Robert R. Kehoe

1922 - 2020

When he was 21 years old, Robert R. Kehoe, a young enlisted soldier in a training camp in Missouri, volunteered for an unknown and dangerous assignment. It was 1943. Hitler's troops were pushing into Russia; Allied forces were fighting Mussolini in Italy. Kehoe, the sixth child of Irish immigrants to New Brunswick, had left a chemistry degree to join the Army Signal Corps. When he was offered the assignment -- after a battery of tests and an interview -- his fellow soldiers agreed he was a bit crazy. Nine months later, Kehoe, the British Major Adrian Wise, and Paul Aguirec, a French lieutenant, would parachute in the dead of the night into the Foret du Duault in Brittany, deep into territory held by German forces. Their mission was to connect with the French resistance there, to form a link between the resistance and the Allied forces in London, and to coordinate airdrops of supplies to resistance fighters in northwestern France. Kehoe's account of the time he spent in the forests of Brittany would become one of the definitive stories of the Jedburghs, an international Special Forces operation to sabotage the Nazi occupation in Western Europe. He, Wise, and Aguirec spent three months staying one step ahead of Nazi patrols, as Kehoe sent and received encoded radio transmissions from London. They slept in ditches and abandoned farmhouses. Four times, they barely evaded capture by German soldiers, once avoiding gunfire by hiding in a briar patch. They helped bring together the passionate, divided factions of the French resistance. They formed close friendships with members of the maquis. Kehoe would go on to write about the strong characters of the resistance fighters -- of the leftist Yves Le Hegarat and the conservative Josef Forestier, of the network of French school teachers on bicycles that kept the entire operation alive. He would keep his friendships with many of them for the rest of their lives. Kehoe was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross in November 1945 for his mission in France. He would go on to work on a Jedburgh team in China, then to graduate from Rutgers and Columbia. He got a PhD from American University in 1970. From 1949 until his retirement in 1984, he worked for the CIA, training intelligence officials in foreign area studies and the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, among other things. He didn't often speak of the war or his part in it. He was far more interested in peace -- in learning about the world and its people, in the lives of his friends. He lived in Virginia and then Colorado. He married Ann Harrison Heckman in 1954, and spent 56 years with her. He grew strawberries and tomatoes, built Shaker furniture, and practiced French with his granddaughters and son-in-law. He traded letters across the Atlantic with those he met as a Jedburgh. Robert Kehoe died on August 28, 2020, at 98 years old, in Boulder, Colorado. He is survived by three children and four grandchildren. A memorial service is planned for Robert Kehoe in May 2021, on his 99th birthday, when hopefully people can gather. If you would like to make a donation in his name, please consider Colorado Public Radio, the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, or a charity of your choice.