Father’s Day a time of healing for son whose dad died a mysterious death

Wells grew up knowing very little about his father, a former military officer and weapons expert who worked in Vietnam as a public safety adviser to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Credit: James B. Wells

Credit: James B. Wells

Started in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy and shuttered this year by the Trump administration, USAID provided humanitarian assistance to developing countries with the goal of reducing poverty, increasing production and preventing the spread of Communism. But many believe it was also used as a front by the CIA, particularly its department of public safety.

Wells was 9 years old when government officials arrived at his College Park home one day to inform the family that his 39-year-old father, Jack J. Wells, had died in Vietnam. He had been the sole passenger on a small Air America plane shot down by Communist fire, they said, and seven South Vietnamese police officers trying to help Jack Wells and the plane’s two pilots escape the burning wreckage were killed by the Viet Cong.

For 25 years, Wells and his family believed that account. Then the author’s mother died. While sorting through her possessions, Wells was stunned to discover a drawer containing 400 handwritten letters from his father. They spanned from 1944 during his military service to 1965, just days before he died. And in those letters Wells, now 69 and living in Lexington, Kentucky, learned that his father may have been a whistleblower who was murdered to keep him quiet.

Credit: MilSpeak Books

Credit: MilSpeak Books

Letters paint a different picture

Discovering those letters sent Wells down a rabbit hole with seemingly no end. He started out scanning the letters and typing up the ones that were falling to pieces. He cataloged the letters and thought about publishing them in a book. Then he thought he might write a book using the letters as source material. He took some community writing classes that eventually led him to pursue an MFA in creative writing.

“When I found the letters, I studied them,” Wells said, speaking from his daughter’s home in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was helping assemble a play set for his 14-month-old granddaughter. “And I’m learning that my father was a very moral, righteous and religious man obsessed with the truth, committed to doing the right thing.”

Through the letters, Wells got to know his father.

“He writes to my mother like she’s sitting across the table and they’re having a conversation,” he said. “He would write her first thing in the morning before coffee, and then maybe around noon and late at night and sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, all in the same letter. And I get caught up in that. I feel like he’s communicating with me. Even to this day I can sit down and read his letters and feel like he’s communicating with me.”

In those letters, Wells discovered that his father had uncovered corruption in the agency. He had been tasked with evaluating, implementing and managing a refugee settlement program for people displaced by war. Under the plan, the U.S. government paid the South Vietnamese to feed and shelter refugees based on their headcount. According to his father’s letters, the South Vietnamese had inflated those numbers tenfold, and the corruption was so flagrant, his father suspected the U.S. knew about it, Wells said.

These revelations prompted Wells to pay a visit to the National Archives in Washington where he reviewed declassified confidential, secret and top-secret archival documents that altered everything he thought he knew.

Credit: James B. Wells

Credit: James B. Wells

“On that very first trip to the National Archives … I was shocked to learn there were conflicting reports concerning the circumstances surrounding his death,” Wells said of his father.

For starters, Jack Wells was not the only passenger on the plane. There were two others, identity unknown. Even more disturbing: The plane was riddled with bullet holes discharged from inside the cabin, not fired from the outside, as the government claimed.

No stone unturned

That’s when the desire to discover what really happened to his father became an obsession. Wells, who has a doctorate in research, returned to the National Archives five more times. Then he broadened his research to include the Air America archives and the Army archives. He went to Vietnam for two months to explore their archives and do field research. He interviewed witnesses to his father’s plane crash.

“Everywhere I go I find more and more evidence that conflicted with what we were told about his death,” he said.

Wells is like his father in a lot of ways. Jack Wells’ obsession with Vietnam and his work there kept him away from his family. And his son’s obsession with what happened to his father kept him away from his own family, threatening to tear it apart.

Credit: James B. Wells

Credit: James B. Wells

“Ever since I found the letters, at least once a year my wife Brenda gives me hell late at night,” he said. “‘You got to get over this,’ she’d say. She threatened to leave me. Then the next morning she’d apologize. It’s been really, really tough.

“She hoped I’d get peace in Vietnam, but I didn’t. Through counseling I learned that peace requires forgiveness, and forgiveness requires the truth. This book is … my version of the truth, so I hope and pray that once I share it with the world, my father and I come to peace."

In the course of his research, Wells made some damning discoveries. Most alarming is the fact that the day Jack Wells died he was scheduled to implement a national program to reduce corruption in the refugee settlement operation and to correct the headcount. Wells suspects there may have been people who didn’t want that to happen, and he floats some theories in his book as to who he thinks might have killed his father. Whether he’ll ever know for sure remains unknown.

The flight accident report has never been found, and Wells has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the CIA seeking access to their reports on the crash, but he’s been denied on multiple occasions. The report remains classified.

Credit: James B. Wells

Credit: James B. Wells

A sign from above

In the course of working on the book, Wells sensed his father’s spirit urging him on.

“In Vietnam they practice ancestral worship where they believe the dead continue to exist in a different realm where they can continue to guide and advise the living … they have a symbiotic relationship between the living and the dead,” he said.

“I feel like my father and I also have a symbiotic relationship in that he’s guiding me to reveal this cover-up, these lies about his death, so he can be at peace. My dead father mentored me, literally. I believe that. He’s taught me to be a better person, a better Christian and more humanitarian and to care for the marginalized.”

Wells likens his pursuit of the truth to Homer’s “Odyssey.”

“Odysseus and my father are both alike. My story and the ‘Odyssey’ don’t start with the fathers; both stories begin with the sons,” he said. “The ‘Odyssey’ starts with Telemachus longing for his father, and the same with my story. And then our fathers — Odysseus on the other side of the world and my father in another realm — are both longing for the sons, trying to reconnect with them. In some regards I feel we have reconnected in so many ways. I feel like I have accomplished a lot of what he wanted me to do.”

Married for 48 years, Wells is the father of two daughters who have given him two grandchildren. But he won’t spend Father’s Day with them this year. Instead he and his wife Brenda will embark that day on a six-month book tour via travel trailer, starting with stops in his home state of Kentucky. Mid-July will find him in the Atlanta area for a few author appearances, and he’ll take time to visit his father’s grave at the Marietta National Cemetery.

But he’ll end Father’s Day as he always does, with a celebratory drink of Old Grand-Dad bourbon and a toast to his father. “But this time,” he said, “I’ll tell him, as I toast him with a copy of our book in front of us, ‘We did it, Dad!’”

AUTHOR EVENTS

James B. Wells. The author will discuss and sign his book, “Because: A CIA Coverup & a Son’s Odyssey to Find the Father He Never Knew,” at the following locations:

• 5 p.m. July 11-12, Liberty Books, 176 W. Crogan St., Lawrenceville. 770-945-9288, libertybooks.us

• 1 p.m. July 13, St. John’s Episcopal Church, 3480 E. Main St., College Park. 404-761-8402, stjohnscollegepark.org

• 6:30 p.m. July 17, Myrtle’s Plot Twist, 209 S. 6th St., Griffin. 470-204-7174, myrtlesbooks.com