A funeral of 2 friends: CIA deaths rise in secret Afghan war

WASHINGTON — On a sweltering day earlier this summer, operatives with the Central Intelligence Agency gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to bury two of their own. Brian Ray Hoke and Nathaniel Patrick Delemarre, elite gunslingers who worked for the CIA’s paramilitary force, were laid to rest after a firefight with Islamic State militants near Jalalabad in Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan.

There had been scant mention of Hoke’s death in local news reports in Leesburg, Va., his home, and nothing at all about Delemarre in news accounts in the Florida Panhandle, where his family lives.