-
als” to obtain large amounts of
cash.
One of Mr. Earnest’s subordi-
nates in the case was Aldrich
Ames, who later sold American
secrets to the KGB and was sen-
tenced to life in prison for espio-
nage. Shevchenko died in 1998.
Mr. Earnest also served in the
CIA inspector general’s o ffice and
worked as the agency’s chief liai-
son with the U. S. Senate. He
received honors including the
Intelligence Medal of Merit and
Career Intelligence Medal and
became president and chairman
of the Association of Former In-
telligence Officers.
After retiring from the agency,
he co-wrote books including
“Business Confidential” (2010), a
management guide that included
examples from CIA operations,
and “Harry Potter and the Art of
Spying” (2014), which explored
the spy craft employed in J.K.
Rowling’s wizarding novels. (The
character Severus Snape was anexceptional double agent, he not-
ed.)
Mr. Earnest’s marriage to
Chesney ended in divorce, and in
1988, he married Rice, a fellow
CIA veteran. In addition to his
wife, of McLean, Va., survivors
include four daughters from his
first marriage, Nancy Cintorino
of Reston, Va., Sheila Gorman of
Port Republic, Md., Patricia Ear-
nest of Bethesda and Carol Ear-
nest of Washington; six grand-
children; and eight great-grand-
children.
During his years at the Spy
Museum, Mr. Earnest sometimes
met with school groups visiting
the institution, chatting with
them about his career at the CIA.
Their first question was always
the same, his wife said: “How
many people did you kill?”
The answer was “none,” Mr.
Earnest told Stephen Colbert in a
2008 interview. When the TV
host pressed him — “Would you
tell me if you had?” — Mr. Earnest
replied, “I would probably hedge
on that.”
“I’ll put you down for seven,”
Colbert said.KAZ SASAHARA FOR THE INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM
Peter Earnest, seen at the old International Spy Museum building in Washington’s Penn Quarter
neighborhood, ran CIA agents in Eastern Europe and the Middle East as part of Cold War operations.BY GREGORY S. SCHNEIDERrichmond — A bill giving par-
ents the power to review sexually
explicit material before i t is taught
in the classroom has passed both
chambers of the General Assem-
bly and is headed to Gov. Glenn
Youngkin’s desk, fulfilling one of
the key promises of the Republi-
can’s c ampaign for office.
The bill cleared the House of
Delegates on Monday on a party-
line vote of 52 to 46, with all Re-
publicans in favor. It had passed
the Senate in early February after
two Democrats joined with 18 Re-
publicans to support it, 20 to 18.
The measure — Senate Bill 656 —
was sponsored by Sen. Siobhan S.
Dunnavant (R-Henrico).
Youngkin made the issue a focal
point of his successful election
campaign last year against D emo-
crat Terry McAuliffe, releasing a
television ad late in the race fea-
turing Fairfax resident Laura
Murphy, who had objected to her
high-schooler being taught Nobel
Prize-winning author Toni Morri-
son’s n ovel about the terrible lega-
cy o f slavery, “ Beloved.”
Murphy first took her com-
plaint to the General Assembly
years a go, and l awmakers passed a
“Beloved bill” in 2 016 with biparti-
san s upport — but i t was vetoed by
McAuliffe, who served as governor
from 20 14 to 2018. McAuliffe ve-
toed a similar measure again in20 17.
During last year’s p olitical cam-
paign, Youngkin attacked McAu-
liffe for those actions, capitalizing
on a groundswell of conservative
parental grievance against school
systems in the wake of long coro-
navirus shutdowns.
Since becoming governor,
Youngkin has continued hitting
on the theme of parental empow-
erment. He scored his first big
legislative win with bipartisan
support for a bill making masks
optional in schools as of March 1
but also stoked resentment with
the e stablishment of a “tip line” f or
parents to complain to the state
about any teachers or principals
who teach material they find ob-jectionable.
The bill that won passage Mon-
day requires the state to make a
model policy for each local school
board to follow in allowing par-
ents an opportunity to review any
material containing “sexually ex-
plicit content” before it is taught.
If a parent objects, the teacher
would have to offer alternative
material for that parent’s child.
The policy does not address what
books school libraries may h old.
Democrats complained Mon-
day that the bill would make Vir-
ginia t he f irst state in the nation t o
set a statewide policy for review-
ing sexually explicit materials in
schools, as opposed to leaving the
matter up to localities.“Teachers who are already o ver-
worked are going to have t o create
two lesson plans ... they’re not
going to teach the most controver-
sial or dynamic or insightful
ideas,” Del. Alfonso H. Lopez (D-
Arlington) said.
He also objected to the bill’s
definition of sexually explicit as
“overly broad.” That had been a
sticking point in the Senate as
well. An original version of Dun-
navant’s b ill h ad i ncluded a d efini-
tion from a section of state code
that refers to child pornography.
The final version, though, referred
to a code section t hat defines non-
criminal pornography.
Del. Carrie E. Coyner (R-Ches-
terfield) urged her colleagues to“all calm down for a minute” in
debating the bill before Monday’s
vote. The definition of sexually
explicit, she s aid, is “the s ame defi-
nition that we use [for materials]
that we don’t permit any state
employee to access from any state
device.”
In a statement, Youngkin hailed
the vote as a win for his “Parents
Matter” campaign. “The passage
of this bill, signals to schools that
parents will not be silenced,” he
said. “Notifying parents is just
commonsense, and I look forward
to signing it when it reaches my
desk.”Laura Vozzella contributed to this
report.VIRGINIA
Bill giving parents power to review sexually explicit school material passes
BY EMILY LANGERCarmen Herrera was 106 when
she died on Feb. 12 in the loft in
Manhattan where s he had w orked
for more than half a century, cre-
ating a lifetime’s w orth of abstract
art that went almost entirely over-
looked until her life was nearly
over.
