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- 2026-10-09T1338 · [[Alvin Johnson]]
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- 2026-10-09T1337 · [[Council on Foreign Relations]]
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- 2026-10-09T1335 · [[Nelson Rockefeller]]
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- 2026-10-09T1335 · [[Wilhelm Reich]]
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- 2026-10-09T1335 · [[Max Ascoli]]
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- 2026-10-09T1334 · [[Research Project on Totalitarian Communication]]
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- 2026-10-09T1334 · [[Hans Speier]]
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- 2026-10-09T1333 · [[CIAA]]
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- 2026-10-09T1333 · [[BBC]]
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- 2026-10-09T1333 · [[Bill Clinton]]
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- 2026-10-09T1333 · [[Atomic Energy Commission]]
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- 2026-10-09T1333 · [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]]
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- 2026-10-09T1333 · [[Project Blue Book]]
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- 2026-10-09T1333 · [[Office of Strategic Services]]
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- 2026-10-09T1333 · [[Central Intelligence Agency]]
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- 2026-10-09T1333 · [[Allen Dulles]]
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- 2026-10-09T1331 · [[Kim Philby]]
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- 2026-10-09T1330 · [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]]
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- 2026-10-09T1330 · [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]]
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- 2026-10-09T1329 · [[Rockefeller Foundation]]
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- 2026-10-09T1328 · [[Bob Kerrey]]
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- 2026-10-09T1327 · [[New School for Social Research]]
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- 2026-10-09T1324 · [[Bernard L. Schwartz]]
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- 2026-10-09T1324 · [[Michael Whitney Straight]]
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- 2026-10-09T1324 · [[Dorothy Payne Whitney]]
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- 2026-10-09T1322 · [[Klara G. Roman]]
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- 2026-10-09T1301 · [[Leo Strauss]]
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- 2026-10-09T1259 · [[Project MKUltra]]
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- 2026-10-09T1259 · [[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]]
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- 2026-10-09T1258 · [[National Reconnaissance Office]]
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- 2026-10-09T1258 · [[Eileen Garrett]]
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- 2026-10-09T1256 · [[Rand Corporation]]
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- 2026-10-09T1256 · [[James Monroe]]
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- 2026-10-09T1256 · [[John Gittinger]]
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- 2026-10-09T1253 · [[Robert M. Brier]]
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- 2026-10-09T1253 · [[Martin Ebon]]
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- 2026-10-09T1253 · [[Kurt Riezler]]
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- 2026-10-09T1253 · [[Ernst Kris]]
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- 2026-10-09T1241 · [[Jeffrey Epstein]]
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- 2026-10-08T2150 · [[Claire Zabel]]
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- 2026-10-08T2150 · [[Alexander Berger]]
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- 2026-10-08T2150 · [[Effective Ventures]]
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- 2026-10-08T2150 · [[Centre for Effective Altruism]]
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- 2026-10-08T2150 · [[Center for Applied Rationality]]
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- 2026-10-08T2150 · [[Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative]]
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- 2026-10-08T2150 · [[Open Philanthropy]]
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- 2026-10-08T2113 · [[Saddam Hussein]]
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- 2026-10-08T2112 · [[St. Thomas Jet Center]]
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- 2026-10-08T2112 · [[Bobby Ray Inman]]
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- 2026-10-08T2110 · [[NSA]]
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- 2026-10-08T2110 · [[Fluor Corporation]]
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- 2026-10-08T2110 · [[Defense Intelligence Agency]]
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- 2026-10-08T2110 · [[Central Intelligence Agency]]
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- 2026-10-08T2109 · [[Lesley Groff]]
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- 2026-10-08T2109 · [[Larry Visoski]]
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- 2026-10-08T2109 · [[Jeffrey Epstein]]
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- 2026-10-08T2109 · [[Epstein Files]]
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- 2026-10-08T2109 · [[Black Diamond Capital Management]]
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- 2026-10-08T2108 · [[Stephen Deckoff]]
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@ -43,58 +87,14 @@
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Department of Defense]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Arthur Welmas]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Ted Shackley]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[John Singlaub]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Michael Riconosciuto]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[John Singlaub]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Ariel Sharon]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Anastasio Somoza]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Robert S. McNamara]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[William J. Casey]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[William J. Casey]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Robert Gates]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Michael Aquino]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Henry B. Gonzalez]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Arif Durrani]]
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- 2026-10-08T1935 · [[Alexander M. Haig, Jr.]]
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- 2026-10-08T1933 · [[Daniel O. Graham]]
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- 2026-10-08T1929 · [[NASA]]
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- 2026-10-08T1928 · [[Augusto Pinochet]]
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- 2026-10-08T1813 · [[Norman Antokol]]
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- 2026-10-08T1813 · [[Mayer Nudell]]
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- 2026-10-08T1812 · [[Ora Group]]
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- 2026-10-08T1812 · [[Oliver North]]
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- 2026-10-08T1812 · [[Eden Pastora]]
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- 2026-10-08T1812 · [[Adolfo Calero]]
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- 2026-10-08T1812 · [[Counter Terrorism Consultants, Inc.]]
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- 2026-10-08T1810 · [[Jamaica]]
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- 2026-10-08T1809 · [[Cabazon Indian Reservation]]
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- 2026-10-08T1809 · [[Dr. Harry Fair]]
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- 2026-10-08T1808 · [[Dr. John Philip Nichols]]
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- 2026-10-08T1807 · [[Eugene Propper]]
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- 2026-10-08T1806 · [[Robert Frye]]
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- 2026-10-08T1804 · [[Earl Brian]]
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- 2026-10-08T1804 · [[Ari Ben-Menashe]]
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- 2026-10-08T1800 · [[Ralph E. Caudle]]
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- 2026-10-08T1800 · [[Frederic J. Truslow]]
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- 2026-10-08T1800 · [[Wackenhut Advanced Technologies Corporation]]
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- 2026-10-08T1800 · [[Brunswick Corporation]]
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- 2026-10-08T1800 · [[Lane and Edson]]
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- 2026-10-08T1346 · [[Gerald S. Walker]]
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- 2026-10-08T1342 · [[October Surprise]]
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- 2026-10-08T1342 · [[Bank of Credit and Commerce International]]
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- 2026-10-08T1337 · [[Open Philanthropy]]
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- 2026-10-08T1337 · [[Nick Beckstead]]
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- 2026-10-08T1337 · [[Anthropic]]
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- 2026-10-08T1337 · [[Jacob Coxon]]
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- 2026-10-08T1337 · [[Effective Altruism Foundation]]
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- 2026-10-08T1337 · [[Carla Cremer]]
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- 2026-10-08T1331 · [[Carter Cornick]]
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- 2026-10-08T1331 · [[Robert Parry]]
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- 2026-10-08T1331 · [[Spencer Oliver]]
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- 2026-10-08T1329 · [[Francis J. McNeil]]
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- 2026-10-08T1329 · [[Robert Scherrer]]
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- 2026-10-08T1328 · [[James B. Motley]]
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- 2026-10-08T1323 · [[House October Surprise Task Force]]
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- 2026-10-08T1323 · [[Greg Kehoe]]
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- 2026-10-08T1214 · [[Jacques Bergier]]
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- 2026-10-08T1213 · [[Gerard Messadie]]
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- 2026-10-08T1213 · [[U.S. Navy]]
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@ -23,28 +23,28 @@ relations:
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start: 2011
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fn: 4
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created: 2026-09-23
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updated: 2026-09-23
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updated: 2026-10-08
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---
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Alexander Berger is the chief executive of [[Open Philanthropy]], renamed Coefficient Giving in November 2025, the grantmaker funded chiefly by [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and [[Cari Tuna]] through their foundation [[Good Ventures]]. He joined [[GiveWell]] from [[Stanford University]], cofounded Open Philanthropy when it was still GiveWell Labs, became co-chief executive with [[Holden Karnofsky]] in June 2021 and sole chief executive in July 2023. He has been a director of the couple's 501(c)(4), the [[Open Philanthropy Action Fund]], since 2018, and its returns have carried his Open Philanthropy officer titles since 2021.[^1][^2][^3][^4][^5]
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### Stanford
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Berger graduated from Stanford in 2011 with a B.A. in philosophy and also holds a Stanford M.A. in education policy.[^2] As a freshman he heard the political scientist [[Rob Reich]] as a guest lecturer, took Reich's courses over the next two years, and completed the Honors Program in Ethics in Society with Reich, the faculty director of the [[McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society]], as his thesis advisor. In an honors seminar in his junior year he read a paper noting how safe kidney donation had become; the same year he came across GiveWell, the charity evaluator Karnofsky and [[Elie Hassenfeld]] had founded in 2007, and began volunteering for it. After graduating he worked there as a researcher "conducting evidence reviews and cost-effectiveness analyses for potential top charities." A second alumna of the same honors program, [[Claire Zabel]] of the 2013-14 cohort, went on to lead Open Philanthropy's grantmaking on effective altruism.[^1][^2]
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Berger graduated from Stanford in 2011 with a B.A. in philosophy and also holds a Stanford M.A. in education policy.[^2] As a freshman he heard the political scientist [[Rob Reich]] as a guest lecturer, took Reich's courses over the next two years, and completed the Honors Program in Ethics in Society with Reich, the faculty director of the [[McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society]], as his thesis advisor. In an honors seminar in his junior year he read a paper noting how safe kidney donation had become; the same year he came across GiveWell, the charity evaluator Karnofsky and [[Elie Hassenfeld]] had founded in 2007, and began volunteering for it. After graduating he worked there as a researcher "conducting evidence reviews and cost-effectiveness analyses for potential top charities." A second alumna of the same honors program, [[Claire Zabel]] of the 2013-14 cohort, went on to lead Open Philanthropy's grantmaking on effective altruism.[^1][^2][^6]
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### The Kidney Op-Ed
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On December 5, 2011, about six months after graduating, Berger published "Why Selling Kidneys Should Be Legal" in *[[New York Times|The New York Times]]*, datelined [[San Francisco]]: "On Thursday, I will donate one of my kidneys to someone I've never met." He gave his age as 21. "When I first told some friends and family that I wanted to donate a kidney, they assumed I'd gone off my rocker," he wrote. "They saw it as a crazy act of self-sacrifice, rather than what it is," which he called "one of the many ways a reasonably altruistic person can help others." He argued that the 1984 federal ban on compensating kidney donors left more than 34,000 people joining the waiting list in 2010 against fewer than 17,000 transplants, that "the victims of the current ban are disproportionately African-American and poor," and that a regulated market in which "only the government or a chosen nonprofit would be allowed to purchase the kidneys," at a price "somewhere in the ballpark of $50,000," paid by insurers or [[Medicare]], "could actually save the government money" against the cost of dialysis. He cited a ruling of the previous week by the [[Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals]] allowing compensation for bone marrow donors.[^6]
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On December 5, 2011, about six months after graduating, Berger published "Why Selling Kidneys Should Be Legal" in *[[New York Times|The New York Times]]*, datelined [[San Francisco]]: "On Thursday, I will donate one of my kidneys to someone I've never met." He gave his age as 21. "When I first told some friends and family that I wanted to donate a kidney, they assumed I'd gone off my rocker," he wrote. "They saw it as a crazy act of self-sacrifice, rather than what it is," which he called "one of the many ways a reasonably altruistic person can help others." He argued that the 1984 federal ban on compensating kidney donors left more than 34,000 people joining the waiting list in 2010 against fewer than 17,000 transplants, that "the victims of the current ban are disproportionately African-American and poor," and that a regulated market in which "only the government or a chosen nonprofit would be allowed to purchase the kidneys," at a price "somewhere in the ballpark of $50,000," paid by insurers or [[Medicare]], "could actually save the government money" against the cost of dialysis. He cited a ruling of the previous week by the [[Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals]] allowing compensation for bone marrow donors.[^7]
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### Open Philanthropy
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Berger was, in Open Philanthropy's own biography of him, "a cofounder of Open Philanthropy" who "led our initial process for selecting focus areas and hiring and training program officers within them."[^2] In 2018 he told the *[[Stanford Social Innovation Review]]* writer [[Marc Gunther]], who counted seven entities around Tuna (among them the Open Philanthropy Project LLC, the Action Fund, two donor-advised funds at the [[Silicon Valley Community Foundation]], the Good Ventures Foundation and Good Ventures LLC), that "each has a reason for being" and that "tax considerations are key."[^7]
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Berger was, in Open Philanthropy's own biography of him, "a cofounder of Open Philanthropy" who "led our initial process for selecting focus areas and hiring and training program officers within them."[^2] In 2018 he told the *[[Stanford Social Innovation Review]]* writer [[Marc Gunther]], who counted seven entities around Tuna (among them the Open Philanthropy Project LLC, the Action Fund, two donor-advised funds at the [[Silicon Valley Community Foundation]], the Good Ventures Foundation and Good Ventures LLC), that "each has a reason for being" and that "tax considerations are key."[^8]
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On June 16, 2021, Karnofsky announced that Berger "has been promoted to co-CEO," writing that he had "for some time" been "the primary leader for most of our work on causes focused on maximizing verifiable impact within our lifetimes." The same post renamed that portfolio "Global Health and Wellbeing" in place of "near-termism" and stated: "We now have a dual-CEO structure, with both of us reporting directly to the board." Karnofsky kept biosecurity and pandemic preparedness and "potential risks from advanced AI"; Berger took global health and development "(including to GiveWell-recommended charities)," scientific research, farm animal welfare and criminal justice reform.[^3]
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On July 27, 2023, Karnofsky wrote "on behalf of Open Philanthropy's board" that Berger "is now sole CEO," that Berger had run the organization during Karnofsky's leave of absence, and that the two had worked together since 2011; Berger "co-founded Open Philanthropy (back when it was GiveWell Labs), initially leading our policy philanthropy work." Karnofsky's own title changed "from co-CEO to Director of AI Strategy," and [[Emily Oehlsen]] was promoted to managing director over Global Health and Wellbeing. Tuna, styled in the post as president, said: "Dustin and I have worked closely with Alexander for many years, and he's helped us think through many of the toughest questions we've faced as philanthropists." Berger said the mission "resonates just as much with me today as it did when Holden, Cari, Dustin and I were starting to think about it together."[^4]
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In 2026 Coefficient Giving listed Berger as chief executive, Tuna as chair and Oehlsen as president.[^8] Berger said that year that the organization had spent about a tenth of the [[Gates Foundation]]'s budget in 2025 and more than twice that so far in 2026, and, of its standing with [[Anthropic]], whose president [[Daniela Amodei]] is married to Karnofsky: "We're definitely not the Anthropic Foundation."[^9]
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In 2026 Coefficient Giving listed Berger as chief executive, Tuna as chair and Oehlsen as president.[^9] Berger said that year that the organization had spent about a tenth of the [[Gates Foundation]]'s budget in 2025 and more than twice that so far in 2026, and, of its standing with [[Anthropic]], whose president [[Daniela Amodei]] is married to Karnofsky: "We're definitely not the Anthropic Foundation."[^10]
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### The Action Fund
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@ -57,7 +57,8 @@ The Open Philanthropy Action Fund, EIN 81-2644663, files in care of [[Apercen Pa
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[^3]: Karnofsky, Holden. "Open Philanthropy's New Co-CEO." Open Philanthropy blog, June 16, 2021, archived May 31, 2022. http://web.archive.org/web/20220531031049/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/open-philanthropys-new-co-ceo
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[^4]: Karnofsky, Holden. "Alexander Berger is Now Sole CEO of Open Philanthropy." Open Philanthropy, July 27, 2023, republished by Coefficient Giving, archived March 17, 2026. http://web.archive.org/web/20260317060608/https://coefficientgiving.org/research/alexander-berger-is-now-sole-ceo-of-open-philanthropy/
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[^5]: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, "Coefficient Giving Action Fund" (formerly Open Philanthropy Action Fund), EIN 81-2644663, Form 990 Part VII officer listings for fiscal years 2016 to 2024, retrieved September 23, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812644663
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[^6]: Berger, Alexander. "Why Selling Kidneys Should Be Legal." *The New York Times,* December 5, 2011, archived October 24, 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20251024084715/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/opinion/why-selling-kidneys-should-be-legal.html
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[^7]: Gunther, Marc. "Giving in the Light of Reason." *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* Summer 2018. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason
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[^8]: Coefficient Giving, "Team," accessed September 2026. https://coefficientgiving.org/about-us/team/
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[^9]: Smith, Ben. "Coefficient Giving's CEO on Silicon Valley's $40 billion philanthropy boom." *Semafor,* September 3, 2026. https://www.semafor.com/article/09/03/2026/coefficient-givings-ceo-on-silicon-valley-40-billion-philanthropy-boom
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[^6]: Open Philanthropy, "Claire Zabel," team biography, Wayback Machine capture of January 19, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220119041801/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel
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[^7]: Berger, Alexander. "Why Selling Kidneys Should Be Legal." *The New York Times,* December 5, 2011, archived October 24, 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20251024084715/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/opinion/why-selling-kidneys-should-be-legal.html
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[^8]: Gunther, Marc. "Giving in the Light of Reason." *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* Summer 2018. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason
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[^9]: Coefficient Giving, "Team," accessed September 2026. https://coefficientgiving.org/about-us/team/
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[^10]: Smith, Ben. "Coefficient Giving's CEO on Silicon Valley's $40 billion philanthropy boom." *Semafor,* September 3, 2026. https://www.semafor.com/article/09/03/2026/coefficient-givings-ceo-on-silicon-valley-40-billion-philanthropy-boom
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---
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created: 2026-05-15
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updated: 2026-05-17
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updated: 2026-10-09
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title: Allen Dulles
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aliases:
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- Allen Welsh Dulles
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@ -22,6 +22,12 @@ summary: Allen Dulles served as CIA Director from 1953 to 1961, overseeing Opera
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born: 1893-04-07
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died: 1969-01-29
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location: Washington, D.C.
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relations:
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- type: director_of
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with: "[[American Committee on United Europe]]"
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start: 1949
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role: "vice-chairman"
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fn: 2
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---
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Allen Welsh Dulles (April 7, 1893 - January 29, 1969) served as [[Director of Central Intelligence]] from February 26, 1953, to November 29, 1961 - the longest tenure of any DCI, the first civilian DCI, and the only brother of a sitting Secretary of State to hold the position. Dulles built the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] into the instrument of Cold War covert action that executed [[Operation AJAX]] in [[Iran]] (1953), [[Operation PBSUCCESS]] in [[Guatemala]] (1954), and the [[Bay of Pigs]] invasion of [[Cuba]] (1961). The Bay of Pigs disaster cost him his position - President [[John F. Kennedy]] forced his resignation, along with [[Richard Bissell]] and [[Charles P. Cabell|C.P. Cabell]] - and his subsequent appointment by President [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] to the [[Warren Commission]] investigating Kennedy's assassination placed him in the remarkable position of overseeing the investigation of the event that had ended both his patron's life and his own career.[^1]
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@ -43,23 +49,27 @@ The incorporation of Gehlen's network into American intelligence - authorized at
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The unverifiable provenance of Gehlen's Soviet networks meant that the intelligence they produced - which formed a significant portion of early CIA's knowledge about the Soviet Union - was of unknown reliability. Some of it may have been Soviet-directed disinformation fed through networks the KGB controlled. The relationship between the Gehlen inheritance and [[James Jesus Angleton|Angleton]]'s subsequent mole hunt paranoia - his conviction that CIA's Soviet intelligence was systematically compromised - has been examined by historians without definitive resolution.[^1]
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### American Committee on United Europe
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Dulles was vice-chairman of the [[American Committee on United Europe]] (ACUE), which [[Richard Aldrich]] describes as formed to support [[Winston Churchill]] and the [[European Movement]] and officially incorporated in February 1949. [[William J. Donovan]] was its chairman, and [[Thomas W. Braden]], a former OSS officer, was its executive director.[^2] Aldrich reports Braden's assertion in the 1980s that ACUE funds originated with the CIA, and writes that the 1962 Oxford thesis of [[F. X. Rebattet]], son of the European Movement's secretary-general [[George Rebattet]], "confirms that most ACUE funds originated with the CIA."[^3] Dulles also corresponded with [[Max Ascoli]], whose papers index a photocopy of a typed letter from Dulles dated May 27 among the 1968 letters on the closing of [[The Reporter]].[^4] A February 7, 1958 letter to Dulles from the chairman of the President's Committee on Scientists and Engineers thanks him for addressing the Conference on America's Human Resources at [[Yale University]] and encloses a participant list that includes "Mr. Max Ascoli, Editor and Publisher, The Reporter."[^5] [[Hugh Wilford]] writes that The Reporter's deputy [[Philip Horton]] used contacts with Donovan, Dulles and James Jesus Angleton to enhance its foreign coverage.[^6]
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### DCI: Iran, Guatemala, and the Covert Action Doctrine
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Dulles was named Deputy Director (Plans) in 1951 and became DCI on February 26, 1953, days after President Eisenhower's inauguration. His brother John Foster simultaneously became Secretary of State. The confluence gave the Dulles brothers a degree of combined policy and intelligence authority unprecedented in American government.
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Operation AJAX (August 1953): Working with British intelligence, Dulles's CIA executed the coup that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister [[Mohammad Mosaddegh]] and returned [[Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi|Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi]] to full power. The operation was designed and led in the field by [[Kermit Roosevelt|Kermit Roosevelt Jr.]], grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. Operation AJAX established the operational template that Dulles and Bissell believed could be replicated elsewhere.
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Operation PBSUCCESS (June 1954): The CIA's overthrow of Guatemalan President [[Jacobo Arbenz]] was presented to Eisenhower as a vindication of covert action - a small paramilitary force, CIA air assets, and psychological warfare had collapsed a government with minimal U.S. exposure. Dulles and his team drew exactly the wrong lesson: that the model was transferable. The direct organizational line from PBSUCCESS to the Bay of Pigs ran through the same personnel - [[Howard Hunt]], [[Tracy Barnes]], [[David Atlee Phillips]] - applying the same framework to a target that had fundamentally different characteristics.[^2]
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Operation PBSUCCESS (June 1954): The CIA's overthrow of Guatemalan President [[Jacobo Arbenz]] was presented to Eisenhower as a vindication of covert action - a small paramilitary force, CIA air assets, and psychological warfare had collapsed a government with minimal U.S. exposure. Dulles and his team drew exactly the wrong lesson: that the model was transferable. The direct organizational line from PBSUCCESS to the Bay of Pigs ran through the same personnel - [[Howard Hunt]], [[Tracy Barnes]], [[David Atlee Phillips]] - applying the same framework to a target that had fundamentally different characteristics.[^7]
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|
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[[MKULTRA]]: Dulles authorized the CIA's human experimentation program in April 1953 under Technical Services Staff chief [[Sidney Gottlieb]]. The program used LSD and other substances on unconsenting subjects, including mental patients, prisoners, and unwitting CIA employees. Dulles's authorization memorandum noted concerns about Soviet brainwashing capabilities and framed the program as defensive research. The program's scope - eventually comprising 150 subprojects at 80 institutions - far exceeded what Dulles's authorization documents described.
|
||||
|
||||
### MKULTRA: The Sandoz Panic and the Olson Death
|
||||
|
||||
Dulles approved MKULTRA on April 13, 1953, ten days after Richard Helms proposed a program for the "covert use of biological and chemical materials," with an initial $300,000 exempt from normal financial controls and payable blindly on the signatures of Gottlieb and TSS chief [[Willis Gibbons]]. Acting in a climate of Cold War urgency, that same month Dulles approved a $240,000 payment after an intelligence report claimed [[Sandoz]] wanted to sell 10 kilograms of [[LSD]] on the open market; CIA officers flew to Switzerland with a black bag of cash only to learn Sandoz had produced barely 40 grams in fifteen years, the entire panic stemming from a military attaché who confused milligrams with kilograms. When [[Frank Olson]] died in November 1953 after Gottlieb dosed him with LSD at [[Deep Creek Lodge]], Dulles ordered Inspector General [[Lyman Kirkpatrick]] to investigate; the resulting reprimands were softened through six drafts and placed in no personnel file.[^3]
|
||||
Dulles approved MKULTRA on April 13, 1953, ten days after Richard Helms proposed a program for the "covert use of biological and chemical materials," with an initial $300,000 exempt from normal financial controls and payable blindly on the signatures of Gottlieb and TSS chief [[Willis Gibbons]]. Acting in a climate of Cold War urgency, that same month Dulles approved a $240,000 payment after an intelligence report claimed [[Sandoz]] wanted to sell 10 kilograms of [[LSD]] on the open market; CIA officers flew to Switzerland with a black bag of cash only to learn Sandoz had produced barely 40 grams in fifteen years, the entire panic stemming from a military attaché who confused milligrams with kilograms. When [[Frank Olson]] died in November 1953 after Gottlieb dosed him with LSD at [[Deep Creek Lodge]], Dulles ordered Inspector General [[Lyman Kirkpatrick]] to investigate; the resulting reprimands were softened through six drafts and placed in no personnel file.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Rockefeller's Special Group and the Human Ecology Front
|
||||
|
||||
Under Eisenhower, Dulles reported all CIA covert operations, including MKULTRA, the coups, and assassination planning, to the NSC "[[Special Group]]" chaired by [[Nelson Rockefeller]], the structure formalized by NSC 5412/2 in December 1955 that gave the president plausible deniability; in a 1955 "Family Jewels" briefing Dulles described the full range of covert programs to Rockefeller's board. When MKULTRA needed a research hospital, Dulles sought Rockefeller's approval for a scheme to channel CIA money through private foundations to win matching federal grants for a wing at [[Georgetown University Hospital]]. The program's primary funding front, the [[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]], was organized at Dulles's initiative through [[Harold Wolff]], the Cornell neurologist who had treated Dulles's brain-damaged son; Dulles attended one of its first board meetings. His relationship with [[D. Ewen Cameron]] predated the funding: in November 1945, still with the OSS, Dulles had sent Cameron to Nuremberg to assess whether [[Rudolf Hess]] was fit to stand trial.[^4]
|
||||
Under Eisenhower, Dulles reported all CIA covert operations, including MKULTRA, the coups, and assassination planning, to the NSC "[[Special Group]]" chaired by [[Nelson Rockefeller]], the structure formalized by NSC 5412/2 in December 1955 that gave the president plausible deniability; in a 1955 "Family Jewels" briefing Dulles described the full range of covert programs to Rockefeller's board. When MKULTRA needed a research hospital, Dulles sought Rockefeller's approval for a scheme to channel CIA money through private foundations to win matching federal grants for a wing at [[Georgetown University Hospital]]. The program's primary funding front, the [[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]], was organized at Dulles's initiative through [[Harold Wolff]], the Cornell neurologist who had treated Dulles's brain-damaged son; Dulles attended one of its first board meetings. His relationship with [[D. Ewen Cameron]] predated the funding: in November 1945, still with the OSS, Dulles had sent Cameron to Nuremberg to assess whether [[Rudolf Hess]] was fit to stand trial.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Bay of Pigs and Forced Resignation
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -71,13 +81,13 @@ Dulles submitted his resignation in September 1961; it was formally accepted Nov
|
|||
|
||||
### The Warren Commission
|
||||
|
||||
On November 29, 1963 - exactly two years after Dulles's forced resignation - President [[Lyndon B. Johnson|Lyndon Johnson]] appointed the Warren Commission to investigate Kennedy's assassination. Among the seven commissioners Johnson named was Allen Dulles despite Kennedy’s firing of Dulles.
|
||||
On November 29, 1963 - exactly two years after Dulles's forced resignation - President Lyndon Johnson appointed the Warren Commission to investigate Kennedy's assassination. Among the seven commissioners Johnson named was Allen Dulles despite Kennedy’s firing of Dulles.
|
||||
|
||||
The investigation was examining whether CIA-connected parties (specifically the anti-Castro exile networks and organized crime figures that Dulles had directly overseen) had any role in the assassination. He was now in a position to shape what evidence the Commission sought, what witnesses it called, and what conclusions it reached regarding the CIA programs he had run.
|
||||
|
||||
Dulles was reportedly among the most active commissioners in shaping the investigation's scope. He briefed commissioners on CIA history and procedures. He did not disclose the [[ZR/RIFLE]] assassination plotting program - which [[Richard Helms]] as DDP was simultaneously concealing from the Commission at the agency level. The CIA's failure to disclose the assassination plots to the Warren Commission, documented by the Church Committee in 1975, was the institutional decision; Dulles's personal role in that decision - as both a commissioner and the former DCI who had authorized the programs - was the structural conflict of interest the Commission's composition created.
|
||||
|
||||
The [[HSCA|House Select Committee on Assassinations]] (1979) found that the Warren Commission had not been fully informed of CIA activities relevant to the investigation. The precise mechanism by which this occurred - institutional CIA decision, active concealment by Dulles, or some combination - was not definitively established.[^2]
|
||||
The [[HSCA|House Select Committee on Assassinations]] (1979) found that the Warren Commission had not been fully informed of CIA activities relevant to the investigation. The precise mechanism by which this occurred - institutional CIA decision, active concealment by Dulles, or some combination - was not definitively established.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Death and Legacy
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -86,6 +96,11 @@ Dulles spent his post-CIA years writing, lecturing, and defending the covert act
|
|||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Kinzer, Stephen. *The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War.* Times Books, 2013 (covers both brothers, the Sullivan & Cromwell connections, and the covert action programs). Grose, Peter. *Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles.* Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
|
||||
[^2]: Kornbluh, Peter, ed. *Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba.* New Press, 1998. Church Committee. "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders." Senate Report No. 94-465, 1975. Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.* Random House, 1991. Chapter 4.
|
||||
[^3]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 4; "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification," Joint Senate Hearing, August 3, 1977.
|
||||
[^4]: Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, *Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon*. HarperCollins, 1995, Ch. 18; John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 9.
|
||||
[^2]: Richard J. Aldrich, "OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on United Europe, 1948-60," Diplomacy & Statecraft 8, no. 1 (1997), p. 192, DOI 10.1080/09592299708406035, https://text.www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf.
|
||||
[^3]: Aldrich (1997), pp. 211-212 (Braden's 1980s assertion at p. 211; Rabattet passage at p. 212), same URL.
|
||||
[^4]: Senato della Repubblica, Archivio storico, Max Ascoli fonds, sottofascicolo 15, index of names, https://patrimonio.archivio.senato.it/inventario/scheda/max-ascoli/IT-AFS-005-002785/letters-expressing-regrets-upon-closing-of-the-reporter-from-personal-friends-of-max-ascoli-1968.
|
||||
[^5]: Howard L. Bevis to Allen W. Dulles, February 7, 1958, CIA-RDP80B01676R003800020106-4, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80b01676r003800020106-4.
|
||||
[^6]: Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer (Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 230-231.
|
||||
[^7]: Kornbluh, Peter, ed. *Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba.* New Press, 1998. Church Committee. "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders." Senate Report No. 94-465, 1975. Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.* Random House, 1991. Chapter 4.
|
||||
[^8]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 4; "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification," Joint Senate Hearing, August 3, 1977.
|
||||
[^9]: Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, *Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon*. HarperCollins, 1995, Ch. 18; John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 9.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -16,74 +16,91 @@ tags:
|
|||
- ClintonFoundation
|
||||
- FlightLogs
|
||||
- LolitaExpress
|
||||
summary: "Bill Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States and Governor of Arkansas during the Mena CIA-linked drug-smuggling period, whose administration terminated Project Stargate in 1995, and who took multiple flights on Jeffrey Epstein's aircraft for Clinton Foundation work in 2002-2003 while denying any knowledge of Epstein's crimes."
|
||||
summary: "Bill Clinton, Governor of Arkansas during the Mena smuggling period and 42nd President, whose administration ended Project Stargate in 1995 and who flew on Jeffrey Epstein's aircraft for Clinton Foundation work in 2002 and 2003."
|
||||
born: 1946-08-19
|
||||
location: "Hope, Arkansas"
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Bill Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as Governor of [[Arkansas]] and as the 42nd President of the [[United States]] from 1993 to 2001. After leaving office he established the [[Clinton Foundation]] and traveled internationally on its behalf, including on aircraft owned by [[Jeffrey Epstein]]. Flight logs entered into civil litigation list Clinton on flights aboard Epstein's Boeing 727, the aircraft journalists later nicknamed the "[[Lolita Express]]." Clinton has denied knowledge of Epstein's sexual offenses and has denied visiting Epstein's private island, [[Little St. James]]. No court, prosecutor, or official investigation has produced evidence that Clinton committed a crime in connection with Epstein.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Governor of Arkansas and the Mena Drug Operations
|
||||
|
||||
As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton presided over the period when [[Barry Seal]] operated his [[Central Intelligence Agency]]-connected [[Cocaine]] smuggling operation at Mena airport. Clinton's close friend [[Danny Ray Lasater]] was convicted as part of a major drug ring in [[Little Rock, Arkansas|Little Rock]], raising questions about what the governor knew about the activities at [[Mena, Arkansas|Mena]].[^16]
|
||||
As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton presided over the period when [[Barry Seal]] operated his [[Central Intelligence Agency]]-connected [[Cocaine]] smuggling operation at Mena airport. Clinton's close friend [[Danny Ray Lasater]] was convicted as part of a major drug ring in [[Little Rock, Arkansas|Little Rock]], raising questions about what the governor knew about the activities at [[Mena, Arkansas|Mena]].[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson testified that troopers were aware "that there was large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport" and that "it was a CIA operation." Despite the scale of Seal's operations, which a letter from the Arkansas attorney general to U.S. Attorney General [[Ed Meese]] valued at 3 billion to 5 billion dollars in smuggled drugs, the state government took no action to shut down the operation. Clinton's administration in Arkansas presided over the period when the Mena airport served as a hub for both drug trafficking and Contra supply operations.[^16]
|
||||
Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson testified that troopers were aware "that there was large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport" and that "it was a CIA operation." Despite the scale of Seal's operations, which a letter from the Arkansas attorney general to U.S. Attorney General [[Ed Meese]] valued at 3 billion to 5 billion dollars in smuggled drugs, the state government took no action to shut down the operation. Clinton's administration in Arkansas presided over the period when the Mena airport served as a hub for both drug trafficking and Contra supply operations.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Project Stargate
|
||||
|
||||
As president, Clinton's administration oversaw the 1995 declassification and termination of the [[Stargate Project]], the government's remote-viewing program, after a CIA-commissioned review concluded the program had no demonstrated intelligence value. The *Remote Viewers* account does not detail any direct involvement by Clinton in the program, but notes that [[William Perry]], who served as Clinton's Secretary of Defense, had earlier been involved in funding decisions for the program during the Carter administration.[^15]
|
||||
As president, Clinton's administration oversaw the 1995 declassification and termination of the [[Stargate Project]], the government's remote-viewing program, after a CIA-commissioned review concluded the program had no demonstrated intelligence value. The *Remote Viewers* account does not detail any direct involvement by Clinton in the program, but notes that [[William Perry]], who served as Clinton's Secretary of Defense, had earlier been involved in funding decisions for the program during the Carter administration.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Epstein Contacts and Flight Logs
|
||||
|
||||
Epstein donated 1,000 dollars to Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and contributed to later Democratic fundraising, and Clinton Foundation records show a 25,000 dollar contribution from an Epstein-linked foundation in 2006, according to a timeline compiled by [[ABC News]]. Epstein and [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] were recorded as visitors during Clinton's presidency and were photographed at [[White House]] events. Clinton's spokesman has said the former president met Epstein privately on two occasions after leaving office, once at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse and once at the [[Clinton Global Initiative]] offices in Harlem.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Flight logs released in civil litigation and later in document tranches list Clinton on flights aboard Epstein's Boeing 727, registration N908JE. Reporting on the logs in 2016 noted Clinton appearing on at least 26 flight "legs," a figure that counts individual segments of multi-stop trips rather than distinct journeys, and noted that he traveled on at least some legs without his [[United States Secret Service|Secret Service]] detail. Maxwell, recorded in the logs by the initials "GM," appears on the trips, as do entries read as the initials of Epstein assistant [[Sarah Kellen]]. The logs record who boarded which aircraft and when; they do not, on their face, establish what occurred at any destination.[^2][^3]
|
||||
Flight logs released in civil litigation and later in document tranches list Clinton on flights aboard Epstein's Boeing 727, registration N908JE. Reporting on the logs in 2016 noted Clinton appearing on at least 26 flight "legs," a figure that counts individual segments of multi-stop trips rather than distinct journeys, and noted that he traveled on at least some legs without his [[United States Secret Service|Secret Service]] detail. Maxwell, recorded in the logs by the initials "GM," appears on the trips, as do entries read as the initials of Epstein assistant [[Sarah Kellen]]. The logs record who boarded which aircraft and when; they do not, on their face, establish what occurred at any destination.[^2][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
[[FactCheck.org]], reviewing the manifests, counted six trips comprising the 26 flights between February 2002 and November 2003, the discrepancy between trip and leg counts arising from whether each take-off and landing is tallied separately. The documented segments included a February 2002 Miami-to-Westchester hop, a round trip from New York to London in March 2002, a May 2002 sequence through Japan, [[Hong Kong]], Singapore, and Brunei, a July 2002 stop tied to a wedding in Morocco, the September 2002 Africa tour, and a November 2003 routing through Brussels, Oslo, Hong Kong, and Beijing. President [[Donald Trump]] in 2025 claimed Clinton flew on the plane "27 or 28 times," a characterization FactCheck.org described as conflating the leg total with the number of trips; the same review found no flight log placing Clinton on an aircraft bound for the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]].[^11]
|
||||
[[FactCheck.org]], reviewing the manifests, counted six trips comprising the 26 flights between February 2002 and November 2003, the discrepancy between trip and leg counts arising from whether each take-off and landing is tallied separately. The documented segments included a February 2002 Miami-to-Westchester hop, a round trip from New York to London in March 2002, a May 2002 sequence through Japan, [[Hong Kong]], Singapore, and Brunei, a July 2002 stop tied to a wedding in Morocco, the September 2002 Africa tour, and a November 2003 routing through Brussels, Oslo, Hong Kong, and Beijing. President [[Donald Trump]] in 2025 claimed Clinton flew on the plane "27 or 28 times," a characterization FactCheck.org described as conflating the leg total with the number of trips; the same review found no flight log placing Clinton on an aircraft bound for the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]].[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Maxwell, deposed in the Giuffre litigation, stated of the island that "just so we are clear, the allegations that Clinton had a meal on Jeffrey's island is 100 percent false." On one of the 2003 legs, from Oslo to the Russian city of Novosibirsk, the manifest listed Clinton, Epstein, the aide [[Doug Band]], and individuals identified by the initials "GM" and "SK." No court, prosecutor, or official investigation has produced a finding that Clinton witnessed or participated in any crime aboard the aircraft.[^12][^2]
|
||||
Maxwell, deposed in the Giuffre litigation, stated of the island that "just so we are clear, the allegations that Clinton had a meal on Jeffrey's island is 100 percent false." On one of the 2003 legs, from Oslo to the Russian city of Novosibirsk, the manifest listed Clinton, Epstein, the aide [[Doug Band]], and individuals identified by the initials "GM" and "SK." No court, prosecutor, or official investigation has produced a finding that Clinton witnessed or participated in any crime aboard the aircraft.[^2][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### 2002 Africa Trip
|
||||
|
||||
Clinton departed on September 21, 2002, on a roughly nine-day trip through several African nations to advance the Clinton Foundation's early work on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, including efforts to expand access to antiretroviral medication for mothers with HIV. The itinerary ran through Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa and included a day spent with former South African President [[Nelson Mandela]]. FactCheck.org and reporting on the manifests counted this single trip as accounting for roughly 11 of the 26 logged flight legs.[^4][^11]
|
||||
Clinton departed on September 21, 2002, on a roughly nine-day trip through several African nations to advance the Clinton Foundation's early work on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, including efforts to expand access to antiretroviral medication for mothers with HIV. The itinerary ran through Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa and included a day spent with former South African President [[Nelson Mandela]]. FactCheck.org and reporting on the manifests counted this single trip as accounting for roughly 11 of the 26 logged flight legs.[^6][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
The manifest for the outbound leg from New York to the Azores listed Clinton, the actors [[Kevin Spacey]] and [[Chris Tucker]], Epstein, Maxwell, and roughly a dozen others including Doug Band, the investor [[Ron Burkle]], [[Casey Wasserman]], former Transportation Secretary [[Rodney Slater]], and Clinton aides. Chris Tucker appears in the records on the outbound and subsequent legs of the African routing. Spacey, named on the flight log, later said he had flown with Epstein and a group described as young women and characterized his presence as incidental to the Foundation trip; he was never accused of wrongdoing in connection with it.[^4][^5]
|
||||
The manifest for the outbound leg from New York to the Azores listed Clinton, the actors [[Kevin Spacey]] and [[Chris Tucker]], Epstein, Maxwell, and roughly a dozen others including Doug Band, the investor [[Ron Burkle]], [[Casey Wasserman]], former Transportation Secretary [[Rodney Slater]], and Clinton aides. Chris Tucker appears in the records on the outbound and subsequent legs of the African routing. Spacey, named on the flight log, later said he had flown with Epstein and a group described as young women and characterized his presence as incidental to the Foundation trip; he was never accused of wrongdoing in connection with it.[^8][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
The trip was arranged in part through Doug Band, who served as a central organizer of Clinton's post-presidential travel and of the Foundation's network of donors and contacts during this period. Clinton said through a spokesman in 2002 that he regarded Epstein as "both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets." After Epstein's 2019 arrest, Clinton's spokesman said the trips "included stops in connection with the work of The Clinton Foundation."[^5][^1]
|
||||
The trip was arranged in part through Doug Band, who served as a central organizer of Clinton's post-presidential travel and of the Foundation's network of donors and contacts during this period. Clinton said through a spokesman in 2002 that he regarded Epstein as "both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets." After Epstein's 2019 arrest, Clinton's spokesman said the trips "included stops in connection with the work of The Clinton Foundation."[^1][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Denials and Statements
|
||||
|
||||
After Epstein's July 2019 federal arrest, Clinton's spokesman Angel Urena issued a statement saying Clinton "knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York." The statement said Clinton had taken trips on Epstein's plane in 2002 and 2003 in connection with Foundation work, that staff and his Secret Service detail traveled on every leg, that Clinton had not spoken to Epstein "in well over a decade," and that Clinton "has never been to Little St. James Island." The reference in that statement to Secret Service traveling on every leg sits alongside reporting on the logs indicating Clinton flew at least some segments without his detail, a discrepancy his office has not separately reconciled in public.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
In his 2024 memoir *Citizen*, Clinton wrote that he wished he had never met Epstein, that traveling on Epstein's plane "was not worth the years of questioning afterward," and that he and Epstein discussed only "politics and economics." Clinton again denied visiting Little St. James and wrote that he had stopped contact with Epstein by the time of Epstein's 2005-2006 legal troubles in Florida. Clinton wrote that he had thought Epstein "odd" but had no knowledge of his crimes.[^6]
|
||||
In his 2024 memoir *Citizen*, Clinton wrote that he wished he had never met Epstein, that traveling on Epstein's plane "was not worth the years of questioning afterward," and that he and Epstein discussed only "politics and economics." Clinton again denied visiting Little St. James and wrote that he had stopped contact with Epstein by the time of Epstein's 2005-2006 legal troubles in Florida. Clinton wrote that he had thought Epstein "odd" but had no knowledge of his crimes.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
In a deposition compelled by the [[House Oversight Committee]], conducted behind closed doors in late February 2026 near the Clintons' home in Chappaqua, New York, Clinton again denied any knowledge of Epstein's offenses, stating "I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong" and "I saw nothing that ever gave me pause." It was the first time a former president had been compelled to testify before a congressional panel. In his opening remarks Clinton objected to the committee's separate deposition of his wife [[Hillary Clinton]], saying she "had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein" and "has no memory of even meeting him." Hillary Clinton was deposed and said she had no information relevant to the inquiry. Video of both depositions was released in early March 2026. Neither has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.[^13][^14]
|
||||
In a deposition compelled by the [[House Oversight Committee]], conducted behind closed doors in late February 2026 near the Clintons' home in Chappaqua, New York, Clinton again denied any knowledge of Epstein's offenses, stating "I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong" and "I saw nothing that ever gave me pause." It was the first time a former president had been compelled to testify before a congressional panel. In his opening remarks Clinton objected to the committee's separate deposition of his wife [[Hillary Clinton]], saying she "had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein" and "has no memory of even meeting him." Hillary Clinton was deposed and said she had no information relevant to the inquiry. Video of both depositions was released in early March 2026. Neither has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.[^11][^12]
|
||||
|
||||
### References in Unsealed and Released Documents
|
||||
|
||||
Documents unsealed in January 2024 in the defamation case [[Giuffre v. Maxwell]] included deposition testimony from [[Johanna Sjoberg]], given in 2015, in which she testified that Epstein had once said "Clinton likes them young," which she clarified referred to "girls." Sjoberg attributed the remark to Epstein as something he said and not as a statement of her own knowledge about Clinton, and said she understood Epstein to have had "dealings" with him. The same filings referenced a 2011 account in which [[Virginia Giuffre]] said she had seen Clinton on Epstein's island; Giuffre later said she did not witness a helicopter flight she had earlier described, and she made no allegation of wrongdoing by Clinton. Reporting on the January 2024 release noted that the documents did not implicate any previously unnamed person and contained no accusation of a crime by Clinton. A judge in the Maxwell litigation had previously denied a request to depose Clinton.[^7][^8]
|
||||
Documents unsealed in January 2024 in the defamation case [[Giuffre v. Maxwell]] included deposition testimony from [[Johanna Sjoberg]], given in 2015, in which she testified that Epstein had once said "Clinton likes them young," which she clarified referred to "girls." Sjoberg attributed the remark to Epstein as something he said and not as a statement of her own knowledge about Clinton, and said she understood Epstein to have had "dealings" with him. The same filings referenced a 2011 account in which [[Virginia Giuffre]] said she had seen Clinton on Epstein's island; Giuffre later said she did not witness a helicopter flight she had earlier described, and she made no allegation of wrongdoing by Clinton. Reporting on the January 2024 release noted that the documents did not implicate any previously unnamed person and contained no accusation of a crime by Clinton. A judge in the Maxwell litigation had previously denied a request to depose Clinton.[^13][^14]
|
||||
|
||||
Materials released in 2025 by the [[House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform|House Oversight Committee]] and the [[United States Department of Justice|Department of Justice]] included flight records, estate documents, and a "birthday book" assembled by Maxwell for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. The committee made the contents public in September 2025, and the panel released more than 33,000 pages from the Justice Department on September 2, 2025. The book contained an entry attributed to Clinton, the wording of which, as released by the committee, included the line "It's reassuring isn't it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends," signed "Bill Clinton." Outlets reporting on the documents noted that the materials did not implicate Clinton in any crime.[^9][^10]
|
||||
Materials released in 2025 by the [[House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform|House Oversight Committee]] and the [[United States Department of Justice|Department of Justice]] included flight records, estate documents, and a "birthday book" assembled by Maxwell for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. The committee made the contents public in September 2025, and the panel released more than 33,000 pages from the Justice Department on September 2, 2025. The book contained an entry attributed to Clinton, the wording of which, as released by the committee, included the line "It's reassuring isn't it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends," signed "Bill Clinton." Outlets reporting on the documents noted that the materials did not implicate Clinton in any crime.[^15][^16]
|
||||
|
||||
On December 19, 2025, in accordance with the [[Epstein Files Transparency Act]], which set that date as the deadline for Attorney General [[Pam Bondi]] to publish the unclassified federal records, the Justice Department released several hundred thousand documents, many heavily redacted. Across the 2025 and 2026 releases, totaling more than 60,000 pages by late 2025, no document established a criminal allegation against Clinton, and reporting consistently noted that his name appeared in connection with the flight logs, social contacts, and the birthday book rather than any accusation by a survivor.[^10][^14]
|
||||
On December 19, 2025, in accordance with the [[Epstein Files Transparency Act]], which set that date as the deadline for Attorney General [[Pam Bondi]] to publish the unclassified federal records, the Justice Department released several hundred thousand documents, many heavily redacted. Across the 2025 and 2026 releases, totaling more than 60,000 pages by late 2025, no document established a criminal allegation against Clinton, and reporting consistently noted that his name appeared in connection with the flight logs, social contacts, and the birthday book rather than any accusation by a survivor.[^12][^16]
|
||||
|
||||
### Chinasat-8 waiver, 1998
|
||||
|
||||
On February 18, 1998, Clinton made a "national interest" determination that allowed the launch of the Chinasat-8 satellite, built by [[Space Systems/Loral]], on a Chinese rocket. The Cox Committee counted twelve such determinations between 1989 and the start of 1998, three by President [[George H. W. Bush]] and nine by Clinton, including determinations dated June 23, July 9, November 19 and November 23, 1996.[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
A decision memorandum for the President dated February 12, 1998, from [[Samuel Berger]], [[Larry Stein]] and [[Daniel Tarullo]], stated: "We believe that the advantages of this project outweigh the risk, and that we can effectively rebut criticism of the waiver."[^18] A transmittal memorandum dated February 18, 1998 from [[Phil Caplan]] relayed a note from White House counsel [[Charles Ruff]] and stated: "The Department [of Justice] realizes the potential adverse impact on a potential criminal prosecution but has chosen not to oppose the waiver."[^18] In a December 1998 interview, [[Robert Litt]], a Justice Department official, recalled that "Certainly the Department was put on notice that there was a waiver application," and said: "I didn't believe that we were being asked for our views on whether or not the waiver should be granted as a matter of policy."[^18] The Commerce Department issued the Chinasat-8 license on March 23, 1998.[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
The New York Times reported on April 13, 1998 that Clinton had approved the waiver despite an ongoing Justice Department criminal investigation of Loral's alleged earlier unauthorized transfer of missile guidance technology to China.[^19] A June 1, 1998 account by [[Jeff Gerth]] and [[John M. Broder]] reported that Justice Department prosecutors had warned that the deal "could jeopardize possible prosecution of the company for an earlier unauthorized technology transfer to Beijing," that the February decision "was treated as an urgent matter not because of its importance to the national security, but because the company was facing heavy fines for delay," and that Clinton approved the waiver six days after the February 12 memorandum. The account quoted Ruff's note of February 13 that "the Department had every opportunity to weigh in against the waiver at the highest levels and elected not to do so," and noted that Justice Department officials said Ruff, in his discussion with Litt, asked only about the impact of the waiver on possible prosecution. It reported that [[Bernard L. Schwartz]], the chairman of Loral, "donated $100,000 to the Democratic Party four weeks before the waiver application was approved in early July 1996 by Clinton."[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
A Mother Jones profile of May 1, 1997 reported that Schwartz celebrated his 71st birthday in December 1996 with an "intimate White House dinner with the president."[^21] In October 2000 Representative [[Henry Waxman]] placed in the Congressional Record excerpts of August 1998 Justice Department memoranda, including a statement by [[Lee Radek]], chief of the public integrity section, that "there is not a scintilla of evidence or information that the President was corruptly influenced by Bernard Schwartz," in answer to Representative [[Curt Weldon]]'s May 1998 statement that the matter "involves potential treason."[^22] Senator [[Arlen Specter]] stated on May 2, 2000 that a memorandum by [[Charles LaBella]] of the Justice Department's campaign finance task force had recommended an independent prosecutor in the Loral matter, which the Los Angeles Times of May 23, 2000 reported to be a mistaken impression.[^22][^23]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Timeline: Bill Clinton's interactions with Jeffrey Epstein," *ABC News,* 2025. https://abcnews.com/US/timeline-bill-clintons-interactions-jeffrey-epstein/story?id=130567229
|
||||
[^2]: "Flight logs show Bill Clinton flew on sex offender's jet much more than previously known," *Fox News,* 2016. https://www.foxnews.com/us/flight-logs-show-bill-clinton-flew-on-sex-offenders-jet-much-more-than-previously-known
|
||||
[^3]: "Report: Bill Clinton Flew on Disgraced Donor's Jet 26 Times," *Roll Call,* 2016. https://rollcall.com/2016/05/13/report-bill-clinton-flew-on-disgraced-donors-jet-26-times/
|
||||
[^4]: "How well did Bill Clinton know Jeffrey Epstein?," *ABC News,* 2025. https://abcnews.com/Politics/bill-clinton-jeffrey-epstein/story?id=127629827
|
||||
[^5]: "Kevin Spacey admits to flying with Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton and a group of young girls," *AOL,* 2025. https://www.aol.com/kevin-spacey-admits-flying-jeffrey-195850925.html
|
||||
[^6]: "Bill Clinton denies visiting Epstein island in new memoir and wishes he 'had never met him'," *Fox News,* 2024. https://www.foxnews.com/us/bill-clinton-denies-visiting-epstein-island-new-memoir-wishes-he-had-never-met-him
|
||||
[^7]: "The Biggest Names from Jeffrey Epstein's Unsealed Documents," *Time,* 2024. https://time.com/6552063/jeffrey-epsteins-unsealed-court-documents/
|
||||
[^8]: Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 15-cv-07433 (S.D.N.Y.), unsealed exhibits, January 2024. https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Giuffre%20v.%20Maxwell,%20No.%20115-cv-07433%20(S.D.N.Y.%202015)/
|
||||
[^9]: "Bill Clinton letter in Epstein 'birthday book' among new files released by House Oversight Committee," *Fox News,* 2025. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bill-clinton-letter-epstein-birthday-book-among-new-files-released-house-oversight-committee.amp
|
||||
[^10]: "Epstein files totaling more than 60,000 pages have already been released this year. Here's what we've seen so far," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epstein-files-released-2025-so-far/
|
||||
[^11]: "The Epstein Connections Fueling Conspiracy Theories," *FactCheck.org,* 2019, counting six trips and 26 flights, February 2002 to November 2003. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/08/the-epstein-connections-fueling-conspiracy-theories/
|
||||
[^12]: "The Biggest Names from Jeffrey Epstein's Unsealed Documents," *Time,* 2024, on the Maxwell deposition statement about the island. https://time.com/6552063/jeffrey-epsteins-unsealed-court-documents/
|
||||
[^13]: "Bill Clinton defends himself at House deposition on Epstein: 'I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong,'" *CBS News,* 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-clinton-epstein-house-oversight-committee-deposition/
|
||||
[^14]: "Videos of Clinton depositions in Epstein investigation released," *The Washington Post,* 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/02/bill-hillary-clinton-deposition-videos/
|
||||
[^15]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* Dell, 1997, on the 1995 declassification and termination of the Stargate remote-viewing program and William Perry's earlier funding role.
|
||||
[^16]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998, chapter 7, on the Mena airport operations, Barry Seal, Danny Ray Lasater, and the Arkansas trooper testimony.
|
||||
[^3]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998, chapter 7, on the Mena airport operations, Barry Seal, Danny Ray Lasater, and the Arkansas trooper testimony.
|
||||
[^4]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* Dell, 1997, on the 1995 declassification and termination of the Stargate remote-viewing program and William Perry's earlier funding role.
|
||||
[^5]: "Report: Bill Clinton Flew on Disgraced Donor's Jet 26 Times," *Roll Call,* 2016. https://rollcall.com/2016/05/13/report-bill-clinton-flew-on-disgraced-donors-jet-26-times/
|
||||
[^6]: "The Epstein Connections Fueling Conspiracy Theories," *FactCheck.org,* 2019, counting six trips and 26 flights, February 2002 to November 2003. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/08/the-epstein-connections-fueling-conspiracy-theories/
|
||||
[^7]: "The Biggest Names from Jeffrey Epstein's Unsealed Documents," *Time,* 2024, on the Maxwell deposition statement about the island. https://time.com/6552063/jeffrey-epsteins-unsealed-court-documents/
|
||||
[^8]: "How well did Bill Clinton know Jeffrey Epstein?," *ABC News,* 2025. https://abcnews.com/Politics/bill-clinton-jeffrey-epstein/story?id=127629827
|
||||
[^9]: "Kevin Spacey admits to flying with Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton and a group of young girls," *AOL,* 2025. https://www.aol.com/kevin-spacey-admits-flying-jeffrey-195850925.html
|
||||
[^10]: "Bill Clinton denies visiting Epstein island in new memoir and wishes he 'had never met him'," *Fox News,* 2024. https://www.foxnews.com/us/bill-clinton-denies-visiting-epstein-island-new-memoir-wishes-he-had-never-met-him
|
||||
[^11]: "Bill Clinton defends himself at House deposition on Epstein: 'I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong,'" *CBS News,* 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-clinton-epstein-house-oversight-committee-deposition/
|
||||
[^12]: "Videos of Clinton depositions in Epstein investigation released," *The Washington Post,* 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/02/bill-hillary-clinton-deposition-videos/
|
||||
[^13]: "The Biggest Names from Jeffrey Epstein's Unsealed Documents," *Time,* 2024. https://time.com/6552063/jeffrey-epsteins-unsealed-court-documents/
|
||||
[^14]: Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 15-cv-07433 (S.D.N.Y.), unsealed exhibits, January 2024. https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Giuffre%20v.%20Maxwell,%20No.%20115-cv-07433%20(S.D.N.Y.%202015)/
|
||||
[^15]: "Bill Clinton letter in Epstein 'birthday book' among new files released by House Oversight Committee," *Fox News,* 2025. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bill-clinton-letter-epstein-birthday-book-among-new-files-released-house-oversight-committee.amp
|
||||
[^16]: "Epstein files totaling more than 60,000 pages have already been released this year. Here's what we've seen so far," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epstein-files-released-2025-so-far/
|
||||
[^17]: U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China, Report (H. Rept. 105-851), vol. III, ch. 9, p. 50 (national-interest determinations from 1989 to 1998; the February 18, 1998 determination for Chinasat-8), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^18]: Cox Report, vol. III, ch. 9, pp. 51 to 52 and p. 185, note 169 (decision memorandum of February 12, 1998; Caplan transmittal of February 18, 1998; Litt's account, interview of December 8, 1998, printed in the notes as "1988"; Commerce license of March 23, 1998), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^19]: The New York Times, April 13, 1998, as reported in U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China, Report (H. Rept. 105-851), vol. III, ch. 9, p. 51, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^20]: Jeff Gerth and John M. Broder, "The White House Dismissed Warnings on China Satellite Deal," The New York Times, June 1, 1998, reprinted in the Congressional Record, House, June 18, 1998, pp. H4758 to H4760, https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/china/1998/h980618-prc7.htm
|
||||
[^21]: Dave Eisenstadt, "Orbiter of Power," Mother Jones, May 1, 1997, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1997/05/orbiter-power/
|
||||
[^22]: Henry A. Waxman, extension of remarks, Congressional Record, October 28, 2000, p. E1991 (quoting Radek's memorandum of August 5, 1998, LaBella's of August 12, 1998, and the Los Angeles Times of May 23, 2000), https://www.govinfo.gov/link/crec/146/E/1991 The statement is Waxman's characterization, made in a dispute with Weldon.
|
||||
[^23]: Shirley A. Kan, Congressional Research Service Report 98-485, updated March 27, 2003, pp. 7 to 9, https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20030327_98-485_ee468327e241c908e7fe19dc62e4d7f02279db65.html
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ aliases:
|
|||
- President Eisenhower
|
||||
- Dwight David Eisenhower
|
||||
created: 2026-05-14
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
category: "Political Figure"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- KeyFigure
|
||||
|
|
@ -79,7 +79,7 @@ The journalist [[Seymour Hersh]] wrote that Eisenhower had been concerned about
|
|||
|
||||
The published Eisenhower Library and National Archives record, assembled by the [[National Security Archive]] and the Wilson Center, dates the administration's discovery to the last months of 1960. In late July 1960 embassy officials in Tel Aviv learned from an American Machine and Foundry employee that French personnel were building what he described as a 60 megawatt power reactor near Beersheba; Professor Henry Gomberg of the [[University of Michigan]], a consultant to the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, reported on December 1, 1960 that Israel was building a large secret project; and Special National Intelligence Estimate 100-8-60, issued on December 8, 1960, determined that the complex included a reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. The January 1961 CIA post-mortem stated that "information was available to some elements of the intelligence community as early as April 1958" and that information from "special intelligence sources in mid 1959" had been discounted. The Wilson Center editors wrote that it "is still a puzzle whether, and to what extent, U-2 overhead photographs were especially telling or whether they were being distributed within the intelligence community."[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
On December 8, 1960, with Eisenhower presiding, the National Security Council heard [[Allen Dulles]] report that Israel was building with French assistance a complex including a reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium, and passed around photographs taken by the United States Army attaché; Secretary of State [[Christian A. Herter]] said the Arab reaction would be "severe," and Under Secretary of the Treasury Fred Scribner suggested that "Jewish charitable organizations in the U.S." with tax-deductible contributions might have been a funding source. On December 19, 1960, after press reports partly based on leaks by Atomic Energy Commission chairman [[John McCone]], Eisenhower met Herter, Dulles, McCone, [[Thomas S. Gates]] (Secretary of Defense), the science adviser [[George Kistiakowsky]] and Gray. Gates said "our information is that the plant is not for peaceful uses"; McCone said his people believed there was a chemical separation plant; Herter said the plant had been built "through diversions from private and public [U.S.] aid to Israel"; and Eisenhower said "we had evidence" the cost was between $100 and $200 million and that "we do not know where they have obtained the funds." Eisenhower agreed that the American public statement should call on Israel, as an IAEA member, to allow inspection, said a visit to the site by the United States would be unnecessary if the agency inspected it, and the meeting ended with the decision that the State Department rather than the White House would handle the matter. Portions of the December 8 and December 19 records remained classified, and the editors noted that the classified portions of the December 8 record were the subject of a mandatory declassification review request filed in 2014.[^6]
|
||||
On December 8, 1960, with Eisenhower presiding, the National Security Council heard Allen Dulles report that Israel was building with French assistance a complex including a reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium, and passed around photographs taken by the United States Army attaché; Secretary of State [[Christian A. Herter]] said the Arab reaction would be "severe," and Under Secretary of the Treasury Fred Scribner suggested that "Jewish charitable organizations in the U.S." with tax-deductible contributions might have been a funding source. On December 19, 1960, after press reports partly based on leaks by Atomic Energy Commission chairman [[John McCone]], Eisenhower met Herter, Dulles, McCone, [[Thomas S. Gates]] (Secretary of Defense), the science adviser [[George Kistiakowsky]] and Gray. Gates said "our information is that the plant is not for peaceful uses"; McCone said his people believed there was a chemical separation plant; Herter said the plant had been built "through diversions from private and public [U.S.] aid to Israel"; and Eisenhower said "we had evidence" the cost was between $100 and $200 million and that "we do not know where they have obtained the funds." Eisenhower agreed that the American public statement should call on Israel, as an IAEA member, to allow inspection, said a visit to the site by the United States would be unnecessary if the agency inspected it, and the meeting ended with the decision that the State Department rather than the White House would handle the matter. Portions of the December 8 and December 19 records remained classified, and the editors noted that the classified portions of the December 8 record were the subject of a mandatory declassification review request filed in 2014.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
On January 19, 1961 the State Department told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that Israel and France had given "unequivocal" official statements as to the non-military character of the Israeli program, that Israel had given "formal assurance that visitors from the United States or another friendly country will be received when the present intense public interest in the question has subsided," and that the Department would "take any feasible measures to damp down speculation."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -87,11 +87,15 @@ On January 19, 1961 the State Department told the Joint Committee on Atomic Ener
|
|||
|
||||
A document headed "Briefing Document: Operation Majestic 12 Prepared for President-Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower (Eyes Only), 18 November 1952," and a memorandum dated July 14, 1954 from the presidential assistant [[Robert Cutler]] to General [[Nathan Twining]] referring to an "NSC/MJ-12 Special Studies Project" and a briefing on July 16, 1954, are the two documents on which the Majestic-12 claims connect to Eisenhower; see [[Majestic-12]] and [[Cutler-Twining memorandum]].
|
||||
|
||||
The National Archives' Military Reference Branch recorded on July 22, 1987, in a reference report signed by Jo Anne Williamson, that the Cutler memorandum in Record Group 341 lacks the top secret register number the series requires, is the only item in its folder about "NSC/MJ-12," carries a marking, "Top Secret Restricted Information," that the National Security Council and the Eisenhower Library said was not used in the Eisenhower administration, and bears no eagle watermark of the kind found on all Cutler documents in the Library's collection; that a search of National Security Council meeting minutes found no meeting on July 16, 1954 and no mention of MJ-12 or Majestic; and that a folder titled "Special Meeting July 16, 1954" held a notice that NSC members would be called to a civil defense exercise. The Eisenhower Library wrote on July 16, 1987 that the President's appointment books contain no entry for a special meeting on July 16, 1954, that Cutler was visiting overseas military installations on July 14, 1954 at Eisenhower's direction (a report to the President dated July 20, 1954 refers to visits between July 3 and 15), and that the NSC's declassification office had no record of declassification of the memorandum.[^8] The researchers who published the documents, [[William L. Moore]] and [[Jaime Shandera]], and later commentators including [[Stanton T. Friedman]] took positions on authenticity that are recorded on the [[Majestic-12]] page.
|
||||
The National Archives' Military Reference Branch recorded on July 22, 1987, in a reference report signed by Jo Anne Williamson, that the Cutler memorandum in Record Group 341 lacks the top secret register number the series requires, is the only item in its folder about "NSC/MJ-12," carries a marking, "Top Secret Restricted Information," that the National Security Council and the Eisenhower Library said was not used in the Eisenhower administration, and bears no eagle watermark of the kind found on all Cutler documents in the Library's collection; that a search of National Security Council meeting minutes found no meeting on July 16, 1954 and no mention of MJ-12 or Majestic; and that a folder titled "Special Meeting July 16, 1954" held a notice that NSC members would be called to a civil defense exercise. The Eisenhower Library wrote on July 16, 1987 that the President's appointment books contain no entry for a special meeting on July 16, 1954, that Cutler was visiting overseas military installations on July 14, 1954 at Eisenhower's direction (a report to the President dated July 20, 1954 refers to visits between July 3 and 15), and that the NSC's declassification office had no record of declassification of the memorandum.[^8] The researchers who published the documents, [[William L. Moore]] and [[Jaime Shandera]], and later commentators including [[Stanton T. Friedman]] took positions on authenticity that are recorded on the Majestic-12 page.
|
||||
|
||||
### Wilhelm Reich and weather control
|
||||
|
||||
[[Wilhelm Reich]]'s journal CORE (July 1954) states that "the legislative procedures of the Eisenhower administration which tended to secure safety in weather control were greatly appreciated," reproduces a New York Times report of July 11, 1953 of Eisenhower's remarks on drought, and records Army planes over Orgonon on July 8, 1953.[^9] Reich's Contact with Space states that Mr. Douglas of Tucson, described as a member of "President Eisenhower's advisory board," wrote in late 1954 requesting a personal discussion.[^10] On March 21, 1957 [[William Moise]] wrote to Senator [[Margaret Chase Smith]] that he faced the decision whether to use orgone energy "to storm and flood portions of the U.S.A." and that the responsibility for such a decision rests with "the few genuinely responsible government persons such as yourself and the President"; the Senator's administrative assistant gave the letter to the FBI on March 25, 1957.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Farewell address, January 17, 1961
|
||||
|
||||
In his farewell radio and television address on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower said: "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government." He continued: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." On research he said that "a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity" and warned "that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."[^9]
|
||||
In his farewell radio and television address on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower said: "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government." He continued: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." On research he said that "a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity" and warned "that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -103,4 +107,7 @@ In his farewell radio and television address on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower sai
|
|||
[^6]: "The U.S. Discovery of Israel's Secret Nuclear Project," sections "The Eisenhower Administration and the Discovery of Dimona," Documents 1 to 14, including the post-mortem on SNIE 100-8-60, the National Security Council meeting of December 8, 1960 and the meeting of December 19, 1960 (Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Christian Herter Papers; White House Office, Office of the Staff Secretary, International Series, box 8, Israel (3)); also National Security Archive, "Israel and the Bomb: Dimona Revealed." https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/israel/documents/reveal/
|
||||
[^7]: Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations William B. Macomber, Jr., to Executive Director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, January 19, 1961, with enclosed summary of January 17, 1961, *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963*, Volume XVII, Near East 1961-1962, Document 3. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v17/d3
|
||||
[^8]: National Archives and Records Administration, Military Reference Branch, "Reference Report on MJ-12," July 22, 1987 (Jo Anne Williamson, Chief), quoting the Eisenhower Library letter of July 16, 1987 to NNMR; text as transcribed at https://mirror.cyberbits.eu/textfiles.com/ufo/UFOBBS/2000/2437.ufo
|
||||
[^9]: Eisenhower, Dwight D. "Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People," January 17, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/farewell-radio-and-television-address-the-american-people
|
||||
[^9]: Wilhelm Reich, CORE vol. 6 nos. 1 to 4 (July 1954), https://archive.org/details/contact-from-space-by-wilhelm-reich.
|
||||
[^10]: Wilhelm Reich, Contact with Space: Oranur Second Report, 1951-1956 (Core Pilot Press, 1957), p. 132, https://archive.org/details/wilhelm-reich-contact-with-space. Sole source.
|
||||
[^11]: Moise to Smith, March 21, 1957, and Nease to Tolson, March 25, 1957, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 6, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^12]: Eisenhower, Dwight D. "Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People," January 17, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/farewell-radio-and-television-address-the-american-people
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -8,6 +8,15 @@ summary: "Eileen Garrett was an Irish medium who was well-known in New York City
|
|||
born: 1893-03-17
|
||||
died: 1970-09-15
|
||||
location: "Beauparc, County Meath, Ireland"
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: reported_to
|
||||
with: "[[Martin Ebon]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "administrative secretary to the founder of the Parapsychology Foundation"
|
||||
start: 1953
|
||||
end: 1965
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -15,6 +24,11 @@ Eileen Garrett was an Irish medium who was well-known in New York City parapsych
|
|||
|
||||
Garrett's psychic abilities were tested in a [[Faraday cage]] using Zener cards. According to Puharich, her ESP scores were significantly higher inside the cage, which suggested that electronic shielding had a positive impact on psychic functioning.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
[[Martin Ebon]] was administrative secretary of the [[Parapsychology Foundation]], which Garrett founded, from 1953 to 1965 according to the Skeptical Inquirer's biography of him; another biography dates the post from 1954.[^2] Ebon's masthead roles at the magazine Tomorrow are documented: volume 4 (1956) lists Garrett as editor-publisher, Ebon as managing editor, Lenore Davison as assistant to the publisher and Lester Buckland as circulation and business manager, Garrett Publications, 500 Fifth Avenue; volume 9 (1961) lists Phoebe Moss as associate editor and Gorham Munson as consulting editor, with Ebon identified as managing editor of Tomorrow and administrative secretary of the Parapsychology Foundation.[^3] Ebon is listed among participants (U.S.A.) at the Foundation's First International Conference of Parapsychological Studies, Utrecht, July 1953, with Miss I. Jephson, Dr. Henry Margenau and Dr. Louis Mars.[^3] The New School Archives hold an "Eileen J. Garrett Scholarship, 1975" file regarding a scholarship to take a New School course in parapsychology.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
|
||||
[^2]: Skeptical Inquirer, "Martin Ebon," author biography (administrative secretary of the Parapsychology Foundation, 1953 to 1965). https://skepticalinquirer.org/authors/martin-ebon/
|
||||
[^3]: Tomorrow, vol. 4 (1956), p. 122, https://books.google.com/books?id=OHUPAQAAIAAJ ; vol. 9 (1961), https://books.google.com/books?id=8HAPAQAAIAAJ
|
||||
[^4]: New School Archives and Special Collections, Adult Division Office of the Dean records (NS-02-01-01), Series 5, Box 7, Folder 43, "Eileen J. Garrett Scholarship, 1975." https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -185,8 +185,14 @@ relations:
|
|||
with: "[[Mark Epstein]]"
|
||||
role: "brother"
|
||||
fn: 94
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 2014
|
||||
end: 2019
|
||||
role: "tuition and transfers paid from Epstein accounts, as recorded in Deutsche Bank statements and a Deutsche Bank exhibit"
|
||||
fn: 153
|
||||
created: 2026-06-18
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-08
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Jeffrey Epstein (January 20, 1953 to August 10, 2019) was an American financier and convicted sex offender who, with his companion [[Ghislaine Maxwell]], ran a sex-trafficking operation that recruited and abused dozens of underage girls across his residences in [[Manhattan]], [[Palm Beach, Florida|Palm Beach]], [[New Mexico]], the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]], and [[Paris]]. He built a social and financial network that encompassed technology billionaires ([[Peter Thiel]], [[Bill Gates]], [[Elon Musk]], [[Reid Hoffman]], [[Mark Zuckerberg]]), heads of state and politicians ([[Bill Clinton]], [[Ehud Barak]], [[Prince Andrew]], [[Donald Trump]]), diplomats and intelligence officials ([[William Burns]], [[Vitaly Churkin]]), financiers and executives ([[Leslie Wexner]], [[Leon Black]], [[Tom Pritzker]], [[Howard Lutnick]]), and prominent scientists ([[Martin Nowak]], [[Marvin Minsky]], [[George Church]], [[Stephen Hawking]]) brokered through the literary agent [[John Brockman]]. The source of his fortune was never satisfactorily explained, his long association with [[Robert Maxwell|Robert Maxwell's]] daughter raised documented intelligence questions, and his death in federal custody in 2019 was ruled a suicide over disputes that have not been resolved.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
|
@ -361,6 +367,12 @@ Deutsche Bank informally designated Epstein an "Honorary PEP," or politically ex
|
|||
|
||||
The post-death litigation produced large settlements. In 2022 Epstein's estate agreed to pay the U.S. Virgin Islands more than 105 million dollars, plus the repayment of 80,576,236 dollars in tax benefits and half the proceeds of Little St. James. In 2023 JPMorgan paid 290 million dollars to victims and 75 million dollars to the Virgin Islands, and Deutsche Bank paid 75 million dollars to victims. Staley, who managed the Epstein banking relationship at JPMorgan before becoming chief executive of Barclays, was banned from senior UK financial roles and fined by the [[Financial Conduct Authority]] in a decision dated May 30, 2023 and published that October, which the Upper Tribunal upheld in June 2025 while reducing the penalty to 1,107,306.92 pounds; the ban took effect with the Authority's Final Notice of July 23, 2025. The [[Epstein Victims' Compensation Program]]'s administrator, [[Jordana Feldman]], announced in 2021 nearly 125 million dollars in payments to 150 eligible claimants; the co-executors' lawyers later put it at 121 million dollars to 136 claimants, and the estate separately settled with 58 women for about 48 million dollars.[^11][^20][^104][^106][^107][^108]
|
||||
|
||||
### Payments to The New School
|
||||
|
||||
Deutsche Bank statements for Epstein's account record payments to [[New School for Social Research|The New School]]. The August 2015 statement lists an outgoing transfer on August 6 of $16,083.00 to a Bank of America account with the beneficiary line "E NEW SCHOOL OPERATING ACCOUNT."[^150] The October 2016 statement lists a preauthorized debit dated October 27 of $17,030.00 described as "TUITION THE NEW SCHOOL."[^151] The May 2017 statement lists a preauthorized debit dated May 10 of $10,856.00 described as "TUITION THE NEW SCHOOL"; the same page lists an outgoing transfer on May 11 of $3,589.00 through [[Sterling National Bank]] with the beneficiary line "FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY," and, on May 19, an American Express payment of $89,103.78.[^152]
|
||||
|
||||
A Deutsche Bank presentation to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, dated September 12, 2019, lists nine payments to The New School from Epstein accounts in an exhibit titled "Tuition Payments on Behalf of Children / Women": $29,025 (February 4, 2014), $15,704 (January 5, 2015), $4,730 (June 12, 2015), $16,083 (August 6, 2015), $16,656 (December 9, 2015), $4,420 (June 14, 2016), $16,850 (July 8, 2016), $3,756 (January 13, 2017) and $8,790 (January 10, 2019). The beneficiary is redacted; the exhibit's background column describes the redacted beneficiary as one who "appears to be a Russian model" and as "listed as a beneficiary of the Butterfly Trust." The exhibit's only [[New York Film Academy]] entry is $3,442 on March 10, 2017.[^153]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Virgin Islands Government
|
||||
|
||||
According to JPMorgan's 2023 filings in the territory's suit against the bank, Epstein's local affairs were managed by [[Cecile de Jongh]], the office manager of Southern Trust and the wife of Governor [[John de Jongh]] (in office 2007 to 2015), who helped Epstein shape legislation affecting sex-offender monitoring and the Economic Development Commission benefits while Epstein-linked entities paid family expenses. On the day the commission's certificate for Southern Trust was dated, January 24, 2014, Cecile de Jongh asked Epstein to match 15,000 dollars for her husband's final State of the Territory reception and asked Richard Kahn to make out a check to the "Governor's Special Events Fund." The commission's general counsel from 2007 to 2014 was [[Stacey Plaskett]], later the territory's delegate to Congress, who acknowledged receiving about 30,000 dollars in campaign contributions from Epstein and his employees. Epstein's office also handled requests from the Mapp-Potter inaugural committee (10,000 dollars from Southern Trust, December 2014), a Mapp super PAC (75,000 dollars, September 2016), and the Bryan/Roach inaugural committee (25,000 dollars requested, December 2018; payment not shown).[^11][^109][^110]
|
||||
|
|
@ -564,3 +576,7 @@ The 2025 and 2026 releases produced resignations and removals without prosecutio
|
|||
[^147]: "Summers Resigns From OpenAI Board Amid Backlash Over Epstein Emails." *The Harvard Crimson,* November 19, 2025. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/19/summers-resigns-open-ai/ ; "Larry Summers banned for life from American Economic Association." Associated Press via *Fortune,* December 3, 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/12/03/larry-summers-banned-for-life-from-american-economic-association
|
||||
[^148]: Chapman, Michelle. "Thomas Pritzker steps down from Hyatt board, saying he deeply regrets association with Epstein." Associated Press via *PBS NewsHour,* February 17, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/thomas-pritzker-steps-down-from-hyatt-board-saying-he-deeply-regrets-association-with-epstein
|
||||
[^149]: *CBS News,* February 2026, on Ruemmler's resignation as Goldman Sachs general counsel. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kathryn-ruemmler-resigning-from-goldman-sachs-epstein-files/
|
||||
[^150]: DOJ Epstein Library, file EFTA01285659, Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas statement for Jeffrey Epstein, August 1 to 31, 2015, page 1 of 5: "08-06 Outgoing Money Trnsf TO BANK OF AMERICA A/C [redacted] TH E NEW SCHOOL OPERATING ACCOUNT (16,083.00)."
|
||||
[^151]: DOJ Epstein Library, file EFTA01286417 (Bates EFTA01286419), Deutsche Bank statement for October 1 to 31, 2016, page 3 of 5: "10-27 Preauthorized Debit ... TUITION THE NEW SCHOOL (17,030.00)."
|
||||
[^152]: DOJ Epstein Library, file EFTA01299344 (Bates EFTA01299345), Deutsche Bank statement for May 1 to 31, 2017, page 2 of 5: "05-10 Preauthorized Debit ... TUITION THE NEW SCHOOL (10,856.00)"; "05-11 Outgoing Money Trnsf TO STERLING NATIONAL BANK A/C [redacted] FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (3,589.00)"; "05-19 Preauthorized Debit ... ACH PMT AMEX EPAYMENT (89,103.78)."
|
||||
[^153]: DOJ Epstein Library, file EFTA01681865, page marked EFTA01681912 (printed page 49), Deutsche Bank presentation to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, September 12, 2019, Exhibit R, "Tuition Payments on Behalf of Children / Women."
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -11,7 +11,13 @@ born: 1909
|
|||
died: 2003
|
||||
location: Washington, D.C.
|
||||
created: 2026-06-03
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-03
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]]"
|
||||
start: 1957
|
||||
role: "field representative, per the 1957 annual report"
|
||||
fn: 3
|
||||
---
|
||||
John Gittinger was a heavy-set, goateed native of [[Oklahoma]] who in his later years came to resemble actor Walter Slezak, looking more like someone's kindly grandfather than a calculating theoretician. He had an almost insatiable curiosity about personality and spent most of his waking hours tinkering with and trying to perfect his [[Personality Assessment System]] (PAS). So obsessed did he become that he always had the feeling, even after other researchers had verified large chunks of it, that the whole thing was "a kind of paranoid delusion." Top Agency officials were so impressed that they gave the PAS a place in most agent-connected activities. During the [[Cuban missile crisis|Cuban Missile Crisis]], it was Gittinger who was summoned to the [[White House]] to advise on how [[Nikita Khrushchev|Khrushchev]] would react to American pressure.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -25,6 +31,16 @@ Gittinger built an office within the Agency that refined both [[Henry Murray]]'s
|
|||
|
||||
In 1962 Gittinger and his coworkers moved to [[Psychological Assessment Associates]], a CIA proprietary company in Washington. He served as president and personally opened a branch office in Tokyo, later moved to [[Hong Kong]]. The Washington staff grew to about 15 professionals. Gittinger patiently taught his system to colleagues but was never able to show anyone how to use it as skillfully as he did. His system was full of interrelations and variables he instinctively understood but had not articulated. Even after Agency officials spent a fortune trying to computerize the PAS, the machine "couldn't tie down all the variables" that Gittinger carried in his head.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Human Ecology Records
|
||||
|
||||
The 1957 annual report of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology lists John W. Gittinger as field representative, under president [[Harold Wolff]] and executive secretary [[James Monroe]].[^3] The report states that in October 1957 the Society made funds available to the [[Educational Testing Service]] "for the investigation of the interrelationships between two broad theories of personality: The John Gittinger Theory and the Isabel Briggs Myers Theory," and that the Service was administering the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to the same group of people, with the objective "to unify the Gittinger-Myers theories into a larger coherent picture." The project is listed under "Personality Studies" with Dr. [[David R. Saunders]].[^3] Marks writes that the Society gave about $140,000 to Saunders, "who knew about the Agency's involvement."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
A CIA memorandum of June 9, 1961 on MKULTRA Subproject 134, a $22,000 body-typing study, states: "This work fits into our indirect assessment requirement and will contribute to the Wechsler-Bellevue work in which Dr." [redacted] "is engaging."[^5] A memorandum of August 24, 1961 on Subproject 137, a $2,000 graphology lexicon, states that the Technical Services Division "continues to approach the problem of handwriting identification and analysis in a number of ways" in support of its "general requirement to further the Agency's capability for the indirect assessment of personality."[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Marks writes that "At Gittinger's urging, other Human Ecology grantees gave the Wechsler battery to their experimental subjects and sent him the scores," and, of the Society's graphology work, that it "wound up funding handwriting research and a publication in West Germany" and sponsored a comparison of handwriting analyses with Wechsler scores of actors, psychotherapy patients, criminal psychopaths and fashion models, after which "Gittinger went on to hire a resident graphologist."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
At the August 3, 1977 hearing Gittinger testified: "The Agency in effect provided the money. They did not direct the projects," that "there are a lot of innocent people who received the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology money which I know for a fact they were never asked to do anything for the CIA," and, asked over what period this took place: "As far as I was concerned, it was the period of time ending in 1961. I believe the Human Ecology fund finally phased out in 1965, but I was not involved in this phasing out." He estimated the budget at "about $150,000 a year, but don't hold me to that."[^7] A February 1963 CIA memorandum on Subproject 137 refers to "The Fund."[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Operational Applications
|
||||
|
||||
The TSS assessment staff used the PAS to recommend recruitment strategies and exploitation methods for agents. They contributed to psychological profiles of world leaders, continuing the [[Office of Strategic Services|OSS]] tradition of analyzing figures like Hitler. The system helped identify "soft spots" for approaching targets. "I've heard John say there's always something that someone wants," a former colleague said. "And with the PAS you can find out what it is. It's not necessarily sex or booze. Sometimes it's status or recognition or security." Gittinger himself journeyed to the West Coast to test homosexuals, lesbians, and prostitutes under [[George White]]'s auspices in the San Francisco safehouse. In 1966, Gittinger personally took part in selecting members of an anti-terrorist police unit in Uruguay.[^2]
|
||||
|
|
@ -39,3 +55,8 @@ In 1973 Gittinger and associate John Winne published a description of the PAS in
|
|||
|
||||
[^1]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, Chapter 1.
|
||||
[^2]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, Chapter 10.
|
||||
[^3]: Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, 1957 Annual Report (officers and staff; Review of Projects, "Educational Testing Service, Two Theories of Personality"). Wayback Machine capture of https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21090820/1957-annual-report-society-human-ecology.pdf
|
||||
[^4]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate* (Times Books, 1979), chapter 10, pp. 168 (Saunders grant), 170 (Wechsler scores), 171 n. (graphology).
|
||||
[^5]: MKULTRA Subproject 134, CIA release DOC_0000017393, memorandum of June 9, 1961. https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017393
|
||||
[^6]: MKULTRA Subproject 137, CIA release DOC_0000017396, memorandum for the record of August 24, 1961 and accounting memorandum of February 1963. https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017396
|
||||
[^7]: *Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification*, Joint Hearing, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, 95th Congress, 1st Session, August 3, 1977, testimony of John Gittinger.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
239
10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Martin Ebon.md
Normal file
239
10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Martin Ebon.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,239 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Authors & Journalists"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Parapsychology
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- SovietAffairs
|
||||
- ColdWar
|
||||
- InformationAgency
|
||||
- VoiceOfAmerica
|
||||
- ParapsychologyFoundation
|
||||
- PsychicWarfare
|
||||
- SurvivalResearch
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Martin Ebon
|
||||
- Hans Martin Schwarz
|
||||
- Hans Martin Schwartz
|
||||
- Ebon, Martin
|
||||
summary: "Martin Ebon, a wartime and Voice of America information officer, became administrative secretary of the Parapsychology Foundation and wrote Psychic Warfare (1983)."
|
||||
born: 1917-05-27
|
||||
died: 2006-02-11
|
||||
location: "Hamburg, Germany"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Overseas News Agency]]"
|
||||
role: "Managing editor, Foreign Language Division"
|
||||
start: 1943
|
||||
end: 1943
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Office of War Information]]"
|
||||
role: "Staff member; chief, Foreign News Section, Overseas News and Features Bureau"
|
||||
start: 1943
|
||||
end: 1945
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Voice of America]]"
|
||||
role: "Radio information specialist (GS-11); chief, Pakistan unit (GS-13); director of Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi and Urdu language units"
|
||||
start: 1950
|
||||
end: 1953
|
||||
fn: 9
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Hill and Knowlton]]"
|
||||
role: "Account executive"
|
||||
start: 1952
|
||||
end: 1953
|
||||
fn: 15
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Parapsychology Foundation]]"
|
||||
role: "Administrative secretary"
|
||||
start: 1953
|
||||
end: 1965
|
||||
fn: 17
|
||||
- type: reported_to
|
||||
with: "[[Eileen Garrett]]"
|
||||
role: "Administrative secretary to the founder"
|
||||
start: 1953
|
||||
end: 1965
|
||||
fn: 16
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Tomorrow (magazine)]]"
|
||||
role: "Managing editor"
|
||||
start: 1955
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "Lecturer, Division of Social Sciences; lecture series Parapsychology: From Magic to Science"
|
||||
start: 1966
|
||||
end: 1968
|
||||
fn: 24
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Survival Research Foundation]]"
|
||||
role: "Chairman"
|
||||
start: 1971
|
||||
fn: 28
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal]]"
|
||||
role: "Panelist, Psychic Arms Race session, Stanford University conference"
|
||||
start: 1984
|
||||
end: 1984
|
||||
fn: 41
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Martin Ebon was the pen name of Hans Martin Schwarz, a journalist and author born in [[Hamburg]] on May 27, 1917.[^1] He served in the [[Office of War Information]] and the [[United States Department of State]] information program, directed language units of the [[Voice of America]] in New York in 1950 and after, and from 1953 was administrative secretary of the [[Parapsychology Foundation]] under [[Eileen Garrett]]. He wrote books on Soviet affairs and on parapsychology, among them *Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion?* (1983).[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Early life and emigration
|
||||
|
||||
Schwarz wrote for German-Jewish periodicals during the 1930s, chiefly the [[Israelitisches Familienblatt]], and the [[Leo Baeck Institute]] holds clippings of his articles from 1934 to 1938 and reviews of two of his books.[^1] A 1948 biographical entry gives his birth in Hamburg to Julius and Martha Ebon, study at the University of Hamburg and at the Hochschule fuer Politik in Berlin, and a journalistic apprenticeship in Berlin in 1934.[^3] A reference work on emigrants lists his father Julius as a manufacturer, his mother as Martha Ludwig, and a sibling named Ellie, with the parents arriving in the United States in 1941 and Ellie in 1940.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
He emigrated to the United States in 1938 and was naturalized in 1945.[^3] The 1948 entry lists him as unmarried.[^3] In 1949 he married [[Chariklia S. Baltazzi]]; their son was Andrew Richard.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Overseas News Agency, Office of War Information and Department of State
|
||||
|
||||
In 1941 and 1942 Ebon was a contributing correspondent of the [[Christian Science Monitor]].[^3] The 1948 entry lists him as managing editor of the Foreign Language Division of the [[Overseas News Agency]] in 1943, and a 1945 contributor note in *Free World* describes him as a staff member of that agency who also acted as managing editor of its Foreign Language Division.[^3][^5] The emigrant reference work gives the same post.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
From 1943 to 1945 he was on the staff of the Office of War Information, as chief of its basic news intelligence desk in 1943 and then as chief of the Foreign News Section of its Overseas News and Features Bureau.[^3] Contributor notes of 1946 and 1948 describe him as having served with the Department of State as an information officer, and as a staff member of the [[Foreign Policy Association]].[^6] His 1948 entry gives his office address as the [[Partisan Review]], 1545 Broadway, New York.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
In 1948 [[Whittlesey House]], the trade imprint of [[McGraw-Hill]], published his *World Communism Today*, a country-by-country reference work; its acknowledgment states that data had been obtained from government officials and from functionaries of Communist parties in all parts of the world.[^7] Two 1948 articles, "World Communism Has Passed Its Peak" and "The New Communist Internationals," appeared under his name.[^3] The *American Mercury* note for the second describes him as the author of *World Communism Today* and as having worked for the State Department, the Office of War Information and the Foreign Policy Association.[^8] A 1948 contributor note in the *Middle East Journal* describes him as a member of the faculty of the [[New School for Social Research]].[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Voice of America
|
||||
|
||||
The Department of State's *Biographic Register* records that Ebon, born May 27, 1917, was appointed radio information specialist (GS-11) in the Department of State on August 31, 1950, and became chief of the Pakistan unit (GS-13) on June 10, 1951; the entry in the supplement of April 1, 1952 carries the office symbol IBS, the International Broadcasting Service that operated the Voice of America.[^9][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
Ebon's own account places him in the fall of 1950 "in a half-empty office at the Voice of America in New York," surrounded by books, files and clippings on Indochina, newly appointed to direct the new Vietnamese-language unit of the agency's short-wave and medium-wave broadcasts. He had earlier directed the agency's broadcasts to Indonesia and later was put in charge of the Hindi and Urdu units, which transmitted to India and Pakistan. His research on Vietnamese religious tendencies led him to the Cao Dai movement and to its veneration of [[Victor Hugo]] among its saints, which became the subject of his introduction to a later edition of Hugo's table-rapping transcripts.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
The biographical notes in Ebon's books state that he served with the Office of War Information in World War II, was subsequently on the staff of the Foreign Policy Association, and was with the [[United States Information Agency]] during the Korean War.[^12] A directory entry lists him as information officer of the United States Information Agency from 1950 to 1952.[^13] His *Malenkov: Stalin's Successor* (McGraw-Hill, 1953), a study of [[Georgy Malenkov]] with an introduction by [[Harry Schwartz]], acknowledges the research report on Malenkov by [[Lazar Pistrak]] of the Voice of America staff and is dedicated to 23,000 Greek children abducted by Communist guerrillas in 1948.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
In the 1953 House Appropriations hearings on a supplemental bill, a section titled "Reduction in force in New York broadcasting office" reproduces a table headed "Name, Title, Grade, Salary, Reason" for the New York offices of the International Broadcasting Service, with reasons that include reduction in force, resignation and death. Martin Ebon is among the names listed for the service.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
### Hill and Knowlton
|
||||
|
||||
The emigrant reference work lists Ebon as an account executive of the public relations firm [[Hill and Knowlton]] from 1950 to 1952, and a writers' directory lists the same post for 1952 to 1953.[^4][^13] The latter places his administrative secretaryship at the Parapsychology Foundation from 1953.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### Parapsychology Foundation
|
||||
|
||||
Records differ on the dates of Ebon's work for the Parapsychology Foundation. The [[Skeptical Inquirer]] biography gives administrative secretary from 1953 to 1965.[^16] The emigrant reference work gives administrative secretary and editor from 1953 to 1965, with the managing editorship of *Tomorrow* from 1953 to 1962 and a place on the editorial board of *International Reports* from 1959 to 1965.[^4] A book biography of 1974 gives administrative secretary from 1953 to 1962, managing editor of *Tomorrow* from 1953 to 1965 and of the *International Journal of Parapsychology* from 1959 to 1962.[^17] A 1998 edition of Hugo's transcripts describes him as having served for twelve years as administrative secretary.[^11] A writers' directory gives administrative secretary from 1953 to 1959 and executive editor of the *International Journal of Parapsychology* from 1959 to 1965, a member of the editorial board of *International Reports* from 1960 to 1967, president of Lombard Associates, Inc. of New York from 1962 to 1982, and consulting editor of the [[New American Library]] from 1966 to 1985.[^13] The Occult World biography dates the post from 1954 and describes him as working with the founder, Eileen Garrett.[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
[[H. P. Albarelli Jr.]] wrote that one former CIA official had reported that the writings of Ebon on parapsychology and the paranormal were of special interest to the [[Central Intelligence Agency]], and that many of Ebon's books originated in studies conducted by the CIA's Security Research Staff and Technical Services Staff; the official is not named.[^19]
|
||||
|
||||
### Tomorrow magazine
|
||||
|
||||
The summer 1955 issue of *Tomorrow*, a quarterly review of psychical research published in New York by Garrett Publications, names Garrett as editor-publisher and Ebon as managing editor.[^20] The masthead of volume 4 (1956) lists Garrett as editor-publisher, Ebon as managing editor, Lenore Davison as assistant to the publisher and Lester Buckland as circulation and business manager, at 500 Fifth Avenue, New York.[^21] The masthead of volume 9 (1961) lists Ebon as managing editor with Garrett as editor.[^22]
|
||||
|
||||
### New School for Social Research
|
||||
|
||||
A directory of writers lists Ebon as lecturer in the Division of Social Sciences of the New School for Social Research in 1949 and 1950, 1955 and 1956, and 1967.[^13] The jacket notes of his 1967 *Beyond Space and Time* and the Associated Press and newspaper notices of his *Svetlana* in 1967 describe him as a member of the faculty.[^23] The biography in *Psychic Exploration* (1974) states that he conducted a lecture series at the school titled "Parapsychology: From Magic to Science" from 1966 to 1968.[^24] The school's own archives hold, in the records of the Adult Division Office of the Dean, a 1975 file titled "Eileen J. Garrett Scholarship," regarding a scholarship to take a New School course in parapsychology.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
A 1975 directory of parapsychology research and teaching lists under the New School an entry naming [[Robert M. Brier]], Ebon and [[Gilbert Roller]], with the address 66 West 12th Street, New York; it lists Brier in the philosophy department of [[C.W. Post College]].[^26] The school's *Bulletin* for the spring 1975 semester (volume 32, number 5, dated December 27, 1974) lists a course "Experimental Parapsychology," taught by Bob Brier on Wednesdays from February 5, and a course "Paramechanics: A Study of Paranormal Psychical Phenomena," taught by Gilbert Roller on Tuesdays from February 4, each at $90.[^27] The bulletin's faculty biography of Brier gives a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, a research fellowship at the [[Institute for Parapsychology]], an associate professorship of philosophy at C.W. Post College, membership in the Parapsychological Association, and editorship with [[J. B. Rhine]] of *Parapsychology Today*.[^27] The bulletin's index does not list Ebon.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
The same bulletin's faculty biography of Gilbert Roller states that he conducted investigations into paranormal phenomena, particularly physical manifestations, and was a faculty member of the Fashion Institute of Technology, president of Hepworth Films Corp. and of IFE Corp., a director of Opti-Sound Corp., and a member of the [[American Society for Psychical Research]] and the American Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine.[^27] *Parapsychology Review* reported in 1973 that Gilbert Roller was teaching a course introducing the most controversial aspects of paranormal phenomena, among them telekinesis, poltergeists and ectoplasmia.[^28] A Gilbert Roller, described as a retired television producer and writer, was with [[Leonard Lauer]] one of the core members of the [[Bindelof séance circle]] that began in 1929 and produced table movement, levitations and raps; that Roller later worked as an artist, writer, filmmaker and television producer and died in 2004 aged 89.[^29] The records found do not state in one document that the New School's Gilbert Roller and the Bindelof circle's Gilbert Roller are the same man.
|
||||
|
||||
### Survival Research Foundation
|
||||
|
||||
In September 1971 the psychic and author [[Susy Smith]] established the [[Survival Research Foundation]] in [[Tucson, Arizona]], with Ebon as chairman and eleven other trustees. The foundation's stated aim was to conduct, subsidize and assist in procuring scientific evidence of conscious survival of the human soul or spirit after death.[^30] The index of *Parapsychology Review* records "Survival Research Foundation established" in the first issue of its volume, at page 28, and a report in the same volume of a lecture by Ebon titled "Can $300,000 Prove Life after Death," which took as its starting point the will of the gold prospector [[James Kidd]].[^31]
|
||||
|
||||
### Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion?
