Stansfield Turner

Stansfield Turner, who led the Central Intelligence Agency through four tumultuous years under President Jimmy Carter, starting small covert actions against international communism that grew into some of the biggest battles of the Cold War, , died on Thursday January 18 2018. Turner, leaving his base in Italy, took over on March 9, 1977, succeeding George Bush, who had tried to steer the C.I.A. for a year while congressional committees combed through the agency’s history after the Watergate scandal. On taking office President Reagan dismissed Mr. Turner. Mr. Turner spent much of his remaining years writing and lecturing on the C.I.A. and American national security. Mr. Turner was born on Dec. 1, 1923, in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Ill., to Oliver Stansfield Turner, a real estate broker, and the former Wilhelmina Josephine Wagner. He attended Highland Park High School and entered Amherst College in 1941. He joined the Naval Reserve, before being admitted to the United States Naval Academy in 1943; one of his classmates was Jimmy Carter, though the two men barely knew each other at the time. A Rhodes scholar, Mr. Turner received degrees in politics, economics and philosophy from Oxford University in 1950. As he rose though the ranks during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, he commanded a minesweeper, a destroyer, a carrier group and a fleet. He also served as president of the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., from 1972 to 1974. His marriage to Patricia Busby Whitney ended in divorce; they had a son, Geoffrey, and a daughter, Laurel, both of whom survive him. His second wife, Karin Gilbert, who had been his secretary, died in January 2000 in a crash of a light plane in Costa Rica. Mr. Turner was critically injured in the accident but recovered and returned to his post, which he had held since 1991, at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is also survived by his wife, Marion Weiss Turner, whom he married in 2002, along with his stepsons Peter Weiss and Andrew Weiss; another stepson, John Gilbert, and a stepdaughter, Laila Ballon, from his marriage to Ms. Gilbert; 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.