Obituaries: Robert J. Michela; Ross D. Netherton; Lawrence F. Riedman; Charles W. Roades

-- Adam Bernstein

Charles W. Roades Air Force, Defense Officer

Charles W. Roades, 79, a retired Air Force colonel who later served with the Defense Intelligence Agency as a human intelligence expert, died of cardiac arrest April 26 at his home in Colorado Springs.

He was a Washington area resident for many years until retiring to Colorado in 2005.

In the late 1940s, Col. Roades enlisted in the Air Force and was trained as a Russian linguist. He later served for a few months in Korea before attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he graduated in 1955 with a degree in military engineering. He was trained as a pilot and accumulated more than 7,000 hours of flight time, specializing in heavy-lift aircraft.

After a short stint teaching in the English department at the Air Force Academy, Col. Roades served as a pilot in Thailand and Vietnam and was selected for intelligence training.

From 1977 to 1979, he served as an Air Force attach? in Moscow, where he earned commendations for saving classified documents from destruction after a fire gutted the U.S. Embassy.

He retired from the Air Force in 1985 as the special assistant to the director of attaches at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Then, as a civilian with the DIA, he joined the Senior Executive Service and served as a human intelligence collection expert. He retired again in 1997.

Charles Walton Roades was born in Evansville, Ind. He received a master's degree in English literature from the University of Washington in 1963 and a master's degree in counseling psychology in 1973 from what is now Troy University in Alabama.

His marriages to Dorothy Roades and Margaret Lowe Roades ended in divorce. His third wife, Viviane Tanton Roades, died in 2003.

Survivors include a son from his second marriage, Christopher Roades of Long Beach, Calif.; a son from his third marriage, Charles W. Roades Jr. of Vienna; a brother; and five grandchildren.

-- T. Rees Shapiro