|
||||
|
||||
McGraw-Hill published *Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion?* in New York in 1983.[^2] The book has nineteen chapters: "Moscow, June 11, 1977" (page 1), "Would Marx Approve?" (12), "The Great Nautilus Hoax" (22), "Amplified Mind Power" (33), "The Tragedy of Edward Naumov" (45), "If Thoughts Can Kill" (63), "Code by Telepathy" (79), "The Skin Readers" (88), "They Call It Psychotronics" (98), "Secrets, Rumors, Speculations" (110), "Boosting the Human Brain" (121), "The Novosibirsk Connection" (132), "Dzhuna the Healer" (141), "The KGB Takes Control" (151), "An Astronaut Speaks Out" (165), "The View from Menlo Park" (176), "Washington's Dilemma" (188), "Threat or Illusion?" (199) and "The Century of Fear." Appendixes follow, one of them an "Outline of CIA Project on ESP" reprinted at pages 256 to 260, with a bibliography of English-language literature on Soviet and United States government efforts in parapsychology compiled by [[Marcello Truzzi]].[^32]
|
||||
|
||||
Chapter 3 reports the 1960 French story of telepathy experiments with the nuclear submarine [[The Nautilus (Telepathy Project)|Nautilus]], with a 1980 conversation with Gérard Messadié of *Science et Vie* and an account of [[Jacques Bergier]] (pages 22 to 31), and states that the Navy and Westinghouse statements on the reports were published in the newsletter of the Parapsychology Foundation.[^33] In the book's account the Soviet drive in parapsychology followed the Nautilus reports.[^33]
|
||||
|
||||
Chapter 17 reports the congressional report on parapsychology (pages 188 to 190); a *Fate* article of July 1981 by [[Randy Fitzgerald]] on CIA memoranda on ESP obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, including a document of April 9, 1952 on whether ESP capabilities are affected by drugs, and Fitzgerald's reference to Project Artichoke and MKULTRA (page 191); and the statements of [[Victor Marchetti]] that the agency had become "involved with mediums" and that "They began to contact our own dead agents, as well as dead agents from the other side," with [[Oleg Penkovsky]] as the example (pages 193 and 194).[^34] Ebon wrote that the CIA could not openly back major parapsychology research for fear of the accusation of financing "a bunch of psychic kooks," and that the agency had ordered and received a status report on Soviet parapsychology from a private California corporation (page 210).[^35] The book's appendix reprints an "Outline of CIA Project on ESP," introduced as text "released by the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act" in 1981 that deals with a twofold project to examine the potential use of extrasensory perception for "practical problems of intelligence"; Ebon notes that there are "no indications whether the project was actually undertaken" (pages 257 to 260).[^36]
|
||||
|
||||
Ebon's chapter on the Soviet microwave bombardment of the United States embassy in [[Moscow]] states two hypotheses, one that the beams served to defeat Soviet listening devices or jam American electronic eavesdropping, and another that they were used to change minds; he wrote that the possibility of [[Jimmy Carter]] having been subjected to some esoteric form of mind manipulation at the Vienna summit with Leonid Brezhnev on [[SALT II]] could not be ruled out (pages 118, 119 and 129).[^37] Chapter 16 reports the remote-viewing experiments of [[Hal Puthoff]], [[Russell Targ]] and [[Edwin May]] at [[SRI International]], including trials with [[Hella Hammid]] (pages 176 to 187); chapter 15 reports the Apollo 14 ESP experiment of Capt. [[Edgar Mitchell]] (pages 172 to 174), and the book quotes at length the appendix "The New Mental Battlefield" by Lt. Col. [[John B. Alexander]] to a 1981 Army study (pages 15 and 108).[^38]
|
||||
|
||||
### Reception in the military and intelligence record
|
||||
|
||||
The Associated Press reported on November 6, 1983 that a U.S. Army study had found "significant progress" by the Soviet Union toward psychic weapons, as disclosed in Ebon's book, and described him as a New York-based professional writer specializing in Soviet affairs.[^39] The *New York Times* of January 10, 1984 reviewed the book among three reports on Pentagon psychic research and reported that, by one of them, President Carter ordered the CIA in 1977 to review psychic research behind the Iron Curtain.[^40] A review of the book by Michael S. Evancevich, U.S. Army, Retired, in *Military Intelligence* states that it contains strong evidence that the military, scientific and intelligence communities of both superpowers had been making zealous attempts to harness the mind, and summarizes Ebon's account of CIA experiments using persons with keen psychic gifts to contact agents who had died on operational missions, citing Penkovsky.[^41]
|
||||
|
||||
In the "Psychic Arms Race" session at the conference of the [[Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal]] at [[Stanford University]] on November 9 and 10, 1984, Ebon took part; he also wrote "Psychic Studies: The Soviet Dilemma" for the *Skeptical Inquirer* (winter 1985/1986).[^16] On the *MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour* of November 13, 1984 he appeared from San Francisco opposite [[Paul Kurtz]], was introduced as the only "true believer" to emerge from the conference, and said of the remote-viewing hypothesis that "I think that is much more fundamentally correct" and of the phrase psychic arms race that it was "a sort of tabloid sensationalism."[^42] An [[ABC]] *Nightline* segment of February 15, 1984 identified him as a "Soviet specialist" and presented him on the 1960 Nautilus story as a hoax, after a quotation from a 1952 CIA memorandum on using high-ESP individuals on intelligence problems; a Science Applications International Corporation video log lists Ebon, Kurtz and Hammid among the segment's speakers.[^43]
|
||||
|
||||
The Air War College research report "Psychic Warfare: Exploring the Mind Frontier" (May 1988) states that Capt. Mitchell commented in an early 1980s interview with Ebon, and that Ebon cites the Defense Intelligence Agency report *Controlled Offensive Behavior: USSR*, which McKelvy states was declassified eight years ahead of schedule.[^44] A 1992 Defense Intelligence College thesis by Michael E. Zarbo cites the book for the microwave hypothesis, the Carter passage, a comparison with Alexander's views on remote viewing, and the sentence on page 219.[^45]
|
||||
|
||||
### After Psychic Warfare
|
||||
|
||||
On August 5, 1984 Ebon wrote to John McMahon, Deputy Director of the CIA, enclosing the outline of his projected book *The Soviet Propaganda Machine*, for McGraw-Hill, listing his earlier books (*The Andropov File* and *Psychic Warfare* the year before, *World Communism Today* "after leaving the Office of War Information," *Malenkov*, biographies of Svetlana and Lin Piao, and *Che: The Making of a Legend*), stating that he would not request material under the Freedom of Information Act, and asking whether the interagency committee on Soviet "active measures" could provide guidance. On August 16, 1984 [[George V. Lauder]], the CIA's Director of Public Affairs, replied that the agency had no unclassified material beyond what was available at the United States Information Agency or the Department of State, and referred him to [[Herbert Romerstein]], Assistant to the Associate Director for Plans at the United States Information Agency.[^46]
|
||||
|
||||
*The Andropov File* (McGraw-Hill, 1983) concerned [[Yuri Andropov]]; *The Soviet Propaganda Machine* (McGraw-Hill, 1987) was published and later cited in U.S. Army professional journals on Soviet active measures; a book on [[Nikita Khrushchev]] appeared in 1986, and *KGB: Death and Rebirth* in 1994.[^47] *Svetlana: The Story of Stalin's Daughter* (New American Library, 1967) was excerpted in newspapers; in 1967 an AP dispatch from Moscow reported a Soviet magazine's charge that the CIA ghost-wrote the memoirs of Svetlana Alliluyeva, and added that those memoirs were not to be confused with Ebon's book.[^48] *Lin Piao: The Life and Writings of China's New Ruler* was published by [[Stein and Day]] in 1970.[^49]
|
||||
|
||||
Ebon edited *The Signet Handbook of Parapsychology* (New American Library, 1978), whose chapters, among them Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ on remote viewing and [[Montague Ullman]] and [[Stanley Krippner]] on experimental dream studies, were cited in later Defense Department and Army research reports.[^50] His New American Library paperbacks run from *Beyond Time and Space* (1967) through *Witchcraft Today* (1971) and include *Test Your ESP*, *They Knew the Unknown* and *Psychic Discoveries of the Russians* (1971).[^51]
|
||||
|
||||
### Writing on Soviet and Chinese parapsychology
|
||||
|
||||
Two Ebon articles in the *Parapsychology Review*, "Peking Journal Denounces Telepathy Studies" (November-December 1975) and "Parapsychology in Contemporary China" (September-October 1981), are cited in a 1982 Defense Intelligence Agency-funded report on psychoenergetics research in the People's Republic of China.[^52] Marcello Truzzi called Ebon an "astute China watcher" in *Omni*.[^53]
|
||||
|
||||
A CIA summary of Soviet parapsychology cites Ebon's *Psi in the USSR: Religion Without a Cross*, which dates psi research in Russia to before the 1917 revolution and describes a telepathy experiment in [[Tashkent]] around 1870.[^54] Ebon was among those who congratulated [[Hans Bender]] on a bibliography of his writings published with a 1987 special issue marking Bender's eightieth birthday.[^55]
|
||||
|
||||
### Citations in the STARGATE record
|
||||
|
||||
Ebon's works recur in the bibliographies that Defense Intelligence Agency programs and their contractors compiled on psychic research. A 1990 DIA bibliographic database on psychoenergetics lists his 1974 chapter "A history of parapsychology," from *Psychic Exploration*.[^56] A 1991 anthology compiled by Science Applications International Corporation cites the same chapter and lists the New School for Social Research among the colleges and universities pursuing parapsychology.[^57] A 1991 report by Edwin May and S. LaBerge on anomalous cognition in lucid dreams cites the 1978 *Signet Handbook* chapter by Ullman and Krippner.[^58] The CREST file of the STARGATE collection also holds printouts of the Associated Press, *New York Times* and *MacNeil/Lehrer* items on *Psychic Warfare*.[^59]
|
||||
|
||||
### Later life and death
|
||||
|
||||
John Chambers, translator of Hugo's transcripts, thanks Ebon as mentor, benefactor and friend.[^60] Ebon died on February 11, 2006; the Leo Baeck Institute's note places his death in New York.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Leo Baeck Institute, "Hans Martin Schwarz Collection," AR 25064, biographical note and scope and content note, Center for Jewish History ArchivesSpace. https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/5/resources/13647 (captured 2021 at https://web.archive.org/web/2021/https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/5/resources/13647)
|
||||
[^2]: Martin Ebon, *Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion?* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), copyright page and contents. https://books.google.com/books?id=fdShyTnpk9gC
|
||||
[^3]: *Who's Who in America*, 1948 edition, p. 178, entry "Ebon, Martin, author, lecturer on world affairs" (born May 27, 1917, Hamburg; son of Julius and Martha Ebon; Hochschule fuer Politik; came to America 1938, naturalized 1945; managing editor, Foreign Language Division, Overseas News Agency, 1943; staff of Office of War Information 1943-45; "World Communism Has Passed Its Peak" and "The New Communist Internationals," 1948; office, Partisan Review, 1545 Broadway). https://books.google.com/books?id=paYSAAAAIAAJ
|
||||
[^4]: *Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933*, vol. 2, *The Arts, Sciences, and Literature* (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1983; reprint Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), p. 233, entry "Ebon, Martin." https://books.google.com/books?id=fNKJDwAAQBAJ
|
||||
[^5]: *Free World* (New York), 1945, contributor note on Martin Ebon. https://books.google.com/books?id=gKe0AAAAMAAJ
|
||||
[^6]: *Forum* (1946), contributor note (member of the staff of the Foreign Policy Association; served recently with the Department of State as an information officer and, during the war, as chief of the Foreign News Section of the Office of War Information). https://books.google.com/books?id=POsZAAAAMAAJ. *The Middle East Journal* (1948), contributor note to "Communist Tactics in Palestine" (member of the faculty of the New School of Social Research; chief of the Foreign News Section, Overseas News and Features Bureau, Office of War Information; since served with the Department of State). https://books.google.com/books?id=icIsAQAAIAAJ
|
||||
[^7]: Martin Ebon, *World Communism Today* (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1948), title page, copyright page and acknowledgment. https://archive.org/details/worldcommunismto00ebon
|
||||
[^8]: *The American Mercury* (1948), contributor note to Martin Ebon, "The New Communist Internationals." https://books.google.com/books?id=N40qAAAAMAAJ
|
||||
[^9]: *Middle East Journal*, 1948, contributor note, as cited in note 6. U.S. Department of State, *Biographic Register*, supplement of April 1, 1953 (Publication 5056), entry "Ebon, Martin." https://archive.org/details/biographicregist1953wash
|
||||
[^10]: U.S. Department of State, *Biographic Register*, supplement of April 1, 1952, entry "Ebon, Martin ... app. radio info. specialist, GS-11, Dept. of State, Aug. 31, 1950; chief, Pakistan unit, GS-13, June 10, 1951.; office symbol IBS." https://archive.org/details/biographicregist1952wash
|
||||
[^11]: John Chambers, *Conversations with Eternity: Victor Hugo's Forgotten Masterwork* (Boca Raton: New Paradigm Books, 1998), introduction by Martin Ebon, "Victor the Grandiose," as reprinted in *Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World* (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 2008) and in the Spanish edition *Conversaciones con la eternidad* (Editorial Diana, 2002), pp. 1-2 and author notes. https://books.google.com/books?id=hFwoDwAAQBAJ and https://archive.org/details/conversaciones-con-la-eternidad-victor-hugo.-introduccion-martin-ebon
|
||||
[^12]: Martin Ebon, *The Andropov File* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), "About the Author"; *The Soviet Propaganda Machine* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), "About the Author"; *KGB: Death and Rebirth* (1994), "About the Author." https://books.google.com/books?id=Y8IeAAAAMAAJ, https://books.google.com/books?id=5kIFAQAAIAAJ and https://books.google.com/books?id=UgoJAAAAMAAJ
|
||||
[^13]: *The Writer's Directory, 1998-2000* (Detroit: St. James Press, 1995), p. 424, entry "Ebon, Martin." https://books.google.com/books?id=AKgKAB3ClvwC
|
||||
[^14]: Martin Ebon, *Malenkov: Stalin's Successor* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), dedication, preface, acknowledgment and introduction by Harry Schwartz. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.183698
|
||||
[^15]: U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Appropriations, *Supplemental Appropriation Bill, 1954*, hearings before subcommittees, 83d Cong., 1st sess. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1953), section "Reduction in Force in New York Broadcasting Office," pp. 656-665 (Ebon at p. 665). https://books.google.com/books?id=Lt3joDo0OXwC
|
||||
[^16]: Skeptical Inquirer, "Martin Ebon," author biography. https://skepticalinquirer.org/authors/martin-ebon/
|
||||
[^17]: John White, ed., *Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science* (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974), contributor note on Martin Ebon. https://books.google.com/books?id=MbbxpH5RCaAC
|
||||
[^18]: Occult World, "Martin Ebon," biography (captured 2021). https://web.archive.org/web/2021/https://occult-world.com/martin-ebon/
|
||||
[^19]: H. P. Albarelli Jr., *A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments* (Walterville, Ore.: Trine Day, 2009), p. 495. Sole source for the passage so cited; the former CIA official is not named. https://books.google.com/books?id=rUOdEQAAQBAJ
|
||||
[^20]: *Tomorrow: Quarterly Review of Psychical Research*, vol. 3, no. 4 (summer 1955), New York: Garrett Publications, editor-publisher Eileen J. Garrett, managing editor Martin Ebon. Eton College Collections, shelfmark Lee.4.12. https://catalogue.etoncollege.com/B21120
|
||||
[^21]: *Tomorrow*, vol. 4, nos. 1-3 (1956), mastheads and statement of ownership. https://books.google.com/books?id=OHUPAQAAIAAJ
|
||||
[^22]: *Tomorrow*, vol. 9, nos. 2-3 (1961), mastheads and statement of ownership. https://books.google.com/books?id=8HAPAQAAIAAJ
|
||||
[^23]: Martin Ebon, *Beyond Space and Time: An ESP Casebook* (New York: New American Library, 1967), jacket note. https://books.google.com/books?id=lKGb7SLZtaIC. Associated Press dispatch, "Ghosted," Chicago Sun-Times, 1967, and the New American Library serial notice of *Svetlana*, CIA CREST, CIA-RDP88-01350R000200680022-6 and CIA-RDP75-00001R000400200004-8. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp88-01350r000200680022-6
|
||||
[^24]: John White, ed., *Psychic Exploration*, contributor note, and Martin Ebon, "A History of Parapsychology" (the same volume, chapter 1). https://books.google.com/books?id=MbbxpH5RCaAC
|
||||
[^25]: The New School Archives and Special Collections, NS-02-01-01, New School Adult Division Office of the Dean records, Series 5, Office files, Awards and scholarships, Box 7, Folder 43, "Eileen J. Garrett Scholarship, 1975." https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/
|
||||
[^26]: Walter and Mary Jo Uphoff, *New Psychic Frontiers* (Minneapolis: Bolger Publications, 1975), chapter V, "Research, Investigation and Teaching: A Survey of the International Scene," p. 228 (C.W. Post College entry) and p. 229 (New School for Social Research entry). CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200230018-6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001200230018-6
|
||||
[^27]: New School for Social Research, *New School Bulletin*, spring 1975, vol. 32, no. 5 (December 27, 1974), published as *Announcement of Courses of Study*: course 2750-0 and Brier biography (pp. 88 and 328), course 2755-3 and Roller biography (pp. 88 and 356), index (pp. 383, 396, 399). https://books.google.com/books?id=Ez07AAAAMAAJ
|
||||
[^28]: *Parapsychology Review* (1973), news item on a course taught by Gilbert Roller, and volume index entry "Roller, Gilbert, 6:10." https://books.google.com/books?id=sH8YAQAAMAAJ
|
||||
[^29]: *Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research* (2000), article on the Bindelof experience, list of participants. https://books.google.com/books?id=VndRAAAAYAAJ. Psi Encyclopedia, "Bindelof Phenomena," Society for Psychical Research. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/bindelof-phenomena/, drawing on Rosemarie Pilkington, *The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof: The Enigma of Séance Phenomena* (San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2006).
|
||||
[^30]: Walter and Mary Jo Uphoff, *New Psychic Frontiers* (Minneapolis: Bolger Publications, 1975), p. 235, entry for the Survival Research Foundation. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200230018-6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001200230018-6
|
||||
[^31]: *Parapsychology Review* (New York: Parapsychology Foundation), volume index and issues, entries "Survival Research Foundation established, 1:28" and the report of Ebon's lecture on the Kidd will. https://books.google.com/books?id=QXoYAQAAMAAJ
|
||||
[^32]: Ebon, *Psychic Warfare*, contents, appendixes and bibliography (pp. 221-262). https://books.google.com/books?id=fdShyTnpk9gC
|
||||
[^33]: Ebon, *Psychic Warfare*, chapter 3, "The Great Nautilus Hoax," pp. 22-31, and p. 208. https://books.google.com/books?id=fdShyTnpk9gC
|
||||
[^34]: Ebon, *Psychic Warfare*, chapter 17, "Washington's Dilemma," pp. 188-197. https://books.google.com/books?id=fdShyTnpk9gC
|
||||
[^35]: Ebon, *Psychic Warfare*, p. 210. https://books.google.com/books?id=fdShyTnpk9gC
|
||||
[^36]: Ebon, *Psychic Warfare*, appendix "Outline of CIA Project on ESP," pp. 257-260 (introductory note on p. 257; the book's index lists the reprinted project outline at 257-260). https://books.google.com/books?id=fdShyTnpk9gC
|
||||
[^37]: Ebon, *Psychic Warfare*, pp. 118-119 and 128-129. https://books.google.com/books?id=fdShyTnpk9gC
|
||||
[^38]: Ebon, *Psychic Warfare*, pp. 15, 108, 172-174, 176-187. https://books.google.com/books?id=fdShyTnpk9gC
|
||||
[^39]: Barton Reppert, "Study Cites Soviet Progress on Mind Weapons," Associated Press, November 6, 1983, and "U.S. Military Research: From War Games to Mind Games?", November 7, 1983. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200230033-6 and CIA-RDP96-00791R000200230030-9. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000200230033-6
|
||||
[^40]: William J. Broad, "Pentagon Is Said to Focus on ESP for Wartime Use," *New York Times*, January 10, 1984, sec. C, p. 1. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200230027-3. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000200230027-3
|
||||
[^41]: Michael S. Evancevich, review of Martin Ebon, *Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion?* (McGraw-Hill, 282 pages, $15.95), *Military Intelligence*. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200030002-5. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001200030002-5
|
||||
[^42]: *The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour*, transcript no. 2382, November 13, 1984, segment "Psychic Warfare." CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200230022-8. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000200230022-8
|
||||
[^43]: *ABC News Nightline*, February 15, 1984, transcript. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP90-00552R000606540004-8 and CIA-RDP90-00806R000200970098-6. Science Applications International Corporation, letter of May 13, 1995 with video log entry "Night Line (ABC)," CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190060-1, which dates the entry "approximately 1983." https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00552r000606540004-8
|
||||
[^44]: Dolan M. McKelvy, "Psychic Warfare: Exploring the Mind Frontier" (Air War College research report, Maxwell Air Force Base, May 1988). CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00789R001001420001-3. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r001001420001-3
|
||||
[^45]: Michael E. Zarbo, "Remote Viewing: Parapsychological Potential for Intelligence Collection?" (Defense Intelligence College thesis, November 1992), pp. 23-24 and 52 and notes 17, 22, 32, 33, 60, 85. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00789R002600250001-6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r002600250001-6
|
||||
[^46]: Martin Ebon to John McMahon, August 5, 1984, and George V. Lauder, Director, Public Affairs, CIA, to Martin Ebon, August 16, 1984. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP86M00886R001100080008-7. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp86m00886r001100080008-7
|
||||
[^47]: Ebon, *The Andropov File* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983); *The Soviet Propaganda Machine* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), cited in *Military Review* (1989); *Nikita Khrushchev* (1986); *KGB: Death and Rebirth* (1994). https://archive.org/details/andropovfilelife00ebon, https://archive.org/details/sovietpropaganda0000ebon, https://archive.org/details/nikitakhrushchev0000ebon and https://archive.org/details/kgbdeathrebirth00ebon
|
||||
[^48]: Martin Ebon, *Svetlana: The Story of Stalin's Daughter* ([New York]: New American Library, 1967). https://archive.org/details/svetlanastoryofs00ebon. Associated Press, Moscow, "Ghosted," Chicago Sun-Times, 1967, CIA CREST, CIA-RDP88-01350R000200680022-6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp88-01350r000200680022-6
|
||||
[^49]: Martin Ebon, *Lin Piao: The Life and Writings of China's New Ruler* (New York: Stein and Day, 1970). https://archive.org/details/linpiaolifewriti00ebon
|
||||
[^50]: Martin Ebon, ed., *The Signet Handbook of Parapsychology* (New York: New American Library, 1978). https://archive.org/details/signethandbookof00ebon. Chapter citations: Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ, "Remote Viewing: A New Research Frontier," and Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner, "Experimental Dream Studies," pp. 409-422, as cited in Puthoff and Edwin C. May, *DoD Psychoenergetics Program: Replication Studies*, SRI/GF-0260 (February 1984), CIA CREST CIA-RDP96-00792R000600310001-7, and in the John Palmer report for the European Research Office, CIA CREST CIA-RDP96-00789R003800360001-1.
|
||||
[^51]: Ebon titles as listed in the references of CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200230018-6, pp. 252-253: *Beyond Time and Space* (New American Library, 1967), *Prophecy in Our Time* (1969), *The Psychic Reader* (1970), *Reincarnation in the Twentieth Century* (1970), *Test Your ESP* (1971), *They Knew the Unknown* (1972), *True Experiences in Communicating With the Dead* (1968), *True Experiences in Exotic ESP* (1968), *Witchcraft Today* (1971), and *Psychic Discoveries of the Russians* (1971).
|
||||
[^52]: Harold E. Puthoff, *Psychoenergetics Research in the People's Republic of China (1982)*, final report, Defense Intelligence Agency contract MDA908-82-C-0034 (October 1982), reference list. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00792R000400320001-8. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000400320001-8
|
||||
[^53]: Marcello Truzzi, "China's Psychic Savants," *Omni* (1984), corpus copy. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00792R000300420017-1. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000300420017-1
|
||||
[^54]: "Parapsychology in the USSR," CIA CREST summary, CIA-RDP96-00792R000500210001-9, citing Ebon's "Psi in the USSR: Religion Without a Cross" (Appendix 1, reference literature). Sole source for the title and the Tashkent account as given here; publisher not identified in this record. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000500210001-9
|
||||
[^55]: *Parapsychology Abstracts International*, 1988, reporting the special issue marking Hans Bender's eightieth birthday (5 February 1987), with a 207-item bibliography compiled by Eberhard Bauer and a list of congratulants that includes Martin Ebon. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00792R000700650003-7. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000700650003-7
|
||||
[^56]: Defense Intelligence Agency, bibliographic database, "Psychoenergetics (U), Initial Report," 16 November 1990, entry for Ebon, "A history of parapsychology," in *Psychic Exploration*. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00789R002900060001-4. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r002900060001-4
|
||||
[^57]: Science Applications International Corporation, *Anomalous Mental Phenomena: Selected Papers* (24 June 1991), reference 1 and institutions roster. CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00789R003100030001-4. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r003100030001-4
|
||||
[^58]: Edwin C. May and S. LaBerge, "Anomalous Cognition in Lucid Dreams" (20 December 1991), references, citing Ullman and Krippner in Ebon (ed.), *The Signet Handbook of Parapsychology* (1978). CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00789R003100140001-2. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r003100140001-2
|
||||
[^59]: CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200230021-9, -0022-8, -0026-4, -0027-3, -0030-9, -0031-8, -0032-7 and -0033-6 (database-search printouts). https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000200230027-3
|
||||
[^60]: John Chambers, acknowledgments in *Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World* (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 2008). https://books.google.com/books?id=hFwoDwAAQBAJ
|
||||
195
10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Max Ascoli.md
Normal file
195
10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Max Ascoli.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,195 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Max Ascoli
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Max Ascoli
|
||||
- Ascoli
|
||||
- Max Raoul Ascoli
|
||||
- Dr. Ascoli
|
||||
category: "Authors & Journalists"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- MaxAscoli
|
||||
- TheReporter
|
||||
- MazziniSociety
|
||||
- AntiFascism
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- UniversityInExile
|
||||
- AllenDulles
|
||||
- AmericanCommitteeOnUnitedEurope
|
||||
- Rosenwald
|
||||
- CoordinatorOfInterAmericanAffairs
|
||||
- FightForFreedom
|
||||
- FortnightlyCorporation
|
||||
summary: "Italian anti-fascist exile, dean of the New School's Graduate Faculty (1940), president of the Mazzini Society, Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs official, and editor and co-owner of The Reporter (1949 to 1968)."
|
||||
born: 1898
|
||||
died: 1978
|
||||
location: "Ferrara, Italy; New York, New York"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 1933
|
||||
role: "Graduate Faculty member from late 1933; dean of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science from 1940"
|
||||
fn: 5
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[The Reporter]]"
|
||||
start: 1949
|
||||
end: 1968
|
||||
role: "editor and publisher"
|
||||
fn: 16
|
||||
- type: owned
|
||||
with: "[[Fortnightly Corporation]]"
|
||||
role: "stockholder with Marion Rosenwald Ascoli and Nathan W. Levin (1963 application record)"
|
||||
fn: 25
|
||||
- type: owned
|
||||
with: "[[Northern West Virginia Television Broadcasting Company]]"
|
||||
start: 1963
|
||||
role: "vice president and director; owned through Fortnightly Corporation (WBOY-TV, Clarksburg, West Virginia)"
|
||||
fn: 25
|
||||
- type: spouse_of
|
||||
with: "[[Marion Rosenwald Ascoli]]"
|
||||
start: 1940
|
||||
fn: 11
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[Julius Rosenwald]]"
|
||||
role: "father-in-law (wife's father)"
|
||||
fn: 11
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Mazzini Society]]"
|
||||
start: 1940
|
||||
role: "first president (the end of the term is stated as 1941 and as 1943 by different sources)"
|
||||
fn: 10
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Fight for Freedom]]"
|
||||
start: 1941
|
||||
role: "donor described by Mark Chadwin as particularly generous, as reported by Thomas Mahl"
|
||||
fn: 12
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Rockefeller Foundation]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1931
|
||||
role: "fellowship that brought him to the United States"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs]]"
|
||||
start: 1942
|
||||
role: "listed as Associate Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in a February 18, 1942 Coordinator of Information memorandum; associate director of cultural relations per Fermi"
|
||||
fn: 14
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Interdepartmental Committee on Foreign Nationality Problems]]"
|
||||
start: 1942
|
||||
end: 1942
|
||||
role: "CIAA representative at the Committee's meetings"
|
||||
fn: 14
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[American Committee on United Europe]]"
|
||||
role: "listed among the mass-media members of the 1950 membership in a secondary account drawn from the Rebattet thesis"
|
||||
fn: 22
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Max Ascoli (1898 to 1978) was an Italian anti-fascist jurist and political philosopher who left Italy in 1931 on a [[Rockefeller Foundation]] fellowship, joined the [[University in Exile]] at the [[New School for Social Research]], and served as dean of its Graduate Faculty. He was the first president of the [[Mazzini Society]], held a post in the [[Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs]] under [[Nelson Rockefeller]] in 1942, and from 1949 to 1968 was editor and, with his wife [[Marion Rosenwald Ascoli]], owner of the biweekly [[The Reporter]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Birth, arrest and exile, 1898 to 1931
|
||||
|
||||
Max Raoul Ascoli was born in [[Ferrara]] on June 25, 1898, the son of Enrico Ascoli, a surveyor who became a merchant, and Adriana Finzi. He graduated in law at the [[University of Ferrara]] in July 1920 with a thesis on the legal philosophy of [[Benedetto Croce]], studied in [[Rome]] under [[Giorgio Del Vecchio]], and in 1925 joined [[Gaetano Salvemini]] and [[Carlo Rosselli]] in the clandestine sheet [[Non mollare]]. His first teaching post was in philosophy of law and international law at the [[University of Camerino]] in 1926 to 1927.[^1] He later called Ferrara the "cradle of Fascism."[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The accounts of his arrest differ. The Senate archive biography by [[Renato Camurri]] places it in April 1928, in an investigation into the group [[Giovane Italia]], and says the admonition measure had to be revoked before he could sit the examination for the libera docenza, after which he taught public law at the [[University of Cagliari]] in 1929 to 1930.[^1] A [[Boston University]] profile states that he was arrested in 1928 after his name was found in the address book of another intellectual charged with clandestine political activities.[^2] Ascoli's own account, written in 1954, gives the date as April 30, 1928, says he and other Italian anti-fascist university professors were arrested "for no other reason than a summons to repent or else," that he was held about three weeks, and that on release he was asked to write a letter to [[Benito Mussolini]] announcing his conversion to the Fascist faith. He wrote that he refused, was kept under strict police supervision until he left Italy in September 1931, and that in the spring of 1931, as the only remaining member of his university who refused to join the Fascist Association of University Teachers, he was offered a Rockefeller fellowship by the Foundation's representative in Italy, [[Luigi Einaudi]].[^3] Camurri gives the arrival in New York as October 1931, with a research project on the crisis of democracy in America, and records that the fellowship was extended through 1932, with five months at [[Harvard University]], where he formed close ties with [[Felix Frankfurter]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Isabelle Richet]], reviewing the intellectual biography by [[Davide Grippa]] for the [[Primo Levi Center]], places his early activism among the circle of [[Piero Gobetti]], Salvemini and Rosselli, describes his break with Rosselli's movement [[Giustizia e Libertà]] in the early 1930s, and writes that he was very close to Frankfurter and [[Louis Brandeis]], who became his mentors and introduced him to influential Jewish networks in the United States.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### University in Exile, 1933 to 1949
|
||||
|
||||
Camurri writes that Frankfurter put Ascoli in touch with [[Alvin Johnson]], and that documents in the Rockefeller Foundation archives show Johnson had already read Ascoli's work and been impressed; Johnson placed him on the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science.[^1] [[Peter Rutkoff]] and [[William Scott]] write that Johnson recruited "two additional Rockefeller scholars, Italian political scientist Max Ascoli and Austrian Erich Hula," and that Ascoli joined the University in Exile in late 1933.[^5] [[Daniel Bessner]] records that Johnson hoped to bring over Ascoli, [[Rudolf Littauer]] and [[Werner Hegemann]], and that all three joined the New School; Ascoli's article "Realism versus the Constitution" appeared in the first volume of [[Social Research]] in 1934.[^6] The [[Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars]] kept a file on him in its non-grantee series, for the applicants it did not aid, for 1933 to 1935 and for 1939 to 1943.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
Camurri lists his books of the period as *Intelligence in Politics* (1936), *Political and Economic Democracy* (1937, edited with [[Fritz Lehmann]]) and *Fascism for Whom?* (written with [[Arthur Feiler]]), and states that he was the only Italian given significant responsibilities on the Graduate Faculty and in Social Research.[^1] Richet gives 1940 as the year of his United States citizenship.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
*School and Society* reported on March 16, 1940 that Ascoli had been elected dean of the graduate faculty of political and social science at the New School, "succeeding Frieda Wunderlich, whose term expires next fall."[^8] The *American Teacher* of May 1941 describes him as the dean of the Graduate Faculty.[^9] In 1954 he wrote that he joined the Graduate Faculty two years after the fellowship and "Later I became Dean of the Faculty."[^3] [[Laura Fermi]] writes that he had been a professor at the New School since 1933 and that [[Franco Modigliani]] obtained a fellowship with his help.[^10] Camurri writes that he gave up the academic career in 1949 to devote himself to The Reporter.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Marriage to Marion Rosenwald
|
||||
|
||||
In 1940 Ascoli married Marion Rosenwald Stern, a daughter of [[Julius Rosenwald]], chairman of [[Sears, Roebuck and Company]]. She had been married to [[Alfred K. Stern]], a housing specialist, and they were divorced in 1936.[^11] Camurri writes that the marriage gave him contacts at the highest levels of the political and administrative establishment.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Mazzini Society
|
||||
|
||||
Camurri names Ascoli among the founders of the Mazzini Society in 1939, with [[Roberto Bolaffio]], [[Renato Poggioli]], [[Michele Cantarella]], Salvemini and [[Lionello Venturi]], and gives his presidency as 1940 to 1943, adding that Ascoli and his family contributed substantially to the support of the organization.[^1] Fermi dates the society's creation to 1940 and writes that Ascoli was appointed its first president and Salvemini its honorary president; that in early 1941 it was broadcasting from Boston to Italy; that it began the weekly *Nazioni Unite* in March 1942; and that its political contacts with the American government "were not extensive and, at least at the beginning, limited to the Intelligence Service." She also writes that he was named president in 1940 and "the following year resigned" because the society was in New York while his wartime duties required him in Washington.[^10] Richet, summarizing Grippa, calls him one of the leaders of the society and an agent of the [[United States Department of State|State Department]] during the war.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Thomas E. Mahl]] reports that the secret "BSC Account" of [[British Security Coordination]] stated that BSC had close ties with the Italian-American Mazzini Society headed by Ascoli, and quotes a July 1941 report by [[Sydney Morrell]] of the [[Special Operations Executive]] that a subsidy had been paid to the Mazzini Society for Italian broadcasts from the Boston radio station [[WRUL]].[^12] Mahl also writes that Ascoli was one of the donors listed by [[Mark Chadwin]] as particularly generous to [[Fight for Freedom]], a committee Mahl describes as a British intelligence front, and that Ascoli "was also working for British intelligence through his Italian-American Mazzini Society."[^12] The [[Princeton University]] finding aid for the Fight for Freedom, Inc. records lists a correspondence folder "Ascoli, Max, 1941."[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, 1942
|
||||
|
||||
Camurri lists among Ascoli's institutional affiliations of the late 1930s and early 1940s the Bureau of Latin America Relations, the Inter-American Affairs office of Nelson Rockefeller, the [[Council on Foreign Relations]], the [[Council for Democracy]] and the [[Committee for a National Trade Policy]].[^1] Fermi states that at the time of his resignation from the Mazzini presidency he was associate director of cultural relations in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
Released minutes and memoranda of the [[Interdepartmental Committee on Foreign Nationality Problems]], filed in the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] reading room under an [[Office of Strategic Services]] heading, record Ascoli at the committee's weekly meetings, convened by [[Adolf Berle|Adolf A. Berle]], Assistant Secretary of State, at the State Department from February to April 1942. A memorandum of the [[Coordinator of Information]] (the predecessor agency of the OSS) by [[DeWitt C. Poole]] to [[John C. Wiley]], dated February 11, 1942, names "Mr. Nelson Rockefeller, Dr. Max Ascoli and Mr. Wallace K. Harrison of the Office of the Coordinator for Latin American Relations" among those present, and Poole's memorandum of February 18, 1942 lists "Dr. Ascoli, Associate Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs." Berle's letter of February 27, 1942 to the Secretary of War gives the CIAA members as "Mr. N. A Rockefeller; Mr. Wallace K. Harrison; Dr. Ascoli." The minutes list him as CIAA representative at the sixth meeting (March 11, with Rockefeller and Harrison), the seventh (March 18), the ninth (April 15) and the tenth (April 29).[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
The March 11 minutes record that Ascoli reported, on information from "Mr. Romualdi, a representative of the Mazzini Society just returned from South America," that perhaps 1,500 anti-Fascist Italians might be recruited there for an anti-Fascist Italian legion, that interest was most intense in Uruguay, and that a cable be sent to the embassy in Montevideo about a "Garibaldi Legion" recruiting in Uruguay and Argentina. A Coordinator of Information memorandum to Colonel [[William J. Donovan]] of the same date lists Rockefeller, Ascoli and Harrison among those present, and the same memorandum records Ascoli describing Salvemini's skepticism about the number of probable recruits for an Italian legion as "undoubtedly excessive" and suggesting that a small Italian cadre be formed in the United States and sent to Africa as "missionaries." At the April 15 meeting, "Dr. Ascoli for CIAA" referred to the problem of Mexicans in the southwest and offered the assistance of his organization, and Berle suggested that Cramer of the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice and Ascoli meet with [[Jonathan Daniels]] of the [[Office of Civilian Defense]] to work out plans on the "color" problem.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Hugh Wilford]] writes that during the war Ascoli "worked alongside Nelson Rockefeller, John Hay Whitney, and C. D. Jackson," although Jackson never warmed to him.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Reporter, 1949 to 1968
|
||||
|
||||
The June 21, 1949 issue of The Reporter lists Ascoli as "Editor & Publisher," says the magazine was published every other Tuesday by [[Fortnightly Publishing Company]], a limited partnership, and lists [[Douglass Cater]] on the staff.[^16] By December 1955 the masthead gives Ascoli as editor and [[Harlan Cleveland]] as publisher, with [[The Reporter Magazine Company]] at 136 East 57th Street; in 1961 he is "Editor and Publisher," with Cater as Washington editor, and the company at 660 Madison Avenue.[^17][^18] Fermi writes that Ascoli wrote an editorial for each issue, decided policy and chose authors, and that the magazine's existence depended on "the never-sufficiently-eulogized assistance of American money."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
Wilford writes that The Reporter had "intimate ties to the U.S. intelligence community," that there is no evidence Ascoli received covert payments "in the same manner as" the editor of The New Leader, "although this is perhaps not surprising, given the apparent destruction of The Reporter's financial records," and that Ascoli had "conspicuous access to wealth" through his wife. Wilford identifies [[Philip Horton]] and Douglass Cater as ex-OSS officers who kept their intelligence connections, states that Horton served briefly as the CIA's first station chief in Paris before joining Time and then The Reporter as Ascoli's second in command, and that Horton used contacts with Donovan, [[Allen Dulles]] and [[James Jesus Angleton]] to enhance foreign coverage. Wilford adds that Cater helped found the [[United States National Student Association]] and later served in the [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] White House, and that The Reporter had ties to the [[Congress for Cultural Freedom]], the American Committee on United Europe, the [[National Committee for a Free Europe]] and the Vietnam Lobby.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
A CIA memorandum dated March 19, 1952 concerns "The China Lobby" by [[Charles Christian Wertenbaker]], written for The Reporter. Its author, an assistant to the Director, reports that Wertenbaker invited him to review the piece before publication, and that the text would go to Philip Horton, assistant editor, who would edit it. The memorandum says the piece ran to 30,000 to 35,000 words in two installments beginning in early April 1952, and that the magazine "presumably" was building a promotional campaign around it. Wertenbaker had notified Ascoli, "editor and publisher," that he could not devote any more time to the piece.[^19]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Hans Renders]], reviewing [[Elke van Cassel]]'s history of the magazine, writes that the Reporter, against the prevailing anticommunism of the period, attacked the witch hunt of [[Joseph McCarthy]], and that it kept alive the American tradition of investigative journalism through the conformist 1950s.[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
### Senator Bridges, 1954
|
||||
|
||||
On August 19, 1954 Senator [[Styles Bridges]] attacked The Reporter in a Senate speech (Congressional Record, pages 14472 to 14480) after the magazine's July 20 article "Senator Styles Bridges and His Far-flung Constituents." Ascoli's reply, inserted in the Congressional Record of September 3 by Senator [[Herbert H. Lehman]] (pages A6583 to A6585), states that Bridges accused him of ingratitude to the country that gave him refuge and questioned his financial honesty, and that Bridges said he had been "several times jailed" in Italy for "socialistic activities." Ascoli answered that he had been jailed once, in 1928. On the financial charge, Bridges had referred to a loan of $4,600,000 from the [[Export-Import Bank]]; Ascoli replied that at the end of 1944 he had started a nonprofit corporation, Handicraft Development, Inc., to help Italian handicraft producers export to the United States, that the Bank then offered the Italian government a loan administered by a company, the Compagnia Nazionale Artigiana, and that [[William McChesney Martin]], chairman of the Bank, wrote him on December 3, 1947 that Handicraft Development should subscribe part of the company's capital and be represented on its board. The reply adds that Senators [[Lyndon Johnson]] and [[Richard Russell]] had expressed sympathy with Bridges when he attacked the magazine.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Allen Dulles and the American Committee on United Europe
|
||||
|
||||
[[Richard Aldrich]] describes the [[American Committee on United Europe]] (ACUE) as formed to support [[Winston Churchill]] and the [[European Movement]], and as officially incorporated in February 1949. William J. Donovan was its chairman, Dulles its vice-chairman, and [[Thomas W. Braden]], a former OSS officer, its executive director, with day-to-day administration in Braden's hands. Aldrich reports Braden's assertion in the 1980s that ACUE funds originated with the CIA, and writes that the 1962 Oxford thesis of [[F. X. Rebattet]], son of the European Movement's secretary-general [[George Rebattet]], "confirms that most ACUE funds originated with the CIA."[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
[[David Barnby]], drawing on that 1962 Oxford thesis on the European Movement, writes that ACUE had a membership of 380 in 1950 and lists, among 29 media figures, "Dr. Max Ascoli, publisher of (The Reporter)."[^22] Wilford lists the American Committee on United Europe among the Agency fronts with which The Reporter had ties.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
A copy of a February 7, 1958 letter from the chairman of the President's Committee on Scientists and Engineers to Dulles, then Director of Central Intelligence, thanks him for addressing the Conference on America's Human Resources at [[Yale University]] and encloses the list of participants, which includes "Mr. Max Ascoli, Editor and Publisher, The Reporter."[^23] The 1968 closing file of The Reporter in the Ascoli papers indexes a photocopy of a typed letter from Dulles, dated May 27, among letters from friends of Ascoli expressing regret at the closing.[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
### Fortnightly Corporation and the Clarksburg television station, 1959 to 1963
|
||||
|
||||
In an application filed with the [[Federal Communications Commission]] on March 21, 1963 for assignment of the license of television station WBOY-TV, Clarksburg, West Virginia, from Rust Craft Broadcasting Company to Northern West Virginia Television Broadcasting Company, the published notice lists the officers of the purchaser as including Max Ascoli, vice president and director, and Marion R. Ascoli, vice president and director, with Nathan W. Levin as president, treasurer and director. It states that [[Fortnightly Corporation]] was the sole stockholder of the purchaser, that Max Ascoli and Marion R. Ascoli were vice presidents and directors of Fortnightly, and that "The stockholders of Fortnightly Corporation are: Max Ascoli, Marion R. Ascoli, and Nathan W. Levin."[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
The brief of the appellants, the Citizens TV Protest Committee and Clarksburg Publishing Company, in their appeal to the [[United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit]] against the Commission's approval, states that Fortnightly owned and operated community antenna (cable) systems in Clarksburg and Fairmont, West Virginia; that in March 1959 it had bought the stock of Schwager-Wood Corporation of Portland, Oregon, a manufacturer of electrical switches used mainly by public utilities, which became a division of Fortnightly and was later divested; and that Fortnightly urged approval of the sale on the grounds that it was familiar with the area, that pending litigation between Rust Craft and Fortnightly would be resolved, and that acquisition of WBOY "would give Fortnightly, owner and publisher of the Reporter Magazine, an additional medium for public discussion of national affairs."[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
### Closing, 1968
|
||||
|
||||
In April 1968 the [[Wall Street Journal]] reported that The Reporter would cease publication with its June 13 issue. Circulation had risen to 210,000 in the final half of 1967, from 172,000 five years earlier, while advertising had fallen to 401 pages in 1967 from 843 pages in 1963. The magazine had run a deficit in each of its nineteen years, and the deficits "have been met by" Ascoli and his wife Marion, "who are sole owners." The Journal described the magazine as having drifted rightward and as one of a handful of national magazines with a hawkish stand on the Vietnam war. Some features and two of its 54 employees were taken over by [[Harper's Magazine]], and Ascoli was to contribute an essay each month to Harper's.[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
The index of names for the 1968 closing letters includes [[McGeorge Bundy]], [[Henry Kissinger]], Adolf Berle, [[Walt Whitman Rostow]], [[Theodore H. White]], [[William Rosenwald]], [[Paul Douglas]] and [[John Dos Passos]], as well as Dulles.[^24] Ascoli died in New York on January 1, 1978.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Papers
|
||||
|
||||
Ascoli's papers are held at the [[Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center]] at Boston University, whose Special Collections keep the editorial files of The Reporter.[^2] The Italian Senate's historical archive holds a federated description of a "Max Ascoli Collections" fonds with the Gotlieb Center as custodian, listed at 209 boxes. Its Reporter series includes a historical file of 1947 to 1950, editorial correspondence from 1949 to about 1968, killed manuscripts, libel files, letters to the editor and a closing file. Its personal series contains correspondence from 1934 to 1978 and thematic files on institutions with which Ascoli worked.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Renato Camurri, biographical note, "Max Ascoli 1898 - 1978," in Senato della Repubblica, Archivio storico, federated fonds Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Max Ascoli, https://patrimonio.archivio.senato.it/inventario/howard-gotlieb-archival-research-center/max-ascoli (Italian; translated). Sole source for the Giovane Italia investigation as the reason for the 1928 arrest, the Camerino and Cagliari teaching posts, the Frankfurter introduction to Johnson, the Mazzini Society presidency of 1940 to 1943, the list of institutional affiliations, the 1949 end of the academic career and the death on January 1, 1978.
|
||||
[^2]: Boston University, Bridge, "Connections," November 23, 2001, https://www.bu.edu/bridge/archive/2001/11-23/connections.htm. Sole source for the address-book account of the 1928 arrest, the "cradle of Fascism" phrase and the Gotlieb Center holdings.
|
||||
[^3]: "The Reporter's Notes," *The Reporter*, September 23, 1954 (Vol. 11, No. 5), pp. 2-6, https://archive.org/details/sim_reporter_1954-09-23_11_5, excerpting Max Ascoli's reply to Senator Bridges (Congressional Record, September 3, 1954, pp. A6583-A6585) and citing Bridges's speech of August 19, 1954 (Congressional Record, pp. 14472-14480). Sole source for Ascoli's own account of the 1928 arrest, the Einaudi fellowship offer and Handicraft Development, Inc.
|
||||
[^4]: Isabelle Richet, review of Davide Grippa, *Un antifascista tra Italia e Stati Uniti. Democrazia e identità nazionale nel pensiero di Max Ascoli (1898-1947)*, Primo Levi Center, November 24, 2014, https://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/an-antifascist-between-italy-and-the-united-states/. Sole source for the Grippa biography's account of the Mazzini Society and State Department service, as reported by the reviewer, and for the mentorship, *Intelligence in Politics* (1936) and the citizenship in 1940.
|
||||
[^5]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, *New School: A History of the New School for Social Research* (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 102 and 118.
|
||||
[^6]: Daniel Bessner, "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State" (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2013), note 21 and note 116, https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/232a76ac-f2d8-4827-99fe-50b3b109fa6c/content.
|
||||
[^7]: New York Public Library, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars records, MssCol 922, Series I.B (Non-Grantees), box 38, folder 46, "Ascoli, Max 1933-1935, 1939-1943," https://archives.nypl.org/mss/922.
|
||||
[^8]: "Educational Notes and News," *School and Society* 51, no. 1316 (March 16, 1940), https://archive.org/details/sim_usa-today_1940-03-16_51_1316.
|
||||
[^9]: "Contributors to this Issue," *The American Teacher* 25, no. 9 (May 1941), https://archive.org/details/sim_american-teacher_1941-05_25_9.
|
||||
[^10]: Laura Fermi, *Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930-41* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 118-119 (Mazzini Society; "Political contacts" sentence at p. 119) and pp. 283-284 (The Reporter; the 1940 presidency, resignation and CIAA position at p. 284), p. 336 (Modigliani), https://archive.org/details/illustriousimmig0000unse.
|
||||
[^11]: Glenn Fowler, "Marion Rosenwald Ascoli, 88, Longtime Advocate for Children," *New York Times*, October 2, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/02/obituaries/marion-rosenwald-ascoli-88-longtime-advocate-for-children.html. The obituary states that Marion was a daughter of Julius Rosenwald, that she married Alfred K. Stern and was divorced in 1936, that she married Dr. Ascoli in 1940, and that he died in 1978.
|
||||
[^12]: Thomas E. Mahl, *Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44* (Washington: Brassey's, 1998), pp. 24 and 31 and the biographical entry for Ascoli at p. 190 (index: Ascoli, 24, 31, 190); the Morrell quotation appears in the chapter on front groups. Mahl cites Mark Lincoln Chadwin, *The Warhawks* (1968) for the donor list.
|
||||
[^13]: Princeton University Library, Fight for Freedom, Inc. Records (MC025), Series 1 Correspondence, folder "Ascoli, Max, 1941," https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/MC025_c00024.
|
||||
[^14]: CIA reading room, "OSS: Memoranda on meetings of the Interdepartmental Committee on Foreign Nationality Problems," CIA-RDP13X00001R000100370009-5, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp13x00001r000100370009-5: pp. 39-41 (Poole to Wiley, February 11, 1942), p. 34 (Poole to Wiley, February 18, 1942), pp. 29-30 (Berle to the Secretary of War, February 27, 1942, postscript listing members), pp. 17-18 (minutes of the sixth meeting, March 11, 1942), p. 12 (seventh meeting, March 18), pp. 22-24 (memorandum to Colonel Donovan, March 11), pp. 72-75 (ninth meeting, April 15) and p. 5 (tenth meeting, April 29). The minutes give the abbreviation as CIAA; the March 11 and 18 lists print it as OCIAA.
|
||||
[^15]: Hugh Wilford, *The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America* (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 230-231, with endnotes citing the C. D. Jackson Papers and the Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Papers.
|
||||
[^16]: *The Reporter*, June 21, 1949 (Vol. 1, No. 5), masthead, https://archive.org/details/sim_reporter_1949-06-21_1_5_0.
|
||||
[^17]: *The Reporter*, December 15, 1955 (Vol. 13, No. 10), masthead, https://archive.org/details/sim_reporter_1955-12-15_13_10_0.
|
||||
[^18]: *The Reporter*, November 23, 1961 (Vol. 25, No. 9), masthead, https://archive.org/details/sim_reporter_1961-11-23_25_9.
|
||||
[^19]: CIA memorandum for the Director, "Magazine Piece: 'The China Lobby' by Charles Christian Wertenbaker (for Reporter magazine)," March 19, 1952, CIA-RDP57-00384R000200090021-0, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp57-00384r000200090021-0. The memorandum's author is redacted in the released copy. Sole source for the pre-publication contact.
|
||||
[^20]: Hans Renders, review of Elke van Cassel, *A Cold War Magazine of Causes: A Critical History of The Reporter, 1949-1968* (self-published, 573 pp.), "Culturele propaganda," *Media Facts* (2007), p. 45, https://hansrendersarchive.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Elke-van-Cassel-A-cold-war-magazine-History-of-the-reporter-Media-Facts-1020074.pdf. Dutch-language review, translated. Sole source for the magazine's position on McCarthy.
|
||||
[^21]: Richard J. Aldrich, "OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on United Europe, 1948-60," *Diplomacy & Statecraft* 8, no. 1 (1997), pp. 184-227, at pp. 192 (leadership) and 211-212 (Braden's assertion; the Rabattet passage), DOI 10.1080/09592299708406035, https://text.www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf. The quoted sentence is Aldrich's account of Rabattet's conclusion.
|
||||
[^22]: David Barnby, *The EU: A Corporatist Racket* (Orinoco Standard, 2014), pp. 85-88, citing F. X. Rebattet, "The European Movement 1945-1953" (thesis, 1962, Bodleian Library, Oxford). Self-published secondary account; the names are stated there to be taken from the thesis.
|
||||
[^23]: Howard L. Bevis to Allen W. Dulles, February 7, 1958, with program and participant list, "Conference on America's Human Resources," CIA-RDP80B01676R003800020106-4, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80b01676r003800020106-4.
|
||||
[^24]: Senato della Repubblica, Archivio storico, Max Ascoli fonds, sottofascicolo 15, "Letters expressing regrets upon closing of The Reporter from personal friends of Max Ascoli, 1968," index of names, https://patrimonio.archivio.senato.it/inventario/scheda/max-ascoli/IT-AFS-005-002785/letters-expressing-regrets-upon-closing-of-the-reporter-from-personal-friends-of-max-ascoli-1968. The index lists "Dulles Allen W., photocopy TL May 27" among letters with carbon replies from Ascoli.
|
||||
[^25]: *Citizens TV Protest Committee and Clarksburg Publishing Company v. Federal Communications Commission*, No. 18,738 (D.C. Cir.), brief for appellants and transcript of record (statement of questions presented and statement of facts, including the published notice of the March 1963 application), https://archive.org/details/dc_circ_1964_18738_citizens_tv_protest_comm_et_al_v_fed_comm_commn.
|
||||
[^26]: "Reporter Magazine To Stop Publication With June 13 Issue," *Wall Street Journal*, April 10, 1968 (stamped copy in the CIA reading room, CIA-RDP88-01314R000100620020-5), https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01314r000100620020-5. The article is credited to a Wall Street Journal staff reporter and names Ascoli and his wife Marion as the magazine's sole owners.
|
||||
[^27]: Senato della Repubblica, Archivio storico, "Max Ascoli" fonds, introduction ("Introduzione archivistica"), https://patrimonio.archivio.senato.it/inventario/howard-gotlieb-archival-research-center/max-ascoli/introduzione.
|
||||
80
10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Robert M. Brier.md
Normal file
80
10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Robert M. Brier.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,80 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Scientists & Researchers"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Parapsychology
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- Philosophy
|
||||
- Egyptology
|
||||
- InstituteForParapsychology
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Robert M. Brier
|
||||
- Robert Brier
|
||||
- Dr. Robert M. Brier
|
||||
summary: "Robert M. Brier was a research fellow at the Institute for Parapsychology, later a philosophy professor at C.W. Post College, and then an Egyptologist at the Webb Institute."
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "Graduate student, studies in psychology and phenomenology"
|
||||
start: 1964
|
||||
end: 1966
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "taught the course Experimental Parapsychology, spring 1975"
|
||||
start: 1975
|
||||
end: 1975
|
||||
fn: 6
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Institute for Parapsychology]]"
|
||||
role: "Research fellow"
|
||||
start: 1966
|
||||
end: 1970
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[C.W. Post College]]"
|
||||
role: "Assistant professor, associate professor, professor; chairman of the philosophy department 1980 to 1996"
|
||||
start: 1971
|
||||
end: 2003
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Webb Institute]]"
|
||||
role: "Adjunct assistant professor (Egyptology)"
|
||||
start: 2012
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Robert M. Brier was a research fellow at the [[Institute for Parapsychology]] in Durham, North Carolina, in the late 1960s, taught philosophy at [[C.W. Post College]] of [[Long Island University]] for three decades, and later joined the faculty of the [[Webb Institute]] as an Egyptologist.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Education
|
||||
|
||||
Brier received an A.B. from [[Hunter College]] in 1964 and studied psychology and phenomenology at the graduate school of the [[New School for Social Research]] from 1964 to 1966.[^1] A Ph.D. dated 1970 is recorded for him, with the institution printed as "University of North Caroline."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Parapsychology research, 1966 to 1970
|
||||
|
||||
Brier was a research fellow at the Institute for Parapsychology, formerly the [[Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory]], in Durham from 1966 to 1970.[^1] A 1975 bibliography of parapsychology lists [[Joseph B. Rhine]]'s *Parapsychology Today* (New York: Citadel Press, 1968) as co-written with Robert Brier.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
With [[S. R. Feather]], Brier published "The possible effect of the checker in precognition tests" in the *Journal of Parapsychology* in 1968.[^3] The March 1971 issue of the *Journal of Parapsychology* carries an article on repetitions of the French precognition experiments with mice, in which the authors state that Dr. Robert Brier made important contributions at several points.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### C.W. Post College and Long Island University
|
||||
|
||||
A 1975 directory lists "Dr. Robert M. Brier" in the philosophy department of C.W. Post College (Long Island University).[^5] His career there is recorded as an assistant professorship from 1971 to 1974, an associate professorship from 1974 to 1980, a professorship from 1980 to 2003, and the chairmanship of the philosophy department from 1980 to 1996. From 2003 he is recorded as a senior research fellow there.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### New School listing
|
||||
|
||||
The 1975 directory also lists Brier under the New School for Social Research, at 66 West 12th Street, together with [[Martin Ebon]] and [[Gilbert Roller]] and others.[^5] The school's *Bulletin* for spring 1975 lists the course "Experimental Parapsychology," taught by Bob Brier on Wednesdays from February 5 and covering telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition and "a history of the development of parapsychology from magic to science," and a course on Egyptian culture; its faculty biography reads "Bob Brier, Ph.D., University of North Carolina; Research Fellow, Institute for Parapsychology. Associate Professor of Philosophy, C. W. Post College. Member, Parapsychological Association. Editor, with J. B. Rhine, Parapsychology Today; author, Precognition and the Philosophy of Science."[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Egyptology and publications
|
||||
|
||||
From 2012 Brier is recorded as an adjunct assistant professor of Egyptology at the Webb Institute.[^1] His publications include *Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs* (New York: Macmillan, 2013), *Secret of the Great Pyramid*, with [[Jean-Pierre Houdin]] (Smithsonian, 2008), and "Return to the Great Pyramid," *Archaeology* (July-August 2009). His listed honors include a Fulbright fellowship to Turkey (1985), a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in Islamic science at Columbia University (1986), and the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching (1988).[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Webb Institute, faculty profile, "Robert M. Brier," curriculum vitae as posted. https://www.webb.edu/academics/faculty/robert-m-brier/
|
||||
[^2]: CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200230018-6, references list of Walter and Mary Jo Uphoff, *New Psychic Frontiers* (Minneapolis: Bolger Publications, 1975): "Rhine, Joseph B. (with Robert Brier), Parapsychology Today, Citadel Press, New York (1968)." https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001200230018-6
|
||||
[^3]: S. R. Feather and R. Brier, "The possible effect of the checker in precognition tests," *Journal of Parapsychology* 32 (1968): 167-175, as listed in the bibliography of CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00789R002200410001-2. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r002200410001-2
|
||||
[^4]: Walter J. Levy, Jr., L. Allen Mayo, Jr., et al., "Repetition of the French Precognition Experiments with Mice," *Journal of Parapsychology* 35, no. 1 (March 1971), acknowledgment, CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400100021-6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000400100021-6
|
||||
[^5]: Walter and Mary Jo Uphoff, *New Psychic Frontiers* (Minneapolis: Bolger Publications, 1975), chapter V, pp. 228-229 (C.W. Post College and New School for Social Research entries). CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200230018-6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001200230018-6
|
||||
[^6]: New School for Social Research, *New School Bulletin*, spring 1975, vol. 32, no. 5 (December 27, 1974), course 2750-0 (p. 88), Egyptian culture course (p. 82), faculty biography (p. 328). https://books.google.com/books?id=Ez07AAAAMAAJ
|
||||
162
10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Alvin Johnson.md
Normal file
162
10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Alvin Johnson.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,162 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Alvin Johnson
|
||||
- Alvin Saunders Johnson
|
||||
- Alvin S. Johnson
|
||||
- Johnson, Alvin
|
||||
- Johnson, Alvin Saunders
|
||||
category: "Scientists & Researchers"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- AlvinJohnson
|
||||
- NewSchoolForSocialResearch
|
||||
- UniversityInExile
|
||||
- EmergencyCommittee
|
||||
- RockefellerFoundation
|
||||
- EncyclopaediaOfTheSocialSciences
|
||||
- FBIReporting
|
||||
summary: "Alvin Saunders Johnson was an American economist and editor who co-founded the New School for Social Research and organized the University in Exile for scholars displaced from Germany after 1933."
|
||||
born: 1874-12-18
|
||||
died: 1971-06-07
|
||||
location: "Homer, Nebraska; New York, New York; Upper Nyack, New York"
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: founded
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "co-founder"
|
||||
start: 1919
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "director, later president"
|
||||
start: 1922
|
||||
end: 1946
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[New Republic]]"
|
||||
role: "economics editor"
|
||||
start: 1917
|
||||
end: 1923
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences]]"
|
||||
role: "associate editor"
|
||||
start: 1927
|
||||
end: 1935
|
||||
fn: 35
|
||||
- type: informant_for
|
||||
with: "[[Federal Bureau of Investigation]]"
|
||||
role: "met regularly with FBI officials to report on the faculty, by his own acknowledgment in private letters"
|
||||
start: 1930
|
||||
fn: 29
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Alvin Saunders Johnson (December 18, 1874 to June 7, 1971) was an American economist, editor and educator who co-founded the [[New School for Social Research]] in New York and served as its director and then its president.[^1][^2] He was associate editor of the [[Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences]] and the organizer of the [[University in Exile]], the New School division that gave refuge to scholars whose careers were being upended in Europe after 1933.[^3] The [[New York Times]] reported on June 9, 1971, that he died "Monday night" at his home in Upper Nyack, aged 96, and had been president emeritus since 1945.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Nebraska, Columbia and the New Republic
|
||||
|
||||
Johnson was born near [[Homer, Nebraska]], and took a bachelor's degree in classics at the [[University of Nebraska]] in 1897. He received a doctorate in economics from [[Columbia University]] in 1902.[^1] He taught between 1902 and 1917 at [[Bryn Mawr College]], Columbia, [[Cornell University]], [[Stanford University]], the University of Nebraska, the [[University of Texas]] and the [[University of Chicago]].[^1] From 1902 to 1906 he edited the [[Political Science Quarterly]], and in the same period he took part in a study of prostitution in New York City made for the [[Committee of Fifteen]], published in 1902 as *The Social Evil*.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
From 1917 he was economics editor of the [[New Republic]] until about 1923.[^1] The school's histories page describes him as editor of the magazine from 1917.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The New School, 1919 to 1946
|
||||
|
||||
The school's archive says that in 1919 Johnson joined a group of New Republic colleagues and Columbia professors, including [[Charles Beard]], [[James Harvey Robinson]], [[John Dewey]] and [[Wesley Clair Mitchell]], to found the school.[^1] The school's histories page gives 1918 as the year Johnson co-founded it.[^2] The Times obituary gives 1919 and lists Beard, Dewey, [[Thorstein Veblen]], Robinson and Mitchell as his co-founders.[^4] Johnson's own memoir names Mrs. Willard Straight and Mrs. George Bacon among the liberals who launched it.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The school had no endowment. Rutkoff and Scott's history records that Robinson and Beard found in [[Herbert Croly]] and [[Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight]] "sympathetic and resourceful patrons," and that ten-year pledges of nearly $300,000 came largely from Straight.[^6][^7] In 1922 the New Republic was short of money, and the same history reports that its owners wanted the school closed so that Straight would support the magazine.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
Johnson became director in April 1922, after serving as a trustee, and wrote to Straight after taking the post.[^1][^9] He held the post as director and later president until 1946.[^1] The school's histories page says he officially retired in December 1945 and died in 1971 in [[Upper Nyack, New York]].[^2] He continued as president emeritus, raising money for the school, for about twenty-five years after that.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### The University in Exile
|
||||
|
||||
In April 1933 Johnson began to raise $60,000 a year for two years to support a faculty of fifteen scholars at $4,000 each.[^3] Before the largest gift he had collected between $7,000 and $15,000.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Hiram J. Halle]] gave the entire sum. Rutkoff and Scott write that Halle had pledged the whole amount Johnson required before the announcement of May 13, 1933, that he wanted his name kept out of it, and that he had "made his fortune in petroleum refining and finance."[^10] In Johnson's account, Halle telephoned him after a letter Johnson had written to [[Edwin R.A. Seligman]] reached him. Johnson had answered Halle's question about the amount pledged with "Twelve thousand," and Halle said: "I am prepared to guarantee the sixty thousand a year for two years, so that you can go ahead at once." Johnson writes that [[Frank Altschul]] vouched for Halle's credit, saying that Halle's signature on a check for a million dollars would be accepted by any bank, and that Altschul advised keeping the offer quiet because nobody would contribute if he knew Halle was ready to carry the whole load.[^11] The historian [[Daniel Bessner]] describes Halle as part owner of the [[Gulf Oil Company]] and associated with the [[Rockefeller Foundation]].[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
Rutkoff and Scott write that Johnson recruited two additional "Rockefeller scholars," the Italian political scientist [[Max Ascoli]] and the Austrian [[Erich Hula]], and that Johnson persuaded the Foundation to appoint [[Hans Simons]] in Hula's place after Hula first rejected the offer.[^13] The same history lists Johnson's 1934 additions as Alfred Kahler, Fritz Lehmann, Arthur Feiler and Hans Staudinger.[^13] Ascoli joined the University in Exile in late 1933.[^14] Johnson's account of the appointments ends with [[Kurt Riezler]]: "With Riezler the roster was closed."[^15] The school's history records that the Foundation and [[Harold Laski]] of the [[London School of Economics]] recommended [[Leo Strauss]] to Johnson.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
### Rockefeller Foundation and the choice of scholars
|
||||
|
||||
Johnson and the Foundation agreed on about a dozen individuals to rescue. The Foundation's associate in [[Paris]], [[Tracy Kittredge]], wrote on March 29, 1933.[^17][^18] Rutkoff and Scott write that the [[Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars]] acted for the Foundation in these cases, and that the Foundation wished to salvage "the most empirical segment of German social science."[^19][^20] The Rockefeller Archive Center's account of the Foundation's refugee program says its officers worked closely with Johnson from 1933 onward, and it cites a July 31, 1941 letter from [[Marc Bloch]] to Johnson in the Foundation's records.[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
Johnson writes that the Foundation "had never been very cordial to the New School or to me," and that he decided to ask its president, [[Raymond Fosdick]], for traveling expenses and a two-year stipend for five scholars. He revised the figure to fifteen on the bus to [[Rockefeller Center]] and to twenty-five in the elevator, and when Fosdick asked how many could be cared for he answered that the project was not worth undertaking "unless we are prepared to take care of a hundred." Fosdick said he would consult his trustees and telephoned the next day to say they had approved.[^22] He also writes that the Foundation supplied expert information on which refugees were Nazi or Fascist.[^22] The Times obituary of Johnson repeats the Fosdick account and states that the Foundation approved the request and assured the financing of 100 emigres.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Emergency Committee
|
||||
|
||||
The Emergency Committee was formed in May 1933, when [[Alfred E. Cohn]], [[Bernard Flexner]] and [[Fred M. Stein]] approached [[Stephen Duggan]] of the [[Institute of International Education]]. [[Felix Warburg]] and [[Alan Gregg]] advised the organizers, and [[Livingston Farrand]] chaired the committee.[^23] The committee made grants to host institutions rather than to scholars, and it made 335 grants from about 6,000 applicants.[^24] Duggan invited Johnson to lunch after the University in Exile was announced and told him of the committee's plan.[^25] [[Edward R. Murrow]] was its assistant secretary until 1935.[^23]
|
||||
|
||||
The committee's records hold a New School file for 1933 to 1945, and they include Johnson's name in executive committee correspondence for 1940 to 1945. They also hold applicant files filed under the heading "Non-Grantees" for [[Hans Speier]], [[Gerhard Colm]], [[Arnold Brecht]], Hans Simons, [[Hans Staudinger]], [[Jacob Marschak]], [[Adolph Lowe]], [[Emil Lederer]], Ascoli, Riezler and [[Wilhelm Reich]].[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Ecole Libre
|
||||
|
||||
In 1941 Johnson facilitated the establishment of the [[Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes]] at the New School, which the school's archive calls the Free French School. The school's finding aid says the Ecole Libre offered courses from 1942 to 1946, that it was legally part of the New School, and that its board included [[Henri Focillon]], [[Jean Perrin]], [[Paul van Zeeland]], [[Jacques Maritain]] and [[Gustave Cohen]]. The school severed the Ecole Libre in June 1947.[^27] The Foundation's records group an Ecole Libre file, titled "Refugee Scholars - New School for Social Research - (French Institute)," under its New School grants.[^28]
|
||||
|
||||
### Reporting on the faculty
|
||||
|
||||
Rutkoff and Scott write that after 1947 Johnson's anticommunist rhetoric intensified, "and in his private letters he acknowledged that he had been meeting regularly with FBI officials since the 1930s to report on the faculty."[^29] The same history quotes [[Sidney Hook]] that on at least one occasion Johnson "wanted to get rid of a Communist Party member" but "delegated it to [[Clara Mayer]]," and says that in 1940 Johnson supported the adoption by the [[Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science]] of "an explicitly anticommunist clause in its charter" in response to the school's difficulty with the [[United States Department of State|Department of State]] and immigration authorities.[^29]
|
||||
|
||||
Rutkoff and Scott write that a Rockefeller Foundation memorandum "indicated that Johnson had also monitored files of 'enemy aliens' in the early 1940s for the federal district attorney." Their endnote for the passage cites a memorandum of January 27, 1942, in the "Hans Eisler File" of the Rockefeller Foundation Archives, with a letter from Johnson to Urban of December 9, 1948.[^30] In the early 1950s, the same history reports, the school's administration received "inquiries from congressional and Senate committees, the FBI, and numerous individuals."[^31]
|
||||
|
||||
### Enemy alien hearing board and the 1942 panel
|
||||
|
||||
Johnson's memoir records that after America entered the war he was appointed to an enemy alien hearing board, with [[Maurice Davidson]], chairman, and [[Joseph Leary Delaney]]. He writes: "Case after case came before us, well prepared in advance by the FBI. After we had studied the record and had heard the FBI investigators, we would hear the accused."[^32]
|
||||
|
||||
In early 1942, Rutkoff and Scott write, Johnson, Hans Staudinger and [[Alexander Makinsky]] met with State Department officials in Washington at a meeting Johnson requested after complaining of departmental "high jinks." They spent the day testifying before what the history describes as "a governmental panel comprised of representatives from the FBI, the Visa Division, Naval Intelligence, and the Department of the Army," and Johnson "had to defend himself against charges of heading a 'Communist outfit.'" Rutkoff and Scott add that officials of the Visa Division regarded the creation of the Gaullist Ecole Libre at the New School as dangerous to American policy.[^33]
|
||||
|
||||
### Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences
|
||||
|
||||
The *Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences* appeared under Seligman as editor-in-chief, with Johnson as associate editor. The title page of volume three, published in 1930, gives that credit.[^34] Bessner writes that Johnson accepted Seligman's offer of the associate editorship in 1927, and that "both the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations contributed $1.25 million to the project, which the [[Social Science Research Council]] oversaw."[^35] Rutkoff and Scott name a different pair of funders, the [[Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial]] and the [[Russell Sage Foundation]], through which Seligman "secured financial support."[^36]
|
||||
|
||||
### New York anti-discrimination work
|
||||
|
||||
In 1943 Johnson served as vice-chairman of New York State's [[Commission on Discrimination in Employment]]. The New School's finding aid says he helped draft and pass the New York Fair Employment Act of 1945, and that Governor [[Thomas E. Dewey]] sent him the signing statement and pen.[^37] The [[New York State Division of Human Rights]] describes the 1945 measure as the [[Ives-Quinn Act]], which Dewey signed and which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, creed, color and national origin.[^38] In February 1947 Johnson resigned as chairman of the State Committee Against Discrimination in Education because of his duties on the State Commission for a State University.[^39]
|
||||
|
||||
### Papers and later years
|
||||
|
||||
The New School Archives hold the Alvin Saunders Johnson collection, 6.5 cubic feet dated 1908 to 1973, in four series: biographical, correspondence, subject files and writings. Its correspondence and subject files concern fundraising, a proposed labor college and a Faculty of Retired Professors.[^40] The finding aid places institutional papers from Johnson's New School years at the [[Yale University]] Library, and says that papers from his [[West Nyack, New York]] home went to the Love Library at his alma mater, the University of Nebraska, which it places in Omaha. Bessner cites a Johnson collection at the Love Library in Lincoln.[^40][^41] Yale University's Manuscripts and Archives holds the Alvin Saunders Johnson papers (MS 615), 1902 to 1969, 5.75 linear feet in 15 boxes, given by Johnson, [[Agnes de Lima]] and Edith Levy in 1967, arranged as correspondence, biographical and subject files, and writings. Its scope note says the papers contain only a very limited amount of material on the New School, the University in Exile, the Ecole Libre and the state commission on discrimination in employment.[^42] Johnson's autobiography, *Pioneer's Progress*, was published in 1952.[^40] He received honorary degrees from [[Brandeis University]] in 1957, [[Hebrew Union College]] in 1960 and [[Freie Universität Berlin]] in 1964.[^37]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "Alvin Saunders Johnson collection," NS-01-01-01, biographical note, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/230 (accessed October 9, 2026).
|
||||
[^2]: "Alvin Johnson," Histories of The New School, https://histories.newschool.edu/node/157 (co-founder in 1918, director in 1922, official retirement in December 1945, death on June 7, 1971 in Upper Nyack, New York).
|
||||
[^3]: "University in Exile," Histories of The New School, https://histories.newschool.edu/histories/university-exile ($60,000 a year for two years, a faculty of fifteen at $4,000 each).
|
||||
[^4]: "Dr. Alvin Johnson Of New School Dies," *The New York Times*, June 9, 1971, p. 1, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/09/archives/dr-alvin-johnson-of-new-school-dies-dr-alvin-johnson-of-new-school.html (died "Monday night" at Upper Nyack at 96; president emeritus since 1945; founded 1919 with Beard, Dewey, Veblen, Robinson and Mitchell; took his case to Raymond B. Fosdick, president of the Rockefeller Foundation; Foundation "approved the request and assured the financing of 100 emigres").
|
||||
[^5]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress* (New York: Viking Press, 1952; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 167.
|
||||
[^6]: Peter Rutkoff and William Scott, *New School: A History of the New School for Social Research* (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 10 to 11.
|
||||
[^7]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 21: "ten-year pledges of support amounting to nearly $300,000, much of it from Dorothy Straight."
|
||||
[^8]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 28: the New Republic's owners "wanted to terminate the New School so that Straight would provide his magazine with more support."
|
||||
[^9]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 30, on Johnson's April 1922 letter to Dorothy Straight after taking over as director. The letter is cited in the book's note 40.
|
||||
[^10]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 92: Halle "had pledged the entire sum that Johnson required"; before the gift Johnson "had collected only between $7,000 and $15,000"; Halle "made his fortune in petroleum refining and finance"; Halle's anonymity was kept to avoid discouraging other donors.
|
||||
[^11]: Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, p. 340: Halle's call after a letter Johnson wrote to Seligman; Johnson's answer "Twelve thousand"; Halle: "I am prepared to guarantee the sixty thousand a year for two years, so that you can go ahead at once"; Altschul: "Hiram Halle's signature on a check for a million dollars would be accepted by any bank in New York. But we'll keep his amazing offer under our hats. Nobody will contribute if he knows Halle is ready to carry the whole load."
|
||||
[^12]: Daniel Morris Bessner, *The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State* (Duke University dissertation), note 16, on Halle as part owner of the Gulf Oil Company and associated with the Rockefeller Foundation, which spent $1.4 million helping displaced scholars. Sole source for the Gulf Oil ownership.
|
||||
[^13]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 102: "Beyond these original appointments, Johnson recruited two additional Rockefeller scholars, Italian political scientist Max Ascoli and Austrian Erich Hula"; Hula "originally rejected Johnson's offer"; "Johnson persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to appoint Hans Simons"; 1934 additions Alfred Kahler, Fritz Lehman, Arthur Feiler and Hans Staudinger.
|
||||
[^14]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 118: "Ascoli joined the University in Exile in late 1933."
|
||||
[^15]: Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, p. 347: "With Riezler the roster was closed."
|
||||
[^16]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 146: "The Rockefeller Foundation and Harold Laski of the London School of Economics recommended Strauss to Alvin Johnson."
|
||||
[^17]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 86: Johnson and the Rockefeller Foundation "had agreed to rescue" a dozen individuals.
|
||||
[^18]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 91, printed as "Tracy Kittridge, an associate in the Paris office of the Rockefeller Foundation," writing on March 29, 1933.
|
||||
[^19]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 94: "the Emergency Committee, acting for the Rockefeller Foundation."
|
||||
[^20]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 95: the Foundation "wished to salvage the most empirical segment of German social science."
|
||||
[^21]: Rockefeller Archive Center, "The Rockefeller Foundation's Refugee Scholar Program," REsource, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/the-rockefeller-foundations-refugee-scholar-program-world-war-ii-nazi-europe/ (Foundation officers worked with Johnson from 1933; letter from Marc Bloch to Johnson, July 31, 1941, RAC, RG 1.1, Series 200, Box 48, Folder 550).
|
||||
[^22]: Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, pp. 366 to 367: "The president of the Foundation, Raymond Fosdick, whom I regarded as our foremost international educational statesman, would at least hear me. I decided to ask for traveling expenses and a two years' stipend for five scholars"; "five," "fifteen," "twenty-five," and "unless we are prepared to take care of a hundred"; "The trustees had approved and I could go ahead immediately." The statement on expert information about Nazi or Fascist refugees is at p. 369.
|
||||
[^23]: New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, "Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars records, 1933-1945," MssCol 922, biographical note, https://archives.nypl.org/mss/922 (Cohn, Flexner and Stein contacted Duggan in May 1933; Warburg and Gregg served as advisors; Farrand chaired; Murrow served as assistant secretary until 1935).
|
||||
[^24]: New York Public Library, MssCol 922, scope note: grants for 335 scholars from about 6,000 applicants.
|
||||
[^25]: Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, p. 344: "Stephen Duggan, of the Institute for International Education, invited me to lunch."
|
||||
[^26]: New York Public Library, MssCol 922, container list: Series II, New School file, 1933-1945, box 148, folders 1 to 12; Series VI, executive committee correspondence, "Johnson, Alvin 1940-1945," box 190, folder 8; Series I.B, Non-Grantees: Riezler (box 107, folder 16), Speier (box 118, folder 17), Ascoli (box 38, folder 46), Colm (box 50, folder 5), Brecht (box 46, folder 36), Simons (box 117, folder 3), Staudinger (box 119, folder 3), Marschak (box 93, folder 52), Lowe (box 91, folder 23), Lederer (box 86, folder 44), Reich (box 105, folder 36).
|
||||
[^27]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "David Hahn Ecole Libre papers," https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/526 (Johnson facilitated the establishment of the school in 1941; courses 1942 to 1946; board members Focillon, Perrin, Van Zeeland, Maritain and Cohen; severed from the New School in June 1947).
|
||||
[^28]: Rockefeller Archive Center, DIMES catalog, Rockefeller Foundation records, RG 1.1, Series 200, file group "Refugee Scholars - New School for Social Research - (French Institute)," https://dimes.rockarch.org
|
||||
[^29]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 226: "in his private letters he acknowledged that he had been meeting regularly with FBI officials since the 1930s to report on the faculty"; Hook: Johnson "wanted to get rid of a Communist Party member" but "delegated it to Clara Mayer"; 1940 "an explicitly anticommunist clause in its charter." Note 22 (p. 296).
|
||||
[^30]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 226, text: "A Rockefeller Foundation memorandum indicated that Johnson had also monitored files of 'enemy aliens' in the early 1940s for the federal district attorney." Note 22 (p. 296): "Johnson to Urban (December 9, 1948), JPYU; memorandum (January 27, 1942), Hans Eisler File, Rockefeller Foundation Archives; Sidney Hook, telephone interview with Professor Roy Wortman, Kenyon College (June 20, 1981)." The note names no author for the memorandum. Sole source for the enemy alien monitoring.
|
||||
[^31]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 228: the administration "also received inquiries from congressional and Senate committees, the FBI, and numerous individuals" during the early 1950s.
|
||||
[^32]: Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, p. 370: "After America entered the war I was appointed to an enemy alien hearing board, with Maurice Davidson, chairman, and Joseph Leary Delaney. Case after case came before us, well prepared in advance by the FBI. After we had studied the record and had heard the FBI investigators, we would hear the accused."
|
||||
[^33]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 135: "In early 1942, Johnson, Hans Staudinger, and Makinsky met with State Department officials in Washington. Johnson, having complained of departmental 'high jinks,' requested the meeting. They spent the day testifying before a governmental panel comprised of representatives from the FBI, the Visa Division, Naval Intelligence, and the Department of the Army"; "Johnson had to defend himself against charges of heading a 'Communist outfit'"; Visa Division officials "regarded the creation of the Gaullist Ecole Libre at the New School, in particular, as dangerous to American policy."
|
||||
[^34]: *Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences*, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1930), title page: "Editor-in-Chief Edwin R. A. Seligman, Associate Editor Alvin Johnson." https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofso0000unse_b9t1
|
||||
[^35]: Bessner, *The Night Watchman*, dissertation text on the encyclopedia and note 14: Johnson accepted Seligman's 1927 offer; "Both the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations contributed $1.25 million to the project, which the Social Science Research Council oversaw." Competing account at note 36.
|
||||
[^36]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 67: "Seligman secured financial support from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller and Russell Sage foundations."
|
||||
[^37]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "Alvin Johnson honorary degrees and family photographs," NA.0035.01, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/567 (vice-chairmanship of the New York State Commission on Discrimination in Employment in 1943; the 1945 letter and Dewey's signing pen; honorary degrees from Brandeis University in 1957, Hebrew Union College in 1960 and Freie Universitat Berlin in 1964).
|
||||
[^38]: New York State Division of Human Rights, "About the Division," https://dhr.ny.gov/about (Governor Thomas E. Dewey signed the Ives-Quinn Anti-Discrimination Act in 1945, prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, creed, color and national origin).
|
||||
[^39]: "Dr. Alvin Johnson, Chairman of the State Committee Against Discrimination in Education," *The Omaha Guide*, February 8, 1947, p. 2. https://nebnewspapers.unl.edu/lccn/sn93062828/1947-02-08/ed-1/seq-2/
|
||||
[^40]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "Alvin Saunders Johnson collection," NS-01-01-01, abstract, arrangement, biographical note and related materials (see note 1).
|
||||
[^41]: Bessner, *The Night Watchman*, note 15: Alvin Johnson Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Love Library, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Box 47, folder "Graduate Faculty-University in Exile."
|
||||
[^42]: Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives, "Alvin Saunders Johnson papers," MS 615, https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/3846 (accessed October 9, 2026).
|
||||
231
10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Bob Kerrey.md
Normal file
231
10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Bob Kerrey.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,231 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Bob Kerrey
|
||||
- J. Robert Kerrey
|
||||
- Joseph Robert Kerrey
|
||||
- Robert Kerrey
|
||||
- Joseph R. Kerry
|
||||
category: "Political Figure"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Politician
|
||||
- Senator
|
||||
- Governor
|
||||
- NavySeal
|
||||
- ThanhPhong
|
||||
- NationalReconnaissanceOffice
|
||||
- NROCommission
|
||||
- NineElevenCommission
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- IraqWar
|
||||
- FulbrightUniversityVietnam
|
||||
summary: "Former Navy SEAL, Nebraska governor and senator, co-chair of the 2000 National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office, 9/11 Commission member and New School president, linked to the 1969 Thanh Phong killings."
|
||||
location: "Lincoln, Nebraska"
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "seventh president"
|
||||
start: 2001-01
|
||||
end: 2010-12-31
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Tenet Healthcare]]"
|
||||
start: 2001-03
|
||||
end: 2012-03
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Tenet Healthcare]]"
|
||||
role: "independent director, audit and compensation committees"
|
||||
start: 2012-11-30
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Genworth Financial]]"
|
||||
start: 2004
|
||||
end: 2012-03-14
|
||||
fn: 19
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Jones Apparel Group]]"
|
||||
start: 2002
|
||||
end: 2005
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[The Aerospace Corporation]]"
|
||||
role: "trustee"
|
||||
start: 2001-08
|
||||
end: 2002-08
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Fulbright University Vietnam]]"
|
||||
role: "chairman of the board of trustees"
|
||||
start: 2016-05-16
|
||||
fn: 53
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[United States Senate]]"
|
||||
start: 1989
|
||||
end: 2001
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]]"
|
||||
role: "vice chairman, 105th Congress"
|
||||
start: 1997
|
||||
end: 1998
|
||||
fn: 21
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office]]"
|
||||
role: "co-chair"
|
||||
start: 2000-02-01
|
||||
end: 2000-11
|
||||
fn: 22
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States]]"
|
||||
start: 2003-12-10
|
||||
end: 2004-08-21
|
||||
fn: 23
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[Committee for the Liberation of Iraq]]"
|
||||
start: 2002-11
|
||||
fn: 28
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Thanh Phong]]"
|
||||
start: 1969-02-25
|
||||
fn: 6
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Carmen Group]]"
|
||||
start: 2013-04
|
||||
fn: 51
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Joseph Robert "Bob" Kerrey (J. Robert Kerrey, born August 27, 1943[^1]) is a former [[United States Navy]] SEAL officer who served as [[Governor of Nebraska]] and as a [[United States Senate|United States Senator]] from Nebraska, and who was president of the [[New School for Social Research]] from January 2001 to December 2010.[^1][^2] He was vice chairman of the [[Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]] in the 105th Congress (1997 to 1998), co-chaired the [[National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office]] in 2000, and sat on the [[National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States]] from 2003 to 2004.[^3] He sat on the boards of [[Tenet Healthcare]], [[Genworth Financial]], [[Jones Apparel Group]] and, according to Tenet's 2001 proxy statement, the board of trustees of [[The Aerospace Corporation]].[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Navy service and the Thanh Phong raid
|
||||
|
||||
Kerrey graduated from the [[University of Nebraska]] in 1966, attended [[Officer Candidate School]] at [[Naval Station Newport]], and was deployed to [[Vietnam War|Vietnam]] as a Navy SEAL officer in 1969.[^5] On the night of February 25, 1969, as a 25-year-old lieutenant, he led a seven-man commando team into [[Thanh Phong]], a hamlet in the [[Mekong Delta]]. [[Gregory L. Vistica]] wrote in [[The New York Times Magazine]] in April 2001 that "around midnight on Feb. 25, 1969, Kerrey and his men killed at least 13 unarmed women and children," and that "witnesses and official records give varying accounts of exactly what happened."[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Amy Waldman]] of [[The New York Times]] reported on April 25, 2001 that Vistica, a former [[Newsweek]] reporter, had begun the story for Newsweek, which decided not to publish it after Kerrey decided not to run for president in 2000, and that Vistica did more than a year of further reporting before the Magazine published it. Kerrey first spoke publicly about the raid in an April 18, 2001 speech at the [[Virginia Military Institute]]: "I have been haunted by it for 32 years." The Magazine article was posted on the Times website on April 25 as the cover story of that Sunday's issue, and [[60 Minutes II]] was to broadcast its report the following Tuesday.[^7] CBS carries Part I of its transcript under the date May 1, 2001.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
Kerrey's account. Kerrey told Vistica in a 1998 interview that "we took fire from the target." Vistica reported that an after-action report says the team "received several rounds from about 100 yards," and that in April 2001 Kerrey said he "couldn't be absolutely certain that shots were fired."[^9] Kerrey told Vistica in 1998: "The thing that I will remember until the day I die is walking in and finding, I don't know, 14 or so, I don't even know what the number was, women and children who were dead."[^9] Vistica wrote that Kerrey read six pages of after-action reports in late 1998.[^9] CBS reported that Kerrey agreed to talk to the Times Magazine and 60 Minutes II only after Vistica discovered previously classified military documents that suggested women and children had been killed.[^8] In his 2001 interview with [[Dan Rather]], Kerrey said the squad "just emptied everything we could into this place and we were taking fire." He added: "There was a cluster of women and children, they were all dead. So that's the outcome." Of the first hooch, CBS reported that Kerrey said the squad used knives on five men, and Kerrey said: "in my mind, I personally killed all of them."[^8] Asked about a battle report reading "two hooches destroyed, 14 VC KIA," Kerrey said "We considered everybody in that area to be VC and that's how we would report it."[^8] In the same program Kerrey said of Klann's version that "It is neither possible nor probable. It's not impossible that some version of what Gerhard is talking about happened. But it's not my memory."[^10] Kerrey and the five other SEALs on the operation, other than Klann, issued a statement in April 2001 that read: "At the village we received fire and we returned fire," and that the memory "that we rounded up women and children and shot them at point blank range, is simply not true."[^10][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
Klann's account. [[Gerhard Klann]], a member of Kerrey's squad, gave a different account to Vistica and to 60 Minutes II. Klann said the first hooch held a mixture of people, three of them children, and that his own job was to kill the old man there. He named Kerrey as the man who helped him: "Bob Kerrey. I think he kneeled on his chest and so I put his head back and cut this [sic] throat." CBS reported that Klann said the unit knew there were women and children before it opened fire at the second set of hooches, and Klann described the result: "It was carnage."[^8][^10] In 2001 Klann was a steel worker in Pennsylvania, and he stood by his story.[^10] Vistica wrote that Klann was reluctant to speak to him, ignoring two letters and numerous telephone calls over about six months, and relented after Vistica drove to his home in western Pennsylvania.[^9] Michael Ambrose, another member of the squad, told CBS that Kerrey helped Klann kill the old man at the first hooch, and disagreed with Klann that the villagers were rounded up and shot, while saying that they were shot at 20 to 50 feet, closer than Kerrey contends.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
Pham Tri Lanh's account. [[Pham Tri Lanh]] was 62 years old when 60 Minutes II interviewed her at Thanh Phong. She said she hid behind a banana tree and watched the Americans kill an old woman, an old man, two girls and a boy in the first hooch, the old man having been dragged to a water pump and his throat cut, and that the Americans then ordered villagers out of a bunker, lined them up and shot them from behind. CBS noted that she had been a Communist revolutionary during the war, and later reported that journalists who went to the village afterward said she now stated she had heard some of the killings rather than seen them.[^12] The [[Los Angeles Times]] reported on April 29, 2001 that Lanh, interviewed on April 28, said she had actually seen only the first two killings, having earlier claimed to have witnessed all of them.[^13] Dan Kennedy of the Providence Phoenix reported that [[Time]] magazine wrote of Lanh that "then she changed it, saying she hadn't actually seen the killings, but had only heard the screams and later seen the bodies," and that after telling Vistica and 60 Minutes II producer Tom Anderson that her husband had been a member of the Viet Cong, she denied it to Time. Kennedy quoted Time as asking whether she was "an honest witness, a propagandist or just an old woman with a hazy memory."[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
Bui Thi Luom's account. [[Bui Thi Luom]] was twelve at the time. She told journalists on April 28, 2001, according to the Los Angeles Times, that the commandos woke the occupants of an earthen shelter, ordered them to sit on the ground outside, and "then opened fire at close range"; she said 15 members of her family were killed and that she escaped with a knee wound.[^13] The [[Vietnam News Agency]], quoting the [[Washington Post]], reported that Luom said: "Nobody fired on the Americans before they initiated the fatal barrage."[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
The Vietnamese government's account. The Vietnam News Agency, the Vietnamese state news agency, reported on May 10, 2001: "The massacre of innocent civilians at Thanh Phong hamlet on a February night 32 years ago, as admitted by former U.S. senator, Bob Kerrey, has been exposed by Vietnamese witnesses during their interviews with a group of foreign journalists who visited the hamlet on April 28."[^14] The Los Angeles Times reported that the Vietnamese government allowed the journalists to visit Thanh Phong that Saturday, and that the government the previous week had welcomed Kerrey's show of remorse and suggested that he and other troubled veterans take "concrete and realistic actions" to help heal wounds left by the war.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
Kerrey on Lanh and Klann. Asked by Rather about the eyewitness who described an elderly man, an elderly woman and three children at the first hooch, Kerrey said that "Gerhard I will not contradict," and that "as to the eyewitness is at the very least, sympathetic to the Viet Cong. At the absolute very least." Asked what the most might be, he said: "Might be Viet Cong themselves."[^10] Kerrey rejected Klann's claim that he had tried to get Klann to change his story: "That is not true. God bless Gerhard, that is not, if I was gonna change Gerhard's story, I would have contacted him three years ago."[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
Hoffmann. Kerrey described his commanding officer, [[Roy Hoffmann]], to Vistica: "He wanted hooches destroyed and people killed." Vistica reported that Hoffmann agrees but says he never intended for his men to kill innocent women or children. Kerrey told Vistica in April 2001: "We were instructed not to take prisoners."[^16] Waldman reported that in television interviews on April 25 Kerrey was "more emphatic in denying that his unit knowingly killed women and children" than in his interviews with the Times over the previous two years, and in one broadcast interview described the incident as "a firefight."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The Bronze Star. For Thanh Phong Kerrey received a [[Bronze Star]]. The 60 Minutes II narration stated that the citation "credits Kerrey and his men with killing 21 Viet Cong." The Los Angeles Times wrote that Kerrey received the award "after his squad falsely reported that it had killed 21 Viet Cong in the attack." Asked by Rather whether the award was inappropriate, Kerrey said: "I think it's inappropriately awarded, yeah." He also said: "I didn't send it back. But I've never worn it."[^13][^15]
|
||||
|
||||
The Medal of Honor. Two weeks after Thanh Phong, according to CBS, Kerrey led a SEAL team up cliffs it described as 300 feet high against Viet Cong on an island off [[Nha Trang]]; CBS reported that he split the team, there was crossfire, he was wounded and he lost a leg, and that Kerrey said he wanted to take the enemy soldiers prisoner on that mission. [[Richard Nixon]] later presented him the [[Medal of Honor]].[^15] The Navy's citation, as published by the Military Times Hall of Valor, gives March 14, 1969 as the action date and presents the award "for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving as a SEAL Team Leader for Seal Team ONE during action against enemy aggressor (Viet Cong) forces in Nha Trang Bay, Republic of Vietnam, on 14 March 1969." The citation states that he and his team "scaled a 350-foot sheer cliff," that a grenade "exploded at his feet and threw him backward onto the jagged rocks," and that "The enemy soldiers who were captured provided critical intelligence to the allied effort." The Hall of Valor describes Kerrey as the first U.S. Navy SEAL to receive the Medal of Honor.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Governor, senator and the National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office
|
||||
|
||||
The [[National Governors Association]] lists Kerrey's term as governor as January 6, 1983 to January 9, 1987.[^17] The commission's biography of him says "Upon taking office as Governor in 1982" and records his leaving office in 1987; Tenet's proxy statements of 2001 and 2002 give his governorship as "from 1982 to 1987"; Genworth's 2005 proxy statement says "From January 1982 to December 1987"; and Tenet's 2012 release and the Hall of Valor give 1983 to 1987.[^1][^4][^18][^19][^20] He was elected to the United States Senate in 1988, took office in 1989, and was re-elected in 1994.[^18] The commission's report described him as having "recently finished serving as Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI)."[^18] The committee's special report on its activities from January 7, 1997 to October 21, 1998 lists Richard C. Shelby as Chairman and J. Robert Kerrey as Vice Chairman; the roster of a committee hearing in June 2000 lists Richard H. Bryan as Vice Chairman.[^21] Kerrey wrote in 2003 that he was "a member and later as the Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence."[^22] The [[Democracy Now]] program reported in December 2003 that as a senator he had been the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.[^23] He signed the November 1999 conference report on the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 as one of the Senate managers, alongside [[Richard Shelby]] and [[Wayne Allard]].[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
The commission was created by Title VII of the [[Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000]], approved December 3, 1999, as [[Public Law 106-120]].[^25] The conference report's joint explanatory statement says that neither the House bill nor the Senate amendment contained a similar provision, that "the managers determined that an independent review of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)" was needed before the conferees met, and that they included the provision. [[Porter Goss]] filed the conference report for the House.[^24] Section 702 set the membership at eleven: the [[Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management]], three members appointed by the Senate majority leader (one senator and two private citizens), two by the Senate minority leader, three by the Speaker of the House and two by the House minority leader. The director of the [[National Reconnaissance Office]] sat as an ex officio member.[^25] The statute required two co-chairs, one from each party, jointly agreed by the President and the congressional leaders, and set November 1, 2000 as the deadline for the final report.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
The co-chairs were Kerrey and Goss, the Republican [[United States House of Representatives|Representative]] from Florida who chaired the [[House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]].[^26] In an August 11, 2003 letter to NRO director [[Peter B. Teets]], written in response to an article in [[U.S. News & World Report]] titled "Lack of Intelligence," Kerrey wrote: "believing that organizational change was needed, I wrote the 1999 Congressional Act that authorized the creation of the National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office. After President Clinton signed this into law, I asked Congressman Porter Goss to co-chair this effort with me." The letter says the commission met first on February 1, 2000 and released its report on November 15, 2000.[^22] The report's appendix lists Wayne Allard, [[Anthony C. Beilenson]], [[Larry D. Cox]], [[Joan Avalyn Dempsey]] (Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management), [[Norm Dicks]], [[Martin C. Faga]], [[Keith R. Hall]] (NRO director, ex officio), [[Patrick M. Hughes]], [[Eli S. Jacobs]] and [[William Schneider Jr.]] as members.[^26] The report, titled [[The NRO at the Crossroads]], is dated November 1, 2000 on its cover. Its executive summary recommended that a new office, to be called the Office of Space Reconnaissance, be established, and states that "The NRO has become a publicly acknowledged organization that openly announces many of its new program initiatives."[^27] Its biography of Kerrey states that he "earned the Congressional Medal of Honor, America's highest military honor, and is currently the only member of Congress who has received this honor."[^18] Kerrey's 2003 letter quotes the report's unanimous findings, including "Over time, the NRO has gained a well-deserved reputation as the preeminent research, development, and acquisition organization in the Intelligence Community and DoD."[^22]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 9/11 Commission
|
||||
|
||||
On December 10, 2003, Democracy Now reported that Kerrey had been named to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, replacing [[Max Cleland]], who had stepped down to serve on the [[Export-Import Bank of the United States]].[^23] The commission's biography of him says that he "chose not to run for re-election a third time because of the offer to be President of New School University." The commission closed on August 21, 2004.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and the 2002 protests
|
||||
|
||||
In November 2002 [[Salon]] reported that Kerrey was part of the newly formed [[Committee for the Liberation of Iraq]], with former Secretary of State [[George P. Shultz]] and Senator [[John McCain]], a group meant to shore up support for regime change in Iraq.[^28] In December 2002 New School students confronted him over the committee. Democracy Now headlined the confrontation as students who "Demand Resignation."[^29] The same program reported in December 2003 that thousands of New School students had protested his decision to join the committee the previous year.[^23]
|
||||
|
||||
### New School presidency, 2001 to 2010
|
||||
|
||||
On February 17, 2000, the [[Associated Press]] reported, in the [[Orlando Sentinel]], that Kerrey had announced the previous month that he would not seek a third term. He said he would start working for the university "next January, after he officially has left office."[^30] The [[New York Post]] headlined its item "New School taps Kerrey" and described him as a 56-year-old Vietnam veteran.[^31] The Times reported that Kerrey said he had been planning to run for a third Senate term until the school approached him, that his predecessor [[Jonathan F. Fanton]], appointed in 1984, had left the $250,000 post with its official Greenwich Village residence the previous September for the [[MacArthur Foundation]], and that Kerrey did not yet have a formal contract. It quoted [[Philip Scaturro]], the school's chancellor.[^32]
|
||||
|
||||
A New School fact sheet captured by the [[Internet Archive]] on December 11, 2000 names [[John L. Tishman]] as chairman of the board of trustees. [[Arnold H. Aronson]], [[Michael E. Gellert]] and [[Nancy B. Peretsman]] are listed as vice chairs, and Scaturro as treasurer. The same page names Scaturro as chancellor and chief officer, [[Elizabeth Dickey]] as acting provost, and [[James Murtha]] as executive vice president.[^33] The university installed Kerrey as its seventh president at [[Carnegie Hall]] on February 20, 2001. Tishman gave introductory remarks, and [[Joseph Lieberman]], then a senator from Connecticut, spoke.[^34] The Tenet proxy statement of August 2001 gives Kerrey as "President of New School University in New York City since January 2001."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The New School Archives' biographical note states that Kerrey "was an unpopular choice with faculty members, although his political connections made him very popular with the board of trustees," and that he renamed New School University as The New School in 2005. The same note dates his presidency "from 2001 through 2010" and states that he was "succeeded in 2011 by David Van Zandt."[^5] The New School's press release of August 26, 2010 announcing Van Zandt as eighth president states that Kerrey "will remain as New School president until the end of 2010," that Van Zandt would assume the post on January 1, 2011, and that Kerrey "was appointed in 2001," and the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in 2012 that Van Zandt "succeeded Mr. Kerrey as New School's president in January 2011."[^2][^35]
|
||||
|
||||
In March 2002 [[Kenneth Prewitt]], recruited as dean of the [[Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science]], resigned on March 6 after less than a year. He told The American Prospect: "Given the prevailing priorities in the administration," he said, "I could not do what I had been recruited to do." The Prospect reported that the trustees, after Vistica's article appeared, had stood by Kerrey, reminding the public in a statement that "war is hell" and giving him their "unqualified support."[^36] At a faculty and student meeting on March 15, 2002, in [[Tishman Auditorium]], Prewitt described a provost's proposal for "private bonuses" to deans who raised enrollment, and Kerrey took the microphone and asked: "You know whose idea the 'private bonuses' were?" He answered "Mine," and added: "I concede now that it was a bad idea."[^36]
|
||||
|
||||
On January 4, 2004, the trustees extended Kerrey's term to June 2011, from an original expiry in June 2006. Scaturro, then chairperson of the board, said: "In just four years as president, Bob Kerrey has confidently charted an ambitious course that has given the university far greater national visibility and recognition."[^37]
|
||||
|
||||
On December 10, 2008, the Faculty Senate met in an emergency closed-door session and approved a motion of no confidence in Kerrey. A summary released by faculty senate co-chair Jim Miller recorded 74 votes in favor, two against and one abstention, and the [[Chronicle of Higher Education]] described the vote as "nearly unanimous."[^38] [[NBC New York]] reported the same tally on December 11, with the faculty members described as senior and tenured.[^39] The trustees met the same day at a regularly scheduled meeting and, according to a university statement, unanimously expressed confidence in Kerrey's leadership.[^38][^39] The faculty vote followed Kerrey's announcement that he would serve as provost temporarily after the departure of the fifth provost in seven years.[^39] [[amNewYork]] reported on December 23 that after a Faculty Senate meeting a week before the student occupation, a majority of senior faculty members approved a no-confidence measure against Kerrey "by a vote of 269 to 18."[^40]
|
||||
|
||||
On Wednesday, December 17, 2008, several dozen students occupied the ground-floor cafeteria of the New School's graduate faculty building on Fifth Avenue.[^40][^41] The students' demands included the resignation of Kerrey, of Murtha and of [[Robert Millard]], the treasurer of the board of trustees, along with transparency in investments and a socially responsible investment committee.[^40] amNewYork reported that the occupation ended peacefully early on Friday morning, December 19. The six-point document that Kerrey signed did not include the resignations. It granted total amnesty to those involved, provided for student participation in establishing a committee for socially responsible investing, and gave a student senate representative access to board meetings.[^40] The New School Archives' biographical note states that the New York City police "were brought in to expel" students from the building.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
In May 2009 Kerrey announced that he would step down once a successor was named. The Chronicle reported that the trustees then awarded him a $1.2 million "retention" bonus, according to the university's Form 990, and that with a deferred compensation payout of more than $620,000 his total earnings from the school for 2010 to 2011 came to $3,047,703; it gave his base earnings for 2010 to 2011 as $602,593. Board chairman [[Michael J. Johnston]] said the bonus was meant "to ensure a smooth transition to his successor's presidency."[^35] Financial disclosures from Kerrey's 2012 campaign office estimated that he would earn between $400,000 and $600,000 a year as president emeritus.[^35] [[David E. Van Zandt]] succeeded him in January 2011 and was installed as university president on September 15, 2011.[^35][^42]
|
||||
|
||||
### Jeffrey Epstein
|
||||
|
||||
Kerrey appears in [[Jeffrey Epstein]]'s 2013 scheduling records released by the Department of Justice. An April 15, 2013 calendar alert reads "NEED to start coordinating dinner w/woody,soon yi, bob Kerrey for April 23" (a dinner with [[Woody Allen]], [[Soon-Yi Previn]] and Kerrey).[^43] On May 28, 2013 Epstein's scheduler [[Lesley Groff]] wrote to household staff under the heading "Lunch w/Barak and Bob Kerrey": "Heads up! We have scheduled Barak and Bob Kerrey for lunch at noon on Tues. June 4th!"[^44] The "Barak" of that email is [[Ehud Barak]], named in full in the office's next schedule. Groff's schedule email of June 2, 2013 lists the day in full: "10:00am-12:00pm Appt w/Eileen Alexanderson, Miriam, Peggy, etc. at [[Leon Black]]'s office", then "12:00pm Lunch w/Ehud Barak & Bob Kerrey", then a tentative appointment with [[Reid Weingarten]].[^45] The same office's schedules list "Appt w/Ehud Barak" at 4:00 pm the previous day, with [[Mort Zuckerman]] at 6:00 pm, and the final schedule for June 4 lists "Appt w Ehud Barak" at 1:00 pm followed by "Lunch to be served", without Kerrey's name.[^46] On August 22, 2013 a calendar alert asked "can bob Kerrey join for dinner tonight."[^47]
|
||||
|
||||
### Later career
|
||||
|
||||
Kerrey served on the board of Tenet Healthcare from March 2001 to March 2012. Tenet's proxy statement of August 2001 lists him as a director on its ethics, quality and compliance and nominating committees and states that he sat on the boards of [[infoUSA]], class.com and the [[Concord Coalition]], and on the board of trustees of The Aerospace Corporation; the 2002 proxy adds Jones Apparel Group.[^4] Tenet announced his return on November 30, 2012, as an independent director on its audit and compensation committees. Its chief executive [[Trevor Fetter]] said: "His wisdom and insight have been invaluable to Tenet's board through the years."[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
Genworth Financial's 2005 proxy statement lists Kerrey as a director since 2004 and a member of its audit committee, and gives his Jones Apparel and Tenet directorships. He resigned from the Genworth board effective March 14, 2012, "in order to pursue his campaign for the United States Senate representing the state of Nebraska," according to the company's filing.[^19][^48]
|
||||
|
||||
Kerrey ran for the Senate seat in 2012 against the Republican state senator [[Deb Fischer]]. As early returns came in on November 6, 2012, Fischer's lead grew "to a 58 to 42 percent margin as the evening wore on."[^49] The Federal Election Commission's candidate totals for Kerrey's 2012 Senate committee show receipts of $5,798,058 and disbursements of $5,662,682.[^50]
|
||||
|
||||
In April 2013 Kerrey joined the government affairs firm [[Carmen Group]]. [[The Hill]] reported on April 22, 2013 that the firm had earned $7.3 million in lobbying fees the previous year, according to the [[Center for Responsive Politics]], that many of its clients were state and local entities or governments, and quoted the firm's founder, [[David Carmen]], as saying Kerrey "has a wealth of experience in business, education and public service at the state and federal level." Kerrey said in a statement: "I have known David Carmen for more than ten years."[^51]
|
||||
|
||||
Kerrey was under contract to serve as president emeritus of the New School through 2016. He resigned that post in February 2013, calling the decision "largely mutual."[^52]
|
||||
|
||||
In May 2016 Kerrey was named chairman of the board of trustees of [[Fulbright University Vietnam]], a university promoted by the [[Trust for University Innovation in Vietnam]]. [[Thomas J. Vallely]], the trust's chairman, called him "the ideal candidate for the job." Asia Times reported that the appointment was reportedly made on May 16, and that it angered some people in Vietnam after the online news outlet [[Zing]] published a story on Kerrey's role at Thanh Phong on May 30. [[Barack Obama]], speaking in Ho Chi Minh City on May 25, called Kerrey "one of the key people to help lead" the project. In a piece published by Zing on June 1, the former Vietnamese ambassador to the European Union and Belgium, [[Ton Nu Thi Ninh]], wrote that she was "extremely stunned" by the decision.[^53]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Military Times, Hall of Valor, "Joseph Robert Kerrey," Medal of Honor citation, action date March 14, 1969. https://valor.militarytimes.com/?p=29692
|
||||
[^2]: New School press release, "The New School Names David E. Van Zandt New President," August 26, 2010 (Internet Archive capture of January 24, 2021): Van Zandt "will assume his new position as president of The New School on January 1, 2011. He succeeds the university's current president, Bob Kerrey, who will remain as New School president until the end of 2010." https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2010/NewPresidentAppointment.htm
|
||||
[^3]: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, biography of Bob Kerrey, archived copy of the commission site, which records the commission's closing on August 21, 2004. https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/about/bio_kerrey.htm
|
||||
[^4]: Tenet Healthcare Corporation, Schedule 14A proxy statements filed August 21, 2001 and August 14, 2002 (Kerrey: "director since March 2001," committees, outside boards, governor "from 1982 to 1987"). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/70318/000091205701529713/a2056401zdef14a.htm and https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/70318/000089710102000565/tenet023987_def14a.htm
|
||||
[^5]: The New School Archives and Special Collections, "Video statement by Bob Kerrey, 2014 January 28," file NS-03-02-08, biographical note. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/58008
|
||||
[^6]: Gregory L. Vistica, "One Awful Night in Thanh Phong," The New York Times Magazine, April 25, 2001. Reposted text: https://muckrakerfarm.com/2001/04/one-awful-night-in-than-phong/
|
||||
[^7]: Amy Waldman, "Bob Kerrey Reveals His Role in Deaths of Vietnam Civilians," The New York Times, April 25, 2001, as reproduced in a compilation at holtz.org. https://holtz.org/Library/Social%20Science/History/Atomic%20Age/Kerrey%20Vietnam%20atrocity.htm
|
||||
[^8]: CBS News, "Memories of a Massacre," 60 Minutes II, Part I, transcript. Includes Kerrey's 2001 interview with Dan Rather and the account of how Vistica obtained the documents. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/memories-of-a-massacre-part-i
|
||||
[^9]: Vistica, "One Awful Night in Thanh Phong," The New York Times Magazine, April 25, 2001 (excerpt as in note 4). Kerrey's 1998 interview with Vistica, the after-action report quoted by Vistica, and Kerrey's 2001 comments on whether shots were fired are all from this text. https://muckrakerfarm.com/2001/04/one-awful-night-in-than-phong/
|
||||
[^10]: CBS News, "Memories of a Massacre," 60 Minutes II, Part II, transcript, including Gerhard Klann's interview and his description of the first hooch. Sole source for the passages so cited. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/memories-of-a-massacre-part-ii
|
||||
[^11]: Dan Kennedy, "Bob Kerrey's war," Providence Phoenix, May 3 to 10, 2001 (quoting Time magazine on Pham Tri Lanh and the statement of Kerrey and five other SEALs). https://www.providencephoenix.com/archive/features/01/05/03/KERREY.html
|
||||
[^12]: CBS News, "Memories of a Massacre," 60 Minutes II, Part I, transcript, including the interview with Pham Tri Lanh, 62 years old, and the broadcast's note on her wartime role. Sole source for the passages so cited. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/memories-of-a-massacre-part-i
|
||||
[^13]: Richard C. Paddock, "Two Survivors Say U.S. Unit Killed Villagers 'in Cold Blood,'" Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2001, as reproduced on the World Systems Network list archive. https://wsarch.ucr.edu/wsnmail/2001/msg00754.html
|
||||
[^14]: Vietnam News Agency, "US squad's killing of civilians exposed by witnesses," May 10, 2001, reproduced by the Embassy of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in the United States. The agency quotes the Washington Post, which the drafter did not open. Sole source for the passages so cited. https://vietnamembassy-usa.org/relations/us-squads-killing-civilians-exposed-witnesses
|
||||
[^15]: CBS News, "Memories of a Massacre," 60 Minutes II, Part III, transcript, including Kerrey's responses on Klann, the Bronze Star, the Medal of Honor and the Nha Trang operation. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/memories-of-a-massacre-part-iii
|
||||
[^16]: Vistica, "One Awful Night in Thanh Phong," The New York Times Magazine, April 25, 2001 (excerpt as in note 4), on Captain Roy Hoffmann and Kerrey's statement that the squad was instructed not to take prisoners. https://muckrakerfarm.com/2001/04/one-awful-night-in-than-phong/
|
||||
[^17]: National Governors Association, "Joseph Robert (Bob) Kerrey," former governors listing. https://www.nga.org/governor/joseph-robert-bob-kerrey/
|
||||
[^18]: National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office, The NRO at the Crossroads, November 1, 2000, Appendix G, "Commission Member Biographies," pp. 135 to 136 (Kerrey's biography). Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2020id_/https://irp.fas.org/nro/commission/nro.pdf
|
||||
[^19]: Genworth Financial, Inc., Schedule 14A proxy statement for the annual meeting of May 19, 2005 (Kerrey: director since 2004, audit committee, "From January 1982 to December 1987" as governor). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1276520/000119312505073486/ddef14a.htm
|
||||
[^20]: Tenet Healthcare Corporation, "Tenet Names Bob Kerrey to Board of Directors," press release, November 30, 2012, which gives his age as 69, his service as governor as 1983 to 1987, and his Senate service as 1989 to 2001. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000070318/000110465912081033/a12-28321_1ex99d1.htm
|
||||
[^21]: Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, Committee Activities, Special Report, January 7, 1997 to October 21, 1998, S. Rpt. 106-3 (February 3, 1999), committee roster and letter of transmittal, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/1999/02/03/publications-committee-activities-special-report-select-committee-intelligence-january-7-1997/ ; Select Committee on Intelligence, hearing on the Report of the National Commission on Terrorism, June 2000, committee roster.
