page_title: Stansfield Turner
section_title: Personal life and death
hierarchical_section_title: Stansfield Turner / Personal life and death
context_page_description: Stansfield Turner was an admiral in the United States Navy who served as President of the Naval War College, commander of the United States Second Fleet, Supreme Allied Commander NATO Southern Europe, and was Director of Central Intelligence under the Carter administration. A graduate of Oxford and the Naval Academy, Turner served for more than 30 years in the Navy, commanding warships, a carrier group, and NATO's military forces in southern Europe, among other commands.
  Turner was appointed to lead the CIA by Jimmy Carter in 1977 and undertook a series of controversial reforms, including downsizing the Agency's clandestine arm and emphasizing technical intelligence collection over human intelligence. He also oversaw the CIA's responses to the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet–Afghan War. After leaving the CIA in 1981, Turner entered the private sector, authored several books, and criticized subsequent administrations, including the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War. He was a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park's School of Public Policy.
context_section_description: Turner married Patricia Busby Whitney (1924–2013) on 23 December 1953. The couple had two children, Laurel and Geoffrey. The marriage ended in divorce in 1984. Turner then married Norwegian-born Eli Karin Gilbert (née Tjelta) in 1985. On 15 January 2000, Turner survived a plane crash, although seriously injured, in Costa Rica that killed his wife and three other people on board. Turner and his wife were on the L-410 Turbolet operated by Taxi Aereo Centroamericano, on a flight from the small airport of Tobías Bolaños International Airport in San José, destined toward Tortuguero. Three minutes after take-off the airplane crashed into a house. The cause of the crash was unknown. Turner later married Marion Levitt Weiss in 2002.
  Turner died at his home in Redmond, Washington on January 18, 2018, at age 94.
caption: Turner in November 2005
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