Monday, Jun. 25, 1979

MARRIED. Maria Isabella Niarchos, 20, daughter of the Greek shipping Croesus Stavros Niarchos and a staffer at the French edition of Vogue; and Alix Chevassus, 36, heir to a French chemical fortune; both for the first tune; in Paris.

DIED. General Ignatius Acheampong, 47, who ruled West Africa's chronically troubled Republic of Ghana from 1972 to 1978; by firing squad following his conviction on charges of corruption; in Accra. The country's current strongman, Flight Lieut. Jerry Rawlings, 33, overthrew Acheampong's successor in another military coup earlier this month.

DIED. Anatoli Kuznetsov, 49, Russian author of Babi Yar, a documentary novel about the Nazi slaughter of Jews and others outside Kiev, who fled to Britain in 1969; of a heart attack; in London. Once an obedient party member who even informed on fellow writers for the KGB, he bitterly denounced his homeland as a "fascist state" after his defection.

DIED. John D. Murchison, 57, who teamed with younger brother Clint, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, to parlay their father's multimillion-dollar oil fortune into a vast empire (publishing, real estate, insurance, others); of a heart attack; in Dallas. So complex were the Murchisons' holdings that John joked, "If we're not careful, we may find out we're suing ourselves."

DIED. John Wayne, 72, "the Duke" of Hollywood; of cancer; in Los Angeles (see SHOW BUSINESS).

DIED. Reinhard Gehlen, 77, legendary German spymaster; of cancer; in Berg, West Germany. The austere, shadowy Gehlen was Adolf Hitler's intelligence chief for the eastern front until his predictions of Soviet triumph prompted the irritated Fuehrer to threaten to send him to an insane asylum. Gehlen fled and surrendered to American forces in May 1945, bringing with him 50 cases of Red Army documents. He later built a network of some 4,000 agents that became the CIA's chief chink in the Iron Curtain throughout the cold war, forecasting the 1956 Hungarian revolt and planning a 600-yd., CIA-built tunnel into East Berlin that tapped communications with Moscow for nine months. In 1955 the network became the nucleus of West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, which Gehlen headed until 1968. By then, his reputation had been tarnished, partly because Communist spies had infiltrated his agency.

DIED. Edward M. (Ned) Almond, 86, whip-cracking Army infantry commander who as Douglas MacArthur's chief of staff in Korea in September 1950 led the bold landing behind enemy lines on the treacherous shores of Inchon that turned the tide of the war; in San Antonio.

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