Ms. Herrera, who was born in
Cuba in 1915 and trained in Paris
in the aftermath of World War II,
anticipated the artistic movement
known as minimalism with her
use of straight lines and geomet-
ric shapes. She exhibited her
works occasionally over the years
but did not sell her first painting
until 2004, when a show at the
Latin Collector gallery in New
York helped propel her to sudden
renown.
“How can we have missed these
brilliant compositions?” art critic
Laura Cumming wrote in the Lon-
don Observer in 2009 , describing
Ms. Herrera as “the discovery...
of the decade.”
Critics and collectors, once
made aware that Ms. Herrera ex-
isted, were rapt by the intensity of
her work, which she achieved by
juxtaposing geometric shapes in
contrasting colors — black and
white, red and blue, black and
yellow and, in her noted sequence
“Blanco y Verde,” white and green.
Pairing green and white, she once
remarked, is “like saying yes and
no.”
With her “hard-edged style of
pared-down geometric shapes”
and “simplified palettes,” she es-
tablished herself a leading ab-
stract artist of the late 20 th and
early 2 1st centuries, James Meyer,
the curator of modern art at the
National Gallery of Art in Wash-
ington, said in an interview.
Earlier this year, the National
Gallery acquired two works by
Ms. Herrera — an untitled paint-
ing in green and white, executed
in 20 13, and an untitled alumi-
num relief conceived in 1966 and
completed in 20 16. Her works are
also housed at the Museum of
Modern Art and the Whitney Mu-
seum of American Art in New
York, the Smithsonian American
Art Museum in Washington, and
the Tate Modern i n London.
Ms. Herrera, Meyer said, “is an
example of an artist persisting in
her work, unaffected by lack of
recognition, a l ack of sales, pursu-
ing her vision with great rigor and
self-confidence and happily re-
ceiving recognition late in life.”
Her death was confirmed by
artist Tony Bechara, her friend of
decades and legal representative.
He d id not cite a specific cause.
Carmen Consuelo Marta Her-
rera y Nieto was born in Havana in
1915 — on May 30, according to
her Cuban passport, or on May 31,according to her U. S. one, Bechara
said — one of seven children in a
progressive and affluent family.
Her father, who died when she
was 3, was the editor of the Ha-
vana newspaper El Mundo. Her
mother was a reporter for the
publication and a committed f em-
inist.
Ms. Herrera began painting as
a girl, went to finishing school in
Paris and returned to Cuba to
study architecture at the Univer-sity of Havana. She met a visiting
American, Jesse Loewenthal, and
returned with him to the United
States. T hey were married in 1939.
The couple lived for a period in
Paris, where Ms. Herrera, who
had previously painted in a more
traditional, representational
style, began t o explore abstract art
in earnest after discovering the
Salon des Réalités Nouvelles,
which c ultivated abstract artists.
“That was an eye-opener,” shetold the Observer in 20 10. “I
thought, ‘This is what I want to
do.’ I went to the studio, and I
worked and worked and worked
and worked. I was angry that I
didn’t k now about this before.”
In 1954, she and her husband
returned to New York, where he
worked as a high school English
teacher while she devoted herself
to her artwork, generating little if
any notice.
Ms. Herrera faced obstacles a s a
woman painting during a time
when, Meyer said, “what we call
the art world tended to be sexist
and tended to diminish women’s
accomplishments.”
But also, he noted, “the style of
her work... fell somewhat be-
tween the cracks.” Ms. Herrera
was working in what would be-
come known as the minimalist
style in the 1950 s, when the ab-
stract expressionism of artists
such as Willem de Kooning, Jack-
son Pollock and Franz Kline was
ascendant. Ms. Herrera, Meyer
said, was “working in a much
cooler, cleaner way,” without
“manifest brushwork.”
“There is nothing I love more
than to make a straight line,” Ms.
Herrera told the London Sunday
Telegraph in 20 10. “How can I
explain it? It’s t he beginning of all
structures, really.”
Asked where a line ends, she
replied, “It doesn’t.”Ms. Herrera recalled her indig-
nation when, by her account, a
gallerist in New York told her,
“Carmen, you can paint circles
around the men artists that I
have, but I ’m n ot going to give you
a show because you’re a woman.”
Ms. Herrera did find, however,
that obscurity had its benefits; she
was free to pursue her art with no
need to satisfy anyone but herself.
“I do it because I have to do it,”
she told the Telegraph. “People
keep saying, ‘How do you work all
those years without any reward,
no money, few exhibitions?' Be-
cause it was a vocation. Why
would anyone go to a hospital to
take care of the lepers if they do
not have the vocation of being
nuns? It’s the same.”
After she made her first sale at
age 89, Ms. Herrera’s work attract-
ed ever greater notice — and
fetched ever greater prices, into
the tens of thousands of dollars
per piece. In 2016 and 2017, she
was the subject of an exhibit at t he
Whitney, “Carmen Herrera: Lines
of Sight.”
By the end of her life, Ms. Her-
rera, suffering from severe arthri-
tis, relied on a wheelchair to move
about her studio. She had no im-
mediate survivors. She continued
to paint, she told the New York
Times in 2009, because “only my
love of the straight line keeps me
going.”CARMEN HERRERA, 106
Minimalist artist found fame late in life with her abstract geometric works
RICHARD DREW/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Artist Carmen Herrera looks at a sketch in her New York studio in- “There is nothing I love more than to make a straight line,”
Ms. Herrera told the London Sunday Telegraph in 2010.