|
||||
[^22]: Bob Kerrey, letter to Peter B. Teets, Director, National Reconnaissance Office, August 11, 2003, posted by the NRO as "Former Senator and Co-Chair of SSCI Bob Kerrey Expresses His Support of the NRO" (NRO press release 2003-03). Sole source for Kerrey's statements about drafting the 1999 Act and recruiting Goss. https://web.archive.org/web/2id_/https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/news/press/2003/2003-03.pdf
|
||||
[^23]: Democracy Now!, "Bob Kerrey Tapped For 9/11 Independent Panel," headline item, December 10, 2003. https://democracynow.org/2003/12/10/headlines/bob_kerrey_tapped_for_9_11_independent_panel
|
||||
[^24]: U.S. House of Representatives, Conference Report 106-457 on H.R. 1555 (Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000), November 5, 1999, joint explanatory statement on Title VII and list of managers. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRPT-106hrpt457/html/CRPT-106hrpt457.htm
|
||||
[^25]: Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, Public Law 106-120, approved December 3, 1999, Title VII, secs. 701 to 709. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-106publ120/pdf/PLAW-106publ120.pdf
|
||||
[^26]: National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office, The NRO at the Crossroads, November 1, 2000, cover and Appendix G (members and co-chairs). Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2020id_/https://irp.fas.org/nro/commission/nro.pdf
|
||||
[^27]: National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office, The NRO at the Crossroads, November 1, 2000, Executive Summary, pp. 7 to 8 ("Office of Space Reconnaissance"). Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2020id_/https://irp.fas.org/nro/commission/nro.pdf
|
||||
[^28]: Salon, interview with Bob Kerrey on the Iraq war, November 11, 2002, which describes the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. https://www.salon.com/2002/11/11/kerrey_3/
|
||||
[^29]: Democracy Now!, "Students Confront New School University President Bob Kerrey Over His Role in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and Demand Resignation," headline item, December 5, 2002. https://www.democracynow.org/2002/12/5/students_confront_new_school_university_president
|
||||
[^30]: Associated Press, report on Kerrey's appointment, Orlando Sentinel, February 17, 2000. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2000/02/17/kerrey-to-be-president-of-new-school-university-2/
|
||||
[^31]: "New School taps Kerrey," New York Post, February 17, 2000. https://nypost.com/2000/02/17/new-school-taps-kerrey/
|
||||
[^32]: Neil MacFarquhar, "Senator Kerrey Accepts Presidency of New School," The New York Times, February 17, 2000. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/regional/021700kerry-pres-edu.html (Kerrey said he had been planning to run for a third Senate term until the school approached him; Fanton, "appointed in 1984," left the "$250,000 post with its official Greenwich Village residence" the previous September to become president of the MacArthur Foundation; "The senator does not yet have a formal contract with the school"; Philip Scaturro identified as the school's chancellor)
|
||||
[^33]: New School University, fact sheet on the university, Internet Archive capture of December 11, 2000. https://web.archive.org/web/20001211161500/http://www.newschool.edu:80/aboutnsu/an_ata.html
|
||||
[^34]: New School University, press release, "Bob Kerrey Installed as President of New School University," February 20, 2001 (Internet Archive copy). https://web.archive.org/web/2id_/https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2001/022001_install.html
|
||||
[^35]: Jack Stripling, "Lucrative Payments to Bob Kerrey by the New School Irk Critics in a Time of Austerity," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31, 2012 (Internet Archive copy). https://web.archive.org/web/2id_/https://www.chronicle.com/article/Bob-Kerreys-Pay-From-the-New/132063/
|
||||
[^36]: "Kerrey's Quagmire," The American Prospect, April 26, 2002. https://prospect.org/2002/04/26/kerrey-s-quagmire/
|
||||
[^37]: Lincoln Anderson, "New School extends Kerrey's contract six more years," amNY (The Villager), January 4, 2004. https://www.amny.com/news/new-school-extends-kerreys-contract-six-more-years
|
||||
[^38]: Chronicle of Higher Education, "New School Faculty Senate Votes No Confidence in President Bob Kerrey," December 10, 2008 (Internet Archive copy). https://web.archive.org/web/2id_/https://www.chronicle.com/article/new-school-faculty-senate-votes-no-confidence-in-president-bob-kerrey/
|
||||
[^39]: NBC New York, "New School Votes No Confidence in Kerrey," December 11, 2008. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/local/kerry-gets-no-confidence-vote-at-new-school/1856735
|
||||
[^40]: amNY, "New School in turmoil; Students occupy building, tell Kerrey, 'Quit!'," December 23, 2008. https://www.amny.com/news/new-school-in-turmoil-students-occupy-building-tell-kerrey-quit
|
||||
[^41]: Democracy Now!, "New School Students Protest Kerrey with Sit-In," headline item, December 18, 2008. https://democracynow.org/2008/12/18/headlines/new_school_students_protest_kerrey_with_sit_in
|
||||
[^42]: New School Archives and Special Collections, New School Office of the President, Board of Trustees records (NS-01-01-04), finding aid, including the Series 2 "Presidential searches" listing with the folder for the David E. Van Zandt installation on September 15, 2011. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/244
|
||||
[^43]: Calendar alert, April 15, 2013, EFTA02141689, U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library, Data Set 10. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02141689.pdf
|
||||
[^44]: Lesley Groff email to household staff including Richard Barnett, "Lunch w/Barak and Bob Kerrey," May 28, 2013, EFTA00365259 (full header copy EFTA02100188), U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library, Data Set 9. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00365259.pdf
|
||||
[^45]: Lesley Groff, schedule email "10-12 meeting on Tues. June 4th at Leon Black's office," June 2, 2013, EFTA00389623, U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library (duplicates EFTA01756762, EFTA00389634).
|
||||
[^46]: Epstein office schedules for June 3 and 4, 2013, EFTA00284774; calendar alerts EFTA02137359, EFTA02137042, U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library.
|
||||
[^47]: Calendar alert, August 22, 2013, EFTA02130566, U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library, Data Set 10. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02130566.pdf
|
||||
[^48]: Genworth Financial, Form 8-K, March 2012, reporting that J. Robert Kerrey resigned from the board effective March 14, 2012. https://investor.genworth.com/sec-filings/all-sec-filings/content/0001193125-12-119695/d308983d8k.htm
|
||||
[^49]: Fred Knapp, "Fischer defeats Kerrey for Nebraska U.S. Senate seat," Nebraska Public Media, November 7, 2012. https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/fischer-defeats-kerrey-for-nebraska-us-senate-seat/
|
||||
[^50]: Federal Election Commission, candidate totals for Kerrey's 2012 Senate committee (candidate ID S8NE00067), 2012 cycle, via the FEC open data API. https://api.open.fec.gov/v1/candidate/S8NE00067/totals/?cycle=2012
|
||||
[^51]: Megan R. Wilson, "Former Sen. Bob Kerrey joins government affairs firm," The Hill, April 22, 2013. https://digital-release.thehill.com/?p=148312
|
||||
[^52]: "Bob Kerrey resigns from controversial president emeritus post at New School," Higher Ed Dive, February 4, 2013. https://www.highereddive.com/news/bob-kerrey-resigns-from-controversial-president-emeritus-post-at-new-school/96160/
|
||||
[^53]: "Vietnam's Kerrey dilemma: Fulbright U appointment is lightning rod for US ties," Asia Times, June 2016. https://asiatimes.com/2016/06/vietnams-kerrey-dilemma-fulbright-u-appointment-is-lightning-rod-for-us-ties/
|
||||
56
10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Ernst Kris.md
Normal file
56
10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Ernst Kris.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Medicine & Psychology"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Psychoanalysis
|
||||
- PropagandaAnalysis
|
||||
- BBC
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- ErnstKris
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Ernst Kris
|
||||
summary: "Viennese art historian and psychoanalyst who built the BBC's analysis of German radio in 1939 and 1940 and co-directed the New School's Research Project on Totalitarian Communication."
|
||||
born: 1900-04-26
|
||||
died: 1957-02-27
|
||||
location: "Vienna; London; New York; New Haven"
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Research Project on Totalitarian Communication]]"
|
||||
role: "co-director with Hans Speier"
|
||||
start: 1941-04
|
||||
fn: 3
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[BBC]]"
|
||||
role: "Senior Research Officer"
|
||||
start: 1939
|
||||
end: 1940
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: spouse_of
|
||||
with: "[[Marianne Kris]]"
|
||||
start: 1927
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Ernst Kris (April 26, 1900 to February 27, 1957) was an Austrian art historian and psychoanalyst who emigrated to London in 1938, established the [[BBC]]'s research unit on enemy radio propaganda, and from 1940 worked in New York, where he and [[Hans Speier]] directed the [[Research Project on Totalitarian Communication]] at the [[New School for Social Research]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Vienna
|
||||
|
||||
Kris was born in Vienna, the son of the lawyer Leopold Kris. He studied art history under Julius von Schlosser, took his doctorate in 1922, and worked at the Kunsthistorisches Museum on its collection of sculpture and applied arts. In 1927 he married [[Marianne Kris]], a psychoanalyst and daughter of [[Sigmund Freud]]'s friend, the pediatrician Oscar Rie. He became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1927, assisted Freud with his collection of antiquities, and at Freud's request co-edited the journal Imago with Robert Waelder from 1931.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### BBC and the New School
|
||||
|
||||
After emigrating to London in 1938 he worked at the Psychoanalytic Institute and as a training analyst. In 1939 and 1940 he built up the BBC's analysis of enemy radio propaganda as Senior Research Officer; the German biographical account adds that he was then sent to help found similar institutions in Canada and the United States. After a brief period on a similar task at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal, he settled in New York in 1940 and became a visiting professor of psychology at the New School; the Research Project on Totalitarian Communication ran from 1941 to 1944 with Speier. The 1944 book German Radio Propaganda carries Kris's epilogue. His papers include BBC correspondence with Mark A. Abrams (1940 to 1943) and with John Scarlett Alexander Salt (1940 to 1956), telegrams concerning German propaganda from 1940, New School files with Max Ascoli (1940 to 1941) and Alvin Johnson (1941 to 1944), a Rockefeller Foundation file for 1940 to 1952, and a file of correspondence with Edward L. Bernays for 1942.[^1][^2][^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Later Career
|
||||
|
||||
From 1942 Kris taught at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and then at the College of the City of New York, where he was a professor in the Graduate Division from 1945. He attended the September 1947 conference of social scientists convened by Project RAND at which Speier was recruited; his papers contain a file of correspondence with Leo Rosten for 1946 to 1948, the screenwriter through whom Speier came to RAND's attention. In 1949 he joined the Child Study Center at Yale, becoming professor of psychology in 1951 and of psychiatry in 1953. He died in New York on February 27, 1957. His papers (MSS84824, about 7,000 items, bulk 1940 to 1956, a gift of his children in 2001) are at the Library of Congress; they include a folder of correspondence with Hans Speier for 1940 to 1949 and the project's research papers for 1941 to 1944.[^1][^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Deutsche Biographie, "Kris, Ernst" (NDB 13, 1982; sfz46084). https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz46084.html
|
||||
[^2]: Kris, Ernst, and Hans Speier. German Radio Propaganda. New York: Oxford University Press, 1944, Preface and Epilogue. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.499058
|
||||
[^3]: The New School Archives, "Research Project on Totalitarian Communication, 1940-1944," NS-02-16-01. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/27451
|
||||
[^4]: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Ernst Kris Papers (MSS84824), register by Michael Spangler, 2003: biographical chronology, scope note and container list (British Broadcasting Corp. files; New School files; Rockefeller Foundation; Bernays, Edward L., 1942; Rosten, Leo Calvin, 1946-1948; Speier, Hans). https://web.archive.org/web/20161221192727id_/http://rs5.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/2006/ms006003.pdf. Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 130 note 41 cites Kris Papers, Box 13, Folder "Speier, Hans, 1940-1949."
|
||||
[^5]: Bessner, Daniel M. "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State." PhD diss., Duke University, 2013, p. 190 note 88 (attendee list of RAND R-106, Conference of Social Scientists, September 14-19, 1947). https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/232a76ac-f2d8-4827-99fe-50b3b109fa6c/content
|
||||
|
|
@ -8,7 +8,14 @@ tags:
|
|||
summary: "Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who succeeded Harold Wolff as director of the CIA-fronted Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology and supervised its behavioral research grant program."
|
||||
location: Washington, D.C.
|
||||
created: 2026-06-03
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-03
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]]"
|
||||
start: 1957
|
||||
end: 1963
|
||||
role: "executive secretary and treasurer (1957 annual report); executive director of the renamed Human Ecology Fund 1961 to 1963 (Price)"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
---
|
||||
Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe had worked closely with the [[CIA]] as head of the Air Force's study of [[Korean War]] prisoners before the Agency hired him to run the [[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]] after its formal separation from [[Cornell University Medical College|Cornell]] in 1957. Monroe led a staff of four whose salaries the Agency paid, taking over the Society's dealings with the outside world and the monitoring of several hundred thousand dollars a year in research projects.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -18,6 +25,19 @@ Monroe personally supervised dozens of grants, including [[D. Ewen Cameron]]'s b
|
|||
|
||||
Monroe's role was to maintain the Society's legitimacy while ensuring that [[MKULTRA]] interests were served. [[Sidney Gottlieb|Sid Gottlieb]] and the [[TSS]] hierarchy in Washington made the major decisions, but Monroe managed day-to-day operations, visited grant recipients, and kept track of developments in the behavioral sciences. He let [[Carl Rogers]] know that once he agreed to serve on the Society board, he could expect a grant, and Rogers received about $30,000 over three years. Monroe's operation gave the CIA a "legitimate basis to approach anyone in the academic community anywhere in the world," as one Agency source put it.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### 1957 Report, the Fund and the 1977 Statement
|
||||
|
||||
The 1957 annual report of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology gives James L. Monroe as executive secretary and treasurer, with the Society's address as 71-58 Austin Street, Forest Hills, Long Island, New York. The report names [[Harold Wolff]] as president and [[Lawrence Hinkle]] as vice president.[^2] It states that funds to that date came from "gifts by private individuals" and, in one instance, from the Foresight Foundation, and that "A major portion of the money has been expended in support of the Human Ecology Study Program at the Cornell University Medical College."[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Marks writes that in 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund.[^3] The anthropologist [[David H. Price]] states that Monroe was the Fund's executive director from 1961 to 1963 and that David Rhodes held the post from 1964, and that operations shifted from New York City to Cornell University's medical school.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
Marks reports that Monroe told The New York Times on August 2, 1977 that "only about 25 to 30 percent" of the Society's budget came from the CIA, and states that Monroe knew this to be false "since the actual figure was well over 90 percent." Marks adds that the statement "allowed some other grantees to claim that their particular project was funded out of the non-Agency part of the Society."[^5] In his own testimony on August 3, 1977, [[John Gittinger]] estimated the Society's budget at about $150,000 a year.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, Chapter 9.
|
||||
[^2]: Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, 1957 Annual Report, officers and staff, "The Society," and address page. Wayback Machine capture of https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21090820/1957-annual-report-society-human-ecology.pdf
|
||||
[^3]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate* (Times Books, 1979), chapter 9, p. 149 n.
|
||||
[^4]: David H. Price, "Buying a piece of anthropology, Part 1," *Anthropology Today* 23(3), June 2007. https://archive.org/details/human_ecology_torture_suicide . Sole source for the 1961-1963 directorship and Rhodes: Price.
|
||||
[^5]: Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, note on p. 207 (chapter "Conclusions"). Sole source for the Monroe quotation: Marks.
|
||||
[^6]: *Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification*, Joint Hearing, August 3, 1977, testimony of John Gittinger.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
248
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Bernard L. Schwartz.md
Normal file
248
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Bernard L. Schwartz.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,248 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Business & Finance"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Loral
|
||||
- ChinaSatellites
|
||||
- Chinagate
|
||||
- CampaignFinance
|
||||
- ExportControls
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- Philanthropy
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- "Bernard L. Schwartz"
|
||||
- "Bernard Schwartz"
|
||||
- "Bernard Leon Schwartz"
|
||||
summary: "Loral's chairman through the 1996 Long March failure and the 1998 Chinasat-8 waiver, Schwartz gave heavily to Democratic committees and endowed programs at the New School and think tanks."
|
||||
born: 1925-12-13
|
||||
died: 2024-03-12
|
||||
location: "New York City"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Loral Corporation]]"
|
||||
start: 1972
|
||||
end: 1996
|
||||
role: "chairman and chief executive after acquiring the company in 1972"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Loral Space & Communications]]"
|
||||
end: 2006-03-01
|
||||
role: "chairman and chief executive until his retirement effective March 1, 2006"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 2004-09-01
|
||||
role: "member of the Board of Trustees"
|
||||
fn: 40
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 2001
|
||||
role: "$1.1 million for the Bernard L. Schwartz Lecture Series and Project in Markets, Equality and Democracy"
|
||||
fn: 39
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 2004
|
||||
role: "$3.7 million for the Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and an endowed professorship"
|
||||
fn: 41
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Council on Foreign Relations]]"
|
||||
start: 2002
|
||||
role: "Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellowship in Business and Foreign Policy"
|
||||
fn: 42
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[New America Foundation]]"
|
||||
start: 2004
|
||||
end: 2010
|
||||
role: "board of directors"
|
||||
fn: 43
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Brookings Institution]]"
|
||||
start: 2005
|
||||
role: "Bernard L. Schwartz Chair in International Economics"
|
||||
fn: 44
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Democratic National Committee]]"
|
||||
start: 1995
|
||||
end: 1998
|
||||
role: "non-federal (soft money) receipts itemized by the Federal Election Commission"
|
||||
fn: 27
|
||||
- type: investigated
|
||||
with: "[[Cox Committee]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1998-11-21
|
||||
role: "deposed by the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China"
|
||||
fn: 5
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[K & F Industries]]"
|
||||
start: 2004
|
||||
role: "chairman, as stated in the October 21, 2004 New School release"
|
||||
fn: 40
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[First Data Corporation]]"
|
||||
start: 2004
|
||||
role: "board member, as stated in the October 21, 2004 New School release"
|
||||
fn: 40
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
---
|
||||
[[Bernard L. Schwartz]] (December 13, 1925 to March 12, 2024) was a [[Brooklyn]]-born investor who took over the ailing [[Loral Corporation]] in 1972, sold the bulk of it to [[Lockheed Martin]] in 1996, and served as a trustee of the [[New School for Social Research|New School]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Loral Corporation, 1972 to 1996
|
||||
|
||||
Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, graduated in finance from [[City College of New York]], and joined a Wall Street accounting firm whose clients included Admiral Plastics, run by his brother Harold. That work led to [[Saul P. Steinberg]] of [[Leasco Data Processing Equipment Corporation]], and Schwartz proposed that Leasco acquire [[Reliance Insurance]], which it did in 1968, taking the Reliance name. As president of the Reliance Group he proposed a takeover of [[Chemical Bank]], which Chemical's management resisted and Reliance abandoned. After four years with Reliance he joined Loral.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The obituary says that Loral, a maker of electronic weapons, countermeasures and communications systems, was on the brink of bankruptcy when its two founders retired in 1972, and on the verge of going out of business and having its stock delisted when Schwartz acquired it, investing $2 million in the company. It says he had no experience of doing business with the [[Pentagon]], remained chairman and chief executive for 34 years, and recorded 96 straight quarters in which profits surpassed those of the comparable period the year before.[^1] The Cox Committee describes [[Loral Space & Communications]] as the parent company of Loral and reports that a group including it acquired [[Ford Aerospace]] in 1990, renaming the business [[Space Systems/Loral]].[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Schwartz sold the bulk of the company to Lockheed Martin in 1996, when, the obituary says, it had grown in value to $13 billion. The obituary says that when Loral was sold he distributed more than $18 million of his own funds to some 40 people whose jobs were in jeopardy.[^1] A May 1, 1997 profile in [[Mother Jones]] by [[Dave Eisenstadt]] reported that Schwartz was "reportedly pocketing close to $27 million in personal stock gains" from the defense sale, that he had given "a whopping $217,000 since 1993" to the [[Democratic Leadership Council]], that the administration had "actually considered Schwartz as a candidate for the defense post" the previous fall, and that he celebrated his 71st birthday in December 1996 with an "intimate White House dinner with the president."[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
On July 15, 2003, Old Loral and certain of its subsidiaries filed for Chapter 11 protection. Schwartz retired from all of his officer and director positions effective March 1, 2006, and [[Michael B. Targoff]] became chief executive on the same date.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Export licensing and the Ron Brown meetings, 1993 to 1995
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Cox Committee]] reported that Schwartz, chairman and chief executive of Loral Space & Communications, Ltd., the parent of Loral, met directly on at least four occasions after 1993 with [[Ron Brown]], then Secretary of Commerce, and accompanied him on a 1994 trade mission to China.[^5] The committee describes [[C. Michael Armstrong]], the former chairman and chief executive of GM Hughes Electronics, as chairman of President Clinton's Export Council since 1993. On October 6, 1995, Armstrong, Schwartz and [[Daniel Tellep]] of Lockheed Martin sent a letter to the President stating: "Continuing to license export of these technologies under the more stringent and cumbersome Munitions List places American companies at a distinct disadvantage in global markets." The committee wrote of the transfer of export licensing authority from the [[United States Department of State|State Department]] to the Commerce Department that "The changes they advocated were ultimately adopted."[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
On June 9, 1995, Space Systems/Loral and the [[China Aerospace Corporation]] signed a Memorandum of Agreement on long-term cooperation, signed by Robert E. Berry for Space Systems/Loral and Zhang Xin-Xia for the Chinese side. The committee's chronology describes it as a ten-year joint technology development program, and its text describes a 1995 agreement under which Loral offered the PRC direct broadcast satellites, regional mobile satellite services systems and the joint development of an advanced high capacity communications satellite.[^7] The State Department's draft charging letter states that Loral Space & Communications and Space Systems/Loral each had agreements with the China Aerospace Corporation providing for long-term cooperation, under which Loral intended to procure up to ten launch vehicles for its [[Globalstar]] satellites.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
The committee counted five satellite projects for which Loral and Hughes obtained waivers or licenses between 1993 and January 3, 1999.[^5] A sidebar in the report states that "Even while under criminal investigation for these transfers, Loral obtained Presidential waivers for another launch in the PRC."[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 1996 Long March failure
|
||||
|
||||
On February 15, 1996, a Long March 3B rocket carrying the Loral-built [[Intelsat 708]] satellite failed after liftoff from [[Xichang]] in the People's Republic of China.[^10] One passage of the Cox Report, giving the failure determination announced by [[China Great Wall Industry Corporation]] on September 10, 1996, refers to the February 11, 1996 Long March 3B crash.[^11] The State Department's draft charging letter gives February 15, 1996.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
The Chinese side then invited [[Wah Lim]], Loral's senior vice president and general manager of engineering and manufacturing, to chair an Independent Review Committee. The committee met at Loral's offices in [[Palo Alto]], California, on April 22 to 24, 1996.[^12] On May 23, 1996, Loral engaged the Washington law firm [[Feith & Zell]], which on June 17, 1996 submitted a disclosure on Loral's behalf to the State Department.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
The Cox Committee wrote that "In 1996, Loral and Hughes showed the PRC how to improve the design and reliability of the guidance system used in the PRC's newest Long March rocket." It also wrote that "Loral and Hughes acted without the legally required license, although both corporations knew that a license was required."[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
The committee quoted a 1997 Defense Department assessment that Loral and Hughes "committed a serious export control violation by virtue of having performed a defense service without a license."[^14] A May 16, 1997 entry in the committee's chronology records a Defense Technology Security Administration recommendation for referral to the [[Justice Department]] for criminal prosecution.[^14] The interagency review team assessed in July 1998 that the true failure mode "may have been discovered more quickly by the PRC as a result of the Independent Review Committee's report."[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Chinasat-8 waiver, February 1998
|
||||
|
||||
Congress imposed the requirement for a presidential "national interest" determination in 1989. Between 1989 and the beginning of 1998 twelve such determinations were made for launches of commercial communications satellites on PRC rockets. President [[George H. W. Bush]] made three, and President [[Bill Clinton]] made nine, including determinations dated June 23, July 9, November 19 and November 23, 1996.[^16] The most recent, dated February 18, 1998, applied to the Loral-built [[Chinasat-8]] satellite.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
The New York Times reported on June 1, 1998 that Loral's waiver application for Chinasat-8 was submitted in May 1997, the month in which the Pentagon completed its assessment of the Independent Review Committee, and that the Justice Department began its investigation after that assessment. It reported that the first draft of the Presidential memorandum, dated January 13, 1998, recommended action by January 20 because of "severe contractual penalties which Loral will incur if it cannot begin technical discussions with the Chinese by next week," and that a Loral letter in White House files stated that a delay would cost the company at least $6 million and could cost it a $20 million project.[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
A January 1998 draft National Security Council memorandum referred to the ongoing review of PRC transfers to Iran of C-802 anti-ship cruise missiles, a point also listed in a State Department memorandum to the NSC. The reference was deleted from the memorandum that was ultimately sent to the President.[^18] A decision memorandum for the President dated February 12, 1998, from [[Samuel Berger]], the national security adviser, [[Larry Stein]] and [[Daniel Tarullo]], argued: "We believe that the advantages of this project outweigh the risk, and that we can effectively rebut criticism of the waiver."[^17][^19] The Times reported that on February 13 White House counsel [[Charles Ruff]] wrote that "the Department had every opportunity to weigh in against the waiver at the highest levels and elected not to do so," and that Justice Department officials said Ruff, in his discussion with [[Robert Litt]], asked only about the impact of the waiver on a possible prosecution. The notes of the National Security Council deputy counsel [[Newell Highsmith]] on a conversation with Ruff read: "Issue is not [underlined twice] impact on DOJ litig(ation)," and, "but whether bilateral U.S.-China concerns and economic factors outweigh risk of political embarrassment."[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
A transmittal memorandum dated February 18, 1998 from [[Phil Caplan]] stated that Ruff "notes that there have been extensive discussions with Justice on this matter," and that "The Department [of Justice] realizes the potential adverse impact on a potential criminal prosecution but has chosen not to oppose the waiver."[^20] The same memorandum continued: "Therefore, in balancing national security and criminal justice interests, Chuck agrees that the balance, under these special circumstances, is properly struck by granting the waiver."[^21] In a December 1998 interview with the committee, Litt, a Justice Department official, recalled that "Certainly the Department was put on notice that there was a waiver application," and said that "I didn't believe that we were being asked for our views on whether or not the waiver should be granted as a matter of policy."[^22] The Commerce Department approved the Chinasat-8 license application on March 23, 1998.[^22] The State Department's draft charging letter records that two technical assistance agreements for the Chinasat-8 launch were approved on February 20, 1998.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
On April 13, 1998, the [[New York Times]] reported that the President had approved the waiver despite an ongoing Justice Department criminal investigation of Loral's alleged earlier unauthorized transfer of missile guidance technology to China. The White House released related documents on May 22, 1998.[^23] A June 1, 1998 article by [[Jeff Gerth]] and [[John M. Broder]] reported that Justice Department prosecutors "warned that allowing the deal could jeopardize possible prosecution of the company for an earlier unauthorized technology transfer to Beijing." The article said the February decision "was treated as an urgent matter not because of its importance to the national security, but because the company was facing heavy fines for delay," and that Clinton approved the waiver six days after the February 12 memorandum.[^17] The article also reported that Loral's June 1996 disclosure to the State Department included "an admission that it allowed the Chinese to see its lengthy review of the rocket mishap without prior Federal approval."[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
Loral's statement of May 18, 1998 said that Schwartz "was not personally involved in any aspect of this matter." The Times, reporting the statement, described him as "one of the largest individual Democratic Party donors in the last few years."[^24] The statement also said: "No political favors or benefits of any kind were requested or extended, directly or indirectly, by any means whatever."[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
Representative [[Henry Waxman]], in a statement placed in the Congressional Record in October 2000, wrote that a February 13, 1998 letter to Berger urging a swift decision on the waiver was written by Loral vice president Thomas B. Ross, citing a New York Times article of May 24, 1998.[^26] The same statement recalls that in May 1998 Representative [[Curt Weldon]] spoke on the House floor about the allegations, describing a "Scandal that is unfolding that I think will dwarf every scandal that we have seen talked about on this floor in the past 6 years" and saying that "This scandal involves potential treason."[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
### Campaign contributions
|
||||
|
||||
The obituary says that Schwartz was outraged by the war in Vietnam and by the 1970 Kent State killings, considered moving his family to France, and decided instead to remain and work for the Democratic Party, becoming "a top campaign donor."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Itemized [[Federal Election Commission]] receipts for the contributor name "SCHWARTZ, BERNARD L" (and, on four entries, "SCHWARTZ, BERNARD," three of them with the employer given as Loral Corporation) list the following contributions to the [[Democratic National Committee]]'s non-federal accounts. In 1995: $25,000 on April 24, $75,000 on June 30 and $100,000 on November 28. In 1996: $100,000 on June 10, with the employer given as Loral Corp.; $70,000 on October 18 to the non-federal unincorporated association account; and $6,000 on December 20. In 1997: $100,000 on June 27 and $50,000 on December 23. In 1998: $30,000 on January 21; $25,000 on March 2; $100,000 on April 22; $250,000 on August 11; $50,000 on October 26, with the employer given as Loral Corporation; and $100,000 on November 6 to the party's non-federal corporate account.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
The same index lists non-federal receipts by the [[Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee]] of $40,500 in 1995, $115,000 in 1996 and $110,000 in 1997, and by the [[Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]] of $20,000 in 1996, $56,000 in 1997 and $100,000 in 1998. The itemized non-federal rows for 1995 through 1998 add to $1,522,500.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
Descriptions of his place in Democratic giving vary by source. The Cox Committee gives the New York Times as its source for calling him "the largest individual donor to the Democratic Party in 1997."[^23] The Congressional Research Service wrote that Loral's chief executive "was reported as the largest personal donor to the Democratic National Committee for the 1996 election."[^28] In its May 1997 ranking of donors, Mother Jones listed him first, with "$661,000 total contributions."[^3] In its November 1998 ranking Mother Jones listed Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz third, with $555,000, and wrote that he "has given Democrats $1.4 million since 1991."[^29] The Times described Loral as "headed by the Democratic Party's largest campaign contributor" and reported that Schwartz "donated $100,000 to the Democratic Party four weeks before the waiver application was approved in early July 1996 by Clinton."[^17] An Associated Press account of January 10, 2002 stated that he "donated nearly $1 million to Democrats from 1995 to 1998."[^30] Senator [[Arlen Specter]] stated on May 2, 2000 that Schwartz had donated $1.5 million to the Democratic National Committee.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
The obituary says that Schwartz "later counted Bill and Hillary Clinton among his well-placed friends."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Justice Department review of the donations
|
||||
|
||||
In May 1998 the Justice Department began a preliminary inquiry into whether political donations influenced the approval of satellite exports to China.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
Waxman quotes [[Lee Radek]], chief of the Justice Department's public integrity section, as writing in August 1998 that "there is not a scintilla of evidence or information that the President was corruptly influenced by Bernard Schwartz," and quotes [[Charles LaBella]], then head of the department's campaign finance task force, writing on August 12, 1998 that "The Review shares the view expressed in the Interim Report that this was a matter which likely did not merit any investigation."[^26] At a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on May 2, 2000, Specter referred to LaBella's memorandum to Attorney General [[Janet Reno]] of the summer of 1998, which was reported to recommend that she appoint an independent prosecutor because the allegations of political favors involved the President; Reno denied the recommendations.[^25] An article by William C. Rempel and Alan C. Miller in the Los Angeles Times of May 23, 2000 reported that Specter had suggested the sealed memorandum sought an independent counsel for the Loral matter, and that the memorandum and related documents obtained by the Times showed that by the summer of 1998 the task force had effectively excused Schwartz and Loral from the campaign finance investigation. A former task force investigator told the Times: "There was never a whiff of a scent of a case against him."[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
On March 16, 2000, U.S. Ambassador [[Joseph Prueher]] hosted a dinner in Beijing for representatives of Loral, Lockheed Martin, Hughes, the China Aerospace Corporation and ChinaSat, and the embassy denied that an export license for ChinaSat 8 was discussed. On July 17, 2000 the Defense Security Service issued an award for "outstanding security performance and practices" to Loral and 49 other companies, then rescinded Loral's after realizing it remained under investigation. In the summer of 2001 the Bush administration was reported to be negotiating civil settlements with Loral and Hughes rather than criminal charges.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
### Congressional inquiries
|
||||
|
||||
The Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, chaired by [[Fred Thompson]], issued its report S. Rept. 105-167 in six volumes, ordered printed on March 10, 1998. The table of contents of the first volume lists a chapter titled "Johnny Chung and the White House 'Subway.'"[^31]
|
||||
|
||||
The House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, chaired by [[Dan Burton]], issued an interim report on November 5, 1998. Its section on Chung states that "Chung's bank accounts and his record of contributions to the DNC tend to corroborate the account first published by the New York Times," and that Chung "received three wire transfers from Hong Kong totaling $290,000" in July and August 1996.[^32] The Cox Committee's report, H. Rept. 105-851, was issued in classified form on January 3, 1999 and declassified in part on May 25, 1999.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Johnny Chung and Chinagate
|
||||
|
||||
[[Johnny Chung]], a Democratic fundraiser, disclosed during plea negotiations that he had met [[Liu Chaoying]] and General [[Ji Shengde]] during a trip to Hong Kong in the summer of 1996. According to Chung, he received $300,000 from Liu and Ji as a result of the meeting. The Cox Committee wrote that the FBI confirmed the deposit into Chung's account, and concluded that the payment was an attempt to better position Liu in the United States.[^33]
|
||||
|
||||
Liu was a vice-president of China Aerospace International Holdings, which the committee described as the Hong Kong subsidiary of China Aerospace Corporation, the organization that manages the PRC's missile and space industry. The committee also reported that China Aerospace Corporation is a substantial shareholder in the Apstar and APMT projects, which import U.S. satellites to the PRC for launch by China Great Wall Industry Corporation.[^33]
|
||||
|
||||
On December 14, 1998, Judge [[Manuel Real]] of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles sentenced Chung to five years of probation and 3,000 hours of community service. Chung had admitted in March 1998 to an illegal $20,000 contribution to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign and an illegal $8,000 contribution to the campaign of Senator [[John Kerry]], and to fraudulently obtaining a loan for his California home; that he had funneled contributions through straw donors; prosecutors recommended probation because he cooperated with their two-year investigation; and Real expressed skepticism at a letter from the Democratic National Committee claiming that Chung had concealed the source of the contributions from party officials.[^34]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 2002 consent agreement
|
||||
|
||||
The State Department's draft charging letter to [[Eric J. Zahler]], president and chief operating officer of Loral Space & Communications, signed by William Lowell, director of the Office of Defense Trade Controls, states that Space Systems/Loral violated the Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations in connection with its conduct after the February 1996 failed launch carrying Intelsat 708, and that "Sixty-four (64) violations are alleged at this time." Charges 1 to 5 concern Space Systems/Loral's attendance at a failure briefing in Beijing on April 10 to 12, 1996, the charter of the Independent Review Committee, a further Beijing briefing on April 15 to 16 and the first committee meeting in Palo Alto, each without a Defense Department monitor or a license; charges 6 to 29 concern the 24 areas for further technical investigation delineated at that meeting; charges 30 to 61 concern the written summary faxed to China Great Wall on April 25, the second committee meeting in Beijing from April 30 to May 1, the faxed draft of the preliminary committee report on May 7, the final report on May 10, a copy faxed on May 13 to an insurance industry representative in Beijing, and an evaluation of the Long March 3B stage separation system. Charge 62 concerns the October 5, 1995 license application for the Apstar IIR satellite, and charges 63 and 64 concern the May 5 and May 16, 1997 submissions of technical assistance agreements for Chinasat 8, each alleged to have omitted the technical interchanges already held with Chinese authorities. The letter states that civil penalties may not exceed $500,000 per violation.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
On January 9, 2002, the Department of State's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, acting through its Office of Defense Trade Controls, and Space Systems/Loral entered a consent agreement under the Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. The agreement refers to a draft charging letter alleging that Space Systems/Loral violated Section 38 of the Act and Section 127 of the regulations.[^35]
|
||||
|
||||
The agreement sets a civil penalty of $20,000,000 (twenty million dollars), "comprised of" $2,200,000 payable to the State Department within 10 days of the signing of the Order and $11,800,000 payable in installments of $1,685,714 on each of the first seven anniversaries. A further $6,000,000 is assessed, but its payment is suspended on condition that the company apply it over seven years to remedial compliance measures.[^35] Space Systems/Loral and Loral "neither admit nor deny the allegations in the draft Charging Letter."[^35]
|
||||
|
||||
The agreement states that decisions on export licenses for the CHINASAT-8 and APSTAR V spacecraft would be made "without reference to the Department's previously expressed concerns regarding SS/L's reliability."[^35] Loral's Form 8-K for the period reported that the Justice Department had "terminated its investigation of SS/L relating to this matter."[^36] Schwartz said in Loral's announcement of January 9, 2002 that the matter "grew out of the activities of an Independent Review Committee (IRC) set up to inform the insurance industry about the causes of a 1996 Chinese rocket failure" and that a copy of the committee's preliminary report "was mistakenly sent to the Chinese by a Loral employee."[^37] The U.S. Customs Service announced on January 10, 2002 that its investigation, begun in May 1996, had resulted in the $20 million fine, which it called the largest paid by an American company under the Arms Export Control Act.[^38] The obituary says that federal authorities had charged the company with "64 counts of violating rules governing the transfer of sensitive technologies."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Gifts to the New School for Social Research
|
||||
|
||||
On November 9, 2001, the New School announced a gift of $1.1 million from Schwartz, then chairman and chief executive of Loral Space & Communications, to create the Bernard L. Schwartz Lecture Series and Project in Markets, Equality and Democracy. The four-year project was based at the Graduate Faculty's Center for Economic Policy Analysis.[^39]
|
||||
|
||||
On October 21, 2004, the school announced that Schwartz, [[Peggy Brim Bewkes]], [[Eileen Naughton]] and [[Richard Reiss Jr.]] had joined its Board of Trustees on September 1, 2004, and that [[Philip Scaturro]] was chairman of the board. The release lists Schwartz as chairman of [[K & F Industries]] and a member of the board of [[First Data Corporation]], and as a trustee of [[NYU Hospitals Center]], [[Thirteen-WNET]], [[Baruch College]] and the Democratic Leadership Council. It describes him as a member of the advisory council of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he had established a chair in political economy, and says he "established fellowship programs at the Council on Foreign Relations and The New America Foundation."[^40]
|
||||
|
||||
On November 4, 2004, the school announced a $10 million grant from the [[Starr Foundation]], which the release calls "the largest foundation gift in the University's history," to establish the [[India China Institute]], led by Provost [[Arjun Appadurai]] and Graduate Faculty dean [[Benjamin Lee]]. The same release announced a $3.7 million gift from Schwartz to establish the [[Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis]] and endow the Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of Economics and Policy. The release says the center was established in September 2004 and that it continues to sponsor the Irene and Bernard Schwartz Lecture. Kerrey's quoted remarks attribute the $3.7 million to the [[Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation]].[^41]
|
||||
|
||||
### Other gifts
|
||||
|
||||
On March 20, 2002, the [[Council on Foreign Relations]] announced that [[Bennett Freeman]] had been named the first Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow in Business and Foreign Policy, a post housed in the council's new [[Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies]]. The release states: "This fellowship is funded by Bernard L. Schwartz, Chairman and CEO of Loral Space & Communications Ltd."[^42]
|
||||
|
||||
The [[New America Foundation]]'s memorial page says Schwartz served on its board from 2004 to 2010 and was a supporter of its Fellows Program. The page credits 40 Bernard L. Schwartz New America Fellows with six New York Times bestsellers.[^43]
|
||||
|
||||
On August 4, 2005, the [[Brookings Institution]] announced that Schwartz had established the Bernard L. Schwartz Chair in International Economics.[^44]
|
||||
|
||||
In July 2006 Schwartz was identified as a donor to an alliance of nearly a hundred wealthy donors that had directed more than $50 million in nine months to liberal think tanks and advocacy groups; he said the group offers partners "an array of opportunities that have passed their smell test."[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
### Later life
|
||||
|
||||
The 2014 memoir took its title from the motto Schwartz used to end disputes. He would listen to opposing views, make up his mind, and tell anyone who persisted to "just say yes."[^1] He married Irene Zanderer, whom he had met at City College of New York; they were married for 63 years, until her death in 2014. He married Denise Jansen in 2018. In 2006 he founded [[BLS Investments]], a private investment firm. He died at his home in Manhattan on March 12, 2024, aged 98.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Federal Election Commission records list itemized contributions under the name Bernard L. Schwartz with the employer BLS Investments in 2023 and 2024, including $100,000 on September 21, 2023 to the Harris Victory Fund, and $25,000 on February 6, 2024 each to the Harris Victory Fund and to the Democratic National Committee.[^45]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Bernard Schwartz, antiwar executive who built an arms maker, dies at 98," The New York Times, reprinted by The Boston Globe, March 19, 2024, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/03/19/metro/bernard-schwartz-antiwar-executive-who-built-an-arms-maker-dies-98
|
||||
[^2]: U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China, Report (H. Rept. 105-851, issued January 3, 1999, declassified in part May 25, 1999), vol. II, pp. 117 to 118 (Loral Space and Communications, Ltd. as the parent of Loral; the 1990 Ford Aerospace acquisition and renaming as Space Systems/Loral), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^3]: Dave Eisenstadt, "Orbiter of Power," Mother Jones, May 1, 1997, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1997/05/orbiter-power/ Sole source for the $27 million stock-gain figure, the defense-post and White House dinner statements, the Democratic Leadership Council total and the ranking entry ("#1," "Party: Both," "$661,000 total contributions").
|
||||
[^4]: Loral Space & Communications Ltd., Form 10-K for fiscal year 2005, statements on the July 15, 2003 reorganization filings of Old Loral and certain subsidiaries, the retirement of Bernard L. Schwartz effective March 1, 2006, and the election of Michael B. Targoff as chief executive, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1006269/000095012306003801/y18173e10vk.htm
|
||||
[^5]: Cox Report, vol. I, pp. 49 to 50 and notes 112 to 116 (p. 240), covering the meetings with Ron Brown, the 1994 trade mission, the letter to the President co-signed by Armstrong, Schwartz and Tellep, the November 21, 1998 Schwartz deposition, and the count of five satellite projects; declassification date from the report's front matter, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^6]: Cox Report, vol. III, ch. 9, p. 61 (letter of October 6, 1995 from Armstrong, Schwartz and Tellep to the President), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^7]: Cox Report, vol. I, p. 215 (1995 Memorandum of Agreement between Loral and China Aerospace Corporation), vol. II, p. 178 (chronology entry "June 9 Loral signs Memorandum of Agreement with CASC for a ten-year joint technology development program") and p. 330, note 260 (Memorandum of Agreement "signed on June 9, 1995 by Robert E. Berry and Zhang Xin-Xia"), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^8]: U.S. Department of State, Office of Defense Trade Controls, Draft Charging Letter to Space Systems/Loral, Inc. (undated; paragraphs 5 to 22 and charges 1 to 64; note 4 on the agreements with CASC), published by the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/sys_attachment.do?sys_id=032ef245db15df00d0a370131f96192b
|
||||
[^9]: Cox Report, vol. I, p. 50, sidebar on Loral's Presidential waivers for another launch in the PRC, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf The sentence is the committee's own characterization.
|
||||
[^10]: Cox Report, vol. II, p. 96 (Chapter 6 summary: failure of the Intelsat 708 launch from Xichang on February 15, 1996), p. 119 (3:00 a.m. local time) and the chronology entry for February 15, 1996, p. 178, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^11]: Cox Report, vol. II, p. 157 ("its final failure determination: that the cause of the February 11, 1996 Long March 3B crash was the absence of current output from the servo-loop of the follow-up frame of the inertial guidance platform," announced September 10, 1996), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^12]: Cox Report, vol. II, pp. 96 and 108 (Wah Lim invited to chair the Independent Review Committee), p. 109 (meetings at Loral's offices in Palo Alto, April 22 to 24, 1996) and pp. 113 to 114 (Feith & Zell engaged May 23, 1996; disclosure to the State Department June 17, 1996), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^13]: Cox Report, Overview, vol. I, pp. xix to xx, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^14]: Cox Report, vol. II, p. 98 (quotation of the 1997 Defense Department assessment) and the chronology entry for May 16, 1997, p. 193 (Defense Technology Security Administration recommendation of referral to the Justice Department), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^15]: Cox Report, vol. II, p. 98 (July 1998 interagency review team assessment), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^16]: Cox Report, vol. III, ch. 9, p. 50 (national-interest determinations from 1989, Bush and Clinton determinations including those of 1996, and the February 18, 1998 determination for the Chinasat-8 satellite built by Loral), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^17]: Jeff Gerth and John M. Broder, "The White House Dismissed Warnings on China Satellite Deal," The New York Times, June 1, 1998, reprinted in the Congressional Record, House, June 18, 1998, pp. H4758 to H4760, https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/china/1998/h980618-prc7.htm The Times version of Berger's memorandum reads "In any case ... we believe that the advantages of this project outweigh this risk"; the Cox Report quotation reads "outweigh the risk."
|
||||
[^18]: Cox Report, vol. III, ch. 9, pp. 52 to 53 and notes 174 to 176 (January 1998 draft National Security Council memorandum; the C-802 reference, deleted from the memorandum sent to the President), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^19]: Cox Report, vol. III, ch. 9, p. 51 (passage quoted from the decision memorandum for the President, released May 22, 1998) and p. 185, note 169 (memorandum of February 12, 1998 from Samuel L. Berger, Larry Stein and Daniel Tarullo; Cox spells the adviser's middle initial "L," and the New York Times spells it "R."), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^20]: Cox Report, vol. III, ch. 9, p. 51 (transmittal memorandum dated February 18, 1998 from Phil Caplan, Executive Clerk, Office of the White House, relaying the counsel's note and the Justice Department position), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^21]: Cox Report, vol. III, ch. 9, p. 52 (continuation of the Caplan transmittal memorandum, note 170), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^22]: Cox Report, vol. III, ch. 9, p. 52 (Robert S. Litt, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, recollection of the Justice Department's notice of the application, interview of December 8, 1998, printed in the report's notes as "1988"; Commerce license of March 23, 1998), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^23]: Cox Report, vol. III, ch. 9, p. 51 (New York Times report of April 13, 1998; White House release of documents on May 22, 1998; the Times description of Schwartz as "the largest individual donor to the Democratic Party in 1997," cited to the Times in note 168), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^24]: The New York Times, May 19, 1998, account of Loral's May 18, 1998 statement, reprinted in the Congressional Record, House, June 18, 1998, https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/china/1998/h980618-prc6.htm
|
||||
[^25]: Shirley A. Kan, Congressional Research Service Report 98-485, "China: Possible Missile Technology Transfers Under U.S. Satellite Export Policy: Actions and Chronology," updated March 27, 2003, pp. 7 to 9 and chronology (citing William C. Rempel and Alan C. Miller, "Internal Justice Memo Excuses Loral From Funds Probe," Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2000; David Johnston, "Memo Shows Another Push For Clinton Inquiry," The New York Times, May 3, 2000; Walter Pincus, "Defense Award Rescinded From Firm Being Probed," The Washington Post, July 18, 2000; Andy Pasztor and David Cloud, The Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2001), https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20030327_98-485_ee468327e241c908e7fe19dc62e4d7f02279db65.html
|
||||
[^26]: Henry A. Waxman, extension of remarks addressed to Representative Curt Weldon, Congressional Record, October 28, 2000, p. E1991 (quoting memoranda of Lee Radek of August 5, 1998 and Charles LaBella of August 12, 1998, the Los Angeles Times of May 23, 2000 and the New York Times of May 24, 1998), https://www.govinfo.gov/link/crec/146/E/1991 The statement is Waxman's characterization, made in a dispute with Weldon.
|
||||
[^27]: Federal Election Commission, itemized receipts (Schedule A index, OpenFEC) for contributor names "SCHWARTZ, BERNARD L" and "SCHWARTZ, BERNARD" with New York addresses, two-year periods 1996 and 1998 (covering January 1995 through December 1998), https://api.open.fec.gov/v1/schedules/schedule_a/?contributor_name=SCHWARTZ%2C+BERNARD+L&two_year_transaction_period=1996 The index is incomplete for the earlier period, and the totals given are sums of the itemized rows computed from the index, not totals reported by the committees.
|
||||
[^28]: Shirley A. Kan, Congressional Research Service Report 98-485, updated August 13, 1998, https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/19980813_98-485_e7cf0f509de870d8e74490ae9a58cfb95a001443.html
|
||||
[^29]: "The Mother Jones 400," Mother Jones, November 1998, entry No. 3, Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1998/11/mojo-400-top-ten-0/
|
||||
[^30]: Daniel McKivergan, "Mi$$ile Man," Washington Examiner, July 17, 2006, quoting a Washington Post article of that day and an Associated Press report of January 10, 2002, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/1808307/miile-man/
|
||||
[^31]: U.S. Senate, Committee on Governmental Affairs, S. Rept. 105-167, vol. 1 of 6, ordered printed March 10, 1998, table of contents, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-105srpt167/pdf/CRPT-105srpt167-pt1.pdf
|
||||
[^32]: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, H. Rept. 105-829, interim report, vol. 1 of 4, November 5, 1998, section "Overseas Wires and Contributions," https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-105hrpt829/pdf/CRPT-105hrpt829-vol1.pdf
|
||||
[^33]: Cox Report, vol. I, pp. 23 to 24 (Chung's plea-negotiation disclosures; the FBI confirmation of the deposit; the committee's conclusion on the payment; Liu's position at China Aerospace International Holdings; the Apstar and APMT shareholding; China Great Wall Industry Corporation), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^34]: Mike O'Sullivan, "Fundraiser Sentenced," Voice of America correspondent report, Los Angeles, December 14, 1998, https://irp.fas.org/news/1998/12/981215-chung.htm
|
||||
[^35]: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Office of Defense Trade Controls, consent agreement with Space Systems/Loral, Inc., January 9, 2002 (draft charging letter, civil penalty, neither-admit-nor-deny clause, and the CHINASAT-8 and APSTAR V licensing paragraph), Exhibit 10.1 to Loral's Form 8-K, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001006269/000095012302000193/y56456ex10-1.txt
|
||||
[^36]: Loral Space & Communications Ltd., Form 8-K, January 2002, Item 5, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001006269/000095012302000193/y56456e8-k.txt
|
||||
[^37]: "Loral and U.S. Government Settle 1996 Chinese Launch Matter," Loral Space & Communications announcement, January 9, 2002, https://spacenews.com/?p=33950
|
||||
[^38]: U.S. Customs Service news release, "U.S. Customs Probes Into Satellite Manufacturer Results in Record $20 Million Fine," January 10, 2002, as reprinted by the U.S. Department of State, International Information Programs, https://web.archive.org/web/20030114052408/http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/ea/uschina/loralcna.htm
|
||||
[^39]: New School press release, November 9, 2001, Wayback Machine capture of September 10, 2006, http://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2001/110901_schwart.html (capture at https://web.archive.org/web/20060910004616/http://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2001/110901_schwart.html)
|
||||
[^40]: New School press release, "New School University Announces New Board Members," October 21, 2004, https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2004/102104_nsu_members.html (Wayback Machine capture of September 10, 2006: Bewkes, Naughton, Reiss and Schwartz joined September 1, 2004; Philip Scaturro as chairman of the board; Schwartz's listed positions)
|
||||
[^41]: New School press release, "New School University Receives Major Gifts to Fund Projects Related to Globalization," November 4, 2004, https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2004/110404_nsu_gifts.html (Wayback Machine capture of September 10, 2006: the Starr Foundation grant of $10 million, "the largest foundation gift in the University's history"; the $3.7 million gift; the center "established in September 2004"; Kerrey's remarks naming the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation)
|
||||
[^42]: Council on Foreign Relations, "Bennett Freeman Named First Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow in Business and Foreign Policy," press release dated March 20, 2002, https://www.cfr.org/articles/bennett-freeman-named-first-bernard-l-schwartz-senior-fellow-business-and-foreign
|
||||
[^43]: "In memory of Bernard L. Schwartz," New America, Wayback Machine capture of March 20, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240320232540/https://www.newamerica.org/fellows/in-memory-of-bernard-l-schwartz/
|
||||
[^44]: Brookings Institution, "Bernard L. Schwartz Establishes Chair at Brookings," news release, August 4, 2005, https://www.brookings.edu/news-releases/bernard-l-schwartz-establishes-chair-at-brookings/
|
||||
[^45]: Federal Election Commission, itemized receipts (Schedule A index, OpenFEC) for contributor name "SCHWARTZ, BERNARD L" with employer BLS Investments, two-year periods 2024 and 2022 to 2024, https://api.open.fec.gov/v1/schedules/schedule_a/?contributor_name=SCHWARTZ%2C+BERNARD+L
|
||||
236
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Hans Speier.md
Normal file
236
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Hans Speier.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,236 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Scientists & Researchers"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- HansSpeier
|
||||
- PsychologicalWarfare
|
||||
- PropagandaAnalysis
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- UniversityInExile
|
||||
- RAND
|
||||
- FBIS
|
||||
- OWI
|
||||
- ProjectTroy
|
||||
- Quantico
|
||||
- ColdWar
|
||||
- RockefellerFoundation
|
||||
- FordFoundation
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Hans Speier
|
||||
- Speier
|
||||
- Hans-Heinrich Adolf Ludwig Speier
|
||||
summary: "German-American sociologist who analyzed Nazi radio at the New School, ran German analysis at the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, and from 1948 to 1960 directed the Social Science Division of the RAND Corporation."
|
||||
born: 1905-02-03
|
||||
died: 1990-02-17
|
||||
location: "Berlin, Germany; New York; Washington, D.C.; Santa Monica, California"
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Deutsche Hochschule für Politik]]"
|
||||
role: "lecturer in political sociology"
|
||||
start: 1931-11
|
||||
end: 1933-04
|
||||
fn: 5
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "one of ten founding members of the University in Exile (Graduate Faculty)"
|
||||
start: 1933
|
||||
fn: 8
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "professor of sociology"
|
||||
start: 1933-09
|
||||
end: 1948
|
||||
fn: 8
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Research Project on Totalitarian Communication]]"
|
||||
role: "co-director with Ernst Kris"
|
||||
start: 1941-04
|
||||
end: 1943-01
|
||||
fn: 12
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]]"
|
||||
role: "Senior Political Analyst, head of the Central European Section; Principal Political Analyst from November 1942"
|
||||
start: 1942-03
|
||||
end: 1944-05
|
||||
fn: 15
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Office of War Information]]"
|
||||
role: "head of the German Committee; Propaganda Policy Adviser (Germany) from December 1944"
|
||||
start: 1944-05
|
||||
end: 1945-08
|
||||
fn: 25
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[U.S. Department of State]]"
|
||||
role: "Deputy and Acting Chief, Division for Occupied Areas"
|
||||
start: 1946-01
|
||||
end: 1947-09
|
||||
fn: 26
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Rand Corporation]]"
|
||||
role: "head of the Social Science Division"
|
||||
start: 1948-07
|
||||
end: 1960
|
||||
fn: 28
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Project Troy]]"
|
||||
role: "panel member"
|
||||
start: 1950-10
|
||||
end: 1951-02
|
||||
fn: 35
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Quantico I and II]]"
|
||||
role: "panel member, Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel"
|
||||
start: 1955-06
|
||||
end: 1955-06
|
||||
fn: 41
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Ford Foundation]]"
|
||||
role: "consultant on the Behavioral Sciences Program"
|
||||
start: 1951
|
||||
fn: 39
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[University of Massachusetts Amherst]]"
|
||||
role: "professor of sociology"
|
||||
start: 1969
|
||||
fn: 43
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Hans Speier (February 3, 1905 to February 17, 1990) was a German sociologist who emigrated in 1933, helped found the Graduate Faculty (the University in Exile) at the [[New School for Social Research]], co-directed a Rockefeller-funded study of Nazi radio propaganda, and then moved through the [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]], the [[Office of War Information]] and the [[U.S. Department of State]] into the [[Rand Corporation]], where he headed the Social Science Division from 1948 to 1960. He sat on the State Department's [[Project Troy]] panel in 1950 and 1951 and on the 1955 [[Quantico I and II|Quantico]] panel convened by [[Nelson Rockefeller]], and he drafted the plan that became the [[Ford Foundation]]'s Behavioral Sciences Program and Stanford's [[Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Berlin and Heidelberg
|
||||
|
||||
Hans-Heinrich Adolf Ludwig Speier was born in Berlin to Adolf Speier, an insurance executive, and Anna Persson (spelled Person in one account). He sat the Abitur at the Helmholtz Realgymnasium in Friedenau, worked as a bank apprentice at Sachs, Warschauer and Company, and from 1926 studied economics and sociology at the [[University of Heidelberg]] under [[Emil Lederer]] and [[Karl Mannheim]], becoming a founding member of the Mannheim circle there. Through [[Karl Jaspers]], who advised him in philosophy, he knew [[Hannah Arendt]] and Dolf Sternberger; in 1925 he met the exchange student [[Talcott Parsons]], who later vouched for him to the American government.[^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
He took his doctorate under Mannheim on April 19, 1928, with a dissertation on the philosophy of history of Ferdinand Lassalle. Lederer placed him as an analyst in the Berlin office of [[Rudolf Hilferding]], then finance minister, and he joined the [[Social Democratic Party of Germany]] in 1928 or 1929. He married the pediatrician Luise (Lisa) Griesbach, who was Jewish, on August 30, 1929; she lost her post in Berlin's welfare office in 1933.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
From October 1928 he edited for the [[Ullstein Verlag]] in Berlin, and from 1931 he lectured in political sociology at the [[Deutsche Hochschule für Politik]] under its director [[Ernst Jäckh]]. He also worked for Lederer as editor of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik and lectured to young Social Democrats on the history of the German parties. The Hochschule was financed in part by the [[Rockefeller Foundation]] and the [[Carnegie Corporation]], and colleagues there included [[Sigmund Neumann]], [[Albert Salomon]], [[Hans Simons]] and [[Franz Neumann]].[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The University in Exile
|
||||
|
||||
The Propaganda Ministry seized the Hochschule in April 1933 and dismissed Speier. That summer Lederer, then in London, wrote asking whether he would help create a University in Exile at the New School; Speier carried contracts between London and Berlin to prospective members, reached New York on September 15, 1933, and entered the United States as a non-quota academic immigrant.[^7] [[Alvin Johnson]], the New School's president, had raised $120,000 from the philanthropist Hiram Halle to fund fifteen professorships of $4,000 each. The ten founding members were Karl Brandt, [[Gerhard Colm]], Arthur Feiler, [[Eduard Heimann]], Erich von Hornbostel, Herman Kantorowicz, Lederer, Speier, [[Max Wertheimer]] and Frieda Wunderlich.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
Speier was the first editor of the journal Social Research. With Alfred Kähler he edited the 1939 collection War in Our Time, and the Graduate Faculty produced the first English translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1938 and 1939, the edition later used by the [[Office of Strategic Services]] and the OWI.[^9] He became a US citizen on April 20, 1940.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Research Project on Totalitarian Communication
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Research Project on Totalitarian Communication]] began work on April 1, 1941, at the Graduate Faculty under the co-directorship of Speier and the Viennese psychoanalyst [[Ernst Kris]], who had run an analysis unit on German broadcasts for the [[BBC]] in London. The preface to its 1944 book states that the project was "supported by one of the large foundations" and was assigned "to develop methods for the study of enemy propaganda and to train American social scientists for prospective government work in this field." It worked from the BBC Monitoring Service's restricted Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts and from documents obtained through John Salt, then deputy director of the BBC's New York office, and its research papers went "almost exclusively to government agencies in Washington, London, and Ottawa."[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
The Rockefeller Foundation granted the project $15,960 in March 1941 and a further $19,000 in 1942. Alvin Johnson housed the staff in rooms at the New School. The Rockefeller Foundation also funded [[Harold Graves]]'s Princeton Shortwave Listening Center and Harold Lasswell's Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications at the [[Library of Congress]], and the project brought Speier into contact with Lasswell's division and with the Committee for National Morale. The proposal Speier and Kris submitted to the foundation in late 1940 described the project as a way to train "American social scientists for prospective government work in this field." Speier's own chronology describes the project as financed for two years "for training of Rockefeller Research Fellows and study of classified British materials." Kris's papers at the Library of Congress include a Rockefeller Foundation correspondence file for 1940 to 1952 and the project's research papers for 1941 to 1944. The project's roster of twenty-four named staff, its eight research papers and the 1944 book are set out on the project's own page.[^12][^13]
|
||||
|
||||
The Graduate Faculty as a whole supplied more than twenty-five government-associated projects. The National Defense Commission asked the New School in the winter of 1939 to 1940 for analyses of the Nazi victories, and Washington organizations used intermediaries at the Rockefeller Foundation to assign projects to Graduate Faculty members who were still foreign nationals. The [[Board of Economic Warfare]], the Foreign Economic Administration and the Social Science Research Council's Public Administration Committee made use of its research, the OSS regarded the New School as the best collection of German left-leaning intellectuals in the United States, and more than two hundred of its former students worked for the government during the war.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service
|
||||
|
||||
A week after Pearl Harbor Speier sent the project's first report to the FBIS, the civilian unit of the [[Federal Communications Commission]] that monitored foreign radio. Harold Graves, the FBIS senior administrator since March 1941, had directed the Princeton Listening Center, which was launched in November 1939 with Rockefeller Foundation funding and which the service absorbed in June 1941; Graves forwarded Speier's reports and asked for more, and Lloyd Free, the director of the service, and [[Goodwin Watson]], head of its Analysis Division, read his work "with the greatest of interest." Watson offered him the post of Senior Political Analyst, head of the Central European Section, in February 1942. On July 29, 1942, Nelson Rockefeller, then Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, wrote to the FCC chairman [[James Fly]] asking for a greater volume of verbatim transcripts from the service's Kingsville bureau for use in propaganda promoting hemispheric solidarity.[^15][^16]
|
||||
|
||||
The FBI delayed his appointment for months. According to Speier's own letter to [[Kurt Riezler]], investigators suspected him of "having been a dangerously subversive character" because he had published on Marx in Germany and "was not a Jew and yet left Germany in 1933"; a neighbor wrongly told them he travelled often to Germany. The Civil Service Commission informed him on May 26, 1942, two months after he entered the Analysis Division, that he had been rated eligible. His wife Lisa was Jewish.[^17] The Central European Section analyzed all broadcasts from Greater Germany, Scandinavia, Hungary and the Netherlands, and Speier personally examined every German-language broadcast. His section included Alexander George, [[Nathan Leites]] and the psychologist Henry Kellermann; George and Leites later followed him to RAND. In November 1942 Speier became Principal Political Analyst, which made him a vice president of the Analysis Division. Watson wrote of him on November 13, 1943: "I know of nobody in the United States whom I would willingly trade for him." Watson also praised his "extraordinarily good job of analysis" and "uncanny memory," and in July 1943 Speier declined an offer to join the Office of War Information.[^18][^19]
|
||||
|
||||
On October 29, 1943, Speier wrote a memorandum predicting the content of Hitler's speech for the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch; seventeen of twenty-five predictions proved correct, and an OWI contact, Mark Abrams, passed the memorandum to Representative Joseph Martin and Senator Alexander Wiley, who delivered a radio broadcast taking most of its content from it. In May 1943 Watson sent FBIS director Robert Leigh a list of recruits for the section, all but one of them German exiles, among them Sigmund Neumann, Hans Simons and Arnold Wolfers; Leigh replied that he wanted "scholar[s] trained in American Universities."[^20][^21]
|
||||
|
||||
### Dies and Cox
|
||||
|
||||
Representative [[Martin Dies]], first chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, accused three FBIS employees of "un-American beliefs": Watson, the Soviet specialist Frederick Schuman of Speier's section, and William E. Dodd Jr. of the Report Section. The CIA's staff historian Stephen Mercado writes that Dies may have been provoked by FBIS reports that his statements were being praised in Nazi Germany, which had drawn a public rebuke from Vice President [[Henry Wallace]]. In 1943 Congress, by a rider (Section 304) to the Urgent Deficiency Appropriation Act of 1943, halted the pay of Watson, Dodd and a third employee, Robert Morss Lovett, after a special subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee under [[John H. Kerr]] reported; the Supreme Court held the measure unconstitutional in United States v. Lovett (1946).[^22] Separately, Representative Eugene Cox of Georgia opened hearings against the FCC in January 1943 and charged that FBIS was "a glorified news agency that provided nothing of value to the military"; the Cox-Lea Committee submitted its final report on January 2, 1945, after concluding that the United States could not conduct an intelligent program for counteracting enemy propaganda without accurate knowledge of that propaganda. Schuman, who had joined FBIS from Williams College in October 1942, had resigned and returned to Williams before the 1943 cutoff. Watson and Dodd resigned a few days after the cutoff date of November 15, 1943, and Speier replaced Watson as Acting Chief Analyst, overseeing thirty people.[^23]
|
||||
|
||||
In February 1944 the appropriations committee cut 30 percent of the FBIS budget. Leigh's newsletter attributed the cut to Cox's opposition to the FCC and to the Dodd-Watson case, and [[William L. Langer]] of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch intervened for the service without result. By April 1944 most analysts had left the Central European Section, George and Kellermann going to the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, and Speier was left with "four inexperienced assistants." Leigh resigned in the summer of 1944.[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
### Office of War Information
|
||||
|
||||
Speier transferred from FBIS to the OWI's Overseas Operations Branch on May 22, 1944, under Wallace Carroll, as head of the German Committee of Area One, and in December 1944 became Propaganda Policy Adviser for Germany, responsible for planning psychological warfare against Germany and long-range propaganda to be used inside it after defeat. He sat on the interdepartmental German Propaganda Policy Committee, attended the Overseas Planning Board and belonged to the Review Board, and worked with British officials in Washington. In April 1943 the Analysis Division and the OWI's Bureau of Research and Analysis of the Overseas Operations Branch had agreed that the OWI would use the division for analysis of radio broadcasts, and in May 1943 the division moved to OWI headquarters with Watson as its director, in offices contiguous with the branch Speier later joined. Bessner reports that Speier wrote many of the directives for broadcasts to Germany over the [[Voice of America]], which Carroll signed. A central directive of July 1944, as quoted by Winkler, stated that "our propaganda offensive will run boldly in advance of our military offensive" and that "We shall proceed on the implicit assumption that the German will to resist can be broken and will be broken by next December."[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
### Division for Occupied Areas
|
||||
|
||||
After the OWI closed, Speier acted as liaison between State and General Robert McClure's Information Control Division of the US military government, and visited Germany in October 1945. At Bad Homburg a weather delay put him in conversation with Assistant Secretary of State [[William Benton]]; an OWI cable of November 20, 1945, relayed Benton's view that Speier was "the best man OWI ever sent to Germany." State offered him a place on the planned Policy Planning Staff; he declined and instead became Acting Deputy Chief of the Division for Occupied Areas in January 1946, and from January 1947 its Associate (Acting) Chief, supervising about twenty-five staff. His paper on licensing political newspapers in the US zone was rejected by General [[Lucius Clay]]. He returned to the New School in September 1947, declining an offer to coordinate all information media for the military government in Berlin.[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
### Return to the New School
|
||||
|
||||
Back at the New School for 1947 and 1948 he was elected to found a Division of International Studies. He had been in conflict since 1943 with colleagues over the Institute of World Affairs, a research center financed by [[Doris Duke]], and described himself as "used as a pawn in ridiculous faculty politics." The Graduate Faculty extended his leave of absence in 1948, 1949, 1950 and 1951 after he joined RAND.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
### RAND and the Social Science Division
|
||||
|
||||
In September 1947 Project RAND held a Conference of Social Scientists in New York to find leaders for its planned Social Science and Economics divisions. A committee of Herbert Goldhamer, Olaf Helmer, Frederick Mosteller, Leo Rosten, W. Allen Wallis, Warren Weaver and Samuel Wilks had begun considering candidates in the summer of 1946. Speier came to RAND's attention through the screenwriter [[Leo Rosten]], whom he had known at the OWI, where Rosten had been the liaison between Washington and Hollywood; he had not heard of RAND and asked State Department colleagues whether it was genuine. The thirty-five participants included RAND's Frank Collbohm, Olaf Helmer and John D. Williams, Charles Dollard of the Carnegie Corporation, Donald Young of the Social Science Research Council, Kris, Franz Neumann, [[Harold Lasswell]], [[Bernard Brodie]], [[Ruth Benedict]], [[Pendleton Herring]] of the Carnegie Corporation, and [[Warren Weaver]] of the Rockefeller Foundation, who told the group that every piece of knowledge in sociology, economics and political science would be forged into "weapons" for the defense of democracy. Collbohm told the group that the Air Force "makes available to RAND information in other fields, intelligence, plans, etc." Speier told the conference that the "fundamental task of American foreign policy [is] to stem Communism anywhere without at the same time playing into the hands of Fascism." Speier consulted for RAND from May 1948 and directed the Social Science Division from July 1948. At his insistence it was based in Washington until 1957.[^28]
|
||||
|
||||
RAND became an independent corporation on May 14, 1948. [[H. Rowan Gaither]] and [[Frank Collbohm]] arranged the separation from [[Douglas Aircraft]] with a $100,000 interest-free loan and a $300,000 credit guarantee from [[Henry Ford II]] of the Ford Foundation, later raised to $1,000,000; the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation were among RAND's other early financial supporters.[^29] Speier hired former wartime colleagues, among them [[Alexander George]], Nathan Leites and Phil Davison, recruited the nuclear strategists Bernard Brodie and William Kaufmann, and used Leon Gouré, John Herz and [[Otto Kirchheimer]] as consultants. Speier held a "Q" clearance, the highest nuclear clearance, and visited the North American Air Defense Command and Strategic Air Command headquarters. He opened a RAND office in Wiesbaden. In October 1960 RAND's five divisions were split into eleven departments; [[Herbert Goldhamer]] took over the social science side and Speier joined the Research Council, which he chaired in 1961 and 1962; from 1958 to 1962 he was also a consultant to the USAF Scientific Advisory Board.[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
Division publications under Speier included Nathan Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951) and RM-365, "The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare," by Jean M. Hungerford, dated April 14, 1950 (Bessner gives April 15), a Project RAND research memorandum marked as a working paper. It surveys superstition in wartime Germany (astrologers, fortune-tellers, crystal-gazers and chain letters, with a Security Service report of May 21, 1942 on chain letters translated in an appendix), in other belligerent countries and in the postwar Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and reports Hitler's and Goebbels's reliance on omens and fortune-tellers, Rudolf Hess's interest in the occult, and a file the FBI was said to have kept on wartime astrologers suspected of being Axis agents. Its section on deliberate manipulation records German agents posing as astrologers in France in 1940, Goebbels's 1942 diary entries on counter-horoscopes and on a plan by Berndt for occultist propaganda, the OSS black radio program Operation Hermit, which used astrology and fortune-telling in broadcasts beamed to Nanking, and British Army magicians in Italy. It concludes that attempts to manipulate superstition would probably be most successful against peasants, old people and the less educated workers of the Soviet Union and its satellites, proposes the use of astrology and fortune-telling to predict dire events likely to befall the enemy and of chain letters that would burden the enemy postal system, and lists questions on timing, on word-of-mouth rumors introduced by agents, and on boomerang effects. Its sources included the FCC's weekly reports on Nazi propaganda for 1943 and early 1944, the Central European Analysis reports of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, and Kris and Speier's German Radio Propaganda; it states that the files of "black" propagandists were not examined.[^31] After the outbreak of the Korean War a group from the division including Goldhamer, George, Davison, Ewald Schnitzer and a Hungerford (Bessner writes "Jay Hungerford"; RM-365 is credited to Jean M. Hungerford, and records found do not establish whether they are the same person) visited Korea; from August 24, 1951, Goldhamer advised the American delegation at the Kaesong armistice talks and circulated Speier's memoranda and Leites's book to the negotiators. Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy was reported to carry the Operational Code on helicopter trips to the conference site.[^32]
|
||||
|
||||
Speier also sat on the Human Relations and Morale subcommittee of the Defense Department's Research and Development Board's Committee on Human Resources, the body that influenced which communication studies were funded.[^33]
|
||||
|
||||
### Psychological Warfare Reconsidered
|
||||
|
||||
Truman announced the "Campaign of Truth" in April 1950, after the senator William Benton had called in March for a "Marshall Plan of Ideas." On April 10, 1950, Speier addressed the State Department's Foreign Service Institute on "Propaganda and Its Setting," warning against what he called "the democratic fallacy in propaganda," the belief that power always resides in the masses. In "Psychological Warfare Reconsidered" (RAND P-196, February 5, 1951, reissued in 1951 as a Foreign Service Institute pamphlet) he defined the aim of psychological warfare as "deviant, politically relevant behavior," meaning action that weakens the ability of elites to govern and command, wrote that the population at large "is no rewarding target of conversion propaganda from abroad," and wrote that political warfare "can therefore attack the cooperation among elite members," which depends on "a modicum of mutual trust." Deception, he wrote, is "aimed at creating erroneous estimates of enemy capabilities or intentions," and desertions of elite members, though rare, "provide great opportunities to political warfare"; he cited the defection of Rudolf Hess, which he wrote the British had not exploited. Bessner reads the first of these papers as a rejection of the Campaign of Truth. In a 1950 essay Speier wrote that "popular opinion should [not] govern the actions of governments" in a crisis.[^34]
|
||||
|
||||
### Project Troy
|
||||
|
||||
Barrett, head of the State Department's public affairs office, organized a group of experts, Speier among them, in April 1950 to discuss psychological strategy, tactics and organization; Barrett later claimed that he had drawn on the conclusions of that symposium in helping to prepare Truman's Campaign of Truth speech. The State Department then convened Project Troy after RCA chairman [[David Sarnoff]] complained to President [[Harry Truman]] about the Voice of America; State's James Webb then approached MIT's president [[James Killian]] and dean [[John Burchard]] to host a study of Soviet jamming. Speier was among the roughly twenty participants, who met in Washington in October 1950 and in Cambridge, Massachusetts until January 1951 and included [[Lloyd Berkner]], [[Jerome Bruner]], [[Clyde Kluckhohn]], [[Edward Purcell]], [[Merle Tuve]], [[Jerome Wiesner]] and Robert Morison, a physician of the Rockefeller Foundation. The report to Secretary of State [[Dean Acheson]] is dated February 1, 1951, and Bessner records Acheson's receipt of it on February 15. A State Department progress report of March 1951 describes the project as MIT's assembly of "30 of the nation's top scientists and other experts to explore all means" of penetrating the Iron Curtain, conventional and unconventional. Robert Hooker of the Policy Planning Staff told Paul Nitze on March 26, 1951, that the report "deserves the most serious consideration" and recorded its recommendations to stimulate "mutual distrust" among Soviet leaders "by artificial means, bogus letters, etc." and to increase defection. The report was anonymous; Daniel Bessner infers from the similarity to Speier's writings that Speier was a primary author of its sections on psychological warfare against the Soviet Union.[^35]
|
||||
|
||||
The project was followed by CENIS, MIT's Center for International Studies, which began operating in the fall of 1951 and whose first director, from February 1952, was Max Millikan, an economist who had spent a year at the CIA.[^36] The Psychological Strategy Board's directive PSB D-31 of November 26, 1952, issued by a panel of State, Defense, CIA and PSB personnel (the board for which Speier would consult), called for increasing suspicion within the communist system "to the point of systematic removal or elimination of personnel in important and effective positions."[^37]
|
||||
|
||||
### Psychological Warfare in Germany
|
||||
|
||||
At the request of Shepard Stone of the High Commission for Occupied Germany, Speier and Wallace Carroll visited Germany in autumn 1950 as State Department consultants and delivered on December 1, 1950, "Psychological Warfare in Germany," whose primary recommendation was to "destroy Soviet power in Germany." The report called for propaganda to create the belief that an East German resistance movement was ready to fight, and described later phases of "infiltration of selected Soviet zone organizations, ... sabotage, abduction, direct action against selected, high placed functionaries." After Stalin's note of March 1952 the Psychological Strategy Board's directive PSB D-21 (October 9, 1952) set out tasks including disaffection and defection in the Soviet Zone and non-attributable psychological, political and economic harassment; a later implementation report records financial assistance to a West Berlin publisher to distribute 50,000 fake copies of the East German labor paper Tribuene.[^38]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Ford Foundation and the Behavioral Sciences Center
|
||||
|
||||
Gaither, who chaired the Ford Foundation study committee of 1949 and had arranged RAND's Ford loan, asked Speier and Donald Marquis in late 1950 for advice on the foundation's Program Five. Speier recommended Bernard Berelson as its director; with Marquis and Berelson he presented in December 1951 a plan proposing an institute for advanced training in the behavioral sciences, a research center on international communication and a study of the stability of totalitarian governments. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences opened at Stanford in September 1954 under Ralph Tyler. Speier spent 1956 and 1957 there as a fellow.[^39]
|
||||
|
||||
For the MIT program, Speier visited Millikan in February 1952, and in the spring of 1952 Ford trustees granted CENIS $875,000 for a research program in international communication. Speier chaired the planning committee (Bruner, Carroll, Lasswell, [[Paul Lazarsfeld]], Edward Shils, [[Ithiel de Sola Pool]]), whose June 1953 report recommended study of "communications to and from the wielders of power and influence"; Pool became the program's research director after Speier declined the position.[^40]
|
||||
|
||||
### Quantico I
|
||||
|
||||
Nelson Rockefeller, then Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Cold War Planning, invited Speier on May 25, 1955. The Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel met at the Marine Corps Schools from June 5 to 10, 1955, with [[Henry Kissinger]] and members of the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, the Operations Coordinating Board and the National Security Council attending some sessions. Its report lists Speier as of the RAND Corporation. Its chairman was [[Walt Rostow]] of MIT; the other members were Frederick Dunn, [[C. D. Jackson]], Ellis Johnson, Paul Linebarger, Max Millikan, Philip Mosely, George Pettee, Stefan Possony, Speier and Charles A. H. Thomson. On June 13, 1955, Rockefeller sent [[Allen Dulles]] a copy (Copy No. 42), thanking him for the participation of members of his agency in the panel discussions; on July 25, 1955, [[Richard Bissell]], Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence for Planning and Coordination, sent the Assistant Director for National Estimates a memorandum drawing attention to Ellis Johnson's supporting paper on the requirements for the United States and NATO to win the arms race. Its report, stamped Secret, recommends proposals including "a proposed agreement for mutual inspection of military installations, forces, and armaments" and a convention on the right of aircraft to fly over any country. Speier's memorandum for the panel held that the Soviets would use the Geneva summit for advantage in "the international struggle for power" and that the United States should "force them to retreat." Rockefeller handed Eisenhower a note recommending mutual aerial inspection on July 6 and sent him a memorandum, "Psychological Strategy at Geneva," on July 11. On July 21, 1955, Eisenhower proposed Open Skies, and Rockefeller cabled panel members that they "should be reading newspapers tonight with great pride and satisfaction." Speier did not attend Quantico II (September 25 to 29, 1955), because he was in Germany for RAND; Kissinger attended in his place, and Rockefeller became Kissinger's patron. According to Bessner, Speier never again consulted for the executive branch.[^41]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Political Game
|
||||
|
||||
With Herbert Goldhamer, Speier developed a free-form political simulation, played four times at RAND in 1955 and 1956 and presented to the Social Science Research Council, the Army War College and West Point. Players took national roles, wrote justifications for each move and met random events refereed by staff; State Department officials joined the fourth game. In 1960 CENIS held the game POLEX II, the Joint War Games Agency adopted it, and in September and October 1961 two Berlin crisis games directed by [[Thomas Schelling]] were played by officials including McGeorge Bundy, Alain Enthoven, Carl Kaysen, Henry Kissinger, Robert Komer and John McNaughton's aide Henry Rowen. Kaysen briefed President Kennedy on the results.[^42]
|
||||
|
||||
### Later Career
|
||||
|
||||
Speier remained in RAND's Research Council until 1968, wrote on West Germany and Berlin (Divided Berlin, 1961), held a Senior Fellowship at the [[Council on Foreign Relations]] in 1964 at the request of [[John J. McCloy]], and left for a professorship in sociology at the [[University of Massachusetts Amherst]] in 1969. He later edited with Lasswell and [[Daniel Lerner]] the three-volume Propaganda and Communication in World History (1979 to 1980), and was named professor emeritus of the New School's Graduate Faculty. He died in Sarasota, Florida.[^43]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Deutsche Biographie, "Speier, Hans" (NDB 24, 2010; entry sfz123260), on the offices held 1933 to 1969 and the death in Sarasota. https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz123260.html
|
||||
[^2]: Bessner, Daniel M. "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State." PhD diss., Duke University, 2013, pp. 33-38 (printed pagination; family, Helmholtz Realgymnasium, apprenticeship at Sachs, Warschauer and Company, Heidelberg from early 1926). Birth date February 3, 1905, p. 33. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/19152946-8fbb-4b9b-9da0-faca0979e718. Deutsche Biographie, "Speier, Hans" (NDB 24, 2010; sfz123260), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz123260.html, gives the mother as Anna Persson of Anklam and the start of studies at Heidelberg as 1925; Bessner p. 33 gives "Person" and p. 37 gives early 1926.
|
||||
[^3]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 38 and notes 10-12 (Mannheim circle, Jaspers, Arendt and Sternberger, Talcott Parsons in 1925; Speier Papers, University at Albany).
|
||||
[^4]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 48 and notes 42-43 (doctorate April 19, 1928; Hilferding; SPD membership in "1928 or 1929--records are unclear"; marriage in August 1929) and p. 80 (Lisa Speier's Judaism and dismissal in 1933). Deutsche Biographie, "Speier, Hans" (NDB 24, 2010; sfz123260), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz123260.html, gives the marriage as 1929 to Luise (Lisa) Griesbach (1903 to 1965, Jewish) of Erfurt. University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), gives August 30, 1929.
|
||||
[^5]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 55-57 (Ullstein from October 1928 until June 1932; lectureship at the Hochschule from November 1931 until spring 1933; assistantship with Lederer). Deutsche Biographie, "Speier, Hans" (NDB 24, 2010; sfz123260), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz123260.html, states that he worked at Ullstein until 1930. University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), gives 1928 to 1930. The three accounts differ on the Ullstein end date.
|
||||
[^6]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 57-60 (Jäckh; Rockefeller and Carnegie financing of the Hochschule at p. 58; colleagues Sigmund Neumann and Albert Salomon).
|
||||
[^7]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 80-81 (Propaganda Ministry seizure April 1933; Lederer's letter; Speier's trips between London and Berlin; arrival September 15, 1933; non-quota status).
|
||||
[^8]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 85-86 and notes 15-16 (Hiram Halle's $120,000; ten founding members). Deutsche Biographie, "Speier, Hans" (NDB 24, 2010; sfz123260), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz123260.html, gives the Graduate Faculty's later count of 167 scholars and artists assisted.
|
||||
[^9]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 87 (first editor of Social Research), p. 106 note 107 and p. 126 (War in Our Time, ed. Speier and Alfred Kähler, W. W. Norton, 1939), p. 129 note 38 (first English translation of Mein Kampf, 1938 to 1939, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939; "Possibly through Speier, the New School's edition of Mein Kampf was the one used by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of War Information (OWI)").
|
||||
[^10]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 134 ("received U.S. citizenship in the spring of 1940"). University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), chronology: "April 20, became naturalized U.S. citizen."
|
||||
[^11]: Kris, Ernst, and Hans Speier, with Sidney Axelrad, Hans Herma, Janice Loeb, Heinz Paechter and Howard B. White. German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts during the War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1944, Preface, pp. v-vii. Digital Library of India scan: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.499058
|
||||
[^12]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 129-131 and notes 39-49 (Kris's BBC unit and John Salt, described there as director of the BBC's European Services; proposal of late 1940; five reports; project ended January 1943). The preface of German Radio Propaganda dates the project's start to April 1, 1941, and states that it was reorganized in May 1942 when Speier went to Washington while remaining co-director. University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), chronology, 1941-1942 entry. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Ernst Kris Papers (MSS84824), register: scope note and container list (Rockefeller Foundation correspondence 1940-1952; Research Project on Totalitarian Communication research papers, 1941-1944). https://web.archive.org/web/20161221192727id_/http://rs5.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/2006/ms006003.pdf
|
||||
[^13]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 131 and notes 46-47 (Rockefeller Foundation grants of $15,960 in March 1941 and $19,000 in 1942; the foundation's other funded projects; staff list). Rockefeller Archive Center, "Rockefeller Foundation Support for Communications Media in the 1930s and 1940s," on the "Study of Totalitarian Communication in Wartime" by Kris and Speier, funding ending in 1943 (RG 1.1, Series 200R). https://resource.rockarch.org/story/rockefeller-foundation-support-for-communications-media-in-the-1930s-and-1940s/
|
||||
[^14]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 138-139 and notes 71-73, drawing on Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 119, 139-149, 161, 165-168.
|
||||
[^15]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 132-133 and notes 51-55, citing RG 262, Entry 2, General Correspondence Q-Z, Box 66 (Graves to Speier and Kris, December 23 and 26, 1941; Watson to Speier, December 26, 1941; Free to Speier, January 31, 1942) and RG 262, Entry 75, Box 40 (Speier and Watson, February 6 and 10, 1942), National Archives II. Bessner calls Lloyd Free the director of the service.
|
||||
[^16]: Mercado, Stephen C. "FBIS Against the Axis, 1941-1945." Studies in Intelligence 45, no. 5 (2001): Graves joined as senior administrator in March 1941; the Princeton Listening Center, launched in November 1939 with Rockefeller Foundation funding, was absorbed in June 1941; Speier had been conducting research on German war propaganda under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation; Nelson A. Rockefeller to James L. Fly, July 29, 1942 (NARA, RG 262, Entry 68, Box 22). Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2015/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol45no5/html/v45i5a04p.htm
|
||||
[^17]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 134 and notes 58-59 (Speier to Riezler, April 12, 1942, Speier Papers Box 4, Folder 57; Civil Service Commission to Speier, May 26, 1942, Box 2, Folder 5), and p. 80 for Lisa Speier. The suspicions are Speier's report of what investigators believed.
|
||||
[^18]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 135-136 and notes 60-62 (RG 262, Entry 74, Box 36; Entry 73, Box 34; Watson to Speier, November 13, 1943, RG 262, Entry 73, Box 31).
|
||||
[^19]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 136 and note 65 (Leigh to Speier, July 30, 1943: refusal to join the OWI in July 1943) and p. 137 and note 69 (Principal Political Analyst, November 1942; Watson to Leigh, July 31, 1942, RG 262, Entry 74, Box 36).
|
||||
[^20]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 136-137 and notes 66-68 (Speier, "What Hitler Might Say on November 8," Speier Papers Box 8, Folder 6; Watson to Leigh, November 10, 1943, RG 262, Entry 73, Box 32).
|
||||
[^21]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 139 and notes 74-76 (Watson to Leigh, May 12, 1943, and Leigh's reply of May 14, 1943, RG 262, Entry 75, Box 49, Folder "New Personnel-German"). The list also named Kurt Mattusch, Eric Dale, Hans W. Weigert, John H. Herz and the Chicago historian Bernadotte Schmitt.
|
||||
[^22]: Roop, Part I, p. 193 and note (Section 304 cutoff of November 15, 1943; Watson and Dodd resigned a few days later; Schuman had already resigned and returned to Williams College) and p. 200 (final report of the Lea committee, January 2, 1945), https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947; United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. 303 (1946), on Section 304 and the special subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee; Stephen C. Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis, 1941-1945," Studies in Intelligence 45, no. 5 (2001), on Schuman's departure from Williams College in October 1942.
|
||||
[^23]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 142-143 and notes 87-90; Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," on the Cox hearings of January 1943 and their ending on January 2, 1945 (the Cox-Lea Committee's conclusion), Dies's accusations of "un-American beliefs" against Watson, Schumann and Dodd, Wallace's criticism of Dies, and the Lovett decision. Both texts spell the name Schumann; the person is the political scientist Frederick L. Schuman of Williams College. Bessner p. 138 for Watson's departure and Speier's thirty subordinates.
|
||||
[^24]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 143 and notes 91-94 (Leigh's newsletter of February 15, 1944; Newcomb to Leigh, February 9 and April 3, 1944, RG 262, Entry 73, Box 32), quoting Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis."
|
||||
[^25]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 143-147 and notes 95-110, citing Speier to Carroll, February 2, 1945, RG 208 (OWI), Entry 355, Box 1712, Folder "Wallace Carroll"; Watson to Speier, April 17, 1943, RG 262, Entry 2, Box 66; and Carroll to Bernard, December 4, 1944, Speier Papers Box 2, Folder 3. Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 132 (the July 1944 central directive). Bessner cites Winkler at p. 146 note 106 in connection with the German directives.
|
||||
[^26]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 148-157 and notes 117-148, including the OWI cable of William Stone and Ferdinand Kuhn, November 20, 1945, RG 208, Entry 358, Box 108 (p. 150 note 124), and Speier to Brecht, August 8, 1947 (p. 157). University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), chronology (trips to Germany for OWI, October 13 to December 2, 1945; Associate Chief of the Division for Occupied Areas, January 1946 to September 1947).
|
||||
[^27]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 164-170 and notes 1-26 (Institute of World Affairs, "a research center funded by Doris Duke," p. 164; "used as a pawn in ridiculous faculty politics," p. 165; Division of International Studies elected December 17, 1947, p. 169; plans never realized, p. 170).
|
||||
[^28]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 187-195 and notes 76-104, citing U.S. Air Force Project RAND, Conference of Social Scientists, September 14-19, 1947 (RAND R-106, June 9, 1948), pp. 1-8, 95-156, 184, and Speier, The RAND Social Science Program (RAND D-717-PR, February 2, 1950). Participant list at p. 190 note 88; Rosten at pp. 190-191 and note 89.
|
||||
[^29]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 187 and note 76 (Ford loan of $100,000, $300,000 credit guarantee, a $150,000 Wells Fargo credit line, extension to $1,000,000 in 1950; other early supporters; RAND became the RAND Corporation on May 14, 1948).
|
||||
[^30]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 194-200 and notes 102-123. University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), chronology (Research Council 1960 to 1968, chairman 1961 to 1962; consultant to the USAF Scientific Advisory Board 1958 to 1962).
|
||||
[^31]: Rand Corporation, Research Memorandum RM-365, Jean M. Hungerford, The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare (Santa Monica: Project RAND, April 14, 1950; ASTIA Document Number ATI 210637), cover, summary, sections II to V and appendix. Full text at https://archive.org/details/1950-hungerford-exploitation-of-superstitions-for-purposes-of-psychological-warfare (rand.org record: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM365.html). Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 201 note 128 gives the date as April 15, 1950 and the author as J. Hungerford.
|
||||
[^32]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 205-207 and notes 145-150, citing Goldhamer, The 1951 Korean Armistice Conference: A Personal Memoir, and Robert C. Tucker\'s memoir for the helicopter detail.
|
||||
[^33]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 186 note 73, citing Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 58.
|
||||
[^34]: Speier, Hans. Psychological Warfare Reconsidered. RAND P-196, February 5, 1951 (DTIC AD0603909). https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0603909. Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 209-210 note 164-165 (quoting Speier, "The Historical Development of Public Opinion," American Journal of Sociology 55, January 1950, p. 378), pp. 229-233 and notes 6-27 (Benton's "Marshall Plan of Ideas," Truman's speech of April 1950, the April 10, 1950 Foreign Service Institute address, Speier Papers Box 9, Folder 35, and P-196 pp. 7, 14-15, 17, 30-32). University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), Series 4 (the 1951 Foreign Service Institute pamphlet).
|
||||
[^35]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 236-239 and notes 37-50, citing Project Troy, Report to the Secretary of State, Vol. 1, February 1, 1951, RG 59, Lot 52-283, National Archives II. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955, The Intelligence Community, Document 57 (third progress report on NSC 59/1) and Document 59 (Hooker to Nitze, March 26, 1951). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d57 and https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d59. The participant list is at Bessner pp. 237-238 note 41, the April 1950 symposium and Barrett's later claim at p. 236 and p. 237 note 38 (Bessner names the official William Barrett at p. 236 and Edward W. Barrett at p. 230), and Acheson's receipt on February 15 at p. 238 note 41; FRUS Document 57 note states the report was submitted on February 1, 1951. The identification of Speier as primary author of the report's Soviet sections is Bessner's inference.
|
||||
[^36]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 256 (CENIS began operating in the fall of 1951; Millikan accepted the directorship in February 1952, an economics professor who had spent a year at the CIA).
|
||||
[^37]: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955, The Intelligence Community, Document 139, PSB D-31, "A Strategic Concept for a National Psychological Program with Particular Reference to Cold War Operations under NSC-10/5," November 26, 1952, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d139. Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 240 and notes 51-53 (Strategic Concept Panel; Speier would consult for the PSB).
|
||||
[^38]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 241-246 and notes 54-76, citing Carroll and Speier, "Psychological Warfare in Germany," December 1, 1950, RG 466, National Archives II, and PSB D-21, FRUS 1952-1954, vol. 7, Document 156; Bessner observes at p. 245 that the appendix tasks echoed the Speier and Carroll report.
|
||||
[^39]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 247-255 and notes 82-104, citing Speier, Marquis and Berelson, "The Ford Foundation Behavioral Sciences Program: Proposed Plan," December 1951 (Ford Foundation Archives, Report 002072). Speier's CASBS year is given as 1956 to 1957 by Bessner (p. 255) and by University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm); Deutsche Biographie, "Speier, Hans," gives 1957 and 1958. University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), chronology: "1951 Consultant, Ford Foundation."
|
||||
[^40]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 255-258 and notes 106-116 (trustees' grant "in the spring of 1952"; Pool as research director after Speier declined, p. 257 note 110), citing Speier et al., Research in International Communication: An Advisory Report of the Planning Committee (MIT Center for International Studies, June 1953), and Blackmer, Donald L. M., The MIT Center for International Studies: The Founding Years, 1951-1969 (2002).
|
||||
[^41]: Report of the Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel, June 10, 1955, with Rockefeller's letter to Allen W. Dulles of June 13, 1955 and Richard M. Bissell's memorandum of July 25, 1955 (CIA-RDP86B00269R000800070001-5), CIA Reading Room. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp86b00269r000800070001-5. Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 260-266 and notes 126-148, citing Rockefeller to Speier, May 25, July 21 and August 16, 1955, Rockefeller to Eisenhower, July 11, 1955 (FRUS 1955-1957, vol. 5, Document 154), and Speier, "U.S. Strategy at the Forthcoming Conference," Speier Papers Box 4, Folder 60. University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), container list (folders for Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1955-1956, and the Rockefeller Foundation, 1944 and 1975, Box 4).
|
||||
[^42]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 266-278 and notes 152-187, citing Goldhamer and Speier, "Some Observations on Political Gaming," World Politics 12, no. 1 (October 1959), and Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon, The Worlds of Herman Kahn (Harvard University Press, 2005), chapter 6.
|
||||
[^43]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 283, 303, 307 (Council on Foreign Relations fellowship at McCloy's request; move to the University of Massachusetts in 1969; Propaganda and Communication in World History). Deutsche Biographie, "Speier, Hans" (NDB 24, 2010; sfz123260), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz123260.html, dates his Amherst teaching 1969 to 1973 and the RAND Research Council 1960 to 1968, and gives the death as February 17, 1990, in Sarasota, Florida; University at Albany, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Hans Speier Papers, 1922-1989 (GER-084), finding aid, chronology and box and folder list (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm), adds that he died while vacationing there.
|
||||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2026-05-15
|
||||
updated: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Kim Philby
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Kim Philby
|
||||
|
|
@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ tags:
|
|||
- 1940s
|
||||
- 1950s
|
||||
- 1960s
|
||||
summary: "Kim Philby was the most damaging member of the Cambridge Five, a KGB agent who penetrated MI6 to its anti-Soviet section chief and CIA liaison in Washington, directly causing the death or capture of hundreds of Western agents and precipitating James Angleton's decade-long mole hunt paranoia before defecting to Moscow in January 1963."
|
||||
summary: "Kim Philby, Cambridge Five member and KGB agent inside MI6, rose to head its anti-Soviet section and serve as CIA liaison in Washington before defecting to Moscow in January 1963."
|
||||
born: 1912-01-01
|
||||
died: 1988-05-11
|
||||
location: "Moscow, Soviet Union"
|
||||
|
|
@ -33,6 +33,8 @@ The Cambridge Five - the group of British agents recruited by Soviet intelligenc
|
|||
|
||||
Philby's assignment was long-term penetration of the British intelligence and foreign policy establishment. His cover was carefully constructed: he worked initially as a journalist sympathetic to fascism - including covering the Spanish Civil War from the Nationalist side - to launder his previous left-wing associations before approaching government employment.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
In 1963 [[Michael Whitney Straight]], an American who had been in the same Cambridge circle, told United States authorities that Anthony Blunt had approached him in 1937 to spy. Straight told the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] in June 1963 that he believed Guy Burgess was the person directing Blunt.[^2] In 1981 he said that the FBI passed the details to British security officials and that Blunt confessed in exchange for immunity.[^3] A Cabinet Office minute of January 17, 1983 states that "the lead which led to Anthony Blunt's confession in 1964 was a statement by an American, Mr Michael Whitney Straight, towards the end of 1963."[^4] The National Archives file KV 2/4705 on Blunt covers February 28 to June 19, 1964 and is catalogued as recording that he confessed and was given immunity.[^5] The Vassiliev notebooks, in the Wilson Center translation, quote Burgess ("Madchen") in January and February 1937 reports on Straight to the London station, and a 1942 report on Straight names "Madchen" and "Tony" as the sources through whom he had been recruited.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### MI6 Career
|
||||
|
||||
Philby joined MI6 (the [[Secret Intelligence Service]]) in 1940, recruited partly through personal connections. He rose with unusual speed: by 1941 he headed Section V (counterintelligence), and by 1944 he had been appointed head of the newly created Section IX, tasked specifically with anti-Soviet operations. This position gave him visibility into MI6's entire intelligence collection effort against the USSR and its assets in Eastern Europe.
|
||||
|
|
@ -49,7 +51,7 @@ Philby deliberately delayed the British response, citing bureaucratic complicati
|
|||
|
||||
From 1949 to 1951, Philby served as MI6's liaison officer in [[Washington, D.C.]], working alongside the newly established [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]]. This position gave him access to the joint MI6-CIA program of operations against Soviet-occupied states, including Operation Valuable, the 1949-1950 joint effort to insert agents into [[Albania]] to support an anti-Communist resistance movement.
|
||||
|
||||
Philby informed Moscow of Operation Valuable's personnel, insertion methods, and timing. The Albanian agents were captured or killed as they arrived. The operation failed completely, with approximately three hundred agents eventually dead or imprisoned. The CIA's [[Frank Wisner]], who ran the program, spent years attributing the failures to bad luck or operational security lapses before the full scope of Philby's betrayal became clear.[^2]
|
||||
Philby informed Moscow of Operation Valuable's personnel, insertion methods, and timing. The Albanian agents were captured or killed as they arrived. The operation failed completely, with approximately three hundred agents eventually dead or imprisoned. The CIA's [[Frank Wisner]], who ran the program, spent years attributing the failures to bad luck or operational security lapses before the full scope of Philby's betrayal became clear.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
During his Washington posting, Philby also became aware of the [[Venona]] project - the American-British effort to decrypt intercepted Soviet intelligence communications from the 1940s. He informed Moscow of Venona's existence and progress, enabling the KGB to identify which agents might be exposed by the decrypts and to take protective action.
