Weekly Intelligence Notes #40-03 22 October 2003 |
Weekly Intelligence Notes (WINs) are commentaries on Intelligence and related national security matters, based on open media sources, selected, interpreted, edited and produced by AFIO for non-profit educational uses by AFIO members and WIN subscribers.
NOTE TO AFIO MEMBERS, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES This week's WIN is the Obituary for the WINs originator/editor, and AFIO Executive Director, Roy K. Jonkers. WINs will recommence on 10 November -- after our 4-day Symposium. Thank you for the many emails, cards, packages, and letters to the Jonkers Family [which we have forwarded] and to the AFIO staff.
COL. ROY JONKERS, 76, INTELLIGENCE OFFICER, ASSOCIATION EXECUTIVE
Retired Air Force Colonel Roy Kenneth Jonkers, whose career in the intelligence field spanned almost 60 years, died on October 14 at age 76. He suffered a heart attack at the Pentagon physical fitness facility and was pronounced dead at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington. His last of many intelligence positions was as executive director of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, or AFIO.
Born in New York May 26, 1927, of Dutch parents, Col. Jonkers had dual citizenships in Holland and the U. S. He spent much of his boyhood in The Netherlands, where he had his first exposure to the intelligence world at age 16, when he worked with an underground cell that saved 11 Jewish Dutch people. After the war he returned to the U.S. and enlisted in the Army as a German linguist. He was sent to Germany where he did human intelligence collection on Soviet activities in East Germany. He was also involved in the
Nurnberg war crime trials of members of the
Waffen SS.
Col. Jonkers received his undergraduate education at Georgetown University and did post-graduate work at Stanford and Rutgers universities. He entered the Air Force in 1952 and held a succession of increasingly sensitive intelligence posts, ranging from tactical intelligence to reconnaissance and psychological warfare. He retired in 1983 and for the next decade was a corporate program and business development manager with GTE, retiring again in January 1994.
In his post-military career, Col. Jonkers received credit for reviving two moribund professional intelligence organizations. Long active in the National Military Intelligence Association, he became president of its Potomac Chapter in 1983 and then national president. At the time, both NMIA and the Potomac Chapter were troubled with declining membership and finances. In short order, Col. Jonkers completely turned around finances and attendance of both groups. He left the NMIA presidency in 1989.
In a continuation of his desire "to give something back to an intelligence community filled with fine people doing their best for our country," in 1998 Col. Jonkers became executive director at the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, which was formed in 1975 as a support group for a beleaguered intelligence community. In the early 1990s, AFIO suffered many of the problems he had encountered in NMIA. He performed the same "turnaround," organizing money-making symposia, drawing large numbers of attendees, instituting annual Intelligence Merit Awards, and creating an extensive publications program. AFIO grew from 1,000 members to almost 4,000 at the time of his death.
Col. Jonkers taught international relations courses for University of Maryland in 1959 and 1966. He was on the faculty of Princeton University as professor of aerospace studies, 1967-1971.
In 1948 he married Vilma Kimenis, a native of Valka, Latvia, who preceded him in death by five weeks. He is survived by two sons, Ronald and Randall; a daughter, Sylvia Tahler, two sisters and three brothers, and seven grandchildren.
This appeared in The Washington Post on 10/19/2003.
JONKERS, ROY K., COL. USAF (RET.)
On October 14, 2003 of Falls Church, VA. Beloved husband of the late Vilma Jonkers; father of Sylvia M. Tahler, Ronald N. and Randall G. Jonkers; brother of Ellen Connaughton, Joyce Glanville, Richard, Reggie and Herbert Jonkers; son of the late Gerard A. and Jeannette Jonkers. Also survived by seven grandchildren. Memorial services will be held at Ft. Myer Chapel on Tuesday, December 2, at 1 p.m. Interment Arlington National Cemetery with full Military Honors. Memorial contributions may be made to AFIO Scholarship Fund, 6723 Whittier Ave., Suite 303-A, McLean, VA 22101-4533. Arrangements by NATIONAL FUNERAL HOME, Falls Church.
MEMORIAL SERVICE: A Memorial Service and Burial -- with full honors -- has been tentatively scheduled by the Jonkers Family for 2 December 2003 at 1 p.m. at Arlington National Cemetery. Details on whether it will be in the Old or New Chapel will be announced in a later WIN.
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