If someone with a very secret Govt job dies do they get a public obituary notice?

Factual Questions
1

Just curious. How is this handled? Obvioulsy a super secret spy or spymaster type can’t list their life’s accomplisments. “Helped topple Peron” etc. Do they even get a public newspaper obituary notice, or what…?

2

At CIA headquarters they have a wall with a bunch of starts on it. Each star represents an officer killed in the line of duty. Some of the stars have names under them and others don’t. There are guys who were killed in the 50’s whose identities have not been released.

When they die, I imagine the obit just says that they were government employees or greeting card salesmen or whatever.

Haj

3

We can only know the answer to this if it is false unless we are CIA, in which case we can’t disclose it as true.

4

Does the government issue “official” obituaries? My understanding is that obituaries are written by the media. So if someone’s activities were truly secret, there’d be no media notice of their death.

5

Yep, obituaries are written by newspapers for whoever they see fit. If a secret ‘somebody’ dies, they may not know about it, or they may not have any information, or they may decide that nobody cares. But it’s their own decision. What information is actually made available depends on circumstances - there may or may not be a legal obligation to release details of what happened.

6

Yuk…too many ‘they’s’…

It’s the newspapers’ decision as to what to print.

It’s MI5/CIA/etc who decide what is made public, which will presumably follow legal requirements, precendent, general decency, perhaps in that order.

7

When my FIL died, the funeral home released the information provided to them by my MIL, including the “survived by” list.

I don’t see why the gov’t would get involved. If the deceased has no family, then there will be no obituary.

8

Just taking the opportunity to city a kinduv cool link from slate explainer talking about the various levels of CIA ‘cover’: http://slate.msn.com/id/2089062

I would imagine that if various parts of a person’s career are still classified, the loved ones might be prevented from releasing any details that they have… even if they would want to. :]