COLLEAGUES KNEW THEIR JOBS CARRIED GREAT RISKS
Like Hoke, many of those in the Special Activities Division came from the SEALS, the Army’s Delta Force and other elite military units.
During his 12 years in the CIA, Hoke played the role of both commando and spy. He deployed to Iraq and other hot spots but also posed as a foreign service officer — the agency’s typical cover for a covert officer — in Greece and Denmark. The agency had Hoke serve outside war zones to broaden his experiences, friends said.
Hoke, like his colleagues, knew there were great risks. In a desk drawer at home in Leesburg, he kept a clipping of a newspaper article about another CIA operative, Maj. Douglas A. Zembiec, a Marine officer and fellow Naval Academy graduate known as the “Lion of Fallujah,” who was killed in Iraq in 2007.
In 2008, Hoke was deployed in Afghanistan when he was called on to reinforce a group of CIA operatives who had been ambushed by the Taliban. One of the operatives, Donald Barger, 40, a former Ranger and Green Beret who earned the Bronze Star, was dead by the time Hoke arrived at the scene, former agency officers said.
Friends say that Hoke turned to painting to help decompress after his tours.
In an email exchange, Hoke’s wife, Christy, described her husband as “the kind of person movies are made about, as are most of his colleagues. Unbelievable human beings.”
“He lived by a code that I will not break for anything. Even writing this email feels like a small betrayal,” she said.
Hoke left behind three children.
Little is known about Delemarre’s service in the CIA. According to military records, he spent roughly a dozen years as a radio operator in the Marine Reserves, where he was a lance corporal. Friends willing to talk about him said he joined the CIA following the Sept. 11 attacks and later shifted to the Navy Reserves — a commitment he maintained while also working at the spy agency — where he became a commissioned officer.
Delemarre’s wife declined to be interviewed. He left behind two daughters.
CIA in Afghanistan
Since 2001, as thousands of CIA officers and contractors have cycled in and out of Afghanistan targeting terrorists and running sources, operatives from the Special Activities Division have been part of some of the most dangerous missions. Overall, the division numbers in the low hundreds and also operates in Somalia, Iraq, the Philippines and other areas of conflict.
CIA paramilitary officers from the division were the first Americans in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, and they later spirited Hamid Karzai, the future president, into the country. Greg Vogle, an agency operative who took Karzai into Afghanistan, went on to run the paramilitary division and became the top spy at the CIA.
The first American killed in the country, Johnny Micheal Spann, was a CIA officer assigned to the Special Activities Division. He died in November 2001 during a prison uprising.
In the years since, paramilitary officers from the Special Activities Division have trained and advised a small army of Afghan militias known as counterterrorism pursuit teams. The militias took on greater importance under President Barack Obama, who embraced covert operations because of their small footprint and deniability.
The militias, and their CIA handlers, were at times accused by Afghan officials and others of acting as a law unto themselves, running roughshod over civilians and killing innocents. Raids by CIA paramilitary officers and militia fighters also resulted in airstrikes that killed Afghan civilians.
In 2009, in the worst loss for the agency in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber detonated an explosives vest and killed seven CIA employees — none were from the Special Activities Division — at a forward operating base in Khost, on the Pakistan border.
At the same time, the CIA helped build the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, which has long faced accusations of torturing suspected militants.
The CIA also spent more than a decade financing a slush fund for Karzai. Every month, agency officers would drop off cash in suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags. Karzai’s aides would use the cash to run a vast patronage network, paying off warlords, lawmakers and others they wanted to keep on their side.
The slush fund, which was exposed in 2013, was seen by many U.S. diplomats and other officials and experts as fueling the rampant corruption that has undermined the American effort to build a functioning democracy in Afghanistan.
Assault and a funeral of two friends
On Oct. 21, 2016, Hoke and Delemarre were shot in an assault on an Islamic State compound in Jalalabad, where the militant group has made inroads in recent years.
Details are sparse. Friends say that as Hoke made his way around a wall, a militant shot him. Hoke radioed that he was down, Delemarre heard his close friend’s voice, left his position of safety and ran to Hoke’s aid, but Hoke soon died. Delemarre was wounded in his attempt to help and was evacuated to Germany, where he died shortly after his wife arrived.
The two were awarded stars at the CIA in May, when the agency held its annual memorial for officers who died in the line of duty. A third CIA paramilitary officer, George A. Whitney, 38, who was killed in December in the Jalalabad area, also received a star.
As a Marine captain, Whitney served with the 3rd Marine Reconnaissance Battalion in Anbar province in Iraq. Relatives of Whitney, who studied classics and played fullback on the football team at Bates College in Maine, declined to comment.
Other CIA operatives killed in Afghanistan since 2001 include Dario Lorenzetti, a West Point graduate and former Ranger, who died in 2012 after a member of the Afghan intelligence service detonated a suicide vest in an insider attack; Jay Henigan, 61, a contractor and plumber who was gunned down in Kabul in 2011 during an attack; a pair of paramilitary officers killed in 2003 while tracking terrorists in southeastern Afghanistan; and Nathan Ross Chapman, a Green Beret who was detailed to a CIA paramilitary team in Afghanistan when he was shot to death hunting al-qaida in January 2002.
The ranks of CIA operatives are not easily replaced, said Stiles, the former counterterrorism analyst.
“That’s going to be one of the challenges for the government,’’ he said. “How do we maintain the level of experience and expertise in a war that is going to last for another 20 or 30 years or longer?”
At the Arlington funeral of Hoke and Delemarre on July 14 — long delays before interment are common — heavily muscled men with beards and sunglasses sweated through their suit jackets as a Navy honor guard played taps and performed a rifle salute. Vogle, the CIA operative who took Karzai into Afghanistan, stood among the mourners.
On the back of the funeral program is a quote from Adm. Chester W. Nimitz: “They fought together as brothers in arms; they died together and now they sleep side by side.”