“Jane Wallis Burrell was in the OSS from 1943-1945, and was a case officer in X-2 in France and Germany. She segued into the SSU, the CIG, and then the CIA, and was recognized as the first CIA officer to have died while in service.”

The OSS Society — August 27 2018

On January 6, 1948, Jane Burrell was killed in an airplane crash while on official travel, at Gonesse, France, on a flight from Brussels to Le Bourget Airfield, (outside of Paris, France).

The OSS Society honors the historic accomplishments of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II predecessor to the CIA. A declassified CIA document — released in 2003 — indicates that Burrell was part of a team hunting for the NAZI gold. Why is the OSS society tweeting about Burrell now is itself a bit of a mystery! Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY

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Jane Wallis Burrell: The First CIA Officer To Die in the Agency’s Service

Jane Burrell at Smith College

Jane Burrel was born on 22 Sep 1911 in Dubuque, Dubuque County, Iowa, USA. She is buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery and Mausoleum in Hartsdale, Westchester County, New York, USA.

On January 6, 1948, an Air France DC-3 from Brussels crashed on approach to the Le Bourget airport near Paris, killing all five crew members and 10 of the 11 passengers.

Jane Burrell in Beuerberg, Germany. June 30, 1945.

Among the dead was a young woman who, press reports said, was either a clerk or a courier. She was neither.

Jane Burrell was a CIA officer, and her death—only 110 days after CIA was officially established the previous September—makes her the first CIA officer to die while employed by the Agency. (…)

We know nothing about Jane’s activity at the time of her death. She was returning from a trip to Brussels on January 6 — traditionally the end of the Christmas season—and despite speculation that she was on an operational mission, the limited documentation sheds no light. An official US spokesman at the time said Jane had been on vacation.

Jane was never a candidate for a Star on CIA’s Memorial Wall because the Wall commemorates Agency employees who died in specific circumstances, and deaths from crashes of commercial aircraft have generally not qualified.

Burrell in Berkeley Square — London (29 April 1944)

At the same time, her service with CIA and its predecessor organizations was honorable and deserves to be remembered. [CIA Website]

Our Lovely Jane ~ XAIPE [Rejoice]

The Salzburg Connection

Helen Clark MacInnes (October 7, 1907 – September 30, 1985)was a Scottish-American author of espionage novels.

She and her husband immigrated to the United States in 1937, when he took an academic position at Columbia University in New York, while retaining his role in the British MI6, for foreign espionage.

MacInnes published her first novel during World War II, and her early novels are all based in that setting. Later she wrote more about characters within the context of the Cold War.

The Salzburg Connection is a 1972 American thriller film directed by Lee H. Katzin, starring Barry Newman and Anna Karina . It is based on a 1968 novel by Helen MacInnes.

Plot — After a chest is brought up from the bottom of an Austrian lake, the diver, Richard Bryant (Patrick Jordan), is found murdered. Bill Mathison (Barry Newman) is an American lawyer on vacation in Austria. He stops by a photography shop to meet with a man who is compiling a book of photographs of Austrian Lakes, as a favor to the publisher, and meets the photographer’s wife Anna (Anna Karina). The photographer has disappeared. Mathison gets caught up in trying to find the chest recovered by Bryant. It is revealed to contain a list of former members of the Nazi party who could be embarrassingly connected to current United States politics.

An American woman, Elissa Lang (Karen Jensen), pretending to be a recent college graduate on a European tour, is also after the chest, on behalf of an underground group of surviving Nazis. They all end up fighting for their lives, as well as for possession of the chest, along with a group of CIA agents. ( Wikipedia )

REFERENCES

The Mystery of Jane Wallis Burrell: The First CIA Officer To Die in the Agency’s Service — CIA news & Information

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Jane Wallis Burrell — First CIA Officer to Have Died While in Service