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -69,9 +71,14 @@ Philby lived in Moscow from 1963 until his death. He was awarded the Order of Le
|
|||
|
||||
### Legacy
|
||||
|
||||
The cumulative damage of Philby's espionage is difficult to quantify but was among the most severe of any penetration agent in Western intelligence history. Western agents died, operations failed, and intelligence assessments were systematically corrupted throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. The trust between MI6 and the CIA was severely damaged; CIA counterintelligence chief [[James Angleton]], who had been personally close to Philby in Washington, developed the conspiratorial suspicion of Soviet penetration that paralyzed CIA operations for years afterward.[^2]
|
||||
The cumulative damage of Philby's espionage is difficult to quantify but was among the most severe of any penetration agent in Western intelligence history. Western agents died, operations failed, and intelligence assessments were systematically corrupted throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. The trust between MI6 and the CIA was severely damaged; CIA counterintelligence chief [[James Angleton]], who had been personally close to Philby in Washington, developed the conspiratorial suspicion of Soviet penetration that paralyzed CIA operations for years afterward.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Philby, Kim. *My Silent War.* Granada, 1968 (Philby's own account, selective but valuable for his perspective). Macintyre, Ben. *A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal.* Crown, 2014 (the definitive modern account, drawing on MI5 files and interviews with Philby's contemporaries).
|
||||
[^2]: Mangold, Tom. *Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Master Spy Hunter.* Simon & Schuster, 1991 (covers Angleton's relationship with Philby and its aftermath for CIA counterintelligence). West, Nigel, and Oleg Tsarev. *The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives.* Yale University Press, 1999 (uses KGB archive material on the Cambridge Five).
|
||||
[^2]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), memorandum of June 25, 1963 on the interview of June 18, 1963, https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1. The belief that Burgess directed Blunt is Straight's own, as recorded by the agents.
|
||||
[^3]: Joe Ritchie, "Writer Cites Role in Unmasking British Spy," The Washington Post, March 26, 1981, CIA Reading Room copy, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00552r000302750023-1; Daniel F. Gilmore, United Press International, March 26, 1981, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/03/26/Michael-W-Straight-former-deputy-chairman-of-the-National/9678354430800/.
|
||||
[^4]: Sir Robert Armstrong to Mr. Butler, minute ref. A083/0151, January 17, 1983, The National Archives (UK), PREM 19/1951 f208, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/244748 (PDF: https://archive.margaretthatcher.org/doc23/830117%20cab%20off%20min%20PREM19-1951%20f208.pdf).
|
||||
[^5]: The National Archives (UK), file KV 2/4705, "Anthony BLUNT," 1964, Discovery record C19404941, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C19404941. The catalogue description does not name Straight.
|
||||
[^6]: Alexander Vassiliev, White Notebook #3 (English translation), pp. 81, 111 to 112 and 122 to 123, Wilson Center Digital Archive, https://digitalarchive.umd.edu/node/88908. Bracketed identifications are Vassiliev's; the posted translation contains errors.
|
||||
[^7]: Mangold, Tom. *Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Master Spy Hunter.* Simon & Schuster, 1991 (covers Angleton's relationship with Philby and its aftermath for CIA counterintelligence). West, Nigel, and Oleg Tsarev. *The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives.* Yale University Press, 1999 (uses KGB archive material on the Cambridge Five).
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
113
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Klara G. Roman.md
Normal file
113
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Klara G. Roman.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,113 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Medicine & Psychology"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Graphology
|
||||
- Handwriting
|
||||
- Psychology
|
||||
- NewSchoolForSocialResearch
|
||||
- MKULTRA
|
||||
- HumanEcologyFund
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Klara G. Roman
|
||||
- Klara Roman
|
||||
- Klara Goldzieher
|
||||
- Klara Goldzieher-Roman
|
||||
- Klara G. Roman (1881-1962)
|
||||
- Karla Roman
|
||||
summary: "Hungarian-born graphologist who taught at the New School from 1948 until shortly before her death in 1962, and whose Encyclopedia of the Written Word thanks the Human Ecology Fund."
|
||||
born: 1881
|
||||
died: 1962
|
||||
location: "New York, New York"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "graphology course instructor; taught from 1948 until shortly before her death"
|
||||
start: 1948
|
||||
end: 1962
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Children's Health Council of the Mid-Peninsula]]"
|
||||
role: "clinical psychologist and graphologist"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "the Human Ecology Fund is thanked in the Encyclopedia of the Written Word as having helped her during the years she worked on it"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Project MKUltra]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "MKULTRA Subproject 137, $2,000 advance of September 11, 1961 toward her graphology lexicon, paid through the Human Ecology Fund; approved by Sidney Gottlieb"
|
||||
start: 1961
|
||||
fn: 10
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Klara G. Roman (1881-1962) was a [[Budapest]]-born graphologist and clinical psychologist who taught graphology at the [[New School for Social Research]] in [[New York City]] from 1948 until shortly before her death. The posthumous Encyclopedia of the Written Word thanks the [[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology|Human Ecology Fund]] among two foundations that helped her. In 1961 [[Project MKUltra|MKULTRA]] Subproject 137 paid $2,000 through the Fund toward the lexicon, approved under the signature of [[Sidney Gottlieb]]; the CIA's memorandum describes her as "neither cleared nor witting" of the source.
|
||||
|
||||
### Budapest and Emigration
|
||||
|
||||
Roman was born and raised in Budapest. She graduated in 1928 from the [[Hungarian Royal State Institute for Abnormal Psychology]] and later founded the [[Hungarian Institute of Writing Research]].[^1] The New School Archives state that she suffered severe deprivation and lost her husband to the Nazis during the Second World War, and that she immigrated to the United States in 1947.[^1] The biographical note is drawn from the introduction by Rose Wolfson to her Encyclopedia.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
In the preface to her 1954 book, Roman wrote that she had "the privilege of working for more than two decades on research projects instituted by government agencies and clinical institutions in Europe, notably in Budapest." The preface credits work at [[Michael Reese Hospital]] in [[Chicago]], "to which she was called by Dr. [[Franz Alexander]]," and her students at the New School.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Teaching at the New School
|
||||
|
||||
Roman was invited to offer a course at the New School in 1948.[^1] The school's archive holds the course "Graphology: A Psychological Method for the Study of Personality," dated 1949 and 1959.[^3] Her 1954 preface credits "her unusually mature students at the New School for Social Research, New York" with "further excellent opportunities for observation and testing."[^2] She continued to teach until shortly before her death and entrusted her classes to a protege, Daniel S. Anthony.[^1] The Encyclopedia's acknowledgments thank Anthony "of The New School."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
Roman served as research consultant to the treatment clinic of the [[Manhattan Criminal Court]] and as clinical psychologist and graphologist for the [[Children's Health Council of the Mid-Peninsula]] in [[Palo Alto]], California.[^1] She invented the "graphodyne," an instrument for measuring writing speed and pressure.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Books
|
||||
|
||||
*Handwriting: A Key to Personality* appeared in 1952 and was published in London by [[Routledge & Kegan Paul]] in 1954.[^1][^2] Its preface states that the method "rests mainly upon psychometrically and experimentally verified observations."[^2] A further book, *Handwriting, etc.*, is dated 1961.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
*Encyclopedia of the Written Word: A Lexicon for Graphology and Other Aspects of Writing* was "written and compiled by Klara G. Roman" and "edited by Rose Wolfson and Maurice Edwards" (xviii, 550 pages, [[F. Ungar Publishing Company]], New York, 1968).[^5] The New School holds the editors' working files for it, dated 1962 to 1969.[^3] Edwards, a stage actor who had worked for Roman helping to put her lectures and writings into English, edited it after her death.[^1][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Funding of the Encyclopedia
|
||||
|
||||
The Encyclopedia's acknowledgments thank "the two foundations that helped Klara G. Roman during the years she worked on this Encyclopedia: The Handwriting Institute and The Human Ecology Fund," and, among individuals, Huntington Hartford and Dr. Clarence A. Tripp "of The Handwriting Institute," Dr. Walter P. Pasternak "of the Human Ecology Fund," and Daniel S. Anthony "of The New School for Social Research and former assistant to Mrs. Roman."[^4] The editors' account, signed Rose Wolfson, states that "Sometime later, The Human Ecology Fund in New York City contributed research funds for the preparation of this book" and that "From 1959 to the beginning of 1962, Klara Roman labored on it."[^4] A preface in the first person states that The Handwriting Institute subsidized Roman for the work and retained an editor to help her with it.[^4] The preface also states that when she died the Encyclopedia was about eighty-five per cent finished.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
Pasternak is listed as technical writer in the 1957 annual report of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which was renamed the Human Ecology Fund in 1961.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Death
|
||||
|
||||
The New School Archives date her death to 1962.[^1] Wolfson's account in the Encyclopedia says she found a letter from Roman dated July 31, in which Roman wrote "I have lost my way," and that Roman "had died on August 9"; the same passage places the year at 1962.[^4] A memorial edition of the periodical [[Handwriting Analysts News]], titled for her, appeared in 1963, and the school holds a copy.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### MKULTRA Subproject 137
|
||||
|
||||
A file in the [[John R. Everett]] records at the New School, labeled "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1977-1978," describes "two projects conducted at the New School in 1962 that received funding through MKUltra," the second of which "concerned graphology and psychopathologies."[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]]'s released file for MKULTRA Subproject 137 names no contractor. Its memorandum of August 24, 1961 states that the purpose of the subproject was "to support the work of Dr." [redacted], whose institution is also redacted, "in completing a psycholexicon on handwriting." It continues: "Dr." [redacted] "has an international reputation for her work in graphology and speech. She is advanced in years and her health is failing. It is important that her manuscript, now eighty percent complete, be finished in order not to waste many tedious years of effort." The memorandum describes the Technical Services Division's "general requirement to further the Agency's capability for the indirect assessment of personality," states that the project "will be funded through the" [redacted] "for security and cover purposes," and states that the investigator was "neither cleared nor witting of Agency sponsorship."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
The attached proposal, "A Proposal for Support to Complete the Manuscript of a Psycholexicon on Writing and the Written Word," requests $2,000, of which $1,750 was for a half-time research assistant-secretary and $250 for photographic services, with no salary for the principal investigator. It states that "no compendium of terms exists for student or layman which deals with the history and evolution of handwriting, its psychology and psychopathology," that the manuscript was "presently 80 per cent complete," and that twelve more months were needed.[^10] The curriculum vitae attached to the proposal has the name redacted. Its entries are set beside her recorded biography below.
|
||||
|
||||
| Subproject 137 curriculum vitae (name redacted) | Roman record |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| "clinical psychologist, specializing in the psychology of speech, reading, and handwriting" | Graphologist and clinical psychologist[^1] |
|
||||
| 1928, diploma from a redacted institution | Graduated 1928 from the Hungarian Royal State Institute for Abnormal Psychology[^1] |
|
||||
| 1930, constructed a measuring device, the Graphodyne, an apparatus for writing speed and pressure; 1955, perfected the first all-electronic Graphodyne | Invented the "graphodyne," an instrument to measure writing speed and pressure[^1] |
|
||||
| 1948, research appointment at the "Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training," "in conjunction with" a redacted "Institute for Psychoanalysis" | Called to Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago by Franz Alexander[^2] |
|
||||
| 1949, member of the faculty of a redacted institution | Invited to teach at the New School in 1948; course on file for 1949[^1][^3] |
|
||||
| Official handwriting expert to courts and for juvenile delinquents, 1932 to 1947 | Research consultant to the Manhattan Criminal Court treatment clinic[^1] |
|
||||
|
||||
The invoice for Subproject 137 shows a $2,000 treasurer's check, number 185479, dated September 11, 1961, payable to a redacted institution, with a receipt dated October 4, 1961. The accounting memorandum of February 1963 states: "Dr." [redacted] "died in 1962 and did not send in an accounting." It records that she had "four editorial assistants during the period," that "We have two letters from Dr." [redacted] "acknowledging receipt of the money and a letter from her brother stating that the manuscript is almost finished," and that "The Fund will receive its usual acknowledgement in the publication of the manuscript." Two men whose names are redacted "concur that no further accounting is possible." A certification states that the recipient "died in 1962 without rendering an accounting" and that "a manuscript has been published and value received." The accounting form for the $2,000 advance of September 11, 1961 was approved on March 10, 1964 over the signature of Sidney Gottlieb, marked "DC/TSD."[^10] The F. Ungar Publishing Company published the Encyclopedia of the Written Word in 1968.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The Human Ecology Fund's 1961-1963 report, as tabulated by anthropologist David H. Price, lists a grant of $2,000 for "Book: The Psychology of Writing" to "Roman, Klara G." in the field of psychology.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
The investigator of Subproject 137 was Roman. The released file redacts her name, but its curriculum vitae matches her record entry for entry, the Everett file places the graphology project at the New School in 1962, the Human Ecology Fund's report lists the $2,000 under her name, and her Encyclopedia thanks the Fund and its technical writer. The 1961 memorandum states that she was neither cleared nor witting of Agency sponsorship.
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: New School Archives and Special Collections, Maurice Edwards papers documenting the work of graphologist Klara G. Roman (NA-0010-01), biographical note (source cited there: introduction by Rose Wolfson to the *Encyclopedia of the Written Word*). https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/284
|
||||
[^2]: Klara G. Roman, *Handwriting: A Key to Personality* (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), preface, pp. v-vi. University of Ghana digital repository copy: https://ugspace.ug.edu.gh/bitstreams/a2528ff1-0d2f-4ccc-ad93-b6b7e13b1c37/download
|
||||
[^3]: New School Archives and Special Collections, Roman, Klara G. archival objects: course "Graphology: A Psychological Method for the Study of Personality," 1949, 1959, Series 6, Box 6, Folder 31, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/19951 ; *Encyclopedia of the Written Word*, 1962-1969, Box 1, Folder 4, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/32418 ; *Handwriting Analysts News*, Klara G. Roman Memorial Edition, 1963, Box 1, Folder 13, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/32422
|
||||
[^4]: *Encyclopedia of the Written Word* (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1968), acknowledgments, preface and editors' account signed by Rose Wolfson.
|
||||
[^5]: Library of Congress catalog record (LCCN 68-12124), "Encyclopedia of the written word; a lexicon for graphology and other aspects of writing, written and compiled by Klara G. Roman. Edited by Rose Wolfson and Maurice Edwards. New York, F. Ungar Pub. Co. [1968], xviii, 550 p.," as reproduced in the Internet Archive MARC record, https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofwr0000roma
|
||||
[^6]: New School Archives and Special Collections, Maurice Edwards papers (NA-0010-01), biographical note on Edwards. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/284
|
||||
[^7]: Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, *1957 Annual Report*, officers and staff ("Walter P. Pasternak, Technical Writer"). Wayback Machine capture of https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21090820/1957-annual-report-society-human-ecology.pdf
|
||||
[^8]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate* (New York: Times Books, 1979), chapter 9, p. 149 n. ("In 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund").
|
||||
[^9]: New School Archives and Special Collections, John R. Everett records (NS-01-01-02), Series 3, Subject files, File "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1977-1978," Box 7, Folder 29. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/34220
|
||||
[^10]: MKULTRA Subproject 137, Central Intelligence Agency release DOC_0000017396 (19 pages): memorandum for the record, August 24, 1961; proposal, budget and curriculum vitae; obligation memorandum, August 28, 1961; invoice and receipt for check no. 185479 (September 11 and October 4, 1961); accounting memorandum, February 1963; accounting by individual for advance, approved March 10, 1964. https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017396 ; https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/00017396 . The contractor, institution and most signatories are redacted in the release.
|
||||
[^11]: David H. Price, "Buying a piece of anthropology, Part 1: Human Ecology and unwitting anthropological research for the CIA," *Anthropology Today* 23(3), June 2007, fig. 4 (source given there: Human Ecology Fund, *Report*, 1963, pp. 13-42). https://archive.org/details/human_ecology_torture_suicide
|
||||
270
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Kurt Riezler.md
Normal file
270
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Kurt Riezler.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,270 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Kurt Riezler
|
||||
- Riezler
|
||||
- Kurt Karl Joseph Siegmund Riezler
|
||||
- Curt Riezler
|
||||
- J. J. Ruedorffer
|
||||
- J. J. Ruedorfer
|
||||
- Kurt Ruedorfer
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- KurtRiezler
|
||||
- BethmannHollweg
|
||||
- JulyCrisis1914
|
||||
- Parvus
|
||||
- Stockholm1917
|
||||
- Mirbach
|
||||
- Moscow1918
|
||||
- Weimar
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- LeoStrauss
|
||||
- FischerControversy
|
||||
- FrankfurtSchool
|
||||
- UniversityInExile
|
||||
summary: "German diplomat and adviser to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, head of the Russian section at Stockholm in 1917, acting head of the Moscow mission after the Mirbach assassination, and New School professor from 1939."
|
||||
born: 1882-02-11
|
||||
died: 1955-09-05
|
||||
location: "Munich; Berlin; Stockholm; Moscow; Frankfurt; New York"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[German Foreign Office]]"
|
||||
start: 1906
|
||||
end: 1919
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: reported_to
|
||||
with: "[[Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg]]"
|
||||
start: 1914
|
||||
end: 1917
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[German wartime support for the Russian revolutionary movement]]"
|
||||
role: "official who passed the funds"
|
||||
start: 1915
|
||||
end: 1918
|
||||
fn: 11
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[German Legation in Stockholm]]"
|
||||
role: "head of the Russian section"
|
||||
start: 1917
|
||||
end: 1918
|
||||
fn: 22
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[German Embassy in Moscow]]"
|
||||
role: "acting head of the mission"
|
||||
start: 1918-07
|
||||
end: 1918-08
|
||||
fn: 47
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Office of the President of Germany]]"
|
||||
role: "head of the president's office"
|
||||
start: 1919
|
||||
end: 1920
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: appointed
|
||||
with: "[[University of Frankfurt]]"
|
||||
role: "honorary professor and managing chairman of the board of curators"
|
||||
start: 1928
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: spouse_of
|
||||
with: "[[Käthe Liebermann]]"
|
||||
start: 1915
|
||||
fn: 55
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[Max Liebermann]]"
|
||||
role: "father-in-law"
|
||||
fn: 55
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[Howard B. D. White]]"
|
||||
role: "son-in-law"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
role: "professor of philosophy, Graduate Faculty"
|
||||
start: 1939
|
||||
end: 1952
|
||||
fn: 58
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[Institute of World Affairs]]"
|
||||
role: "member of the Study Group on Germany; listed among its researchers"
|
||||
fn: 61
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Kurt Riezler (February 11, 1882 to September 5, 1955) was a German diplomat, political adviser and philosopher of history. He served as secretary and adviser to Chancellor [[Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg]] during the First World War, headed the Russian section of the German legation in [[Stockholm]] in 1917, acted as head of the German mission in [[Moscow]] after the murder of Count [[Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff]] in 1918, and after emigrating in 1938 taught at the [[New School for Social Research]] in [[New York]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Adviser to the Chancellor
|
||||
|
||||
Riezler entered the Foreign Office press department in 1906 and became a legation councillor in 1910. In August 1914 he followed Bethmann Hollweg to the Great Headquarters, and in January 1915 he was attached to the Imperial Chancellery.[^1] The catalogue of German war aims that Bethmann Hollweg sent to State Secretary [[Clemens von Delbrück]] on September 9, 1914, known as the September Program, was developed by Riezler. The [[Neue Deutsche Biographie]] states that no direct influence of Riezler on Bethmann's decisions can be shown, but that he had a considerable share in conceiving imperialist expansion and in giving German war aims their system.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
His prewar books were *Die Erforderlichkeit des Unmöglichen* and, under the pseudonym J. J. Ruedorffer, *Grundzüge der Weltpolitik in der Gegenwart* (1914). The NDB dates the first book to 1913; [[Holger Afflerbach]] dates it to 1912.[^1][^2] The second argued that the threat of mutual destruction had made war between the great powers irrational, while a skilful bluff could exploit the fear of such a war to win limited gains.[^2] Afflerbach notes that the chancellor's own papers were destroyed, so that Riezler's notes are the only direct access to Bethmann Hollweg's thinking in the July crisis.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Diaries and the Fischer Controversy
|
||||
|
||||
Riezler's diaries and war writings for 1910 to 1919 were published in 1972 as *Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente*, edited by [[Karl Dietrich Erdmann]] for the [[Historische Kommission]] of the [[Bavarian Academy of Sciences]]. The heirs gave permission only after long hesitation.[^2][^3] The edition went out of print, and a second edition in 2008 reprinted the 1972 text photomechanically with a new introduction by Afflerbach.[^2]
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|
||||
[[Fritz Fischer]]'s *Griff nach der Weltmacht* (1961) had argued that German policy in the First World War was directed at expansionist aims.[^2] After 1964 the diary entries for July 1914 became the central text of the Fischer controversy, in which historians argued over whether the notes confirmed or qualified Fischer's thesis on German responsibility for the war.[^1] Fischer and others doubted that the entries from July 7 to August 14, 1914 reproduced the original diary.[^4]
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|
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[[Bernd Sösemann]] carried out the most substantial criticism of the edition. Afflerbach writes that the papers had been closed to use by Riezler's heirs, and that Sösemann compared the printed text with the papers in the [[Federal Archives]] at Koblenz after he finally obtained permission to use them. He found extensive deletions in the original August 1914 diary that the edition did not mention. Erdmann later supplied a plausible explanation for them, but doubts about the edition's reliability remained for a long time.[^2] The Riezler papers at Koblenz (Bundesarchiv, N 1584) comprise ten numbered items dated 1910 to 1983, catalogued as diaries and notes together with investigation documents on the authenticity of the diaries.[^5] Sösemann's study of the manuscripts' authenticity and of the edition appeared in [[Historische Zeitschrift]] in 1983.[^1] Erdmann replied in the same journal that year.[^1] Sösemann returned to the July entries in 2014 with a critical edition.[^6] The NDB summarizes his source-critical findings as doubts about the reliability of the edition and the authenticity of some notes, and it calls the value of the July 1914 volume questionable.[^1]
|
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|
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The historian [[Volker Ullrich]] wrote in 1997 that the doubts about the authenticity of the July 1914 notes raised in the 1980s had largely proven unfounded, and that the source remained central to the question of German war guilt.[^2]
|
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|
||||
[[Andreas Hillgruber]] took up Riezler's prewar idea of calculated risk in a 1966 article in *Historische Zeitschrift* and asked whether the July crisis could be explained as a calculation of this kind.[^1][^2] Afflerbach regards Hillgruber's reading and Erdmann's reading of Bethmann's fatalism as correct and complementary.[^2]
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|
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Afflerbach also cites the historian [[Fritz Stern]], who wrote in 1967 that the diaries are most burdened by what they omit, namely the passages that would have documented Bethmann's efforts for peace.[^2] He cites [[Wolfgang J. Mommsen]]'s short study of Riezler, which found the importance of the diaries in their devastating criticism of the political traditions of the German upper classes.[^2][^7]
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|
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### Parvus and the Lenin Transport, 1915 to 1917
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A telegram of January 13, 1915, sent by State Secretary [[Gottlieb von Jagow]] from General Headquarters, said that Riezler was to meet the Russian revolutionary [[Parvus]] (Alexander Helphand) in Berlin, and that "Parvus must not know that Riezler comes from General Headquarters."[^8] [[Z.A.B. Zeman]] and [[W. B. Scharlau]] write that Riezler "was sent over from the General Headquarters to Berlin 'with more detailed instructions'" before Helphand's reception at the Wilhelmstrasse.[^9] Erdmann writes that Parvus had turned to the Reich government in January 1915 through the German embassy in [[Constantinople]], offering the overthrow of tsarism and the division of Russia into smaller states, that he was called to [[Berlin]], and that Riezler, who was to negotiate with him, seemed unconvinced that the revolutionizing of Russia had so far been pursued from Germany with particular skill.[^10] The dates of the meeting differ across the sources. [[Otto Wenzel|Wenzel]] places Riezler at a late February 1915 meeting between Jagow and Parvus, at which Parvus proposed a plan for taking Germany out of the war by promoting revolution in Russia, asked for two million marks, and received one million at once.[^11] [[Wayne C. Thompson]] gives March 6, 1915 for Riezler's discreet meeting with Parvus in Berlin, and writes that there is no record of what they discussed.[^12] Erdmann treats a memorandum by Parvus dated March 9, 1915 as the outcome of his conversations with Riezler in Berlin.[^10] [[Stefan T. Possony]] wrote that Parvus was received by the German State Secretary, had long discussions with Riezler, and was given one million marks and later another 500,000.[^13] Wenzel attributes the two-million figure to [[Elisabeth Heresch]]'s 2000 book.[^14] Zeman and Scharlau write that Helphand's revolutionary programme was presented to the Foreign Ministry in March 1915, that "at the end of March he received, from the Foreign Ministry, the first payment of one million marks for these purposes," and that at his request the money was transferred, "exclusive of losses incurred in exchange," to Bucharest, Zurich and Copenhagen.[^15]
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|
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[[Semion Lyandres]] notes that after the Germans put a first million rubles at Parvus's disposal in 1915, he set up an organization in [[Copenhagen]] with agents in Russia who gave financial help to revolutionary groups. He adds that no direct evidence has been found that these agents financed the Bolsheviks.[^16]
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|
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On April 9, 1917 the German minister in Copenhagen telegraphed that Parvus had asked to be told at once when the Russian emigrants travelling from Switzerland through Germany reached [[Malmö]] or [[Sassnitz]], because he wished to meet them in Malmö. The Foreign Ministry replied on April 10 that they would arrive at Sassnitz at noon on Wednesday. The editorial note in Z.A.B. Zeman's collection quotes [[Karl Radek]] (1924) that in Stockholm Parvus tried to see [[Vladimir Lenin]] in the name of the Central Committee of the German Social Democrats and that Lenin refused, asking Radek, [[Vorovsky]] and [[Jakub Fürstenberg]] (Hanecki) to record the attempt.[^17] Erdmann reads Riezler's diary note of April 13, 1917, that Russia would be ready for larger concessions in a few weeks, as probably connected with Lenin's return to Russia.[^18]
|
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|
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Erdmann writes that the transport of the Russian revolutionaries, which left [[Zürich]] on April 9 and reached [[Petrograd]] on April 16, was carried out by the Foreign Office and military offices on the order of the [[Oberste Heeresleitung|Supreme Army Command]], on an instruction from Bethmann Hollweg that he reported to [[Wilhelm II|the Kaiser]] by telegram on April 11. Erdmann presumes that Riezler took part in the preliminary deliberations given his area of work, though he appears to have had no official responsibility, and notes that the files, which document the journey in bureaucratic detail, do not show his name. According to several of his friends, Riezler nevertheless felt politically co-responsible for Lenin's return. [[Arnold Brecht]] wrote to Erdmann on September 8, 1970 that it was established, from Riezler's own statements to friends, that Riezler had accompanied the transport; in his memoirs Brecht wrote that Riezler was not the originator of the plan but had carried out an assignment given to him. [[Kurt von Fritz]] confirmed the fact of a Lenin adventure without details.[^18]
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|
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Erdmann also reports an episode that he calls not fully illuminated, the unscheduled stop of many hours in Berlin, where a deliberate missing of the connection to the Sassnitz ferry has some probability in his view. Possony, in *Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary* (Chicago, 1964; German edition 1965), wrote that it was conceivable that Lenin conferred with German officials in Berlin and, if so, possible that he saw Riezler, adding that Riezler later told a friend that he had sent an emissary to the train but that the talk took place only on the ferry between Germany and Sweden.[^19] Erdmann reports that on Possony's reading Riezler's note of April 13 might go back directly to an impression of a conversation with Lenin, and judges this speculation probably absurd, because Lenin wished not to compromise himself and the diary places Riezler in Berlin on April 10 and 11, although he may have gone to the train on the 11th or accompanied it to the ferry port.[^18] Thompson writes that the train had a layover of twelve to twenty hours in Berlin, that no documentary evidence or diary entry supports a meeting with a German official, that Riezler was in Berlin at the time, and that it was unlikely he would have boarded the train; he gives the same account of what Riezler told a friend.[^20] Erdmann also reports that [[Karl Rheindorf]], a former professor of history at [[Frankfurt]] and a friend of Riezler, had the impression after the war that Lenin and [[Leon Trotsky]] were a memory that weighed on Riezler in his last years.[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
### Stockholm and the Russian Desk, 1917
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||||
|
||||
After Bethmann Hollweg's fall Riezler returned to the Foreign Office.[^1] Erdmann gives August 5, 1917 as the date he re-entered the service, and records a memorandum by Legationsrat [[Rudolf Nadolny]] of September 24, 1917 and a decree of Chancellor [[Georg Michaelis]] of September 29 that outlined his task. Nadolny proposed sending a politically trained official to Stockholm to set up a Russian section, so to speak Germany's representative stationed there for Russia, working independently with his reports countersigned by the minister, [[Hellmuth Lucius von Stoedten]].[^21] Erdmann has Riezler beginning the work on October 3, 1917 and officially installed on November 1. The editorial note in Zeman's documentary collection says that he went to the legation in Stockholm in September 1917 as counsellor to run the newly created Russian section, and that he was recalled to Berlin in April 1918. The NDB dates his assignment to lead the section to November 1917.[^1][^21][^22]
|
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|
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Erdmann quotes Riezler's diary entry of October 3, 1917 that peace in the East depended on a wonder in the form of a man appearing. The diary has no entries from October 3, 1917 to January 14, 1918, and the entry of January 14, 1918 described Lenin's seizure of power as a miracle for Germany's rescue.[^21] Thompson writes that Riezler gave no information in the diary on his activities in support of the Bolshevik Revolution, that no documents in the Foreign Office archives show how he helped the Bolsheviks in October, and that it is certain he was charged with funding Bolshevik operations. Thompson adds that on October 25, 1917 one hundred thousand Swiss francs were sent by courier from Germany to the Bolsheviks in Russia, and that with this money German agents were able to continue buying rifles and machine guns from Russian soldiers for the Bolshevik Red Guards.[^23]
|
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|
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Wenzel describes Riezler as the most important intermediary between the German government and Lenin's agents in 1917, to whom he handed aid from the so-called Riezler-Fonds for Russia.[^11] Wenzel cites [[Richard Pipes]]'s German edition of *The Russian Revolution* for that sentence.[^24] Erdmann's editorial note reports that after Riezler had gone to Moscow, State Secretary [[Richard von Kühlmann]] spoke occasionally of a "Riezlerfonds", citing a document in Zeman's collection.[^25]
|
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|
||||
Zeman and Scharlau write that when Helphand arrived in Stockholm in November 1917 he was received by Counsellor Kurt Riezler, whom he had first met in March 1915, when Helphand presented his revolutionary programme to the Foreign Ministry. They write that Riezler "abbreviated the address so that the message should reach the majority socialists only," in connection with the Bolshevik declaration of November 17 and 18, 1917; that "to his utter dismay, Riezler found that Helphand's ideas were supported by Vorovski"; and that "Riezler did his best to discredit both Helphand and Erzberger in the eyes of the Bolsheviks."[^26]
|
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|
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The paper trail for the money runs through Zeman's collection of documents from the German Foreign Ministry. On November 8, 1917 Riezler's telegram, sent through the minister in Stockholm, asked for two million from the War Loan to be forwarded for agreed purposes.[^27] On November 10 the under state secretary replied that half the sum would be taken by courier that Sunday and the remainder on the Tuesday, and that further sums were available if necessary.[^28] Zeman and Scharlau write that on November 9, 1917 the Treasury allowed a further fifteen million marks for political purposes in Russia, that the Foreign Ministry knew the Bolshevik government had to struggle "with great financial difficulties," and that "a further two million for known purposes" were transferred for the same reason.[^29] Erdmann describes the request as one for two million marks from the war loan, made the day after the revolution, granted at once with further funds promised, and writes that the sums that went through Riezler to Petrograd cannot be established.[^21] Possony reads the same documents as a request for two million in war bonds and a shipment on November 10 of one million rubles; Thompson writes that the document of November 10 indicates that Riezler had dispensed millions of rubles for use in Russia.[^30][^31]
|
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|
||||
On December 3, 1917 the State Secretary telegraphed the Foreign Ministry liaison officer at General Headquarters that the disruption of the Entente was the most important war aim of German diplomacy and that the subversive activity carried out in Russia behind the front had been, "in the first place promotion of separatist tendencies and support of the Bolsheviks." The telegram continues: "It was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under different labels that they were in a position to be able to build up their main organ, Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and appreciably to extend the originally narrow basis of their party."[^32]
|
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|
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Lyandres does not name Riezler. His study of the July 1917 charges argues that the Provisional Government's accusation, that German money reached Lenin through Helphand's business and its Petrograd agents, was never substantiated. He nonetheless holds that German Foreign Ministry documents show substantial funds allocated to Bolshevik anti-war activity in 1917, and that these did not travel through the business channel alleged. The one documented pre-revolutionary transfer he identifies is a contribution then valued at 230,000 German marks that the Bolshevik Foreign Bureau in Stockholm received from the Swiss socialist [[Carl Moor]] in summer 1917, after the published minutes of the Central Committee had recorded that the offer was declined. Lyandres writes that the Bureau used the sum to finance the Third [[Zimmerwald Conference]], which met in Stockholm in September 1917, that it never reached the organization in Petrograd, and that Moor worked independently of Parvus.[^33]
|
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|
||||
Wenzel reports that Riezler's telegram to the Chancellor of November 12, 1917 stated that Lenin and Trotsky were said to hold very great personal authority among their followers and would probably be able to keep order in their party and to obtain and keep dictatorial power. In a letter of November 25 to Minister [[Diego von Bergen|Diego Bergen]], Wenzel writes, Riezler said that the Bolsheviks would not be dissuaded from the idea of international revolution even after a peace, so that the best case was a most strange peace without regular intercourse between the two peoples, while assuming that their rule would be short.[^34] Wenzel adds that Riezler found the Soviet representative in Scandinavia, Vorovsky, reasonable and educated, and that Riezler was told six weeks later that Vorovsky had said on hearing of the Vienna strikes of January 1918 that the international revolution was beginning.[^34] Erdmann records that Riezler's main interlocutor in Stockholm was Vorovsky, who made on him an honest and reasonable impression.[^35]
|
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|
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### Parvus, Radek and the Funds
|
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|
||||
Zeman's introduction states that Helphand, known as Parvus, played the most important part in Germany's relations with the Russian revolutionary movement from the spring of 1915 until November 1917, when he parted company with the German government.[^22] Erdmann's introduction records that shortly after the October Revolution Parvus agreed, in personal talks with [[Friedrich Ebert]] and [[Philipp Scheidemann]] in Berlin and with Radek and Vorovsky in Stockholm, an exchange of declarations of sympathy, to be expressed in mass meetings and in a resolution for an immediate armistice.[^36]
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|
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Erdmann writes that Riezler's dealings in Stockholm were mainly with three Bolsheviks of Polish origin. Riezler called Radek the most active and gifted, completely unscrupulous but extremely skilful and a gifted writer, and described Fürstenberg-Hanecki as enjoying Lenin's particular trust but under fire in the party for his political and business relations with Parvus.[^35] According to Zeman's editorial note, Radek and Hanecki were the two closest contacts of Parvus's among the Bolsheviks.[^17] The December 1917 correspondence shows the friction. On December 18 Riezler telegraphed that Parvus wished to stay in Stockholm over Christmas to talk with Radek and Fürstenberg, who were returning from Petrograd.[^37] The reply from Berlin on December 19 said it seemed expedient to keep Parvus away from Stockholm while the preliminary peace negotiations began.[^38]
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|
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On December 24, 1917 Riezler wrote to Minister Bergen enclosing a secret memorandum on Parvus's recent role. He advised Bergen to consult Parvus in Berlin on the Rumanian question and wrote: "It may well be that we shall soon feel that it would be an advantage to base our position in Russia on wider circles than those around Lenin." He wrote that the Radeks "are apparently spinning some international revolutionary web of their own." The memorandum says that Parvus had overestimated the confidence that Vorovsky and Radek placed in him, and that Riezler had "had to eliminate him from all questions concerned with methods for negotiation."[^39]
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|
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Wenzel reports that on January 24, 1918 Riezler sent the Chancellor a bleak description of the situation in Russia, proposing that German policy place its hope in Ukraine, and that on March 8 Riezler wrote that a fall of the Bolsheviks before a general peace seemed to him contrary to German interests, with the reservation that if a countermovement would win in any case, an early understanding with it was called for, and the Treaty of [[Brest-Litovsk]] should then be treated as liquidation assets.[^34]
|
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|
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### Moscow and the Mirbach Assassination, 1918
|
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|
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Riezler went to Moscow as counsellor of embassy after the peace with Russia of April 7, 1918.[^1] Wenzel describes him as number two in the mission under Mirbach, who arrived in Moscow on April 23 or 24, 1918 at the head of a mission that finally numbered 120 persons. Wenzel records that the army representative on the mission, Major Karl von Bothmer, kept a diary marked by antisemitism and had an antipathy to Riezler, among other reasons because Riezler read the [[Frankfurter Zeitung]] and was married to the daughter of the Jewish painter [[Max Liebermann]]; Wenzel cites Erdmann for this.[^40] On April 29 Riezler chaired a meeting of ten members of the mission on financial questions, which concluded that the Bolsheviks' economic policy stood in glaring contradiction to the economic provisions of the Brest-Litovsk treaty.[^41]
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|
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On May 16, 1918 the minister in Moscow telegraphed that he was still trying to counter the efforts of the Entente and to support the Bolsheviks, and asked for instructions on whether the overall situation justified larger sums and which trend to support if the Bolsheviks could not hold out.[^42] On May 18, 1918 State Secretary Kühlmann replied that it was greatly in German interests that the Bolsheviks should survive, and added: "Riezler's funds at your disposal." The telegram goes on that it was very difficult to say which trend to support if the Bolsheviks fell, that left-wing Social Revolutionaries would fall with them, and that Germany had no interest in supporting Monarchist ideas, which would reunite Russia: "On the contrary, we must try to prevent Russian consolidation as far as possible and, from this point of view, we must therefore support the parties furthest to the left."[^43]
|
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|
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Wenzel reports that on June 4 Riezler telegraphed Bergen personally that the physical means of the Bolsheviks were running out and that Germany should prepare a future government of understanding and revise the Brest peace against economic hegemony in all Russia. He also reports a note of June 5 by Legationsrat Trautmann for the Reich Treasury state secretary [[Siegfried von Rödern]], stating that Mirbach needed three million marks a month to counter the Entente's efforts with the Soviet executive committee and a fund of forty million to secure a safe transition in the event of the Bolsheviks' fall, and that Kühlmann wrote privately to Rödern, who agreed on June 11, 1918. Thompson, citing no date for the approval, writes that on June 8 Riezler was granted forty million marks.[^44][^45] Wenzel also writes that on June 2 Mirbach sent the Chancellor a memorandum by Legationsrat Count Bassewitz and advised preparing, at first only cautiously, for a possible regrouping, that Kühlmann noted in the margin "Einverstanden, aber sehr behutsam" (agreed, but very cautiously), and that Mirbach reported on June 20 three conversations Riezler had held with a group formed by the former agriculture minister [[Alexander Krivoshein]].[^44]
|
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|
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Mirbach was assassinated on July 6, 1918. According to Thompson, who draws on Riezler's recollection, two Russians, Jacob Blyumkin and N. Andreyev, came to the embassy at about 2:30 p.m. with identification signed by [[Felix Dzerzhinsky]], head of the [[Cheka]]; Riezler, who had been ordered to see all visitors, spoke with them first, and was seated with Mirbach and the translator when the shooting began; neither Riezler nor the translator was hit.[^46] Thompson writes that actual guilt for the murder "remains far from clear."[^46] Riezler's telegram to Berlin on July 7 attributed the attack to two [[Left Socialist Revolutionaries]] who were members of the Cheka.[^47] Wenzel identifies the assassin as [[Yakov Blumkin]], who was responsible for counter-intelligence and for infiltrating the German mission.[^47] The NDB states that after the murder Riezler took over the mission and developed ideas for the overthrow of the Bolsheviks by a German counter-revolution.[^1] Riezler then led the mission until [[Karl Helfferich]] arrived as Mirbach's successor. Helfferich was ordered to Berlin to report on the ninth day after his arrival in Moscow, and Riezler ran the mission again until its move to Petrograd, after which he was sent to [[Pskov]] behind the front line.[^48]
|
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|
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Wenzel writes that [[Georgy Chicherin]], [[Lev Karakhan]], Dzerzhinsky and Radek (then head of the department for Central European affairs in the Foreign Commissariat) came to the legation to condole, that Lenin stayed in the Kremlin until Riezler insisted that he appear in person and give a statement and an apology, and he quotes Pipes that this was a wholly unusual demand of a foreign diplomat toward a head of state, but that German influence was then so great that Lenin had to comply.[^49] In a 1952 account Riezler gave to [[Hans von Saucken]], whose memorandum of the account is dated New York, September 29, 1952, Riezler described a meeting with Lenin after the murder. Lenin offered a correct but icy apology and promised that the guilty would be punished. Riezler told him that Blumkin and his accomplice had been admitted to the mission only on a letter of introduction from Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky, Wenzel reports, said to Lenin in Russian that he now knew who was behind the affair, and declared his signature forged.[^50] Wenzel's note adds that Saucken confused the Left Socialist Revolutionaries with the [[Mensheviks]], which was corrected in an addendum of October 31, 1952.[^50]
|
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|
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Wenzel reports that on July 8 Riezler telegraphed, marked very secret, about a conversation with Karakhan, who had raised in strict confidence the Bolsheviks' knowledge of the mission's counter-revolutionary connections; Riezler answered that the Bolsheviks had every reason to be grateful if the mission helped them divide the bourgeois elements and prevent a united counter-revolutionary front.[^49] On July 14 Riezler wrote to the Foreign Office that he had won over [[Mikhail Muraviev|Murav'ev]], the commander of the Bolshevik front against the [[Czechoslovak Legion]], with considerable funds for energetic action. Wenzel adds that Murav'ev, certainly bought with higher sums by the Entente as Chicherin later admitted, defected in early July 1918, issued a declaration of war against Germany, and was killed by his own men a few days later.[^49] On July 19 Riezler told Radek and Vorovsky that the whole world condemned the shooting of the Tsar.[^49]
|
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|
||||
On July 19 Riezler wrote to the Chancellor that the Bolsheviks were finished, and proposed that a German-oriented government in Moscow and Petrograd could sweep away the Entente's counter-revolutionary structure. On July 20 he forwarded a report from Russian monarchist circles.[^49] On July 23 he reported a meeting with an emissary of the Siberian government in [[Omsk]], who was to leave for Omsk the day before and return in about three and a half weeks with Admiral [[Aleksandr Kolchak]] in disguise; Riezler answered the question whether money was necessary in the affirmative, provided the legation bought goods at real prices.[^49]
|
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|
||||
In a diary entry of September 12, 1918, written at [[Oberstdorf]], Riezler called German policy in the East a field of rubble without a unified plan.[^48] He was back in Berlin by late August, and on October 7, 1918 he became chief of the cabinet of the new State Secretary [[Wilhelm Solf]] under Prince [[Max of Baden]].[^1]
|
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|
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### Weimar: The President's Office and Frankfurt
|
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|
||||
During the Munich council republic of 1919 Riezler served the Reich government as its permanent representative to the Bavarian government in [[Bamberg]], and he supported the military action to conquer [[Munich]].[^1] His last political office, held in 1919 and 1920, was head of the office of President Friedrich Ebert with the rank of envoy.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
In 1928 Riezler became an honorary professor of the philosophy of history at the [[University of Frankfurt]] and managing chairman of the university's board of curators. Thompson writes that his terms were accepted on April 5, 1928 after much delay, and that among the appointments he successfully made were those of [[Max Wertheimer]], [[Karl Mannheim]], [[Max Horkheimer]], [[Ernst Kantorowicz]], [[Paul Tillich]] and the economist [[Adolph Löwe]].[^51] The NDB states that his teaching licence was withdrawn in 1934 under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.[^1] Thompson writes that on April 1, 1933 an SA unit occupied the university, that Riezler was driven from the lecture podium, put in protective custody, and released only on consenting to a temporary resignation as curator, and that his permanent separation came with the Law of April 7, 1933.[^52]
|
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|
||||
A chronology of Mannheim's Frankfurt years records that on August 14, 1929 the board offered additional funds for Mannheim's teaching assignment, that on November 8 Riezler passed the faculty's objections to the Prussian minister [[Carl Heinrich Becker|Becker]] in Berlin and asked the ministry to win both [[Hans Kelsen]] and Mannheim for Frankfurt, and that on December 17 Mannheim set Riezler six conditions for his future chair. On December 21 Riezler told a ministry official that the conditions were justified. Mannheim was appointed professor of sociology on January 27, 1930 and took up the post on April 1.[^53]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Amalia Barboza]]'s study of Mannheim's sociological seminar and the [[Institute for Social Research]] records that Riezler wanted the university to become a centre of interdisciplinary research, and that Löwe was appointed in spring 1931 partly for that purpose.[^54] Barboza states that the cooperation between the neighbours which Riezler had hoped for did not come about. She cites meetings in Riezler's and Tillich's homes, where Mannheim and members of the institute met.[^54] On June 27, 1931 a discussion on secular civilization and the mission of Christianity was held at Tillich's house, with Horkheimer, [[Friedrich Pollock]], Mannheim, Theodor Wiesengrund ([[Theodor Adorno]]) and Riezler among the participants.[^53][^54]
|
||||
|
||||
### Family
|
||||
|
||||
Riezler married [[Käthe Liebermann]], the only child of Max Liebermann and Martha Marckwald. The Liebermann Villa in Berlin gives the wedding date as May 11, 1915, at the registry office in Berlin-Mitte, and Thompson gives the same date; the NDB gives 1916.[^1][^55][^56] Their only child, Maria (Mary), was born in 1917 and married [[Howard B. D. White]], a professor at the New School.[^1][^55] The NDB gives Käthe's dates as 1885 to 1952. The [[Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach]] authority record gives 1885 to 1955.[^1][^57]
|
||||
|
||||
### Emigration and the New School
|
||||
|
||||
After his removal from the Frankfurt posts, Riezler emigrated to the United States at the end of 1938, where he took a professorship at the New School for Social Research and a visiting professorship at the [[University of Chicago]].[^1] Thompson gives December 1938 as the month the family travelled, bringing Max Liebermann's art collection and furniture.[^56] The Editors' Note in the 1956 memorial issue of [[Social Research]] states that Riezler was Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty of the New School from 1939 to 1952, when he became Professor Emeritus; Thompson likewise writes that he retired from the New School in 1952 and received the title of professor emeritus.[^58][^59] The Marbach record lists his affiliation with the New School as circa 1939 to 1954, and the NDB states that he returned to [[Rome]] in 1954 and later to Munich, where he died in 1955.[^1][^57] The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek authority record, in the Kalliope catalogue, adds that he was expatriated in 1944.[^60]
|
||||
|
||||
The New School's finding aid for the [[Institute of World Affairs]] states that the Institute, established in 1942 as an independent unit of the New School, developed from two divisions of the Graduate Faculty: a Study Group on Germany, attended by [[Eduard Heimann]], [[Erich Hula]], [[Karl Mayer]], [[Albert Salomon]], Riezler, [[Leo Strauss]], [[Horace Kallen]] and [[Felix Kaufmann]], and the Totalitarian Communication Project organized by [[Hans Speier]] and [[Ernst Kris]]. It lists Riezler among the researchers associated with the "University-in-Exile", and notes among the Institute's studies those done in conjunction with, or on the commission of, U.S. war offices.[^61] The finding aid for the papers of the philosopher Reuben Abel lists Riezler among the lecturers whose New School lectures Abel attended.[^62] Thompson writes that Riezler took part in joint seminars with [[Karen Horney]], Speier and Wertheimer, in seminars on Aristotle and Plato with Kurt von Fritz at [[Columbia University]], and in the weekly General Seminars; that he argued with the dean, [[Hans Staudinger]], over faculty appointments; and that he spent long periods at the University of Chicago.[^56]
|
||||
|
||||
Leo Strauss first met Riezler in 1938, at the New School, when Riezler was already well into his fifties. Strauss describes a relationship of colleagues that became a simple and firm friendship over several years. Strauss left for Chicago in 1949 and after that saw Riezler only at long intervals.[^63]
|
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|
||||
Riezler and Strauss shared an interest in the foundations of the social sciences and taught a couple of courses together in the mid-1940s, one on Aristotle's *De anima* and Descartes's *Passions of the Soul* with [[Solomon Asch]], and one on Plato's *Theaetetus* with [[Alexandre Koyré]].[^64] In 1945 Riezler published "Some Critical Remarks on Man's Science of Man" in *Social Research*.[^65] Strauss's paper from about the same time states that its objections "are based on full agreement with what Riezler says or implies about the present state of affairs," and then argues that Riezler's demand for one science of man rests on "quite specific, and by no means self-evident, presuppositions."[^64]
|
||||
|
||||
The New School Archives hold a faculty vertical file for Riezler (Box 10, Folder 18, collection NS-08-02-02).[^66] Strauss's eulogy for Riezler appeared in *Social Research* in 1956, and was reprinted in *What Is Political Philosophy?* in 1959. In it Strauss wrote that "[t]he term 'professor' does not designate anything of him, but the term 'gentleman' does."[^63] [[Theodor Heuss]]'s memorial article appeared in the same issue of *Social Research*.[^67]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Becker, Bert, "Riezler, Kurt Karl Joseph Siegmund (Pseudonym J. J. Ruedorffer)," *Neue Deutsche Biographie* 21 (2003), pp. 618-619, the biographical article on Riezler, including its literature list. https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118601008.html
|
||||
[^2]: Afflerbach, Holger, "Ein Fukuyama seiner Zeit? Kurt Riezler und der Erste Weltkrieg," *Akademie Aktuell* 4 (2008), pp. 20-23, on the destroyed Bethmann papers (p. 20), the 1914 books (the first dated 1912) and the Rothfels reading (p. 21), the heirs' hesitation and closure of the papers (pp. 20-21), the edition's reception (pp. 20-21), Sösemann's collation (p. 21), Ullrich (p. 21), Stern (p. 22) and Mommsen (p. 23). https://badw.de/fileadmin/pub/akademieAktuell/2008/27/07_Afflerbach.pdf
|
||||
[^3]: Erdmann, Karl Dietrich, ed., *Kurt Riezler: Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente* (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), series Deutsche Geschichtsquellen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 48, editor's introduction and notes.
|
||||
[^4]: Fischer, Fritz, *Juli 1914: Wir sind nicht hineingeschlittert. Das Staatsgeheimnis um die Riezler-Tagebücher* (Reinbek, 1983), pp. 48, 61 and 79ff, and Schulte, Bernd F., *Die Verfälschung der Riezler-Tagebücher* (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), pp. 58ff, both as cited in Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," *Zeitschrift des Forschungsverbundes SED-Staat* 25 (2009), p. 159, note 9.
|
||||
[^5]: Kalliope-Verbund, finding-aid record DE-611-BF-114654, Bundesarchiv (Koblenz), "Nachlass Riezler, Kurt," Signatur N 1584, "1910-1983. - 10 Nummern," remark "Tagebücher und Aufzeichnungen, Untersuchungsdokumente zur Echtheit der Tagebücher Riezlers." http://kalliope-verbund.info/DE-611-BF-114654
|
||||
[^6]: Sösemann, Bernd, "Die 'Juli-Krise' im Riezler-Tagebuch. Eine kritische Edition (7. Juli bis 15. August 1914)," *Historische Zeitschrift* 298, no. 3 (2014), pp. 686-707, published online June 1, 2014 by De Gruyter Oldenbourg. DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/hzhz-2014-0219
|
||||
[^7]: Mommsen, Wolfgang J., a short study of Riezler in *Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht* (1974), pp. 193-209, as listed in NDB and quoted in Afflerbach, "Ein Fukuyama seiner Zeit?," p. 23.
|
||||
[^8]: Zeman, Z. A. B., ed., *Germany and the Revolution in Russia 1915-1918: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry* (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), telegram No. 40, State Secretary at General Headquarters to the Foreign Ministry, January 13, 1915, with note 1 giving Riezler's career.
|
||||
[^9]: Z. A. B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau, *The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus), 1867-1924* (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 145 (Jagow's agreement of January 10, 1915 to Helphand's reception; Riezler sent from General Headquarters). Page numbers are those of the archive.org lending copy merchantofrevolu0000zabz.
|
||||
[^10]: Erdmann, *Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente*, editor's introduction, p. 83 and note 3 (Parvus's approach through Constantinople, Riezler's doubts, the Helphand memorandum of March 9, 1915, text in Scharlau and Zeman).
|
||||
[^11]: Wenzel, Otto, "Auf verlorenem Posten. Legationsrat Kurt Riezler an der Deutschen Gesandtschaft Moskau im Jahre 1918," *Zeitschrift des Forschungsverbundes SED-Staat* 25 (2009), pp. 159-160, on Riezler's career, the late February 1915 meeting of Jagow and Parvus (note 10) and the Riezler-Fonds (note 11). https://www.zeitschrift-fsed.fu-berlin.de/index.php/zfsed/article/download/309/293/594
|
||||
[^12]: Thompson, Wayne C., *In the Eye of the Storm: Kurt Riezler and the Crises of Modern Germany* (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980), pp. 130-131, on the referral of Parvus by Ambassador Wangenheim on January 8, 1915 and Riezler's meeting with him on March 6, 1915.
|
||||
[^13]: Possony, Stefan T., *Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary* (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), chapter "Revolutionizing," on Parvus's plan, his reception by the German State Secretary, his discussions with Riezler and the sums of one million and 500,000 marks.
|
||||
[^14]: Heresch, Elisabeth, *Geheimakte Parvus: Die gekaufte Revolution* (Munich, 2000), pp. 117-129 and 379-392, as cited in Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," p. 160, note 10.
|
||||
[^15]: Zeman and Scharlau, *The Merchant of Revolution*, p. 152 (first payment of one million marks at the end of March 1915; transfer to Bucharest, Zurich and Copenhagen).
|
||||
[^16]: Lyandres, Semion, "The Bolsheviks' 'German Gold' Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917 Accusations," *Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies*, no. 1106 (Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, February 1995), conclusion, pp. 102-103, on the first million rubles, the Copenhagen organization and its agents. DOI https://doi.org/10.5195/cbp.1995.63. https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/cbp/article/view/63 Lyandres gives the 1915 sum in rubles; Wenzel and Possony give marks.
|
||||
[^17]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, document 36, telegram No. 560, Minister in Copenhagen to the Foreign Ministry, April 9, 1917, with note 1 (reply of April 10 from Zimmermann; Radek's account in Platten's pamphlet *Die Reise Lenins durch Deutschland*, Berlin, 1924, p. 66; Radek and Hanecki as Helphand's two closest contacts among the Bolsheviks).
|
||||
[^18]: Erdmann, *Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente*, editor's introduction, pp. 84-85 and the note on Brecht, Kurt von Fritz and Rheindorf (Brecht's letter to Erdmann of September 8, 1970; Brecht, *Aus nächster Nähe: Lebenserinnerungen 1884-1927*, Stuttgart, 1966, p. 325), including the passage on the Berlin stop and Possony's speculation (Possony, *Lenin. Eine Biographie*, German edition 1965, pp. 262ff). Sole source for the Brecht, von Fritz and Rheindorf statements.
|
||||
[^19]: Possony, *Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary*, chapter "The Sealed Car," on the delay of the train in Berlin and Riezler. Possony gives no source for what Riezler told a friend.
|
||||
[^20]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, p. 137, on the Berlin layover and Riezler's statement to a friend.
|
||||
[^21]: Erdmann, *Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente*, editor's introduction, pp. 85-87 and notes 47, 52, 53 and 54 (re-entry into the Foreign Office on August 5, 1917; the Nadolny memorandum of September 24 and the Michaelis decree of September 29, 1917; the diary entries of October 3, 1917 and January 14, 1918; the request of two million marks, Zeman documents 72 and 78).
|
||||
[^22]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, introduction, pp. viii-ix, and the editorial note to telegram No. 40 (January 13, 1915), note 1, giving Riezler's career.
|
||||
[^23]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, pp. 138-139 and note 32, which cites Riezler's diary (pp. 453-454), Zeman documents 72, 75, 78-79 and 94, and Possony's *Lenin* (pp. 192, 241-242, 248, 255). Sole source for the passage on October 25, 1917 and the Swiss francs.
|
||||
[^24]: Pipes, Richard, *Die Russische Revolution*, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1992), p. 467, as cited in Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," p. 160, note 11.
|
||||
[^25]: Erdmann, *Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente*, editor's introduction, p. 87, note 54, citing Zeman, document 129 for the term "Riezlerfonds".
|
||||
[^26]: Zeman and Scharlau, *The Merchant of Revolution*, pp. 240-243 (Helphand received by Riezler in Stockholm; the abbreviated address; Vorovski; the discrediting of Helphand and Erzberger).
|
||||
[^27]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, doc. 72, telegram No. 1796, Minister in Stockholm to the Foreign Ministry, November 8, 1917, signed "Riezler. T".
|
||||
[^28]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, doc. 78, telegram No. 1526, under state secretary to the minister in Stockholm, November 10, 1917, "For Riezler."
|
||||
[^29]: Zeman and Scharlau, *The Merchant of Revolution*, pp. 235-236 (the Treasury's allowance of November 9, 1917 and "a further two million for known purposes").
|
||||
[^30]: Possony, *Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary*, chapter "The Armed Uprising," on the requests of November 8 and 10, 1917.
|
||||
[^31]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, p. 139.
|
||||
[^32]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, doc. 94, telegram No. 1925, State Secretary to the Foreign Ministry Liaison Officer at General Headquarters, December 3, 1917, pp. 94-95.
|
||||
[^33]: Lyandres, "The Bolsheviks' 'German Gold' Revisited," pp. 102-104 and note 150 (the Moor contribution of summer 1917, the Central Committee minutes, the Third Zimmerwald Conference). DOI https://doi.org/10.5195/cbp.1995.63
|
||||
[^34]: Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," pp. 160-162, quoting the Riezler diary edition, pp. 683, 685, 687-688, 691, 694, 696-698 and 701-708 (telegram of November 12, 1917; letter of November 25; Vorovsky; the report of January 24, 1918; the letter of March 8, 1918).
|
||||
[^35]: Erdmann, *Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente*, editor's introduction, pp. 86-87 (Riezler's diary characterizations of Radek, Fürstenberg-Hanecki and Vorovsky-Orlovsky; Riezler to the Foreign Office, Stockholm, December 8, 1917, Zeman document 100).
|
||||
[^36]: Erdmann, *Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente*, editor's introduction, pp. 88-89 (Parvus's talks with Ebert, Scheidemann, Radek and Vorovsky).
|
||||
[^37]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, doc. 109, telegram No. 2065, Minister in Stockholm to the Foreign Ministry, December 18, 1917, signed "Riezler. T".
|
||||
[^38]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, doc. 110, telegram No. 1750, under state secretary to the minister in Stockholm, December 19, 1917, "For Riezler."
|
||||
[^39]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, doc. 111, letter from the counsellor of legation in Stockholm to Minister Diego Bergen, December 24, 1917, with enclosed "Secret Memorandum."
|
||||
[^40]: Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," p. 162, and note 25 citing Erdmann, *Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente*, p. 103. Wenzel gives Mirbach's arrival as April 24, 1918 in his introduction (p. 159) and April 23 in the main text (p. 162).
|
||||
[^41]: Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," pp. 163-164, citing Mirbach's transmission of the minutes of April 29, 1918.
|
||||
[^42]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, doc. 128, telegram No. 122, Minister in Moscow to the Foreign Ministry, dispatched May 17, 1918.
|
||||
[^43]: Zeman, *Germany and the Revolution in Russia*, doc. 129, telegram No. 121, State Secretary to the minister in Moscow, May 18, 1918, signed Kühlmann.
|
||||
[^44]: Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," pp. 165-166 (June 2 letter, note 42; June funds, note 44; June 4 telegram, note 45; June 20 report, notes 46-48), citing PAAA R 2062, Deutschland 131 secr., vol. 18, Bl. 149f. and 157; PAAA R 2003, Deutschland 131, vol. 40, Bl. 78ff.; the Riezler diary edition, pp. 709-710; and a copy of Rödern's reply in Heresch, *Geheimakte Parvus*, p. 358. Wenzel himself refers to the Bolsheviks as having come to power with German money, citing a Spiegel TV broadcast of 2007 and Heresch.
|
||||
[^45]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, p. 155.
|
||||
[^46]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, pp. 152-154, on the visit of July 6, 1918.
|
||||
[^47]: Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," p. 167, citing PAAA R 22316, Russland 31k, vol. 1 (Riezler's telegram of July 7, 1918) and Volkogonov, *Lenin. Utopie und Terror* (Düsseldorf, 1993), p. 180.
|
||||
[^48]: Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," pp. 173-176, on Helfferich's recall on the ninth day, the move to Petrograd and Pskov (arrival August 23, 1918), the diary entry of September 12, 1918 and the appointment of October 7, 1918.
|
||||
[^49]: Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," pp. 167-171, citing among others Pipes, *Die Russische Revolution* 2, p. 507, the Riezler diary edition, pp. 717 and 719-720, and PAAA R 22316 and R 10109.
|
||||
[^50]: Wenzel, "Auf verlorenem Posten," p. 168 and note 61, citing Hans von Saucken's memorandum of Riezler's oral account, New York, September 29, 1952, and its addendum of October 31, 1952, printed in Erdmann, *Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente*, pp. 713ff. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^51]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, pp. 211-213.
|
||||
[^52]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, pp. 214-215.
|
||||
[^53]: Koolwaay, Jens, "Chronik zu Karl Mannheims Frankfurter Zeit," version 0.3 (July 2, 2007), entries for August 14, 1929, November 8, 1929, December 17 and 21, 1929, January 27 and April 1, 1930, and June 27, 1931. https://wiki.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/SOZFRA/images/archive/b/b3/20070723092823%21Chronik.pdf
|
||||
[^54]: Barboza, Amalia, "Die verpassten Chancen einer Kooperation zwischen der 'Frankfurter Schule' und Karl Mannheims Soziologischem Seminar" (PDF), on Riezler's aims and the Löwe appointment (citing Löwe 2004, p. 93), the neighbouring institute, the meetings in Riezler's and Tillich's homes, and the June 27, 1931 meeting (citing Tillich 1983). https://wiki.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/SOZFRA/images/8/85/BarbozaFrankfurt.pdf
|
||||
[^55]: Liebermann Villa Berlin, "Women in focus," audio guide, on the marriage on May 11, 1915, the birth of Maria Martha Margarethe Riezler on March 27, 1917, and Käthe Liebermann's dates. https://liebermann-villa.de/en/audioguide/women-in-focus/
|
||||
[^56]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, p. 217 (December 1938 departure), pp. 227-228 (New School, joint seminars, Staudinger, Chicago), and the note on the marriage of May 11, 1915.
|
||||
[^57]: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Normdaten record PE00079064, "Riezler, Kurt (1882-1955)," affiliations ("New School for Social Research <New York, NY> (1919-1997) (ca. 1939-1954)") and relations ("Liebermann, Käthe (1885-1955), Ehefrau 1915"). https://www.dla-marbach.de/en/catalogue/find/opac/id/PE00079064/
|
||||
[^58]: Editors' Note, *Social Research* 23, no. 1 (Spring 1956), p. 233 (footnote to Leo Strauss, "Kurt Riezler, 1882-1955"): "Kurt Riezler was Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty of the New School from 1939 to 1952, when he became Professor Emeritus."
|
||||
[^59]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, p. 232.
|
||||
[^60]: Kalliope-Verbund, authority record for Riezler, Kurt (1882-1955), GND 118601008, biographical notes (including "1934 Schutzhaft und Versetzung in den Ruhestand" and "1944 Ausbürgerung"). http://kalliope-verbund.info/gnd/118601008
|
||||
[^61]: The New School Archives and Special Collections, "Institute of World Affairs records," record group NS-02-16-01, historical note and scope and contents. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/235
|
||||
[^62]: The New School Archives and Special Collections, "Reuben Abel papers," collection NA-0003-01, scope and contents (list of lecturers). https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/165
|
||||
[^63]: Strauss, Leo, "Kurt Riezler (1882-1955)," *Social Research* 23 (1956), pp. 233-258, reprinted in *What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies* (1959).
|
||||
[^64]: Colen, José A., and Svetozar Minkov, "Leo Strauss on Social and Natural Science: Two Previously Unpublished Papers," *The Review of Politics* 76, no. 4 (2014), pp. 619-633, introduction, and Strauss's paper "The frame of reference in the social sciences" (Leo Strauss Papers, Box 14, Folder 10). DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/S003467051400059X
|
||||
[^65]: Riezler, Kurt, "Some Critical Remarks on Man's Science of Man," *Social Research* 12, no. 4 (1945), pp. 481-505, as listed in Colen and Minkov.
|
||||
[^66]: The New School Archives and Special Collections, "Riezler, Kurt," File, Box 10, Folder 18, New School faculty vertical files collection (NS-08-02-02). https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/43221
|
||||
[^67]: Heuss, Theodor, "A Word in Memory of Kurt Riezler," *Social Research* 23, no. 1 (Spring 1956), opening article of the issue.
|
||||
|
|
@ -10,12 +10,19 @@ tags:
|
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- Esotericism
|
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- Neoconservatism
|
||||
- PeterThiel
|
||||
summary: "Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher at the University of Chicago whose doctrine of esoteric writing, critique of liberal modernity, and revival of the ancients shaped American neoconservatism and supplied one of the three pillars of Peter Thiel's 2007 essay 'The Straussian Moment.'"
|
||||
summary: "Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher at the University of Chicago whose doctrine of esoteric writing and critique of liberal modernity shaped American neoconservatism and Peter Thiel's 2007 essay 'The Straussian Moment.'"
|
||||
born: 1899-09-20
|
||||
died: 1973-10-18
|
||||
location: "Kirchhain, Germany; Chicago, Illinois"
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 1938
|
||||
end: 1948
|
||||
role: "Graduate Faculty member"
|
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fn: 1
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 to October 18, 1973) was a German-born political philosopher who taught for nearly two decades at the [[University of Chicago]] and who founded the school of interpretation known as Straussianism. His central claims were that the great philosophers of the past practiced esoteric writing, concealing a dangerous teaching beneath a salutary surface; that modern liberal philosophy represents a decline from classical political philosophy; and that the conflict between reason and revelation, which he called the theological-political problem, is the permanent theme of Western thought. His students and their students became a recognizable presence in American conservatism, and his name attaches to the intellectual genealogy of [[Neoconservatism|neoconservatism]]. [[Peter Thiel]] titled his 2007 essay "The Straussian Moment" after him.[^1][^2]
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@ -26,42 +33,49 @@ Strauss was born in Kirchhain, in Hesse, into an observant Jewish family, and st
|
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|
||||
In 1932 a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship took Strauss out of Germany to France and then England, and he never returned; the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 made his exile permanent. He completed *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes* in England, emigrated to the United States in 1937, and from 1938 to 1948 taught at the [[New School for Social Research]] in New York. In 1949 he joined the University of Chicago, where he was Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor and taught until 1967, the period in which he trained the bulk of his students and produced his major interpretive works. He spent a year at Claremont Men's College in 1968 and then moved to [[St. John's College]] in Annapolis as scholar in residence, where he died in 1973.[^1][^3]
|
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|
||||
The Rockefeller Foundation and [[Harold Laski]] of the [[London School of Economics]] recommended Strauss to [[Alvin Johnson]] for a post at the New School.[^4] There Strauss met [[Kurt Riezler]] in 1938, when Riezler was in his fifties; Strauss describes a relationship of colleagues that became a simple and firm friendship over several years.[^5] In the mid-1940s the two taught two courses together, one on De anima and the Passions of the Soul with [[Solomon Asch]] and one on the Theaetetus with [[Alexandre Koyré]].[^6] In 1945 Riezler published "Some Critical Remarks on Man's Science of Man" in Social Research; Strauss's paper "The frame of reference in the social sciences" (Leo Strauss Papers, Box 14, Folder 10) agrees with Riezler's account of the present state of affairs and then objects that his demand for one science of man rests on specific presuppositions.[^6][^7] The finding aid for the Institute of World Affairs lists Strauss among the members of the New School Study Group on Germany from which the Institute developed, alongside Riezler, [[Eduard Heimann]], [[Erich Hula]], [[Karl Mayer]], [[Albert Salomon]], [[Horace Kallen]] and [[Felix Kaufmann]].[^8] Strauss left for Chicago in 1949 and afterwards saw Riezler only at long intervals. His eulogy for Riezler, first given as a talk to the Graduate Faculty's General Seminar, appeared in Social Research in 1956 and was reprinted in What Is Political Philosophy? (1959); it says that "the term 'professor' does not designate anything of him, but the term 'gentleman' does."[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Esoteric Writing and Persecution
|
||||
|
||||
Strauss's most distinctive doctrine, set out in *Persecution and the Art of Writing* (1952), holds that under conditions of persecution philosophers learned to write on two levels at once. The surface, or exoteric, teaching conformed to the moral and religious opinions of the city and protected the author from reprisal, while a hidden, or esoteric, teaching, addressed to careful readers and signaled by deliberate contradictions, omissions, and errors, communicated the philosopher's real and potentially subversive thought. Strauss developed the reading through studies of [[Maimonides]], Judah Halevi, and Spinoza, arguing that modern scholars had lost the very art of reading "between the lines" that earlier readers took for granted.[^4][^5]
|
||||
Strauss's most distinctive doctrine, set out in *Persecution and the Art of Writing* (1952), holds that under conditions of persecution philosophers learned to write on two levels at once. The surface, or exoteric, teaching conformed to the moral and religious opinions of the city and protected the author from reprisal, while a hidden, or esoteric, teaching, addressed to careful readers and signaled by deliberate contradictions, omissions, and errors, communicated the philosopher's real and potentially subversive thought. Strauss developed the reading through studies of [[Maimonides]], Judah Halevi, and Spinoza, arguing that modern scholars had lost the very art of reading "between the lines" that earlier readers took for granted.[^9][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
Behind the contingent fact of persecution Strauss placed a permanent tension between philosophy and the political community. Philosophy questions the authoritative opinions on which any society rests, and so the pursuit of truth is always potentially corrosive of the beliefs that hold a city together. The classical solution, in Strauss's account, was a politic reticence: the philosopher tempers the public expression of the truth and grants the city the salutary myths it requires, a posture connected to the Platonic notion of the noble lie, the gennaion pseudos of the *Republic*, the medicinal falsehood the rulers tell for the good of the whole. Critics, notably Shadia Drury in *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss* (1988), read this as an esoteric endorsement of rule by a deceiving elite, a reading Strauss's defenders dispute.[^4][^6]
|
||||
Behind the contingent fact of persecution Strauss placed a permanent tension between philosophy and the political community. Philosophy questions the authoritative opinions on which any society rests, and so the pursuit of truth is always potentially corrosive of the beliefs that hold a city together. The classical solution, in Strauss's account, was a politic reticence: the philosopher tempers the public expression of the truth and grants the city the salutary myths it requires, a posture connected to the Platonic notion of the noble lie, the gennaion pseudos of the *Republic*, the medicinal falsehood the rulers tell for the good of the whole. Critics, notably Shadia Drury in *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss* (1988), read this as an esoteric endorsement of rule by a deceiving elite, a reading Strauss's defenders dispute.[^9][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Critique of Modernity
|
||||
|
||||
Strauss argued that classical political philosophy, oriented by an idea of the naturally best regime and the question of how one ought to live, was abandoned by modern thought in favor of lower but supposedly more solid foundations. In *Natural Right and History* (1953) he traced the collapse of the classical doctrine of natural right into modern natural rights and then into the historicism and value-relativism he regarded as the characteristic disease of the twentieth century, a relativism he thought left liberal democracy defenseless against its enemies. He described modernity as unfolding in "three waves," the first beginning with [[Niccolo Machiavelli|Machiavelli]] and [[Thomas Hobbes|Hobbes]], the second with [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]], the third with [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], each lowering the horizon further until thought arrived at the nihilism he associated with Heidegger.[^2][^7]
|
||||
Strauss argued that classical political philosophy, oriented by an idea of the naturally best regime and the question of how one ought to live, was abandoned by modern thought in favor of lower but supposedly more solid foundations. In *Natural Right and History* (1953) he traced the collapse of the classical doctrine of natural right into modern natural rights and then into the historicism and value-relativism he regarded as the characteristic disease of the twentieth century, a relativism he thought left liberal democracy defenseless against its enemies. He described modernity as unfolding in "three waves," the first beginning with [[Niccolo Machiavelli|Machiavelli]] and [[Thomas Hobbes|Hobbes]], the second with [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]], the third with [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], each lowering the horizon further until thought arrived at the nihilism he associated with Heidegger.[^2][^12]
|
||||
|
||||
The recovery he proposed was a return to the ancients, achieved by reading Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers on their own terms rather than through the assumptions of progress. Works such as *On Tyranny* (1948), a commentary on Xenophon's *Hiero* that occasioned his published exchange with the Hegelian [[Alexandre Kojeve]], *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958), and *The City and Man* (1964) enacted this return. Underlying all of it was what Strauss called the theological-political problem, the unresolved quarrel between the claims of reason ("Athens") and the claims of revelation ("Jerusalem"), which he held no philosophy had ever refuted and which he treated as the animating tension of the Western tradition.[^7][^8]
|
||||
The recovery he proposed was a return to the ancients, achieved by reading Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers on their own terms rather than through the assumptions of progress. Works such as *On Tyranny* (1948), a commentary on Xenophon's *Hiero* that occasioned his published exchange with the Hegelian [[Alexandre Kojeve]], *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958), and *The City and Man* (1964) enacted this return. Underlying all of it was what Strauss called the theological-political problem, the unresolved quarrel between the claims of reason ("Athens") and the claims of revelation ("Jerusalem"), which he held no philosophy had ever refuted and which he treated as the animating tension of the Western tradition.[^12][^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Schmitt Exchange
|
||||
|
||||
In 1932 Strauss published "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political," a close and critical review of the jurist [[Carl Schmitt]]'s book. Strauss argued that Schmitt, in seeking to ground the political in the friend-enemy distinction and to escape the liberalism he attacked, in fact remained within the liberal horizon he wished to overcome, because he could give no positive account of why the political was worth affirming. Schmitt privately praised the review as the one penetrating response his book had received, revised passages of the third edition in light of it, and supplied a recommendation that supported Strauss's Rockefeller fellowship.[^9]
|
||||
In 1932 Strauss published "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political," a close and critical review of the jurist [[Carl Schmitt]]'s book. Strauss argued that Schmitt, in seeking to ground the political in the friend-enemy distinction and to escape the liberalism he attacked, in fact remained within the liberal horizon he wished to overcome, because he could give no positive account of why the political was worth affirming. Schmitt privately praised the review as the one penetrating response his book had received, revised passages of the third edition in light of it, and supplied a recommendation that supported Strauss's Rockefeller fellowship.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
The German scholar [[Heinrich Meier]] reconstructed this episode in *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue* (German 1988, English 1995), arguing that the exchange concerned, beneath its ostensible subject, the deeper quarrel between political philosophy and political theology. Thiel set the two thinkers' names side by side in "The Straussian Moment."[^9][^10]
|
||||
The German scholar [[Heinrich Meier]] reconstructed this episode in *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue* (German 1988, English 1995), arguing that the exchange concerned, beneath its ostensible subject, the deeper quarrel between political philosophy and political theology. Thiel set the two thinkers' names side by side in "The Straussian Moment."[^14][^15]
|
||||
|
||||
### Students, Neoconservatism, and the Straussian Moment
|
||||
|
||||
Strauss trained a large cohort of students at Chicago, among them Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield (at Harvard), Harry Jaffa, and Walter Berns, and a later generation including the analyst [[Paul Wolfowitz]] and the journalist William Kristol moved into government and the policy press, which is why commentators traced a line from Strauss to the foreign policy of the [[George W. Bush]] administration, though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Strauss's own writing addressed no policy questions. The "Straussian" reading also split into rival camps, an East Coast school around Mansfield and an interpretively bolder West Coast school around Jaffa and the [[Claremont Institute]], which became influential on the [[Trump]]-era right.[^2][^11]
|
||||
Strauss trained a large cohort of students at Chicago, among them Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield (at Harvard), Harry Jaffa, and Walter Berns, and a later generation including the analyst [[Paul Wolfowitz]] and the journalist William Kristol moved into government and the policy press, which is why commentators traced a line from Strauss to the foreign policy of the [[George W. Bush]] administration, though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Strauss's own writing addressed no policy questions. The "Straussian" reading also split into rival camps, an East Coast school around Mansfield and an interpretively bolder West Coast school around Jaffa and the [[Claremont Institute]], which became influential on the [[Trump]]-era right.[^2][^16]
|
||||
|
||||
Thiel's "The Straussian Moment," published in *Politics and Apocalypse* (2007), takes Strauss as one of three twentieth-century thinkers, with Schmitt and [[Rene Girard]], who saw past the optimistic anthropology of Enlightenment liberalism. Thiel reads the [[September 11 attacks]] as evidence that the Hobbesian and Lockean account of human beings as fearful, economically motivated, and threatened only by recognized states had failed, and he invokes Strauss's distinction between the exoteric surface and the esoteric core to argue that the modern state conceals its hardest necessities, a logic he extends to covert intelligence and to the surveillance work of his company [[Palantir]]. The essay treats the Straussian recovery of the ancients as possibly the last and best resource of the West while voicing the suspicion, drawn from Girard, that even the Straussian moment of triumph may prove brief.[^12][^13]
|
||||
Thiel's "The Straussian Moment," published in *Politics and Apocalypse* (2007), takes Strauss as one of three twentieth-century thinkers, with Schmitt and [[Rene Girard]], who saw past the optimistic anthropology of Enlightenment liberalism. Thiel reads the [[September 11 attacks]] as evidence that the Hobbesian and Lockean account of human beings as fearful, economically motivated, and threatened only by recognized states had failed, and he invokes Strauss's distinction between the exoteric surface and the esoteric core to argue that the modern state conceals its hardest necessities, a logic he extends to covert intelligence and to the surveillance work of his company [[Palantir]]. The essay treats the Straussian recovery of the ancients as possibly the last and best resource of the West while voicing the suspicion, drawn from Girard, that even the Straussian moment of triumph may prove brief.[^17][^18]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Leo Strauss," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* on the Kirchhain birth, the 1921 Hamburg doctorate under Ernst Cassirer, Husserl and Heidegger, the Berlin and New School years, and the Chicago career. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
|
||||
[^2]: "Leo Strauss," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on Straussianism, the critique of modernity, and the disputed line to neoconservatism. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Strauss
|
||||
[^3]: Strauss, Leo. *Spinoza's Critique of Religion* (1930); *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes* (1936).
|
||||
[^4]: Strauss, Leo. *Persecution and the Art of Writing.* Free Press, 1952.
|
||||
[^5]: "Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing," *The Review of Politics,* Cambridge, on the strong and weak accounts of esotericism. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/morality-nature-and-esotericism-in-leo-strausss-persecution-and-the-art-of-writing/AE252D909A9FE588A1ADED672DFA6C0F
|
||||
[^6]: Drury, Shadia B. *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss.* St. Martin's Press, 1988. See also Drury, "The Esoteric Philosophy of Leo Strauss," *Political Theory* 13, no. 3 (1985).
|
||||
[^7]: Strauss, Leo. *Natural Right and History.* University of Chicago Press, 1953; and "The Three Waves of Modernity," in *An Introduction to Political Philosophy* (1989).
|
||||
[^8]: Strauss, Leo. *On Tyranny* (1948, rev. ed. with the Kojève exchange 1963); *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958); *The City and Man* (1964).
|
||||
[^9]: Strauss, Leo. "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political" (1932), reprinted in *Spinoza's Critique of Religion* and in Meier's volume below; on Schmitt's June 1932 praise and the third-edition revisions. https://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/notes-on-carl-schmitt-the-concept-of-the-political/
|
||||
[^10]: Meier, Heinrich. *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue,* trans. J. Harvey Lomax. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
|
||||
[^11]: "Leo Strauss," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* rejecting the claim that Strauss is responsible for Iraq-war policy and noting his work "does not concern policy issues of any sort." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
|
||||
[^12]: Thiel, Peter. "The Straussian Moment," in *Politics and Apocalypse,* ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Michigan State University Press, 2007, pp. 189 to 218.
|
||||
[^13]: "Peter Thiel's The Straussian Moment Explained," summary of the essay's use of Strauss, Schmitt, and Girard, the September 11 framing, and the esoteric concealment argument. https://vistasofinsight.substack.com/p/peter-thiels-the-straussian-moment
|
||||
[^4]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of The New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 146: "The Rockefeller Foundation and Harold Laski of the London School of Economics recommended Strauss to Alvin Johnson."
|
||||
[^5]: Strauss, Leo, "Kurt Riezler (1882-1955)," *Social Research* 23 (1956), pp. 233-258, reprinted in *What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies* (1959).
|
||||
[^6]: Colen, José A., and Svetozar Minkov, "Leo Strauss on Social and Natural Science: Two Previously Unpublished Papers," *The Review of Politics* 76, no. 4 (2014), pp. 619-633, introduction, and Strauss's paper "The frame of reference in the social sciences" (Leo Strauss Papers, Box 14, Folder 10). DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/S003467051400059X
|
||||
[^7]: Riezler, Kurt, "Some Critical Remarks on Man's Science of Man," *Social Research* 12, no. 4 (1945), pp. 481-505, as listed in Colen and Minkov.
|
||||
[^8]: The New School Archives and Special Collections, "Institute of World Affairs records," record group NS-02-16-01, historical note and scope and contents. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/235
|
||||
[^9]: Strauss, Leo. *Persecution and the Art of Writing.* Free Press, 1952.
|
||||
[^10]: "Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing," *The Review of Politics,* Cambridge, on the strong and weak accounts of esotericism. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/morality-nature-and-esotericism-in-leo-strausss-persecution-and-the-art-of-writing/AE252D909A9FE588A1ADED672DFA6C0F
|
||||
[^11]: Drury, Shadia B. *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss.* St. Martin's Press, 1988. See also Drury, "The Esoteric Philosophy of Leo Strauss," *Political Theory* 13, no. 3 (1985).
|
||||
[^12]: Strauss, Leo. *Natural Right and History.* University of Chicago Press, 1953; and "The Three Waves of Modernity," in *An Introduction to Political Philosophy* (1989).
|
||||
[^13]: Strauss, Leo. *On Tyranny* (1948, rev. ed. with the Kojève exchange 1963); *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958); *The City and Man* (1964).
|
||||
[^14]: Strauss, Leo. "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political" (1932), reprinted in *Spinoza's Critique of Religion* and in Meier's volume below; on Schmitt's June 1932 praise and the third-edition revisions. https://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/notes-on-carl-schmitt-the-concept-of-the-political/
|
||||
[^15]: Meier, Heinrich. *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue,* trans. J. Harvey Lomax. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
|
||||
[^16]: "Leo Strauss," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* rejecting the claim that Strauss is responsible for Iraq-war policy and noting his work "does not concern policy issues of any sort." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
|
||||
[^17]: Thiel, Peter. "The Straussian Moment," in *Politics and Apocalypse,* ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Michigan State University Press, 2007, pp. 189 to 218.
|
||||
[^18]: "Peter Thiel's The Straussian Moment Explained," summary of the essay's use of Strauss, Schmitt, and Girard, the September 11 framing, and the esoteric concealment argument. https://vistasofinsight.substack.com/p/peter-thiels-the-straussian-moment
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
248
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Michael Whitney Straight.md
Normal file
248
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Michael Whitney Straight.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,248 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Michael Whitney Straight
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Michael Whitney Straight
|
||||
- Michael W. Straight
|
||||
- Michael Straight
|
||||
- M. W. Straight
|
||||
- Nigel
|
||||
category: "Authors & Journalists"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Whitney
|
||||
- NewRepublic
|
||||
- CambridgeFive
|
||||
- CambridgeApostles
|
||||
- KGB
|
||||
- FBI
|
||||
- NationalEndowmentForTheArts
|
||||
- VassilievNotebooks
|
||||
- ColdWar
|
||||
- 1930s
|
||||
- 1960s
|
||||
summary: "Michael Whitney Straight was a Whitney heir and New Republic editor whom Anthony Blunt recruited for Soviet intelligence at Cambridge, and whose 1963 disclosure to the Kennedy administration led to Blunt's confession."
|
||||
born: 1916-09-01
|
||||
died: 2004-01-04
|
||||
location: "New York City; Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Illinois"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[Dorothy Payne Whitney]]"
|
||||
role: mother
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[Willard Straight]]"
|
||||
role: father
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[Whitney Straight]]"
|
||||
role: brother
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[Beatrice Straight]]"
|
||||
role: sister
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[The New Republic]]"
|
||||
start: 1941
|
||||
role: Washington correspondent, then editor and publisher
|
||||
fn: 29
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[William C. Whitney Foundation]]"
|
||||
start: 1937
|
||||
role: president
|
||||
fn: 41
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[National Endowment for the Arts]]"
|
||||
start: 1969
|
||||
end: 1977
|
||||
role: deputy chairman
|
||||
fn: 38
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[Cambridge Apostles]]"
|
||||
start: 1935
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: investigated
|
||||
with: "[[Federal Bureau of Investigation]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1941
|
||||
fn: 31
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[KGB]]"
|
||||
start: 1937
|
||||
end: 1943
|
||||
fn: 22
|
||||
- type: spouse_of
|
||||
with: "[[Belinda Crompton]]"
|
||||
start: 1939
|
||||
end: 1969
|
||||
fn: 50
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Michael Whitney Straight (September 1, 1916 to January 4, 2004) was a magazine publisher, novelist and arts administrator from the [[Whitney family]], the son of [[Willard Straight]] and [[Dorothy Payne Whitney]]. While an undergraduate at [[Trinity College, Cambridge]] he was recruited for Soviet intelligence by [[Anthony Blunt]]; the Soviet file on him carried the cover name "Nigel." In 1963 he disclosed that recruitment to the [[United States]] government, which passed it to British security.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Parents and Childhood
|
||||
|
||||
His father was an investment banker with [[JPMorgan Chase|J. P. Morgan & Company]], who died of septic pneumonia while serving with the American Expeditionary Forces in France in 1918. His mother, an heiress, had started [[The New Republic]] with her husband in 1914. In 1925 she married [[Leonard Knight Elmhirst]], and the couple ran [[Dartington Hall]], the progressive school in [[Devon]]. Michael was the third and youngest child; his brother [[Whitney Straight]] became a racing driver and head of the [[British Overseas Airways Corporation]], and his sister [[Beatrice Straight]] an actress.[^1] The [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] recorded his birth as September 1, 1916, at [[Southampton, Long Island|Southampton]], [[Long Island]], while the [[The New York Times|New York Times]] gave [[New York City]].[^1][^2] He attended the [[Lincoln School]] in New York and Dartington Hall, then spent a year at the [[London School of Economics]] before going on to Cambridge in 1934.[^1] He told the FBI in 1963 that his father died two years after his birth, that he was taken to [[England]] and raised there, and that his early life was that of an orphan who lacked no material thing.[^2] An FBI summary of his military record lists the London School of Economics in 1934 and [[Cambridge University]] from 1934 to 1937.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Cambridge and the Apostles
|
||||
|
||||
Straight told the FBI that he entered Cambridge in the fall of 1934 and was domiciled at Trinity College. He described a warm and lasting friendship with [[John Cornford]], two years his senior, a confirmed Communist who was killed in [[Spain]] in late 1936. In his second year Straight joined a student Communist group of about twenty-five members, which he said was headed by Cornford and by [[James Klugmann]]. He was also admitted to the [[Cambridge Apostles]], the secret discussion society whose members included [[Guy Burgess]] and Blunt.[^2] The Times reported that he joined the Communist Party, as he said in his memoir, in sympathy with its Popular Front aims, and became part of the circle around [[John Maynard Keynes]].[^1] Straight told the FBI that he took part in the student march of May Day 1936, that he made unsolicited gifts of about $2,000 to the [[Daily Worker]] in 1936, and that he gave money directly to [[Harry Pollitt]], then secretary of the [[Communist Party of Great Britain]]. In August 1936 he took part in a student tour of the [[Soviet Union]] organized by [[John Madge]], on which, he said, Blunt also travelled.[^4] The abstract of his 1982 oral history lists him as president of the Socialist Society.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Recruitment by Anthony Blunt
|
||||
|
||||
Straight told the FBI that after Cornford's death became known, Blunt invited him to his rooms and suggested that Straight make a comparable sacrifice. Blunt asked him to give up Communist work in England and turn to the international field, and said the [[Communist International]] wanted a man at Morgan and Company to supply economic reports. Straight protested that he was not cut out to be a banker; about three weeks later Blunt told him that his protests had been rejected, and he sailed for the United States, where he wrote a further letter of protest to Blunt from the ship. Before he left, Blunt tore a small ink drawing of Straight's sweetheart in half and kept one piece. Straight could not recall whether an oral parole was also arranged. He told the FBI that he believed Burgess was the person directing Blunt, although Blunt declined to say so.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
In a 1981 telephone interview with [[United Press International]], Straight placed Blunt's approach in February 1937 and said: "Blunt tried to recruit me as a Soviet agent and have me return to United States and join the J.P. Morgan company." He added: "I flatly refused. I said I didn't want any part."[^7] [[The [[Washington, D.C.|Washington]] Post]] reported the same month that Blunt had tried to recruit him at Cambridge in 1937, and quoted him that "they" had decided to accelerate their timetable "because of the death of my closest friend."[^8] [[The Washington Star]] reported on March 28, 1981 that the approach came less than two weeks after Cornford's death and that Blunt wanted him to "infiltrate" Wall Street.[^9] In a January 1983 radio interview he described the instruction in nearly the same terms: "What they wanted me to do was not to go into government, but to go to Wall Street, go back to my father's old firm, J.P. Morgan & Company."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Contact with Michael Green
|
||||
|
||||
In December 1937, Straight told the FBI, an unknown man telephoned him and identified himself as Michael Green. Straight was certain the call had originated with Blunt. The two had a couple of meetings in New York City, where Green appeared to be testing Straight's opinions rather than making demands, and later three or four meetings in Washington at intervals of about a month, including two lunches. Green disapproved of Straight's friendships with two White Russian drama teachers and with [[Roger Baldwin]] of the [[American Civil Liberties Union]].[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
Straight described Green as about thirty-five to forty years old in 1937, five feet ten inches tall, with thick black hair, who spoke good English but was not a native American; Straight believed him to be Russian. Straight said Green's wife, whom he met once at Longchamps restaurant, was introduced as Helen Green and appeared American. In 1963 the FBI showed Straight photographs, and he identified one of [[William Grienke]] as the man he had known as Green. A confidential source of known reliability identified the same photograph as [[Iskhak Akhmerov]], a former Soviet intelligence officer whom the source had first known in [[Moscow]] in 1931. Grienke entered the United States in August 1935 on a fraudulent passport, with an affidavit from [[Alexander Koral]] as identifying witness.[^12] Straight said Green once told him that if he needed to reach Green he could do so through Koral, whose address in Brooklyn he could not remember; shown photographs of Koral and Koral's wife Helen, he identified neither.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
The Wilson Center's concordance to the [[Alexander Vassiliev|Vassiliev]] notebooks and the [[Venona]] decrypts lists "Green, Michael" and "Greinke, William" as pseudonyms of Akhmerov, with references to Vassiliev's White Notebook #3 (pp. 75 to 76) and Yellow Notebook #2 (p. 83).[^14] [[Allen Weinstein]] wrote in 1997 that Akhmerov's dispatches concerned Straight, "who was then involved with Akhmerov and the NKVD."[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Nigel File in the Vassiliev Notebooks
|
||||
|
||||
Alexander Vassiliev, who took notes in the archives of the Russian foreign intelligence service in the 1990s, copied passages from the Soviet file on Straight, "File 58380 v.1 'Nigel'." The Wilson Center concordance lists "Nigel" as the cover name of Straight in the Black Notebook, White Notebooks #1 to #3 and Yellow Notebook #2.[^14] The passages below are Vassiliev's summaries and quotations as published in English translation; bracketed comments are his.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
An excerpt from a report by "Madchen" (identified in the notes as Burgess) dated January 1937 described Straight as one of the leaders of the Party at Cambridge, "an extremely devoted member of the Party and completely dependable"; a February 1937 report put his support of the Daily Worker at "nearly 1,500 pounds a year." A letter from "Man" (spelled "Mally") to the Center of January 29, 1937 stated: "Let me direct your attention to Michael Straight." A letter of February 16, 1937 reporting Burgess's account carries Vassiliev's bracketed note that Burgess recruited Straight through Anthony Blunt and that the cover name "Nigel" had already been given. The same report stated that Cornford's death was "the one circumstance in our favor" for removing Straight from open Party work, and described a plan, proposed by "A.B.," under which Straight would appear crushed by the death, withdraw from Cambridge politics, and go to the United States, and leave the Party under a pretext.[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
On March 24, 1937 "Man" reported that "Nigel" had gone to America on vacation and "wants to work with us very much." A report from "Stephan" dated July 9, 1937, after two meetings with Straight, described a very inexperienced young man who "thinks he works for the Comintern, and it is necessary to keep him in this illusion for the time being." The notes record that Straight left for the United States on August 8, 1937, after giving 500 pounds for the Communist newspaper, with instructions for a first meeting in New York at his mother's apartment at 1172 Park Avenue, to be introduced by a letter signed "Anthony" and the greeting "I am here from Anthony. He says hello". On September 11, 1937 the Center wrote to "Jung" (the notes identify Jung as Akhmerov's cover name in the 1930s) to contact "Nigel."[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
Reports from "Jung" in late 1937 and 1938 describe regular meetings with Straight in New York and Washington. They record that Straight gave "Jung" $2,000 as quarterly Party dues; that he offered $10,000 to $12,000 of spare money, which the Center ordered "Jung" to collect; that in January 1938 he had joined the State Department and was preparing a report on armaments from ambassadors' reports; and that on March 26, 1938 the Center wrote that he "could be a very valuable source" and should be "EDUCATED." A "Jung" report of June 28, 1938 stated that through his job Straight had made contact with [[Alger Hiss|Hiss]], whom he described as "an interesting employee with a senior post" and "very ideologically progressive."[^19] Straight later wrote to the [[The New York Review of Books|New York Review of Books]] that he did not offer to recruit Hiss; Weinstein replied that the passage in his book should have read that Straight "identified and described Hiss to Itzhak Akhmerov."[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
The notes record that in February 1938 "[[Solomon Adler|Adler]] from Treasury" approached Straight to draw him into the American Communist apparatus, that Straight "categorically denied" being a Communist, and that the Center ordered that he not be connected with it. Straight told the FBI of a summer 1938 telephone call from a man calling himself Solomon who said he worked for the [[United States Department of the Treasury|Treasury Department]]; he identified Solomon Adler from photographs.[^19][^20]
|
||||
|
||||
In March 1939 the Center wrote that "Nigel has the potential to be a major agent." In a 1939 passage, "Jung" reported that Straight had delivered $1,700, part of it for the Communist Party of the United States and part for Spain, and had obtained from a State Department colleague named Coe a 102-page report on the Munich Conference. After the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 "Jung" reported that Straight openly criticized Soviet policy and stayed away from meetings for a month; on October 25, 1939 he wrote that he had "managed to straighten N-l out." The notes record that "Jung" left for the Soviet Union at the end of 1939, that the legal station kept up the connection with virtually no work, that a Center cable of November 9, 1939 directed that "Nigel" be passed to "Igor" because of his "recent hesitation," that on July 15, 1941 "Chap" met Straight, who said he had resigned from the State Department and had not received the appointment to the London embassy he had counted on, and that a report of February 26, 1942 stated that if "Madchen" and "Tony" were British intelligence agents, the "recruiting" of Straight "could also have been a cunning maneuver by Eng. Intelligence," after which, in Vassiliev's bracketed words, the decision was made to continue work with him, and that a report of June 3, 1942 attributed to "Maxim" the view that Straight had been "ideologically corrupted" and recorded the anti-Soviet influence of [[Louis Dolivet|Dolivet]], "who is married to N's sister."[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
A report of August 10, 1942 from the New York station recorded that after repeated missed meetings contact with "Nigel" had finally been established, that he "has an excellent understanding" of the attention given him, and that he was "very busy with his book"; the same passage records his recommendation of a friend, William Sherwood, as someone who could be "very useful." A later report summarized in White Notebook #1 states: "In 1943 he was drafted into the army and there has been no communication with him since then." A Yellow Notebook entry of March 2, 1943 states that "the army recruit 'Nigel'" would report his location by telephone or mail.[^22][^23] A Black Notebook entry on the most valuable agents in the United States in 1940 and 1941 describes "Nigel" as "son of an American millionaire," who "Gave valuable materials from the State Department" and was "Deactivated." A plan approved on December 16, 1943 directs: "Deactivate agents without future prospects (Zero, Informator, Liza, Nigel)." A cable of July 10, 1947 records that "Oleg" learned that "the wealthy economist Michael Straight is in [[Henry A. Wallace|Wallace]]'s inner circle." A list of agents with whom the Washington station was asked to renew contact in 1948 to 1950 includes "'Nigel' M. Straight. Publisher of the 'New Republic.' Connection was not renewed."[^23] Straight told the FBI in 1963 that his relationship with Green ended in the autumn of 1942 and that he was never afterward approached by anyone representing Soviet intelligence.[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
### Government Service, 1938 to 1941
|
||||
|
||||
Straight told the FBI that [[Thomas Corcoran]] arranged a post for him at the [[United States Department of the Interior]], where he wrote speeches for members of the Cabinet. In 1938 he worked without salary in the State Department under an economic adviser whom the memorandum names as Herbert Pels (the Vassiliev notes name his superior as "Herbert Feis or Feiz"), preparing a report on the economic consequences of European rearmament for [[Cordell Hull]]. He said that [[Eleanor Roosevelt]] helped him obtain the assignment.[^13][^19] He told the FBI he gave Green two official State Department documents, one on trade with Italy and one a mimeographed "Political Summary" for Foreign Service personnel, which Green took to have copied; he described them as unimportant and possibly marked "Confidential." He said he wrote a memorandum for Green on the Nazi-Soviet pact urging the Soviets not to undermine France and Great Britain.[^25] The New York Times, summarizing the memoir in 2004, reported that Straight insisted the only papers he passed to the Soviet agent he knew as Green were political and economic analyses written by himself.[^1] In 1981 he told UPI that in the United States a Soviet agent approached him in 1938 and "I gave him six to eight political articles of my own, many critical of the Soviet Union."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
Straight told the FBI that on August 27, 1940 [[James Dunn]] appointed him division assistant in the Division of European Affairs, a post he held until May 21, 1941. The Bureau's military-record summary of 1968 gives State Department service from January 1, 1938 to March 9, 1939 and from September 28, 1940 to February 28, 1941, Interior from March 1939 to September 1940, and "Editorial Publications Incorporated, Publishers" in New York from March 1941 to February 1943; a September 1969 field report from St. Louis gives the Public Works Administration from May 1, 1939 to March 15, 1940, Interior from March 16 to August 27, 1940, and State from August 27, 1940 to May 21, 1941.[^3][^13][^26]
|
||||
|
||||
Straight told the FBI that Burgess came to Washington in about 1940, telephoned him, and lunched with him at the Little Garden Tea House. Burgess said he was completely out of touch with his friends and asked whether Straight could put him back in touch. Straight said he made no comment and changed the subject, did not report the meeting to any authority, and did not believe he told Green about it; Burgess had supper at his house that night, which Straight recalled as tense.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
### Wartime Service and the New Republic
|
||||
|
||||
Straight enlisted in the Enlisted Reserve Corps of the [[United States Army Air Forces]] on November 24, 1942, reported for active duty on February 2, 1943, was discharged as an aviation cadet on March 11, 1944 to accept a commission, and was relieved from active duty on October 28, 1945, according to a 1968 summary of his record; his occupation was listed as pilot with over 1,000 flying hours. The record contains recommendation letters from [[Abe Fortas]], then Under Secretary of the Interior (October 21, 1942), from William S. Youngman Jr., president of China Defense Supplies (October 17, 1942), and from Major General Frank Ross McCoy, president of the [[Foreign Policy Association]] (October 9, 1942).[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
His book [[Make This the Last War]] was published by Harcourt, Brace; the Bureau's 1963 memorandum gives the end of 1942 and its records of the [[Library of Congress]] give 1943. Straight told the FBI that he had discussed it with [[Maxim Litvinov]], then the Soviet ambassador in Washington, and prepared a memorandum on it for Green, that the publisher gave a book party to which [[Earl Browder]] was invited, and that Green had wanted him to meet Browder.[^24][^28] He told the FBI that he did not hear from Green between May 1941 and the autumn of 1942, when Green called him shortly before he enlisted; they met at the Jamaica, New York railroad station, and at his last meetings he told Green that he was going into the Air Corps and that their relationship was at an end. He said he never afterward saw or heard from Green or was approached by anyone representing the Communist underground or Soviet intelligence.[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
The Bureau's records give differing accounts of his New Republic work. A December 1957 memorandum states that he resigned from government service in 1941, became Washington correspondent of the magazine, and in June 1943 became its editor, and that in October 1946 he hired Henry A. Wallace as editor.[^29] A records brief lists "1941 - 43 an editor, New Republic." A 1969 summary describes him as a contributing editor until about 1956 and as president of the [[William C. Whitney Foundation]], and a 1969 memorandum states that he was editor and publisher after the war.[^30][^31] He was described as editor and publisher, and "after his mother's withdrawal of support of the magazine he enlisted new patrons and gradually ended his connection." A New Republic publisher interviewed in 1969 told the Bureau that Straight's parents had set up a fund that founded the magazine in 1914 and that it was used until 1954, when [[Gilbert A. Harrison]] bought a controlling interest.[^1][^32]
|
||||
|
||||
Straight told the FBI that in England in about 1946 he attended a meeting of the Apostles at which Burgess spoke, and that Burgess and Blunt asked to see him at a club where Burgess was a member; a bitter argument followed in which he expressed his disillusionment with everything Russian and Communist. On the same trip he discussed the American proposal to share atomic energy with Pollitt, after speaking to [[Margot Heinemann]], who had been Cornford's girlfriend. In early 1947, he said, he lunched with Burgess at the Savoy; Burgess said he was working as secretary to [[Hector McNeil]], and asked whether he could pass on to his "friends" Straight's statement that America was approaching complete frustration with the Soviets. Straight told the FBI that he said he could.[^27] In the 1940s Straight's wife [[Belinda Crompton|Belinda]] gave the names of Blunt and Burgess to her analyst, Dr. Jennie Welderhall, wife of a British Embassy official, so that they could be passed to the British government.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
### Burgess, 1951 and the British Embassy
|
||||
|
||||
Straight told the FBI that in 1951 or 1952, as he left the British Embassy in Washington, he met Burgess, who said he was connected with the Embassy on special work, and that he told Burgess to resign from British government service within three months or he would report him; shortly afterward Burgess fled. The New York Times reported the same encounter as occurring on a Washington street corner in 1951, with Straight assuming that Burgess was running a spy ring out of the Embassy and warning him to stop or be exposed; Burgess then defected with [[Donald Maclean]].[^1][^27] Asked by the FBI why he had not reported Burgess earlier, Straight said that he had considered it many times but was afraid, mindful of [[Whittaker Chambers]] and [[Elizabeth Bentley]] and of the publicity of hearings and trials with injury to his wife and five children; he said he had once gone to the British Information Service and said he knew Burgess, but the man on duty told him many witnesses knew Burgess and Straight left without giving pertinent facts.[^33] In 1981 he told UPI that after Burgess defected he went to the British Embassy in Washington to tell them about Blunt's recruitment effort, "but was turned away."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 1963 Disclosure and Who Sent Him to the FBI
|
||||
|
||||
Straight was interviewed by FBI agents in Washington on June 18, 1963, and the Bureau's memorandum of June 25 sets out his account; he told the agents that he was glad to have divulged the information.[^33] Accounts of how he came to the Bureau differ.
