Obituaries

Ruth Marriner SzopaCIA Employee, Homemaker

Ruth Marriner Szopa, 79, a homemaker and former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, died Aug. 26 of respiratory failure at the Quarry Hill nursing home in Camden, Maine. A former resident of Alexandria, she had lived in Camden since 1984.

Mrs. Szopa was born in Waterville, Maine, and received a bachelor's degree in art history from Colby College in Waterville in 1948. She received a master's degree, also in art history, from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass., in the early 1950s.

She worked briefly for architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller before moving to Washington in the late 1950s to take a clerical job with the CIA. She was dispatched to Tehran, where her spy career, as she told family members years later, consisted of counting train cars along the Russia-Iran border.

After marrying a CIA agent in 1956, she accompanied her husband on assignments to Italy, West Germany, Poland, Mozambique, South Africa and Singapore. She worked primarily as a homemaker.

She and her husband returned to the Washington area in 1970. Living in Alexandria, Mrs. Szopa volunteered with a number of social, political and religious groups, including Alexandria organizations supporting mental retarded people. She also maintained her interest in art and organized slide shows featuring female artists neglected by history.

Mrs. Szopa's husband, Eugene Stanley Szopa, died Aug. 15.

Survivors include a son, Stephen Szopa of the District, and a brother.