PETER EARNEST (1934-2022)
He grew up in Bethesda, Md., graduating from nearby Georgetown Preparatory School. He studied history and government at Georgetown University, received a bachelor’s degree in 1955 and served in the Marine Corps, doing a tour in Japan. When he was about to leave the Corps, his then-fiancee, Janet Chesney, told her co-workers at the CIA field office in Washington that he was getting out of the service, leading an agency official to approach him about joining the CIA. He signed up in 1957 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 Washingtonian. “There was a great sense of serving the country. That has a certain redeeming quality, thinking, ‘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.”
Moving up in the agency, he played a key role in the "debriefing" of Arkady Shevchenko, a top United Nations official who became the highest-ranking Soviet diplomat to defect to the United States. Later, he would serve as the agency’s media relations director and spokesman, trying to strike a delicate balance between transparency and the protection of government secrets. A few years after his retirement in 1994, he was asked to join the International Spy Museum, which officially opened in downtown Washington in 2002.
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 2019, 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 which stories we would tell and how we would tell them,” museum President 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.
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 an exceptional double agent, he noted.)
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.