|
||||
|
||||
[[Cartha DeLoach]] of the Bureau recorded that on September 17, 1969 he told [[Egil Krogh]], who had telephoned from [[John Ehrlichman]]'s office at the [[White House]], that "Bobby Kennedy had sent this man over to the FBI in June of 1963 to be interviewed relative to his questionable background." The memorandum adds that the effort of [[Robert Kennedy]], then attorney general, "was merely an attempt to get this man's record straightened out." On October 15, 1969 DeLoach wrote that the first time the Bureau talked to Straight was in June 1963 "when Bobby Kennedy sent him to the FBI."[^31]
|
||||
|
||||
In a 1981 telephone interview Straight told UPI that in 1963 he went to [[Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.]], then a White House aide, because President [[John F. Kennedy]] had asked him to serve on the [[National Endowment for the Arts]] and he wanted to ensure his record was clear; UPI reported that "Schlesinger sent him to the FBI, which in turn notified the British Secret Service."[^7] In an interview with the Washington Post the same month he said he had revealed his knowledge about Blunt to attorney general Robert Kennedy in 1963 after learning that the president planned to name him to the newly formed Endowment for the Arts, adding that he "had ruled myself out for the job" because of what government security checks were likely to disclose.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
In a radio interview on January 26, 1983 the host, Fred Fiske, put the sequence as follows, and Straight assented. Straight said that the arts council appointment "triggered it, when President Kennedy asked me to do that," adding that it "would have become the Endowment." Fiske said that Straight had "confided in Arthur Schlesinger about it, and he sent you to Bobby Kennedy." Straight: "Robert Kennedy. Right." Fiske: "Who sent you to the FBI." Straight: "Correct."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
The New York Times obituary in 2004 stated that Straight, offered a top arts post in the Kennedy administration and "fearing a background check," went to Schlesinger, "who in turn directed him to the Justice Department," and that his talks with the FBI and British intelligence led to the unmasking of Blunt. It reported that Straight turned down the Kennedy post.[^1] Straight's 1982 oral history for Columbia University lists "decision to refuse chairmanship" and "cooperation with Federal Bureau of Investigation and British Intelligence, 1964" among its topics.[^5] Critics on the right, the Times reported, accused him of "confessing to the F.B.I. only to clear his career path."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
On January 17, 1983, Sir Robert Armstrong of the Cabinet Office minuted the prime minister's office that "the lead which led to Anthony Blunt's confession in 1964 was a statement by an American, Mr Michael Whitney Straight, towards the end of 1963 that he had been recruited by Mr Blunt as an agent of the KGB when he was at Cambridge before the war." The minute states that the Security Service had seen the manuscript of Straight's autobiography, that it contained "no information which is not already known to the Security Service or which might be regarded as particularly damaging to the interests of the Security Service," and that it was to be serialised in the Observer. The prime minister's private secretary noted on January 18 that the prime minister had seen the minute.[^34]
|
||||
|
||||
Straight told UPI in 1981 that the FBI notified the British Secret Service, that the British had already been questioning Blunt, that he agreed to confront Blunt in their presence, and that Blunt asked to see him alone for fifteen minutes first. He said he went to Blunt's apartment in April 1964 and Blunt said: "Thank God you did this. I couldn't do it myself." In return for confessing, the Washington Post reported him as saying, Blunt received immunity from prosecution.[^7][^8] The Washington Star's account, of an interview with Straight the day before, was that he had offered to go to England and confront Blunt personally and, if need be, take him to court.[^9] In the 1983 interview Fiske said that Blunt had "told you that he was relieved," and Straight answered: "Yes." Fiske added that Straight had a fifteen-minute private meeting with Blunt before the British intelligence officers came in.[^10] Blunt's confession and immunity are dated 1964 in the catalogue of the [[National Archives (United Kingdom)|United Kingdom National Archives]], whose file KV 2/4705, on Blunt, covers February 28 to June 19, 1964 and describes him as having been given immunity from prosecution in exchange for information about fellow agents; the catalogue description does not name Straight.[^35] Blunt lost his knighthood after Prime Minister [[Margaret Thatcher]] disclosed his past to Parliament in November 1979.[^8] In a 1983 interview Straight said: "I've named all the ones I know to the FBI and to British intelligence."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Deputy Chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts, 1969
|
||||
|
||||
The White House's request for an investigation of Straight, received by the Bureau on August 27, 1969, concerned a presidential appointment whose position was not stated.[^36] On September 3, 1969 President [[Richard Nixon]] announced the appointment of [[Nancy Hanks]] as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and added: "I anticipate that soon she will be joined by a deputy of equal stature." Hanks was confirmed by the Senate on October 2 and sworn in on October 6, 1969.[^37][^38] The Bureau's special inquiry was sent to Ehrlichman under a letter from [[J. Edgar Hoover]] on September 11, 1969. The summary memorandum of September 10 describes his service on the boards of the [[American Veterans Committee]], [[Amnesty International]] of the United States, the National Parks Association, the Washington Theater Club and the Washington chapter of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; his divorce; and reports from interviews, including Senators [[Jacob Javits]] and [[Charles Goodell]], who recommended him.[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
On September 17, 1969 Krogh asked DeLoach whether Straight had been an FBI employee, so that the White House could consider him for the deputy chairmanship of the [[National Council on the Arts]]. DeLoach told Krogh that Straight had never been employed by the Bureau. His memorandum records that Krogh said he "planned to recommend to Ehrlichman that this man not be hired." On October 15, 1969 [[Leonard Garment]], special consultant to the president, told DeLoach that the White House was still weighing the appointment; that Straight had told the White House he had "cooperated fully with the FBI" since 1963; that Peter M. Flanagan had discussed the appointment with Senators [[Karl Mundt]] and [[Gordon Allott]], and that Mundt had reservations; and asked whether the Bureau would talk to Mundt. DeLoach replied that the Bureau would furnish nothing without White House instructions. DeLoach told Garment that the Bureau had contacted Straight a number of times since 1963 to fill out his admissions, and that Straight had contacted the Bureau once in 1969 to say he planned a short trip to the Soviet Union and was concerned that the KGB might approach him.[^31] A newspaper clipping in the Bureau's file of November 1969 states that Straight "will play a major role in the Arts Council under Miss Hanks' direction" and "is being spoken of as a possible deputy."[^39] The Endowment's staff list of January 1970 names Straight as deputy chairman.[^38]
|
||||
|
||||
The New York Times reported that he served "in the Nixon and Ford administrations" as deputy chairman, from 1969 to 1977; a listing of his book *Twigs for an Eagle's Nest: Government and the Arts, 1965-1978* gives 1969 to 1978. His 1982 oral history lists his role as deputy chairman and as acting chairman of the Endowment in 1977.[^1][^5][^40] The Washington Post identified him as a former deputy chairman in 1981.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### William C. Whitney Foundation
|
||||
|
||||
The FBI's 1969 summary describes Straight as president of the William C. Whitney Foundation, a charitable organization that "concerns itself with the arts, having made many grants in the fields of music, dance, theater, and painting."[^30] [[Milton C. Rose]], senior partner of [[Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander]], told the Bureau that the foundation was a client of the firm, was "created by Mr. Straight's parents in memory of his grandfather" [[William C. Whitney]], and that Straight had been its president "since its inception in 1937."[^41] [[Herbert Faber]], an associate of the firm, said Straight was a client and that the firm handled the foundation's legal transactions. [[Harriett K. Evison]] told the Bureau she had been Dorothy's social secretary and later assistant secretary-treasurer of the foundation. Dr. Shelton Siegel, a vice president of the [[Population Council]], said he had contacted Straight about possible grants to the council and that Straight had been cooperative.[^41]
|
||||
|
||||
The 1969 summary also records a December 6, 1952 article in the Washington Times-Herald reporting that Straight was questioned before a special House committee investigating tax-exempt foundations about $19,000 in grants by the foundation to organizations "cited as subversive or communist fronts." The clipping states that Straight contended that none of the organizations was known to be a Communist front when the grants were made and that they were cut off when so listed.[^42] In 1955 "Michael Straight, Publisher, The 'New Republic,'" signed a petition to the President on amnesty for Smith Act defendants, and he was national chairman of the American Veterans Committee from 1952 to 1954.[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
### Family and Associates
|
||||
|
||||
An FBI investigation of an unidentified Soviet subject known as "Dan," conducted in 1968, examined Straight. The Bureau's memoranda record that his military record tended to eliminate him as a suspect, and they asked for information on his brother, Whitney Straight. They also considered Louis Dolivet, who had been married to Straight's sister Beatrice, and noted that Dolivet had tried to interest [[Nelson Rockefeller]] and [[John Hay Whitney]] in a [[United Nations]] journal. The memoranda concluded that Dolivet could not be considered a good suspect.[^43] The 1969 summary gives the marriage of Beatrice and Dolivet as February 21, 1941; the 1968 memoranda give February 21, 1942. It records that informants "who have furnished reliable information in the past" said Dolivet was in early 1930 an active international Communist agent in Europe and a close associate of [[Willi Münzenberg]], that his employers recommended him as pro-American and anti-Soviet, and that other informants thought him "an inactive, but highly placed, Soviet Agent." The Bureau reported in September 1969 that Straight had not associated with Dolivet in over twenty years.[^30][^44] The Vassiliev concordance lists Dolivet as Straight's brother-in-law with references in White Notebooks #2 and #3.[^14] The National Archives' MI5 file KV 2/4366 (December 18, 1937 to March 22, 1951) is on Dolivet and is catalogued as describing a secret Communist who moved to the United States in 1941.[^45]
|
||||
|
||||
An FBI index entry records that Whitney Straight was chief executive of the British Overseas Airways Corporation in 1948 and joined the board of Rolls-Royce in 1955; Straight told the FBI in 1963 that his brother was executive vice president of Rolls-Royce and that during a visit to Moscow about February 1963 he talked with Burgess, who sent Michael his regards.[^27][^29] The 1969 inquiry recorded that his son David had applied to the [[National Security Agency]] and the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] and that his son Michael Willard Straight was a naval officer.[^46] It also records that his daughter Susan was one of three persons observed on September 19, 1967 placing handbills on cars in the Pentagon parking lot that read "Exorcise the Pentagon, 10/21-22."[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
### After Long Silence
|
||||
|
||||
Straight published his account as *After Long Silence* in 1983, serialised in the Observer.[^34] The New York Times summarized the book as a confession in which Straight said he was reluctant to spy when Blunt ordered him to in 1937. It reported that critics on the right accused him of confessing to the FBI "only to clear his career path" and speculated whether blowing the whistle sooner might not have saved lives, and that "gentler reviewers" accused him of "sentimentality and narcissism."[^1] In the January 1983 radio interview, asked who was criticizing him when Blunt had thanked him, Straight answered that he was being "hit very hard" for one line in the book saying that he remained a liberal, and said: "I've had a lot of criticism for writing the story."[^10] In a 1995 letter to the London Review of Books he wrote: "I was not a spy in the accepted usage of that word."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
His papers are at [[Cornell University]] (collection #4465, 21 cubic feet, 1890 to 1992), including FBI files requested under the Freedom of Information Act, files on the National Endowment for the Arts and Nancy Hanks, clippings and letters relating to Blunt, and notes on *The Haunted Wood*.[^47]
|
||||
|
||||
### Contested Accounts
|
||||
|
||||
[[Roland Perry]]'s biography, *The Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight* (2005), argues that Straight's involvement in Soviet espionage continued after the break he dated to 1942. A [[PopMatters]] review summarized Perry's case as follows. Perry argued that Straight's 1963 confession was false. Perry also argued that Straight's later civil liberties work and his involvement with Amnesty International served Soviet interests. Perry further held that Straight worked near the agent handling [[Walter Krivitsky]], who was found dead in 1941, and left his government post three days after the death to edit the New Republic. The review recorded that Perry lacked hard evidence, and that the surviving documents generally supported Straight's account.[^48] The sources give State Department end dates of February 28, 1941 and May 21, 1941; the Vassiliev notes record Straight's resignation as reported to a KGB contact on July 15, 1941.[^3][^13][^21]
|
||||
|
||||
On the Hiss question, Allen Weinstein's book [[Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case]] asserted that Straight tried to recruit Alger Hiss. Straight wrote to The New York Review of Books in December 1997 that in the June 1938 dispatch published by Weinstein, Akhmerov noted only that Straight "mentioned" Hiss as "a very progressive man," and that Weinstein had asserted that he "tried to recruit" Hiss. Weinstein replied that the book's line should read that Straight, code-named "Nigel," "identified and described Hiss to Itzhak Akhmerov," and that it would read that way in any future edition.[^15] In the 1983 radio interview Straight said he had one or two encounters with Hiss, and that on the day Chambers named Hiss he telephoned Hiss, who answered quietly and deliberately that it was an effort to undermine the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, of which he was president; Straight said he reasoned from the calm that "he's been preparing himself for this day for quite a while."[^10] The CIA's selected Venona messages, published as *[[Venona Part II]]*, do not name Straight or "Nigel"; the Wilson Center concordance lists "Nigel" as a cover name in the Vassiliev notebooks only.[^14][^49]
|
||||
|
||||
### Death
|
||||
|
||||
Straight died at home in [[Chicago]] on January 4, 2004, aged 87, of pancreatic cancer, according to his lawyer, [[Arthur Mahon]].[^1] He had married Belinda Crompton on September 10, 1939. A court in Washoe County granted her a divorce from him in [[Reno, Nevada]] on August 27, 1969, on grounds of incompatibility.[^50]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Michael Straight, Who Wrote of Connection to Spy Ring, Is Dead at 87," *The New York Times*, January 5, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/nyregion/michael-straight-who-wrote-of-connection-to-spy-ring-is-dead-at-87.html (Internet Archive copy, https://web.archive.org/web/2016id_/https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/nyregion/michael-straight-who-wrote-of-connection-to-spy-ring-is-dead-at-87.html).
|
||||
[^2]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1, memorandum of June 25, 1963 on the interview of June 18, 1963, opening passages (birth, Cambridge, the Communist group, the Conversazione Society).
|
||||
[^3]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, memorandum of August 1, 1968 from the St. Louis office summarizing the military personnel record of Michael Whitney Straight (Army serial numbers 13 105 244 and 0-825 321), in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1.
|
||||
[^4]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," passages on contributions to the Daily Worker and Harry Pollitt, the May Day 1936 march, and the August 1936 tour of the Soviet Union.
|
||||
[^5]: "Reminiscences of Michael Straight, 1982" (interviewer Frederick P. Jessup), Columbia University Libraries, Time-Based Media, https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/time_based_media/10.7916/46yr-z978 (abstract, Internet Archive copy https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/time_based_media/10.7916/46yr-z978). Abstract.
|
||||
[^6]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," passage on Blunt's invitation and instruction, Straight's protests and the torn drawing.
|
||||
[^7]: Daniel F. Gilmore, United Press International, March 26, 1981, "Michael W. Straight, former deputy chairman of the National...," https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/03/26/Michael-W-Straight-former-deputy-chairman-of-the-National/9678354430800/ (Internet Archive copy, https://web.archive.org/web/2020id_/https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/03/26/Michael-W-Straight-former-deputy-chairman-of-the-National/9678354430800/). Based on a telephone interview with Straight; his statements as reported.
|
||||
[^8]: Joe Ritchie, "Writer Cites Role in Unmasking British Spy," *The Washington Post*, March 26, 1981, CIA Reading Room copy, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00552r000302750023-1.
|
||||
[^9]: Article in *The Washington Star*, March 28, 1981, CIA Reading Room copy, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00552r000100600015-0.
|
||||
[^10]: Fred Fiske Show, interview with Michael Straight, WAMU-FM, January 26, 1983, transcript by Radio TV Reports, Inc., CIA Reading Room copy, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01070r000100570002-1. The sequence Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, FBI is stated in the host's question and confirmed by Straight's answers.
|
||||
[^11]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," passages on the telephone call from Michael Green, the New York and Washington meetings, and Green's objections to Straight's friendships.
|
||||
[^12]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," passages on the description of Green and Helen Green and the identification of the photograph of William Grienke.
|
||||
[^13]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," passages on Straight's arrival in Washington in 1938, State Department work, Koral, Corcoran, Dunn and the Interior Department.
|
||||
[^14]: Wilson Center, "Vassiliev Notebooks and Venona Index Concordance" (update of November 1, 2014), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/Vassiliev-Notebooks-and-Venona-Index-Concordance_update-2014-11-01.pdf, entries "Green, Michael," "Greinke, William," "Nigel," "Dolivet, Louis."
|
||||
[^15]: Michael Straight and Allen Weinstein, letters under the heading "Not a Recruiter," *The New York Review of Books*, December 18, 1997, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/12/18/not-a-recruiter/.
|
||||
[^16]: Alexander Vassiliev Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, notebooks published with English translation by the Wilson Center Digital Archive, collection 86, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/vassiliev-notebooks (mirror at https://digitalarchive.umd.edu/node/88908 for White Notebook #3). The Wilson Center's file guide states that the posted translation contains errors; the passages cited are quoted from the English translation. Page numbers are the translation's printed page labels.
|
||||
[^17]: Vassiliev, White Notebook #3 (English translation), pp. 81 and 111 to 112: "File 58380 v.1 'Nigel'"; excerpt of a report by "Madchen" (Burgess) of January 1937; "Man" to the Center, January 29, 1937; "Man" to the Center, February 16, 1937 with Burgess's report; Vassiliev's bracketed note on Blunt. https://digitalarchive.umd.edu/node/88908.
|
||||
[^18]: Vassiliev, White Notebook #3 (English translation), pp. 112 to 115: "Man" to the Center, March 24, 1937; "Stephan" on "N." from July 9, 1937; note that "N. left for the USA on 8.8.37"; the Center to "Jung," September 11, 1937. The concordance identifies "Jung" as a 1930s cover name of Iskhak Akhmerov. https://digitalarchive.umd.edu/node/88908.
|
||||
[^19]: Vassiliev, White Notebook #3 (English translation), pp. 115 to 118: "Jung" to the Center, November 1937 to June 28, 1938; the Center to "Jung," March 26, 1938; reports of January 25 and February 28, 1938 on Adler. https://digitalarchive.umd.edu/node/88908.
|
||||
[^20]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," passage on the telephone call from "Solomon" and the photographs of Solomon Adler; the Bureau's note states that Chambers identified Adler as a Treasury employee who furnished reports of a financial nature to Chambers's "Soviet principal," and that Bentley identified him as an active member of a Soviet espionage group in Washington before 1944.
|
||||
[^21]: Vassiliev, White Notebook #3 (English translation), pp. 119 to 123: the Center to "Jung," March 29, 1939; "Jung" to the Center, March 1, 1939 (the Coe report and $1,700); "Jung" reports of September 8 and October 5 and 25, 1939; entries of July 15, 1941 and February 26, 1942. https://digitalarchive.umd.edu/node/88908.
|
||||
[^22]: Vassiliev, White Notebook #1 (English translation), pp. 12 to 13 and 47 to 48, https://digitalarchive.umd.edu/node/88906; Yellow Notebook #2, p. 83, https://digitalarchive.umd.edu/node/89157.
|
||||
[^23]: Vassiliev, Black Notebook (English translation), p. 161 (cable of November 9, 1939), p. 175 (report on valuable agents), p. 182 (plan of December 16, 1943), p. 63 (cable of July 10, 1947) and p. 83 (list of agents for renewed contact, 1948 to 1950), https://digitalarchive.umd.edu/node/89160.
|
||||
[^24]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," passages on Make This the Last War, the book party, and the last meetings with Green.
|
||||
[^25]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," passages on the two State Department documents and the memorandum on the Nazi-Soviet pact.
|
||||
[^26]: FBI, report of SA Harry C. Jung, St. Louis, September 2, 1969, synopsis (employment dates), in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1." The same report gives his relief from active duty as October 16, 1945; the 1968 summary gives October 28, 1945.
|
||||
[^27]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," passages on Burgess (the 1940 lunch, the 1946 and 1947 meetings, the 1951 or 1952 encounter, the 1963 visit by Whitney Straight, and the 1948 disclosure by Belinda Straight).
|
||||
[^28]: FBI, memorandum of September 29, 1969 supplementing the summary of September 10, 1969, listing his books from the records of the Library of Congress ("Make This the Last War," 1943; "Trial by Television," 1954; "Carrington," 1960; "A Very Small Remnant," 1963), in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^29]: FBI, memorandum of December 18, 1957 (with an index of references to Whitney Straight), in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^30]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969, and letter of J. Edgar Hoover to John Ehrlichman of September 11, 1969, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^31]: FBI, memoranda of C. D. DeLoach to Clyde Tolson of September 18, 1969 and October 15, 1969, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1." The September 18 memorandum states that the Bureau's inquiry "reflects an investigation from 1941 to 1943 based on this individual's reported Communist Party activities" and that he was editor and publisher of the New Republic after World War II.
|
||||
[^32]: FBI, teletypes and interview reports of September 1969 on the special inquiry, including the interview with the publisher of the New Republic, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^33]: FBI, memorandum of June 25, 1963, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," closing passages (why he had not reported earlier; British Information Service; willingness to answer questions).
|
||||
[^34]: Sir Robert Armstrong to Mr. Butler, minute ref. A083/0151, January 17, 1983, "SECRET," and Principal Private Secretary to Sir Robert Armstrong, January 18, 1983, The National Archives (UK), PREM 19/1951 f208, https://archive.margaretthatcher.org/doc23/830117%20cab%20off%20min%20PREM19-1951%20f208.pdf (released December 2023; described at https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/244748).
|
||||
[^35]: The National Archives (UK), file KV 2/4705, "Anthony BLUNT," covering dates February 28 to June 19, 1964, Discovery catalogue record C19404941, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C19404941.
|
||||
[^36]: FBI, memorandum of W. V. Cleveland to Gale, August 27, 1969, "Special Inquiry - White House," in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^37]: Richard Nixon, "Statement on Appointing Nancy Hanks as Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts," September 3, 1969, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-appointing-nancy-hanks-chairman-national-endowment-for-the-arts.
|
||||
[^38]: National Endowment for the Arts, *Annual Report 1969*, https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEA-Annual-Report-1969.pdf (Hanks sworn in October 6, 1969; staff list of January 1970 naming Michael Straight, Deputy Chairman); *Annual Report 1973*, https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEA-Annual-Report-1973.pdf.
|
||||
[^39]: FBI, newspaper clipping of November 1969 on the National Council on the Arts, attached to the file of the special inquiry, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^40]: National Arts Publication Database, Americans for the Arts, entry for Michael Straight, *Twigs for an Eagle's Nest: Government and the Arts, 1965-1978* (Devon Press, 1978), https://ww2.americansforthearts.org/publications/twigs-eagles-nest-government-and-arts-1965-1978.
|
||||
[^41]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 and teletypes of September 1969 on interviews with Milton C. Rose, Herbert Faber, Harriett K. Evison and Dr. Shelton Siegel, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^42]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 ("Miscellaneous Information"), citing the Washington Times-Herald of December 6, 1952, and the clipping of that article in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1." The same clipping reports the testimony before the committee of Marshall Field.
|
||||
[^43]: FBI, memoranda on UNSUB aka "Dan" (file 65-61067), July and August 1968, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^44]: FBI, supplementary memorandum of September 29, 1969, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^45]: The National Archives (UK), file KV 2/4366, "Louis DOLIVET," covering dates December 18, 1937 to March 22, 1951, Discovery catalogue record C16548843, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C16548843.
|
||||
[^46]: FBI, teletype of September 5, 1969 from Baltimore and airtel of September 23, 1969 from Alexandria, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^47]: Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, "Michael Whitney Straight papers," #4465, https://archives.library.cornell.edu/repositories/2/resources/4143.
|
||||
[^48]: PopMatters Staff, review of Roland Perry, *The Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight* (Da Capo Press, 2005), https://www.popmatters.com/last-of-the-cold-war-spies-2496243761.html. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^49]: Central Intelligence Agency, *Venona Part II: Selected Messages, 1939-1957*, https://cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Venona-Part-II-Selected-Messages-1939-1957.pdf.
|
||||
[^50]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 ("Marital Status") and report of Belinda C. Straight's statement, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1"; the 1963 memorandum gives the marriage as September 1939 and the summary as September 10, 1939.
|
||||
|
|
@ -16,14 +16,19 @@ born: 1908-07-08
|
|||
died: 1979-01-26
|
||||
location: New York, NY
|
||||
created: 2026-06-05
|
||||
updated: 2026-09-22
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Planning Coordination Group]]"
|
||||
role: "chairman"
|
||||
start: 1955-03-10
|
||||
end: 1955
|
||||
fn: 18
|
||||
fn: 23
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Interdepartmental Committee on Foreign Nationality Problems]]"
|
||||
start: 1942
|
||||
role: "CIAA representative (Mr. N. A. Rockefeller)"
|
||||
fn: 11
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (July 8, 1908 - January 26, 1979), named after his maternal grandfather and US Senator [[Nelson Aldrich]], was the dominant figure in US-Latin American relations from World War II through the mid-1970s. As coordinator of inter-American affairs (1940-1944), assistant secretary of state for American republic affairs (1944-1945), and later as President [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]]'s special assistant for national security, he built the institutional architecture that governed American policy toward [[Latin America]] and shaped the intelligence community's covert operations in the Western Hemisphere. His private vehicles, the [[IBEC]] (International Basic Economy Corporation) and the [[AIA]] (American International Association), extended [[Rockefeller family]] commercial interests into the Brazilian Amazon and beyond.
|
||||
|
|
@ -54,39 +59,43 @@ Rockefeller used the CIAA to advance US aviation dominance in Latin America thro
|
|||
|
||||
The CIAA's rubber program in the Amazon drove 100,000 people off their land (including a Haitian displacement project), a pattern that would repeat throughout Rockefeller's career in Latin American development.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
Minutes and memoranda of the [[Interdepartmental Committee on Foreign Nationality Problems]], convened by [[Adolf Berle|Adolf A. Berle]] at the State Department in 1942 and filed in the CIA reading room under an [[Office of Strategic Services]] heading, list Rockefeller among the CIAA representatives. A [[Coordinator of Information]] memorandum of February 11, 1942 names "Mr. Nelson Rockefeller, Dr. Max Ascoli and Mr. Wallace K. Harrison of the Office of the Coordinator for Latin American Relations" among those present; Berle's letter of February 27, 1942 to the Secretary of War lists the CIAA members as "Mr. N. A Rockefeller; Mr. Wallace K. Harrison; Dr. Ascoli"; and the minutes of the sixth meeting (March 11, 1942) record Rockefeller, Harrison and [[Max Ascoli]] as CIAA representatives. At that meeting Ascoli reported on the possible recruitment of anti-Fascist Italians in South America for an Italian legion.[^11] Laura Fermi writes that Ascoli was associate director of cultural relations in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.[^12] [[Hugh Wilford]] writes that during the war Ascoli "worked alongside Nelson Rockefeller, John Hay Whitney, and C. D. Jackson."[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
Rockefeller's office was one of the principal customers of the [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]]. He wrote to FCC chairman [[James L. Fly]] on March 5, 1942 about the "invaluable aid" the service supplied to his organization. On July 29, 1942 he wrote that his office had "been able thus far to make good use of the material provided by teletype from the Kingsville Field Bureau," and asked for a greater volume of verbatim transcripts for hemispheric propaganda work.[^14] [[Goodwin Watson]] wrote to him on July 7, 1942 about an offer the CIAA had made to an FBIS analyst, and [[Robert D. Leigh]] wrote to him on January 2, 1943 proposing a release system for Latin American information modeled on the service's own.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Act of Chapultepec and Cold War Architecture (1945)
|
||||
|
||||
Appointed assistant secretary of state for American republic affairs on December 20, 1944 (his entry on duty date), Rockefeller convened the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace at [[Chapultepec Castle]] in [[Mexico City]], which ran from February 21 to March 8, 1945. There he pushed through the Act of Chapultepec (formally adopted March 6, 1945), which authorized a regional military pact making an attack on any American state an attack on all, a Latin American precursor to [[NATO]] that both the State Department and the Soviet Union recognized as a violation of the Yalta accords.[^11]
|
||||
Appointed assistant secretary of state for American republic affairs on December 20, 1944 (his entry on duty date), Rockefeller convened the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace at [[Chapultepec Castle]] in [[Mexico City]], which ran from February 21 to March 8, 1945. There he pushed through the Act of Chapultepec (formally adopted March 6, 1945), which authorized a regional military pact making an attack on any American state an attack on all, a Latin American precursor to [[NATO]] that both the State Department and the Soviet Union recognized as a violation of the Yalta accords.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
At Chapultepec, Rockefeller assembled his "Latin American Junta": [[Galo Plaza]] of Ecuador, [[Alberto Lleras Camargo]] of Colombia, and Mexico's [[Ezequiel Padilla]]. These men would become presidents, OAS secretaries-general, and trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation. Rockefeller also arranged for [[Adolf Berle]] to replace [[Jefferson Caffery]] as US ambassador to Brazil.[^12]
|
||||
At Chapultepec, Rockefeller assembled his "Latin American Junta": [[Galo Plaza]] of Ecuador, [[Alberto Lleras Camargo]] of Colombia, and Mexico's [[Ezequiel Padilla]]. These men would become presidents, OAS secretaries-general, and trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation. Rockefeller also arranged for [[Adolf Berle]] to replace [[Jefferson Caffery]] as US ambassador to Brazil.[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
The Act of Chapultepec killed 180 Latin American resolutions promoting industrialization and protective tariffs, replacing them with an open-door policy for American corporate investment and commitments to road-building that served extractive industries. Rockefeller supported Argentina's [[Juan Perón]]'s admission to the founding United Nations conference over strong objections, adding the Latin American bloc's 19 votes to the Western tally against the Soviets. Adolf Berle warned him privately this would be a political error; Rockefeller ignored the advice and paid with his job when the move was exposed as a violation of Yalta.[^13]
|
||||
The Act of Chapultepec killed 180 Latin American resolutions promoting industrialization and protective tariffs, replacing them with an open-door policy for American corporate investment and commitments to road-building that served extractive industries. Rockefeller supported Argentina's [[Juan Perón]]'s admission to the founding United Nations conference over strong objections, adding the Latin American bloc's 19 votes to the Western tally against the Soviets. Adolf Berle warned him privately this would be a political error; Rockefeller ignored the advice and paid with his job when the move was exposed as a violation of Yalta.[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
Nelson's appointment as assistant secretary terminated on August 17, 1945. President [[Harry S. Truman]] reversed his policies and shut down the OCIAA shortly thereafter; whether his departure was a dismissal or a resignation has been characterized differently by different sources, with the State Department's official record listing a termination date of August 17, 1945.[^14]
|
||||
Nelson's appointment as assistant secretary terminated on August 17, 1945. President [[Harry S. Truman]] reversed his policies and shut down the OCIAA shortly thereafter; whether his departure was a dismissal or a resignation has been characterized differently by different sources, with the State Department's official record listing a termination date of August 17, 1945.[^19]
|
||||
|
||||
### Private Instruments: IBEC, AIA, and the "First Cold War Coup"
|
||||
|
||||
Back in New York, Rockefeller reconvened his Junta and created two private vehicles for Latin American penetration: the IBEC (International Basic Economy Corporation, of which he served as president from 1947 to 1953 and again from 1956 to 1958) and the AIA (American International Association for Economic and Social Development, of which he served as president from 1946 to 1953 and again from 1957 to 1958). These nominally separate entities combined Rockefeller commercial interests with US government development goals.[^15]
|
||||
Back in New York, Rockefeller reconvened his Junta and created two private vehicles for Latin American penetration: the IBEC (International Basic Economy Corporation, of which he served as president from 1947 to 1953 and again from 1956 to 1958) and the AIA (American International Association for Economic and Social Development, of which he served as president from 1946 to 1953 and again from 1957 to 1958). These nominally separate entities combined Rockefeller commercial interests with US government development goals.[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
Through his former CIAA aide Adolf Berle and his CIA Western Hemisphere operations director [[J.C. King]] (a former Johnson & Johnson Latin American manager), Rockefeller was connected to the 1945 coup that overthrew Brazilian president [[Getulio Vargas]]. The coup ended Vargas's plan for state-directed Amazon development and opened Brazil to the American corporate penetration Rockefeller had prepared during the CIAA years.[^16]
|
||||
Through his former CIAA aide Adolf Berle and his CIA Western Hemisphere operations director [[J.C. King]] (a former Johnson & Johnson Latin American manager), Rockefeller was connected to the 1945 coup that overthrew Brazilian president [[Getulio Vargas]]. The coup ended Vargas's plan for state-directed Amazon development and opened Brazil to the American corporate penetration Rockefeller had prepared during the CIAA years.[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
### Eisenhower's Cold War General (1953-1955)
|
||||
|
||||
In 1953, Rockefeller accepted appointment as chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Government Organization, which ran from 1952 to 1953, before becoming Under Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (1953-1954). On December 15, 1954, President Eisenhower sent Rockefeller a letter appointing him Special Assistant to the President for Foreign Affairs (also described as Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy). The appointment letter tasked him with providing "advice and assistance in the development of increased understanding and cooperation among all peoples" and attending meetings of the Cabinet, the National Security Council, the [[Council on Foreign Economic Policy]], and the [[Operations Coordinating Board]].[^17]
|
||||
In 1953, Rockefeller accepted appointment as chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Government Organization, which ran from 1952 to 1953, before becoming Under Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (1953-1954). On December 15, 1954, President Eisenhower sent Rockefeller a letter appointing him Special Assistant to the President for Foreign Affairs (also described as Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy). The appointment letter tasked him with providing "advice and assistance in the development of increased understanding and cooperation among all peoples" and attending meetings of the Cabinet, the National Security Council, the [[Council on Foreign Economic Policy]], and the [[Operations Coordinating Board]].[^22]
|
||||
|
||||
On March 3, 1955, Bureau of the Budget Director Rowland Hughes recommended that Eisenhower designate Rockefeller as a member and vice chairman of the OCB and as chairman of a new Planning Coordination Group. Eisenhower approved these recommendations on March 10, 1955. The Planning Coordination Group (PCG), operating within the framework of [[NSC 5412]] governing covert operations, comprised Rockefeller as chairman, the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Director of Central Intelligence. Its function was to "advise and assist the responsible operating agencies in the coordinated development of plans and programs" and to serve as the "normal channel for giving policy approval" for CIA covert operations. CIA director [[Allen Dulles]] and State Department officials refused to cooperate, and their obstruction stymied the PCG's initiatives. Rockefeller recommended the group's abolishment in September 1955 and resigned as Special Assistant to the President in December 1955.[^18]
|
||||
On March 3, 1955, Bureau of the Budget Director Rowland Hughes recommended that Eisenhower designate Rockefeller as a member and vice chairman of the OCB and as chairman of a new Planning Coordination Group. Eisenhower approved these recommendations on March 10, 1955. The Planning Coordination Group (PCG), operating within the framework of [[NSC 5412]] governing covert operations, comprised Rockefeller as chairman, the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Director of Central Intelligence. Its function was to "advise and assist the responsible operating agencies in the coordinated development of plans and programs" and to serve as the "normal channel for giving policy approval" for CIA covert operations. CIA director [[Allen Dulles]] and State Department officials refused to cooperate, and their obstruction stymied the PCG's initiatives. Rockefeller recommended the group's abolishment in September 1955 and resigned as Special Assistant to the President in December 1955.[^23]
|
||||
|
||||
In this role, he commissioned and partly directed the [[Quantico I and II]] strategy panels. Quantico I convened June 5-10, 1955, at the Marine Corps School in [[Quantico]], [[Virginia]], where eleven experts in Soviet-American relations (including [[W.W. Rostow]] of [[MIT]] as panel chairman, [[C.D. Jackson]] of [[Time-Life]], and [[Hans Speier]] of the [[RAND Corporation]]) assessed the US position in the psychological dimensions of the Cold War and developed the "Open Skies" proposal that Eisenhower then brought to the Geneva Summit. Quantico II met in late August 1955 in Washington and Quantico to examine the psychological aspects of US national security policy. He brought [[Henry Kissinger]], then a young Harvard academic, in as director of the Special Studies Project of the [[Rockefeller Brothers Fund]], whose six panel reports appeared between January 1958 and September 1960; Kissinger directed the project until June 30, 1958.[^rbfpfa] Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett wrote that the reports shaped the Kennedy administration's counterinsurgency strategy.[^19]
|
||||
In this role, he commissioned and partly directed the [[Quantico I and II]] strategy panels. Quantico I convened June 5-10, 1955, at the Marine Corps School in [[Quantico]], [[Virginia]], where eleven experts in Soviet-American relations (including [[W.W. Rostow]] of [[MIT]] as panel chairman, [[C.D. Jackson]] of [[Time-Life]], and [[Hans Speier]] of the [[RAND Corporation]]) assessed the US position in the psychological dimensions of the Cold War and developed the "Open Skies" proposal that Eisenhower then brought to the Geneva Summit. Quantico II met in late August 1955 in Washington and Quantico to examine the psychological aspects of US national security policy. He brought [[Henry Kissinger]], then a young Harvard academic, in as director of the Special Studies Project of the [[Rockefeller Brothers Fund]], whose six panel reports appeared between January 1958 and September 1960; Kissinger directed the project until June 30, 1958.[^24] Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett wrote that the reports shaped the Kennedy administration's counterinsurgency strategy.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
### Brazil and the 1964 Coup
|
||||
|
||||
By 1964, Rockefeller's instruments were in place for a more decisive intervention. His former CIAA colleague Adolf Berle maintained connections to Brazilian military officers through the State Department and private channels. The CIA's J.C. King coordinated with US Ambassador [[Lincoln Gordon]] and Military Attaché [[Vernon Walters]]. Rockefeller's IBEC had major agricultural and commercial holdings in Brazil, and his brother [[David Rockefeller]]'s [[Chase Manhattan Bank]] was deeply invested in the Brazilian economy.[^20]
|
||||
By 1964, Rockefeller's instruments were in place for a more decisive intervention. His former CIAA colleague Adolf Berle maintained connections to Brazilian military officers through the State Department and private channels. The CIA's J.C. King coordinated with US Ambassador [[Lincoln Gordon]] and Military Attaché [[Vernon Walters]]. Rockefeller's IBEC had major agricultural and commercial holdings in Brazil, and his brother [[David Rockefeller]]'s [[Chase Manhattan Bank]] was deeply invested in the Brazilian economy.[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
The April 1964 coup deposing President [[Joao Goulart]] was welcomed within the Rockefeller network. Planning for the contingency had been underway since at least December 1962: a November 22, 1963 contingency plan showed "heavy emphasis on U.S. armed intervention," and Ambassador Gordon's March 28, 1964 telegram from Rio de Janeiro described Goulart as "now definitely engaged on campaign to seize dictatorial power, accepting the active collaboration of the Brazilian Communist Party." On March 31, 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff assigned the code name "Brother Sam" to a naval task force authorized to supply arms and potentially deploy combat troops in support of the coup if needed. [[Operation Brother Sam]] was the military expression of a strategy Rockefeller had been building since Chapultepec. These deliberations are documented in FRUS 1964-1968, Vol. XXXI, which covers South and Central America and includes the Lincoln Gordon cables and the JCS Brother Sam authorization.[^21]
|
||||
The April 1964 coup deposing President [[Joao Goulart]] was welcomed within the Rockefeller network. Planning for the contingency had been underway since at least December 1962: a November 22, 1963 contingency plan showed "heavy emphasis on U.S. armed intervention," and Ambassador Gordon's March 28, 1964 telegram from Rio de Janeiro described Goulart as "now definitely engaged on campaign to seize dictatorial power, accepting the active collaboration of the Brazilian Communist Party." On March 31, 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff assigned the code name "Brother Sam" to a naval task force authorized to supply arms and potentially deploy combat troops in support of the coup if needed. [[Operation Brother Sam]] was the military expression of a strategy Rockefeller had been building since Chapultepec. These deliberations are documented in FRUS 1964-1968, Vol. XXXI, which covers South and Central America and includes the Lincoln Gordon cables and the JCS Brother Sam authorization.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Nixon Mission and Latin American Backlash (1969)
|
||||
|
||||
In 1969, President [[Richard Nixon]] asked Rockefeller, on Nixon's first full day in office, to assess the effectiveness of the [[Alliance for Progress]] program and prepare a policy report on Latin America. Rockefeller undertook a 20-nation tour in summer 1969. The tour was met with riots, demonstrations, and stone-throwing in nearly every country he visited, a response that shocked official Washington but not those who had watched his career from the other side. The tour's report, delivered to Nixon and titled "Quality of Life in the Americas," recommended reversing recent trends to reduce security assistance to Latin American military governments. The report stated, "At the moment there is only one Castro among the 26 nations of the hemisphere; there can well be more in the future." Its military aid recommendations further deepened US backing for Latin American military dictatorships.[^22]
|
||||
In 1969, President [[Richard Nixon]] asked Rockefeller, on Nixon's first full day in office, to assess the effectiveness of the [[Alliance for Progress]] program and prepare a policy report on Latin America. Rockefeller undertook a 20-nation tour in summer 1969. The tour was met with riots, demonstrations, and stone-throwing in nearly every country he visited, a response that shocked official Washington but not those who had watched his career from the other side. The tour's report, delivered to Nixon and titled "Quality of Life in the Americas," recommended reversing recent trends to reduce security assistance to Latin American military governments. The report stated, "At the moment there is only one Castro among the 26 nations of the hemisphere; there can well be more in the future." Its military aid recommendations further deepened US backing for Latin American military dictatorships.[^28]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Rockefeller Commission (1975)
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -94,21 +103,21 @@ In 1975, amid the congressional [[Church Committee]] investigations into CIA abu
|
|||
|
||||
Rockefeller "attempted to head off inclusion of the subject" of CIA assassination plots, restricting consideration of assassinations to the question of Cuba's possible role in the assassination of [[John F. Kennedy]]. When the Commission voted on whether to include assassination investigations, it overrode its own chairman, with [[Ronald Reagan]] (then Governor of California, serving as a commissioner) siding with executive director David Belin against Rockefeller. In a March 10, 1975 memorandum to Commission members, Belin argued that selective investigation of assassination plots would confuse the public and that "the threat of assassination" warranted comprehensive inquiry. The Commission took testimony from CIA General Counsel [[John Warner]] on April 14, 1975.
|
||||
|
||||
Despite the Commission's vote to include the assassination material, the Ford White House suppressed it. An entire 86-page section, "Summary of Facts: Investigation of CIA Involvement in Plans to Assassinate Foreign Leaders" (dated June 5, 1975), covering plots against [[Fidel Castro]], [[Rafael Trujillo]], and references to [[Patrice Lumumba]] and [[Sukarno]], was removed from the final report before public release. Then-Deputy White House Chief of Staff [[Richard Cheney]] made handwritten edits throughout the draft on or around June 1, 1975, altering language describing CIA activities from "unlawful" to merely "improper" in most instances, while drug experiments on US citizens retained the characterization "illegal." White House Counsel [[Philip Buchen]] coordinated the suppression. Commission public affairs director Peter Clapper warned that deleting the section would "cast doubt on the rest of the report" and be perceived as a cover-up; his objection was overridden. Senator [[Frank Church]] personally visited Rockefeller in early May 1975, alleging that CIA documents were being withheld from the Church Committee by the Rockefeller Commission. President Ford wrote to Church on October 31, 1975, urging suppression of assassination findings; Church rejected the request, stating that "the national interest is better served by letting the American people know the true and complete story." These internal documents are collected in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 543, published February 29, 2016, edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi.[^23]
|
||||
Despite the Commission's vote to include the assassination material, the Ford White House suppressed it. An entire 86-page section, "Summary of Facts: Investigation of CIA Involvement in Plans to Assassinate Foreign Leaders" (dated June 5, 1975), covering plots against [[Fidel Castro]], [[Rafael Trujillo]], and references to [[Patrice Lumumba]] and [[Sukarno]], was removed from the final report before public release. Then-Deputy White House Chief of Staff [[Richard Cheney]] made handwritten edits throughout the draft on or around June 1, 1975, altering language describing CIA activities from "unlawful" to merely "improper" in most instances, while drug experiments on US citizens retained the characterization "illegal." White House Counsel [[Philip Buchen]] coordinated the suppression. Commission public affairs director Peter Clapper warned that deleting the section would "cast doubt on the rest of the report" and be perceived as a cover-up; his objection was overridden. Senator [[Frank Church]] personally visited Rockefeller in early May 1975, alleging that CIA documents were being withheld from the Church Committee by the Rockefeller Commission. President Ford wrote to Church on October 31, 1975, urging suppression of assassination findings; Church rejected the request, stating that "the national interest is better served by letting the American people know the true and complete story." These internal documents are collected in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 543, published February 29, 2016, edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi.[^29]
|
||||
|
||||
Rockefeller's chairmanship of the commission investigating the agency he had supervised under Eisenhower was widely considered a conflict of interest. Key findings were withheld or classified. The Commission also added Recommendations 29 (civilian oversight committee) and 20 (periodic declassification reviews) to the report without a Commission vote, under [[White House]] direction.[^24]
|
||||
Rockefeller's chairmanship of the commission investigating the agency he had supervised under Eisenhower was widely considered a conflict of interest. Key findings were withheld or classified. The Commission also added Recommendations 29 (civilian oversight committee) and 20 (periodic declassification reviews) to the report without a Commission vote, under [[White House]] direction.[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
### New York Politics and the Vice Presidency
|
||||
|
||||
Rockefeller served as governor of New York from 1959 to 1973, during which time he built the South Mall (later renamed the [[Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza]]) and pursued the presidency unsuccessfully in 1960, 1964, and 1968, repeatedly blocked by the Republican right wing. On August 20, 1974, President Ford nominated Rockefeller as vice president under Section 2 of the [[25th Amendment]]. After a nearly four-month confirmation process, the Senate confirmed the nomination 90-7 on December 10, 1974, and the House confirmed 287-128 on December 19, 1974. Rockefeller was sworn in as the 41st Vice President on December 19, 1974, the second person appointed vice president under the 25th Amendment (Ford having been the first).[^25]
|
||||
Rockefeller served as governor of New York from 1959 to 1973, during which time he built the South Mall (later renamed the [[Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza]]) and pursued the presidency unsuccessfully in 1960, 1964, and 1968, repeatedly blocked by the Republican right wing. On August 20, 1974, President Ford nominated Rockefeller as vice president under Section 2 of the [[25th Amendment]]. After a nearly four-month confirmation process, the Senate confirmed the nomination 90-7 on December 10, 1974, and the House confirmed 287-128 on December 19, 1974. Rockefeller was sworn in as the 41st Vice President on December 19, 1974, the second person appointed vice president under the 25th Amendment (Ford having been the first).[^31]
|
||||
|
||||
### Death
|
||||
|
||||
Rockefeller died on January 26, 1979, of a heart attack at his townhouse at 13 West 54th Street in Manhattan, in the presence of Megan Marshack, a 25-year-old aide who had worked for him during his vice presidency and to whom he had provided financial assistance in purchasing a condominium nearby. After Rockefeller suffered the cardiac event, Marshack called her friend, television journalist Ponchitta Pierce, to the townhouse; Pierce phoned an ambulance approximately one hour after the attack. Initial reports, quickly corrected, stated he had died at his desk at Rockefeller Center. The circumstances received extensive press coverage but diverted attention from his political legacy.[^26]
|
||||
Rockefeller died on January 26, 1979, of a heart attack at his townhouse at 13 West 54th Street in Manhattan, in the presence of Megan Marshack, a 25-year-old aide who had worked for him during his vice presidency and to whom he had provided financial assistance in purchasing a condominium nearby. After Rockefeller suffered the cardiac event, Marshack called her friend, television journalist Ponchitta Pierce, to the townhouse; Pierce phoned an ambulance approximately one hour after the attack. Initial reports, quickly corrected, stated he had died at his desk at Rockefeller Center. The circumstances received extensive press coverage but diverted attention from his political legacy.[^32]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Pocantico Network
|
||||
|
||||
The Rockefeller family's 3,600-acre Pocantico Hills estate in Sleepy Hollow, New York, served as both residence and operational headquarters for family strategic planning. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, co-organized in 1940, became the vehicle for coordinating family philanthropy, "soft" intelligence operations, and policy influence across generations. Nelson used the RBF to channel funds into psychological warfare and counterintelligence programs, with his brother David reluctantly acquiescing to Nelson's demands. The [[Rockefeller Archive Center]], which holds the family papers and is located at Pocantico, holds the primary records for Rockefeller's government and private activities.[^27]
|
||||
The Rockefeller family's 3,600-acre Pocantico Hills estate in Sleepy Hollow, New York, served as both residence and operational headquarters for family strategic planning. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, co-organized in 1940, became the vehicle for coordinating family philanthropy, "soft" intelligence operations, and policy influence across generations. Nelson used the RBF to channel funds into psychological warfare and counterintelligence programs, with his brother David reluctantly acquiescing to Nelson's demands. The [[Rockefeller Archive Center]], which holds the family papers and is located at Pocantico, holds the primary records for Rockefeller's government and private activities.[^33]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -122,21 +131,26 @@ The Rockefeller family's 3,600-acre Pocantico Hills estate in Sleepy Hollow, New
|
|||
[^8]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 ("The Business Imperative").
|
||||
[^9]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 ("The Secret War for the Skies").
|
||||
[^10]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 12 ("Preempting the Cold War").
|
||||
[^11]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 12 ("Triumph at Chapultepec"); Act of Chapultepec, formally adopted March 6, 1945, at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace (Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City, February 21 - March 8, 1945). Text at Avalon Project, Yale Law School (avalon.law.yale.edu). State Department appointment record: "Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller," Office of the Historian, People, Department History (history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/rockefeller-nelson-aldrich), entry on duty December 20, 1944.
|
||||
[^12]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 12 ("Nelson's Latin American Junta").
|
||||
[^13]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 12 ("Roosevelt's Crucial Decision"; "Rekindling the Cold War").
|
||||
[^14]: State Department Office of the Historian, "Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller," termination date August 17, 1945 (history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/rockefeller-nelson-aldrich).
|
||||
[^15]: Rockefeller Archive Center biographical summary (president of AIA 1946-1953, 1957-1958; president of IBEC 1947-1953, 1956-1958). Colby and Dennett, Ch. 13 ("Latin America's First Cold War Coup"); Ch. 14.
|
||||
[^16]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 13; Introduction (2017).
|
||||
[^17]: Rockefeller Archive Center biographical summary; Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Letter to Nelson A. Rockefeller Appointing Him Special Assistant to the President," December 15, 1954 (released December 16, 1954), The American Presidency Project (presidency.ucsb.edu).
|
||||
[^18]: Rowland Hughes memorandum, March 3, 1955 (FRUS 1950-55, Intelligence, Document 210, history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d210); Eisenhower approval, March 10, 1955. NSC 5412, "National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations." Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017); Ch. 18 ("Ike's Cold War General").
|
||||
[^19]: Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017); Ch. 23 ("Ascent of the Hawk"); Ch. 27. Quantico I panel composition from FRUS 1955-57, Vol. 24, Editorial Note, Document 12 (history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v24/d12).
|
||||
[^20]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 28-29.
|
||||
[^21]: FRUS 1964-1968, Vol. XXXI (South and Central America). Document 12 (March 29, 1964), Ambassador Lincoln Gordon telegram, Rio de Janeiro: Goulart "now definitely engaged on campaign to seize dictatorial power, accepting the active collaboration of the Brazilian Communist Party." Document 15 (April 1, 1964), coup status update. JCS code name "Brother Sam" assigned March 31, 1964 (Document 198, FRUS 1964-68 Vol. XXXI, history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v31). National Security Archive, NSAEBB No. 465 ("Brazil Marks 50th Anniversary of Military Coup"), 2014. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 29 ("Operation Brother Sam").
|
||||
[^22]: Nelson A. Rockefeller, "Quality of Life in the Americas" (Report of a Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere), 1969. Published in Department of State Bulletin. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 38-40; Appendix A.
|
||||
[^23]: National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 543, "Gerald Ford White House Altered Rockefeller Commission Report in 1975; Removed Section on CIA Assassination Plots," February 29, 2016, edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi (nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2016-02-29/gerald-ford-white-house-altered-rockefeller-commission-report). Documents cited: Document 3 (David W. Belin memorandum to Commission members, "Scope of Commission Investigation - Assassinations," March 10, 1975, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library); Document 7 (Testimony of CIA General Counsel John Warner, April 14, 1975); Document 15 (Richard Cheney handwritten edits, c. June 1, 1975); Document 19 (86-page suppressed section, "Summary of Facts: Investigation of CIA Involvement in Plans to Assassinate Foreign Leaders," June 5, 1975); Document 21 (Ford letter to Church, October 31, 1975); Document 22 (Church response rejecting suppression request, November 4, 1975).
|
||||
[^24]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 44 ("Hiding the Family Jewels"); Appendix B.
|
||||
[^25]: 1974 United States vice presidential confirmation: Senate vote 90-7, December 10, 1974; House vote 287-128, December 19, 1974; sworn in December 19, 1974.
|
||||
[^26]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 40-44. Death circumstances and location (13 West 54th Street townhouse): "Megan Marshack dies at 70; was with Nelson Rockefeller at his death," *Seattle Times*, October 3, 2024; *New York Times* obituary, January 27, 1979. Marshack died October 2, 2024, at age 70.
|
||||
[^27]: Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017); Ch. 13. Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (rockarch.org).
|
||||
[^rbfpfa]: Rockefeller Brothers Fund. *Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports.* Doubleday, 1961, list of project staff and preface. https://archive.org/details/prospect-for-america-the-rockefeller-panel-reports-rockefeller-brothers-fund-1961
|
||||
[^11]: CIA reading room, "OSS: Memoranda on meetings of the Interdepartmental Committee on Foreign Nationality Problems," CIA-RDP13X00001R000100370009-5, PDF pp. 17-18, 22, 29-30 and 39-41, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp13x00001r000100370009-5.
|
||||
[^12]: Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants (University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 284.
|
||||
[^13]: Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer (Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 230-231.
|
||||
[^14]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis, 1941-1945," Studies in Intelligence 45, no. 5 (2001), note 24, quoting Nelson A. Rockefeller to James L. Fly, 29 July 1942, National Archives, RG 262, Entry 68, Box 22. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol45no5/html/v45i5a04p.htm. Roop, Part I, pp. 158-159, on the 5 March 1942 letter. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^15]: Roop, Part I, pp. 218-219, on Watson's letter of 7 July 1942, and pp. 101-102, on Leigh's letter of 2 January 1943. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^16]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 12 ("Triumph at Chapultepec"); Act of Chapultepec, formally adopted March 6, 1945, at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace (Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City, February 21 - March 8, 1945). Text at Avalon Project, Yale Law School (avalon.law.yale.edu). State Department appointment record: "Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller," Office of the Historian, People, Department History (history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/rockefeller-nelson-aldrich), entry on duty December 20, 1944.
|
||||
[^17]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 12 ("Nelson's Latin American Junta").
|
||||
[^18]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 12 ("Roosevelt's Crucial Decision"; "Rekindling the Cold War").
|
||||
[^19]: State Department Office of the Historian, "Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller," termination date August 17, 1945 (history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/rockefeller-nelson-aldrich).
|
||||
[^20]: Rockefeller Archive Center biographical summary (president of AIA 1946-1953, 1957-1958; president of IBEC 1947-1953, 1956-1958). Colby and Dennett, Ch. 13 ("Latin America's First Cold War Coup"); Ch. 14.
|
||||
[^21]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 13; Introduction (2017).
|
||||
[^22]: Rockefeller Archive Center biographical summary; Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Letter to Nelson A. Rockefeller Appointing Him Special Assistant to the President," December 15, 1954 (released December 16, 1954), The American Presidency Project (presidency.ucsb.edu).
|
||||
[^23]: Rowland Hughes memorandum, March 3, 1955 (FRUS 1950-55, Intelligence, Document 210, history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d210); Eisenhower approval, March 10, 1955. NSC 5412, "National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations." Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017); Ch. 18 ("Ike's Cold War General").
|
||||
[^24]: Rockefeller Brothers Fund. *Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports.* Doubleday, 1961, list of project staff and preface. https://archive.org/details/prospect-for-america-the-rockefeller-panel-reports-rockefeller-brothers-fund-1961
|
||||
[^25]: Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017); Ch. 23 ("Ascent of the Hawk"); Ch. 27. Quantico I panel composition from FRUS 1955-57, Vol. 24, Editorial Note, Document 12 (history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v24/d12).
|
||||
[^26]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 28-29.
|
||||
[^27]: FRUS 1964-1968, Vol. XXXI (South and Central America). Document 12 (March 29, 1964), Ambassador Lincoln Gordon telegram, Rio de Janeiro: Goulart "now definitely engaged on campaign to seize dictatorial power, accepting the active collaboration of the Brazilian Communist Party." Document 15 (April 1, 1964), coup status update. JCS code name "Brother Sam" assigned March 31, 1964 (Document 198, FRUS 1964-68 Vol. XXXI, history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v31). National Security Archive, NSAEBB No. 465 ("Brazil Marks 50th Anniversary of Military Coup"), 2014. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 29 ("Operation Brother Sam").
|
||||
[^28]: Nelson A. Rockefeller, "Quality of Life in the Americas" (Report of a Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere), 1969. Published in Department of State Bulletin. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 38-40; Appendix A.
|
||||
[^29]: National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 543, "Gerald Ford White House Altered Rockefeller Commission Report in 1975; Removed Section on CIA Assassination Plots," February 29, 2016, edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi (nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2016-02-29/gerald-ford-white-house-altered-rockefeller-commission-report). Documents cited: Document 3 (David W. Belin memorandum to Commission members, "Scope of Commission Investigation - Assassinations," March 10, 1975, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library); Document 7 (Testimony of CIA General Counsel John Warner, April 14, 1975); Document 15 (Richard Cheney handwritten edits, c. June 1, 1975); Document 19 (86-page suppressed section, "Summary of Facts: Investigation of CIA Involvement in Plans to Assassinate Foreign Leaders," June 5, 1975); Document 21 (Ford letter to Church, October 31, 1975); Document 22 (Church response rejecting suppression request, November 4, 1975).
|
||||
[^30]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 44 ("Hiding the Family Jewels"); Appendix B.
|
||||
[^31]: 1974 United States vice presidential confirmation: Senate vote 90-7, December 10, 1974; House vote 287-128, December 19, 1974; sworn in December 19, 1974.
|
||||
[^32]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 40-44. Death circumstances and location (13 West 54th Street townhouse): "Megan Marshack dies at 70; was with Nelson Rockefeller at his death," *Seattle Times*, October 3, 2024; *New York Times* obituary, January 27, 1979. Marshack died October 2, 2024, at age 70.
|
||||
[^33]: Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017); Ch. 13. Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (rockarch.org).
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
196
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Wilhelm Reich.md
Normal file
196
10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Wilhelm Reich.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,196 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Wilhelm Reich
|
||||
- Dr. Wilhelm Reich
|
||||
- Reich
|
||||
- Walter Roner
|
||||
category: "Medicine & Psychology"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Psychoanalysis
|
||||
- Orgone
|
||||
- Oranur
|
||||
- Cloudbuster
|
||||
- Orgonon
|
||||
- FBI
|
||||
- FDA
|
||||
- UFO
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- WeatherModification
|
||||
summary: "Austrian-born psychoanalyst who taught at the New School in 1939 to 1941, was detained as an enemy alien in 1941, enjoined by the FDA in 1954 and died in Lewisburg penitentiary in 1957."
|
||||
location: "Rangeley, Maine"
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 1939
|
||||
end: 1941
|
||||
role: "associate professor lecturing in psychiatry (as reported by a New School official to the FBI)"
|
||||
fn: 12
|
||||
- type: subject_of
|
||||
with: "[[Federal Bureau of Investigation]]"
|
||||
start: 1940
|
||||
end: 1957
|
||||
role: "internal security, alien enemy control and security-matter files (Bufile 100-14601)"
|
||||
fn: 13
|
||||
- type: subject_of
|
||||
with: "[[Food and Drug Administration]]"
|
||||
start: 1954-02-10
|
||||
end: 1957
|
||||
role: "injunction suit, contempt information of 1955 and two-year sentence of 1956"
|
||||
fn: 30
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Orgone Institute Research Laboratories]]"
|
||||
start: 1941
|
||||
end: 1957
|
||||
role: "director (as he identified himself to the Bureau, 14 February 1957)"
|
||||
fn: 13
|
||||
- type: partner_of
|
||||
with: "[[Ilse Ollendorff]]"
|
||||
start: 1941
|
||||
role: "common-law wife at the time of the 1941 arrest"
|
||||
fn: 16
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[Eva Reich]]"
|
||||
role: "daughter"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Oranur Experiment]]"
|
||||
start: 1951-01-05
|
||||
role: "experimenter"
|
||||
fn: 26
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[OROP Desert Ea]]"
|
||||
start: 1954-10
|
||||
end: 1955-04
|
||||
role: "expedition director (as described by Reich)"
|
||||
fn: 36
|
||||
- type: partner_of
|
||||
with: "[[Aurora Karrer Reich]]"
|
||||
start: 1955
|
||||
role: "common-law wife (as stated in the National Library of Medicine finding aid)"
|
||||
fn: 49
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[William Moise]]"
|
||||
role: "son-in-law (Moise married Reich's daughter Eva)"
|
||||
fn: 32
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 to November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-born physician and psychoanalyst who entered the United States in August 1939 to teach at the [[New School for Social Research]].[^1] He died on November 3, 1957 in the federal penitentiary at [[Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary|Lewisburg]], Pennsylvania, while serving a two-year sentence for violating an injunction against the interstate shipment of his orgone energy accumulators.[^2] The [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]] kept a file on him from 1940, recording an arrest on December 12, 1941, a teaching career that ended because, in its summary, his teaching "smacked of quack tactics," and, after his death, a request from the prison's chief medical officer that the Bureau laboratory examine his stomach contents for poison.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Vienna, Berlin and Oslo
|
||||
|
||||
The New York office of the Bureau reported in December 1941, on the word of an informant whose name is redacted, that Reich was a psychoanalyst and "a foremost student of political psychology," that he "was active in the Socialist Movement in Germany and Austria," and that he joined the Communist Party in [[Vienna]] and [[Berlin]] and severed all connections with it in 1933 because of differences in political belief. The same synopsis states that he was reported to have been a member of the Communist Party in [[Oslo]], Norway, and adds: "No evidence of subject's Communistic connections in the US."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
A different set of statements reached the Bureau through the [[U.S. Department of State]]. A letter of January 6, 1940 from the Department enclosed a strictly confidential dispatch of December 7, 1939 from the American consul [[Paul C. Squire]] on persons who might have Communist connections. [[J. Edgar Hoover]] thanked Assistant Secretary of State [[George S. Messersmith]] for it on January 19, 1940 and sent a copy to the New York office the same day; on March 26, 1940 he wrote to Assistant Secretary [[Adolf Berle|Adolf A. Berle Jr.]], who is addressed in that letter as the sender of the letter of 6 January, that a confidential source of the New York field office had stated that Reich was on the "Medical Advisory Board" of the Communist Party of the United States, and asked whether the Department had issued a passport to Reich.[^5] On April 11, 1940 the Bureau forwarded the Department's reply to New York. On March 26, 1941 the Bureau sent the New York office a State Department communication titled "Communist Activities of Dr. Wilhelm Reich," with a request that his Communist connections and activities in the United States be determined; the enclosure is withheld in the file as a State Department document.[^6] A Bureau memorandum of May 6, 1941, written about the visa application of Mrs. Elsa Stai, for whom Reich was a sponsor, summarizes the reports as stating that Reich had been a member of the German party before 1933, joined the Norwegian party after moving to Norway, and was expelled from it in 1936 for not adhering closely enough to the party line; that he was reported to have been a paid Communist agent in Austria before the Anschluss and to have been expelled from Austria and other countries; and that his visa had been issued on August 11, 1939 because he was able to prove that the "New York Seminar for Vegetotherapy" was part of the New School. The December 1941 New York report adds that the State Department could not definitely establish his connection with the Communist Party in Norway because the party's files had been confiscated.[^7][^8] On May 7, 1941 Assistant Director [[Edward A. Tamm]] wrote to Assistant Director [[R. P. Kramer]] that "from the information furnished concerning Dr. Wilhelm Reich, sponsor of Mrs. Elsa Stai, it appears that this man is a potentially dangerous threat to the internal security," and asked whether a custodial detention card had been prepared; Kramer answered on May 8, 1941 that a card had been prepared but not approved, that an investigation had been requested of the New York office on March 26, 1941, and that his background had not yet been brought to the attention of the [[Immigration and Naturalization Service]].[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
The Orgone Institute's 1955 compilation, which the Bureau's New York office received that year, states in a parenthetical that "since 1934 WR no longer was a psychoanalyst."[^10] The same compilation, reproduced in the Bureau file, dates the opposition to him in Norway to 1938, when a Norwegian newspaper campaign led by psychiatrists and pathologists followed the publication of his book on the bions, and states that in 1939 the New School invited him to teach in the United States.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### The New School, 1939 to 1941
|
||||
|
||||
The immigration record states that Reich arrived at the Port of New York on August 28, 1939 aboard the Stavangerfjord from Oslo on non-quota immigration visa No. 19, issued by the American consulate in Oslo on August 11, 1939, destined for the New School at 66 West 12th Street. He declared birth at Dobrzanice, Poland, and described himself as professor of psychology at the Psychological Institute of the University of Oslo, come "solely for the purpose of teaching psychology at the New School."[^1] The Bureau's New York report of December 1941 gives his birth on March 24, 1897 at Dobzonica, "located in Austria, and subsequently to 1918 being in Poland, and in Ukrainia," records his declaration No. 287944 of November 20, 1939, names the New School, "Dr. Alvin Johnson, Director," as his destination, and states that he married Dr. Annie Reich in Vienna in 1922; the synopsis of that report gives the arrival date as August 26, 1939, while its body and the immigration record give 28 August.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
An official of the New School, whose name is redacted in the file, told Bureau agents in December 1941 that Reich had been an associate professor for two years, during 1939 and 1940, at about $1,500 a year, and that the connection ended after the spring term of 1941. According to the agents' report, the official said Reich "seems to break with any of his acquaintances after he has known them for a while," that he "is very egotistical and disregards the ideas of other scientists," and that he "claims to have a cure-all for cancer," all of which the official "stated smacked of 'quack' tactics on subject's part." The same official was reluctant to analyze Reich's politics and said the school "makes no inquiry of their political views or background." A second interviewee, name redacted, who had attended one New School lecture at the instance of a former student of Reich then connected with the Vanderbilt Clinic, said he was "not impressed enough to want to attend any others," that Reich "has gone off on a tangent," and that his work "is looked down upon generally by the best psychoanalysts in this country."[^12] The Bureau's summary of February 1957 later condensed this to a statement that Reich taught "until let out by the school because his teaching 'smacked of quack tactics.'"[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
Typescripts of Reich's 1940 New School lectures, supplied from the Archives of the Orgone Institute by the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, are held in the New School Archives in a bound photocopy made for a 2018 exhibition.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Custodial detention, 1941 to 1943
|
||||
|
||||
On July 15, 1941 Hoover reminded the New York office of requests of 28 April and May 29, 1941 for an investigation of Reich.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
The New York report of December 24, 1941 states that Reich was apprehended on December 12, 1941 at his residence at 9906 69th Avenue, Forest Hills, Long Island, and delivered into the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at [[Ellis Island]]. The report lists a basement laboratory, an "Orgonometer" marked with patent application No. 377,277, a library of about a thousand volumes, and pamphlets Reich acknowledged writing, including a 1933 edition of the Mass Psychology of Fascism. It names his common-law wife as [[Ilse Ollendorff]] and his former wife as Annie Rubenstein.[^16] The report summarizes the informants' statements that in 1939 Reich announced a "biological energy," orgone, applied for a patent, and sought to form an Orgone Research Institute association to commercialize a cancer treatment.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Alien Enemy Hearing Board]] Number One, Eastern District of New York, composed of Charles H. Kelby, C. Walter Randall, Henry Vollmer Jr. and Stuart H. Steinbrink, heard him on December 26, 1941 and recommended unconditional release.[^17] Attorney General [[Francis Biddle]] ordered him released on January 27, 1942, and in April 1942 Hoover informed the Director of Naval Intelligence and the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, of the release.[^18] A Bureau letter of January 31, 1942 recorded that the Special Defense Unit of the [[U.S. Department of Justice]], headed by [[Lawrence M. C. Smith]], had tentatively placed him in Group B, "Individuals believed to be somewhat less dangerous but whose activities should be restricted."[^19] On June 2, 1942 Reich wrote to the New York Police Commissioner that plainclothesmen were questioning his neighbors; the New York office replied to the Bureau on July 27, 1942 that on May 29, 1942 a New York police patrolman had telephoned for the disposition of the alien enemy case, and that on June 28, 1942, after the date of Reich's letter to the Commissioner, Special Squad No. 1 of the police department had made an inquiry about Reich.[^20] A memorandum of the Attorney General of July 16, 1943 to Assistant Attorney General Hugh B. Cox and Hoover stated that the danger classifications "serve no useful purpose" and directed that classifications already made not be regarded as classifications of dangerousness. On July 21, 1943 Hoover asked the Newark office, which carried Reich on its key figure list, whether anything warranted keeping him there, noting that the New York case had been closed with a report of February 7, 1942 showing no activity in Communist affairs in this country; the Newark office answered on August 10, 1943 that its key figure was William Robert Reich, who operated a Communist Party literature bookstore at 216 Halsey Street, Newark, and taught at the Workers School in New York, and that the two men were "not identical."[^21] In 1947 an investigator of the [[Food and Drug Administration]] asked the Bureau to check Reich's name and to open its file; the Bureau declined to show the file under Departmental Order 3229.[^22]
|
||||
|
||||
### Einstein, Brady and the press
|
||||
|
||||
The Orgone Institute's compilation "The Red Thread of a Conspiracy," placed in the Bureau file, states that in the winter of 1940 to 1941 Reich brought his discovery to the attention of [[Albert Einstein]]; that Einstein's first response was serious interest, followed by arguments from his assistant [[Leopold Infeld]], then silence; and that in April 1942 the editor of the [[Journal of the American Medical Association]], [[Morris Fishbein]], requested review copies of Reich's journal and of The Function of the Orgasm and printed no review.[^23]
|
||||
|
||||
The same compilation quotes [[Mildred Brady]], writing in [[The New Republic]] in 1947 under the title "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich": "The simplest solution would be to take the current standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association and write them into law." The compilation states that on August 5, 1947 FDA Inspector Wood appeared privately at Orgonon and said that a friend of his in Portland, Maine had sent him Brady's article, and that in January 1948 FDA Inspector Kinney acknowledged that the Brady article was the basis of his prejudice.[^24] On August 5, 1952 Ilse Ollendorff wrote to Hoover for the Wilhelm Reich Foundation that three men showing FDA badges, A. Harris Kenyon, Robert B. Heller and Karl W. Brimmer, had driven through a chained road at Orgonon on July 29, 1952, and asked whether they were officers of the agency.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
### Orgone, Orgonon and Oranur
|
||||
|
||||
Reich's laboratory at Orgonon, near [[Rangeley, Maine|Rangeley]], Maine, was the site of the Oranur experiment. His first report states that two one-milligram radium sources in lead containers arrived on January 5, 1951, that one was placed in a small orgone accumulator charger at 11:30 that day and left there for about five hours, and that the "Oranur sickness" that followed required the evacuation of ill workers and the interruption of the experiment.[^26] The Bureau's New York office had meanwhile heard from Reich's assistant [[Myron Sharaf]] about an episode of August and September 1949. A [[Harvard University|Harvard]] special student named Washington, who had worked at Orgonon, telephoned Reich on August 16, 1949 that he was being held for questioning at the [[Argonne National Laboratory]]; Reich telephoned the Atomic Energy Commission laboratory on 24 August. Sharaf told the Bureau on October 11, 1949 that he came as Reich's representative, that Washington had "swindled them out of some money" and had used motors in orgone experiments, that Reich feared the Russians might obtain the information, and that a Mr. Mayer, security officer of the Argonne laboratory, had advised Reich to report the matter to the Bureau. Sharaf said that Washington had all of the information on the nature of orgone energy and that orgone energy, which he said Reich held to be stronger than electromagnetic energy, "might serve as some defense to rays of radio-active material or atomic energy." A security official of the Commission in New York told the Bureau that Reich had approached the Commission in New York on several occasions, that Reich had presented his experiments to the Commission in Washington and been told they were outside its scope, and, in the Bureau's words, that the scientists of the Commission were of the opinion that Reich was mentally unsound in his scientific experiments. The New York office wrote that it could not determine whether Sharaf or Reich had ulterior motives in reporting the matter.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
### Cloudbusters and the 1954 injunction
|
||||
|
||||
On July 22, 1952 Reich wrote to the Department of Justice, with copies to the Passport Division of the State Department and the Bureau, that he planned an expedition to the southwestern United States, possibly Mexico and northern South America, to study atmospheric orgone energy over desert country, because he had "succeeded, to some extent, in the Rangeley, Maine, region in forming and destroying clouds." He asked to travel incognito under the name Walter Roner.[^28]
|
||||
|
||||
The United States District Court in Maine received the complaint of the Attorney General on February 10, 1954. Reich, appearing by letter and not by counsel, wrote to Judge [[John D. Clifford]] on February 25, 1954 that his position "does not permit me to enter the case against the Food and Drug Administration, since such action would, in my mind, imply admission of the authority of this special branch of the government to pass judgment on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy." The injunction by default was entered on March 19, 1954, and the FDA announced the same day that there is no such energy as orgone energy.[^29] The court of appeals later recorded that certified copies of the decree were served on March 22, 1954 and that on March 30, 1954 Ilse Ollendorff sent the United States Attorney a telegram stating that the foundation was "far advanced in preparing full compliance with injunction of March 19, 1954."[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
On 23 and March 24, 1954 [[William Moise]], described in the Bureau's memorandum as assistant to Reich, was interviewed in the Bureau's Crime Records Division; he had come to give Hoover documents which he alleged were proof of a "red fascist instigated plot" against the Orgone Institute and the United States, and he asked that Hoover write to Reich acknowledging receipt. The memorandum of March 25, 1954 records a telegram of 23 March from the Orgone Institute stating that a telegram had been sent to the [[Weather Bureau]] the day before predicting a snowstorm over Rangeley, and states that Moise explained that, as a result of the injunction, Reich "had decided to flood the East Coast with rain" to prove the value of his experiments.[^31] Moise married Reich's daughter [[Eva Reich|Eva]].[^32] Reich's own journal for July 1954 describes cloudbuster operations at [[Orgonon]] in July 1953 and states that "US Army planes appeared for the first time over Orgonon monitoring the atmosphere on the morning of July 8, 1953." It places the cause of distress at Orgonon since January 1951 in "the Keyhoe report on the so-called Flying Saucers" of autumn 1953 and a book by Major [[Donald Keyhoe]].[^33] Reich's Contact with Space reproduces his letter of January 29, 1954 to "U.S. Airforce Intelligence," signed by Reich and Ollendorff, reporting two lights seen on the night of January 28, 1954; a letter of March 10, 1954 from Flight 3-G, 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, [[Presque Isle Air Force Base]], Maine, stating that the report had been sent to headquarters at Colorado Springs and enclosing a USAF Technical Information Sheet; a letter of March 16, 1954 from 1st Lt. Andrew Matyas; and Reich's letter of March 19, 1954 returning the questionnaire with a manuscript on the orgonomic view of visitors from outer space.[^34]
|
||||
|
||||
### OROP Desert Ea, 1954 and 1955
|
||||
|
||||
A letter dated October 9, 1954 over the signature of William Moise as "Oranur Weather Control Operator," sent for the Orgone Institute Press to the court at [[Portland, Maine|Portland]], listed as copies the Office of the President, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, "Commander, Air Technical Intelligence Center, U.S. Air Force," and Hoover.[^35] Reich's later petition for certiorari states that "the cosmic event was report[ed] to the Air Force Technical Intelligence by one of the operators, William Moise, the Clerk of the Foundation, on his way to Arizona in Dayton, Ohio, on October 14, 1954, at 4:00 p.m." It quotes his own text that after a "star" faded four times in succession in front of his cloudbuster pipes, "the cloudbuster had suddenly changed into a SPACEGUN," and describes an OROP Desert Ea expedition to Arizona from October 1954 to April 1955.[^36] Reich's Contact with Space publishes a report by Moise of the Dayton visit. Moise reported that on October 11, 1954 he telephoned General Watson, whom he identified as commander of the Air Technical Intelligence Center at [[Wright-Patterson Air Force Base]], to report that two UFOs, which the Institute called Ea, had been disabled on October 10, 1954 by Reich, and that Watson told him a group from the CIA was coming on the Friday. According to the report, Watson was not available on 14 October and Dr. W. H. Byers, Captain D. M. Hill and a civilian, Harry Haberer, met Moise instead; on 15 October he reported to the deputy commander, Colonel Wertenbaker, with the same three present, asked that sealed copies of Reich's space equations be deposited with the Air Force, and asked that the Air Force tow the Oranur radium to Arizona behind an aircraft. Moise wrote that Wertenbaker said the first could be done, that he lacked authority for the second and would forward it to Washington, and that he thanked the Orgone Institute on behalf of the Air Force. The book states that the Air Force was thereafter coded in the Institute's records as Eaa.[^37]
|
||||
|
||||
A statement submitted to the Bureau under Moise's signature on February 26, 1957 lists among the facts that might make him appear to be a planted spy that he was a former naval officer and a "cousin of Admiral Walter S. Anderson, former Chief of Naval Intelligence," that he had been a member of the "Tucson, Arizona Expedition in fall of 1954 as Cloudbuster Operator and Secretary to Dr. Wilhelm Reich" of OROP Desert Ea, and that he "had meeting with General Trumend Landon USAF Inspector General during the summer of 1954 concerning Cosmic Orgone Engineering work," held at the Pentagon. The statement adds that General Landon "was a friend of the family during his youth in home town of Carlinville, Illinois," that Moise "had contact with Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller as Art Teacher in the Mt. Desert Schools," and that he was the person responsible for sending "important communications to Court, CIA, Air Force Intelligence, Marshall's Office, etc." concerning Reich's appearance in Portland. The statement is headed as a discussion with Reich at Orgonon in the summer of 1956 of the possibility that Moise was a planted spy of "Black Fascist" and Navy interests, and it records that Reich's space equations were stored after his May 1956 arrest at the house of Aurora Karrer.[^32]
|
||||
|
||||
### Contempt, appeal and burning
|
||||
|
||||
On the morning of October 7, 1955 the United States Attorney for Maine, [[Peter Mills]], and the FDA General Counsel, [[Joseph Maguire]] (typed "McGuire" in the memorandum), came to see Assistant Director [[Louis B. Nichols]] and outlined a conversation with Reich's former attorney [[Asa Richardson]], who had said he had talked to a "big fellow in the FBI." Nichols wrote that at the request of Senator [[Margaret Chase Smith]] he had seen Richardson on February 23, 1954, that Richardson said Reich thought the case could not be handled in federal court because national security was involved, and that he told Richardson "that we had no current interest in Dr. Reich; that he might check with Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Atomic Energy Commission." Mills said Reich was "now being brought up on contempt proceedings because he has not followed the terms of the injunction."[^38]
|
||||
|
||||
The First Circuit recorded that the contempt information was filed on July 15, 1955 and that trial by jury began on May 3, 1956; the jury found Reich and his associate [[Michael Silvert]] guilty.[^30] A Bureau memorandum of February 14, 1957 gives the trial as 2 through May 7, 1956, the sentences as two years for Reich and a year and a day for Silvert, and a fine of $10,000 for the corporation.[^39] Reich's later text dates his arrest in Washington to May 1, 1956, and Moise's statement gives 2 May.[^40] The First Circuit affirmed in Reich v. United States, 239 F.2d 134 (December 11, 1956), and the Supreme Court denied certiorari in No. 688 on February 25, 1957.[^30][^41] Reich's petition states that his literature was burned on court order in August 1956.[^36] The writer David Rosen, reviewing Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron, wrote that on August 23, 1956 agents of the FDA seized six tons of publications from a Greenwich Village warehouse and burned them at the New York Sanitation Department's Gansevoort Street incinerator, after a burning a few weeks earlier near Rangeley, Maine, at which 251 volumes and other materials were destroyed under FDA direction.[^42]
|
||||
|
||||
### Washington, 1957, and death
|
||||
|
||||
On the morning of February 14, 1957 Reich telephoned the Director's office from the Alban Towers Apartments, 3700 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, identified himself as director of the Orgone Institute Research Laboratories, said he was living there under the alias "Roner," and said he was mailing a letter for Hoover personally. The Bureau's memorandum of that day states that in 1956 and in January 1957 Reich and members of his staff had contacted the Boston office, the Augusta, Maine, resident agency and the Washington Field Office, in its word "ostensibly" to offer information on espionage, and that each time the contact ended in a plea for his theories and laboratories.[^13] A Washington Field Office memorandum records that on February 25, 1957 agents interviewed him in Apartment 509, where he introduced a young woman as his daughter Eva, telephoned the Bureau to verify the agents' credentials, and asked them to sign an appointment book, and that Reich spoke of something that had been going on for ten years, referred to cosmic energy and "flying saucers," and, asked whether his knowledge of them prompted his contacting the Bureau, "replied in the affirmative but once again could not be specific." He repeatedly said that Hoover knew all about his work, displayed three heavily sealed envelopes bearing his initials and asked an agent to deliver one to Hoover and sign a receipt. The memorandum states that before the contents of the envelope could be questioned he turned to another subject, and records that the contents of the envelope "was never resolved, and was retained by the subject."[^43]
|
||||
|
||||
After the Supreme Court's denial Reich and Silvert surrendered to the custody of the Attorney General at the Portland proceedings of March 11, 1957. A Boston airtel of March 12, 1957, captioned with the names of William Steig and William Moise and the words "Assaulting of Federal Officer" and "Conspiracy," records that no disturbances were created and that the associates and subjects "departed from Portland area without making any 'citizen arrests.'" Records found do not establish whether the William Steig named is the cartoonist of that name.[^44] On March 21, 1957 Moise wrote to Senator Smith that Reich had "time and time again restrained us, at that time his assistants, from our desire to use his discovery in a war-like manner" and that "I find myself facing the decision of whether or not to use Orgone Energy, which the U.S. Government has declared does not exist, to storm and flood portions of the U.S.A. in an attempt to stop this infamy." The letter adds that the responsibility for such a decision rests with "the few genuinely responsible government persons such as yourself and the President." The Senator's administrative assistant, Bill Lewis, gave the letter to the Bureau on March 25, 1957, saying that the Senator did not intend to answer it and that the group around Moise "may be crackpots but in some respects were brilliant." A Bureau memorandum of March 27, 1957 noted that Moise taught at the Groveton High School in Virginia and recommended that Lewis be asked to inform the Virginia authorities; a note of April 3, 1957 records that, after discussion with Clyde Tolson, the Bureau would not go back to the Senator's office.[^45][^46] A Bureau memorandum later records that Reich died of a heart attack in Lewisburg penitentiary in November 1957,[^47] and a Bureau memorandum of January 20, 1959 states that the communications Reich forwarded to it "were not acknowledged."[^48]
|
||||
|
||||
The finding aid of the National Library of Medicine to the Aurora Karrer Reich Collection (MS C 580) states that Aurora Karrer met Reich at a conference at the Orgone Institute in the summer of 1955, entered a common-law marriage with him later that year, and gave up her position as a medical technician at the National Institutes of Health.[^49]
|
||||
|
||||
On December 9, 1957 Dr. Leon A. Witkin, chief medical officer of the penitentiary, wrote to the Director of the Bureau, enclosing the stomach contents of "Doctor Wilhelm Reich, Reg. No. 23937-NE, who died suddenly on November 3, 1957." The letter states that post mortem examination showed severe aortic stenosis and myocardial scarring, that "his family fears that he may have been poisoned," and that Dr. Janney, Medical Director of the Bureau of Prisons, had instructed that the specimen be sent. The enclosed autopsy report of November 26, 1957 lists bronchopneumonia, myocardial scarring with congestion of viscera, and fatty changes in liver and kidney. The Bureau laboratory reported to Witkin on January 2, 1958 that formaldehyde was detected in the specimen, that no other materials commonly considered poisonous were detected in tests that included cyanide, strychnine, barbiturates, chloral hydrate and arsenic, that the formaldehyde prevented testing for alcohols, and that the specimen was consumed in the examination.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington Field Office report of June 16, 1941 (case 100-1849), in the Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI (reich1). Sole source for the passages so cited: immigration record of admission August 28, 1939, visa No. 19 of August 11, 1939, destination 66 West 12th Street, birth at Dobrzanice, children Eva and Lore.
|
||||
[^2]: Leon A. Witkin, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, U.S. Penitentiary, Lewisburg, to the Director of the FBI, December 9, 1957 ("who died suddenly on November 3, 1957"), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 6 (page 21 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. A Bureau memorandum in Part 3 and Time, "Milestones," November 1957, p. 110, as quoted in it, give the death as November 1957 and the cause as a heart attack.
|
||||
[^3]: Witkin to the Director, December 9, 1957; autopsy report of November 26, 1957 signed by L. L. Ashburn, M.D., Chief, Section on Pathologic Anatomy; FBI Laboratory report to Witkin, January 2, 1958 (FBI file 95-72739; Laboratory No. PC-51232 II), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 6 (pages 21 to 24 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^4]: FBI New York report of December 24, 1941, "Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Alien Enemy Control," NY file 100-8422, synopsis of facts, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^5]: J. Edgar Hoover to George S. Messersmith, January 19, 1940; Hoover to the Special Agent in Charge, New York, January 19, 1940; Hoover to Adolf A. Berle Jr., March 26, 1940; Hoover to the Special Agent in Charge, New York, April 11, 1940, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1 (pages 3 to 8 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^6]: FBI New York report of December 24, 1941, NY file 100-8422, page 7, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1 (page 42 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI; State Department documents are withheld at pages 10, 14 and 31 of the PDF under the FOIPA deleted page sheets ("Document originated with State Dept.").
|
||||
[^7]: FBI memorandum of May 6, 1941, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^8]: FBI New York report of December 24, 1941, NY file 100-8422, page 7 (visa under Section 4(D); the Bureau's account of the State Department's statement on the Norwegian party), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1 (page 42 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^9]: Edward A. Tamm, memorandum for Mr. Kramer, May 7, 1941; R. P. Kramer, memorandum for Mr. E. A. Tamm, May 8, 1941 (Bufile 100-14601), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1 (pages 16 and 17 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^10]: Wilhelm Reich, Biographical Material, History of the Discovery of the Life Energy, Documentary Supplement No. 2, "The Red Thread of a Conspiracy" (Orgone Institute Press, 1955), p. 10, forwarded by the New York office with a memorandum of September 26, 1955, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2 (page 64 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. Sole source for the passage so cited.
|
||||
[^11]: "The Red Thread of a Conspiracy" (Orgone Institute Press, 1955), pp. 7 to 8 (running head "The Einstein Affair"), as reproduced in the Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 5a, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^12]: FBI New York report of December 24, 1941, NY file 100-8422, interview pages 8 and 9 (names redacted), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^13]: M. A. Jones to L. B. Nichols, memorandum of February 14, 1957 (Part 2, pages 123 and 124 of the PDF), "Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Alban Towers Apartments," Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2 (reich2), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^14]: "Wilhelm Reich Lectures, New School for Social Research (1940), 2018," New School Archives, box Mixed k_24 (R), folder 3, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/58166.
|
||||
[^15]: J. Edgar Hoover to the New York office, July 15, 1941, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^16]: FBI New York report of December 24, 1941, NY file 100-8422, details and search inventory, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^17]: FBI New York report of January 23, 1942 (period December 26, 1941), NY file 100-8422, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^18]: Hoover to Brig. Gen. Raymond E. Lee, G-2, War Department, and Hoover to Rear Adm. T. S. Wilkinson, Director of Naval Intelligence, April 1942 (stating that on January 27, 1942 the Attorney General ordered the release of Wilhelm Reich), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1 (page 65 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^19]: J. Edgar Hoover to the Special Agent in Charge, New York, January 31, 1942, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^20]: Reich to the Police Commissioner, June 2, 1942; Wendell Berge memorandum of June 10, 1942; Bureau letter of July 15, 1942; FBI New York letter of July 27, 1942 signed by P. E. Foxworth, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^21]: Attorney General memorandum of July 16, 1943 (Part 1, page 76 of the PDF); Hoover to the SAC, Newark, July 21, 1943; SAC Newark to the Director, August 10, 1943, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^22]: FBI correspondence of 1947 with the Food and Drug Administration, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^23]: "The Red Thread of a Conspiracy" (Orgone Institute Press, 1955), pp. 7 to 9 (running head "The Einstein Affair"), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 5a, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^24]: "The Red Thread of a Conspiracy" (Orgone Institute Press, 1955), pp. 9 to 10 and 28 to 29, sent to the Director with a New York memorandum of September 26, 1955, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2 (pages 63 to 66 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. Brady's article, "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich," The New Republic, May 26, 1947, is quoted there; the date also appears in Sharaf's statement to the Bureau (Part 2, page 11 of the PDF).
|
||||
[^25]: Ilse Ollendorff, secretary, for the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, to J. Edgar Hoover, August 5, 1952, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 6 (page 20 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. The Bureau's reply of August 19, 1952 referred the matter to the FDA Commissioner.
|
||||
[^26]: Wilhelm Reich, The Oranur Experiment, First Report (1947-1951) (Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine: Wilhelm Reich Foundation, 1951), chapter "Orgone Energy Runs Amok (DOR): The Oranur Sickness," https://archive.org/details/the-oranur-experiment-first-report-1947-1951. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^27]: FBI New York letter to the Director, NY 62-10139, pages 1 to 6 (Part 2, pages 10 to 13 of the PDF; Sharaf interview of October 11, 1949), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. The student's name is given in the file as William Washington; the account is Sharaf's report to the Bureau.
|
||||
[^28]: Wilhelm Reich to the Justice Department, July 22, 1952, copy in the Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^29]: Reich to Judge John D. Clifford, February 25, 1954, and the Decree of Injunction of March 19, 1954 with FDA press release, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 4c, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^30]: Reich v. United States, 239 F.2d 134 (1st Cir. 1956) (decided December 11, 1956), https://static.case.law/f2d/239/cases/0134-01.json. The opinion states that the individual defendants were sentenced to terms of imprisonment; the length of each sentence is from the Bureau memorandum cited in a later note.
|
||||
[^31]: M. A. Jones to Mr. Nichols, memoranda of March 25, 1954 (pages 1 to 3) on the visit of William Moise to the Crime Records Division, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^32]: William Moise, "Information to be transmitted to the FBI," February 26, 1957 (two pages, signed; Part 3, pages 27 and 28 of the PDF), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 3, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^33]: Wilhelm Reich, CORE (Cosmic Orgone Engineering) vol. 6, nos. 1 to 4, July 1954, "OROP Desert, Part 1: Space Ships, DOR and Drought," https://archive.org/details/contact-from-space-by-wilhelm-reich. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^34]: Wilhelm Reich, Contact with Space: Oranur Second Report, 1951-1956 (Core Pilot Press, 1957), chapter "Contact with the U.S. Air Force," https://archive.org/details/wilhelm-reich-contact-with-space (letters of 29 January, 10 March, 16 March and March 19, 1954 reproduced from the Archives of the Orgone Institute). Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^35]: Letter of William Moise, October 9, 1954, reproduced in Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 4c, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^36]: Petition for a writ of certiorari of Wilhelm Reich and Michael Silvert, reproduced in Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Parts 5b and 5c, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^37]: Wilhelm Reich, Contact with Space: Oranur Second Report, 1951-1956 (Core Pilot Press, 1957), pp. 78 to 88, "First Direct Contact with the Air Force Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) in Dayton, Ohio," and "Report to WR of conference at Air Force Technical Intelligence Center," https://archive.org/details/wilhelm-reich-contact-with-space. Sole source for the passages so cited; the report is Moise's, published by Reich.
|
||||
[^38]: L. B. Nichols to Mr. Tolson, office memorandum of October 7, 1955, "Wilhelm Reich" (Part 2, page 109 of the PDF), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^39]: M. A. Jones to L. B. Nichols, memorandum of February 14, 1957 (Part 2, page 124 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^40]: Wilhelm Reich, Contact with Space (1957), passage on the transmission of the 1945 pendulum-law manuscript to the CIA in April 1956 ("my unlawful arrest in Washington on May 1, 1956"), https://archive.org/details/wilhelm-reich-contact-with-space; William Moise statement of February 26, 1957, item 13, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 3 ("May 2nd, 1956"). Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^41]: Reich et al. v. United States, No. 688, 352 U.S. 1004 (February 25, 1957) ("C. A. 1st Cir. Certiorari denied"; petitioners pro se), https://static.case.law/us/352/cases/1004-02.json.
|
||||
[^42]: David Rosen, review of Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), The Brooklyn Rail, February 2012, https://brooklynrail.org/2012/02/books/wr-the-wanderings-of-a-lost-soul. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^43]: SAC, Washington Field Office, memorandum to the Director, "Wilhelm Reich aka Dr. Walter Roner," file 100-1849, on the interview of February 25, 1957 (Part 2, pages 129 and 130 of the PDF), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^44]: SAC, Boston, airtel to the Director, March 12, 1957, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 6 (page 18 of the PDF), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^45]: William S. Moise to Senator Margaret Chase Smith, March 21, 1957, as transmitted with the Bureau memoranda of 25 and March 27, 1957, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 6, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^46]: G. A. Nease to Mr. Tolson, March 25, 1957; A. H. Belmont to L. V. Boardman, March 27, 1957; note to Mr. Belmont of April 3, 1957, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 6, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^47]: Time, "Milestones," November 1957, p. 110, as quoted in a Bureau memorandum, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 3 (reich3), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI; the same file contains a Bureau memorandum stating that "In November, 1957, Reich died of a heart attack in Lewisburg penitentiary, Pennsylvania."
|
||||
[^48]: Domestic Intelligence Division addendum of January 20, 1959 to a memorandum to Mr. Nease on briefs forwarded by Reich (Bufile 100-14601-67; Part 3, page 51 of the PDF), Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 3, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^49]: Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, MS C 580, National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division, biographical note, https://findingaids.nlm.nih.gov/repositories/4/resources/698.
|
||||
127
10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Claire Zabel.md
Normal file
127
10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Claire Zabel.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,127 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Claire Zabel
|
||||
category: "Philanthropists & Benefactors"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- ClaireZabel
|
||||
- OpenPhilanthropy
|
||||
- CoefficientGiving
|
||||
- CentreForEffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- EffectiveVentures
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- GlobalCatastrophicRisks
|
||||
- Biosecurity
|
||||
- Longtermism
|
||||
- AtlasFellowship
|
||||
summary: "Open Philanthropy staffer who led its effective altruism grantmaking and Capacity Building team, named investigator on grants totalling about 12.6 million dollars, and a director of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) from 2019 to 2024."
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Open Philanthropy]]"
|
||||
start: 2015-08
|
||||
role: "research analyst from August 2015, later program officer for global catastrophic risks, head of effective altruism grantmaking, program director for biosecurity and pandemic preparedness and head of the Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team; the organization now operates as Coefficient Giving"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Effective Ventures]]"
|
||||
start: 2019-07-18
|
||||
end: 2024-03-28
|
||||
role: "director of the English company then named the Centre for Effective Altruism, later Effective Ventures Foundation (UK)"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Effective Altruism Foundation]]"
|
||||
start: 2019-07
|
||||
role: "grant investigator, with Nick Beckstead, on a 1,000,000 dollar grant for research and general operations"
|
||||
fn: 12
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Centre for Effective Altruism]]"
|
||||
start: 2020-01
|
||||
end: 2021-01
|
||||
role: "grant investigator on the 2020 grants for The Precipice and for the longtermist project incubator"
|
||||
fn: 16
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative]]"
|
||||
start: 2020-01
|
||||
end: 2021-03
|
||||
role: "grant investigator on the 150,000 dollar general support grant of January 2020 and the 210,000 dollar stipend grant for the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative summer research fellowship of March 2021"
|
||||
fn: 15
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Center for Applied Rationality]]"
|
||||
start: 2020-02
|
||||
role: "grant investigator on the 375,000 dollar general support grant"
|
||||
fn: 18
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Atlas Fellowship]]"
|
||||
start: 2022-03
|
||||
role: "grant investigator on the 5,000,000 dollar grant, made via the Centre for Effective Altruism, for a summer program and scholarships for high school students"
|
||||
fn: 25
|
||||
created: 2026-10-08
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-08
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Claire Zabel is a grantmaker in the effective altruism funding network. She joined [[Open Philanthropy]] as a research analyst in August 2015 and went on to lead its effective altruism grantmaking and its Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team.[^1] She was a director of the English company then named the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], later [[Effective Ventures]] Foundation (UK), from July 2019 to March 2024, while Open Philanthropy was that company's largest funder.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Open Philanthropy and Coefficient Giving
|
||||
|
||||
Open Philanthropy's team page, as captured on November 28, 2018, gives her title as program officer for global catastrophic risks and says she joined in August 2015 as a research analyst. Captures from December 12, 2019 through January 19, 2022 add that she "leads our grantmaking on effective altruism." The capture of June 17, 2024 gives the title program director, says she oversees the Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team, and says she "went on to lead our Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team."[^3] The capture of January 5, 2025 gives her title as program director for biosecurity and pandemic preparedness and records a bachelor's and master's degree in earth systems from [[Stanford University]], where she researched the science, ethics and governance of solar geoengineering.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The organization now operates as [[Coefficient Giving]]. The address openphilanthropy.org/grants redirects to the Coefficient Giving fund pages, and the site footer carries the new name.[^4] Her Coefficient Giving biography gives her title as managing director of the Short Timelines Special Projects team, which researches and implements initiatives intended to be especially useful if transformative AI is developed soon. It says she ran the Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team from 2018 to 2024 and oversaw the Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team in 2018 and 2019 and again in 2023 and 2024. The same biography says that before joining the organization she was a research analyst at [[GiveWell]].[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Grants as investigator
|
||||
|
||||
Open Philanthropy grant pages from 2018 to 2022 name her as grant investigator on a run of grants in biosecurity, in longtermist research and in the effective altruism community. The pages state that the investigator reviewed them without writing them and that the grantee's staff reviewed them before publication. The twenty pages below total about 12.6 million dollars at current amounts.
|
||||
|
||||
In May 2018 the foundation recommended 570,000 dollars in scholarship support under the program Early-Career Funding for Global Catastrophic Biological Risks.[^6] In October 2018 it recommended a gift of 20,000 pounds (26,086 dollars at conversion) to the [[University of Oxford]] for the Mathematical Ecology Research Group and the research costs of [[Andrew Snyder-Beattie]], then recently Director of Research at the [[Future of Humanity Institute]].[^7] In November 2018 it recommended 1,904,942 dollars over three years to the [[Nuclear Threat Initiative]] for projects to reduce global catastrophic biological risks, including strengthening the [[Biological Weapons Convention]].[^8] In December 2018 it recommended a 25,000 dollar contract with [[Biosecure Ltd]] to support research for a campaign against biological weapons.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
In May 2019 it recommended 440,525 dollars to [[Altruistic Technology Labs]], described as a new organization, for work on global catastrophic biological risk prevention including machine-learning-based attribution of engineered DNA.[^10] The same month it recommended about 547,800 dollars over four years to [[Ethan Alley]] for a PhD at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]]; the page says the amount was updated in January 2022 to reflect additional funding.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
In July 2019 the foundation recommended 1,000,000 dollars over two years to the [[Effective Altruism Foundation]] for research and general operations. [[Nick Beckstead]] and Zabel are named as the grant investigators. The page describes the grant as an effort to encourage the foundation and its other grantees to approach longtermism with greater emphasis on objectives shared between different value systems.[^12] In September 2019 it recommended 49,676 dollars in scholarships for students whose studies relate to effective altruism, with Zabel and [[Bastian Stern]] named as investigators.[^13] In December 2019 it recommended 250,000 dollars to Stanford University for student education about global catastrophic risks, to be used by [[Stephen Luby]] and [[Paul Edwards]], who teach the course "Preventing Human Extinction."[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
In January 2020 it recommended 150,000 dollars in general support to the [[Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative]], to help establish new collaborations.[^15] The same month it recommended 38,350 dollars to the Centre for Effective Altruism in support of [[The Precipice]].[^16] In February 2020 it recommended 180,000 dollars to the Centre to support the work of [[Jade Leung]] in developing a longtermist project incubator,[^17] and 375,000 dollars in general support to the [[Center for Applied Rationality]].[^18] In April 2020 it recommended 300,000 dollars in general support to [[LessWrong]].[^19] In September 2020 it recommended 500,000 dollars to the Centre for the incubator work. The page now records that amount as 48,736 dollars, revised after 451,264 dollars were returned to the foundation in March 2023.[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
In January 2021 it recommended 5,915 dollars in general support to the [[Effective Altruism Debate Championship]][^21] and 1,500,000 dollars to the [[Stanford Existential Risks Initiative]] for global catastrophic risk education.[^22] In March 2021 it recommended 210,000 dollars to the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative for stipends for the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative summer research fellowship program.[^23] In May 2021 it recommended 24,000 dollars to the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative for distribution of The Precipice.[^24] In March 2022 it recommended 5,000,000 dollars to the [[Atlas Fellowship]], via the Centre for Effective Altruism, to support a summer program and scholarship funding for talented high school students.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
The largest general-support grants to the Centre were not credited to her. A grant of 7,500,000 dollars in February 2021 names the Committee for Effective Altruism Support as its investigator.[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
### Board seat and the Centre's English company
|
||||
|
||||
[[Companies House]] lists Zabel as a director of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), company number 07962181, from July 18, 2019 to March 28, 2024.[^2] The same register records her as a person with significant control holding more than 25 percent but not more than 50 percent of the voting rights from July 18, 2019 to February 2, 2022, and again from September 21, 2023 to March 28, 2024.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
The company's accounts for the year to June 30, 2023 list as trustees [[William MacAskill]] (resigned September 21, 2023), [[Toby Ord]] (resigned July 29, 2022), Zabel, [[Owen Cotton-Barratt]] (resigned February 11, 2023), Nick Beckstead (resigned August 23, 2023), [[Tasha McCauley]], [[Lincoln Quirk]] (appointed May 23, 2023), [[Eli Rose]] and J Winchell (both appointed February 9, 2024), with [[Howie Lempel]] as chief executive until December 7, 2023, and his successor R Gledhill from January 1, 2024.[^28] Note 27 to those accounts describes her as one of its trustees and states that she "is employed as a program director at Open Philanthropy, our largest funder." The same note states that "As a result of that position, Claire has significant influence over some of the funding decisions made by Open Philanthropy in relation to several of the charity's projects." In that year the charity received 39,037,949 pounds in grant income from Open Philanthropy and donations of 2,766,546 pounds from the [[FTX Foundation]]. The note also states that one of the Board of Trustees was the chief executive of the FTX Foundation during the year.[^29]
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Charity Commission]] opened a statutory inquiry into the charity on December 19, 2022 after it reported that two trustees were connected with FTX. The report published on May 22, 2024 records that one trustee was the chief executive of the FTX Foundation and the other an unpaid adviser to the [[FTX Future Fund]]; that the trustees were not required to disclose potential conflicts of interest on joining the board until October 2022; and that it found no evidence of unmanaged conflicts regarding funds received from the FTX Foundation. It does not name the trustees or mention Open Philanthropy.[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
The officer tables of the Form 990 filings of Effective Ventures Foundation USA (EIN 47-1988398) for six filing years as published by ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer do not list her.[^31]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Open Philanthropy, "Claire Zabel," team biography, Wayback Machine capture of January 5, 2025. https://web.archive.org/web/20250105212156/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel/
|
||||
[^2]: Companies House, "Effective Ventures Foundation (UK)," company number 07962181, register of officers filtered to resigned officers, entry for Claire Zabel (appointed July 18, 2019; resigned March 28, 2024), viewed October 8, 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/officers?filter=resigned
|
||||
[^3]: Open Philanthropy, "Claire Zabel," team biography, Wayback Machine captures of November 28, 2018 (https://web.archive.org/web/20181128192541/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel), December 12, 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/20191212003145/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel), February 27, 2021 (https://web.archive.org/web/20210227063817/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel), January 19, 2022 (https://web.archive.org/web/20220119041801/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel) and June 17, 2024 (https://web.archive.org/web/20240617074758/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel).
|
||||
[^4]: Open Philanthropy grants index, openphilanthropy.org/grants/, which redirects to coefficientgiving.org/funds/; footer "2026 Coefficient Giving," viewed October 8, 2026. https://coefficientgiving.org/funds/global-catastrophic-risks-opportunities/
|
||||
[^5]: Coefficient Giving, "Claire Zabel," team biography, viewed October 8, 2026. https://coefficientgiving.org/team/claire-zabel/
|
||||
[^6]: Open Philanthropy, "Early-Career Funding for Global Catastrophic Biological Risks: Scholarship Support (2018)," award date May 2018, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/early-career-funding-for-global-catastrophic-biological-risks-scholarship-support-2018/
|
||||
[^7]: Open Philanthropy, "University of Oxford: D.Phil. Support for Andrew Snyder-Beattie," award date October 2018, amount 20,000 pounds ($26,086 at conversion), grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/oxford-university-d-phil-support-for-andrew-snyder-beattie/
|
||||
[^8]: Open Philanthropy, "Nuclear Threat Initiative: Projects to Reduce Global Catastrophic Biological Risks," award date November 2018, amount 1,904,942 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/nuclear-threat-initiative-projects-to-reduce-global-catastrophic-biological-risks/
|
||||
[^9]: Open Philanthropy, "Biosecure Ltd: Campaign Against Bioweapons Research," award date December 2018, amount 25,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/biosecure-ltd-campaign-against-bioweapons-research/
|
||||
[^10]: Open Philanthropy, "Altruistic Technology Labs: Work on Biological Risk Prevention," award date May 2019, amount 440,525 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/altruistic-technology-labs-work-on-biological-risk-prevention/
|
||||
[^11]: Open Philanthropy, "Global Catastrophic Risks Scholarships: Scholarship Support (2019)," award date May 2019, amount 547,800 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/global-catastrophic-risks-scholarships-scholarship-support-2019/
|
||||
[^12]: Open Philanthropy, "Effective Altruism Foundation: Research and Operations," award date July 2019, grant investigators Nick Beckstead and Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-research-and-operations/
|
||||
[^13]: Open Philanthropy, "EA Scholarships: Scholarship Support (2019)," award date September 2019, amount 49,676 dollars, grant investigators Claire Zabel and Bastian Stern, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/ea-scholarships-scholarship-support-2019/
|
||||
[^14]: Open Philanthropy, "Stanford University: Global Catastrophic Risk Education," award date December 2019, amount 250,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/stanford-university-global-catastrophic-risk-education/
|
||||
[^15]: Open Philanthropy, "Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative: General Support," award date January 2020, amount 150,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/berkeley-existential-risk-initiative-general-support/
|
||||
[^16]: Open Philanthropy, "Centre for Effective Altruism: Support for The Precipice," award date January 2020, amount 38,350 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of October 28, 2025. https://web.archive.org/web/20251028024853/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-support-for-the-precipice/
|
||||
[^17]: Open Philanthropy, "Centre for Effective Altruism: Support for Jade Leung," award date February 2020, amount 180,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=1561
|
||||
[^18]: Open Philanthropy, "Center for Applied Rationality: General Support (2020)," award date February 2020, amount 375,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/center-for-applied-rationality-general-support-2020/
|
||||
[^19]: Open Philanthropy, "LessWrong: General Support," award date April 2020, amount 300,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=1448
|
||||
[^20]: Open Philanthropy, "Centre for Effective Altruism: Longtermist Project Incubator (September 2020)," award date September 2020, amount 48,736 dollars "updated to reflect $451,264 returned to us in March 2023," grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of October 24, 2025 (https://web.archive.org/web/20251024104819/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-longtermist-incubator-september-2020/); the capture of 2024 (https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=1305) shows the original amount of 500,000 dollars.
|
||||
[^21]: Open Philanthropy, "Effective Altruism Debate Championship: General Support," award date January 2021, amount 5,915 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=1132
|
||||
[^22]: Open Philanthropy, "Stanford Existential Risks Initiative: Global Catastrophic Risk Education," award date January 2021, amount 1,500,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=1136
|
||||
[^23]: Open Philanthropy, "Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative: SERI Summer Fellowships," award date March 2021, amount 210,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=7033
|
||||
[^24]: Open Philanthropy, "Stanford Existential Risks Initiative: Distribution of The Precipice," award date May 2021, amount 24,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=1090
|
||||
[^25]: Open Philanthropy, "Atlas Fellowship: Scholarships and Summer Program for Students," award date March 2022, amount 5,000,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine captures of 2022 and 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/atlas-fellowship-scholarships-and-summer-program-for-students/
|
||||
[^26]: Open Philanthropy, "Centre for Effective Altruism: General Support (2021)," award date February 2021, amount 7,500,000 dollars, grant investigator "Committee for Effective Altruism Support," Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=1179
|
||||
[^27]: Companies House, "Effective Ventures Foundation (UK)," company number 07962181, persons with significant control, entry for Claire Zabel (notified July 18, 2019, ceased February 2, 2022; notified September 21, 2023, ceased March 28, 2024), viewed October 8, 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/persons-with-significant-control
|
||||
[^28]: Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), Trustees' Report and Financial Statements for the year ended June 30, 2023, "Reference and administrative details of the Company, its Trustees and advisers," page 1 (trustees printed with initials: W D MacAskill, T D G Ord, C Zabel, O Cotton-Barrat, N M Beckstead, T McCauley, L Quirk, E Rose, J Winchell), read from the scanned filing. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/filing-history/MzQxNDkzNjQ2NGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf
|
||||
[^29]: Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), Trustees' Report and Financial Statements for the year ended June 30, 2023, filed at Companies House March 21, 2024, note 27 ("Related party transactions"), page 48, read from the scanned filing. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/filing-history/MzQxNDkzNjQ2NGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf
|
||||
[^30]: Charity Commission for England and Wales, "Charity Inquiry: Effective Ventures Foundation UK," published May 22, 2024, sections on background, findings and conflicts of interest (marked on the page as withdrawn on May 27, 2026). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charity-inquiry-effective-ventures-foundation-uk/charity-inquiry-effective-ventures-foundation-uk
|
||||
[^31]: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, "Effective Ventures Foundation USA," EIN 47-1988398, full filing text of Form 990, Part VII officer tables, filings listed at https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/471988398, viewed October 8, 2026.
|
||||
126
10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Dorothy Payne Whitney.md
Normal file
126
10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Dorothy Payne Whitney.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,126 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Dorothy Payne Whitney
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Dorothy Payne Whitney
|
||||
- Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight
|
||||
- Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst
|
||||
- Dorothy Whitney Straight
|
||||
- Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst
|
||||
- Dorothy Straight
|
||||
- Dorothy Elmhirst
|
||||
- Mrs. Willard Straight
|
||||
- Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst
|
||||
category: "Philanthropists & Benefactors"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Whitney
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- NewRepublic
|
||||
- Dartington
|
||||
- Philanthropy
|
||||
- 1910s
|
||||
- 1920s
|
||||
- 1930s
|
||||
- 1960s
|
||||
summary: "Dorothy Payne Whitney, a Whitney heiress, helped found The New Republic, pledged $10,000 a year for ten years to the New School for Social Research, and later developed Dartington Hall with Leonard Elmhirst."
|
||||
born: 1887
|
||||
died: 1968
|
||||
location: "New York City; Totnes, Devon"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: spouse_of
|
||||
with: "[[Willard Straight]]"
|
||||
start: 1911
|
||||
end: 1918
|
||||
fn: 3
|
||||
- type: spouse_of
|
||||
with: "[[Leonard Knight Elmhirst]]"
|
||||
start: 1925
|
||||
end: 1968
|
||||
fn: 3
|
||||
- type: relative_of
|
||||
with: "[[Michael Whitney Straight]]"
|
||||
role: son
|
||||
fn: 3
|
||||
- type: founded
|
||||
with: "[[The New Republic]]"
|
||||
start: 1914
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 1919
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
end: 1930
|
||||
role: board of directors
|
||||
fn: 13
|
||||
- type: owned
|
||||
with: "[[Dartington Hall]]"
|
||||
start: 1925
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: founded
|
||||
with: "[[William C. Whitney Foundation]]"
|
||||
fn: 15
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Dorothy Payne Whitney (1887 to 1968) was an heiress of the [[Whitney family]] who helped found [[The New Republic]] with her first husband, [[Willard Straight]], in 1914, and who was among the principal donors to the [[New School for Social Research]] in its first decade. With her second husband, [[Leonard Knight Elmhirst]], she developed [[Dartington Hall]] in [[Devon]] as a progressive experiment that she continued to support until her death.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Youth and Marriage
|
||||
|
||||
She was the youngest child of Flora Payne and [[William C. Whitney]], a financier and secretary of the Navy under President [[Grover Cleveland]]. By the age of seventeen her mother, stepmother and father had all died, leaving her a large inheritance. At the age of 20 she became president of the [[Junior League of New York]] (1907 to 1909), where she introduced formal training for members and was the driving force behind the Junior League Hotel, a new model of cooperative housing for women.[^1][^2] She married Willard Straight in 1911. Their son, [[Michael Whitney Straight]], was born in 1916, the third and youngest of her children with Straight; the others were [[Whitney Straight]] and [[Beatrice Straight]].[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Her papers at [[Cornell University]] (collection #3725, 10 cubic feet, dates 1887 to 1978, most of the material from 1887 to 1926) include notebooks from her school days, guardianship papers, newspaper clippings on her father's death, an inventory of the house at 1130 Fifth Avenue, and correspondence with Willard Straight on their courtship and on his service in France in 1917 and 1918. The finding aid lists her involvement with the New York State Food Commission, the Women's Liberty Loan Committee, the Social Unit Plan, the Junior League, the War Camp Service Committee, the Women's Emergency Committee of the European Relief Council, the New School for Social Research, the Tuberculosis Preventorium for Children, the Pueblos Defense Committee and the Mayor's Committee of Women on National Defense, and states that she supported students at the Bordentown Military Academy and Hobart College.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The New Republic
|
||||
|
||||
After reading [[Herbert Croly]]'s *[[The Promise of American Life]]* aloud during their honeymoon, the couple invited Croly to lunch. In the fall of 1914 the Straights and Croly founded The New Republic.[^1] [[Alvin Johnson]] wrote that when Croly wanted a weekly, "I will find it," Dorothy Straight said simply.[^4] The Cornell finding aid lists correspondence and statements concerning The New Republic and *Asia* magazines among her papers.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
In 1922 the magazine was short of money, and its owners wanted the New School terminated so that Straight would provide the magazine with more support.[^5] A New Republic publisher interviewed by the FBI in 1969 said that her family's fund had founded the magazine in 1914 and had been used for its operation until 1954, when [[Gilbert A. Harrison]] bought a controlling interest; the editor of *Antiques*, a magazine owned by the Straight family since about 1930, said that it and The New Republic had shared the same office space in New York.[^6] Her son "enlisted new patrons" after "his mother's withdrawal of support of the magazine."[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The New School Pledges
|
||||
|
||||
As early as 1916 Dorothy Straight and Croly had discussed with [[Charles Austin Beard]] and [[James Harvey Robinson]] the possibility of an independent social science institute. When Beard and Robinson resigned from [[Columbia University]] in 1917, these discussions took on new meaning. Willard Straight, then serving in Europe, warned her away from the two men: "I'm getting a little restive and uncertain about some of these forward looking people."[^1] Beard and Robinson "found sympathetic and resourceful patrons" in Croly and Dorothy Straight, and the "Heir to the Whitney fortune" saw in their school an opportunity.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
She did not heed the warning. She turned the school from a subject of discussion into a realizable dream "by pledging $10,000 a year to the project for ten years."[^1] The school's early pledges were "ten-year pledges of support amounting to nearly $300,000, much of it from Dorothy Straight," and the townhouse the school renovated was "paid for largely by Dorothy Straight."[^8] In Alvin Johnson's *Pioneer's Progress* the founding circle consisted of Robinson, Beard, Thorstein Veblen, Croly, "Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. George Bacon, and other liberals," and a women's committee met at the apartment of Caroline Bacon: Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. George Haven Putnam, Mrs. Learned Hand, Mrs. Victor Sorchan, and "later Mrs. Thomas W. Lamont."[^9] Johnson wrote of her as "the most generous, Mrs. Straight," who "would leave us if the threatened secession from the board took place" in the crisis of 1922.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
When Johnson took over as director in April 1922 he wrote to her of the change, in a letter that includes the words "To put it baldly, I have usurped the"; the board members who stayed were Croly, [[Wesley Clair Mitchell]], Caroline Bacon, Dorothy Straight and Emily Putnam.[^11][^12] She sat on the Board of Directors until 1930, after 1925 as Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Judith Friedlander]] uses a 1952 letter by Johnson to characterize Dorothy and other founders, including [[Learned Hand]] and [[Mary Harriman]], as antisemites. Mastrelli, reviewing the book, writes: "For the record, I am not sure what kind of antisemite Dorothy would have been," and notes "accounts that she aided Johnson in the University in Exile."[^13] The records of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars include, in their philanthropic file series, a file titled "Elmhirst Fund 1934-1935."[^14] The Cornell finding aid for her papers states that the New School was "begun with the backing of the Whitney Estate in 1919."[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### William C. Whitney Foundation
|
||||
|
||||
After 1929 she continued to support the school for several years through the [[William C. Whitney Foundation]]; Mastrelli attributes this to the Dartington Hall Trust archives.[^13] In 1969 [[Milton C. Rose]], senior partner of [[Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander]], told the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] that the foundation was "created by Mr. Straight's parents in memory of his grandfather" and that her son Michael had been its president "since its inception in 1937."[^15] The FBI's summary describes it as a charitable organization that "concerns itself with the arts, having made many grants in the fields of music, dance, theater, and painting." [[Harriett K. Evison]], who had been her social secretary, became assistant secretary-treasurer of the foundation.[^15] A December 1952 newspaper report on testimony before a House committee on tax-exempt foundations records that her son, as president, was questioned on $19,000 in grants.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
### Dartington Hall
|
||||
|
||||
She married Leonard Knight Elmhirst in 1925.[^3] She met Elmhirst while working on the [[Willard Straight Hall]] project at Cornell, and the couple moved to [[Totnes]] in Devon, bought and restored a medieval property, and set about developing Dartington Hall as a laboratory of experiment for a "many sided life."[^1] She and Elmhirst purchased Dartington Hall, reconstructed the fourteenth-century manor and founded a school on the property.[^2] A second set of her papers from Dartington Hall (collection #3782, 4 cubic feet, 1890 to 1976) includes correspondence on Willard Straight Hall (1920 to 1967), lecture notes, diaries and travel journals, and an inventory of the records room at Dartington Hall.[^17] Her son Michael was educated at Dartington Hall.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Willard Straight Hall
|
||||
|
||||
Willard Straight died of septic pneumonia while serving with the [[American Expeditionary Forces]] in France in 1918, before the school opened.[^3] In his will he asked that Dorothy make Cornell a "more human place." She built Willard Straight Hall, one of the first models of a student union in the [[United States]].[^1] The Cornell finding aid for her papers gives his death as 1919; the finding aid for the Dartington Hall papers and the New York Times give 1918.[^2][^17]
|
||||
|
||||
### Death
|
||||
|
||||
She died in 1968.[^1] The FBI's 1969 summary of her son's background lists her as deceased.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst," Histories of The New School, by Tara Mastrelli, May 25, 2018, https://histories.newschool.edu/people/dorothy-payne-whitney-straight-elmhirst.
|
||||
[^2]: Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, "Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst papers," #3725, https://archives.library.cornell.edu/repositories/2/resources/1281.
|
||||
[^3]: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Michael Straight, Who Wrote of Connection to Spy Ring, Is Dead at 87," *The New York Times*, January 5, 2004 (Internet Archive copy, https://web.archive.org/web/2016id_/https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/nyregion/michael-straight-who-wrote-of-connection-to-spy-ring-is-dead-at-87.html).
|
||||
[^4]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress* (New York: Viking, 1952; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 233.
|
||||
[^5]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, *New School: A History of The New School for Social Research* (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 28.
|
||||
[^6]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1, special inquiry reports of September 1969 on the interviews with the publisher of The New Republic and with Alice Winchester, editor of *Antiques*.
|
||||
[^7]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, pp. 10 and 11.
|
||||
[^8]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, pp. 19 and 21.
|
||||
[^9]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, pp. 167 and 273.
|
||||
[^10]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, p. 280.
|
||||
[^11]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 30, Johnson's letter of April 1922 to Dorothy Straight.
|
||||
[^12]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 35.
|
||||
[^13]: Tara Mastrelli, "'In the Name of Freedom': a Review of Judith Friedlander's *A Light in Dark Times* (2018, Columbia University Press)," *International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society* 34 (2021), pp. 125-135, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-019-09344-5, notes citing the New School Archives and Special Collections and the Dartington Hall Trust Archives; the board tenure, the post-1929 foundation support and the Dartington Hall attribution come from these notes. The characterization of founders by Judith Friedlander, *A Light in Dark Times* (Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 307, which quotes in full a 1952 letter by Johnson, is reported through Mastrelli's review. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^14]: New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars records (MssCol 922), Series IV, box 171, folder 15, "Elmhirst Fund 1934-1935," https://archives.nypl.org/mss/922.
|
||||
[^15]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 and teletypes of September 1969 on interviews with Milton C. Rose and Harriett K. Evison, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1.
|
||||
[^16]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 ("Miscellaneous Information"), citing the Washington Times-Herald of December 6, 1952, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
|
||||
[^17]: Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, "Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst papers from Dartington Hall," #3782, https://archives.library.cornell.edu/repositories/2/resources/1289.
|
||||
|
|
@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
---
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
|
|
@ -6,9 +6,9 @@ tags:
|
|||
- Media
|
||||
- Intelligence
|
||||
- Propaganda
|
||||
summary: "The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is the United Kingdom's publicly funded national broadcaster, operating under Royal Charter since 1927; it appears in this vault primarily as a media institution whose foreign-language services were used for Cold War propaganda purposes, and whose investigative journalism produced significant coverage of intelligence scandals including Gladio, arms-to-Iraq, and BCCI."
|
||||
summary: "The British Broadcasting Corporation, the publicly funded United Kingdom broadcaster, whose foreign-language services were used for Cold War propaganda and whose monitoring service partnered with the American one; its reporting covered Gladio and BCCI."
|
||||
created: 2026-05-15
|
||||
updated: 2026-05-15
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
location: "London, United Kingdom"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -35,7 +35,17 @@ The BBC's journalism on these subjects was conducted against the backdrop of ong
|
|||
|
||||
[[Robert Maxwell]], whose connections to [[Mossad]] and intelligence services are documented elsewhere in this vault, was a direct commercial competitor to BBC journalism through his Mirror Group newspapers and the European tabloid press. Maxwell's media empire and the BBC existed in the same information environment in the UK, and Maxwell's publications were at times used to deflect or respond to BBC investigations touching on sensitive intelligence matters.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Monitoring and the American Service
|
||||
|
||||
The BBC's monitoring operation was the model for the American monitoring service and became its partner. [[Malcolm Frost]], head of the BBC Overseas Intelligence Department, supplied "the imagination and organizing ability" for the BBC's 1939 monitoring service.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
On May 17, 1946 the American service announced that it was taking over the Cairo monitoring post, which the British Ministry of Information had built up to nearly 100 employees and which the BBC could not consider operating. The service's chief, [[Russell M. Shepherd]], assured the BBC of access to the Cairo product and of the right to send as many editors as it wished to Cairo to select copy.[^4] In June 1946 Shepherd spent three weeks in London with BBC officials. Frost, by then chief of the BBC Monitoring Service, proposed that the American service begin paying its share of the monitoring cost, perhaps $250,000 a year, or supply the BBC with enough material from its own monitoring to balance the books; the BBC service then employed 385 persons at a cost of $650,000 a year.[^5] Frost informed the American service on October 15, 1947 that the BBC had obtained authority and funds to sign an agreement, after negotiations that had taken six months.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Briggs, Asa. *The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom.* 5 vols. Oxford University Press, 1961-1995.
|
||||
[^2]: Aldrich, Richard J. *The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence.* John Murray, 2001.
|
||||
[^3]: Joseph E. Roop, "Foreign Broadcast Information Service. History. Part I: 1941-1947" (CIA, approved April 1969), p. 6, on the early BBC monitoring team and Frost's role. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^4]: Roop, Part I, pp. 293-294, on the Ministry of Information's Cairo post, the announcement of May 17, 1946 and the assurances to the BBC. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^5]: Roop, Part II (CIA Directorate of Intelligence, August 1970), p. 51, on Shepherd's visit to London from June 24, 1946, his meeting with "Malcolm Frost, Chief of the BBC Monitoring Service," the $250,000 figure and the BBC service's 385 employees and $650,000 cost. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-06741690.
|
||||
[^6]: Roop, Part II, pp. 54-56, on the negotiations of 1947 and Frost's notice of October 15, 1947. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-06741690.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2025-03-05
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Atomic Energy Commission
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Atomic Energy Commission
|
||||
|
|
@ -84,15 +84,20 @@ In April 1955 [[Richard Bissell]] and Colonel [[Osmund Ritland]] of the [[Air Fo
|
|||
|
||||
The minutes of a conference on "aerial phenomena" held at 1300 on February 16, 1949 in room P-162 of the [[Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory]], classified Secret and later declassified on December 9, 1975, list among those present, from the [[Fourth Army]], the [[Armed Forces Special Weapons Project]], the [[University of New Mexico]] (Dr. [[Lincoln LaPaz]]), the FBI (Mr. Maxwell), the University of California ([[Norris Bradbury]], Dr. Holloway, Mr. Hoyt, Dr. Manley, [[Frederick Reines]] and [[Edward Teller]]) and "USAEC, SFOO: Mr. Morgan." Dr. LaPaz described the December 12, 1948 Starvation Peak fireball as of constant intensity and horizontal path, about two seconds in duration and of a green hue not observed in meteor falls, and said of the observed paths: "I defy you to find anywhere among meteorists, examples of conventional meteorites that move over long horizontal paths." Captain Neef of the Fourth Army stated that the Air Force's Project Sign "is now project Grudge, which includes the phenomena in New Mexico," and Teller said that from what LaPaz said, "it certainly sounds like everything else but meteors."[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### Wilhelm Reich and the Argonne laboratory
|
||||
|
||||
The FBI's New York office recorded that in August 1949 [[Wilhelm Reich]]'s associate Washington telephoned that he had been detained for questioning at the Commission's [[Argonne National Laboratory|Argonne laboratory]] after a visit to Oak Ridge; on 24 August Reich telephoned the laboratory and was told by an officer that he could not say whether Washington was there. [[Myron Sharaf]] told the FBI's New York office on October 11, 1949 that Washington had "swindled them out of some money," that Reich feared the Russians might obtain the information, and that Mayer, security officer of the Argonne laboratory, had advised Reich to report to the FBI; Sharaf said that orgone energy "might serve as some defense to rays of radio-active material or atomic energy."[^14] A security official of the Commission in New York told the Bureau that Reich had approached the Commission in New York on several occasions and had presented his experiments to the Commission in Washington, which told him they were outside its scope; in the Bureau's words, the scientists of the Commission were of the opinion that Reich was mentally unsound in his scientific experiments.[^14] A Bureau memorandum of March 25, 1954 describes the Institute's work as discredited by the Commission and the FDA.[^15] On October 7, 1955 Assistant Director L. B. Nichols wrote that on February 23, 1954 he had told Reich's attorney Asa Richardson that the Bureau had no current interest in Reich and that he might check with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Atomic Energy Commission.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
### Seats on the intelligence advisory bodies
|
||||
|
||||
The Central Intelligence Agency's history of the Directors of Central Intelligence records that the commission was represented on the Intelligence Advisory Committee chaired by the Director, alongside the FBI and the military and State Department intelligence chiefs, and on its successor the United States Intelligence Board, on which Donald R. Cotter represented the commission in 1972 when the Board met under Director [[Richard Helms]].[^14]
|
||||
The Central Intelligence Agency's history of the Directors of Central Intelligence records that the commission was represented on the Intelligence Advisory Committee chaired by the Director, alongside the FBI and the military and State Department intelligence chiefs, and on its successor the United States Intelligence Board, on which Donald R. Cotter represented the commission in 1972 when the Board met under Director [[Richard Helms]].[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
### The commission's grants in the psi files
|
||||
|
||||
The CIA's STARGATE collection includes the 1972 paper by [[Stuart J. Freedman]] and [[John F. Clauser]], "Experimental Test of Local Hidden-Variable Theories," whose acknowledgements state that the work was "supported by U.S. Atomic Energy Commission," and the 1979 [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] biography of [[Edwin C. May]], who joined the Grill Flame remote perturbation work, lists among his publications the 1969 "Proposal to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for Procurement of a Computer Implemented Nuclear Data Acquisition and Control System," [[Crocker Nuclear Laboratory]] Report UCD-112.[^15]
|
||||
The CIA's STARGATE collection includes the 1972 paper by [[Stuart J. Freedman]] and [[John F. Clauser]], "Experimental Test of Local Hidden-Variable Theories," whose acknowledgements state that the work was "supported by U.S. Atomic Energy Commission," and the 1979 [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] biography of [[Edwin C. May]], who joined the Grill Flame remote perturbation work, lists among his publications the 1969 "Proposal to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for Procurement of a Computer Implemented Nuclear Data Acquisition and Control System," [[Crocker Nuclear Laboratory]] Report UCD-112.[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Atomic Energy Act of 1946, Public Law 585, 60 Stat. 755, approved August 1, 1946, sections 2(a), 10(b) and 15, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-60/pdf/STATUTE-60-Pg755.pdf.
|
||||
[^2]: Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, Public Law 93-438, 88 Stat. 1233, October 11, 1974, section 101, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-88/pdf/STATUTE-88-Pg1233.pdf.
|
||||
[^3]: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, *A Short History of Nuclear Regulation* (NUREG/BR-0533), introduction, https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/brochures/br0533/ (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022/https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/brochures/br0533/).
|
||||
|
|
@ -106,5 +111,8 @@ The CIA's STARGATE collection includes the 1972 paper by [[Stuart J. Freedman]]
|
|||
[^11]: John Fialka, "Helms Says He Can't Recall LBJ Talk on Israeli A-Bomb," *The Washington Star*, March 2, 1978, CIA-RDP88-01315R000400060012-2, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01315r000400060012-2; "Ex-CIA Aide Says Johnson Quashed Israel A-Bomb Data," *The Washington Post*, March 2, 1978, CIA-RDP88-01315R000400060010-4, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01315r000400060010-4. Duckett is the sole source for the CIA's view of the diversion question.
|
||||
[^12]: Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, *The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974* (CIA History Staff, 1992), chapter 2, "Developing the U-2," pp. 56 to 57, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434/docs/U2%20-%20Chapter%202.pdf.
|
||||
[^13]: Minutes, "Conference on Aerial Phenomena," Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, February 16, 1949, transcribed at https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/bb/caop16feb1949-01.htm (pages 01, 02, 03, 05 and 18).
|
||||
[^14]: Douglas F. Garthoff, *Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946-2005* (Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2007), chapter 1 and the 1972 United States Intelligence Board photograph caption, https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/159886efc8ff17ac93a5ffc027d9a6a0/dci_leaders.pdf.
|
||||
[^15]: Freedman and Clauser, "Experimental Test of Local Hidden-Variable Theories," Physical Review Letters (1972), CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080052-7, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000200080052-7; Proposed Grill Flame Protocol, Task II, SRI 9-4186, May 8, 1979, biography and publications of Edwin C. May, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300080001-0, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001300080001-0.
|
||||
[^14]: FBI New York letter to the Director, NY 62-10139, Sharaf interview of October 11, 1949, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2 (PDF pages 10 to 13), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^15]: M. A. Jones to Mr. Nichols, March 25, 1954, same file, Part 2 (PDF pages 44 to 46).
|
||||
[^16]: L. B. Nichols to Mr. Tolson, office memorandum of October 7, 1955, same file, Part 2 (PDF page 109).
|
||||
[^17]: Douglas F. Garthoff, *Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946-2005* (Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2007), chapter 1 and the 1972 United States Intelligence Board photograph caption, https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/159886efc8ff17ac93a5ffc027d9a6a0/dci_leaders.pdf.
|
||||
[^18]: Freedman and Clauser, "Experimental Test of Local Hidden-Variable Theories," Physical Review Letters (1972), CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080052-7, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000200080052-7; Proposed Grill Flame Protocol, Task II, SRI 9-4186, May 8, 1979, biography and publications of Edwin C. May, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300080001-0, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001300080001-0.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -9,10 +9,10 @@ tags:
|
|||
- Intelligence
|
||||
- Rockefeller
|
||||
- PsychologicalWarfare
|
||||
summary: "Roosevelt's wartime Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, which served as the first official US government propaganda operation and built the economic, media, and political infrastructure for postwar American hegemony in Latin America."
|
||||
summary: "Roosevelt's wartime Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, the first official US government propaganda operation, which built economic, media and political infrastructure in Latin America."
|
||||
location: Washington, DC
|
||||
created: 2026-06-05
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-05
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) was a wartime US government agency created on August 16, 1940, by order of the [[Council of National Defense]] and placed under the direction of [[Nelson Rockefeller]]. Its official mandate was to promote hemispheric solidarity and counter Axis influence in [[Latin America]]; in practice it functioned as the first official US propaganda operation, a vehicle for expanding American corporate dominance in the hemisphere, and a testing ground for the psychological warfare and covert operations techniques that would be institutionalized in the postwar [[CIA]].[^1]
|
||||
|
|
@ -53,35 +53,37 @@ Hollywood studios were pressured to deny films to theaters showing German or Ita
|
|||
|
||||
The CIAA's Publications and Information Division, run by [[Francis Jamieson]] (a [[Pulitzer Prize]]-winning reporter and future Rockefeller campaign manager), produced the magazine *En Guardia* (registered with the US Postal Office on April 8, 1941, with the first issue in summer 1941 and the third issue circulating in October). Circulation reached 750,000 copies per issue by peak production, distributed free to politicians, journalists, and business executives. Propaganda posters and editorial cartoons were produced through contractors coordinated by Jamieson's New York office; these materials are documented in NARA Record Group 229, series "Propaganda Materials, 1941-1945" (NAID 540082) and "Status of Projects Reports, 1942-1945" (NAID 2067594).[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
The CIAA was one of the heaviest users of the [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]]. On March 5, 1942 Nelson Rockefeller wrote to FCC chairman [[James L. Fly]] to thank the commission for the "invaluable aid" the service supplied to his organization. On July 29, 1942 he reported that the CIAA daily news roundup on Latin American affairs included 400 to 500 words a day drawn from the Kingsville transcripts.[^16] On July 7, 1942 [[Goodwin Watson]] wrote to Rockefeller about an offer the CIAA had made to the service's analyst John W. Gardner, and proposed that officials of the two offices settle the matter together.[^17] On January 2, 1943 [[Robert D. Leigh]] wrote to Rockefeller suggesting that the CIAA set up a system like the service's for releasing information about Latin America.[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
### Aviation and Infrastructure
|
||||
|
||||
The CIAA funded and coordinated displacement of Axis-affiliated airlines from South American routes and integrated Latin American air forces into a US-led hemispheric defense system. The Panair do Brazil operations in northeastern Brazil (a Pan American subsidiary) received War Department financing to build airfields beginning in June 1941; the Natal airbase was built in 1942. CIAA-funded airfields and trans-Andean highways served the immediate war effort while creating the infrastructure for postwar corporate penetration of the interior.[^16]
|
||||
The CIAA funded and coordinated displacement of Axis-affiliated airlines from South American routes and integrated Latin American air forces into a US-led hemispheric defense system. The Panair do Brazil operations in northeastern Brazil (a Pan American subsidiary) received War Department financing to build airfields beginning in June 1941; the Natal airbase was built in 1942. CIAA-funded airfields and trans-Andean highways served the immediate war effort while creating the infrastructure for postwar corporate penetration of the interior.[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
The trans-Andean highway to [[Pucallpa]], Peru, funded by the CIAA, passed within fifteen miles of the [[Ganso Azul]] oil field, the Amazon basin's only proven petroleum source at the time. This highway also enabled the [[Summer Institute of Linguistics]] to establish its Amazonian base at [[Yarinacocha]] adjacent to the road.[^17]
|
||||
The trans-Andean highway to [[Pucallpa]], Peru, funded by the CIAA, passed within fifteen miles of the [[Ganso Azul]] oil field, the Amazon basin's only proven petroleum source at the time. This highway also enabled the [[Summer Institute of Linguistics]] to establish its Amazonian base at [[Yarinacocha]] adjacent to the road.[^19]
|
||||
|
||||
Record Group 229 at NARA includes a [[Department of Transportation]] series totaling 129 linear feet, documenting CIAA aviation, ocean shipping, railway, and highway programs across the hemisphere.[^18]
|
||||
Record Group 229 at NARA includes a [[Department of Transportation]] series totaling 129 linear feet, documenting CIAA aviation, ocean shipping, railway, and highway programs across the hemisphere.[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
### Rubber Program and the Amazon
|
||||
|
||||
The CIAA was assigned the task of reviving Amazon rubber production after Japanese forces overran British Far East plantations in 1942, eliminating 92 percent of the US rubber supply. The US and Brazil entered a formal rubber agreement in March 1942 under which the US committed a $5 million fund to improve raw rubber production in the Amazon and guaranteed purchase of all Brazilian exportable rubber through 1946 at fixed prices. The US paid the Brazilian government $100 for each worker delivered to the Amazon as a "rubber soldier."[^19]
|
||||
The CIAA was assigned the task of reviving Amazon rubber production after Japanese forces overran British Far East plantations in 1942, eliminating 92 percent of the US rubber supply. The US and Brazil entered a formal rubber agreement in March 1942 under which the US committed a $5 million fund to improve raw rubber production in the Amazon and guaranteed purchase of all Brazilian exportable rubber through 1946 at fixed prices. The US paid the Brazilian government $100 for each worker delivered to the Amazon as a "rubber soldier."[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
The rubber program was administered through a network of agencies: the [[Rubber Reserve Company]] (incorporated June 28, 1940, as an RFC subsidiary), which controlled stockpiling and disposal; the [[Rubber Development Corporation]], which managed Amazon operations and was financed through special funds established under the Washington Accords governing Brazil's wartime cooperation; the Brazilian [[SEMTA]] (Serviço Especial de Mobilização de Trabalhadores para a Amazônia), which recruited labor; [[SAVA]] for labor placement; the [[Banco de Credito da Borracha]] for production financing; and the [[SESP]] health and sanitation service.[^20]
|
||||
The rubber program was administered through a network of agencies: the [[Rubber Reserve Company]] (incorporated June 28, 1940, as an RFC subsidiary), which controlled stockpiling and disposal; the [[Rubber Development Corporation]], which managed Amazon operations and was financed through special funds established under the Washington Accords governing Brazil's wartime cooperation; the Brazilian [[SEMTA]] (Serviço Especial de Mobilização de Trabalhadores para a Amazônia), which recruited labor; [[SAVA]] for labor placement; the [[Banco de Credito da Borracha]] for production financing; and the [[SESP]] health and sanitation service.[^22]
|
||||
|
||||
Between 1943 and 1945 approximately 60,000 people were recruited to work as rubber tappers in the Amazon interior. The results were catastrophic for the workers: roughly one-third died within the first year of the program, a ratio that climbed toward one-half before the war ended. Survivors were indentured to seringal operators through permanent debts inherited across generations. CIAA-administered health and sanitation programs for rubber workers, documented in NARA Record Group 229, included the Servicio Especial de Saude Publica, with quarterly reports from 1944 and 1946-1950, and architectural and engineering plans for water supply, drainage, and sewer systems from 1937-1951.[^21]
|
||||
Between 1943 and 1945 approximately 60,000 people were recruited to work as rubber tappers in the Amazon interior. The results were catastrophic for the workers: roughly one-third died within the first year of the program, a ratio that climbed toward one-half before the war ended. Survivors were indentured to seringal operators through permanent debts inherited across generations. CIAA-administered health and sanitation programs for rubber workers, documented in NARA Record Group 229, included the Servicio Especial de Saude Publica, with quarterly reports from 1944 and 1946-1950, and architectural and engineering plans for water supply, drainage, and sewer systems from 1937-1951.[^23]
|
||||
|
||||
The CIAA also oversaw the [[Metals Reserve Company]] (incorporated June 28, 1940, as an RFC subsidiary), which procured approximately 50 kinds of strategic metals and minerals from 51 countries; Bolivia's tin and tungsten, Chile's copper and nitrates, Colombia's platinum and mercury, and Venezuela's oil were among the primary Latin American targets of preclusive buying. By January 1941 the CIAA had been assigned the specific task of assembling data on Axis purchases of strategic materials in Latin America to support preclusive buying recommendations.[^22]
|
||||
The CIAA also oversaw the [[Metals Reserve Company]] (incorporated June 28, 1940, as an RFC subsidiary), which procured approximately 50 kinds of strategic metals and minerals from 51 countries; Bolivia's tin and tungsten, Chile's copper and nitrates, Colombia's platinum and mercury, and Venezuela's oil were among the primary Latin American targets of preclusive buying. By January 1941 the CIAA had been assigned the specific task of assembling data on Axis purchases of strategic materials in Latin America to support preclusive buying recommendations.[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
### Health and Sanitation Programs
|
||||
|
||||
Beginning in spring 1942 the CIAA developed a major health and sanitation program for Latin America, operating through the [[Institute of Inter-American Affairs]] (IIAA), incorporated as a US government corporation in 1942. The IIAA established joint US-Latin American "Servicios" organizations across the hemisphere, each representing cooperative programs in public health, sanitation, agriculture, and education. Coordinating committee records for Brazil and Peru, covering 1941-1946, are held in Record Group 229; they include architectural and engineering plans for 660 health and sanitation infrastructure projects across the hemisphere.[^23]
|
||||
Beginning in spring 1942 the CIAA developed a major health and sanitation program for Latin America, operating through the [[Institute of Inter-American Affairs]] (IIAA), incorporated as a US government corporation in 1942. The IIAA established joint US-Latin American "Servicios" organizations across the hemisphere, each representing cooperative programs in public health, sanitation, agriculture, and education. Coordinating committee records for Brazil and Peru, covering 1941-1946, are held in Record Group 229; they include architectural and engineering plans for 660 health and sanitation infrastructure projects across the hemisphere.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
### Dissolution and Succession
|
||||
|
||||
Rockefeller was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs at the State Department's general reorganization on December 20, 1944, when the position was formally created. He served under both Roosevelt and Truman through 1945.[^24]
|
||||
Rockefeller was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs at the State Department's general reorganization on December 20, 1944, when the position was formally created. He served under both Roosevelt and Truman through 1945.[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
After Rockefeller's departure, Wallace Harrison became director of the renamed Office of Inter-American Affairs under Executive Order 9532 (March 23, 1945). Executive Order 9608 (August 31, 1945) transferred OIAA informational activities to the State Department after the end of the war. Executive Order 9710 (April 10, 1946, effective May 20, 1946), signed by President [[Harry S. Truman]], abolished the office entirely; the Secretary of State received control over five subsidiary corporations: the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, the [[Inter-American Educational Foundation]], the [[Institute of Inter-American Transportation]], the [[Inter-American Navigation Corporation]], and [[Prencin-radio]], along with all records, property, funds, and remaining personnel.[^25]
|
||||
After Rockefeller's departure, Wallace Harrison became director of the renamed Office of Inter-American Affairs under Executive Order 9532 (March 23, 1945). Executive Order 9608 (August 31, 1945) transferred OIAA informational activities to the State Department after the end of the war. Executive Order 9710 (April 10, 1946, effective May 20, 1946), signed by President [[Harry S. Truman]], abolished the office entirely; the Secretary of State received control over five subsidiary corporations: the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, the [[Inter-American Educational Foundation]], the [[Institute of Inter-American Transportation]], the [[Inter-American Navigation Corporation]], and [[Prencin-radio]], along with all records, property, funds, and remaining personnel.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
The CIAA's personnel, techniques, and institutional relationships migrated into the State Department, the new CIA, and Rockefeller's private instruments, the [[IBEC]] and [[AIA]]. The FBI's Special Intelligence Service transferred its Latin American networks, communications systems, and personnel to the CIA during the same period. The CIAA's methods, particularly press control, radio operations, controlled newsprint, and the use of private business executives for public policy, became templates for CIA covert operations in the subsequent decade.[^26]
|
||||
The CIAA's personnel, techniques, and institutional relationships migrated into the State Department, the new CIA, and Rockefeller's private instruments, the [[IBEC]] and [[AIA]]. The FBI's Special Intelligence Service transferred its Latin American networks, communications systems, and personnel to the CIA during the same period. The CIAA's methods, particularly press control, radio operations, controlled newsprint, and the use of private business executives for public policy, became templates for CIA covert operations in the subsequent decade.[^28]
|
||||
|
||||
### Archival Holdings
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -96,7 +98,7 @@ Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs are held at NARA as Record Group
|
|||
- Division of Agriculture (1 linear foot)
|
||||
- Department of Special Services (1 linear foot)
|
||||
|
||||
Audiovisual materials include 45 reels of motion picture film documenting Latin American activities and dignitaries' visits (1940-1945), 24 sound recordings of Spanish and English radio broadcasts (1941-1947), 3,386 still photographs including the Rockefeller Collection, 79 posters and drawings (1941-1945), 55 maps of South American locations, and 660 architectural and engineering plans for health and sanitation infrastructure. Records of subsidiary corporations and minutes of their meetings cover 1942-1949.[^27]
|
||||
Audiovisual materials include 45 reels of motion picture film documenting Latin American activities and dignitaries' visits (1940-1945), 24 sound recordings of Spanish and English radio broadcasts (1941-1947), 3,386 still photographs including the Rockefeller Collection, 79 posters and drawings (1941-1945), 55 maps of South American locations, and 660 architectural and engineering plans for health and sanitation infrastructure. Records of subsidiary corporations and minutes of their meetings cover 1942-1949.[^29]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -115,15 +117,17 @@ Audiovisual materials include 45 reels of motion picture film documenting Latin
|
|||
[^13]: Proclaimed List, July 1941, 1,800 firms: TIME, "War Front: Blacklist"; FRUS 1941 Vol. VI, Document 313 (history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1941v06/d313). Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 ("Nelson's Grand Alliance").
|
||||
[^14]: *Saludos Amigos* premiere Rio de Janeiro August 24, 1942; US release February 6, 1943; Disney goodwill tour facilitated by CIAA: Dale Adams, "Saludos Amigos: Hollywood and FDR's Good Neighbor Policy," *Quarterly Review of Film and Video* 24, no. 3 (2007); Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8.
|
||||
[^15]: *En Guardia* registered April 8, 1941; first issue summer 1941; circulation 750,000: research paper, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, scholarworks.utrgv.edu/art_fac/3/. NARA RG 229, "Propaganda Materials, 1941-1945" (NAID 540082); "Status of Projects Reports, 1942-1945" (NAID 2067594): NARA blog, text-message.blogs.archives.gov, September 26, 2017. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 and Ch. 13 ("The Junta Regroups").
|
||||
[^16]: Panair do Brazil airfield agreement June 1941; Natal airbase 1942: The Pan Am Historical Foundation, panam.org. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 ("The Secret War for the Skies").
|
||||
[^17]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 ("Wings over the Amazon").
|
||||
[^18]: NARA RG 229 Department of Transportation series, 129 linear feet: archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/229.html.
|
||||
[^19]: US-Brazil rubber agreement, March 1942; $5 million fund; $100 per worker; guaranteed purchase through 1946: Americas Quarterly, "The Amazon's Greatest Generation?"; Quintus Curtius, "Brazil's Rubber Soldiers."
|
||||
[^20]: Rubber Reserve Company incorporated June 28, 1940 as RFC subsidiary: Jesse H. Jones, *Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the RFC* (Macmillan, 1951), pp. 406-415. Rubber Development Corporation, SEMTA, Washington Accords: ResearchGate, "Os Soldados da Borracha." FRUS 1943, Vol. V, Document 627 (September 9, 1943, McAshan to Ambassador Caffery): history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1943v05/d627. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 and Ch. 12.
|
||||
[^21]: 60,000 rubber workers recruited 1943-1945; mortality estimates: Americas Quarterly, "The Amazon's Greatest Generation?"; Quintus Curtius, "Brazil's Rubber Soldiers." SESP records and health infrastructure plans: NARA RG 229; "History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs," 1947. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 and Ch. 12.
|
||||
[^22]: Metals Reserve Company incorporated June 28, 1940 as RFC subsidiary (alongside Rubber Reserve Company and Defense Plant Corporation, all created the same day): Jesse H. Jones, *Fifty Billion Dollars*, pp. 389-405. Preclusive buying data assembly by January 1941: "History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs," 1947. Strategic materials by country: Foreign Affairs, "Our Economic Warfare," April 1942.
|
||||
[^23]: Institute of Inter-American Affairs incorporated 1942: NARA, "Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs." Servicios programs and 660 infrastructure plans: NARA RG 229; "History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs," 1947. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8.
|
||||
[^24]: Rockefeller appointed Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs, entry on duty December 20, 1944: State Department Historical Office, "List of Assistant Secretaries of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs," history.state.gov; Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 and Ch. 12-13.
|
||||
[^25]: Executive Order 9532, March 23, 1945; Executive Order 9608, August 31, 1945; Executive Order 9710, April 10, 1946, effective May 20, 1946; five subsidiary corporations transferred to Secretary of State: American Presidency Project.
|
||||
[^26]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8, Ch. 12-13. SIS networks transferred to CIA at CIA's founding in 1947: CIA, "The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency," cia.gov/stories/story/the-office-of-strategic-services-americas-first-intelligence-agency/.
|
||||
[^27]: NARA RG 229 full description: archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/229.html; "History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs," 1947.
|
||||
[^16]: Joseph E. Roop, "Foreign Broadcast Information Service. History. Part I: 1941-1947" (CIA, approved April 1969), pp. 158-159, on the letters of March 5, 1942 and July 29, 1942. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947. Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis, 1941-1945," note 24, gives the July 29, 1942 letter with the Kingsville passage. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol45no5/html/v45i5a04p.htm.
|
||||
[^17]: Roop, Part I, pp. 218-219, on Watson's letter of July 7, 1942, and pp. 101-102, on Leigh's letter of January 2, 1943. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^18]: Panair do Brazil airfield agreement June 1941; Natal airbase 1942: The Pan Am Historical Foundation, panam.org. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 ("The Secret War for the Skies").
|
||||
[^19]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 ("Wings over the Amazon").
|
||||
[^20]: NARA RG 229 Department of Transportation series, 129 linear feet: archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/229.html.
|
||||
[^21]: US-Brazil rubber agreement, March 1942; $5 million fund; $100 per worker; guaranteed purchase through 1946: Americas Quarterly, "The Amazon's Greatest Generation?"; Quintus Curtius, "Brazil's Rubber Soldiers."
|
||||
[^22]: Rubber Reserve Company incorporated June 28, 1940 as RFC subsidiary: Jesse H. Jones, *Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the RFC* (Macmillan, 1951), pp. 406-415. Rubber Development Corporation, SEMTA, Washington Accords: ResearchGate, "Os Soldados da Borracha." FRUS 1943, Vol. V, Document 627 (September 9, 1943, McAshan to Ambassador Caffery): history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1943v05/d627. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 and Ch. 12.
|
||||
[^23]: 60,000 rubber workers recruited 1943-1945; mortality estimates: Americas Quarterly, "The Amazon's Greatest Generation?"; Quintus Curtius, "Brazil's Rubber Soldiers." SESP records and health infrastructure plans: NARA RG 229; "History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs," 1947. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 and Ch. 12.
|
||||
[^24]: Metals Reserve Company incorporated June 28, 1940 as RFC subsidiary (alongside Rubber Reserve Company and Defense Plant Corporation, all created the same day): Jesse H. Jones, *Fifty Billion Dollars*, pp. 389-405. Preclusive buying data assembly by January 1941: "History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs," 1947. Strategic materials by country: Foreign Affairs, "Our Economic Warfare," April 1942.
|
||||
[^25]: Institute of Inter-American Affairs incorporated 1942: NARA, "Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs." Servicios programs and 660 infrastructure plans: NARA RG 229; "History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs," 1947. Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8.
|
||||
[^26]: Rockefeller appointed Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs, entry on duty December 20, 1944: State Department Historical Office, "List of Assistant Secretaries of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs," history.state.gov; Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8 and Ch. 12-13.
|
||||
[^27]: Executive Order 9532, March 23, 1945; Executive Order 9608, August 31, 1945; Executive Order 9710, April 10, 1946, effective May 20, 1946; five subsidiary corporations transferred to Secretary of State: American Presidency Project.
|
||||
[^28]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 8, Ch. 12-13. SIS networks transferred to CIA at CIA's founding in 1947: CIA, "The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency," cia.gov/stories/story/the-office-of-strategic-services-americas-first-intelligence-agency/.
|
||||
[^29]: NARA RG 229 full description: archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/229.html; "History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs," 1947.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ aliases:
|
|||
- Central Intelligence Agency
|
||||
- CIA
|
||||
created: 2025-07-22
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-08
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- Intelligence
|
||||
|
|
@ -117,6 +117,14 @@ CIA Inspector General [[Fred Hitz]] testified before the [[House Permanent Selec
|
|||
|
||||
Multiple CIA officials were indicted during the Iran-Contra investigation. Clarridge was indicted on seven counts of perjury. Fernández was indicted on four counts. [[Alan Fiers]] pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. All were pardoned by former CIA director [[George H.W. Bush]].[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
### Foreign Broadcast Information Service
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]] became a unit of the agency in 1947. The [[War Department]] had sponsored the service from January 2, 1946, and the [[Director of Central Intelligence]] assumed control of it on July 31, 1946, before the [[National Security Act of 1947]] replaced the [[Central Intelligence Group]] with the agency.[^24] The administrative history of the service's record group lists the successor as "Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Central Intelligence Agency, 1947-."[^25] The service's 1969 history says it came to the agency "almost mature, trained and disciplined, and ready to plunge immediately into the tasks outlined for it."[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
Within the agency the service sat under the [[Assistant Director for Operations]]. In January 1947 the Assistant Director presented a propaganda analysis program to the PRC, approving the proposed program but excluding "interpretative analysis" from its scope, and the requested staff was twelve at $61,000 a year. [[Lawrence K. White]] was announced as deputy chief of the service on January 9, 1947.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
The service's functions were folded into the [[Open Source Center]] in November 2005. The release announcing the center said the Director of the CIA would administer it on behalf of the DNI.[^28]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
|
|
@ -142,3 +150,8 @@ Multiple CIA officials were indicted during the Iran-Contra investigation. Clarr
|
|||
[^21]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 5: "God, Fatherland and Freedom"
|
||||
[^22]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Epilogue: "The damage that has been done"
|
||||
[^23]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 13: "The wrong kind of friends"
|
||||
[^24]: Joseph E. Roop, "Foreign Broadcast Information Service. History. Part I: 1941-1947" (Central Intelligence Agency, approved for release April 1969), pp. 279, 299-300 and 303. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^25]: National Archives and Records Administration, Guide to Federal Records, Record Group 262, administrative history. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/262.html.
|
||||
[^26]: Roop, Part I, p. 2. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^27]: Roop, Part II (CIA Directorate of Intelligence, August 1970), pp. 2 and 151-152. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-06741690.
|
||||
[^28]: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "ODNI Announces Establishment of Open Source Center," News Release No. 6-05, November 8, 2005. https://irp.fas.org/news/2005/11/odni110805.html.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2025-07-22
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Federal Bureau of Investigation
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- FBI
|
||||
|
|
@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ relations:
|
|||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[Department of Justice]]"
|
||||
role: "investigative component"
|
||||
fn: 14
|
||||
fn: 25
|
||||
- type: investigated
|
||||
with: "[[Fred Crisman]]"
|
||||
start: 1947-08
|
||||
|
|
@ -50,7 +50,19 @@ relations:
|
|||
start: 2006
|
||||
end: 2007
|
||||
role: "West Palm Beach FBI squad, case agents and supervisor"
|
||||
fn: 25
|
||||
- type: investigated
|
||||
with: "[[Wilhelm Reich]]"
|
||||
start: 1941-05
|
||||
end: 1957
|
||||
role: "bufile 100-14601"
|
||||
fn: 14
|
||||
- type: informant_for
|
||||
with: "[[Alvin Johnson]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1930
|
||||
role: "met regularly with FBI officials to report on the New School faculty, by his own acknowledgment in private letters; sole source"
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the principal federal criminal investigative agency of the [[United States]] and a component of the [[Department of Justice]]. Its files bear on several clusters of this vault: the 1947 flying disc inquiries, the army parapsychology program, the Contra drug cases, the [[Operation C-Chase]] prosecution of [[Bank of Credit and Commerce International]] and the Palm Beach investigation of [[Jeffrey Epstein]].
|
||||
|
|
@ -97,9 +109,19 @@ Senate subcommittee staff recorded that the FBI and Customs possessed informatio
|
|||
|
||||
The Kerry-Brown report on BCCI concluded that Operation C-Chase "arose as a Treasury Department investigation brought by Customs and IRS agents only, without the involvement of the FBI," and that "the failure to bring the FBI into the case may have contributed to the lack of follow through" on what Customs agent [[Robert Mazur]] called "literally hundreds of important leads." The report added that "there does not appear to have been anything sinister" in the Justice Department's pause on the Tampa grand jury.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### Wilhelm Reich
|
||||
|
||||
On May 7, 1941 Assistant Director [[Edward A. Tamm]] wrote that "it appears that this man is a potentially dangerous threat to the internal security" of [[Wilhelm Reich]], sponsor of an applicant for a visa; [[R. P. Kramer]] replied on May 8 that a custodial detention card had been prepared but not approved.[^14] [[J. Edgar Hoover]]'s letter of January 31, 1942 to the New York office lists Reich tentatively in Group B, "Individuals believed to be somewhat less dangerous but whose activities should be restricted," with the evidence marked "Not satisfactory to substantiate the charges"; on July 16, 1943 the Attorney General wrote that the danger classifications "serve no useful purpose."[^14] On October 7, 1955 [[Louis B. Nichols]] recorded that on February 23, 1954 he had told Reich's attorney that "we had no current interest in Dr. Reich."[^15] The Bureau's memorandum of February 14, 1957 states that Reich and his staff had in 1956 and January 1957 contacted the Boston, Augusta and Washington offices, in its word "ostensibly" to offer information on espionage.[^16] On February 25, 1957 Washington Field Office agents interviewed Reich at the Alban Towers Apartments, where he was living under the alias "Roner"; the report records that when "flying saucers" were mentioned and he was asked whether his knowledge of them prompted his contacting the Bureau, he "replied in the affirmative but once again could not be specific," and that he retained a sealed envelope he had asked the agents to deliver to Hoover.[^17] After Reich's death on November 3, 1957 the chief medical officer of Lewisburg penitentiary sent the Bureau his stomach contents, writing that "his family fears that he may have been poisoned"; the Bureau laboratory reported on January 2, 1958 that formaldehyde was detected and that no other commonly poisonous materials were detected in the tests made.[^18] The Boston airtel of March 12, 1957 is captioned "William Steig, William Moise, Assaulting of Federal Officer, Conspiracy"; records found do not establish whether this Steig is the cartoonist.[^19]
|
||||
|
||||
### Faculty reporting at the New School, 1930s to 1950s
|
||||
|
||||
[[Peter M. Rutkoff]] and [[William B. Scott]] write that after 1947 [[Alvin Johnson]], president of the [[New School for Social Research]], acknowledged in his private letters "that he had been meeting regularly with FBI officials since the 1930s to report on the faculty."[^20] The same history quotes [[Sidney Hook]] that Johnson "wanted to get rid of a Communist Party member" but "delegated it to [[Clara Mayer]]."[^20] It states that a [[Rockefeller Foundation]] memorandum "indicated that Johnson had also monitored files of 'enemy aliens' in the early 1940s for the federal district attorney," and its endnote cites a memorandum of January 27, 1942, in the Rockefeller Foundation Archives' "Hans Eisler File."[^21] In early 1942, at a meeting Johnson requested, he and [[Hans Staudinger]] testified before a State Department panel of representatives from the FBI, the Visa Division, Naval Intelligence and the Army, and Johnson had to defend himself against charges of heading a "Communist outfit."[^22] The same history reports that in the early 1950s the school's administration received "inquiries from congressional and Senate committees, the FBI, and numerous individuals."[^23]
|
||||
|
||||
Johnson's memoir records that after the United States entered the war he was appointed to an enemy alien hearing board, writing: "Case after case came before us, well prepared in advance by the FBI. After we had studied the record and had heard the FBI investigators, we would hear the accused."[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
### Epstein, 2006 to 2008
|
||||
|
||||
The Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility reported that in early 2006 a West Palm Beach FBI special agent told Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Marie Villafana that the Palm Beach Police had approached the FBI because the state attorney's office was considering not charging the case or allowing a misdemeanor plea. Villafana and two FBI case agents developed a federal case. The FBI planned to arrest Epstein after a May 15, 2007, indictment date and to hold a press conference, and wanted to arrest him in the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]] while he judged a beauty pageant. After the U.S. Attorney's Office managers in [[Miami]] declined to approve the indictment, the squad supervisor was "not happy," and the case agent recalled the supervisor as "extremely upset." At a meeting with Villafana and her managers the FBI insisted that Epstein register for life as a sex offender. After Epstein rejected the proposal, the squad supervisor "yelled at" First Assistant U.S. Attorney [[Jeffrey Sloman]]. The report found no misconduct by Department attorneys and concluded that U.S. Attorney [[Alexander Acosta]] exercised poor judgment in resolving the case through a non-prosecution agreement.[^14]
|
||||
The Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility reported that in early 2006 a West Palm Beach FBI special agent told Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Marie Villafana that the Palm Beach Police had approached the FBI because the state attorney's office was considering not charging the case or allowing a misdemeanor plea. Villafana and two FBI case agents developed a federal case. The FBI planned to arrest Epstein after a May 15, 2007, indictment date and to hold a press conference, and wanted to arrest him in the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]] while he judged a beauty pageant. After the U.S. Attorney's Office managers in [[Miami]] declined to approve the indictment, the squad supervisor was "not happy," and the case agent recalled the supervisor as "extremely upset." At a meeting with Villafana and her managers the FBI insisted that Epstein register for life as a sex offender. After Epstein rejected the proposal, the squad supervisor "yelled at" First Assistant U.S. Attorney [[Jeffrey Sloman]]. The report found no misconduct by Department attorneys and concluded that U.S. Attorney [[Alexander Acosta]] exercised poor judgment in resolving the case through a non-prosecution agreement.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -116,4 +138,15 @@ The Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility reported that in ea
|
|||
[^11]: U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, *Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy*, S. Prt. 100-165 (December 1988), https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras
|
||||
[^12]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter XI, section D, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9712/ch11p1.htm
|
||||
[^13]: U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, *The BCCI Affair*, report by Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown (December 1992), section on Operation C-Chase, https://archive.org/details/thebcciaffair_202003
|
||||
[^14]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, *Investigation into the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida's Resolution of Its 2006-2008 Federal Criminal Investigation of Jeffrey Epstein* (November 2020), Parts III and IV, copy at https://archive.org/details/epsteindocs ; executive summary at https://www.justice.gov/opr/page/file/1336471/dl
|
||||
[^14]: Tamm memorandum of May 7, 1941 and Kramer memorandum of May 8, 1941 (Part 1, PDF pages 16 and 17); Hoover to SAC New York, January 31, 1942 (Part 1, PDF pages 54 and 55); Attorney General memorandum of July 16, 1943, same file, Part 1.
|
||||
[^15]: Nichols to Tolson, October 7, 1955, same file, Part 2 (PDF page 109).
|
||||
[^16]: M. A. Jones to L. B. Nichols, February 14, 1957, same file, Part 2 (PDF pages 123 and 124).
|
||||
[^17]: SAC, Washington Field Office, memorandum to the Director, file 100-1849, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 2 (PDF pages 129 and 130), https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^18]: Witkin to the Director, December 9, 1957, with autopsy report of November 26, 1957 and FBI Laboratory report of January 2, 1958, same file, Part 6 (PDF pages 21 to 24).
|
||||
[^19]: Boston airtel of March 12, 1957, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 6, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^20]: Peter Rutkoff and William Scott, New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 226. Sole source for the FBI reporting.
|
||||
[^21]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 226 and note 22, p. 296: "Johnson to Urban (December 9, 1948), JPYU; memorandum (January 27, 1942), Hans Eisler File, Rockefeller Foundation Archives." The note names no author for the memorandum. Sole source for the enemy alien monitoring.
|
||||
[^22]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 135.
|
||||
[^23]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 228.
|
||||
[^24]: Alvin Johnson, Pioneer's Progress (Viking Press, 1952; University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 370.
|
||||
[^25]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, *Investigation into the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida's Resolution of Its 2006-2008 Federal Criminal Investigation of Jeffrey Epstein* (November 2020), Parts III and IV, copy at https://archive.org/details/epsteindocs ; executive summary at https://www.justice.gov/opr/page/file/1336471/dl
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,329 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- FBIS
|
||||
- ForeignBroadcast
|
||||
- Monitoring
|
||||
- PropagandaAnalysis
|
||||
- PsychologicalWarfare
|
||||
- FCC
|
||||
- CIA
|
||||
- ColdWar
|
||||
- OpenSourceIntelligence
|
||||
- Congress
|
||||
- DiesCommittee
|
||||
- CoxCommittee
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- RockefellerFoundation
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service
|
||||
- Foreign Broadcast Information Service
|
||||
- Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service
|
||||
- Foreign Broadcast Information Branch
|
||||
- Federal Broadcast Intelligence Service
|
||||
- FBIS
|
||||
- FBMS
|
||||
- FBIB
|
||||
summary: "The Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service was the United States government's radio monitoring and analysis service, created inside the Federal Communications Commission in 1941 and whose expertise was carried into the Open Source Center in 2005."
|
||||
start: 1941-02-26
|
||||
location: "Washington, D.C."
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Lloyd Free]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Director"
|
||||
start: 1941-06-16
|
||||
end: 1942-04
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Robert D. Leigh]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Director"
|
||||
start: 1942-07
|
||||
end: 1944-07
|
||||
fn: 22
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Charles S. Hyneman]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Director"
|
||||
start: 1944-07-27
|
||||
end: 1945-08-07
|
||||
fn: 55
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Russell M. Shepherd]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Director, fourth director of the service"
|
||||
start: 1945-08-07
|
||||
end: 1947-09-29
|
||||
fn: 76
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Harold N. Graves Jr.]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Senior Administrative Officer; acting director in 1942"
|
||||
start: 1941-03
|
||||
end: 1943-12
|
||||
fn: 51
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Goodwin Watson]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Head of the Analysis Section, later Analysis Division"
|
||||
start: 1941-11-17
|
||||
end: 1943-11
|
||||
fn: 23
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Hans Speier]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Senior Political Analyst and head of the Central European Section; acting chief analyst after Watson's departure"
|
||||
start: 1942-03
|
||||
end: 1944-05-22
|
||||
fn: 28
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Nathan Leites]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Analyst; sent to London with Watson in September 1942"
|
||||
start: 1942-09
|
||||
fn: 26
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Alexander L. George]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Analyst in the Central European Section"
|
||||
fn: 31
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[William E. Dodd Jr.]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Editor, hired December 1941"
|
||||
start: 1941-12
|
||||
end: 1943-11
|
||||
fn: 36
|
||||
- type: investigated
|
||||
with: "[[House Un-American Activities Committee]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Named Goodwin Watson, Frederick L. Schuman and William E. Dodd Jr. in 1941 and 1943 attacks"
|
||||
start: 1941-11-18
|
||||
end: 1943-04-21
|
||||
fn: 35
|
||||
- type: investigated
|
||||
with: "[[Cox Committee]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Special House committee to investigate the Federal Communications Commission"
|
||||
start: 1943-01
|
||||
end: 1945-01-02
|
||||
fn: 45
|
||||
- type: owned
|
||||
with: "[[Federal Communications Commission]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Parent agency of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service and Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service"
|
||||
start: 1941-02-26
|
||||
end: 1945-12-30
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: owned
|
||||
with: "[[Central Intelligence Group]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Sponsoring agency after the War Department"
|
||||
start: 1946-07-31
|
||||
end: 1947-09
|
||||
fn: 66
|
||||
- type: owned
|
||||
with: "[[Central Intelligence Agency]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "Component of the agency, under the Assistant Director for Operations"
|
||||
start: 1947
|
||||
fn: 67
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS) was the United States government's service for monitoring, translating and analyzing foreign radio broadcasts. It began as the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service inside the [[Federal Communications Commission]] (FCC) in 1941, passed to the [[War Department]] at the end of 1945, came under the [[Central Intelligence Group]] in 1946 and the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] in 1947, and in November 2005 was named as the base of expertise for the [[Open Source Center]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Creation in the Federal Communications Commission
|
||||
|
||||
The proposal for a government monitoring service reached the [[Defense Communications Board]] in January 1941. The [[Princeton Listening Center]] had been running since November 1939, and the [[State Department]] official [[Breckinridge Long]], the Board's State Department representative, introduced the resolution calling on the FCC to establish a monitoring service.[^2] [[Helena Huntington Smith]] wrote in *Collier's* in January 1943 that the service's "godfather was Breckinridge Long of the State Department," who took the idea to FCC chairman [[James L. Fly]]. Stephen C. Mercado, who serves in the Directorate of Science and Technology, uses the same word for Long and quotes his letter of September 10, 1941 congratulating Fly.[^3] The FCC's annual report for fiscal 1941 states that the service was created in cooperation with the Defense Communications Board.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
On February 25, 1941 [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] allotted $150,000 from his emergency fund, and the money was transferred the next day, so that the birth date of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) was February 26, 1941.[^5] Daniel Bessner's dissertation on [[Hans Speier]] dates the origin to a late 1940 meeting between Roosevelt and [[Henry L. Stimson]], then Secretary of War, at which Stimson suggested a unit to monitor foreign propaganda aimed at the United States.[^6] A 1969 CIA history of the service has the idea raised in an informal late 1940 discussion between the Secretary of State and Roosevelt.[^7] The FCC's Radio Intelligence Division had been running the National Defense Activities that recorded foreign broadcasts, and the FCC was "the only group staffed and equipped" for the monitoring work.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
The service began in an old garage at 316 F Street Northeast in Washington, and in April 1942 moved to 1424 K Street NW, where four floors were assigned to it.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Robert D. Leigh]], who took over as director on July 15, 1942, recommended renaming the service the Broadcast Intelligence Service, on the reasoning that the name was "less unwieldy and more accurately reflected the duties of the organization." The FCC insisted on keeping the word "foreign," and on July 26, 1942 the FBMS became the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service.[^10] An FCC order of July 28, 1942 is recorded for the same change.[^11] The name was raised again in 1945. In a memorandum for the FCC of March 2, 1945, [[Charles S. Hyneman]] proposed a change to end confusion with the FBI, which reported trouble from misdirected mail, and suggested International Broadcast Intelligence Service, Broadcast Intelligence Service, Foreign Broadcast Reporting Service and Broadcast Reporting Service, explaining that "intelligence" and "reporting" described its operations better than "monitoring." The service's newsletter, *On the Beam*, reported on April 9, 1945 that the FCC had approved the change to Foreign Broadcast Reporting Service. The next month the newsletter announced that the FCC had reversed itself, and the new name was never formally adopted.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
### Princeton and the Rockefeller Foundation
|
||||
|
||||
The Princeton Listening Center was the most visible American monitoring effort before the government service existed. [[Harold N. Graves Jr.]], who had directed it, wrote in 1941 that "The Center was established in November 1939 by the School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University, to study international broadcasting in wartime."[^13] The center's finding aid states that the project was financed by the [[Rockefeller Foundation]], was conceived by the Princeton professor [[John B. Whitton]], and was administered by Graves with a committee that included [[Hadley Cantril]], William S. Carpenter, [[Harwood L. Childs]], O. W. Riegel and the engineer Brunson S. McCutchen, with quarters in a house on Alexander Street. It records the center's transcripts from November 1939 through May 1941, "until the operations of the Center were taken over by the Federal Communications Commission," and says the center continued its work until June 1941.[^14] Mercado likewise gives the center's funding as coming from the Rockefeller Foundation and its absorption by the service as occurring in June.[^15] Bessner's dissertation states that the service "had absorbed the Rockefeller-funded Princeton Listening Center, whose director, Harold Graves, became the FBIS's Senior Administrative Officer."[^16] Graves was hired to help organize the service as "the young man who had been acting as director of the Princeton Listening Post since its inception." Staff who had worked at Princeton and joined the new service included [[Jerome S. Bruner]], [[Bennett Ferrell Ellington]], [[Arthur Mathieu]] and [[Arthur Cantor]].[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
The Rockefeller connection was also a public relations problem. A [[Baltimore Sun]] article described the service as a joint project of the FCC, Princeton and the Rockefeller Foundation, and as the "brain child" of Whitton. Graves wrote a memo for [[Lloyd Free]] on July 9, 1941 about his "embarrassment" at inaccuracies in the article, among them the "dragging in" of the Princeton Listening Post and the joint-project claim. On September 8, 1941 a syndicated column by [[Eleanor Ragsdale]] said the service was "inaugurated and pushed through by Chairman Fly of FCC."[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
On July 29, 1942 [[Nelson Rockefeller]], the [[Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs]], wrote to FCC chairman James L. Fly that his office had "been able thus far to make good use of the material provided by teletype from the Kingsville Field Bureau," and asked for a larger volume of verbatim transcripts for hemispheric propaganda work.[^19]
|
||||
|
||||
### Directors and the Analysis Division
|
||||
|
||||
Free, editor of the [[Public Opinion Quarterly]] and a Princeton man, assumed office as director on June 16, 1941. He established contacts with the [[BBC]] very soon after taking office, with the idea of attaching a staff to the BBC, and in December 1941 he was still in London when the Pearl Harbor attack came.[^20] Harold Graves and Tom Grandin took over the Washington office on December 7, 1941.[^21] Free resigned in April 1942 to accept an Army commission, and he was military attaché at the United States Embassy in Switzerland for most of the war years.[^22]
|
||||
|
||||
Leigh, for fourteen years president of [[Bennington College]], took over on July 15, 1942, with Graves as acting director in the intervening months. He was paid $1,000 more than the $8,000 Free had received, and the appropriation bill had to be amended to legalize the salary.[^22]
|
||||
|
||||
The Analysis Division was the service's research core. In November 1941 [[Goodwin Watson]] of [[Columbia University]] entered on duty to head the Analysis Section, which Free and Graves had recruited him to lead.[^23] The section became the Analysis Division in 1942.[^24] In March 1942 the table of organization of the Analysis Division called for 37 analysts, assistants and trainees, with 17 of the positions filled, and the planned table was never reached.[^25] In September 1942 Watson and [[Nathan Leites]] went to London to set up an analysis operation working with the [[Office of War Information]], and a two-man staff remained there through the war.[^26] The division's German Section began the weekly *Central European Radio Analysis* in January 1943, and the *Radio Report on the Far East* first appeared on August 24, 1942.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
### Hans Speier and the Central European Section
|
||||
|
||||
Hans Speier reached the service through the research project he ran with [[Ernst Kris]] at the [[New School for Social Research]]. Speier sent the project's first report a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Free and Watson read his work "with the greatest of interest." In February 1942 Watson offered him a post as Senior Political Analyst and head of the Central European Section, and the Analysis Division was the "heart" of the service.[^28] Graves had written to Speier and Kris on December 23, 1941 about their reports and encouraged them to send more, and Free wrote to Speier on January 31, 1942.[^29] The Civil Service Commission informed Speier on May 26, 1942, two months after he entered the division, that he had been rated eligible for the post of Senior Political Analyst.[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
Speier brought colleagues into the division, including [[Alexander L. George]], Leites and the psychologist Henry Kellermann.[^31] Watson praised Speier's "extraordinarily good job of analysis," and wrote that he knew "nobody in the United States whom I would willingly trade for him."[^31] Watson left under pressure from opponents of the New Deal, after which Speier became acting chief analyst with thirty people under him.[^32] Speier moved from the service to the Office of War Information on May 22, 1944, under [[Wallace Carroll]].[^33]
|
||||
|
||||
On October 29, 1943 Speier wrote a memorandum predicting much of Hitler's speech for the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. Seventeen of twenty-five predictions were correct. Speier gave the memo to an OWI contact, [[Mark Abrams]], who brought it to the attention of Representative [[Joseph Martin]] and Senator [[Alexander Wiley]], and they used most of its content in a radio broadcast.[^34]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Dies Committee and the 1943 Rider
|
||||
|
||||
The first congressional attack came from [[Martin Dies]], chairman of the [[House Un-American Activities Committee]]. On November 18, 1941, the day after Watson entered on duty, Dies wrote to James L. Fly expressing "deep concern" over the selection of a man who had written in favor of the Soviet Union, and naming thirteen organizations he called communist fronts.[^35] Fly replied that Watson belonged to only one of them, Consumers Union. The House passed an appropriation bill with a rider denying salary to the named employees, including [[Frederick L. Schuman]] and [[William E. Dodd Jr.]], who had been hired as an editor in December 1941. The Senate Appropriations Committee deleted the rider, and Watson testified before that committee on February 4, 1942.[^36]
|
||||
|
||||
In a House speech on February 1, 1943, Dies listed 39 "communists" holding government posts, with Dodd, Watson and Schuman at the head of the list. A new rider was attached to a House Post Office and Treasury appropriations bill.[^37] Dies accused the employees of "un-American beliefs."[^38] Mercado writes that Dies may have been provoked by FBIS reports that his statements were being praised in Nazi Germany, and that Vice President [[Henry A. Wallace]] had said Dies's statements "might as well come from Goebbels himself as far as their practical effect is concerned."[^39] A special subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee under Congressman [[John H. Kerr]] took testimony in executive session from the three men. Its report of April 21, 1943 found three employees guilty of "subversive activity" and "unfit" for government service: Dodd, Watson and the Interior Department official [[Robert Morss Lovett]].[^40] The subcommittee was later accused of having prepared its final report before the men were called to testify.[^40]
|
||||
|
||||
The House approved the rider a second time. The Senate rejected it four times before accepting it, 48 to 32. The President signed the appropriation bill while denouncing the rider and declaring it unconstitutional.[^41] The rider became Section 304 of the Urgent Deficiency Appropriation Act of 1943, which halted pay for the three men after November 15, 1943 unless the President reappointed them with the advice and consent of the Senate.[^42]
|
||||
|
||||
In [[United States v. Lovett]], decided June 3, 1946, the Supreme Court held Section 304 unconstitutional. Justice Black wrote that "legislative trials and punishments were too dangerous to liberty to exist in the nation of free men they envisioned." He continued: "And so they proscribed bills of attainder. Section 304 is one."[^43] The judgment ran for Lovett, Watson and Dodd.
|
||||
|
||||
Other staff were drawn into the same attacks. [[Peter Rhodes]], [[Audrey Menefee]] and Speier were attacked on the House floor. Fly wrote to [[J. Edgar Hoover]] on April 28, 1942 that one informant had described the New York school where Speier taught as a "refuge for exiled European communists," and a counter-report called it "a nest of pro-Nazi activities."[^44]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Cox Committee
|
||||
|
||||
The most serious confrontation with Congress came from [[Eugene Cox]], a Georgia congressman who had been an enthusiastic supporter of the FCC. The FCC referred a case about an Atlanta radio station's representation to the Justice Department and urged prosecution of Cox, and Cox retaliated by seeking an investigation of the FCC. In early 1943 the House named him chairman of a special committee, and he appointed [[Eugene Garey]], a New York lawyer, as chief investigator.[^45]
|
||||
|
||||
The committee requisitioned the FBIS personnel files. Leigh reported, in his January 1945 article in [[Harper's Magazine]], that the truck took away "three-fourths of FBIS personnel files," which had no duplicates, and held them for more than a year.[^46] Ten FBIS employees were subpoenaed at 8:00 a.m. after working all night, and Leigh called the questioning that followed "Star Chamber testimony."[^46]
|
||||
|
||||
The committee found one actual irregularity at FBIS, a night clerical shift in which a sick employee drew pay while coworkers marked her present. It publicized that case and also charged that FBIS was "masquerading" as a war agency, that it used "intelligence" in its name to misrepresent its operations, and that it was no more than a "glorified news gathering agency."[^47] Counsel for the committee also charged that Leigh changed the name of the service to "dignify its activities."[^48]
|
||||
|
||||
The Washington Post ran a series of sixteen editorials critical of the committee. An FCC member who usually opposed Fly's views and was sympathetic to Cox agreed to petition the Speaker to dismiss him as chairman, and Cox resigned after an emotional speech. [[Clarence F. Lea]] of California took over the committee, fired Garey, and promised the FCC a fair hearing.[^49]
|
||||
|
||||
FBIS officials testified in May 1944. Leigh made the principal statement, [[Stewart Hensley]] described the wire service, [[Ellis G. Porter]] described the publications, and Harold N. Graves Jr., who had left FBIS and was a naval officer by then, described the Analysis Division. The Lea committee's final report of January 2, 1945 cleared FBIS of wrongdoing and stated that it was rendering an efficient and worthwhile service. Two members, [[Louis E. Miller]] of Missouri and [[Richard B. Wigglesworth]] of Massachusetts, filed a dissenting minority report expressing "grave doubt" as to the value of FBIS materials. In his own minority report Wigglesworth, a member of the Appropriations Committee, charged that Fly and Leigh had violated the law by soliciting aid in congressional appropriations for the FCC, and stated that it was "but fair to assume" that the select committee's inquiry was "largely responsible" for a two-million-dollar cut in the FCC's appropriation for fiscal 1945.[^50] The majority report, quoted in *On the Beam* on February 3, 1945, stated that "Obviously the United States could not conduct an intelligent program for counteracting enemy propaganda without a reasonably accurate knowledge of that propaganda."[^51]
|
||||
|
||||
### Budget Cuts and Leigh's Departure
|
||||
|
||||
The budget was the next weapon. A newsletter by Leigh on February 15, 1944 reported that the House Appropriations Committee would eliminate 30 percent of the service's budget from July onward, and noted that the committee had given no reason. Leigh wrote that "[t]he obvious conclusion is that the proposed cut relates to the opposition on the part of Representative Cox to FCC for reasons well known and [to] the Dodd-Watson case." Leigh resigned that summer.[^52] The House Appropriations Committee recommended a cut of 25 percent for each FCC department. The Senate Appropriations Committee, under Senator [[Kenneth McKellar]], demanded proof of the service's value, and then recommended a cut of $500,000 that both houses approved.[^53]
|
||||
|
||||
Leigh wrote in *Harper's* that no congressional statement gave the real reason for the cut, and that Fly was ruled out of order when he tried to state it to the Senate Appropriations Committee. He quoted a member of Congress, speaking privately: "Surely it was a punitive cut. Larry Fly has been defiant of Congress for a long time. He has been openly defiant. Now his chickens have come home to roost." The CIA's history of the service describes the cut as made to punish Fly and the FCC for defiance of Congress and for Fly's request that the Department of Justice prosecute Cox.[^54] Hyneman became director on July 27, 1944 and served until August 7, 1945, when [[Russell M. Shepherd]] became the fourth director.[^55]
|
||||
|
||||
In the second half of 1944 the service abandoned most of its analytical work. A liaison study of April 1944 found that State, War, the Foreign Economic Administration and the [[Office of Strategic Services]] were reluctant to give up the analytical publications but would drop them and keep the Daily Report if they had to choose, and the Special Reports Section of six analysts in the OWI office was abolished on December 31, 1944. Only the Far East Division under Audrey Menefee kept analytical work. Certain quarters protested in November 1944; Hyneman answered that State should set up a Russian analysis team to use the service's materials and recommended that it obtain the retiring Soviet expert Charles Prince. On January 17, 1945 [[Geroid T. Robinson]] of the OSS wrote to Hyneman to express regret that the analytical work had been discontinued, and added that he hoped the Daily Report would carry more Soviet radio material.[^56] The Soviet Embassy in Washington had asked for copies of the Daily Report as early as November 11, 1942, with State Department approval, and in London the service received the daily Soviet communique directly from TASS.[^57]
|
||||
|
||||
### War Department Custody, 1945 to 1946
|
||||
|
||||
A draft executive order survives among the service's files, undated and bearing the name of [[Harry S. Truman]], to transfer its functions to the State Department and to the Interim Research and Intelligence Service. The draft was apparently prepared by Shepherd and perhaps by State Department representatives, and it was never approved by the Secretary of State.[^58]
|
||||
|
||||
On September 19, 1945 the House Appropriations Committee voted to rescind part of the National Defense Activities appropriation. On 26 September the FCC announced that FBIS would go out of existence within thirty days, and sent thirty-day notices to employees. On 1 December a conference committee reported a compromise rescinding half the remaining money, $465,000, which both houses approved on 3 December. FBIS operations came to a close on December 10, 1945.[^59]
|
||||
|
||||
Mercado writes that the last Daily Report appeared on December 4, 1945, and that the FCC terminated the service the following day.[^60] The FCC's annual report for fiscal 1946 says FBIS was "discontinued as a Commission activity on December 30, 1945."[^61]
|
||||
|
||||
The War Department then stepped in. On December 13, 1945 Shepherd told the FCC that the War Department had requested an executive order transferring FBIS to the Military Intelligence Division effective January 1, 1946. On 21 December Secretary of War [[Robert P. Patterson]] wrote to [[Paul Porter]], chairman of the FCC, asking that FBIS personnel transfer on 31 December. Porter accepted on 27 December, and the service resumed on January 2, 1946 under War Department sponsorship. Shepherd asked that operations continue until the transfer, and only token operations followed, with little monitoring and no publications. No document authorizing continued operations has been found, although "permission may have been given orally."[^62]
|
||||
|
||||
### Central Intelligence Group and the Name
|
||||
|
||||
In January 1946 President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) by executive order. In February [[Hoyt Vandenberg]], then Assistant Chief of Staff for G-2, gave [[Sidney W. Souers]] a memorandum proposing that the CIG choose the agency to direct the service, and a committee of five, drawn from the CIG and the remaining Intelligence Advisory Board members, was formed to study it.[^63][^64]
|
||||
|
||||
The ad hoc committee recommended that FBIS remain with the War Department, but that its operating organization be liquidated and rebuilt, because its publications circulated too widely and its personnel had not been screened for security. The War Department refused, arguing that operating a monitoring service was properly a CIG function, and proposed that the State Department take it over. State declined, and a State memorandum signed by [[William L. Langer]] on May 27, 1946 accepted CIG sponsorship.[^65]
|
||||
|
||||
The Director of Central Intelligence "assumed control" of FBIS on July 31, 1946, and personnel were transferred to the CIG on 3 November.[^66] NARA gives August 5, 1946 as the date of transfer to the CIG, and November 1, 1946 as the date its agency was abolished, with "Foreign Broadcast Information Service, CIG, November-December, 1946" as the successor.[^67]
|
||||
|
||||
The name shifted during this period. A March 1946 CIG memorandum still uses the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service name.[^68] Shepherd's notice of October 31, 1946 announcing the personnel transfer of 3 November stated that the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service would immediately become the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, with publications and letterheads changed accordingly.[^69] On December 31, 1946 [[Edwin L. Sibert]], in charge of the CIG Office of Operations, informed the staff that the name had been changed to the Foreign Broadcast Information Branch, and in a wire of January 2, 1947 designated Shepherd Chief, FBIB.[^70] By May and June 1947 CIG papers refer to the branch by that name. Colonel [[Lawrence K. White]], acting chief of the branch, met with Lloyd Stratton of the Associated Press in May 1947.[^71] A 1970 CIA history places a notice of July 28, 1947 telling field bureaus that they would no longer bear the "confusing name" of the branch, but would retain the name Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and that offices outside Washington were to camouflage their connection with CIG.[^72] A footnote in Mercado's article dates the name Foreign Broadcast Information Service to 1967.[^73]
|
||||
|
||||
### Central Intelligence Agency, 1947 onward
|
||||
|
||||
The [[National Security Act of 1947]] transformed the CIG into the CIA, and the successor is recorded as "Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Central Intelligence Agency, 1947-."[^67] The service came to the agency "almost mature, trained and disciplined, and ready to plunge immediately into the tasks outlined for it."[^74]
|
||||
|
||||
Within the agency the service sat under the Assistant Director for Operations, Sibert. Shepherd proposed in a memorandum of November 5, 1946 that the service take up propaganda analysis, estimating 35 employees at $150,000 a year. The Assistant Director presented a scaled-down project to the PRC on January 6, 1947, approving Shepherd's program but making clear that FBIS would not take over "interpretative analysis." The reduced request was for a staff of twelve at $61,000 a year. White was announced as deputy chief of FBIS on January 9, 1947. A Special Reports Division was approved on February 13, 1947 on an experimental basis, began work on March 28, 1947 and issued its first Survey of Soviet Radio Broadcasts on April 15, 1947. The early years of analysis under the CIA are described as "stormy."[^75] Shepherd resigned on September 29, 1947, and Colonel White became chief.[^76]
|
||||
|
||||
The service also had a working relationship with the BBC monitoring service. In June 1946 Shepherd spent three weeks in London with BBC officials, and met [[Malcolm Frost]], then chief of the BBC Monitoring Service, who proposed that the American service begin paying its share of the monitoring cost, perhaps $250,000 a year, or supply the BBC with enough material from its own monitoring to balance the books.[^77] The BBC service then employed 385 persons at a cost of $650,000 a year. After further negotiation, Frost informed the service on October 15, 1947 that the BBC had obtained authority and funds to sign an agreement.[^78]
|
||||
|
||||
After 1957 the service "had come of age as an established CIA unit." On March 23, 1961 the Directorate of Intelligence and the Assistant Director for Operations instructed FBIS to accept responsibility for propaganda indications, and that FBIS and the BBC together monitored broadcasts from 90 countries in 1961, a figure that rose to 115 by the spring of 1963.[^79]
|
||||
|
||||
### Daily Report and Records
|
||||
|
||||
The Daily Report, the service's translation series, first appeared on November 18, 1941.[^80] Ellis G. Porter, a former newspaper editor, joined the staff in January 1942 to direct its publication.[^81] A Daily Report of the Far Eastern Section dated January 3, 1946 is in Record Group 262, Entry 25, Box 1, and the first issue of the new Daily Report was published that month.[^82]
|
||||
|
||||
The wartime records are held in [[Record Group 262]], including the daily reports of foreign radio broadcasts for 1941 to 1945, daily reports of the Far Eastern, Latin American and European sections for 1941 to 1946, the weekly reviews, the *Radio Reports on the Far East* for 1942 to 1945, and program schedules for 1942 to 1947. The Foreign Broadcast Information Branch records for 1947 and 1948 are in Record Group 263, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency.[^83]
|
||||
|
||||
### Open Source Center, 2005
|
||||
|
||||
On November 8, 2005 [[John D. Negroponte]], the Director of National Intelligence, and the Director of the CIA, [[Porter J. Goss]], announced the establishment of the Open Source Center. The release said the center would be "[b]ased at the CIA" and would "build on the established expertise of the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which has provided the U.S. Government a broad range of highly valued products and services since 1941." Negroponte called the center "the centerpiece of my response to the WMD Commission's recommendations." The CIA Director administers the center on behalf of the DNI, and [[Douglas J. Naquin]], a senior CIA manager, was named as its director.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "ODNI Announces Establishment of Open Source Center," News Release No. 6-05, November 8, 2005. https://irp.fas.org/news/2005/11/odni110805.html.
|
||||
[^2]: Joseph E. Roop, "Foreign Broadcast Information Service. History. Part I: 1941-1947" (Central Intelligence Agency, approved for release April 1969), pp. 2-6, on the Princeton Listening Center's launch in November 1939, the Defense Communications Board resolution, and the request to the President. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^3]: Helena Huntington Smith, "It Pays to Listen," *Collier's*, January 30, 1943, pp. 43-44, which states "Its godfather was Breckinridge Long of the State Department, who foresaw that we might one day be cut off from accustomed sources of news in foreign countries. He took it up with Chairman Fly of the FCC." https://archive.org/details/colliers111janspri_201908. Stephen C. Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis, 1941-1945," Studies in Intelligence 45, no. 5 (2001), on Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, "godfather" of FBIS, and his letter of September 10, 1941 to FCC chairman James L. Fly. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^4]: Federal Communications Commission, Seventh Annual Report, fiscal year 1941, section on the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, "created February 26, 1941, by the Federal Communications Commission in cooperation with the Defense Communications Board." https://archive.org/details/fcc_DOC-308657A1.
|
||||
[^5]: Roop, Part I, p. 9, on the President's allotment of $150,000 on February 25, 1941, its transfer the next day, the "birth date" of the service on February 26, 1941. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^6]: Daniel Morris Bessner, "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State" (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2013), p. 132, which describes "a late 1940 meeting between Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson and FDR" and the allocation of $150,000 on February 25, 1941. Stimson was Secretary of War from July 1940; Roop (note 7) gives the Secretary of State without naming him. Sole source for the Stimson meeting. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/19152946-8fbb-4b9b-9da0-faca0979e718.
|
||||
[^7]: Roop, Part I, pp. 5-6, quoting the account that "Toward the end of 1940 the Secretary of State, in an informal discussion with President Roosevelt, suggested that a government unit should be established to monitor and analyze propaganda beamed to the United States." https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^8]: Roop, Part I, p. 9, on the FCC's Radio Intelligence Division and its National Defense Activities, quoting the FCC as "the only group staffed and equipped" for the monitoring work. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^9]: Roop, Part I, p. 9, on the service's beginnings "in an old garage at 316 F Street Northeast," and p. 49, "In April a move was made to 1424 K St., N.W., where four floors were assigned to FBMS." Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," photograph caption, "FBIS headquarters from 1942-1947 at 1424 K Street, NW, in Washington." https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^10]: Roop, Part I, pp. 49-50, on Leigh taking over "on 15 July 1942," his recommendation of the name Broadcast Intelligence Service, the phrase "less unwieldy and more accurately reflected the duties of the organization," the FCC's insistence on "foreign," and the change of July 26, 1942. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^11]: National Archives and Records Administration, Guide to Federal Records, "Records of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service," Record Group 262, administrative history, which gives "FCC order, July 28, 1942." https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/262.html. The same guide's history line reads "Federal Broadcast Intelligence Service, 1942," which is an apparent typographical error.
|
||||
[^12]: Roop, Part I, p. 259, on Hyneman's memorandum for the FCC of March 2, 1945 proposing alternative names to avoid confusion with the FBI, the preference for Foreign Broadcast Reporting Service, the report in *On the Beam* of April 9, 1945, and, on p. 260, the reversal and the statement that the new name was "never formally adopted." https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^13]: Harold N. Graves Jr., *War on the Short Wave* (Foreign Policy Association, Headline Books No. 30, 1941), Acknowledgments.
|
||||
[^14]: Princeton University Library, "Princeton Listening Center Records, 1939-1941" (AC015), finding aid, Scope and Contents and Biographical / Historical notes. https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/AC015 (EAD at https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/AC015.xml). The finding aid states that the project "was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation," that the center "continued its work successfully until June, 1941," and that its published book was *Propaganda by Short Wave*, edited by Harwood L. Childs and John B. Whitton (Princeton University Press, 1942).
|
||||
[^15]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," on the Princeton Listening Center's launch in November 1939 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and on its absorption by FBIS in June. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^16]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 133, on the absorption of the Princeton Listening Center and Graves's post as Senior Administrative Officer. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/19152946-8fbb-4b9b-9da0-faca0979e718.
|
||||
[^17]: Roop, Part I, p. 10, describing Graves as "the young man who had been acting as director of the Princeton Listening Post since its inception" and naming the Princeton staff; Roop, Part I, pp. 93-95, on the Baltimore Sun article, Graves's memo of July 9, 1941 about his "embarrassment," the "dragging in" of the Princeton Listening Post, the "brain child" description, and the Eleanor Ragsdale column of September 8, 1941. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^18]: Roop, Part I, pp. 93-95. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^19]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," note 24: Nelson A. Rockefeller to James L. Fly, July 29, 1942, National Archives, RG 262, Entry 68, Box 22, quoted as "We have been able thus far to make good use of the material provided by teletype from the Kingsville Field Bureau of the Monitoring Service of your Commission." https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^20]: Roop, Part I, p. 10, on Free's editorship of the *Public Opinion Quarterly*, and "Mr. Free assumed office as Director on 16 June 1941" (p. 11); p. 35, on Free's contacts with BBC officials "very soon after he assumed office with the idea of attaching a staff to BBC." https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^21]: Roop, Part I, pp. 36-37, quoting "With Lloyd Free still in London, Harold Graves and Tom Grandin took over at 316 F St. on 7 December 1941." https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^22]: Roop, Part I, pp. 48-50, on Free's resignation in April 1942 "to accept a commission in the Army," his service as military attache in the United States Embassy in Switzerland, the appointment of Leigh of Bennington College, the $1,000 difference from Free's $8,000 salary and the appropriation bill provision, and Graves as Acting Director until Leigh took over on July 15, 1942. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^23]: Roop, Part I, p. 189, on Free and Graves's recruitment of Goodwin Watson of Columbia University, who "entered upon duty 17 November 1941." https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^24]: Roop, Part I, p. 50, on the Analysis Section becoming the Analysis Division. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^25]: Roop, Part I, p. 57, "In March 1942 the table of organization of the Analysis Division called for 37 analysts, assistants, and trainees, but with only 17 of the positions filled," and p. 58, "the planned table of organization was never reached." https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^26]: Roop, Part I, p. 46, that Watson and Leites "were sent to London in September 1942" to set up analysis, and that "a two-man analysis staff remained" through the war. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^27]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," on the Central European Radio Analysis, begun January 1943 by the German Section, and the Radio Report on the Far East, first published August 24, 1942 (RG 262, Entry 34, Box 1). https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^28]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 132-133, on Speier's report sent "a week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor," Free and Watson's reading of his work "with the greatest of interest," the February 1942 offer, and the Analysis Division as the "heart" of the service. Sole source for the offer and its date.
|
||||
[^29]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 132, note 51, citing Harold Graves to Hans Speier and Ernst Kris, December 23, 1941, and Lloyd Free to Hans Speier, January 31, 1942, RG 262, Entry 2, Box 66. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/19152946-8fbb-4b9b-9da0-faca0979e718.
|
||||
[^30]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 134, which places the letter of May 26, 1942 two months after Speier entered the Analysis Division and quotes it as stating that, "as a result of investigation," he had "been rated eligible on suitability for the position of Senior Political Analyst" (note 59: United States Civil Service Commission to Hans Speier, May 26, 1942, Speier Papers, Box 2, Folder 5). https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/19152946-8fbb-4b9b-9da0-faca0979e718.
|
||||
[^31]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 135, on Speier's colleagues George, Leites and Henry Kellermann and on Watson's praise, with the quoted phrases "extraordinarily good job of analysis" and "nobody in the United States whom I would willingly trade for him" (note 62). Sole source for these quotations.
|
||||
[^32]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 138, on Watson leaving "under pressure from enemies of the New Deal" and Speier becoming acting chief analyst, overseeing thirty people. Sole source for the sequence.
|
||||
[^33]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 145, on Speier's transfer on "May 22, 1944" from the Analysis Division to the Office of War Information, with Wallace Carroll as his immediate superior.
|
||||
[^34]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 136-137, on the memorandum of October 29, 1943, the seventeen of twenty-five predictions, Mark Abrams, Representative Joseph Martin and Senator Alexander Wiley. Sole source for these claims.
|
||||
[^35]: Roop, Part I, p. 189, on Dies's letter to Fly of November 18, 1941, which expressed "deep concern" and named thirteen organizations. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^36]: Roop, Part I, pp. 190-191, on Fly's reply that Watson "belonged to only one of the 13 organizations Dies named," the Senate Appropriations Committee's deletion of the rider, Dodd's hiring as an editor in December 1941, and Watson's testimony of February 4, 1942. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947. Roop and Mercado spell the analyst's surname "Schumann"; Bessner writes "Schuman."
|
||||
[^37]: Roop, Part I, pp. 191-192, on Dies's House speech of February 1, 1943, listing 39 "communists," and the rider attached to the House Post Office and Treasury appropriations bill. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^38]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," on Congressman Dies accusing three FBIS employees, among dozens of civil servants, of "un-American beliefs." https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^39]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," quoting Vice President Henry Wallace on Dies. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^40]: Roop, Part I, pp. 192-193, on the subcommittee under Congressman Kerr, which started hearings on April 2, 1943 and reported on 21 April, the findings of "subversive activity" and "unfit," the three named men, and the statement that the subcommittee "was later accused of having its final report prepared before the men were called to testify." Roop states that the subcommittee was named by the Un-American Activities Committee; *United States v. Lovett*, 328 U.S. 303 (1946), describes a special subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, appointed under a House resolution, whose report is H. Rep. No. 448, 78th Cong., 1st Sess. The Monthly Catalog lists H. Rept. 448 (May 14, 1943, pursuant to H. Res. 105, "submitted by Mr. Kerr") on Watson, Dodd and Lovett; a February 1943 newspaper report names Kerr, a North Carolina Democrat, as chairman of the subcommittee. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/328/303.
|
||||
[^41]: Roop, Part I, p. 193, on the Senate's four rejections, its approval of the rider by 48 to 32, and the President's signature while denouncing the rider and declaring it unconstitutional.
|
||||
[^42]: Urgent Deficiency Appropriation Act of 1943, section 304, 57 Stat. 431, 450, as quoted in *United States v. Lovett*, 328 U.S. 303 (1946). Roop, Part I, p. 193, note, gives the effective cutoff as November 21, 1943, where the statute as quoted gives 15 November. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/328/303.
|
||||
[^43]: *United States v. Lovett*, 328 U.S. 303 (1946), argued May 3-6, 1946, decided June 3, 1946, opinion of Justice Black. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/328/303. Mercado's article gives the middle name as "Morse."
|
||||
[^44]: Roop, Part I, pp. 194-195, on the attacks on Rhodes, Menefee and Speier; Fly's letter to J. Edgar Hoover of April 28, 1942, and the two informant reports, one calling the New York school a "refuge for exiled European communists" and the other calling it "a nest of pro-Nazi activities." Sole source for the informant reports is Roop's account of the FBIS file.
|
||||
[^45]: Roop, Part I, p. 196, on Cox, the Atlanta station case, the FCC's referral to the Justice Department, the House's naming of Cox as chairman in early 1943, and the appointment of Eugene Garey as investigator.
|
||||
[^46]: Roop, Part I, p. 197, on the removal of "three-fourths of FBIS personnel files," the subpoena of ten employees at 8:00 a.m., and "Star Chamber testimony," citing Leigh's article "Politicians vs. Bureaucrats" (subtitle "The case of FCC Chairman Fly and Congressman Cox"), *Harper's Magazine*, January 1945. https://harpers.org/archive/1945/01/politicians-vs-bureaucrats. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^47]: Roop, Part I, p. 198, on the single irregularity found at FBIS and the list of charges, including "masquerading," "intelligence" and "glorified news gathering agency." Mercado renders the last phrase as "glorified news agency."
|
||||
[^48]: Roop, Part I, p. 50, on the Cox counsel's charge that Leigh changed the name of the service to "dignify its activities," make it sound more like a war agency, and influence Congress to grant appropriations."
|
||||
[^49]: Roop, Part I, pp. 198-199, on the Washington Post's sixteen editorials, the FCC member who "agreed to petition the Speaker of the House to dismiss Cox as chairman," Cox's resignation after an emotional speech, Lea's succession, and Garey's dismissal. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947. Louis E. Miller (R-Mo.) and Richard B. Wigglesworth (R-Mass.) are the minority members named in *Broadcasting*, January 8, 1945. Full names: Clarence Frederick Lea (D-Calif.), Louis Ebenezer Miller (R-Mo.), Richard Bowditch Wigglesworth (R-Mass.) and Kenneth Douglas McKellar (D-Tenn.), per the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress as reproduced in the unitedstates/congress-legislators dataset.
|
||||
[^50]: "Lea Probe Demands Sweeping Law Change," *Broadcasting*, January 8, 1945, on the Miller and Wigglesworth minority reports and Wigglesworth's statements. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-BC/BC-1945/1945-01-08-BC.pdf.
|
||||
[^51]: Roop, Part I, pp. 200-201, on the May 1944 testimony of Leigh, Hensley, Porter and Graves; the Lea report of January 2, 1945 ("an efficient and worthwhile service"); the Miller and Wigglesworth minority report ("grave doubt"); and the majority passage quoted in *On the Beam* of February 3, 1945, in the note on p. 201. The hearings are *Hearings of the Special House Committee Investigating the FCC* (GPO, 1944), three volumes, with FBIS testimony beginning in Volume III, page 3439. Roop, Part I, p. 189, records Graves's resignation by the end of 1943.
|
||||
[^52]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," on Leigh's newsletter of February 15, 1944: "The obvious conclusion is that the proposed cut relates to the opposition on the part of Representative Cox to FCC," the 30 percent figure, and Leigh's resignation "that summer." https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^53]: Roop, Part I, pp. 204-206, on the House Appropriations Committee's recommended cut of 25 percent for each FCC department, Senator McKellar's demand for proof, and the Senate Appropriations Committee's recommended cut of $500,000 that both houses approved. Mercado's figure of 30 percent is given at note 48.
|
||||
[^54]: Roop, Part I, pp. 206-207, on the absence of any stated congressional reason for the cut, Fly's being ruled out of order, the statement that "it was a punitive cut, made to punish Fly and FCC for defiance of Congress and for Fly's effrontery in asking the Department of Justice to prosecute Eugene Cox, a member of Congress," and, in the note on p. 207, Leigh's quotation of a member of Congress speaking privately, from Leigh's *Harper's Magazine* article, January 1945. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^55]: Roop, Part I, pp. 241-244, "Charles S. Hyneman, who succeeded Leigh as FBIS director on 27 July 1944," and p. 260, "from 27 July 1944 to 7 August 1945," and Shepherd's appointment as the fourth FBIS Director. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^56]: Roop, Part I, pp. 256-257 (note on the liaison study of April 29, 1944; abolition of the Special Reports Section on December 31, 1944), p. 259 (Far East Division retained "the only analytical work done in FBIS"), and pp. 267-268 (the protest of November 1944, Hyneman's response, and Robinson's letter of January 17, 1945). https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^57]: Roop, Part I, p. 268, on the Soviet Embassy's request of November 11, 1942 and the TASS arrangement in London in 1943. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^58]: Roop, Part I, p. 275, note, on the undated executive order with the name of President Truman, transferring FBIS functions to the Interim Research and Intelligence Service, "prepared by Shepherd and perhaps some representatives from State," and "never approved by the Secretary of State." Job 54-27, Box 15, CIA Records Center.
|
||||
[^59]: Roop, Part I, pp. 274-277, on the House Appropriations Committee's action of September 19, 1945, the FCC's news release of 26 September, the conference compromise of 1 December ($465,000) approved on 3 December, and the closing of operations on December 10, 1945.
|
||||
[^60]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," on the last Daily Report "on 4 December" and the FCC's termination "the following day." https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^61]: Federal Communications Commission, Twelfth Annual Report, fiscal year ended June 30, 1946, which states that FBIS "was discontinued as a Commission activity on December 30, 1945." https://archive.org/details/fcc_DOC-308665A1.
|
||||
[^62]: Roop, Part I, pp. 278-280, on Shepherd's letter of December 13, 1945 to the FCC, the token operations that followed, Patterson's letter of 21 December, Porter's reply of 27 December, the resumption on January 2, 1946 under War Department sponsorship, and the note on p. 279 that "No documents authorizing continued operations have been found, but permission may have been given orally." https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^63]: Roop, Part I, pp. 299-300, on the creation of the CIG by executive order in January 1946, the Vandenberg memorandum to Souers in February 1946, and the five-member committee. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^64]: Central Intelligence Group, "Survey of the Function of Monitoring Press and Propaganda Broadcasts of Foreign Powers," C.I.G. 1, memorandum by the Director of Central Intelligence, February 25, 1946, which states that FBIS functions were "taken over by the War Department on an interim basis on 30 December 1945." https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP80R01731R003400110003-4. Ad hoc committee report, March 18, 1946: https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP80R01731R003400110004-3.
|
||||
[^65]: Roop, Part I, pp. 301-303, on the ad hoc committee's recommendations (March 18, 1946), the War Department's refusal, the State Department's reply, C.I.G. 1/1 (April 26, 1946), C.I.G. 1/2 (May 8, 1946, signed by James S. Lay), and the State memorandum signed by William L. Langer on May 27, 1946, enclosed with C.I.G. 1/3 (June 4, 1946).
|
||||
[^66]: Roop, Part I, pp. 303-304, on the notice, signed for the Director of Central Intelligence by Col. John Dabney, that the Director had "assumed control" of FBIS on July 31, 1946, and on the personnel transfer to CIG on November 3, 1946, announced on 31 October. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^67]: National Archives and Records Administration, Guide to Federal Records, RG 262, administrative history: transfer to the Central Intelligence Group, "August 5, 1946"; "Abolished: November 1, 1946"; successors "Foreign Broadcast Information Service, CIG, November-December, 1946," "Foreign Broadcast Information Branch, CIG, January-September 1947," and "Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Central Intelligence Agency, 1947-." https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/262.html.
|
||||
[^68]: CIG, "Background on Development of Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service," memorandum for the Chief, Information Branch, March 1946. https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP80R01731R003400110001-6.
|
||||
[^69]: Roop, Part I, pp. 303-304, on the notice of October 31, 1946 that "the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service would immediately become the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), with all publications and letterheads changed accordingly." https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^70]: Roop, Part I, p. 305 and note, on Sibert's statement of December 31, 1946 "informing that the name had been changed to the Foreign Broadcast Information Branch (FBIB)" and his wire of January 2, 1947 designating Russell Shepherd Chief, FBIB. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^71]: CIG, "'A' and 'X' Wire Services Furnished by Foreign Broadcast Information Branch," memorandum, June 10, 1947. https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP80R01731R003400110015-1. Also memorandum on the May 6, 1947 interview of Colonel L. K. White, Acting Chief, FBIB, with Lloyd Stratton of the Associated Press. https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP80R01731R003400110022-3.
|
||||
[^72]: Roop, Part II (CIA Directorate of Intelligence, August 1970), p. 102, on the notice that field bureaus would no longer bear "the confusing name of Foreign Broadcast Information Branch (FBIB)," and on the camouflage of their connection with CIG. The notice is dated July 28, 1947. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-06741690.
|
||||
[^73]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," note 4: "The initial monitoring service was renamed the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service in 1942 and evolved into the Foreign Broadcast Information Service in 1967." Roop, Part I, pp. 303-304 (the notice of October 31, 1946) and the 1947 CIG memoranda already use the later name. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^74]: Roop, Part I, p. 2, "FBIS took form during those six years before its adoption by the Central Intelligence Agency, and came to CIA almost mature, trained and disciplined, and ready to plunge immediately into the tasks outlined for it." https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^75]: Roop, Part II, pp. 151-152, on Shepherd's memorandum of November 5, 1946, the Assistant Director for Operations' presentation to the PRC on January 6, 1947, the 35-employee and $150,000 proposal, the reduced request of twelve staff at $61,000, the "stormy" early years, and the Special Reports Division (approved February 13, 1947, begun March 28, 1947, first Survey of Soviet Radio Broadcasts April 15, 1947); p. 2, on the announcement of Col. Lawrence K. White as Deputy Chief on January 9, 1947. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-06741690.
|
||||
[^76]: Roop, Part II, p. 56, "Shepherd resigned from FBIS on 29 September 1947," with Colonel White the new FBIS Chief. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-06741690. Appointment of the fourth director: Roop, Part I, p. 260. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^77]: Roop, Part II, p. 51, on Shepherd's visit to London from June 24, 1946, his meeting with "Malcolm Frost, Chief of the BBC Monitoring Service," the $250,000 figure, and the BBC Monitoring Service's 385 employees and $650,000 cost. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-06741690.
|
||||
[^78]: Roop, Part II, pp. 54-56, on the Shepherd-Frost negotiations and the notice of October 15, 1947. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-06741690.
|
||||
[^79]: Joseph E. Roop, "Foreign Broadcast Information Service History, Part III: 1957-1967" (CIA Directorate of Intelligence, May 1972), p. 2, "after 1957 FBIS had come of age as an established CIA unit"; p. 19, on the March 23, 1961 instruction to accept responsibility for propaganda indications; and pp. 4-5, "FBIS and the BBC were monitoring broadcasts from 90 countries in 1961. By the spring of 1963 this number had increased to 115." https://archive.org/details/CIADirectorateOfIntelligenceHistoricalSeriesForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart319571967.
|
||||
[^80]: Roop, Part I, p. 25, on the mailing list for the Daily Report issued on November 18, 1941; Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," states that the service "published its first Daily Report of translations on 18 November 1941." https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^81]: Roop, Part I, p. 50, that Ellis G. Porter, "former editor of newspapers in Baltimore and Philadelphia," joined the staff in January 1942 "to direct publication of the Daily Report."
|
||||
[^82]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," note 39: "FBIS, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, Far Eastern Section, 3 January 1946, NARA, RG 262, Entry 25, Box 1," and the text that the first issue of the new Daily Report was published in January 1946. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-45-no-5/fbis-against-the-axis-1941-1945-u/.
|
||||
[^83]: NARA, Guide to Federal Records, RG 262: "Daily reports of foreign radio broadcasts, 1941-45"; "Daily reports of the Far Eastern, Latin American, and European Sections, 1941-46"; "Weekly reviews of official foreign broadcasts, 1941-44"; "Radio reports on the Far East, 1942-45"; "Program schedules of foreign broadcasts, 1942-47"; and "Related Records: Records of the Foreign Broadcast Information Branch, 1947-48, in RG 263." https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/262.html.
|
||||
|
|
@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ summary: "Joint Defense Department and CIA agency for reconnaissance satellites,
|
|||
start: 1961-09-06
|
||||
location: "Chantilly, Virginia"
|
||||
created: 2026-09-24
|
||||
updated: 2026-09-24
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[Department of Defense]]"
|
||||
|
|
@ -42,11 +42,11 @@ relations:
|
|||
with: "[[David Grusch]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "NRO representative on the UAP Task Force"
|
||||
fn: 6
|
||||
fn: 11
|
||||
- type: partner_of
|
||||
with: "[[In-Q-Tel]]"
|
||||
start: 2009
|
||||
fn: 5
|
||||
fn: 10
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) builds and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the [[United States]]. It was created without a statute: "acting CIA Director, Gen Charles Cabell established the National Reconnaissance Office by concurring with Deputy Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatric's 6 September 1961 memorandum." [[Richard Bissell]] of the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] and [[Joseph V. Charyk]] of the [[United States Air Force|Air Force]] were its first co-directors.[^1]
|
||||
|
|
@ -102,18 +102,27 @@ In September 1995 Senator [[Arlen Specter]], then chairman of the Senate committ
|
|||
|
||||
### The Future Imagery Architecture
|
||||
|
||||
[[Boeing]] won the Future Imagery Architecture satellite contract over [[Lockheed Martin]] on September 3, 1999. The program ran into "technical problems, leading to a major spacecraft redesign, resulting in delays and overruns." In May 2003 a joint task force of the [[Defense Science Board]] and the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board found it "significantly underfunded and technically flawed," and in 2005 the [[Director of National Intelligence]], [[John Negroponte]], ended it as originally constituted. The National Commission for the Review of the NRO, chaired by Senator [[Bob Kerrey]] and Representative [[Porter Goss]], had reported in November 2000 that the office was "supporting a growing number of users and missions with a budget that had not grown proportionately," and recommended that it "strike a more nuanced balance between openness and secrecy." Under the [[Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act]], signed on December 17, 2004, the director reports to the Director of National Intelligence as well as to the Secretary of Defense.[^1]
|
||||
[[Boeing]] won the Future Imagery Architecture satellite contract over [[Lockheed Martin]] on September 3, 1999. The program ran into "technical problems, leading to a major spacecraft redesign, resulting in delays and overruns." In May 2003 a joint task force of the [[Defense Science Board]] and the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board found it "significantly underfunded and technically flawed," and in 2005 the [[Director of National Intelligence]], [[John Negroponte]], ended it as originally constituted. The National Commission for the Review of the NRO, co-chaired by Senator [[Bob Kerrey]] and Representative [[Porter Goss]], reported in November 2000, in the words of the NRO's official history, that the NRO was facing the challenge of "supporting a growing number of users and missions with a budget that had not grown proportionately," and, in the same history's words, recommended that the NRO "strike a more nuanced balance between openness and secrecy."[^1] The report itself stated that "The NRO has become a publicly acknowledged organization that openly announces many of its new program initiatives" and recommended a new Office of Space Reconnaissance with its own security compartment.[^5] Under the [[Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act]], signed on December 17, 2004, the director reports to the Director of National Intelligence as well as to the Secretary of Defense.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### National Commission for the Review of the NRO
|
||||
|
||||
Congress created the National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office in Title VII of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, approved December 3, 1999 as Public Law 106-120. The conference report's joint explanatory statement says that neither the House bill nor the Senate amendment contained a similar provision and that the managers included it.[^6] The statute set the membership at eleven, with the NRO director serving ex officio, and required two co-chairs, one from each party, jointly agreed by the President and the congressional leaders.[^7] The co-chairs were Kerrey, then a senator from Nebraska and recently vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Goss, the Republican representative from Florida who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.[^8] Kerrey wrote to NRO director Peter B. Teets on August 11, 2003: "I wrote the 1999 Congressional Act that authorized the creation of the National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office. After President Clinton signed this into law, I asked Congressman Porter Goss to co-chair this effort with me."[^9] The report's appendix lists [[Joan Avalyn Dempsey]], the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management, Keith R. Hall as NRO director, Martin C. Faga and [[Patrick M. Hughes]] among the members.[^8] The report, titled "The NRO at the Crossroads," is dated November 1, 2000 on its cover, the statutory deadline for the final report; Kerrey's 2003 letter gives the date of its release as November 15, 2000.[^8][^9] Its executive summary recommended establishing a new Office of Space Reconnaissance.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Later Associations
|
||||
|
||||
[[In-Q-Tel]], the CIA's venture fund, lists the office as a partner from 2009.[^5] [[David Grusch]], an intelligence officer of the NRO and of the [[National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency]], served as the NRO's representative on the [[UAP Task Force]].[^6] He testified to a subcommittee of the [[House Committee on Oversight and Accountability|House Oversight Committee]] on July 26, 2023, that officials had told him of waived [[Special Access Programs|special access programs]] for the retrieval and reverse engineering of UAP that had not been disclosed to Congress.[^7]
|
||||
[[In-Q-Tel]], the CIA's venture fund, lists the office as a partner from 2009.[^10] [[David Grusch]], an intelligence officer of the NRO and of the [[National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency]], served as the NRO's representative on the [[UAP Task Force]].[^11] He testified to a subcommittee of the [[House Committee on Oversight and Accountability|House Oversight Committee]] on July 26, 2023, that officials had told him of waived [[Special Access Programs|special access programs]] for the retrieval and reverse engineering of UAP that had not been disclosed to Congress.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Berkowitz, Bruce. *The National Reconnaissance Office at 50 Years: A Brief History.* Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance, National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, Virginia, September 2011, preface, pp. 20-21, 23-25, 28-29, Appendix A (pp. 36-41) and Appendix B (p. 43). Retrieved via the Wayback Machine snapshot of January 16, 2026. https://web.archive.org/web/20260116035324/https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/history/csnr/programs/NRO_Brief_History.pdf
|
||||
[^1]: Berkowitz, Bruce. *The National Reconnaissance Office at 50 Years: A Brief History.* Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance, National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, Virginia, September 2011, preface, pp. 20-21, 23-26, 28-29, Appendix A (pp. 36-41) and Appendix B (p. 43). Retrieved via the Wayback Machine snapshot of January 16, 2026. https://web.archive.org/web/20260116035324/https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/history/csnr/programs/NRO_Brief_History.pdf
|
||||
[^2]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.* Random House, 1991, chapter 2.
|
||||
[^3]: Berkowitz, *The National Reconnaissance Office at 50 Years,* pp. 20-21, citing Thomas, P., "Spy Unit's Spending Stuns Hill," *Washington Post,* August 9, 1994; Weiner, T., "Senators Angered Over Cost of Spy Agency's New Offices," *New York Times,* August 9, 1994; and Pincus, W., "CIA Told Hill of Project, Woolsey Says," *Washington Post,* August 11, 1994.
|
||||
[^4]: Berkowitz, *The National Reconnaissance Office at 50 Years,* pp. 22-23, citing Weiner, T., "A Spy Agency Admits Accumulating $4 Billion in Secret Money," *New York Times,* May 16, 1996, and Morgan, D., and W. Pincus, "$1.6 Billion in NRO Kitty Helped Appropriators Fund Pet Projects," *Washington Post,* October 5, 1995.
|
||||
[^5]: In-Q-Tel, "Our Milestones." https://www.iqt.org/about/our-milestones
|
||||
[^6]: Elizondo, Luis. *Imminent.* William Morrow, 2024.
|
||||
[^7]: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. *Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency,* hearing, July 26, 2023.
|
||||
[^5]: The NRO at the Crossroads, Executive Summary, pp. 7 to 8 (Office of Space Reconnaissance; "publicly acknowledged organization") and pp. 41 to 42 (new security compartment). Archived copy as in the preceding note.
|
||||
[^6]: U.S. House of Representatives, Conference Report 106-457 on H.R. 1555, November 5, 1999, joint explanatory statement, Title VII ("Neither the House bill nor the Senate amendment contained a similar provision"). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRPT-106hrpt457/html/CRPT-106hrpt457.htm
|
||||
[^7]: Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, Public Law 106-120, approved December 3, 1999, Title VII, secs. 701 to 709. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-106publ120/pdf/PLAW-106publ120.pdf
|
||||
[^8]: National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office, The NRO at the Crossroads, November 1, 2000, cover page and Appendix G, "Commission Member Biographies," pp. 135 to 136. Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2020id_/https://irp.fas.org/nro/commission/nro.pdf
|
||||
[^9]: Bob Kerrey, letter to Peter B. Teets, August 11, 2003, NRO press release 2003-03. Sole source for Kerrey's statement that he wrote the Act and recruited Goss. https://web.archive.org/web/2id_/https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/news/press/2003/2003-03.pdf
|
||||
[^10]: In-Q-Tel, "Our Milestones." https://www.iqt.org/about/our-milestones
|
||||
[^11]: Elizondo, Luis. *Imminent.* William Morrow, 2024.
|
||||
[^12]: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. *Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency,* hearing, July 26, 2023.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2025-07-23
|
||||
updated: 2026-05-15
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Office of Strategic Services
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- OSS
|
||||
|
|
@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ tags:
|
|||
- Donovan
|
||||
description: The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the United States' wartime intelligence agency during World War II and the direct institutional precursor to the CIA.
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
summary: "The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the U.S. wartime intelligence and covert operations agency (1942-1945) founded by General William Donovan on British Security Coordination templates, dissolved by Truman in 1945 and reconstituted as the CIA in 1947."
|
||||
summary: "The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the U.S. wartime intelligence and covert operations agency (1942-1945) founded by William Donovan on British Security Coordination templates and dissolved by Truman in 1945."
|
||||
start: 1942-06-13
|
||||
end: 1945-10-01
|
||||
location: "Washington, D.C."
|
||||
|
|
@ -38,20 +38,31 @@ OSS operations ran through several branches: Research and Analysis (intelligence
|
|||
|
||||
Allen Dulles directed OSS operations in Switzerland from November 1942 through the war's end, developing a European intelligence network that became the foundation for the CIA's clandestine service. He subsequently became CIA Director from 1953 to 1961.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The agency drew heavily on the [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]] for monitored Japanese broadcasts. In September 1941 [[Breckinridge Long]] wrote to FCC chairman [[James L. Fly]] that the service "has a counterpart in the organization of which Mr. Donovan is the head," and assumed that the information was "made instantly available to some of his people" in the [[William J. Donovan]] organization.[^3] On August 13, 1942 Dr. Charles B. Fah, acting chief of the Far Eastern Section, wrote to FBIS director [[Robert D. Leigh]] that the section "has found the various reports of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service of the Federal Communications Commission indispensable in our work."[^3] On November 16, 1942 [[William L. Langer]], director of the Research and Analysis Branch, wrote to Leigh that "Without the monitoring service of the Federal Communications Commission, our knowledge of current events in Japan would be meager."[^4] After the 1944 budget cut, Langer wrote on April 22, 1944 that recent developments had "led to a curtailment of the output of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service."[^5] On January 17, 1945 [[Geroid T. Robinson]] of the agency wrote to [[Charles S. Hyneman]] to express regret that the service's analytical work had been discontinued, and added that he hoped the Daily Report would carry more Soviet radio material.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Truth Drug Program
|
||||
|
||||
The OSS established a "truth drug" committee under Dr. [[Winfred Overholser]], head of [[St. Elizabeth's Hospital]] in Washington, which tried and rejected [[mescaline]], several barbiturates, and scopolamine before settling in spring 1943 on [[marijuana|cannabis indica]] as the most promising substance. Testing ran in cooperation with the [[Manhattan Project]], which supplied the first dozen subjects; oral delivery failed and the committee found cigarettes the most effective vehicle. [[George Hunter White|George White]], an Army captain who had come to OSS from the [[Federal Bureau of Narcotics]], conducted the first field test on New York gangster [[August Del Gracio]] on May 27, 1943, then tested the technique on suspected Communist soldiers at camps outside [[Atlanta]], [[Memphis]], and [[New Orleans]]. The program seeded the CIA's postwar [[Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke|ARTICHOKE]] and [[Project MKUltra|MKULTRA]] work, which began by getting the old OSS files out and approaching the same George White.[^3]
|
||||
The OSS established a "truth drug" committee under Dr. [[Winfred Overholser]], head of [[St. Elizabeth's Hospital]] in Washington, which tried and rejected [[mescaline]], several barbiturates, and scopolamine before settling in spring 1943 on [[marijuana|cannabis indica]] as the most promising substance. Testing ran in cooperation with the [[Manhattan Project]], which supplied the first dozen subjects; oral delivery failed and the committee found cigarettes the most effective vehicle. [[George Hunter White|George White]], an Army captain who had come to OSS from the [[Federal Bureau of Narcotics]], conducted the first field test on New York gangster [[August Del Gracio]] on May 27, 1943, then tested the technique on suspected Communist soldiers at camps outside [[Atlanta]], [[Memphis]], and [[New Orleans]]. The program seeded the CIA's postwar [[Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke|ARTICHOKE]] and [[Project MKUltra|MKULTRA]] work, which began by getting the old OSS files out and approaching the same George White.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Weapons and Behavioral Science
|
||||
|
||||
[[Stanley Lovell]], a Boston industrialist and self-described "saucepan chemist," headed OSS Research and Development through Division 19 of [[James Conant]]'s National Defense Research Committee, producing devices such as the "Aunt Jemima" explosive disguised as pancake mix and the "Who? Me?" harassment substance, and pursuing several schemes to assassinate [[Adolf Hitler]]. Donovan also commissioned a psychoanalytic study of Hitler from psychoanalyst [[Walter Langer]], who predicted his suicide, and brought in [[Harvard University|Harvard]] psychologist [[Henry Murray]] to build an OSS recruit-assessment system in only fifteen days, a milestone as the first systematic American effort to evaluate personality to predict future behavior.[^3]
|
||||
[[Stanley Lovell]], a Boston industrialist and self-described "saucepan chemist," headed OSS Research and Development through Division 19 of [[James Conant]]'s National Defense Research Committee, producing devices such as the "Aunt Jemima" explosive disguised as pancake mix and the "Who? Me?" harassment substance, and pursuing several schemes to assassinate [[Adolf Hitler]]. Donovan also commissioned a psychoanalytic study of Hitler from psychoanalyst [[Walter Langer]], who predicted his suicide, and brought in [[Harvard University|Harvard]] psychologist [[Henry Murray]] to build an OSS recruit-assessment system in only fifteen days, a milestone as the first systematic American effort to evaluate personality to predict future behavior.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Dissolution and CIA Transition
|
||||
|
||||
Truman dissolved the OSS on October 1, 1945, distributing its functions to the State Department (Research and Analysis) and the War Department (Strategic Services Unit, which preserved the clandestine service infrastructure). The Central Intelligence Agency was created by the National Security Act of 1947, signed July 26, 1947, and formally established September 18, 1947. The institutional culture Donovan developed - including the use of academic, journalistic, and cultural figures as intelligence assets; the cultivation of foreign service networks; and the use of proprietary companies as operational covers - became standard CIA practice after the transition.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Emigre Scholars
|
||||
|
||||
The Office of Strategic Services considered the [[New School for Social Research]] "the best collection of German, left-leaning intellectuals in the United States." Over two hundred students who had studied at the school's University in Exile worked for the government during the war, and New School scholars were involved in more than twenty-five government-associated projects routed through [[Rockefeller Foundation]] intermediaries.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Smith, Bradley F. *The Shadow Warriors: O.S.S. and the Origins of the C.I.A.* Basic Books, 1983. Troy, Thomas F. *Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency*. CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1981. "British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-45." Fromm International Publishing, 1998.
|
||||
[^2]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
|
||||
[^3]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 1.
|
||||
[^3]: Stephen C. Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis, 1941-1945," Studies in Intelligence 45, no. 5 (2001), on Long's letter of September 1941 and Fah's letter of August 13, 1942. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol45no5/html/v45i5a04p.htm.
|
||||
[^4]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," on Langer's letter to Leigh of November 16, 1942, National Archives, RG 262, Entry 68, Box 22. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol45no5/html/v45i5a04p.htm.
|
||||
[^5]: Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis," on Langer's letter to Leigh of April 22, 1944, National Archives, RG 262, Entry 68, Box 22. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol45no5/html/v45i5a04p.htm.
|
||||
[^6]: Roop, Part I, pp. 267-268. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
[^7]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 1.
|
||||
[^8]: Daniel Bessner, "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State" (PhD diss., Duke University, 2013), pp. 137-138, citing Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 139-149, 165-167. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/232a76ac-f2d8-4827-99fe-50b3b109fa6c/content
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -12,8 +12,16 @@ tags:
|
|||
- JaanTallinn
|
||||
summary: "The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative is the nonprofit founded in 2017 by Andrew Critch that provides free operational support and grants to university research groups working on existential risk, funded chiefly by Jaan Tallinn and Open Philanthropy."
|
||||
location: "Berkeley, California"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Claire Zabel]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2020-01
|
||||
end: 2021-03
|
||||
role: "grant investigator on the January 2020 general support grant and the March 2021 SERI summer fellowship stipend grant"
|
||||
fn: 7
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-08
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) is an American nonprofit founded in 2017 that supports academic research groups studying risks to the long-term survival of humanity. Its distinctive method is to supply university centers with services and staff that universities are slow to provide, hiring contractors, engineers, and assistants and handling logistics on behalf of researchers, and it also makes grants to such groups. BERI is funded chiefly by the [[Skype]] cofounder [[Jaan Tallinn]] and by [[Open Philanthropy]], and it has served as an operational and grantmaking intermediary in the existential-risk and AI-safety field, including for Tallinn's [[Survival and Flourishing Fund]].[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
|
@ -36,6 +44,8 @@ BERI is funded by the same small set of donors that supports much of the existen
|
|||
|
||||
BERI announced its first grants program in September 2017, and its early grantmaking, funded by Tallinn, was one of the channels through which his existential-risk giving flowed before he formalized the Survival and Flourishing Fund and its S-process in 2019; BERI has continued to act as a grantmaking and fiscal intermediary that distributes some of the funds the S-process recommends. The concentration of its support among a handful of donors, principally Tallinn and Open Philanthropy, mirrors the funding structure of the wider field it serves.[^2][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Open Philanthropy's grant pages record two grants to BERI with [[Claire Zabel]] as grant investigator. In January 2020 the foundation recommended 150,000 dollars in general support, intended to help BERI establish new collaborations; the page describes it as following the foundation's January 2019 support.[^7] In March 2021 it recommended 210,000 dollars to provide stipends for the [[Stanford Existential Risks Initiative]] summer research fellowship program.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "Info," Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, on the mission to improve civilization's long-term prospects, the collaboration-with-university-groups strategy, the free-services model, the 2017 founding by Andrew Critch, and the leadership of Sawyer Bernath since 2020. https://www.beri.org/
|
||||
|
|
@ -44,3 +54,5 @@ BERI announced its first grants program in September 2017, and its early grantma
|
|||
[^4]: "Collaborations," Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, on the partnership with the Center for Human-Compatible AI under Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley and other research groups. https://www.beri.org/collaborations
|
||||
[^5]: "March 2017: Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative," Effective Altruism Funds, on early grant support to BERI. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/payouts/march-2017-berkeley-existential-risk-initiative-beri
|
||||
[^6]: "Announcing BERI's first grants program," Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, September 25, 2017, on the first grants program funded by Jaan Tallinn. https://existence.org/2017/09/25/announcing-beris-first-grants-program.html
|
||||
[^7]: Open Philanthropy, "Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative: General Support," award date January 2020, amount 150,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/berkeley-existential-risk-initiative-general-support/
|
||||
[^8]: Open Philanthropy, "Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative: SERI Summer Fellowships," award date March 2021, amount 210,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=7033
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -11,30 +11,40 @@ tags:
|
|||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
summary: "The Center for Applied Rationality is a Berkeley nonprofit spun off from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2012 to teach rationality techniques through residential workshops, which served as a recruitment funnel for AI-safety work and whose 2019 alumni reunion was protested by the group that became the Zizians."
|
||||
location: "Berkeley, California"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Open Philanthropy]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2020-02
|
||||
role: "375,000 dollar general support grant"
|
||||
fn: 5
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-08
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) is a nonprofit founded in 2012 in [[Berkeley]], [[California]], as a spin-off of the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (MIRI), created to teach the reasoning techniques developed in the [[Rationalist Community]] through paid residential workshops. Its founders came from the MIRI orbit and included [[Anna Salamon]] and [[Julia Galef]]. CFAR shared personnel, premises, and an [[Effective Altruism]] donor base with MIRI, and its workshops functioned as a recruitment funnel that drew talented young people toward artificial-intelligence-safety work and the broader rationalist milieu.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Workshops and the AI-Safety Funnel
|
||||
|
||||
CFAR ran multi-day workshops teaching "applied rationality," a curriculum of decision-making, debiasing, and emotional-processing techniques. The founding instructor group, beyond Salamon and Galef, included [[Valentine Smith]] and the AI-safety researcher [[Andrew Critch]], and the organization began offering classes in 2012. A standard residential workshop ran four and a half days at a fee of 3,900 dollars, with scholarships and a free preliminary consultation; Galef served as president until 2016, when Salamon, who had come from MIRI, succeeded her. CFAR and MIRI shared offices in Berkeley.[^6][^7]
|
||||
CFAR ran multi-day workshops teaching "applied rationality," a curriculum of decision-making, debiasing, and emotional-processing techniques. The founding instructor group, beyond Salamon and Galef, included [[Valentine Smith]] and the AI-safety researcher [[Andrew Critch]], and the organization began offering classes in 2012. A standard residential workshop ran four and a half days at a fee of 3,900 dollars, with scholarships and a free preliminary consultation; Galef served as president until 2016, when Salamon, who had come from MIRI, succeeded her. CFAR and MIRI shared offices in Berkeley.[^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The organization openly oriented its later programming toward AI-risk recruitment, holding specialized workshops, including dedicated "AI Risk for Computer Scientists" sessions run jointly with MIRI, to identify and route promising participants toward existential-risk work. The workshops, the group houses, and the annual alumni reunions formed the in-person spine of the Bay Area rationalist community during the 2010s. The curriculum borrowed from cognitive-behavioral therapy, debiasing research, and the community's own techniques such as "double crux" and "internal double crux," and the residential format placed instructors and participants in extended close contact that several later first-person accounts identified as a vector for the high-control dynamics that developed in the milieu.[^2][^6]
|
||||
The organization openly oriented its later programming toward AI-risk recruitment, holding specialized workshops, including dedicated "AI Risk for Computer Scientists" sessions run jointly with MIRI, to identify and route promising participants toward existential-risk work. The workshops, the group houses, and the annual alumni reunions formed the in-person spine of the Bay Area rationalist community during the 2010s. The curriculum borrowed from cognitive-behavioral therapy, debiasing research, and the community's own techniques such as "double crux" and "internal double crux," and the residential format placed instructors and participants in extended close contact that several later first-person accounts identified as a vector for the high-control dynamics that developed in the milieu.[^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
In February 2020 [[Open Philanthropy]] recommended 375,000 dollars to CFAR for general support, with [[Claire Zabel]] as grant investigator. The grant page says the foundation's primary interest in the workshops is that they introduce people to, or strengthen their connections with, the effective altruism community and way of thinking.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Zizian Protest and the Abuse Accounts
|
||||
|
||||
In November 2019 the group around [[Jack LaSota]] that became the [[The Zizians|Zizians]] protested a CFAR alumni reunion in [[Sonoma County]], appearing in masks and robes, blocking the entrances, and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four protesters were arrested.[^3]
|
||||
In November 2019 the group around [[Jack LaSota]] that became the [[The Zizians|Zizians]] protested a CFAR alumni reunion in [[Sonoma County]], appearing in masks and robes, blocking the entrances, and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four protesters were arrested.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
In 2021 a first-person account titled "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR" circulated on [[LessWrong]] alongside [[Zoe Curzi]]'s parallel writeup of [[Leverage Research]], describing psychological harm, high-control dynamics, and breakdowns in the MIRI and CFAR environment. A 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation gathered further accounts of abuse and coercion across the rationalist organizations. CFAR wound down its regular public workshop schedule around the start of the 2020s.[^4][^5]
|
||||
In 2021 a first-person account titled "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR" circulated on [[LessWrong]] alongside [[Zoe Curzi]]'s parallel writeup of [[Leverage Research]], describing psychological harm, high-control dynamics, and breakdowns in the MIRI and CFAR environment. A 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation gathered further accounts of abuse and coercion across the rationalist organizations. CFAR wound down its regular public workshop schedule around the start of the 2020s.[^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Center for Applied Rationality, founding 2012 as a spin-off of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; cross-referenced against the MIRI organizational timeline at timelines.issarice.com.
|
||||
[^2]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer, and the rationalist community record on CFAR workshops and the AI-safety recruitment orientation; see *Rationality: From AI to Zombies.* Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2015.
|
||||
[^3]: "How a Vermont border agent's death exposed violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-exposed-violence-linked-cultlike-zizian-group/
|
||||
[^4]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021; first-person disclosure-side account. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe
|
||||
[^5]: "Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News," on the 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation; discussion archived on the EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7b9ZDTAYQY9k6FZHS/abuse-in-lesswrong-and-rationalist-communities-in-bloomberg
|
||||
[^6]: "The 'Rationality' Workshop That Teaches People to Think More Like Computers," *Vice,* on the CFAR curriculum, the founders Salamon, Galef, Smith, and Critch, the 3,900 dollar fee, and the residential format. https://www.vice.com/en/article/center-for-applied-rationality/
|
||||
[^7]: Critch, Andrew, "The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR)," acritch.com, on the founding group, the shared Berkeley offices with MIRI, and the Galef-to-Salamon presidential succession in 2016. https://acritch.com/cfar/
|
||||
[^3]: "The 'Rationality' Workshop That Teaches People to Think More Like Computers," *Vice,* on the CFAR curriculum, the founders Salamon, Galef, Smith, and Critch, the 3,900 dollar fee, and the residential format. https://www.vice.com/en/article/center-for-applied-rationality/
|
||||
[^4]: Critch, Andrew, "The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR)," acritch.com, on the founding group, the shared Berkeley offices with MIRI, and the Galef-to-Salamon presidential succession in 2016. https://acritch.com/cfar/
|
||||
[^5]: Open Philanthropy, "Center for Applied Rationality: General Support (2020)," award date February 2020, amount 375,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel, Wayback Machine capture of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/center-for-applied-rationality-general-support-2020/
|
||||
[^6]: "How a Vermont border agent's death exposed violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-exposed-violence-linked-cultlike-zizian-group/
|
||||
[^7]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021; first-person disclosure-side account. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe
|
||||
[^8]: "Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News," on the 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation; discussion archived on the EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7b9ZDTAYQY9k6FZHS/abuse-in-lesswrong-and-rationalist-communities-in-bloomberg
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -166,7 +166,7 @@ relations:
|
|||
role: "statutory inquiry under section 46 of the Charities Act 2011 into the UK charity"
|
||||
fn: 7
|
||||
created: 2026-10-01
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-01
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-08
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Centre for [[Effective Altruism]] (CEA) was the name of two affiliated charities and, later, of a project hosted by them. The English company now registered as Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), number 07962181, was incorporated as the Centre for Effective Altruism on 23 February 2012, took the name [[Effective Ventures|Effective Ventures Foundation]] on 25 August 2022 and became Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) on 27 February 2023.[^1] [[William MacAskill]], [[Toby Ord]] and [[Nick Beckstead]] were each appointed directors on the day of incorporation.[^2] [[Charlotte Alter]] of [[Time|TIME]] described MacAskill as having "co-founded the Centre for Effective Altruism."[^3] The American charity filed its tax returns for 2013 to 2021 as Centre for Effective Altruism USA Inc (EIN 47-1988398, [[San Francisco]], tax-exempt from February 2015) and has since been renamed Effective Ventures Foundation USA.[^4] After the 2022 renaming, CEA continued as one of the projects fiscally sponsored by the two charities, alongside [[80,000 Hours]], [[Giving What We Can]], EA Funds, the [[Forethought Foundation]], the [[Centre for the Governance of AI]] and [[Longview Philanthropy]].[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
|
@ -197,7 +197,9 @@ Grants recommended by a "Committee for Effective Altruism Support" followed: 2,7
|
|||
|
||||
Later recommendations to CEA and its successors included 500,000 dollars for the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund (October 2021); two grants totaling 26,000,000 dollars for general support (March 2022); 77,000 dollars for a research assistant to [[Jonas Sandbrink]], a biosecurity researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute (May 2022); 5,318,000 dollars over three years for a coworking space in Boston for biosecurity teams "including [[Kevin Esvelt]]'s lab" (August 2022); 8,875,000 dollars for a five-year lease on an office in Harvard Square and 250,000 dollars for a one-year office for the Harvard AI Safety Team (August 2022); 4,929,000 dollars for Infrastructure Fund regranting (September 2022); two grants totaling 11,425,000 dollars to Effective Ventures Foundation, "formerly known as the Centre for Effective Altruism," and 1,500,000 pounds for office space for the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford (December 2022); 4,700,000 dollars (January 2023) and 2,360,192 dollars (June 2023) to the American charity; 7,644,021 dollars for the Harvard Square space (April 2023); 11,000,000 dollars (June 2023); 288,000 dollars for an "AI Safety Communications Centre" that "connects journalists to AI safety experts and resources" (August 2023); 3,342,238 dollars and 3,543,240 dollars in simultaneous grants to the English and American charities (November 2023); and 14,201,781 dollars for CEA (May 2024).[^18] In January and March 2023 Open Philanthropy also granted 37,128 dollars and 75,617 dollars to reimburse student group organizers who bought copies of MacAskill's What We Owe the Future; the English charity earned 119,614 pounds in royalties on that book in the year to June 2023.[^18][^19]
|
||||
|
||||
The English charity's accounts for the year to June 2023 state that Zabel "is employed as a program director at Open Philanthropy, our largest funder," and that "Claire has significant influence over some of the funding decisions made by Open Philanthropy in relation to several of the charity's projects." The same note records grant income from Open Philanthropy of 39,037,949 pounds (38,285,688 pounds in the year to June 2022), and a liability of 3,352,129 pounds for grants to be returned to it.[^19] Open Philanthropy's biography of Zabel states that she joined in August 2015 and "went on to lead our Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team"; its biography of Rose gives his title as program officer for the same program, the one under which its later CEA and 80,000 Hours grants are classed.[^20] The note for the year to June 2025 records that Rose, a current trustee, and Zabel are employed at Open Philanthropy with "significant influence" over its funding of the charity's projects, and that grant income from Open Philanthropy was 14,393,034 pounds in the year to June 2024 and 7,076,993 pounds in the year to June 2025, making 98,793,664 pounds over the four years. The trustees' report for that year describes the charity as "dependent on one major donor, Open Philanthropy" for a majority of its funding. The same note records grants of 425,508 pounds to Effective Altruism Germany, of which Gruban was formerly co-director, and states that he took no part in approving them.[^6] The 2022 and 2023 accounts describe a restricted fund named "Open Philanthropy" as "Income and expenses associated with projects supported by Good Ventures Foundation," a reference to [[Good Ventures]].[^11][^19]
|
||||
In March 2022 Open Philanthropy recommended 5,000,000 dollars to the [[Atlas Fellowship]], via the Centre for Effective Altruism, to support a summer program and scholarship funding for talented high school students, with Zabel as grant investigator. A further 1,800,000 dollar general support grant to the Fellowship followed in December 2022.[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
The English charity's accounts for the year to June 2023 state that Zabel "is employed as a program director at Open Philanthropy, our largest funder," and that "Claire has significant influence over some of the funding decisions made by Open Philanthropy in relation to several of the charity's projects." The same note records grant income from Open Philanthropy of 39,037,949 pounds (38,285,688 pounds in the year to June 2022), and a liability of 3,352,129 pounds for grants to be returned to it.[^19] Open Philanthropy's biography of Zabel states that she joined in August 2015 and "went on to lead our Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team"; its biography of Rose gives his title as program officer for the same program, the one under which its later CEA and 80,000 Hours grants are classed.[^21] The note for the year to June 2025 records that Rose, a current trustee, and Zabel are employed at Open Philanthropy with "significant influence" over its funding of the charity's projects, and that grant income from Open Philanthropy was 14,393,034 pounds in the year to June 2024 and 7,076,993 pounds in the year to June 2025, making 98,793,664 pounds over the four years. The trustees' report for that year describes the charity as "dependent on one major donor, Open Philanthropy" for a majority of its funding. The same note records grants of 425,508 pounds to Effective Altruism Germany, of which Gruban was formerly co-director, and states that he took no part in approving them.[^6] The 2022 and 2023 accounts describe a restricted fund named "Open Philanthropy" as "Income and expenses associated with projects supported by Good Ventures Foundation," a reference to [[Good Ventures]].[^11][^19]
|
||||
|
||||
### Oxford Institutes and Projects
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -207,13 +209,13 @@ The charity's projects in the 2022 accounts included Longview Philanthropy, a jo
|
|||
|
||||
### Wytham Abbey
|
||||
|
||||
In December 2021 Open Philanthropy recommended two grants totaling 17,324,697 pounds (about 23,212,677 dollars) to Effective Ventures Foundation "to support the purchase, renovation, and operation of [[Wytham Abbey]]," a venue near Oxford "modeled on similar venues funded by the [[Rockefeller Foundation]] and the Brocher Foundation." The page states that if the venue proved less cost-effective than alternatives, "proceeds from a sale will be used to support EVF's ongoing operations," and that the amount was updated in October 2024.[^21] The accounts record the purchase on 1 April 2022.[^11]
|
||||
In December 2021 Open Philanthropy recommended two grants totaling 17,324,697 pounds (about 23,212,677 dollars) to Effective Ventures Foundation "to support the purchase, renovation, and operation of [[Wytham Abbey]]," a venue near Oxford "modeled on similar venues funded by the [[Rockefeller Foundation]] and the Brocher Foundation." The page states that if the venue proved less cost-effective than alternatives, "proceeds from a sale will be used to support EVF's ongoing operations," and that the amount was updated in October 2024.[^22] The accounts record the purchase on 1 April 2022.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
In the year to June 2025 the trustees recorded an impairment of 8,593,798 pounds against a freehold cost of 16,536,782 pounds. They state that the property was marketed in summer 2024 "at the original purchase price," that valuers then advised a change of strategy "given significant reductions in market sentiment," and that "After the year ended, the Charity entered into a sales agreement and completed the sale of Wytham Abbey for £6m in November 2025." During the year 279,816 pounds were transferred from central funds to meet the running costs. The 2024 accounts record that Lakeside, an Oxford accommodation property carried at about 1.4 million pounds, was sold after the year end for about 1.2 million pounds.[^6][^22]
|
||||
In the year to June 2025 the trustees recorded an impairment of 8,593,798 pounds against a freehold cost of 16,536,782 pounds. They state that the property was marketed in summer 2024 "at the original purchase price," that valuers then advised a change of strategy "given significant reductions in market sentiment," and that "After the year ended, the Charity entered into a sales agreement and completed the sale of Wytham Abbey for £6m in November 2025." During the year 279,816 pounds were transferred from central funds to meet the running costs. The 2024 accounts record that Lakeside, an Oxford accommodation property carried at about 1.4 million pounds, was sold after the year end for about 1.2 million pounds.[^6][^23]
|
||||
|
||||
### FTX Foundation Funds and the Charity Commission Inquiry
|
||||
|
||||
The announcement of the [[FTX Future Fund]] on 1 March 2022, reposted by [[Tyler Cowen]], gave its team as Beckstead (chief executive), [[Leopold Aschenbrenner]], MacAskill and [[Ketan Ramakrishnan]].[^23] Alter reported that in less than nine months the fund gave 13.9 million dollars to CEA.[^3] The English charity's accounts record donations from the [[FTX Foundation]] of 1,478,708 pounds in the year to June 2022 and 2,766,546 pounds in the year to June 2023, and state in both years that one of the trustees was also chief executive of the FTX Foundation.[^19] The Future Fund team announced its resignation in a post dated 11 November 2022.[^24]
|
||||
The announcement of the [[FTX Future Fund]] on 1 March 2022, reposted by [[Tyler Cowen]], gave its team as Beckstead (chief executive), [[Leopold Aschenbrenner]], MacAskill and [[Ketan Ramakrishnan]].[^24] Alter reported that in less than nine months the fund gave 13.9 million dollars to CEA.[^3] The English charity's accounts record donations from the [[FTX Foundation]] of 1,478,708 pounds in the year to June 2022 and 2,766,546 pounds in the year to June 2023, and state in both years that one of the trustees was also chief executive of the FTX Foundation.[^19] The Future Fund team announced its resignation in a post dated 11 November 2022.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
[[FTX]] filed for bankruptcy on 11 November 2022. Five days later Lempel was appointed chief executive.[^8] On 19 November the charity filed a serious incident report with the Commission stating that it held 3.3 million pounds and 300,000 dollars from FTX or affiliated entities, that one trustee was chief executive of the FTX Foundation and another an unpaid adviser to the FTX Future Fund. On 2 December the trustees told the Commission that those trustees had been excluded from decisions on the bankruptcy as "non-participating" trustees. The Commission opened a statutory inquiry under section 46 of the [[Charities Act 2011]] on 19 December 2022. On 12 February 2023 the trustees filed a second serious incident report about a historic safeguarding incident involving a former trustee before that person's appointment.[^7] The accounts for the year to June 2022 state that an internal investigation was "ongoing in Q1 2023 in order to investigate concerns re past conduct of a former trustee."[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -221,9 +223,9 @@ The inquiry report of 22 May 2024 records that the trustees ringfenced the funds
|
|||
|
||||
### Spin-out and Successor Entities
|
||||
|
||||
In November 2023 the trustees decided to spin all fiscally sponsored projects out into independent entities. The accounts for the year to June 2025 record the completion dates: the Centre for the Governance of AI on 15 November 2024, Forethought on 28 February 2025, 80,000 Hours on 31 March 2025 and the teenage fellowship Non-Trivial on 11 April 2025. CEA and EA Funds were to merge from 1 July 2025. The board "does not intend to fiscally sponsor new charitable projects" and expects the company to "wind down (in 2026 or beyond)," and the accounts were prepared on a basis other than going concern. In that year the charity spent 8,135,491 pounds on CEA, 5,454,605 pounds on 80,000 Hours and 9,982,687 pounds on EA Funds and Giving What We Can, against total income of 12,083,820 pounds (31,663,819 pounds in 2024), and net funds fell from 43,259,065 pounds to 17,808,025 pounds.[^6] Open Philanthropy recommended 460,000 dollars to the English charity and 990,000 dollars to the American one for CEA's spin-out costs in May 2024.[^25]
|
||||
In November 2023 the trustees decided to spin all fiscally sponsored projects out into independent entities. The accounts for the year to June 2025 record the completion dates: the Centre for the Governance of AI on 15 November 2024, Forethought on 28 February 2025, 80,000 Hours on 31 March 2025 and the teenage fellowship Non-Trivial on 11 April 2025. CEA and EA Funds were to merge from 1 July 2025. The board "does not intend to fiscally sponsor new charitable projects" and expects the company to "wind down (in 2026 or beyond)," and the accounts were prepared on a basis other than going concern. In that year the charity spent 8,135,491 pounds on CEA, 5,454,605 pounds on 80,000 Hours and 9,982,687 pounds on EA Funds and Giving What We Can, against total income of 12,083,820 pounds (31,663,819 pounds in 2024), and net funds fell from 43,259,065 pounds to 17,808,025 pounds.[^6] Open Philanthropy recommended 460,000 dollars to the English charity and 990,000 dollars to the American one for CEA's spin-out costs in May 2024.[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
Two new English companies, Centre for Effective Altruism UK (number 16360152, incorporated 2 April 2025) and Centre for Effective Altruism Community UK (number 16395613, incorporated 17 April 2025), are registered at Trajan House with a single director each and a statement that the company has no registrable controller.[^26] In the [[United States]], Centre For Effective Altruism Inc (EIN 33-3737390), at an address in Milton, Delaware, holds a tax exemption with a ruling date of 1 March 2025.[^27]
|
||||
Two new English companies, Centre for Effective Altruism UK (number 16360152, incorporated 2 April 2025) and Centre for Effective Altruism Community UK (number 16395613, incorporated 17 April 2025), are registered at Trajan House with a single director each and a statement that the company has no registrable controller.[^27] In the [[United States]], Centre For Effective Altruism Inc (EIN 33-3737390), at an address in Milton, Delaware, holds a tax exemption with a ruling date of 1 March 2025.[^28]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -246,11 +248,12 @@ Two new English companies, Centre for Effective Altruism UK (number 16360152, in
|
|||
[^17]: Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and Prime Minister's Office, "Appointment of Jade Leung as the Prime Minister's AI adviser," GOV.UK, 15 August 2025; Cabinet Office, "Dr Jade Leung appointed Vice-Chair of the AI Security Institute and Security Advisor to the AI Taskforce," GOV.UK, 23 September 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/appointment-of-jade-leung-as-the-prime-ministers-ai-adviser ; https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dr-jade-leung-appointed-vice-chair-of-the-ai-security-institute-and-security-advisor-to-the-ai-taskforce
|
||||
[^18]: Open Philanthropy grant pages, Wayback captures of 2023 to 2025: "Centre for Effective Altruism, Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund" (October 2021); "General Support (2022)" (March 2022); "Research Assistant for Jonas Sandbrink" (May 2022); "Biosecurity Coworking Space," "Harvard Square Coworking Space" and "Harvard AI Safety Office" (August 2022); "Infrastructure Fund Regranting" (September 2022); "Effective Ventures Foundation, General Support" and "Office Space" (December 2022); "General Support (EVF USA, January 2023)"; "Effective Ventures Foundation, Support for What We Owe The Future" (January 2023); "Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Support for What We Owe The Future" (March 2023); "Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Harvard Square Coworking Space (2023)" (April 2023); "General Support (EVF, June 2023)" and "(EVF USA, June 2023)"; "Effective Ventures Foundation, AI Safety Communications Centre" (August 2023); "General Support (EVF, November 2023)" and "(EVF USA, November 2023)"; "General Support (EVF, May 2024)." https://web.archive.org/web/20251117060703/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-effective-altruism-infrastructure-fund/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20251103005418/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-general-support-2022/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250512185858/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-research-assistant-for-jonas-sandbrink/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20251113075351/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-biosecurity-coworking-space/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20251025192305/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-harvard-coworking-space/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20251117005852/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-harvard-ai-safety-office/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20230710180030/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-infrastructure-fund-regranting/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250831045703/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-ventures-foundation-uk-general-support/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250618023752/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-ventures-foundation-office-space/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20251031134905/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-general-support-january-2023/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250429042148/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-ventures-foundation-support-for-what-we-owe-the-future/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20241110095505/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-ventures-foundation-usa-support-for-what-we-owe-the-future/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250618024013/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-harvard-square-coworking-space-2023/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20251023101706/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-general-support/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250711152100/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-general-support-june-2023/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250201041241/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-ventures-foundation-ai-safety-communications-centre/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20251024141001/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-general-support-evf/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250518121930/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-general-support-evf-usa/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250123031744/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-general-support-evf-uk-may-2024/
|
||||
[^19]: Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), Trustees' Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 30 June 2023, filed at Companies House 21 March 2024: Trustees' Report, "Management of existing risks" (FTX bankruptcy), fund descriptions, and note 27 ("Related party transactions"), page 48. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/filing-history/MzQxNDkzNjQ2NGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf
|
||||
[^20]: Open Philanthropy, team biographies "Claire Zabel" (Wayback capture of 5 January 2025) and "Eli Rose" (Wayback capture of 6 January 2025). https://web.archive.org/web/20250105212156/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250106073801/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/eli-rose/
|
||||
[^21]: Open Philanthropy, "Effective Ventures Foundation, Event Venue," award date December 2021, amount updated October 2024, Wayback capture of 4 November 2025. https://web.archive.org/web/20251104150006/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-ventures-foundation-uk-event-venue/
|
||||
[^22]: Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), Trustees' Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 30 June 2024, filed at Companies House 1 April 2025, note 26 ("Post balance sheet events"). https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/filing-history/MzQ2MDU2NjI0MmFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf
|
||||
[^23]: Cowen, Tyler. "Announcing the Future Fund." Marginal Revolution, 1 March 2022. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/03/announcing-the-future-fund.html
|
||||
[^24]: Beckstead, Nick, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Ketan Ramakrishnan and others. "The FTX Future Fund team has resigned." Effective Altruism Forum, 11 November 2022. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xafpj3on76uRDoBja/the-ftx-future-fund-team-has-resigned-1
|
||||
[^25]: Open Philanthropy, "Centre for Effective Altruism, Spinout Costs (EVF UK, May 2024)" and "Spinout Costs (EVF USA, May 2024)," Wayback captures of 18 June 2025. https://web.archive.org/web/20250618031521/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-spinout-costs-evf-uk-may-2024/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250618031718/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-spinout-costs-evf-usa-may-2024/
|
||||
[^26]: Companies House, "Centre for Effective Altruism UK," company number 16360152, and "Centre for Effective Altruism Community UK," company number 16395613, overviews, officers and persons with significant control, retrieved 1 October 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16360152 ; https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16395613
|
||||
[^27]: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API, "Centre For Effective Altruism Inc," EIN 33-3737390, organization record, retrieved 1 October 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api/v2/organizations/333737390.json
|
||||
[^20]: Open Philanthropy, "Atlas Fellowship: Scholarships and Summer Program for Students," award date March 2022, amount 5,000,000 dollars, grant investigator Claire Zabel (Wayback Machine captures of 2022 and 2024), https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/atlas-fellowship-scholarships-and-summer-program-for-students/ ; and "Atlas Fellowship: General Support," award date December 2022, amount 1,800,000 dollars, https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/atlas-fellowship-general-support/
|
||||
[^21]: Open Philanthropy, team biographies "Claire Zabel" (Wayback capture of 5 January 2025) and "Eli Rose" (Wayback capture of 6 January 2025). https://web.archive.org/web/20250105212156/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250106073801/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/eli-rose/
|
||||
[^22]: Open Philanthropy, "Effective Ventures Foundation, Event Venue," award date December 2021, amount updated October 2024, Wayback capture of 4 November 2025. https://web.archive.org/web/20251104150006/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-ventures-foundation-uk-event-venue/
|
||||
[^23]: Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), Trustees' Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 30 June 2024, filed at Companies House 1 April 2025, note 26 ("Post balance sheet events"). https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/filing-history/MzQ2MDU2NjI0MmFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf
|
||||
[^24]: Cowen, Tyler. "Announcing the Future Fund." Marginal Revolution, 1 March 2022. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/03/announcing-the-future-fund.html
|
||||
[^25]: Beckstead, Nick, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Ketan Ramakrishnan and others. "The FTX Future Fund team has resigned." Effective Altruism Forum, 11 November 2022. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xafpj3on76uRDoBja/the-ftx-future-fund-team-has-resigned-1
|
||||
[^26]: Open Philanthropy, "Centre for Effective Altruism, Spinout Costs (EVF UK, May 2024)" and "Spinout Costs (EVF USA, May 2024)," Wayback captures of 18 June 2025. https://web.archive.org/web/20250618031521/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-spinout-costs-evf-uk-may-2024/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20250618031718/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-spinout-costs-evf-usa-may-2024/
|
||||
[^27]: Companies House, "Centre for Effective Altruism UK," company number 16360152, and "Centre for Effective Altruism Community UK," company number 16395613, overviews, officers and persons with significant control, retrieved 1 October 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16360152 ; https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16395613
|
||||
[^28]: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API, "Centre For Effective Altruism Inc," EIN 33-3737390, organization record, retrieved 1 October 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api/v2/organizations/333737390.json
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -79,14 +79,20 @@ relations:
|
|||
reverse: true
|
||||
end: 2023-06-30
|
||||
role: "president, 1,868,393 dollars reportable compensation in the return for the year to June 2023"
|
||||
fn: 27
|
||||
fn: 30
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[David Rubenstein]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "chairman in the return for the year to June 2023"
|
||||
fn: 27
|
||||
fn: 30
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Bernard L. Schwartz]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2002
|
||||
role: "Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellowship in Business and Foreign Policy, first holder Bennett Freeman"
|
||||
fn: 26
|
||||
created: 2026-10-01
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-01
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Council on Foreign Relations is a New York membership organization that publishes [[Foreign Affairs]] and runs study groups, a meetings program for members, affiliated Committees on Foreign Relations in other cities and a corporate subscription program.
|
||||
|
|
@ -167,21 +173,27 @@ General fund expenditures were 6,778,300 dollars against total funding of 6,718,
|
|||
|
||||
The report lists as directors, at press time, Harold Brown, Stanley Hoffmann, Nicholas Katzenbach, Lane Kirkland, Juanita Kreps, Robert Scalapino, [[Brent Scowcroft]], Stephen Stamas, Philip Geyelin, McColough, Donald McHenry, Peterson, William D. Rogers, Vance, Marina Whitman, Walter Wriston, Graham Allison, Warren Christopher, Richard Gelb, Alan Greenspan, [[Bobby Ray Inman]], Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lewis Preston and Clifton Wharton. Of these twenty-four, Brown, Allison, Christopher, Kirkland, Greenspan, Kreps and Whitman appear in the Trilateral Commission's North American roster of July 1981.[^1][^23] A letter from McCloy dated June 27, 1985, printed in the report, refers to David Rockefeller's "44 years of close and active association with the Council" and to his "relinquishment of his leadership on the Board."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Bernard L. Schwartz fellowship and the Greenberg Center, 2002
|
||||
|
||||
On March 20, 2002, the council announced that [[Bennett Freeman]] had been named the first Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow in Business and Foreign Policy. The fellowship was placed in the council's new [[Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies]]. The release states: "This fellowship is funded by Bernard L. Schwartz, Chairman and CEO of Loral Space & Communications Ltd."[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
Two months earlier, on January 9, 2002, [[Space Systems/Loral]] had signed a consent agreement with the State Department's Office of Defense Trade Controls. The agreement set a civil penalty of $20,000,000, of which $14,000,000 was payable and $6,000,000 was suspended, and recorded that the company neither admitted nor denied the allegations in a draft charging letter.[^27] The draft charging letter, addressed to the president of Loral Space & Communications, alleged "Sixty-four (64) violations" in connection with the aftermath of the February 1996 Long March 3B failure.[^28]
|
||||
|
||||
### Foreign Affairs
|
||||
|
||||
Foreign Affairs published "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in July 1947 over the signature "X," credited by the journal to George F. Kennan; the article called for "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."[^26]
|
||||
Foreign Affairs published "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in July 1947 over the signature "X," credited by the journal to George F. Kennan; the article called for "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."[^29]
|
||||
|
||||
### Recent filings
|
||||
|
||||
The Council's Form 990 for the year ended June 30, 2023 reports revenue of 106,930,600 dollars, expenses of 83,166,400 dollars and year-end assets of 719,707,600 dollars; the same series of returns on the [[ProPublica]] Nonprofit Explorer shows revenue of 59,633,100 dollars and assets of 438,237,900 dollars for the year to June 2011.[^2] The 2023 return lists contributions of 63,113,857 dollars, Foreign Affairs revenue of 11,709,500, individual membership revenue of 9,036,200 and corporate membership revenue of 1,103,843, with 711 employees and 34 voting members of the governing body. It describes the membership as "over 5,000," states that the members elect all voting directors, and gives the year of founding as 1921.[^27]
|
||||
The Council's Form 990 for the year ended June 30, 2023 reports revenue of 106,930,600 dollars, expenses of 83,166,400 dollars and year-end assets of 719,707,600 dollars; the same series of returns on the [[ProPublica]] Nonprofit Explorer shows revenue of 59,633,100 dollars and assets of 438,237,900 dollars for the year to June 2011.[^2] The 2023 return lists contributions of 63,113,857 dollars, Foreign Affairs revenue of 11,709,500, individual membership revenue of 9,036,200 and corporate membership revenue of 1,103,843, with 711 employees and 34 voting members of the governing body. It describes the membership as "over 5,000," states that the members elect all voting directors, and gives the year of founding as 1921.[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Richard Haass]] is shown as president through June 30, 2023 with reportable compensation of 1,868,393 dollars and 59,851 dollars of other compensation; [[Michael Froman]] is named as principal officer. Other reported compensation includes 524,534 dollars to the chief investment officer, [[Giovanna Ban]], 519,740 to the executive vice president and chief financial officer, Keith Olson, 459,793 to the director of studies, [[James M. Lindsay]], 330,419 to the editor of Foreign Affairs, [[Daniel Kurtz-Phelan]], and 280,205 to the distinguished fellow [[Martin Indyk]]. [[David Rubenstein]] is chairman, [[Blair Effron]] and [[Jami Miscik]] vice-chairmen, and the directors include [[Thad Allen]], [[Ashton B. Carter]] (through October 2022), [[Kenneth I. Chenault]], [[Laurence D. Fink]] (through June 30, 2023), [[Timothy F. Geithner]] (through June 30, 2023), [[James P. Gorman]], [[Stephen J. Hadley]], [[Jeh Johnson]], [[William H. McRaven]], [[Janet Napolitano]], [[Meghan O'Sullivan]], [[Ruth Porat]], [[Laurene Powell Jobs]], [[Frances F. Townsend]], [[Daniel H. Yergin]] and [[Fareed Zakaria]]. Schedule O reports business relationships between Haass and directors Effron, [[Stephen C. Freidheim]] and [[Nicholas Beim]]; between Rubenstein and Carter and Yergin; between Miscik and Gorman; and between directors [[James Manyika]] and Porat. Schedule I lists fellowship payments including 596,458 dollars for nine International Affairs Fellows, 288,750 dollars for four fellows in national security, 119,350 dollars for six in Japan, 100,000 dollars for one Edward R. Murrow press fellow and 80,000 dollars for one Stanton nuclear security fellow. The donor schedule is redacted in the public copy.[^27]
|
||||
[[Richard Haass]] is shown as president through June 30, 2023 with reportable compensation of 1,868,393 dollars and 59,851 dollars of other compensation; [[Michael Froman]] is named as principal officer. Other reported compensation includes 524,534 dollars to the chief investment officer, [[Giovanna Ban]], 519,740 to the executive vice president and chief financial officer, Keith Olson, 459,793 to the director of studies, [[James M. Lindsay]], 330,419 to the editor of Foreign Affairs, [[Daniel Kurtz-Phelan]], and 280,205 to the distinguished fellow [[Martin Indyk]]. [[David Rubenstein]] is chairman, [[Blair Effron]] and [[Jami Miscik]] vice-chairmen, and the directors include [[Thad Allen]], [[Ashton B. Carter]] (through October 2022), [[Kenneth I. Chenault]], [[Laurence D. Fink]] (through June 30, 2023), [[Timothy F. Geithner]] (through June 30, 2023), [[James P. Gorman]], [[Stephen J. Hadley]], [[Jeh Johnson]], [[William H. McRaven]], [[Janet Napolitano]], [[Meghan O'Sullivan]], [[Ruth Porat]], [[Laurene Powell Jobs]], [[Frances F. Townsend]], [[Daniel H. Yergin]] and [[Fareed Zakaria]]. Schedule O reports business relationships between Haass and directors Effron, [[Stephen C. Freidheim]] and [[Nicholas Beim]]; between Rubenstein and Carter and Yergin; between Miscik and Gorman; and between directors [[James Manyika]] and Porat. Schedule I lists fellowship payments including 596,458 dollars for nine International Affairs Fellows, 288,750 dollars for four fellows in national security, 119,350 dollars for six in Japan, 100,000 dollars for one Edward R. Murrow press fellow and 80,000 dollars for one Stanton nuclear security fellow. The donor schedule is redacted in the public copy.[^30]
|
||||
|
||||
Five of the directors named in the 2023 return (Rubenstein, Manyika, O'Sullivan, Townsend and Yergin) are members of the North American group in the Trilateral Commission's list of September 6, 2024, on which five Council fellows also appear.[^28]
|
||||
Five of the directors named in the 2023 return (Rubenstein, Manyika, O'Sullivan, Townsend and Yergin) are members of the North American group in the Trilateral Commission's list of September 6, 2024, on which five Council fellows also appear.[^31]
|
||||
|
||||
### Jeffrey Epstein
|
||||
|
||||
Two biographical statements in the [[Department of Justice]]'s [[Epstein Files|Epstein Library]], one headed "Biographical Information of Jeffrey E. Epstein" and one "About Jeffrey E. Epstein," neither dated on its face, describe [[Jeffrey Epstein]] as "a former member of the Trilateral Commission and a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations." No Council membership roll appears in the documents examined.[^29] An exchange of November 8 and 15, 2010 between Epstein and the Council's director of events concerns travel and a weekend event.[^30]
|
||||
Two biographical statements in the [[Department of Justice]]'s [[Epstein Files|Epstein Library]], one headed "Biographical Information of Jeffrey E. Epstein" and one "About Jeffrey E. Epstein," neither dated on its face, describe [[Jeffrey Epstein]] as "a former member of the Trilateral Commission and a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations." No Council membership roll appears in the documents examined.[^32] An exchange of November 8 and 15, 2010 between Epstein and the Council's director of events concerns travel and a weekend event.[^33]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -210,8 +222,11 @@ Two biographical statements in the [[Department of Justice]]'s [[Epstein Files|E
|
|||
[^23]: The Trilateral Commission, membership list "As of July 1, 1981," reprinted in Congressional Research Service, The Trilateral Commission, Issue Packet IP0092 (Library of Congress, 1981), https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/19810501_IP0092_2d3ea09e2c6068af730f41d315f4ea490bc91878.pdf
|
||||
[^24]: Memoranda, National Intelligence Officer for China to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for National Intelligence, July 26, 1976 (NIO 1215-76) and September 7, 1976 (NIO 1426-76), CIA-RDP83B00100R000100130019-2, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp83b00100r000100130019-2
|
||||
[^25]: Letter, Stansfield Turner to Alton Frye, Director, International Affairs Fellowships, Council on Foreign Relations, September 12, 1979, CIA-RDP80B01554R003300220008-8, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80b01554r003300220008-8
|
||||
[^26]: "X" (George F. Kennan), "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs, vol. 25, no. 4, July 1947, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct
|
||||
[^27]: Internal Revenue Service, Form 990 of Council on Foreign Relations Inc for the year ended June 30, 2023 (tax year 2022), Parts I, III, VI, VII, VIII, Schedules B, I and O, IRS e-file XML object 202430169349300598, https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/990/xml/2024/2024_TEOS_XML_01A.zip (member 2024_TEOS_XML_01A/202430169349300598_public.xml)
|
||||
[^28]: The Trilateral Commission, membership list "Last updated September 6, 2024," North American Group, https://archive.org/details/tc-membership-list-sept-6-2024-1
|
||||
[^29]: Department of Justice, Epstein Library, "Biographical Information of Jeffrey E. Epstein," EFTA00725190, and "About Jeffrey E. Epstein," EFTA00725191, https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00725190.pdf and https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00725191.pdf
|
||||
[^30]: Department of Justice, Epstein Library, emails of November 8 and 15, 2010 between Jeffrey Epstein and the Council on Foreign Relations director of events, EFTA00751793, https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00751793.pdf
|
||||
[^26]: Council on Foreign Relations, "Bennett Freeman Named First Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow in Business and Foreign Policy," press release dated March 20, 2002, https://www.cfr.org/articles/bennett-freeman-named-first-bernard-l-schwartz-senior-fellow-business-and-foreign
|
||||
[^27]: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Office of Defense Trade Controls, consent agreement with Space Systems/Loral, Inc., January 9, 2002, Exhibit 10.1 to Loral Space & Communications Ltd. Form 8-K, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001006269/000095012302000193/y56456ex10-1.txt
|
||||
[^28]: U.S. Department of State, Office of Defense Trade Controls, Draft Charging Letter to Space Systems/Loral, Inc. (undated), https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/sys_attachment.do?sys_id=032ef245db15df00d0a370131f96192b
|
||||
[^29]: "X" (George F. Kennan), "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs, vol. 25, no. 4, July 1947, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct
|
||||
[^30]: Internal Revenue Service, Form 990 of Council on Foreign Relations Inc for the year ended June 30, 2023 (tax year 2022), Parts I, III, VI, VII, VIII, Schedules B, I and O, IRS e-file XML object 202430169349300598, https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/990/xml/2024/2024_TEOS_XML_01A.zip (member 2024_TEOS_XML_01A/202430169349300598_public.xml)
|
||||
[^31]: The Trilateral Commission, membership list "Last updated September 6, 2024," North American Group, https://archive.org/details/tc-membership-list-sept-6-2024-1
|
||||
[^32]: Department of Justice, Epstein Library, "Biographical Information of Jeffrey E. Epstein," EFTA00725190, and "About Jeffrey E. Epstein," EFTA00725191, https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00725190.pdf and https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00725191.pdf
|
||||
[^33]: Department of Justice, Epstein Library, emails of November 8 and 15, 2010 between Jeffrey Epstein and the Council on Foreign Relations director of events, EFTA00751793, https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00751793.pdf
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -14,8 +14,16 @@ tags:
|
|||
- Philanthropy
|
||||
summary: "Effective Ventures was the umbrella charity that legally housed the central effective-altruism organizations, took roughly 27 million dollars from Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX in 2022, repaid all of it to the FTX bankruptcy estate in a 2024 settlement, and then resolved to spin out all of its projects into independent bodies."
|
||||
location: "Oxford, England; United States"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Claire Zabel]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2019-07-18
|
||||
end: 2024-03-28
|
||||
role: "director of the English company then named the Centre for Effective Altruism"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
created: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-20
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-08
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Effective Ventures was the umbrella organization that served as the legal and operational home of the central institutions of [[Effective Altruism|effective altruism]]. It consisted of two affiliated charities, the Effective Ventures Foundation in the United Kingdom and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, which between them hosted projects including the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], [[80,000 Hours]], [[Giving What We Can]], and the EA Funds. The group received about 27 million dollars from [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]'s [[FTX]] and its associated foundation in 2022, repaid the full amount to the FTX bankruptcy estate in a January 2024 settlement, and subsequently decided to dissolve the umbrella and spin its projects out as independent organizations.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
|
@ -26,30 +34,43 @@ Effective Ventures operated as a fiscal sponsor, a single charitable structure u
|
|||
|
||||
The projects housed under Effective Ventures included the Centre for Effective Altruism, which runs the movement's conferences and community infrastructure; the career-advising organization 80,000 Hours, cofounded by [[William MacAskill]] and Benjamin Todd; Giving What We Can, the pledge organization for charitable donation also cofounded by MacAskill and [[Toby Ord]]; the grantmaking platform EA Funds; the Forethought Foundation; and at various times other research and outreach efforts. Several of the people who ran Effective Ventures and its projects, including MacAskill, also held roles in Bankman-Fried's philanthropic operation.[^1][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Trustees and Control
|
||||
|
||||
[[Companies House]] records [[Claire Zabel]] as a director of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), company number 07962181, from July 18, 2019 to March 28, 2024.[^4] The register of persons with significant control records her as holding more than 25 percent but not more than 50 percent of the voting rights from July 18, 2019 to February 2, 2022, and again from September 21, 2023 to March 28, 2024.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The accounts for the year to June 30, 2023 list as trustees William MacAskill, Toby Ord, Zabel, [[Owen Cotton-Barratt]], [[Nick Beckstead]], [[Tasha McCauley]], [[Lincoln Quirk]], [[Eli Rose]] and J Winchell, with [[Howie Lempel]] as chief executive until December 7, 2023.[^6] Note 27 states that Zabel "is employed as a program director at Open Philanthropy, our largest funder" and that "As a result of that position, Claire has significant influence over some of the funding decisions made by Open Philanthropy in relation to several of the charity's projects." In that year the company received 39,037,949 pounds in grant income from [[Open Philanthropy]] and donations of 2,766,546 pounds from the [[FTX Foundation]]. The note states that one of the Board of Trustees was also the chief executive of the FTX Foundation during the year.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Charity Commission]] report of May 22, 2024 records that one trustee was the chief executive of the FTX Foundation and another an unpaid adviser to the [[FTX Future Fund]], that trustees were not required to disclose potential conflicts of interest on joining the board until October 2022, and that the inquiry found no evidence of unmanaged conflicts regarding funds received from the FTX Foundation. It does not name the trustees or mention Open Philanthropy.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### The FTX Money and the Settlement
|
||||
|
||||
In 2022 entities within Effective Ventures received approximately 26.8 million dollars in grants from FTX and the FTX Foundation, part of the wave of money Bankman-Fried directed into effective-altruism and longtermist causes before his exchange collapsed in November 2022. When FTX failed and entered bankruptcy, its estate moved to recover money that FTX and Alameda had paid out, including charitable grants, on the basis that the funds had originated in customer deposits misappropriated in the fraud.[^2][^4]
|
||||
In 2022 entities within Effective Ventures received approximately 26.8 million dollars in grants from FTX and the FTX Foundation, part of the wave of money Bankman-Fried directed into effective-altruism and longtermist causes before his exchange collapsed in November 2022. When FTX failed and entered bankruptcy, its estate moved to recover money that FTX and Alameda had paid out, including charitable grants, on the basis that the funds had originated in customer deposits misappropriated in the fraud.[^2][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
Effective Ventures announced in January 2024 that it had reached a settlement with the FTX bankruptcy estate under which it returned 26,786,503 dollars, a sum the organization stated was equal to one hundred percent of the funds it and its projects had received from FTX and the FTX Foundation. The repayment, which the group covered in part by drawing on reserves and other donors, removed the threat of clawback litigation but consumed a large share of the organization's resources.[^2][^4]
|
||||
Effective Ventures announced in January 2024 that it had reached a settlement with the FTX bankruptcy estate under which it returned 26,786,503 dollars, a sum the organization stated was equal to one hundred percent of the funds it and its projects had received from FTX and the FTX Foundation. The repayment, which the group covered in part by drawing on reserves and other donors, removed the threat of clawback litigation but consumed a large share of the organization's resources.[^2][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Wytham Abbey
|
||||
|
||||
Among the assets Effective Ventures had acquired in the period of FTX-era abundance was Wytham Abbey, a fifteenth-century manor house near Oxford, bought in 2022 for a reported price of about 15 million pounds to serve as a conference and workshop venue for the effective-altruism community. The purchase, made with funding connected to the movement's major donors, drew public criticism as an extravagant use of charitable money and became a symbol of the movement's spending during its flush years.[^5][^3]
|
||||
Among the assets Effective Ventures had acquired in the period of FTX-era abundance was Wytham Abbey, a fifteenth-century manor house near Oxford, bought in 2022 for a reported price of about 15 million pounds to serve as a conference and workshop venue for the effective-altruism community. The purchase, made with funding connected to the movement's major donors, drew public criticism as an extravagant use of charitable money and became a symbol of the movement's spending during its flush years.[^3][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
After the FTX collapse and the settlement, Effective Ventures put the property up for sale, and it was sold in 2024 at a reported loss of about 14.5 million dollars against the purchase and associated costs. The sale was part of the broader unwinding of the organization's holdings and commitments in the wake of the FTX failure.[^5]
|
||||
After the FTX collapse and the settlement, Effective Ventures put the property up for sale, and it was sold in 2024 at a reported loss of about 14.5 million dollars against the purchase and associated costs. The sale was part of the broader unwinding of the organization's holdings and commitments in the wake of the FTX failure.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Decision to Spin Out
|
||||
|
||||
In the aftermath of the FTX collapse, which implicated people close to the organization and exposed the concentration of legal and reputational risk in a single shared structure, the boards of Effective Ventures UK and Effective Ventures USA decided to spin out all of the group's projects into independent organizations rather than continue as an umbrella. The decision followed an external investigation, commissioned after the collapse, into the organizations' ties to Bankman-Fried.[^1][^6]
|
||||
In the aftermath of the FTX collapse, which implicated people close to the organization and exposed the concentration of legal and reputational risk in a single shared structure, the boards of Effective Ventures UK and Effective Ventures USA decided to spin out all of the group's projects into independent organizations rather than continue as an umbrella. The decision followed an external investigation, commissioned after the collapse, into the organizations' ties to Bankman-Fried.[^1][^11]
|
||||
|
||||
The dissolution proceeded over the following two years. 80,000 Hours announced its plan to become independent in December 2023 and completed its spin-out in May 2025, establishing new United Kingdom entities; the Centre for Effective Altruism announced in January 2024 that it would leave the umbrella and merge with EA Funds, targeting independence by mid-2025. The boards stated that they would not take on new sponsored projects to replace those that departed.[^6][^7]
|
||||
The dissolution proceeded over the following two years. 80,000 Hours announced its plan to become independent in December 2023 and completed its spin-out in May 2025, establishing new United Kingdom entities; the Centre for Effective Altruism announced in January 2024 that it would leave the umbrella and merge with EA Funds, targeting independence by mid-2025. The boards stated that they would not take on new sponsored projects to replace those that departed.[^11][^12]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "EV updates: FTX settlement and the future of EV," Effective Altruism Forum, on the two legal entities, the hosted projects, the settlement, and the decision to spin out all projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjsfHwqasyQMWRzZN/ev-updates-ftx-settlement-and-the-future-of-ev
|
||||
[^2]: "Effective Ventures Settles $26.8M FTX Donations Case," The Crypto Times, January 31, 2024, on the return of 26,786,503 dollars equal to one hundred percent of the FTX funds received. https://www.cryptotimes.io/2024/01/31/effective-ventures-settles-26-8m-ftx-donations-case/
|
||||
[^3]: "Effective Ventures," Effective Altruism Forum topic page, on the fiscal-sponsor structure and the constituent projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/effective-ventures
|
||||
[^4]: "Asset Recovery: Effective Ventures Return $27M in Donations to FTX Bankruptcy Estate," Coinfomania, on the clawback context and the recovery of customer-deposit-sourced grants. https://coinfomania.com/asset-recovery-effective-ventures-return-27m-in-donations-to-ftx-bankruptcy-estate/
|
||||
[^5]: "FTX-linked Effective Ventures sells UK manor at $14.5M loss," Protos, on the 2022 purchase of Wytham Abbey for about 15 million pounds and its 2024 sale at a reported loss. https://protos.com/ftx-linked-effective-ventures-sells-uk-manor-at-14-5m-loss/
|
||||
[^6]: "Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures," Effective Altruism Forum, on the post-FTX investigation and the board decision to spin out the projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AuSah98NtR5qv8zQA/reflections-and-lessons-from-effective-ventures-1
|
||||
[^7]: "80,000 Hours completes spin-out from Effective Ventures," 80,000 Hours, May 2025, on the December 2023 announcement, the May 2025 completion, and the Centre for Effective Altruism's planned merger with EA Funds. https://80000hours.org/2025/05/80000-hours-completes-spin-out-from-effective-ventures/
|
||||
[^4]: Companies House, "Effective Ventures Foundation (UK)," company number 07962181, register of officers filtered to resigned officers, entry for Claire Zabel (appointed July 18, 2019; resigned March 28, 2024), viewed October 8, 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/officers?filter=resigned
|
||||
[^5]: Companies House, "Effective Ventures Foundation (UK)," persons with significant control, entry for Claire Zabel, viewed October 8, 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/persons-with-significant-control
|
||||
[^6]: Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), Trustees' Report and Financial Statements for the year ended June 30, 2023, "Reference and administrative details," page 1 (names printed with initials). https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/filing-history/MzQxNDkzNjQ2NGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf
|
||||
[^7]: Same filing, note 27 ("Related party transactions"), page 48. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/filing-history/MzQxNDkzNjQ2NGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf
|
||||
[^8]: Charity Commission for England and Wales, "Charity Inquiry: Effective Ventures Foundation UK," published May 22, 2024 (marked withdrawn May 27, 2026). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charity-inquiry-effective-ventures-foundation-uk/charity-inquiry-effective-ventures-foundation-uk
|
||||
[^9]: "Asset Recovery: Effective Ventures Return $27M in Donations to FTX Bankruptcy Estate," Coinfomania, on the clawback context and the recovery of customer-deposit-sourced grants. https://coinfomania.com/asset-recovery-effective-ventures-return-27m-in-donations-to-ftx-bankruptcy-estate/
|
||||
[^10]: "FTX-linked Effective Ventures sells UK manor at $14.5M loss," Protos, on the 2022 purchase of Wytham Abbey for about 15 million pounds and its 2024 sale at a reported loss. https://protos.com/ftx-linked-effective-ventures-sells-uk-manor-at-14-5m-loss/
|
||||
[^11]: "Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures," Effective Altruism Forum, on the post-FTX investigation and the board decision to spin out the projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AuSah98NtR5qv8zQA/reflections-and-lessons-from-effective-ventures-1
|
||||
[^12]: "80,000 Hours completes spin-out from Effective Ventures," 80,000 Hours, May 2025, on the December 2023 announcement, the May 2025 completion, and the Centre for Effective Altruism's planned merger with EA Funds. https://80000hours.org/2025/05/80000-hours-completes-spin-out-from-effective-ventures/
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
395
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/New School for Social Research.md
Normal file
395
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/New School for Social Research.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,395 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: New School for Social Research
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- New School for Social Research
|
||||
- The New School
|
||||
- New School
|
||||
- New School University
|
||||
- New School for Social Research (New York)
|
||||
- University in Exile
|
||||
- Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- HigherEducation
|
||||
- UniversityInExile
|
||||
- Rockefeller
|
||||
- MKULTRA
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- Epstein
|
||||
- CIA
|
||||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
summary: "A private New York City university founded in 1919 by Columbia professors who left over the First World War, whose University in Exile sheltered German scholars and whose wartime faculty entered government propaganda work."
|
||||
start: 1919-01-01
|
||||
location: "New York, New York"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: founded
|
||||
with: "[[Charles Austin Beard]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1919
|
||||
role: "co-founder of the school with James Harvey Robinson and Herbert Croly"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: founded
|
||||
with: "[[James Harvey Robinson]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1919
|
||||
role: "co-founder of the school"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Dorothy Payne Whitney]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1919
|
||||
role: "pledged $10,000 a year for ten years and served on the board of directors"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Alvin Johnson]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1922
|
||||
role: "director of the school and organizer of the University in Exile"
|
||||
fn: 6
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Hiram J. Halle]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1933
|
||||
role: "guaranteed $60,000 a year for two years to start the University in Exile"
|
||||
fn: 12
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Rockefeller Foundation]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1933
|
||||
role: "co-funded faculty appointments and the Research Project on Totalitarian Communication"
|
||||
fn: 14
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Hans Speier]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1933-09
|
||||
role: "professor of sociology, Graduate Faculty member and co-director of the Research Project on Totalitarian Communication"
|
||||
fn: 22
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Kurt Riezler]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1939
|
||||
end: 1952
|
||||
role: "professor of philosophy, Graduate Faculty"
|
||||
fn: 37
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Max Ascoli]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1933
|
||||
role: "Graduate Faculty member from late 1933"
|
||||
fn: 48
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Leo Strauss]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1938
|
||||
end: 1948
|
||||
role: "Graduate Faculty member"
|
||||
fn: 34
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Hannah Arendt]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1967
|
||||
end: 1975
|
||||
role: "University Professor in Philosophy"
|
||||
fn: 35
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Hans Simons]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1950
|
||||
end: 1961
|
||||
role: "president"
|
||||
fn: 66
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[John R. Everett]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1964
|
||||
end: 1982
|
||||
role: "president"
|
||||
fn: 66
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Jonathan F. Fanton]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
end: 1999
|
||||
role: "president"
|
||||
fn: 68
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Bob Kerrey]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2001-01
|
||||
end: 2010-12-31
|
||||
role: "seventh president, named in 2000 and due to start after leaving the Senate; president through 2010"
|
||||
fn: 72
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[David E. Van Zandt]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2011
|
||||
role: "eighth president"
|
||||
fn: 72
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Dwight A. McBride]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2020
|
||||
end: 2023
|
||||
role: "ninth president"
|
||||
fn: 74
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Donna Shalala]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2023
|
||||
end: 2024
|
||||
role: "interim president"
|
||||
fn: 74
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Joel Towers]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2024
|
||||
role: "tenth president"
|
||||
fn: 74
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Jeffrey Epstein]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2014
|
||||
end: 2019
|
||||
role: "tuition and transfers paid from Epstein accounts, as recorded in bank statements and a Deutsche Bank exhibit"
|
||||
fn: 90
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Starr Foundation]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2004
|
||||
role: "$10 million grant to establish the India China Institute"
|
||||
fn: 76
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Bernard L. Schwartz]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2004
|
||||
role: "$3.7 million gift for the Center for Economic Policy Analysis and an endowed professorship"
|
||||
fn: 76
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Bernard L. Schwartz]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2004
|
||||
role: "trustee, joined the board September 1, 2004"
|
||||
fn: 75
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[United States Department of the Air Force]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2013
|
||||
role: "assistance award FA95501410030, $6,176,482, on the dynamics of sacred values"
|
||||
fn: 84
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Project MKUltra]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1961
|
||||
end: 1962
|
||||
role: "two 1962 projects at the school, per the Everett file; subproject numbers not stated there"
|
||||
fn: 62
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Bernard L. Schwartz]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2001
|
||||
role: "$1.1 million for the Bernard L. Schwartz Lecture Series and Project in Markets, Equality and Democracy"
|
||||
fn: 77
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Dorothy Payne Whitney]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "board of directors"
|
||||
end: 1930
|
||||
fn: 7
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Wilhelm Reich]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1939
|
||||
end: 1941
|
||||
role: "associate professor lecturing in psychiatry, per a New School official to the FBI"
|
||||
fn: 50
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
A private New York City university founded in 1919 by professors who had been dismissed or had resigned during the First World War, the New School for Social Research opened as an adult school of social science with money from the circle around [[The New Republic]].[^1] Its Graduate Faculty, known from 1933 as the [[University in Exile]], took in German and Central European scholars, and during the Second World War members of that faculty worked for the [[Office of Strategic Services]], the [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]] and the [[Office of War Information]].
|
||||
|
||||
### Founding, 1917 to 1922
|
||||
|
||||
In 1917 [[Nicholas Murray Butler]], president of [[Columbia University]], dismissed [[Henry Dana]] and [[James McKeen Cattell]] for their outspoken opposition to the war. [[Charles Austin Beard]] and [[James Harvey Robinson]] resigned in protest, and Robinson then persuaded [[Herbert Croly]], the first editor of the New Republic, to join them in founding a new school.[^1] The 1919 founding proposal rejected endowment. Beard wrote that "Endowment spells dry rot," and the founders planned to rely on tuition and annual gifts.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Dorothy Payne Whitney]], the Whitney heiress who had married [[Willard Straight]] and co-founded the New Republic with Croly, had discussed an independent social-science institute with Croly, Beard and Robinson from 1916. Her husband, then serving in Europe, warned her against the two men. She pledged $10,000 a year for ten years.[^2] The ten-year pledges reached nearly $300,000, much of it from Straight, and she paid largely for a renovated townhouse.[^3] A women's group that met to support the school included Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. Learned Hand and, later, Mrs. [[Thomas W. Lamont]].[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The school did not rely on endowment. The [[Rockefeller Foundation]], the Carnegie and the Rosenwald foundations turned down an early request for an endowment, and the school could not count on the Rockefellers, the Whitneys, the Goodyears or the Guggenheims.[^5] In 1922 the New Republic was short of money and its owners wanted the school closed so that Straight would support the magazine.[^5] Straight stayed on the board with Croly, [[Wesley Clair Mitchell]], Caroline Bacon and [[Emily James Putnam]].[^5] In April 1922 [[Alvin Johnson]] took over as director and wrote to Straight about the change.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
Dorothy Payne Whitney remained on the Board of Directors until 1930, after 1925 as Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst, and continued financial support for several years after 1929 through the [[William C. Whitney Foundation]].[^7] A Cornell finding aid for her papers states that the school "was begun with the backing of the Whitney Estate in 1919."[^8] In 1969 Milton C. Rose, her son's attorney, told the FBI that the foundation was created by her and Willard Straight in memory of her father and that [[Michael Whitney Straight]] had been its president "since its inception in 1937."[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### University in Exile, 1933
|
||||
|
||||
Johnson had co-edited the [[Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences]] from 1930 to 1935 and had corresponded with German-speaking scholars who contributed to it. After the Nazi seizure of power he set out to shelter them. In April 1933 he began to raise $60,000 a year for two years to support a faculty of fifteen scholars.[^10] Before the largest gift he had raised between $7,000 and $15,000.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Hiram J. Halle]] telephoned Johnson after a letter Johnson had written to [[Edwin R.A. Seligman]] reached him. Johnson's account has Halle telling him "I am prepared to guarantee the sixty thousand a year for two years." Halle wanted his name kept out of the announcement so that other donors would not hold back, and [[Frank Altschul]] vouched for his credit.[^12] The school's own history describes Halle's gift as the entire sum Johnson required.[^10] Johnson's account has Halle guaranteeing $60,000 a year for two years.[^12] Bessner writes that Johnson had collected $120,000 from Halle to fund fifteen professorships at $4,000 a year and raised further money through the Institute of International Education, and that Lederer, then in London, asked Speier to help, so that in the summer of 1933 Speier carried contracts between London and Berlin to prospective members.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
The first appointments were made with the Rockefeller Foundation. Johnson and the Foundation agreed on a dozen individuals to rescue, and the Foundation's Paris associate [[Tracy Kittredge]] wrote on the State Department's view of the question on March 29, 1933.[^14] The [[Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars]] acted for the Foundation in these early cases and did not seek permanent United States posts for the men it supported.[^14] The school's history lists the original members as the agricultural economist [[Karl Brandt]], the public finance specialist [[Gerhard Colm]], [[Arthur Feiler]], [[Eduard Heimann]], [[Herman Kantorowicz]], [[Emil Lederer]], [[Hans Speier]], [[Erich von Hornbostel]], [[Max Wertheimer]] and [[Frieda Wunderlich]]. By October 1933 ten academics were teaching, and by 1935 six more had been added.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
The Emergency Committee was founded in May 1933 when Alfred E. Cohn, Bernard Flexner and Fred M. Stein approached [[Stephen Duggan]] of the [[Institute of International Education]]. [[Felix Warburg]] and [[Alan Gregg]] advised the organizers, and [[Livingston Farrand]] chaired it. The Committee made grants to host institutions rather than to scholars, and it made 335 grants from about 6,000 applicants. [[Edward R. Murrow]] was its assistant secretary until 1935.[^15] Duggan invited Johnson to lunch after the University in Exile was announced and told him of the Committee's plan.[^16] The Committee's records file [[Kurt Riezler]], Speier, [[Max Ascoli]], Colm, [[Arnold Brecht]], [[Hans Simons]], [[Hans Staudinger]], [[Jacob Marschak]], [[Adolph Lowe]], Lederer and [[Wilhelm Reich]] under the heading "Non-Grantees," which the finding aid defines as applicants not aided through the Committee.[^15] The school's history lists Colm and Speier among its original members.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Federal contacts
|
||||
|
||||
[[Peter M. Rutkoff]] and [[William B. Scott]] write that after 1947 Johnson acknowledged in private letters that he had been meeting regularly with [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] officials since the 1930s to report on the faculty, and that a Rockefeller Foundation memorandum of January 27, 1942 indicated that he had also monitored files of "enemy aliens" in the early 1940s for the federal district attorney.[^17] According to [[Sidney Hook]], Johnson on at least one occasion "wanted to get rid of a Communist Party member" but "delegated it to [[Clara Mayer]]." The Graduate Faculty charter adopted an explicitly anticommunist clause in 1940, after difficulties with the State Department and immigration authorities.[^17] In early 1942 Johnson requested a meeting at which he and Staudinger appeared before a panel drawn from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Visa Division, Naval Intelligence and the Army, and Johnson had to defend himself against charges of heading a "Communist outfit."[^18] In the early 1950s the school's administration received "inquiries from congressional and Senate committees, the FBI, and numerous individuals."[^19] Johnson also sat on a wartime enemy alien hearing board whose cases had been "well prepared in advance by the FBI."[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
### Graduate Faculty and wartime government work
|
||||
|
||||
The Office of Strategic Services considered the New School "the best collection of German, left-leaning intellectuals in the United States." Over two hundred students who had studied at the University in Exile worked for the government during the war, and New School scholars were involved in more than twenty-five government-associated projects.[^20] Foreign nationals on the faculty could not work directly for Washington, so agencies used intermediaries at the Rockefeller Foundation to assign projects to them. The National Defense Commission asked the Graduate Faculty in the winter of 1939 to 1940 for analyses of Nazi successes. Organizations that used Graduate Faculty research included the Board of Economic Warfare, the Foreign Economic Administration, the National Economic and Social Planning Association and the Public Administration Committee of the Social Science Research Council.[^13][^20] The Graduate Faculty also produced a translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1938 and 1939, which Bessner writes the OSS and the OWI used, possibly through Speier.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Research Project on Totalitarian Communication]], led by Speier and the psychoanalyst [[Ernst Kris]], was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation until 1943.[^21] The project ran from 1940 to 1944 in the school's finding aid.[^22] The preface of its 1944 book dates the start of work to April 1, 1941. The Rockefeller Foundation granted $15,960 in March 1941 and $19,000 in 1942, and Johnson housed the staff in New School rooms, which Bessner attributes to his wish to show the government and the intellectual community that he was not hiding a fifth column. Its research papers went to agencies in Washington, London and Ottawa.[^23] Its analysts studied radio broadcasts from totalitarian countries and coordinated their work with the [[British Broadcasting Corporation]] and United States agencies. Many of the researchers later held federal posts.[^21] The project's staff included Sidney Axelrad, Joe Carmichael, Rose M. Chayes, Henry Elkin, Erik Estorik, Jacob Goldstein, Hans Herma, George Hilton, Eleanor Horn, Gertrud Kurth, Stanley Lipkin, Janice Loeb, Rita Lowe, Margaret P. Mascret, Alexander Mintz, George A. Nelson Jr., Margaret Otis, Heinz Paechter, Thomas Rubinstein, Dorothy L. Sandler, Joseph Shor, Ursula Wasserman, Florence Weil and Howard B. White.[^24] The project's 1944 book, German Radio Propaganda, went to allied agencies, and the acting head of the British Political Warfare Mission in Washington called it "a magnificent piece of work."[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
Speier's wartime career ran from the project into the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, where [[Goodwin Watson]], head of its Analysis Division, offered him the post of Senior Political Analyst in February 1942; he became Principal Political Analyst in November 1942, and Bessner writes that Watson later "left the FBIS under pressure from enemies of the New Deal, and Speier became the FBIS's Acting Chief Analyst."[^26][^27] On May 22, 1944 he transferred to the Office of War Information's Overseas Operations Branch.[^27] A connection he made at the OWI with [[Leo Rosten]] brought him to the [[Rand Corporation]], where he headed the Social Science Division from July 1948.[^28][^29] [[John Foster Dulles]], a Rockefeller Foundation trustee, urged the Foundation after the war to continue work in this field in order to counter Soviet propaganda in Europe.[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
### Institute of World Affairs
|
||||
|
||||
The finding aid for the Institute of World Affairs states that the Institute, established in 1942 as an independent unit of the New School, developed from two divisions of the Graduate Faculty, a Study Group on Germany and the Totalitarian Communication Project organized by Speier and Kris, and that its studies included work done in conjunction with, or on the commission of, United States war offices, among them Germany's Position in European Postwar Reconstruction.[^30] Bessner writes that from 1943 Speier was in conflict with colleagues over the Institute, a research center funded by [[Doris Duke]]; he declined to serve on its council in October 1943 and wrote that he did not want to be "a pawn" in faculty fights. In 1947 and 1948 he planned a Division of International Studies, which was elected on December 17, 1947 and never realized.[^31]
|
||||
|
||||
### Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes
|
||||
|
||||
In 1941 Johnson facilitated the establishment of the [[Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes]] at the New School, also called the Free French School. Between 1942 and 1946 it offered courses, mostly in French, in the social sciences and humanities. The Ecole Libre was recognized by the de Gaulle and Belgian governments as equivalent to a university degree. Its board included [[Henri Focillon]], [[Jean Perrin]], [[Paul van Zeeland]], [[Jacques Maritain]] and [[Gustave Cohen]]. Some faculty held that the school should be scholarly and non-political, while others, supporters of the Free France movement led by [[Charles de Gaulle]], held that it had an intrinsic relationship to that movement. The Ecole Libre was severed from the New School in June 1947.[^32]
|
||||
|
||||
### Faculty
|
||||
|
||||
[[Leo Strauss]] came to the school on a path that ran through the Rockefeller Foundation. The Foundation and [[Harold Laski]] of the London School of Economics recommended him to Johnson.[^33] Strauss taught at the New School from 1938 to 1948.[^34] [[Hannah Arendt]] was University Professor in Philosophy from 1967 to 1975. The school's archive holds her office files, including correspondence with [[Elizabeth Young-Bruehl]] from 1969 to 1975.[^35] The Rockefeller Foundation records list a grant in aid to Arendt under the New School.[^36]
|
||||
|
||||
Riezler, a diplomat and philosopher, emigrated at the end of 1938 and held a Graduate Faculty post. The Editors' Note in the Spring 1956 issue of [[Social Research]] states that he was Professor of Philosophy from 1939 to 1952, when he became Professor Emeritus; [[Wayne C. Thompson]] writes that he retired in 1952, the Marbach authority record gives his New School affiliation as circa 1939 to 1954, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie has him returning to Rome in 1954.[^37][^38][^39][^40] Johnson recorded Riezler as his last appointment: "With Riezler the roster was closed."[^41] The Institute of World Affairs finding aid lists him among the Study Group on Germany, attended by Eduard Heimann, [[Erich Hula]], [[Karl Mayer]], [[Albert Salomon]], Strauss, [[Horace Kallen]] and [[Felix Kaufmann]], and among the researchers associated with the University in Exile.[^30] The papers of Reuben Abel list him among the lecturers Abel attended, and the school's faculty vertical files hold a file for him.[^42][^43] Riezler and Strauss taught two courses together in the mid-1940s, one on Aristotle's De anima and Descartes's Passions of the Soul with [[Solomon Asch]] and one on Plato's Theaetetus with [[Alexandre Koyré]], and Riezler published "Some Critical Remarks on Man's Science of Man" in Social Research in 1945.[^44][^45] Strauss's eulogy for Riezler appeared in Social Research in 1956 beside a memorial article by [[Theodor Heuss]]. His daughter Maria married the New School professor [[Howard B. D. White]].[^40][^46][^47] Ascoli joined the University in Exile in late 1933 after Johnson recruited him as one of two Rockefeller scholars, and he later edited [[The Reporter]].[^48]
|
||||
|
||||
Wilhelm Reich appears in the school's archive through a bound photocopy of his 1940 New School lectures, transcribed from the archive of the Orgone Institute.[^49] The NYPL files list a Reich file for 1939 and 1940 under non-grantees.[^15] An official of the school, whose name is redacted, told FBI agents in December 1941 that Reich had been an associate professor for two years, during 1939 and 1940, at about $1,500 a year, and that the connection ended after the spring term of 1941; the school, the official said, "makes no inquiry of their political views or background."[^50] The same official described Reich as conducting "a lecture in psychiatry" and said he "claims to have a cure-all for cancer," all of which the official "stated smacked of 'quack' tactics on subject's part."[^50] A Bureau memorandum of May 6, 1941 records that Reich's non-quota visa of August 11, 1939 was issued because his "New York Seminar for Vegetotherapy" was part of the New School; the immigration record gives his arrival as August 28, 1939 and his destination as the school at 66 West 12th Street, and the New York report names "Dr. Alvin Johnson, Director" as the destination.[^51] A Bureau summary of February 1957 (M. A. Jones to L. B. Nichols) condenses the 1941 interview to a statement that Reich entered the United States in 1939, taught psychology at the New School "until let out by the school because his teaching 'smacked of quack tactics,'" and was apprehended as a German alien on December 12, 1941.[^52] The school's archive also keeps a faculty vertical file for [[Gregory Bateson]].[^53] [[Erich Fromm]] taught courses at the school from 1941 to 1959.[^54]
|
||||
|
||||
### Parapsychology listings and teaching, 1968 to 1994
|
||||
|
||||
The school appears in several parapsychology directories and reports in the CIA-held STARGATE record. A special report in the Princeton Alumni Weekly by [[Robert G. Jahn]] lists the New School among the colleges and universities in its survey of psychic research in the Western world.[^55] The 1975 survey New Psychic Frontiers by [[Walter Uphoff]] and [[Mary Jo Uphoff]] lists under the New School an entry naming [[Robert M. Brier]], [[Martin Ebon]], [[Gilbert Roller]] and others at 66 West 12th Street, New York 10011, in its chapter on research, investigation and teaching; the same survey places Brier at [[C.W. Post College]] in its philosophy department and [[Hans Holzer]] at the New York Institute of Technology.[^56] Records found do not establish whether the Gilbert Roller in this entry is the Gilbert Roller who co-founded the early 1930s [[Bindelof séance circle]].
|
||||
|
||||
The school's Bulletin for spring 1975 lists "Experimental Parapsychology" (course 2750-0, Bob Brier, Wednesdays from February 5, $90), "Paramechanics: A Study of Paranormal Psychical Phenomena" (2755-3, Gilbert Roller, Tuesdays from February 4, $90), "The Challenge of Psychic Phenomena" (2760-3, Edith Wegman) and a parapsychology course by Parimal Das (5747-3). Roller's faculty biography reads that he conducted investigations into paranormal phenomena, particularly physical manifestations, and was a faculty member of F.I.T. and president of Hepworth Films Corp.; Parapsychology Review reported in 1973 that Roller taught a course on telekinesis, poltergeists and ectoplasmia.[^57] Ebon's own lecture series "Parapsychology: From Magic to Science" ran from 1966 to 1968, and The Writer's Directory lists him as lecturer in the Division of Social Sciences in 1949 to 1950, 1955 to 1956 and 1967.[^58] The archive holds a file "Eileen J. Garrett Scholarship, 1975" and a file "Soviet Affairs Forum: Related Courses, 1964 January 29."[^59]
|
||||
|
||||
A 1982 engineering article by Jahn in the Proceedings of the IEEE (February 1982) includes a roster of United States universities and colleges where parapsychology is pursued that names the New School for Social Research, and the same roster appears in a 1991 anthology compiled by [[Science Applications International Corporation]].[^60] A conference program circulated by email in March 1994 lists [[Sheila Davis]] of the New School with a paper titled "Cerebral function, Jungian typology and language style: Toward a new theory."[^61]
|
||||
|
||||
### MKULTRA projects, 1962
|
||||
|
||||
The school's archive holds a folder of the records of president [[John R. Everett]] headed "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1977-1978." The folder contains correspondence between Everett and the CIA about the release of [[Project MKUltra|MKULTRA]] details, including the release of universities' involvement, and "a report of two projects conducted at the New School in 1962 that received funding through MKUltra." The first attempted to discern relationships between body type and personality characteristics, and the second concerned graphology and psychopathologies. The description states that the researchers on at least one of them appear to have been unaware of CIA sponsorship.[^62] The description does not name the researchers or give subproject numbers. Two released subproject files, Subprojects 134 and 137, match the two descriptions and are set out on the Project MKUltra page.[^63]
|
||||
|
||||
The graphology teacher [[Klara G. Roman]] taught at the school from 1948 until shortly before her death in 1962. Her Encyclopedia of the Written Word, a graphology lexicon, was edited after her death by [[Maurice Edwards]] and [[Rose Wolfson]], and its acknowledgments thank "The Handwriting Institute and The Human Ecology Fund" and Daniel S. Anthony "of The New School for Social Research."[^64] Subproject 137, a $2,000 grant paid in 1961 for the manuscript of a graphology lexicon by an unnamed woman who died in 1962, has a curriculum vitae in the released file that lists the invention of a "Graphodyne"; Roman invented the graphodyne. The CIA copy does not name her. The Human Ecology Fund's 1961-1963 report, as tabulated by David H. Price, lists $2,000 to "Roman, Klara G."[^63] The first project, on body type and personality, matches Subproject 134, whose investigator is not named in the released file.
|
||||
|
||||
On October 9, 1977, the New York Times reported that the list of 80 institutions given to Senate investigators "is still classified, but each of those institutions has been notified separately by the C.I.A." that it had hosted agency research, and that 26 colleges and universities had acknowledged the research publicly.[^65]
|
||||
|
||||
### Presidents
|
||||
|
||||
The finding aid for the school's presidential records lists Hans Simons (1950 to 1961), [[Henry David]] (1961 to 1963), [[Robert MacIver]] (1963 to 1964) and Everett (1964 to 1982).[^66] Everett's tenure is described as one of the longest in the school's history, second only to Johnson's.[^67] [[Jonathan F. Fanton]], appointed in 1984, left the $250,000 post in September 1999 for the [[MacArthur Foundation]], and on February 17, 2000 the school named [[Bob Kerrey]], who said he had been planning to run for a third Senate term until the school approached him, as its seventh president, to start after he left the Senate in January 2001.[^68] A fact sheet captured by the Internet Archive on December 11, 2000 lists [[John L. Tishman]] as chairman of the board of trustees, [[Arnold H. Aronson]], [[Michael E. Gellert]] and [[Nancy B. Peretsman]] as vice chairs and Scaturro as treasurer, and names Scaturro as chancellor, [[Elizabeth Dickey]] as acting provost and [[James Murtha]] as executive vice president.[^69] Kerrey was installed at [[Carnegie Hall]] on February 20, 2001, with Tishman, "Chair of the Board of Trustees," giving remarks, and Tenet Healthcare's proxy statement of August 2001 gives him as "President of New School University in New York City since January 2001."[^70] On December 10, 2008 the faculty voted no confidence in him, which the Chronicle of Higher Education described as "nearly unanimous" with 74 votes in favor, two against and one abstention in a summary by Faculty Senate co-chair Jim Miller; the trustees met the same day and, in a university statement, unanimously expressed confidence in him. The amNewYork newspaper reported on December 23, 2008 that a majority of senior faculty approved a no-confidence measure "by a vote of 269 to 18" after a Faculty Senate meeting a week before the student occupation of the cafeteria at 65 Fifth Avenue.[^71] [[David E. Van Zandt]], dean and professor of law at the Northwestern University School of Law, was announced on August 26, 2010 as the eighth president and took office on January 1, 2011, with Kerrey remaining president until the end of 2010; Van Zandt's installation ceremony took place on September 15, 2011, and the archive's biographical note for Kerrey dates his presidency "from 2001 through 2010."[^72][^73] [[Dwight A. McBride]] was the ninth president from 2020 to 2023, [[Donna Shalala]] served as interim president from August 2023, and [[Joel Towers]], a member of the school since 2004 and a former executive dean of [[Parsons School of Design]], was appointed the tenth president effective August 1, 2024.[^74]
|
||||
|
||||
### Trustees and finances
|
||||
|
||||
[[Philip Scaturro]] was chairman of the board in 2004, when [[Peggy Brim Bewkes]], [[Eileen Naughton]], [[Richard Reiss Jr.]] and [[Bernard L. Schwartz]], chairman and chief executive of [[Loral Space & Communications]], joined the Board of Trustees on September 1.[^75] On November 4, 2004 the school announced a $10 million grant from the [[Starr Foundation]], the largest foundation gift in its history, to establish the [[India China Institute]], led by Provost [[Arjun Appadurai]] and Graduate Faculty dean [[Benjamin Lee]], and a $3.7 million gift from Schwartz for the Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and the Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz Professorship of Economics and Policy. The announcement attributes the Schwartz gift to Schwartz and, in Kerrey's quoted remarks, to the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation.[^76]
|
||||
|
||||
On November 9, 2001, the school announced a gift of $1.1 million from Schwartz, then chairman and chief executive of Loral Space & Communications, for the Bernard L. Schwartz Lecture Series and Project in Markets, Equality and Democracy, a four-year project based at the Graduate Faculty's Center for Economic Policy Analysis.[^77] The November 4, 2004 release says the center had been established in September 2004 and would be renamed the Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis "in recognition of the Schwartz Foundation's gift," and that it would continue to sponsor the Irene and Bernard Schwartz Lecture.[^78]
|
||||
|
||||
The same release describes the Starr Foundation as established in 1955 by [[Cornelius Vander Starr]], an insurance entrepreneur who founded the American International family of insurance companies, now [[American International Group]], and as holding assets of approximately $3.5 billion.[^79] The House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China deposed Schwartz on November 21, 1998 and reported that Schwartz, chairman and chief executive of Loral Space & Communications, Ltd., met directly with Commerce Secretary [[Ron Brown]] on at least four occasions after 1993.[^80]
|
||||
|
||||
The school's fiscal 2022 Form 990 lists [[Linda E. Rappaport]] as chair, [[Elliot Stein]], [[Franci J. Blassberg]] and Susan L. Foote as vice chairs, and McBride as president with reportable compensation of $815,044 and estimated other compensation of $604,206; the trustees listed include [[Beth Rudin DeWoody]] and [[Bevis Longstreth]].[^81] The school's board page lists current trustees without titles, with Rappaport first and Towers as president ex officio; life trustees include Scaturro, who was the school's chancellor when Kerrey was named.[^68][^82] The school's federal filings, retrieved through the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer summary data for EIN 13-3297197, show total revenue of $602,901,362 and total assets of $1,706,553,269 for the fiscal year ending June 2023. Contributions reported in that year were $35,451,892, down from $55,910,574 in fiscal 2022.[^83]
|
||||
|
||||
### Federal awards
|
||||
|
||||
USAspending.gov records list several federal awards to The New School. The largest defense award is an Air Force assistance award, FA95501410030, for $6,176,482 with a period of performance from December 15, 2013 to March 14, 2019, under the title "Dynamics of Sacred Values and Social Responsibilities in Governance and Conflict Management."[^84] The [[Minerva Research Initiative]] lists a project with the same title, 2014 to 2019, managed by the [[Air Force Office of Scientific Research]], with [[Jeremy Ginges]] of the school as principal investigator and [[Scott Atran]], Richard Davis, [[Douglas Medin]], [[John Alderdice]], Adolf Tobena and Oscar Vilarroya as co-principal investigators.[^85] An earlier Defense Technical Information Center final report, "Mutual Influence of Moral Values, Mental Models and Social Dynamics on Intergroup Conflict," covering May 2010 to April 2013 under Air Force Office of Scientific Research contracts, names Atran as principal investigator with Medin, Ginges and Davis as co-investigators.[^86] A [[National Science Foundation]] award of $653,245 beginning May 1, 2016 carries the title "The Devoted Actor: Sacred Values, Identity Fusion and Intergroup Conflict."[^85] Other records include a 2009 Army award of $1,370,000 for "Northern Chicago Clinic EMR Development," a 2011 Defense Department award of $1,048,998 for a "Multi-Inclusion, Universal Client Electronic Health Record," a 2012 Defense Department award of $522,399 for "Design and Visualization Best Practice," and a 2009 Energy Department award of $1,903,000 for the school's green building.[^84]
|
||||
|
||||
### Epstein payments
|
||||
|
||||
Bank statements for [[Jeffrey Epstein]]'s account at [[Deutsche Bank]] record payments to the school. The August 2015 statement lists an outgoing transfer on August 6 of $16,083.00 to a [[Bank of America]] account, with the beneficiary line "E NEW SCHOOL OPERATING ACCOUNT."[^87] The October 2016 statement lists a preauthorized debit dated October 27 of $17,030.00 described as "TUITION THE NEW SCHOOL."[^88] The May 2017 statement lists a preauthorized debit dated May 10 of $10,856.00 described as "TUITION THE NEW SCHOOL." The same statement page lists an outgoing transfer on May 11 of $3,589.00 through Sterling National Bank with the beneficiary line "FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY."[^89] A Deutsche Bank presentation to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, dated September 12, 2019, lists in an exhibit titled "Tuition Payments on Behalf of Children / Women" nine payments to The New School from Epstein accounts: $29,025 on February 4, 2014; $15,704 on January 5, 2015; $4,730 on June 12, 2015; $16,083 on August 6, 2015; $16,656 on December 9, 2015; $4,420 on June 14, 2016; $16,850 on July 8, 2016; $3,756 on January 13, 2017; and $8,790 on January 10, 2019. The exhibit's only [[New York Film Academy]] entry is $3,442 on March 10, 2017.[^90]
|
||||
|
||||
Emails released by the Department of Justice show the payments were for one student's tuition, invoiced by the school each term from fall 2014 to spring 2019. Epstein's bookkeeper [[Bella Klein]] wired the payments, and his accountant [[Richard Kahn]] forwarded invoices for approval. On December 9, 2015, Klein asked Epstein to "confirm that i can proceed with wire in the amount of $16,656," and he replied "yes."[^91] On September 20, 2016, Kahn forwarded a fall invoice with "approval to pay thank you."[^92] The fall 2015 invoice of $16,083 matches the August 6, 2015 wire to the school's operating account.[^93] On August 1, 2018, Klein wrote: "Today I paid balance for her fall semester in the amount of $7719."[^94] The spring 2019 invoice was $8,790.[^95]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: "The Founding, 1919," Histories of The New School, https://histories.newschool.edu/histories/founding-1919 (the Columbia dismissals of Dana and Cattell, the resignations of Beard and Robinson, Robinson's approach to Croly, Beard's "Endowment spells dry rot," and the 1919 proposal).
|
||||
[^2]: "Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst," Histories of The New School, https://histories.newschool.edu/people/dorothy-payne-whitney-straight-elmhirst (the 1916 discussions, the husband's warning and the pledge of $10,000 a year for ten years).
|
||||
[^3]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of The New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 11, 19, 21 (Dorothy Straight's pledges "nearly $300,000, much of it from Dorothy Straight"; townhouse "paid for largely by Dorothy Straight").
|
||||
[^4]: Alvin Johnson, Pioneer's Progress (Viking, 1952; University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 273: women's group including Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. Learned Hand and "later Mrs. Thomas W. Lamont."
|
||||
[^5]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, pp. 28, 35, 45: the 1922 crisis; the board members who stayed (Croly, Mitchell, Caroline Bacon, Dorothy Straight, Emily Putnam); and the Rockefeller, Carnegie and Rosenwald refusal of an early endowment request, with "could not count on the Rockefellers, the Whitneys, the Goodyears, or the Guggenheims" on p. 44.
|
||||
[^6]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 30: Johnson's April 1922 letter to Dorothy Straight after taking over as director, with the phrase "To put it baldly, I have usurped the".
|
||||
[^7]: Tara Mastrelli, "'In the Name of Freedom': a Review of Judith Friedlander's *A Light in Dark Times* (2018, Columbia University Press)," *International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society* 34 (2021), pp. 125-135, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-019-09344-5, notes citing the New School Archives and Special Collections and the Dartington Hall Trust Archives.
|
||||
[^8]: Cornell University Library, "Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst papers," #3725, https://archives.library.cornell.edu/repositories/2/resources/1281.
|
||||
[^9]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 and teletypes on the interview of Milton C. Rose, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1.
|
||||
[^10]: "University in Exile," Histories of The New School, https://histories.newschool.edu/histories/university-exile (Johnson's correspondence with German-speaking scholars through the Encyclopaedia, $60,000 a year for two years, a faculty of fifteen at $4,000 each, the gift of "the whole $60,000" from Halle, the ten original members, six added by 1935, and the lists of original members). Johnson's own account (p. 340) gives $60,000 a year for two years.
|
||||
[^11]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 92: Halle "had pledged the entire sum that Johnson required," Johnson "had collected only between $7,000 and $15,000," and Halle "made his fortune in petroleum refining and finance." Halle's anonymity is reported on the same page.
|
||||
[^12]: Johnson, Pioneer's Progress, p. 340: Halle's call, "I am prepared to guarantee the sixty thousand a year for two years," Frank Altschul's vouching for Halle's credit and the concern that other donors would not contribute if they knew Halle would carry the whole load; p. 370: Johnson appointed to an enemy alien hearing board with Maurice Davidson and Joseph Leary Delaney, with cases "well prepared in advance by the FBI."
|
||||
[^13]: Daniel Bessner, "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State" (PhD diss., Duke University, 2013), pp. 80-81, 85-86, 129 note 38 and 138-139, https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/232a76ac-f2d8-4827-99fe-50b3b109fa6c/content.
|
||||
[^14]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 86: Johnson and the Rockefeller Foundation "had agreed to rescue" a dozen individuals; p. 91: Tracy Kittredge, "an associate in the Paris office of the Rockefeller Foundation," wrote on March 29, 1933; p. 94: "the Emergency Committee, acting for the Rockefeller Foundation."
|
||||
[^15]: New York Public Library, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars records, MssCol 922, https://archives.nypl.org/mss/922 (biographical note: founding in May 1933 by Cohn, Flexner and Stein contacting Duggan; Warburg and Gregg as advisers; Farrand as chair; Murrow as assistant secretary until 1935; 335 grants from about 6,000 applicants; Series I.B "Non-Grantees" with Riezler box 107 folder 16 (1933-1934, 1940), Speier box 118 folder 17 (1934, 1940), Ascoli box 38 folder 46 (1933-1935, 1939-1943), Colm box 50 folder 5 (1933-1941), Brecht box 46 folder 36, Simons box 117 folder 3 (1933-1943), Staudinger box 119 folder 3, Marschak box 93 folder 52, Lowe box 91 folder 23, Lederer box 86 folder 44 and Reich box 105 folder 36 (1939-1940)).
|
||||
[^16]: Johnson, Pioneer's Progress, p. 344: "Stephen Duggan, of the Institute for International Education, invited me to lunch."
|
||||
[^17]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 226: "in his private letters he acknowledged that he had been meeting regularly with FBI officials since the 1930s to report on the faculty"; Sidney Hook says Johnson "delegated it to Clara Mayer"; the 1940 "explicitly anticommunist clause in its charter"; and a Rockefeller Foundation memorandum of January 27, 1942 ("Hans Eisler File," endnote 22, p. 296) on enemy-alien files; the endnote names no author for the memorandum. Sole source for the enemy-alien monitoring and the Clara Mayer passage.
|
||||
[^18]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 135: "a governmental panel comprised of representatives from the FBI, the Visa Division, Naval Intelligence, and the Department of the Army," with Johnson, Staudinger and Makinsky appearing in early 1942.
|
||||
[^19]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 228.
|
||||
[^20]: Daniel Bessner, "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State" (PhD diss., Duke University, 2013), https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/232a76ac-f2d8-4827-99fe-50b3b109fa6c/content, pp. 137-138 (the OSS quotation, over two hundred students, "over twenty-five government-associated projects," and the Rockefeller intermediaries), citing Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 139-149, 165-167.
|
||||
[^21]: "Rockefeller Foundation Support for Communications Media in the 1930s and 1940s," Rockefeller Archive Center, RE:source, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/rockefeller-foundation-support-for-communications-media-in-the-1930s-and-1940s/ (Kris and Speier's study of totalitarian communication, coordinated with the BBC and government agencies; Rockefeller funding ending in 1943; researchers entering federal service; John Foster Dulles as a Foundation trustee urging post-war work; Bryce Wood's caution).
|
||||
[^22]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "Research Project on Totalitarian Communication, 1940-1944," https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/27451 (led by Speier and Kris for the Research Center of the Graduate Faculty, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation).
|
||||
[^23]: Ernst Kris and Hans Speier, German Radio Propaganda (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), Preface; New School Archives, NS-02-16-01, Series 3, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/27451; Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 130-131 and note 47.
|
||||
[^24]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 131 n. 47, citing the New School Archives, "Totalitarianism Research Project," Box 1.
|
||||
[^25]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 131 n. 49, citing Walter Adams to Ernst Kris, May 8, 1944, Speier Papers, Box 3, Folder 134, and John Marshall's reply.
|
||||
[^26]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 137 (Watson "left the FBIS under pressure from enemies of the New Deal, and Speier became the FBIS's Acting Chief Analyst").
|
||||
[^27]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 132-137 (the offer of February 1942; Principal Political Analyst, November 1942) and pp. 145-146 (transfer to the Overseas Operations Branch on May 22, 1944).
|
||||
[^28]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," introduction, p. 13 (the connection made at the OWI with Leo Rosten "brought Speier to the RAND Corporation").
|
||||
[^29]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 194-195 (consultant May 1948, head of the Social Science Division July 1948).
|
||||
[^30]: The New School Archives and Special Collections, "Institute of World Affairs records," record group NS-02-16-01, historical note and scope and contents. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/235
|
||||
[^31]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 164-170.
|
||||
[^32]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "David Hahn École Libre papers," https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/526 (Johnson facilitated the school in 1941; courses 1942 to 1946; recognition by the de Gaulle and Belgian governments; board members Focillon, Perrin, Van Zeeland, Maritain and Cohen; severance from the New School in June 1947).
|
||||
[^33]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 146: "The Rockefeller Foundation and Harold Laski of the London School of Economics recommended Strauss to Alvin Johnson."
|
||||
[^34]: "Leo Strauss," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/ (the New School years, 1938 to 1948).
|
||||
[^35]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "Hannah Arendt New School faculty files," https://aspace.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/233 (University Professor in Philosophy, 1967 to 1975; office files; correspondence with Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, 1969 to 1975).
|
||||
[^36]: Rockefeller Archive Center, search "New School for Social Research," Rockefeller Foundation records, Series 200, folder "New School for Social Research - Hannah Arendt - (Grant in Aid)" (folder title).
|
||||
[^37]: Editors' Note, *Social Research* 23, no. 1 (Spring 1956), p. 233 (footnote to Leo Strauss, "Kurt Riezler, 1882-1955"): "Kurt Riezler was Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty of the New School from 1939 to 1952, when he became Professor Emeritus."
|
||||
[^38]: Thompson, *In the Eye of the Storm*, p. 232.
|
||||
[^39]: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Normdaten record PE00079064, "Riezler, Kurt (1882-1955)," affiliations ("New School for Social Research <New York, NY> (1919-1997) (ca. 1939-1954)") and relations ("Liebermann, Käthe (1885-1955), Ehefrau 1915"). https://www.dla-marbach.de/en/catalogue/find/opac/id/PE00079064/
|
||||
[^40]: Becker, Bert, "Riezler, Kurt Karl Joseph Siegmund (Pseudonym J. J. Ruedorffer)," *Neue Deutsche Biographie* 21 (2003), pp. 618-619, the biographical article on Riezler, including its literature list. https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118601008.html
|
||||
[^41]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 97 (Riezler's 1932 role at Frankfurt and "philosopher and diplomat Kurt Riezler"); Johnson, Pioneer's Progress, p. 347: "With Riezler the roster was closed."
|
||||
[^42]: The New School Archives and Special Collections, "Reuben Abel papers," collection NA-0003-01, scope and contents (list of lecturers). https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/165
|
||||
[^43]: The New School Archives and Special Collections, "Riezler, Kurt," File, Box 10, Folder 18, New School faculty vertical files collection (NS-08-02-02). https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/43221
|
||||
[^44]: Colen, José A., and Svetozar Minkov, "Leo Strauss on Social and Natural Science: Two Previously Unpublished Papers," *The Review of Politics* 76, no. 4 (2014), pp. 619-633, introduction, and Strauss's paper "The frame of reference in the social sciences" (Leo Strauss Papers, Box 14, Folder 10). DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/S003467051400059X
|
||||
[^45]: Riezler, Kurt, "Some Critical Remarks on Man's Science of Man," *Social Research* 12, no. 4 (1945), pp. 481-505, as listed in Colen and Minkov.
|
||||
[^46]: Strauss, Leo, "Kurt Riezler (1882-1955)," *Social Research* 23 (1956), pp. 233-258, reprinted in *What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies* (1959).
|
||||
[^47]: Heuss, Theodor, "A Word in Memory of Kurt Riezler," *Social Research* 23, no. 1 (Spring 1956), opening article of the issue.
|
||||
[^48]: Rutkoff and Scott, New School, p. 102: "Johnson recruited two additional Rockefeller scholars, Italian political scientist Max Ascoli and Austrian Erich Hula"; p. 118: Ascoli "joined the University in Exile in late 1933," later editor of the Reporter.
|
||||
[^49]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "Wilhelm Reich Lectures, New School for Social Research (1940), 2018," https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/58166 (bound color photocopy of the 1940 transcripts from the Archives of the Orgone Institute).
|
||||
[^50]: FBI New York report of December 24, 1941, "Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Alien Enemy Control," NY file 100-8422, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. The synopsis of the report gives the arrival date as August 26, 1939; its body and the immigration record give August 28.
|
||||
[^51]: FBI memorandum of May 6, 1941 and Washington Field Office report of June 16, 1941, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 1, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^52]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, file on Dr. Wilhelm Reich, bufile 100-14601, Part 2 of 10, memorandum of M. A. Jones to L. B. Nichols, February 14, 1957, PDF page 123, beginning "Files reflect Wilhelm Reich, Austrian born, entered the U. S. in 1939," archive.org item WilhelmReichFBI, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI. The item has ten parts (reich1, reich2, reich3, reich4a, 4b, 4c, reich5a, 5b, 5c, reich6).
|
||||
[^53]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "Bateson, Gregory," New School faculty vertical files, NS-08-02-02, Box 1, Folder 20, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/42943.
|
||||
[^54]: "Erich Fromm," Histories of The New School, https://histories.newschool.edu/people/erich-fromm (courses at the New School "from 1941 to 1959").
|
||||
[^55]: Robert G. Jahn, "Psychic Process, Energy Transfer, and Things That Go Bump in the Night," Princeton Alumni Weekly special report, "Psychic Research in the Western World: Colleges and Universities" list, CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500070001-1, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000500070001-1.
|
||||
[^56]: Walter and Mary Jo Uphoff, New Psychic Frontiers (Minneapolis: Bolger Publications, 1975), chapter V, pp. 228-229 (C.W. Post College and New School entries; Holzer at the New York Institute of Technology), CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200230018-6, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001200230018-6.
|
||||
[^57]: New School Bulletin, spring 1975, vol. 32, no. 5 (December 27, 1974), pp. 82, 88, 172, 328 and 356, https://books.google.com/books?id=Ez07AAAAMAAJ; Parapsychology Review (1973), index entry "Roller, Gilbert, 6:10," https://books.google.com/books?id=sH8YAQAAMAAJ.
|
||||
[^58]: John White, ed., Psychic Exploration (New York: Putnam, 1974), https://books.google.com/books?id=MbbxpH5RCaAC; The Writer's Directory, 1998-2000, p. 424, https://books.google.com/books?id=AKgKAB3ClvwC.
|
||||
[^59]: New School Archives and Special Collections, Adult Division Office of the Dean records (NS-02-01-01), Series 5, Box 7, Folder 43; NS-03-01-07, Box 2, Folder 2, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3.
|
||||
[^60]: Robert G. Jahn, "The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective," Proceedings of the IEEE 70, no. 2 (February 1982), pp. 136-170, roster of colleges and universities, CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100010004-6, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001100010004-6; Science Applications International Corporation, Anomalous Mental Phenomena: Selected Papers (June 24, 1991), institutions roster, CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00789R003100030001-4, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r003100030001-4.
|
||||
[^61]: Brian Josephson, Tucson conference program, email circulated March 21, 1994 to the pdl@jsasoc.com list, CIA CREST, CIA-RDP96-00792R000100130005-8, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000100130005-8.
|
||||
[^62]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1977-1978," John R. Everett records, Box 7, Folder 29, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/34220 (scope note). Sole source for the 1962 projects described in this paragraph.
|
||||
[^63]: MKULTRA Subproject 134 (CIA release DOC_0000017393) and Subproject 137 (DOC_0000017396), https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017393 and https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017396; David H. Price, "Buying a Piece of Anthropology, Part 1: Human Ecology and Unwitting Anthropological Research for the CIA," Anthropology Today 23(3), 2007, fig. 4, https://archive.org/details/human_ecology_torture_suicide.
|
||||
[^64]: New School Archives and Special Collections, Maurice Edwards papers documenting the work of graphologist Klara G. Roman (NA-0010-01), https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/284; Encyclopedia of the Written Word (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968), acknowledgments.
|
||||
[^65]: Jo Thomas, "Extent of University Work for C.I.A. Is Hard to Pin Down," New York Times, October 9, 1977 (dateline Washington, October 8), CIA reading room copy, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp88-01315r000300390007-3.
|
||||
[^66]: New School Archives and Special Collections, "John R. Everett records," https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/289 (Everett 1964-1982; MacIver 1963-1964; Henry David 1961-1963; Hans Simons 1950-1961).
|
||||
[^67]: Public Seminar, "The New School's Forgotten President," https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-new-schools-forgotten-president/ (Everett's tenure 1964 to 1982, "second only to the school's founding father Alvin Johnson").
|
||||
[^68]: Neil MacFarquhar, "Senator Kerrey Accepts Presidency of New School," New York Times, February 17, 2000, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/regional/021700kerry-pres-edu.html (Kerrey said he had been planning to run for a third Senate term until the school approached him; Fanton, "appointed in 1984," left the "$250,000 post with its official Greenwich Village residence" in September 1999 to become president of the MacArthur Foundation; "He will be the school's seventh president"; "The senator does not yet have a formal contract with the school"; Philip Scaturro identified as the school's chancellor).
|
||||
[^69]: New School University fact sheet, Internet Archive capture of December 11, 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20001211161500/http://www.newschool.edu:80/aboutnsu/an_ata.html.
|
||||
[^70]: New School University press release, February 20, 2001 (Internet Archive copy), https://web.archive.org/web/2id_/https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2001/022001_install.html; Tenet Healthcare Corporation, Schedule 14A proxy statement, August 21, 2001, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/70318/000091205701529713/a2056401zdef14a.htm.
|
||||
[^71]: Chronicle of Higher Education, December 10, 2008 (Internet Archive copy), https://web.archive.org/web/2id_/https://www.chronicle.com/article/new-school-faculty-senate-votes-no-confidence-in-president-bob-kerrey/; NBC New York, December 11, 2008, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/local/kerry-gets-no-confidence-vote-at-new-school/1856735; amNewYork, December 23, 2008, https://www.amny.com/news/new-school-in-turmoil-students-occupy-building-tell-kerrey-quit.
|
||||
[^72]: New School press release, "The New School Names David E. Van Zandt New President," August 26, 2010, https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2010/NewPresidentAppointment.htm (Wayback Machine capture of January 24, 2021: eighth president, effective January 1, 2011, succeeding Kerrey, who "was appointed in 2001" and remained president through 2010; Michael J. Johnston, chair of the board).
|
||||
[^73]: New School Archives, Board of Trustees records NS-01-01-04, Series 2, folder "David Van Zandt--installation as University President (September 15, 2011)," https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/244; New School Archives and Special Collections, biographical note to "Video statement by Bob Kerrey, 2014 January 28" (NS-03-02-08), https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/58008.
|
||||
[^74]: Daniel Jonas Roche, "The New School taps architect Joel Towers as its tenth president," The Architect's Newspaper, June 7, 2024, https://www.archpaper.com/2024/06/the-new-school-architect-joel-towers-tenth-president/ (Towers at the school since 2004; appointment begins August 1, 2024; succeeds interim president Donna E. Shalala, in the role since August 2023, and Dwight A. McBride, ninth president 2020 to 2023; Linda E. Rappaport, chair of the board).
|
||||
[^75]: New School press release, "New School University Announces New Board Members," October 21, 2004, https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2004/102104_nsu_members.html (Wayback Machine capture of September 10, 2006: Bewkes, Naughton, Reiss and Schwartz joined September 1, 2004; "Philip Scaturro is Chairman of the Board").
|
||||
[^76]: New School press release, "New School University Receives Major Gifts to Fund Projects Related to Globalization," November 4, 2004, https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2004/110404_nsu_gifts.html (Wayback Machine capture of September 10, 2006: $10 million from the Starr Foundation, "the largest foundation gift in the University's history"; $3.7 million from Bernard L. Schwartz; Kerrey's remarks naming the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation).
|
||||
[^77]: New School press release, November 9, 2001, http://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2001/110901_schwart.html (Wayback Machine capture of September 10, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20060910004616/http://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2001/110901_schwart.html): the $1.1 million gift from Schwartz, chairman and chief executive of Loral Space & Communications, and the four-year project at the Center for Economic Policy Analysis.
|
||||
[^78]: New School press release, "New School University Receives Major Gifts to Fund Projects Related to Globalization," November 4, 2004, https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2004/110404_nsu_gifts.html (Wayback Machine capture of September 10, 2006: "Since its establishment in September 2004"; the center renamed for the Schwartz gift; the Irene and Bernard Schwartz Lecture).
|
||||
[^79]: New School press release, "New School University Receives Major Gifts to Fund Projects Related to Globalization," November 4, 2004, https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2004/110404_nsu_gifts.html, section "About the Starr Foundation" (established 1955 by Cornelius Vander Starr; American International family, now American International Group, Inc.; assets of approximately $3.5 billion).
|
||||
[^80]: U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China, Report (H. Rept. 105-851), vol. I, pp. 49 to 50 and notes 112 to 116 (p. 240), including the November 21, 1998 deposition of Bernard L. Schwartz, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf
|
||||
[^81]: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, The New School, Form 990 for the fiscal year ending June 2022 (filing 202301359349306540), Part VII, Section A, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/133297197/202301359349306540/full (McBride, president, 815,044 reportable compensation and 604,206 estimated other compensation; Rappaport, chair; Stein, Blassberg and Foote, vice chairs; DeWoody and Longstreth, trustees).
|
||||
[^82]: New School, "Board of Trustees Members," https://www.newschool.edu/about/university-leadership/board-of-trustees-members/ (members listed without titles, Linda E. Rappaport listed first, Joel Towers as president, life trustees including Philip Scaturro; no chair identified on the page).
|
||||
[^83]: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, The New School, EIN 13-3297197, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/133297197 (organization summary data, tax years 2011 to 2023).
|
||||
[^84]: USAspending.gov award records, recipient "THE NEW SCHOOL,": FA95501410030 (Department of the Air Force, start 2013-12-15, $6,176,482); W81XWH0910456 (Army, 2009, $1,370,000); W81XWH1120183 (Defense Department, 2011, $1,048,998); FA87501220325 (Defense Department, 2012, $522,399); DEEE0001719 (Energy, 2009, $1,903,000).
|
||||
[^85]: Minerva Research Initiative, "Dynamics of Sacred Values and Social Responsibilities," awarded projects, https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article/2029607/dynamics-of-sacred-values-and-social-responsibilities/ (Wayback Machine capture of December 10, 2019: principal investigator Jeremy Ginges, co-principal investigators, years 2014-2019, managing service agency Air Force Office of Scientific Research). USAspending award detail for ASST_NON_FA95501410030_097: period of performance 2013-12-15 to 2019-03-14. NSF award 1559387: USAspending.gov, start 2016-05-01, $653,245.
|
||||
[^86]: Scott Atran, Douglas Medin, Jeremy Ginges and Richard Davis, "Mutual Influence of Moral Values, Mental Models and Social Dynamics on Intergroup Conflict," final report, Defense Technical Information Center ADA591831 (archive.org mirror DTIC_ADA591831), project period May 2010 to April 2013.
|
||||
[^87]: Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas statement for JEFFREY EPSTEIN, August 1 to 31, 2015, DOJ Epstein Library file EFTA01285659, page 1 of 5: "08-06 Outgoing Money Trnsf TO BANK OF AMERICA A/C [redacted] TH E NEW SCHOOL OPERATING ACCOUNT (16,083.00)." The preceding 08-06 line is an $8,155.00 transfer to 1st United Bank for W. Chester Brewer, Jr., P.A.
|
||||
[^88]: Deutsche Bank statement for JEFFREY EPSTEIN, October 1 to 31, 2016, DOJ Epstein Library file EFTA01286417, page 3 of 5 (Bates EFTA01286419): "10-27 Preauthorized Debit ... TUITION THE NEW SCHOOL (17,030.00)."
|
||||
[^89]: Deutsche Bank statement for JEFFREY EPSTEIN, May 1 to 31, 2017, DOJ Epstein Library file EFTA01299344, page 2 of 5 (Bates EFTA01299345): "05-10 Preauthorized Debit ... TUITION THE NEW SCHOOL (10,856.00)." The same page lists "05-11 Outgoing Money Trnsf TO STERLING NATIONAL BANK A/C [redacted] FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (3,589.00)" and, on May 19, an American Express payment of $89,103.78.
|
||||
[^90]: Deutsche Bank presentation to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, September 12, 2019, Exhibit R, "Tuition Payments on Behalf of Children / Women," DOJ Epstein Library file EFTA01681865, page marked EFTA01681912 (printed page 49).
|
||||
[^91]: Bella Klein email exchange with Jeffrey Epstein, December 9, 2015, EFTA02478844, U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library.
|
||||
[^92]: Richard Kahn email, September 20, 2016, EFTA01782038, U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library.
|
||||
[^93]: The New School invoice, fall 2015, EFTA02491750; Deutsche Bank statement, August 2015, EFTA01285659, U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library.
|
||||
[^94]: Bella Klein email, August 1, 2018, EFTA02600764, U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library.
|
||||
[^95]: The New School invoice, spring 2019, EFTA01008842, U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library.
|
||||
|
|
@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ relations:
|
|||
with: "[[Effective Altruism Foundation]]"
|
||||
role: "1,000,000 dollars over two years, research and general operations, July 2019"
|
||||
start: 2019-07
|
||||
fn: 22
|
||||
fn: 25
|
||||
- type: founded
|
||||
with: "[[Dustin Moskovitz]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
|
|
@ -67,27 +67,33 @@ relations:
|
|||
with: "[[Redwood Research]]"
|
||||
start: 2021-11
|
||||
role: "four grants totaling 9.42 million dollars; grant investigator Nick Beckstead"
|
||||
fn: 17
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Redwood Research]]"
|
||||
start: 2022-08
|
||||
role: "10.7 million dollars over 18 months"
|
||||
fn: 17
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Redwood Research]]"
|
||||
start: 2023-06
|
||||
role: "5.3 million dollars"
|
||||
fn: 17
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Redwood Research]]"
|
||||
start: 2025-05
|
||||
role: "1.1 million dollars for research collaborations"
|
||||
fn: 17
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Alignment Research Center]]"
|
||||
start: 2022-03
|
||||
role: "1,515,000 dollars in 2022"
|
||||
fn: 18
|
||||
fn: 21
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Claire Zabel]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 2015-08
|
||||
role: "research analyst from August 2015, later program officer, head of effective altruism grantmaking and program director"
|
||||
fn: 16
|
||||
created: 2026-06-19
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-08
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
|
@ -112,23 +118,25 @@ In 2022 Open Philanthropy set aside nearly 3 million dollars for what became the
|
|||
|
||||
Karnofsky led Open Philanthropy as chief executive until June 16, 2021, when he announced that the cofounder Alexander Berger had been "promoted to co-CEO" in "a dual-CEO structure, with both of us reporting directly to the board," Karnofsky keeping biosecurity and AI risk and Berger taking the portfolio renamed "Global Health and Wellbeing."[^12] On July 27, 2023, Karnofsky announced "on behalf of Open Philanthropy's board" that Berger was sole chief executive and that his own title was changing to director of AI strategy; Tuna, styled in the announcement as president, said that "Dustin and I have worked closely with Alexander for many years," and Berger recalled the time "when Holden, Cari, Dustin and I were starting to think about it together."[^13] Karnofsky left the staff on April 29, 2024, for the [[Carnegie Endowment for International Peace]], writing that the organization "would benefit from less ambiguity about my role in its funding decisions (especially given the fact that I'm married to the President of a major AI company)," and that he would remain on its board "at least for the time being."[^14] The same officers ran the [[Open Philanthropy Action Fund]], a 501(c)(4) whose returns list Karnofsky and Berger as co-CEOs for 2021 and 2022 and "co-CEO thru 7/23/23" for 2023.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Claire Zabel]] joined Open Philanthropy as a research analyst in August 2015. The organization's team page described her as program officer for global catastrophic risks in November 2018 and, from December 2019 to at least January 2022, as leading its grantmaking on effective altruism; by June 2024 she was a program director who oversaw the Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team and had led the Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team.[^16] The Coefficient Giving team biography gives her current title as managing director of the Short Timelines Special Projects team and states that she ran the Capacity Building team from 2018 to 2024 and oversaw the Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team in 2018 and 2019 and again in 2023 and 2024.[^17] Her name appears as grant investigator on grant pages dated May 2018 to March 2022 that total about 12.6 million dollars, among them 5,000,000 dollars to the [[Atlas Fellowship]] in March 2022 and 1,904,942 dollars to the [[Nuclear Threat Initiative]] in November 2018.[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
### Redwood Research
|
||||
|
||||
Redwood Research, a [[Berkeley]] AI-alignment nonprofit, announced in October 2021 that its board was [[Nate Thomas]], Paul Christiano and Karnofsky; its returns list Karnofsky as treasurer for 2021 and treasurer and CFO for 2022, and as a director until November 2023.[^16] Open Philanthropy recommended four grants totaling 9.42 million dollars to Redwood in November 2021, with [[Nick Beckstead]] as grant investigator, then 10.7 million dollars in August 2022, 5.3 million in June 2023 and 1.1 million in May 2025, before the 36 million dollars of November 2025, a total of 62.52 million dollars. None of the four archived grant pages mentions Karnofsky's or Christiano's board seats. Open Philanthropy's senior program officer for AI risk, [[Ajeya Cotra]], was a Redwood director on its return for 2023 and until August 2024.[^16][^17]
|
||||
Redwood Research, a [[Berkeley]] AI-alignment nonprofit, announced in October 2021 that its board was [[Nate Thomas]], Paul Christiano and Karnofsky; its returns list Karnofsky as treasurer for 2021 and treasurer and CFO for 2022, and as a director until November 2023.[^19] Open Philanthropy recommended four grants totaling 9.42 million dollars to Redwood in November 2021, with [[Nick Beckstead]] as grant investigator, then 10.7 million dollars in August 2022, 5.3 million in June 2023 and 1.1 million in May 2025, before the 36 million dollars of November 2025, a total of 62.52 million dollars. None of the four archived grant pages mentions Karnofsky's or Christiano's board seats. Open Philanthropy's senior program officer for AI risk, [[Ajeya Cotra]], was a Redwood director on its return for 2023 and until August 2024.[^19][^20]
|
||||
|
||||
### ARC and Canary
|
||||
|
||||
Open Philanthropy gave the [[Alignment Research Center]], founded by Paul Christiano, 265,000 dollars for general support in March 2022 and 1,250,000 dollars over two years in November 2022. The center incubated ARC Evals, which spun off in December 2023 as [[METR]].[^18][^19][^20] In September 2025 Open Philanthropy gave the RAND Corporation 10 million dollars over three years for Canary, "a collaboration between RAND and METR to develop advanced methods for evaluating AI systems," on the recommendation of [[Trevor Levin]] of its AI governance and policy team.[^21]
|
||||
Open Philanthropy gave the [[Alignment Research Center]], founded by Paul Christiano, 265,000 dollars for general support in March 2022 and 1,250,000 dollars over two years in November 2022. The center incubated ARC Evals, which spun off in December 2023 as [[METR]].[^21][^22][^23] In September 2025 Open Philanthropy gave the RAND Corporation 10 million dollars over three years for Canary, "a collaboration between RAND and METR to develop advanced methods for evaluating AI systems," on the recommendation of [[Trevor Levin]] of its AI governance and policy team.[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
### Effective Altruism Foundation
|
||||
|
||||
Open Philanthropy's grant pages record five grants to the [[Effective Altruism Foundation]] (EAF). In July 2019 it recommended 1,000,000 dollars over two years "to support some aspects of its research and general operations," with Nick Beckstead and [[Claire Zabel]] as grant investigators. The page states that "we have felt ambivalent about EAF's work to date (despite feeling unambiguously positively about some of their projects)" and that "A major purpose of this grant is to encourage and support EAF and our other grantees in the space in taking approaches to longtermism with greater emphasis on shared objectives between different value systems."[^22]
|
||||
Open Philanthropy's grant pages record five grants to the [[Effective Altruism Foundation]] (EAF). In July 2019 it recommended 1,000,000 dollars over two years "to support some aspects of its research and general operations," with Nick Beckstead and Claire Zabel as grant investigators. The page states that "we have felt ambivalent about EAF's work to date (despite feeling unambiguously positively about some of their projects)" and that "A major purpose of this grant is to encourage and support EAF and our other grantees in the space in taking approaches to longtermism with greater emphasis on shared objectives between different value systems."[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
Four later grants were recorded: 15,358 dollars in April 2020 (investigators [[Zachary Robinson]] and Alexander Berger), 375,000 dollars in October 2020 (investigator Robinson), 697,268 dollars in January 2022, all for research and advocacy on policy interventions in Europe in the field of development aid, and 200,000 dollars in April 2022 for work in biosecurity.[^23]
|
||||
Four later grants were recorded: 15,358 dollars in April 2020 (investigators [[Zachary Robinson]] and Alexander Berger), 375,000 dollars in October 2020 (investigator Robinson), 697,268 dollars in January 2022, all for research and advocacy on policy interventions in Europe in the field of development aid, and 200,000 dollars in April 2022 for work in biosecurity.[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Simon Knutsson]] wrote in 2019 that he sent Open Philanthropy questions on October 31 and November 5 about whether the 2019 grant was conditioned on guidelines written by EAF, and that its communications officer replied on November 5 and 8 that the organization had nothing to add beyond the grant page.[^24]
|
||||
[[Simon Knutsson]] wrote in 2019 that he sent Open Philanthropy questions on October 31 and November 5 about whether the 2019 grant was conditioned on guidelines written by EAF, and that its communications officer replied on November 5 and 8 that the organization had nothing to add beyond the grant page.[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
On Open Philanthropy's share of effective altruism funding, two compilations give different figures for 2019. [[Benjamin Todd]] of [[80,000 Hours]] estimated in 2021 that effective altruism funding in 2019 was about 416 million dollars per year, of which about 260 million dollars came from Open Philanthropy (an average of its 2017 to 2019 grants taken from its grants database), 80 million dollars for GiveWell-recommended charities excluding Open Philanthropy was added to global health, and 30 million dollars per year was a guess for other longtermist and meta donations; he described all the figures as extremely rough. The ratio of 260 to 416 is 62.5 percent. A spreadsheet of grants compiled by a forum user and last updated November 7, 2023 lists Open Philanthropy at 196.6 million dollars of 306.1 million dollars in 2019, a share of 64.2 percent, and 236.9 million dollars of 407.5 million dollars in 2020, with the [[Survival and Flourishing Fund]] at 1.8 million dollars in 2019 and 5.4 million dollars in 2020. Its Open Philanthropy column sums to about 1.99 billion dollars for 2012 through 2022.[^25][^26]
|
||||
On Open Philanthropy's share of effective altruism funding, two compilations give different figures for 2019. [[Benjamin Todd]] of [[80,000 Hours]] estimated in 2021 that effective altruism funding in 2019 was about 416 million dollars per year, of which about 260 million dollars came from Open Philanthropy (an average of its 2017 to 2019 grants taken from its grants database), 80 million dollars for GiveWell-recommended charities excluding Open Philanthropy was added to global health, and 30 million dollars per year was a guess for other longtermist and meta donations; he described all the figures as extremely rough. The ratio of 260 to 416 is 62.5 percent. A spreadsheet of grants compiled by a forum user and last updated November 7, 2023 lists Open Philanthropy at 196.6 million dollars of 306.1 million dollars in 2019, a share of 64.2 percent, and 236.9 million dollars of 407.5 million dollars in 2020, with the [[Survival and Flourishing Fund]] at 1.8 million dollars in 2019 and 5.4 million dollars in 2020. Its Open Philanthropy column sums to about 1.99 billion dollars for 2012 through 2022.[^28][^29]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -147,14 +155,17 @@ On Open Philanthropy's share of effective altruism funding, two compilations giv
|
|||
[^13]: Karnofsky, Holden. "Alexander Berger is Now Sole CEO of Open Philanthropy." Open Philanthropy, July 27, 2023, archived March 17, 2026. http://web.archive.org/web/20260317060608/https://coefficientgiving.org/research/alexander-berger-is-now-sole-ceo-of-open-philanthropy/
|
||||
[^14]: Karnofsky, Holden. "Joining the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace." EA Forum, April 29, 2024. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7gzgwgwefwBku2cnL/joining-the-carnegie-endowment-for-international-peace
|
||||
[^15]: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, "Coefficient Giving Action Fund" (formerly Open Philanthropy Action Fund), EIN 81-2644663, organization record, Form 990 data and Part VII officer listings for fiscal years 2016 to 2024, retrieved September 23, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812644663
|
||||
[^16]: Thomas, Nate. "We're Redwood Research, we do applied alignment research, AMA." LessWrong, October 6, 2021, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qHvHvBR8L6oycnMXe/we-re-redwood-research-we-do-applied-alignment-research-ama ; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, "Redwood Research Group Inc," EIN 87-1702255, Form 990 Part VII officer listings for fiscal years 2021 to 2024, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/871702255 ; Open Philanthropy, "Ajeya Cotra," team biography, archived November 11, 2023. http://web.archive.org/web/20231111135945/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/ajeya-cotra/
|
||||
[^17]: Open Philanthropy grant pages, archived: "Redwood Research, General Support," November 2021, http://web.archive.org/web/20220811081927/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/redwood-research-general-support/ ; "Redwood Research, General Support (2022)," http://web.archive.org/web/20221106183007/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/redwood-research-general-support-2/ ; "Redwood Research, General Support (2023)," http://web.archive.org/web/20230912095528/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/redwood-research-general-support-2023/ ; "Redwood Research, AI Safety Research Collaborations," May 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20250810094119/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/redwood-research-ai-safety-research-collaborations/
|
||||
[^18]: Open Philanthropy, "Alignment Research Center, General Support," March 2022, archived. http://web.archive.org/web/20220816132918id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/alignment-research-center-general-support/
|
||||
[^19]: Open Philanthropy, "Alignment Research Center, General Support (November 2022)," archived. http://web.archive.org/web/20230512114157id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/alignment-research-center-general-support-november-2022/
|
||||
[^20]: METR, "ARC Evals is now METR," December 4, 2023. https://metr.org/blog/2023-12-04-metr-announcement/
|
||||
[^21]: Open Philanthropy, "RAND Corporation, AI Evaluation and Testing," September 2025, archived. http://web.archive.org/web/20251025225511id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/rand-corporation-ai-evaluation-and-testing/
|
||||
[^22]: Open Philanthropy, "Effective Altruism Foundation: Research and Operations," grant page, award date July 2019, grant investigators Nick Beckstead and Claire Zabel. Archived 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-research-and-operations/
|
||||
[^23]: Open Philanthropy grant pages for the Effective Altruism Foundation: April 2020, 15,358 dollars; October 2020, 375,000 dollars; January 2022, 697,268 dollars; April 2022, 200,000 dollars (Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness). Archived 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-european-policy-research/ , https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-european-policy-research-and-advocacy/ , https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-european-policy-research-and-advocacy-2022/ , https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-european-policy-research-and-advocacy-2022-2/
|
||||
[^24]: Simon Knutsson, "E-mail exchange with the Open Philanthropy Project," simonknutsson.com, November 10, 2019. https://www.simonknutsson.com/e-mail-exchange-with-the-open-philanthropy-project Sole source; Knutsson did not publish the replies.
|
||||
[^25]: Benjamin Todd, "How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues?," 80,000 Hours, August 9, 2021, section on 2019 funding by cause area. https://80000hours.org/2021/08/effective-altruism-allocation-resources-cause-areas/
|
||||
[^26]: "Historical EA funding data," spreadsheet linked from the Effective Altruism Forum post of that title, last updated November 7, 2023; columns OPP, GW, EAF (which in this sheet denotes the EA Funds, not the Effective Altruism Foundation), ACE, SFF, FTX, annual totals 2012 to 2023 (estimate). https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZbaDmowkXbTBsxvHn/historical-ea-funding-data Percentages and the 2012 to 2022 sum computed from the sheet's dollar figures.
|
||||
[^16]: Open Philanthropy, "Claire Zabel," team biography, Wayback Machine captures of November 28, 2018, December 12, 2019, January 19, 2022 and June 17, 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20240617074758/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel/
|
||||
[^17]: Coefficient Giving, "Claire Zabel," team biography, viewed October 8, 2026. https://coefficientgiving.org/team/claire-zabel/
|
||||
[^18]: Open Philanthropy grant pages naming Claire Zabel as grant investigator (twenty pages, listed in the footnotes of the Claire Zabel page). https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/atlas-fellowship-scholarships-and-summer-program-for-students/ and https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/nuclear-threat-initiative-projects-to-reduce-global-catastrophic-biological-risks/
|
||||
[^19]: Thomas, Nate. "We're Redwood Research, we do applied alignment research, AMA." LessWrong, October 6, 2021, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qHvHvBR8L6oycnMXe/we-re-redwood-research-we-do-applied-alignment-research-ama ; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, "Redwood Research Group Inc," EIN 87-1702255, Form 990 Part VII officer listings for fiscal years 2021 to 2024, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/871702255 ; Open Philanthropy, "Ajeya Cotra," team biography, archived November 11, 2023. http://web.archive.org/web/20231111135945/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/ajeya-cotra/
|
||||
[^20]: Open Philanthropy grant pages, archived: "Redwood Research, General Support," November 2021, http://web.archive.org/web/20220811081927/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/redwood-research-general-support/ ; "Redwood Research, General Support (2022)," http://web.archive.org/web/20221106183007/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/redwood-research-general-support-2/ ; "Redwood Research, General Support (2023)," http://web.archive.org/web/20230912095528/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/redwood-research-general-support-2023/ ; "Redwood Research, AI Safety Research Collaborations," May 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20250810094119/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/redwood-research-ai-safety-research-collaborations/
|
||||
[^21]: Open Philanthropy, "Alignment Research Center, General Support," March 2022, archived. http://web.archive.org/web/20220816132918id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/alignment-research-center-general-support/
|
||||
[^22]: Open Philanthropy, "Alignment Research Center, General Support (November 2022)," archived. http://web.archive.org/web/20230512114157id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/alignment-research-center-general-support-november-2022/
|
||||
[^23]: METR, "ARC Evals is now METR," December 4, 2023. https://metr.org/blog/2023-12-04-metr-announcement/
|
||||
[^24]: Open Philanthropy, "RAND Corporation, AI Evaluation and Testing," September 2025, archived. http://web.archive.org/web/20251025225511id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/rand-corporation-ai-evaluation-and-testing/
|
||||
[^25]: Open Philanthropy, "Effective Altruism Foundation: Research and Operations," grant page, award date July 2019, grant investigators Nick Beckstead and Claire Zabel. Archived 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-research-and-operations/
|
||||
[^26]: Open Philanthropy grant pages for the Effective Altruism Foundation: April 2020, 15,358 dollars; October 2020, 375,000 dollars; January 2022, 697,268 dollars; April 2022, 200,000 dollars (Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness). Archived 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-european-policy-research/ , https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-european-policy-research-and-advocacy/ , https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-european-policy-research-and-advocacy-2022/ , https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-altruism-foundation-european-policy-research-and-advocacy-2022-2/
|
||||
[^27]: Simon Knutsson, "E-mail exchange with the Open Philanthropy Project," simonknutsson.com, November 10, 2019. https://www.simonknutsson.com/e-mail-exchange-with-the-open-philanthropy-project Sole source; Knutsson did not publish the replies.
|
||||
[^28]: Benjamin Todd, "How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues?," 80,000 Hours, August 9, 2021, section on 2019 funding by cause area. https://80000hours.org/2021/08/effective-altruism-allocation-resources-cause-areas/
|
||||
[^29]: "Historical EA funding data," spreadsheet linked from the Effective Altruism Forum post of that title, last updated November 7, 2023; columns OPP, GW, EAF (which in this sheet denotes the EA Funds, not the Effective Altruism Foundation), ACE, SFF, FTX, annual totals 2012 to 2023 (estimate). https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZbaDmowkXbTBsxvHn/historical-ea-funding-data Percentages and the 2012 to 2022 sum computed from the sheet's dollar figures.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2025-07-22
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-08
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Rand Corporation
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Organization
|
||||
|
|
@ -14,10 +14,34 @@ tags:
|
|||
category: "Private Organization"
|
||||
start: 1946
|
||||
location: "Santa Monica, California"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Hans Speier]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "head of the Social Science Division"
|
||||
start: 1948-07
|
||||
end: 1960
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
summary: "The Rand Corporation is the Air Force's principal Cold War nonprofit think tank in Santa Monica, founded as Project RAND in 1946, whose Vietnam-era Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study produced suppressed critical findings."
|
||||
---
|
||||
The Rand Corporation, whose name is an acronym for Research and Development, is headquartered in [[Santa Monica, California]], with a Washington, D.C., office near the [[White House]]. It arose from the partnership between university scientists and the military that developed during the Second World War, established as Project RAND in 1946 with the [[U.S. Air Force]] as its primary institutional sponsor and incorporated as an independent nonprofit in 1948. It is not primarily a psychological research organization; economists and political scientists form the largest part of its staff. In the [[Cold War]] it was among the first institutions to apply systematic psychological and social scientific methods to military problems, including censorship policy, the psychological effects of weapons, propaganda organization, and, most controversially, the morale and motivation of enemy forces during the [[Vietnam War]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Social Science Division
|
||||
|
||||
In the summer of 1946 a committee of [[Herbert Goldhamer]], Olaf Helmer, Frederick Mosteller, [[Leo Rosten]], W. Allen Wallis, [[Warren Weaver]] and Samuel Wilks began to consider which social scientists to bring to Project RAND. In September 1947 Project RAND held a Conference of Social Scientists in New York (September 14 to 19; RAND R-106, June 9, 1948) to recruit leaders for its planned Social Science and Economics divisions. The thirty-five participants included [[Ernst Kris]], [[Franz Neumann]], [[Harold Lasswell]], [[Bernard Brodie]], [[Ruth Benedict]], Charles Dollard and [[Pendleton Herring]] of the [[Carnegie Corporation]], Donald Young of the [[Social Science Research Council]] and Warren Weaver of the [[Rockefeller Foundation]], an early RAND consultant. Weaver told the group that every piece of knowledge in sociology, economics and political science would be forged into "weapons" for the defense of democracy; [[Frank Collbohm]] told them that the Air Force "makes available to RAND information in other fields, intelligence, plans, etc."[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Hans Speier]] came to RAND from the [[New School for Social Research]], where from April 1, 1941 he had co-directed with Kris the [[Research Project on Totalitarian Communication]] under Rockefeller Foundation grants. At the [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]] he was offered the post of Senior Political Analyst by [[Goodwin Watson]] in February 1942 and became Principal Political Analyst in November 1942; after Watson left he became Acting Chief Analyst, and on May 22, 1944 he transferred to the [[Office of War Information]]'s Overseas Operations Branch.[^3] A connection he made at the OWI with Rosten brought him to RAND's attention.[^2] He consulted from May 1948 and headed the Social Science Division from July 1948, keeping it in Washington until 1957. He hired [[Alexander George]], [[Nathan Leites]], Phil Davison and William Kaufmann, several of them colleagues from the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, used Leon Gouré, [[John Herz]] and [[Otto Kirchheimer]] as consultants, held a "Q" clearance, and opened a RAND office in Wiesbaden. In October 1960 the divisions were reorganized into departments, Goldhamer succeeded him, and Speier joined the Research Council (chairman 1961 to 1962).[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Incorporation and Ford Loan
|
||||
|
||||
RAND was incorporated as an independent nonprofit on May 14, 1948. [[H. Rowan Gaither]] and Collbohm arranged the separation from [[Douglas Aircraft]] with a $100,000 interest-free loan and a $300,000 credit guarantee from [[Henry Ford II]] of the [[Ford Foundation]], plus a $150,000 Wells Fargo credit line; the loan was extended to $1,000,000 in 1950 and later converted to a grant. The Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation were among RAND's other early financial supporters.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Superstitions Study and Korea
|
||||
|
||||
The division issued Jean M. Hungerford's RM-365, "The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare" (April 14, 1950, marked a working paper). It surveys superstition in wartime Germany (astrologers, fortune-tellers, chain letters, with a Security Service report of May 21, 1942 on chain letters translated in an appendix), in other belligerent countries and in the postwar Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; it records Goebbels's 1942 diary entries on counter-horoscopes and a plan for occultist propaganda, German agents posing as astrologers in France in 1940, and the OSS black radio program Operation Hermit, which used astrology and fortune-telling in broadcasts to Nanking. It proposes astrology and fortune-telling to predict dire events likely to befall the enemy, chain letters to burden the enemy postal system, and word-of-mouth rumors introduced by agents, and it states that the files of wartime "black" propagandists were not examined. Its sources include the FCC's weekly reports on Nazi propaganda for 1943 and early 1944, Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service Central European Analysis reports, and Kris and Speier's German Radio Propaganda.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
After the outbreak of the Korean War a team including Goldhamer, George, Davison, Ewald Schnitzer and a Hungerford (Bessner writes "Jay Hungerford"; RM-365 is credited to Jean M. Hungerford, and records found do not establish whether they are the same person) visited Korea; from August 24, 1951, Goldhamer advised the American armistice delegation at Kaesong and circulated Speier's papers and Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (RAND, 1951) to the negotiators. Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy was reported to carry the Operational Code on helicopter trips.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Early Psychological Work
|
||||
|
||||
Rand produced a classified 1949 conference report on methods for studying the psychological effects of unconventional weapons, one of the earliest institutional contributions to the field. Its early Cold War work on propaganda and psychological operations included studies of censorship policy, the effects of translation and mistranslation on message delivery, and the organization of psywar efforts. Other Rand studies relevant to psychological operations examined folk tales relating to swindling and dishonesty in Third World societies and graft and corruption among government officials in Nigeria, the Philippines, and Brazil. [[Daniel Ellsberg]], then a Rand analyst, produced a paper exploring in theoretical terms how blackmail techniques might prove useful to the military.[^1]
|
||||
|
|
@ -64,14 +88,20 @@ Rand's Santa Monica headquarters is described in accounts from the period as res
|
|||
|
||||
### Remote Viewing Era References
|
||||
|
||||
In accounts of the 1970s parapsychology research milieu, Rand is noted as larger and more prestigious than the [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] among scientific think tanks, and it figures in the French accounts of 1959 and 1960 of a [[The Nautilus (Telepathy Project)|USS Nautilus]] telepathy experiment, which the U.S. Navy denied and which a 1975 DIA study called rumors.[^2][^3]
|
||||
In accounts of the 1970s parapsychology research milieu, Rand is noted as larger and more prestigious than the [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] among scientific think tanks, and it figures in the French accounts of 1959 and 1960 of a [[The Nautilus (Telepathy Project)|USS Nautilus]] telepathy experiment, which the U.S. Navy denied and which a 1975 DIA study called rumors.[^8][^9]
|
||||
|
||||
In Le Matin des magiciens, [[Jacques Bergier]] and [[Louis Pauwels]] wrote that at the beginning of 1957 the Rand Corporation laid before [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|President Eisenhower]] a report proposing telepathy for communicating with submarines, particularly under the polar ice cap, and that the report had no effect for a year. In the same chapter they list Rand among the organizations with parapsychology study laboratories, and a footnote cites a "Rapport de la Rand Corporation, 31 août 1958" in connection with a statement that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission proposed in 1958 to use clairvoyants to guess where Russian bombs would fall.[^4] A report to Soviet Defense Minister [[Rodion Malinovsky]] of March 1960, as quoted by [[I. V. Tsykunov]], says that from the end of 1957 Rand, Westinghouse and Bell Telephone had been working intensively on telepathy.[^5]
|
||||
In Le Matin des magiciens, [[Jacques Bergier]] and [[Louis Pauwels]] wrote that at the beginning of 1957 the Rand Corporation laid before [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|President Eisenhower]] a report proposing telepathy for communicating with submarines, particularly under the polar ice cap, and that the report had no effect for a year. In the same chapter they list Rand among the organizations with parapsychology study laboratories, and a footnote cites a "Rapport de la Rand Corporation, 31 août 1958" in connection with a statement that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission proposed in 1958 to use clairvoyants to guess where Russian bombs would fall.[^10] A report to Soviet Defense Minister [[Rodion Malinovsky]] of March 1960, as quoted by [[I. V. Tsykunov]], says that from the end of 1957 Rand, Westinghouse and Bell Telephone had been working intensively on telepathy.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Peter Watson, *War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology*. Basic Books, 1978. pp. 388-394 (Ch. 21), 462-468 (App. II); Mai Elliott, *RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era*. RAND CP-564, 2010; Anthony Russo, "Looking Backward: RAND and Vietnam," *Ramparts*, October 1972; RAND report series: RM-4507/3-ISA (March 1965), RM-4911-2-ISA/ARPA (1966), RM-5446-1-ISA/ARPA (October 1967), RM-5462-1 (November 1969), RM-6131-1 (September 1970).
|
||||
[^2]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^3]: Maire, Louis F., III, and J. D. LaMothe. *Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research*, DST-1810S-387-75, September 1975, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500420001-2, https://cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000500420001-2.
|
||||
[^4]: Pauwels, Louis, and Jacques Bergier. *Le Matin des magiciens*, abridged and annotated university edition prepared by Yvonne Lenard with Monica Faulkner (Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 136-141.
|
||||
[^5]: Tsykunov, I. V. "От фантазии к реальности: как история «Наутилуса» открыла гонку сверхъестественных вооружений между СССР и США" [From fantasy to reality: how the story of the Nautilus opened the race for supernatural weapons between the USSR and the USA]. Aliter, no. 20 (2023), pp. 34-55. https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/ot-fantazii-k-realnosti-kak-istoriya-nautilusa-otkryla-gonku-sverhestestvennyh-vooruzheniy-mezhdu-sssr-i-ssha. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^2]: Daniel Bessner, "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State" (PhD diss., Duke University, 2013), pp. 187-200 and notes 76-123; conference participants at p. 190 note 88; Rosten at pp. 190-191 note 89; Weaver at p. 192; Q clearance at p. 198. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/232a76ac-f2d8-4827-99fe-50b3b109fa6c/content. Deutsche Biographie, "Speier, Hans" (sfz123260), and the University at Albany Speier Papers finding aid (GER-084) give the same RAND dates.
|
||||
[^3]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," introduction p. 13 (the OWI connection with Rosten; Speier recruited several of his Analysis Division colleagues to RAND), pp. 132-137 (February 1942 offer; Principal Political Analyst, November 1942; Acting Chief Analyst after Watson's departure, p. 137) and pp. 145-146 (transfer to the Overseas Operations Branch, May 22, 1944).
|
||||
[^4]: Ernst Kris and Hans Speier, German Radio Propaganda (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), Preface (work begun April 1, 1941).
|
||||
[^5]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 187 note 76.
|
||||
[^6]: RAND RM-365, Jean M. Hungerford, The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare (April 14, 1950; ASTIA ATI 210637), full text at https://archive.org/details/1950-hungerford-exploitation-of-superstitions-for-purposes-of-psychological-warfare; rand.org record https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM365.html. Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 201 note 128 (dates it April 15, 1950).
|
||||
[^7]: Bessner, "The Night Watchman," pp. 205-207 and notes 145-150, citing Goldhamer, The 1951 Korean Armistice Conference: A Personal Memoir, and Robert C. Tucker's memoir for the Joy detail.
|
||||
[^8]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^9]: Maire, Louis F., III, and J. D. LaMothe. *Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research*, DST-1810S-387-75, September 1975, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500420001-2, https://cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000500420001-2.
|
||||
[^10]: Pauwels, Louis, and Jacques Bergier. *Le Matin des magiciens*, abridged and annotated university edition prepared by Yvonne Lenard with Monica Faulkner (Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 136-141.
|
||||
[^11]: Tsykunov, I. V. "От фантазии к реальности: как история «Наутилуса» открыла гонку сверхъестественных вооружений между СССР и США" [From fantasy to reality: how the story of the Nautilus opened the race for supernatural weapons between the USSR and the USA]. Aliter, no. 20 (2023), pp. 34-55. https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/ot-fantazii-k-realnosti-kak-istoriya-nautilusa-otkryla-gonku-sverhestestvennyh-vooruzheniy-mezhdu-sssr-i-ssha. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -8,10 +8,28 @@ tags:
|
|||
- PublicHealth
|
||||
- ColdWar
|
||||
- MKULTRA
|
||||
summary: "The Rockefeller Foundation, endowed from the Standard Oil fortune in 1913, ran public-health and agricultural campaigns across Latin America that eased the social costs of American corporate expansion, supplied a pipeline of trustees into the State Department, and in 1943 funded the McGill psychiatric institute where CIA depatterning experiments were later conducted."
|
||||
summary: "The Rockefeller Foundation, endowed from the Standard Oil fortune in 1913, ran Latin American public-health campaigns, supplied trustees to the State Department, and in 1943 funded the McGill psychiatric institute later tied to CIA experiments."
|
||||
location: New York, NY
|
||||
created: 2026-06-12
|
||||
updated: 2026-06-12
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 1933
|
||||
end: 1943
|
||||
role: "co-funded University in Exile appointments and the Research Project on Totalitarian Communication"
|
||||
fn: 8
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Max Ascoli]]"
|
||||
start: 1931
|
||||
role: "fellowship that brought him to the United States"
|
||||
fn: 15
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Princeton Listening Center]]"
|
||||
start: 1939-11
|
||||
end: 1941-06
|
||||
role: "foundation funding for the listening center, per the Princeton finding aid and Mercado"
|
||||
fn: 19
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Rockefeller Foundation, chartered in 1913 and endowed from the [[Standard Oil]] fortune, was the largest of the [[John D. Rockefeller Jr.|Rockefeller]] family's philanthropies and the institutional model for the family's approach to social engineering through medicine, education, and agriculture. Across the first half of the twentieth century its public-health campaigns in [[Latin America]] (against hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever) prepared the ground for American corporate penetration of the region, easing the human suffering that accompanied plantation agriculture and resource extraction without addressing its causes. By the Cold War the Foundation had become a reservoir of national-security policy talent, supplying secretaries of state and trustees who moved between its board and the highest levels of US government, and a funder of psychiatric research that intersected the CIA's mind-control programs.
|
||||
|
|
@ -40,9 +58,27 @@ The Foundation's board functioned as a recruiting pool for US foreign policy. In
|
|||
|
||||
The Foundation's reach extended into the psychiatric research that the CIA would later exploit. In 1943 it funded the establishment of the [[Allan Memorial Institute]] at [[McGill University]] in Montreal (the book renders the name "Allen"), the psychiatric institute later directed by [[D. Ewen Cameron]], whose depatterning experiments became [[MKULTRA]] Subproject 68. The Foundation also funded [[Sensory Deprivation]] research, the technique of strapping subjects in a sealed box cut off from light, sound, smell, and touch; in March 1955 the [[National Institutes of Health]] began CIA-funded experiments using the standard method minus the practice of releasing subjects on request, after which mind-control experiments spread under funding directed by [[Sidney Gottlieb]] of the CIA's [[TSS|Technical Services Staff]], part of an old-boy network that included Nelson Rockefeller's former CIAA associate [[J.C. King]]. Colby and Dennett note that Nelson "needed little introduction to MKULTRA," the CIA's use of the health and welfare bureaucracy for mind-control work having begun during his own tenure as undersecretary of HEW.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### New School for Social Research
|
||||
|
||||
The Foundation paired with the [[New School for Social Research]] in 1933 to bring German and Central European scholars to the University in Exile. [[Alvin Johnson]] and the Foundation agreed on a dozen individuals to rescue, and the Foundation's Paris associate [[Tracy Kittredge]] wrote on the State Department's view of the question on March 29, 1933. The [[Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars]] acted for the Foundation in these early cases and did not seek permanent United States posts for the men it supported.[^8] Johnson later went to Raymond Fosdick, then the Foundation's president, for travel and two-year stipends for five scholars, and the Foundation supplied expert information on who was a Nazi or Fascist.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
The Rockefeller Archive Center's account of the Foundation's refugee scholar program states that Foundation officers worked closely with Johnson, with whom they had been working since 1933, and that the Foundation depended on the Emergency Committee to find permanent employment for scholars and on the [[United States Department of State]] to secure non-quota visas.[^10] Johnson's memoir has his request to Fosdick growing from five scholars to fifteen and then twenty-five, then to a project of one hundred, which Fosdick put to his trustees and approved the next day; the New York Times obituary of June 9, 1971 states that the Foundation "approved the request and assured the financing of 100 emigres."[^11] The Foundation's grant records group the New School's files under the refugee-scholar program, with a separate file for the [[Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes]] and wartime projects including Totalitarian Communication Studies and War and Peace Studies.[^12] A July 31, 1941 letter from [[Marc Bloch]] to Johnson, written after the French government barred French males of military age from leaving Paris, is filed in the Foundation's records.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
The Foundation funded the [[Research Project on Totalitarian Communication]] at the New School, led by [[Hans Speier]] and [[Ernst Kris]], which analyzed radio broadcasts from totalitarian countries and was coordinated with the British Broadcasting Corporation and government agencies. Foundation funding ended in 1943, and many of the researchers later held federal posts. John Foster Dulles, a Foundation trustee, urged the Foundation to continue work in this field after the war in order to counter Soviet propaganda in Europe.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Refugee Scholar Fellowships, 1931 to 1933
|
||||
|
||||
The Italian anti-fascist [[Max Ascoli]] came to the United States in 1931 on a Foundation fellowship; Ascoli wrote in 1954 that the offer was made in the spring of 1931 by the Foundation's representative in Italy, [[Luigi Einaudi]].[^15][^16] In 1933 Johnson recruited Ascoli, with the Austrian scholar [[Erich Hula]], as one of two additional Rockefeller scholars for the University in Exile, and Ascoli joined the Graduate Faculty in late 1933.[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
### Belém Virus Laboratory
|
||||
|
||||
In the Brazilian Amazon the Foundation's medical infrastructure directly served the development drive. The BR-010 highway pushed south from [[Belem|Belém]] toward [[Juscelino Kubitschek|Kubitschek's]] new capital at Brasília, "shielded from the jungle's malarial counterattacks by mosquito control programs and scientists from the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Belém Virus Laboratory," the same road network that opened uncontacted indigenous territories to settlement and mining.[^8]
|
||||
In the Brazilian Amazon the Foundation's medical infrastructure directly served the development drive. The BR-010 highway pushed south from [[Belem|Belém]] toward [[Juscelino Kubitschek|Kubitschek's]] new capital at Brasília, "shielded from the jungle's malarial counterattacks by mosquito control programs and scientists from the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Belém Virus Laboratory," the same road network that opened uncontacted indigenous territories to settlement and mining.[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
### Princeton Listening Center and Wartime Monitoring
|
||||
|
||||
The Foundation's money reached American radio monitoring before the government had a monitoring service of its own. The [[Princeton Listening Center]] was launched in November 1939 at [[Princeton University]] with Foundation funding, and its finding aid states that it was financed by the Foundation and continued its work until June 1941, when the [[Federal Communications Commission]] took over; [[Stephen C. Mercado]] likewise gives the absorption by the [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]] as June.[^19] [[Daniel Bessner]] writes that Washington organizations "used intermediaries at the Rockefeller Foundation to assign projects to Graduate Faculty members," some of whom could not work directly for the government because they remained foreign nationals.[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
A [[Baltimore Sun]] article described the service as a joint project of the FCC, Princeton and the Foundation. [[Harold N. Graves Jr.]] wrote a memo for [[Lloyd Free]] on July 9, 1941 about his "embarrassment" at inaccuracies in the article, among them its claim of a joint project.[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -53,4 +89,17 @@ In the Brazilian Amazon the Foundation's medical infrastructure directly served
|
|||
[^5]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 9; Ch. 10.
|
||||
[^6]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 12; Ch. 18; Ch. 23.
|
||||
[^7]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 18.
|
||||
[^8]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 22.
|
||||
[^8]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of The New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 86, p. 91 and p. 94.
|
||||
[^9]: Alvin Johnson, Pioneer's Progress (University of Nebraska Press, 1960), pp. 366-367.
|
||||
[^10]: Rockefeller Archive Center, "The Rockefeller Foundation's Refugee Scholar Program," REsource, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/the-rockefeller-foundations-refugee-scholar-program-world-war-ii-nazi-europe/ (Foundation officers worked closely with Alvin Johnson of the New School for Social Research, with whom they had been working since 1933; the Emergency Committee found permanent employment for scholars).
|
||||
[^11]: Alvin Johnson, Pioneer's Progress (Viking Press, 1952; University of Nebraska Press, 1960), pp. 366 to 367; "Dr. Alvin Johnson Of New School Dies," The New York Times, June 9, 1971, p. 1, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/09/archives/dr-alvin-johnson-of-new-school-dies-dr-alvin-johnson-of-new-school.html
|
||||
[^12]: Rockefeller Archive Center, DIMES catalog, Rockefeller Foundation records, RG 1.1, Series 200, file groups "Refugee Scholars - New School for Social Research - (French Institute)," "New School for Social Research - Totalitarian Communication Studies," and "War and Peace Studies," https://dimes.rockarch.org.
|
||||
[^13]: Rockefeller Archive Center, REsource story "The Rockefeller Foundation's Refugee Scholar Program" (letter from Marc Bloch to Alvin Johnson, July 31, 1941, RAC, RG 1.1, Series 200, Box 48, Folder 550).
|
||||
[^14]: "Rockefeller Foundation Support for Communications Media in the 1930s and 1940s," Rockefeller Archive Center, RE:source, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/rockefeller-foundation-support-for-communications-media-in-the-1930s-and-1940s/
|
||||
[^15]: Boston University, Bridge, "Connections," November 23, 2001, https://www.bu.edu/bridge/archive/2001/11-23/connections.htm. Also Isabelle Richet, review of Davide Grippa, Un antifascista tra Italia e Stati Uniti, Primo Levi Center, November 24, 2014, https://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/an-antifascist-between-italy-and-the-united-states/.
|
||||
[^16]: "The Reporter's Notes," The Reporter, September 23, 1954, pp. 2-6, https://archive.org/details/sim_reporter_1954-09-23_11_5.
|
||||
[^17]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 102 and 118.
|
||||
[^18]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 22.
|
||||
[^19]: Princeton University Library, "Princeton Listening Center Records, 1939-1941" (AC015), finding aid. https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/AC015. Stephen C. Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis, 1941-1945," Studies in Intelligence 45, no. 5 (2001), on the Princeton Listening Center's launch in November 1939 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and on its absorption by FBIS in June. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol45no5/html/v45i5a04p.htm.
|
||||
[^20]: Daniel Morris Bessner, "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State" (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2013), p. 138. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/19152946-8fbb-4b9b-9da0-faca0979e718.
|
||||
[^21]: Roop, Part I, pp. 93-95, on the Baltimore Sun article of July 1941 and Graves's memo of 9 July 1941. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology
|
||||
|
|
@ -15,17 +15,47 @@ tags:
|
|||
- 1950s
|
||||
- 1960s
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
summary: "The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was a CIA front foundation established around 1955 in New York City to channel MKULTRA funding to academic and institutional researchers, including Ewen Cameron at McGill University, under the cover of legitimate behavioral science research grants."
|
||||
summary: "The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was a CIA front foundation established around 1955 in New York City to channel MKULTRA funding to academic researchers, including Ewen Cameron at McGill University."
|
||||
start: 1955-01-01
|
||||
end: 1965-01-01
|
||||
location: "New York, New York"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[James Monroe]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1957
|
||||
end: 1963
|
||||
role: "executive secretary and treasurer (1957 annual report); executive director of the renamed Human Ecology Fund 1961 to 1963 (Price)"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[Harold Wolff]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1955
|
||||
role: "president, per the 1957 annual report"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[D. Ewen Cameron]]"
|
||||
start: 1957
|
||||
role: "project Experiments in Techniques and Methods of Psychotherapy (McGill), per the 1957 annual report"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[David R. Saunders]]"
|
||||
start: 1957
|
||||
role: "Personality Studies project at Educational Testing Service, per the 1957 annual report; about $140,000 per Marks"
|
||||
fn: 5
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Klara G. Roman]]"
|
||||
start: 1961
|
||||
end: 1963
|
||||
role: "$2,000 grant for a book on the psychology of writing, per Price's table of the Fund's 1961-1963 report; the Fund is thanked in the posthumous Encyclopedia of the Written Word"
|
||||
fn: 9
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] front foundation established in [[New York City]] around 1955 to channel covert funding from [[Project MKUltra|MKULTRA]] to academic researchers, psychiatric institutions, and other organizations conducting behavioral modification research on the CIA's behalf. Operating under the guise of a legitimate foundation supporting behavioral science research, the Society provided institutional cover that allowed MKULTRA funding to reach recipients whose participation might have been refused or compromised if the CIA's role had been disclosed.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Function and Structure
|
||||
|
||||
The Society was one of three primary cut-out mechanisms through which MKULTRA funding reached institutional recipients; the others were the [[Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation]] (a legitimate foundation that served as a partial conduit) and later the Human Ecology Fund (an organizational successor or parallel vehicle). The Society operated with a board of directors that included academics with legitimate scholarly credentials, providing the appearance of conventional foundation governance.
|
||||
The Society was one of two primary cut-out mechanisms through which MKULTRA funding reached institutional recipients; the other was the [[Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation]] (a legitimate foundation that served as a partial conduit). The Human Ecology Fund was the Society itself under a new name from 1961.[^2] The Society operated with a board of directors that included academics with legitimate scholarly credentials, providing the appearance of conventional foundation governance.
|
||||
|
||||
The cut-out structure served multiple intelligence purposes. It fragmented the institutional relationship between the CIA and individual researchers: a professor at a university receiving a Society grant knew (or was given reason to believe) only that a private foundation was funding their research. It maintained the CIA's deniability, since no CIA name appeared on grant documents. And it distributed the program across enough institutions that no single investigator could reconstruct the program's full scope from their own position within it.
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -39,15 +69,29 @@ The Society also funded research at other American universities, psychiatric hos
|
|||
|
||||
### Founding by Harold Wolff and the Chinese Refugee Project
|
||||
|
||||
The Society was incorporated in 1955 by [[Harold Wolff]], the Cornell neurologist who had conducted an official [[Brainwashing]] study for [[Allen Dulles]]; Wolff argued that to understand how governments manipulate behavior one had to study "human ecology," man in relation to his total environment, drawing on psychology, medicine, sociology, and anthropology. In its early days the Society undertook a covert espionage assignment: under the cover of investigating "the ecological aspects of disease," it studied 100 Chinese refugee students stranded after the 1949 revolution (on an $84,175 budget, paying each $25 a day) to identify candidates who might be recruited, trained, and even conditioned to resist Chinese interrogation as agents on the mainland. [[Lawrence Hinkle]] recalled that when CIA security would not clear an anthropologist Wolff had hired, Wolff simply lied to her about the money's source.[^2]
|
||||
The Society was incorporated in 1955 by [[Harold Wolff]], the Cornell neurologist who had conducted an official [[Brainwashing]] study for [[Allen Dulles]]; Wolff argued that to understand how governments manipulate behavior one had to study "human ecology," man in relation to his total environment, drawing on psychology, medicine, sociology, and anthropology. In its early days the Society undertook a covert espionage assignment: under the cover of investigating "the ecological aspects of disease," it studied 100 Chinese refugee students stranded after the 1949 revolution (on an $84,175 budget, paying each $25 a day) to identify candidates who might be recruited, trained, and even conditioned to resist Chinese interrogation as agents on the mainland. [[Lawrence Hinkle]] recalled that when CIA security would not clear an anthropologist Wolff had hired, Wolff simply lied to her about the money's source.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### James Monroe and the Academic Cover Grants
|
||||
|
||||
In 1955 Sid Gottlieb's [[TSS]] crew took the Society over from [[Morse Allen]] and remade it to look like a legitimate foundation; in 1957, as Cornell administrators tired of it, the CIA severed the university connection and installed a four-person staff under Lieutenant Colonel [[James Monroe]], a former Air Force Korean-War-POW researcher, to monitor several hundred thousand dollars a year in grants (Monroe personally supervised Cameron's work in Montreal). The grants built academic respectability: [[Carl Rogers]] received about $30,000, [[Charles Osgood]] $192,975 for the cross-cultural "semantic differential" research the Agency saw as relevant to propaganda, [[H. J. Eysenck]] $26,000 that a memo admitted had "no immediate relevance" but would "lend prestige," $5,000 to [[B. F. Skinner]] toward the work behind *Beyond Freedom and Dignity*, and a no-strings $30,000 "contingency investment" in [[Martin Orne]]'s hypnosis expertise. Pure "cover grants" funded a Levittown study, an analysis of a Mongoloid skull, and a survey of circumcision's effects on Turkish boys; in 1960 the Society sponsored a $15,000 APA survey that sent ten psychologists to the Soviet Union, nine unaware of CIA involvement. By the end of 1965, having satisfied itself it had overlooked nothing useful, the Society was dissolved, having distributed roughly $400,000 a year at its peak.[^2]
|
||||
In 1955 Sid Gottlieb's [[TSS]] crew took the Society over from [[Morse Allen]] and remade it to look like a legitimate foundation; in 1957, as Cornell administrators tired of it, the CIA severed the university connection and installed a four-person staff under Lieutenant Colonel [[James Monroe]], a former Air Force Korean-War-POW researcher, to monitor several hundred thousand dollars a year in grants (Monroe personally supervised Cameron's work in Montreal). The grants built academic respectability: [[Carl Rogers]] received about $30,000, [[Charles Osgood]] $192,975 for the cross-cultural "semantic differential" research the Agency saw as relevant to propaganda, [[H. J. Eysenck]] $26,000 that a memo admitted had "no immediate relevance" but would "lend prestige," $5,000 to [[B. F. Skinner]] toward the work behind *Beyond Freedom and Dignity*, and a no-strings $30,000 "contingency investment" in [[Martin Orne]]'s hypnosis expertise. Pure "cover grants" funded a Levittown study, an analysis of a Mongoloid skull, and a survey of circumcision's effects on Turkish boys; in 1960 the Society sponsored a $15,000 APA survey that sent ten psychologists to the Soviet Union, nine unaware of CIA involvement. By the end of 1965, having satisfied itself it had overlooked nothing useful, the Society was dissolved, having distributed roughly $400,000 a year at its peak.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 1957 Annual Report
|
||||
|
||||
The Society's annual report for 1957 gave its address as "71-58 Austin Street, Forest Hills 75, L. I., N.Y.," and listed James L. Monroe as executive secretary and treasurer. It named Harold G. Wolff as president, Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. as vice president, and John W. Gittinger as field representative. The board of directors pictured in the report was Wolff, [[Adolf Berle]] Jr., Hinkle, [[Joseph C. Hinsey]], Carl R. Rogers and [[John C. Whitehorn]]. [[Walter P. Pasternak]] was listed as technical writer. The report says the Society's funds came from gifts by private individuals and, in one instance, from the [[Foresight Foundation]], and that "A major portion of the money has been expended in support of the Human Ecology Study Program at the Cornell University Medical College."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The report's review of projects lists the Cornell work, research at [[Rutgers University]], Cameron's psychotherapy experiments at McGill University, [[Robert Hyde|Robert W. Hyde]]'s work at the Butler Health Center, a study of prisoners of war by [[Albert Biderman|Albert D. Biderman]], a project under [[Beatrice Bishop Berle]], and a "Personality Studies" project under Dr. David R. Saunders of the [[Educational Testing Service]]. The Saunders project was funded in October of the year under review to examine the relation between two personality theories, the Gittinger theory and the Myers-Briggs type theory, using the Wechsler-Bellevue scale and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator on the same group.[^4] John D. Marks later wrote that the Society gave about $140,000 to Saunders, "who knew about the Agency's involvement."[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Wechsler Data and Graphology
|
||||
|
||||
Marks describes a program in which [[John Gittinger]]'s Personality Assessment System, built on Wechsler scores, drew its data from the Society's grantees: "At Gittinger's urging, other Human Ecology grantees gave the Wechsler battery to their experimental subjects and sent him the scores."[^6] Marks writes that the Society "wound up funding handwriting research and a publication in West Germany," and that it "sponsored a study to compare handwriting analyses with Wechsler scores of actors (including some homosexuals), patients in psychotherapy, criminal psychopaths, and fashion models." He adds that Gittinger went on to hire a resident graphologist. A former colleague, not named in the note, told Marks of that work: "Something I learned very early in government was not to ask questions."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### CIA Summer Camps for Children
|
||||
|
||||
An October 1977 NBC television segment, "The Children and the CIA," reported that the Agency had used the Society to finance summer camps where children were brought together for observation and possible later recruitment, with counselors unaware of the CIA funding, the same conduit that had paid Cameron for his depatterning work.[^3]
|
||||
An October 1977 NBC television segment, "The Children and the CIA," reported that the Agency had used the Society to finance summer camps where children were brought together for observation and possible later recruitment, with counselors unaware of the CIA funding, the same conduit that had paid Cameron for his depatterning work.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Renaming and Phase-Out
|
||||
|
||||
Marks states that "In 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund," and continues to call the body the Society throughout his book.[^2] The Human Ecology Fund's 1961-1963 report, as tabulated by [[David H. Price]], lists grants including $2,000 to Klara G. Roman for "Book: The Psychology of Writing" and $39,000 to Frank Haronian for "Physique and psychological functioning." Price gives James L. Monroe as the Fund's executive director from 1961 to 1963 and David Rhodes from 1964, and states that operations shifted from New York City to Cornell University's medical school.[^9] The posthumous Encyclopedia of the Written Word (1968) thanks "The Handwriting Institute and The Human Ecology Fund" for helping Roman, and Dr. Walter P. Pasternak "of the Human Ecology Fund."[^10] A February 1963 CIA memorandum on MKULTRA Subproject 137 states that "The Fund will receive its usual acknowledgement in the publication of the manuscript."[^11] At the 1977 hearing Gittinger testified that "As far as I was concerned, it was the period of time ending in 1961," and that the Society and the Human Ecology Fund were phased out. He gave the phase-out end date for the Fund as 1965: "I believe the Human Ecology fund finally phased out in 1965, but I was not involved in this phasing out."[^12] Marks records that in 1962 Gittinger and his co-workers moved their base of operations from the Human Ecology headquarters in New York to [[Psychological Assessment Associates]], a CIA proprietary company in Washington.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### Disclosure
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -55,8 +99,27 @@ The Society's role as a CIA front was disclosed during the 1977 Senate Health Su
|
|||
|
||||
The disclosure that a foundation with academic and scientific board members had served as a CIA funding conduit for human experimentation raised significant questions about the responsibilities of ostensibly independent academic and charitable institutions that accepted government-adjacent funding without adequate disclosure or oversight.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### 1977 Public Accounts
|
||||
|
||||
Asked at the August 3, 1977 hearing about the Society's funding, Gittinger said: "The Agency in effect provided the money. They did not direct the projects." He also said that "there are a lot of innocent people who received the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology money which I know for a fact they were never asked to do anything for the CIA," and that "They had no knowledge that they were getting CIA money."[^12] Asked about the budget, he replied: "I honestly do not remember," and guessed "about $150,000 a year, but don't hold me to that."[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
Marks reports that James Monroe told The New York Times on August 2, 1977 that "only about 25 to 30 percent" of the Society's budget came from the CIA, a figure Marks says Monroe knew to be false because "the actual figure was well over 90 percent."[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
The New York Times reported on October 9, 1977 that "Sociological, cultural and anthropological studies were financed through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology," and that the list of 80 institutions given to Senate investigators "is still classified, but each of those institutions has been notified separately by the C.I.A."[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Marks, John. *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.* Times Books, 1979, Chapter 9 ("The Proprietaries") - primary account of the Society's structure and funding relationships using surviving MKULTRA documents. "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification." Senate Hearing, August 3, 1977.
|
||||
[^2]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 9.
|
||||
[^3]: A.B.H. Alexander, "Sex, Drugs, the CIA, MIND CONTROL and Your Children," PROBE, c. 1996.
|
||||
[^2]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control* (Times Books, 1979), chapter 9, "Human Ecology," p. 149, note ("In 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund").
|
||||
[^3]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 9.
|
||||
[^4]: Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, Annual Report, 1957 (34 pp.). Wayback Machine capture of https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21090820/1957-annual-report-society-human-ecology.pdf , https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21090820/1957-annual-report-society-human-ecology.pdf .
|
||||
[^5]: Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, chapter 9, "Human Ecology," p. 168 (grant to Saunders and the move to Psychological Assessment Associates in 1962). Sole source for the dollar figure and the 1962 move: Marks.
|
||||
[^6]: Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, chapter 10, "The Gittinger Assessment System," p. 170.
|
||||
[^7]: Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, chapter 10, "The Gittinger Assessment System," p. 171, note (asterisk note on graphology).
|
||||
[^8]: A.B.H. Alexander, "Sex, Drugs, the CIA, MIND CONTROL and Your Children," PROBE, c. 1996.
|
||||
[^9]: David H. Price, "Buying a piece of anthropology, Part 1," *Anthropology Today* 23(3), June 2007, text and fig. 4 (source given: Human Ecology Fund, Report, 1963, pp. 13-42). https://archive.org/details/human_ecology_torture_suicide . Sole source for the grant rows: Price's table.
|
||||
[^10]: *Encyclopedia of the Written Word* (New York: F. Ungar, 1968), acknowledgments, Internet Archive full-text index of https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofwr0000roma
|
||||
[^11]: MKULTRA Subproject 137, CIA release DOC_0000017396, accounting memorandum of February 1963. https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017396
|
||||
[^12]: *Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification*, Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, United States Senate, 95th Congress, 1st Session, August 3, 1977, testimony of John Gittinger. Available: intelligence.senate.gov.
|
||||
[^13]: Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, "Conclusions" chapter, note on p. 207 (quoting James Monroe in *The New York Times*, August 2, 1977). Sole source for the Monroe statement: Marks.
|
||||
[^14]: Jo Thomas, "Extent of University Work for C.I.A. Is Hard to Pin Down," *The New York Times*, October 9, 1977 (dateline Washington, October 8). CIA reading room copy: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp88-01315r000300390007-3 ; archive.org copy: https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01315r000300390007-3 .
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2025-07-22
|
||||
updated: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
title: Project MKUltra
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- MKULTRA
|
||||
|
|
@ -19,10 +19,17 @@ tags:
|
|||
- 1960s
|
||||
- 1970s
|
||||
category: "Intelligence Operation"
|
||||
summary: "Project MKUltra was the CIA's classified behavioral modification program (1953-1973) directed by Sidney Gottlieb, which administered LSD and other methods to unconsenting subjects across approximately 150 subprojects before its records were destroyed in January 1973 and partially reconstructed from misfiled documents in 1977."
|
||||
summary: "Project MKUltra was the CIA's classified behavioral modification program (1953-1973) directed by Sidney Gottlieb, which administered LSD and other methods to unconsenting subjects across about 150 subprojects before its records were destroyed in 1973."
|
||||
start: 1953-04-13
|
||||
end: 1973-01-01
|
||||
location: "United States / Canada / Europe"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
start: 1961
|
||||
end: 1962
|
||||
role: "two 1962 New School projects, per the Everett file; subproject numbers not stated there (Subprojects 134 and 137 match the two descriptions)"
|
||||
fn: 6
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Project MKUltra was a classified research and operational program of the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] authorized on April 13, 1953, by Director [[Allen Dulles]] and directed by [[Sidney Gottlieb]], chief of the agency's [[Technical Services Division]]. The program systematically administered [[LSD]] and other drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroconvulsive therapy, and psychological coercion to human subjects who had not consented to the experiments - including psychiatric patients, prisoners, drug addicts, sex workers, military personnel, and ordinary members of the public. It ran across approximately 150 subprojects funded through [[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology|cut-out foundations]] and direct institutional contracts, and it killed at least one CIA officer. [[Richard Helms]] ordered the destruction of nearly all MKULTRA records in December 1972-January 1973; approximately 20,000 surviving documents, discovered misfiled in a financial records annex during a 1977 FOIA search, form the primary documentary record of the program.[^1]
|
||||
|
|
@ -37,7 +44,7 @@ Both programs reflected the CIA's reading of the [[Korean War]] prisoner-of-war
|
|||
|
||||
Dulles authorized MKULTRA on April 13, 1953, on the basis of a proposal Gottlieb had drafted arguing that the [[Soviet Union]] and [[China]] possessed operational behavior-control capabilities that required a defensive American research program. The authorization was remarkable for its breadth: it explicitly waived the normal ethical review requirements and authorized research on unconsenting human subjects when Gottlieb deemed it operationally necessary.
|
||||
|
||||
The program was administered through the CIA's Technical Services Division with funding routed through three primary cut-out organizations: the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (a CIA front based in New York), the [[Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation]], and the [[Human Ecology Fund]]. Institutional recipients included universities, hospitals, prisons, and private research organizations whose principals may or may not have known the ultimate source of their funding. The cut-out structure was deliberate: it fragmented oversight, distributed the research so that no single investigator could reconstruct the program's scope, and maintained deniability between CIA funding and research outcomes.[^1]
|
||||
The program was administered through the CIA's Technical Services Division with funding routed through two primary cut-out organizations: the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (a CIA front based in New York, renamed the Human Ecology Fund in 1961) and the [[Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation]]. Institutional recipients included universities, hospitals, prisons, and private research organizations whose principals may or may not have known the ultimate source of their funding. The cut-out structure was deliberate: it fragmented oversight, distributed the research so that no single investigator could reconstruct the program's scope, and maintained deniability between CIA funding and research outcomes.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### MKDELTA, MKNAOMI, and the Operational Arm
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -47,6 +54,20 @@ MKULTRA was already under way before Dulles gave it structure. Under the code na
|
|||
|
||||
The 149 surviving subprojects funded research at some 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, using 185 private researchers, stabilized at roughly 20 percent of the Technical Services Division's annual research budget. Subproject 35 funneled money through [[Charles Geschickter]]'s [[Geschickter Fund for Medical Research]] to build a research wing (the Gorman Annex) at [[Georgetown University Hospital]] with $375,000 in CIA construction funds, providing access to patients as subjects; Subproject 47 tested large LSD doses on volunteers at the [[Atlanta Federal Penitentiary]] through [[Emory University]]; Subproject 42 covered White's safehouse operations; and Subproject 58 covered [[James Moore]]'s work at the [[University of Delaware]] on psilocybin and other natural psychedelics.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Subprojects 134 and 137 and the New School
|
||||
|
||||
The New School Archives hold a file titled "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1977-1978" in the John R. Everett records, Box 7, Folder 29. Its description states that the folder "contains a report of two projects conducted at the [[New School for Social Research|New School]] in 1962 that received funding through MKUltra; the first attempted to discern relationships between body type and personality characteristics, and the second concerned graphology and psychopathologies." The description adds: "It appears that the researchers for at least one of these projects was unaware of CIA sponsorship." The correspondence concerns the release of "universities' involvement."[^6] The description gives no subproject numbers.
|
||||
|
||||
Two released subproject files match the two descriptions. Subproject 134 was a $22,000 project recommended in a memorandum of June 9, 1961, whose addressee and signatory are redacted. The memorandum recommends funding "despite the superficiality of the proposal and the questionable products which have issued from previous research," says that three redacted doctors "can strengthen the research accomplished through monitorship and close guidance," and says: "This work fits into our indirect assessment requirement and will contribute to the Wechsler-Bellevue work in which Dr." [redacted] "is engaging." The stated purpose was "exploratory research upon the relation of component physique (body typing) to patterns of personality characteristics." The proposal, a letter covering September 1, 1961 to August 31, 1962, describes a "constitutional psychology" study building on a pilot project that used Sheldon's somatotyping, and the author states that his own contract expires at the end of June. The attached pilot report describes fifty adult male Protestant theological students and ministers, photographed and somatotyped by Sheldon or his assistants, and tested on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and other measures. A reviewer's comments, signed Ph.D. and redacted, call the report "poorly organized," note "more variables (60 to 70) than subjects," and recommend "a larger number of subjects, better representative of the general population."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
A table of Human Ecology Fund grants for 1960 to 1963, compiled by the anthropologist David H. Price from the Fund's 1961-1963 report, lists "Physique and psychological functioning," investigator Frank Haronian, psychology, $39,000. A 1964 paper by A. A. Sugerman and Frank Haronian on body type is cited in later sport-psychology reviews. The Fund's table gives a single sum of $39,000 where the Subproject 134 file shows $22,000 initially.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
Subproject 137 was a $2,000 project for a graphology lexicon. The memorandum for the record of August 24, 1961 states that its purpose was "to support the work of Dr." [redacted] "in completing a psycholexicon on handwriting," that she "has an international reputation for her work in graphology and speech," that "She is advanced in years and her health is failing," and that her manuscript was "now eighty percent complete." It states that the Technical Services Division "continues to approach the problem of handwriting identification and analysis in a number of ways" in support of its "general requirement to further the Agency's capability for the indirect assessment of personality," that the project "will be funded through the" [redacted] "for security and cover purposes," and that the investigator was "neither cleared nor witting of Agency sponsorship." The proposal states that "no compendium of terms exists for student or layman which deals with the history and evolution of handwriting, its psychology and psychopathology." A $2,000 treasurer's check dated September 11, 1961 was paid to a redacted institution. A memorandum of February 1963 states that the investigator "died in 1962 and did not send in an accounting," that her brother wrote that the manuscript was "almost finished," and that "The Fund will receive its usual acknowledgement in the publication of the manuscript." The accounting for the advance was approved on March 10, 1964 over the signature "Sidney Gottlieb, DC/TSD," and a certification states that the recipient "died in 1962 without rendering an accounting" and that "a manuscript has been published and value received."[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
The curriculum vitae in the proposal (name redacted) lists the invention of a "Graphodyne" for measuring writing speed and pressure, a 1928 diploma, a 1948 research appointment at an institute of psychosomatic and psychiatric research "in conjunction with" an institute of psychoanalysis, and faculty membership from 1949. The graphologist [[Klara G. Roman]] (1881-1962) invented an instrument called the graphodyne, graduated in 1928, was called to Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago by Franz Alexander, and taught at the New School from 1948. Her posthumous Encyclopedia of the Written Word, published in 1968, thanks "The Handwriting Institute and The Human Ecology Fund," and the Fund's 1961-1963 report, as tabulated by Price, lists a $2,000 grant to "Roman, Klara G." The released CIA file does not name her.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
[[John D. Marks]] writes that the Human Ecology grantees' Wechsler scores fed John Gittinger's assessment system: "At Gittinger's urging, other Human Ecology grantees gave the Wechsler battery to their experimental subjects and sent him the scores." He adds that the Society "wound up funding handwriting research and a publication in West Germany" and that Gittinger "went on to hire a resident graphologist." Marks writes: "In 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund, but for convenience sake it will be called the Society throughout the book."[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Subproject 68: Ewen Cameron and the Allan Memorial Institute
|
||||
|
||||
The most internationally significant MKULTRA subproject was the collaboration with Dr. [[D. Ewen Cameron]], chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at [[McGill University]] in [[Montreal]] and director of the [[Allan Memorial Institute]]. Cameron was the sitting president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953 - the most prominent psychiatrist in North America.
|
||||
|
|
@ -120,4 +141,10 @@ MKULTRA generated litigation in multiple jurisdictions:
|
|||
[^2]: "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification." Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, 95th Congress, 1st Session, August 3, 1977. U.S. Government Printing Office. Available: intelligence.senate.gov.
|
||||
[^3]: Albarelli, H.P. *A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments.* Trine Day, 2009. Starrs, James E. Forensic examination report, Olson exhumation, 1994.
|
||||
[^4]: Earman, John S., CIA Inspector General, "Report of Inspection of MKULTRA/TSD," July 26, 1963 (National Security Archive Document 16); National Security Archive, "CIA Behavior Control Experiments Focus of New Scholarly Collection," December 23, 2024, and "Top Secret Testimony of CIA's MKULTRA Chief, 50 Years Later," October 30, 2025; John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, Chapter 4.
|
||||
[^5]: Curt Rowlett, "Project Mind Kontrol: Did the U.S. Government Actually Create Programmed Assassins?," Steamshovel Press #16, 1998.
|
||||
[^5]: Curt Rowlett, "Project Mind Kontrol: Did the U.S. Government Actually Create Programmed Assassins?," Steamshovel Press #16, 1998.
|
||||
[^6]: New School Archives and Special Collections, John R. Everett records (NS-01-01-02), Series 3, Subject files, File "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1977-1978," Box 7, Folder 29. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/34220
|
||||
[^7]: MKULTRA Subproject 134, Central Intelligence Agency release DOC_0000017393 (58 pages): memorandum of June 9, 1961, proposal letter and pilot report, "Comments on Report." https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017393 ; https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/00017393 . Addressee, contractor, consultants and reviewer are redacted.
|
||||
[^8]: David H. Price, "Buying a Piece of Anthropology, Part 1: Human Ecology and Unwitting Anthropological Research for the CIA," *Anthropology Today* 23(3), June 2007, fig. 4 (source given there: Human Ecology Fund, Report, 1963, pp. 13-42). https://archive.org/details/human_ecology_torture_suicide . Sole source for the Haronian grant listing: Price's table. The Sugerman and Haronian (1964) citation appears in sport-psychology reviews.
|
||||
[^9]: MKULTRA Subproject 137, Central Intelligence Agency release DOC_0000017396 (19 pages): memorandum for the record, August 24, 1961; proposal, budget and curriculum vitae; obligation memorandum, August 28, 1961; invoice, check receipt and certifications; accounting memorandum, February 1963; accounting by individual for advance, approved March 10, 1964. https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017396 ; https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/00017396 . Names, institutions and signatories other than Gottlieb's are redacted. Sole source for the 1961-1964 payment and accounting details.
|
||||
[^10]: New School Archives and Special Collections, Maurice Edwards papers documenting the work of graphologist Klara G. Roman (NA-0010-01), biographical note, https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/284 ; Roman, *Handwriting: A Key to Personality* (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), preface pp. v-vi; *Encyclopedia of the Written Word* (New York: F. Ungar, 1968), acknowledgments; Price 2007 (see note 8). Sole source for the identification: the matches listed; the CIA copy is redacted.
|
||||
[^11]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control* (Times Books, 1979), chapter 9, p. 149 n. (renaming); chapter 10, p. 170 (Wechsler scores) and p. 171 n. (handwriting research and a resident graphologist).
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,73 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Government Program"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Program
|
||||
- PropagandaAnalysis
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- RockefellerFoundation
|
||||
- BBC
|
||||
- NaziGermany
|
||||
- WorldWarII
|
||||
- HansSpeier
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Research Project on Totalitarian Communication
|
||||
- Totalitarian Communication Project
|
||||
- Study of Totalitarian Communication in Wartime
|
||||
- Totalitarianism Research Project
|
||||
summary: "Rockefeller-funded wartime study of Nazi radio propaganda at the New School's Graduate Faculty, run by Ernst Kris and Hans Speier from April 1941 with BBC monitoring material, whose papers went to Washington, London and Ottawa."
|
||||
location: "New York, NY"
|
||||
created: 2026-10-09
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Rockefeller Foundation]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "grants of $15,960 (March 1941) and $19,000 (1942)"
|
||||
start: 1941-03
|
||||
end: 1943
|
||||
fn: 3
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Hans Speier]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "co-director"
|
||||
start: 1941-04
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: director_of
|
||||
with: "[[Ernst Kris]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "co-director"
|
||||
start: 1941-04
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Research Project on Totalitarian Communication began work on April 1, 1941, in the Research Center of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the [[New School for Social Research]], under the co-directorship of [[Ernst Kris]] and [[Hans Speier]]. It was financed by the [[Rockefeller Foundation]], analyzed German domestic radio from material supplied by the [[BBC]], and issued its papers to government agencies in Washington, London and Ottawa. Its 1944 book, German Radio Propaganda, was published by Oxford University Press.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Funding
|
||||
|
||||
The preface to the 1944 book says the project was "supported by one of the large foundations" and was assigned to develop methods of studying enemy propaganda and "to train American social scientists for prospective government work in this field." The Rockefeller Foundation's records list a "Study of Totalitarian Communication in Wartime" by Kris and Speier among its communications grants (Series 200R), with funding ending in 1943. Speier's biographer gives the grants as $15,960 in March 1941 and $19,000 in 1942, the second made because Speier took the project's methods to the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. Speier's own chronology describes the project as financed for two years "for training of Rockefeller Research Fellows and study of classified British materials." The foundation's other funded communication projects in the same years included Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project, Harold Graves's Princeton Shortwave Listening Center, which the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service absorbed in June 1941, and Harold Lasswell's Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications at the Library of Congress. A Rockefeller Foundation correspondence file for 1940 to 1952 and the project's research papers for 1941 to 1944 are in the Ernst Kris Papers at the Library of Congress.[^2][^3][^4][^5]
|
||||
|
||||
### BBC and British Links
|
||||
|
||||
Kris had previously directed a research unit that produced weekly analyses of German broadcasts for the BBC, and had briefly worked on a similar task at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal. The project depended on the BBC Monitoring Service and its restricted Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts, and John Salt, formerly director of BBC European Services and then deputy director of the BBC's New York office, made documents accessible. Kris's papers include correspondence with Mark A. Abrams for 1940 to 1943 and with John Scarlett Alexander Salt and his wife Olive for 1940 to 1956. In May 1944 Walter Adams, acting head of the British Political Warfare Mission in Washington, wrote to Kris that the book was "a magnificent piece of work."[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Staff
|
||||
|
||||
The twenty-four staff members named in the project's records were Sidney Axelrad, Joe Carmichael, Rose M. Chayes, Henry Elkin, Erik Estorik, Jacob Goldstein, Hans Herma, George Hilton, Eleanor Horn, Gertrud M. Kurth, Stanley Lipkin, Janice Loeb, Rita Lowe, Margaret P. Mascret, Alexander Mintz, George A. Nelson Jr., Margaret Otis, Heinz Paechter, Thomas Rubinstein, Dorothy L. Sandler, Joseph Shor, Ursula Wasserman, Florence Weil and Howard B. White. Axelrad, Loeb, Herma, Paechter and White are credited in association on the book's title page; Paechter's glossary Nazi-Deutsch was issued by the Office of European Economic Research in 1942 and published by Frederick Ungar in 1944.[^2][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Research Papers
|
||||
|
||||
The book's Appendix III lists eight research papers (Speier's biographer counts five reports and five published articles): German Radio News Bulletins (December 1941, 83 pages); A Study of War Communiques (January 1942, 137 pages); German Freedom Stations Broadcasting to Great Britain (January 1942, 177 pages); German Radio Propaganda to France during the Battle of France (Speier and M. Otis, in Lazarsfeld and Stanton, Radio Research 1942-1943); Data on a German Defeat Situation (June 1942, 82 pages); Topics of the Day: A German Radio Program (August 1942, 125 pages); A Typological Analysis of Stereotypes Used in German News Broadcasts (J. Goldstein, December 1942, 112 pages); and German Front Reports in the Russian Campaign (Sidney Axelrad, unpublished).[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Washington Relocation
|
||||
|
||||
In March 1942 the project was reorganized when Speier went to Washington as Senior Political Analyst, head of the Central European Section, of the [[Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service]] while remaining co-director.[^6] The book was begun in November 1942 and the manuscript completed on July 30, 1943. The project ended in January 1943 according to Speier's biographer, and many researchers entered federal service. A Foundation memo of June 3, 1947 warned that supporting persuasion of Europeans would look like propaganda, and the trustee [[John Foster Dulles]] urged postwar activity of this kind.[^2][^4][^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: The New School Archives, "Research Project on Totalitarian Communication, 1940-1944," Institute of World Affairs records, NS-02-16-01, Series 3. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/27451
|
||||
[^2]: Kris, Ernst, and Hans Speier. German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts during the War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1944, Preface and Appendix III. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.499058
|
||||
[^3]: Rockefeller Archive Center, "Rockefeller Foundation Support for Communications Media in the 1930s and 1940s" (RG 1.1, Series 200R). https://resource.rockarch.org/story/rockefeller-foundation-support-for-communications-media-in-the-1930s-and-1940s/
|
||||
[^4]: Bessner, Daniel M. "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State." PhD diss., Duke University, 2013, pp. 129-131 and notes 41-49 (Salt; grant amounts at p. 131 note 47, with the staff list; Adams to Kris, May 8, 1944, Speier Papers, Box 3, Folder 134, note 49; the foundation's other funded projects, note 46; Nazi-Deutsch, p. 130 note 41). https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/232a76ac-f2d8-4827-99fe-50b3b109fa6c/content. The grant amounts rest on this source alone.
|
||||
[^5]: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Ernst Kris Papers (MSS84824), register, scope note and container list. https://web.archive.org/web/20161221192727id_/http://rs5.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/2006/ms006003.pdf. University at Albany, Hans Speier Papers (GER-084), finding aid, chronology, 1941-1942. https://web.archive.org/web/2022id_/https://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger084.htm. Mercado, Stephen C., "FBIS Against the Axis, 1941-1945," Studies in Intelligence 45, no. 5 (2001), on the Princeton Listening Center. Princeton University Library, "Princeton Listening Center Records, 1939-1941" (AC015), finding aid, https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/AC015.
|
||||
[^6]: Daniel Bessner, "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State" (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2013), pp. 133-134 (the offer of February 1942, Speier's entry into the Analysis Division about March 1942, and the Civil Service letter of May 26, 1942), https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/19152946-8fbb-4b9b-9da0-faca0979e718. University at Albany, Hans Speier Papers (GER-084), finding aid, chronology: "1942-1944 Section Chief and later Acting Chief."
|
||||
[^7]: Rockefeller Archive Center story page cited above (Bryce Wood to Joseph Willits, June 3, 1947, RG 3, Series 900, Box 26, Folder 206).
|
||||
|
|
@ -40,13 +40,13 @@ relations:
|
|||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "project chief"
|
||||
start: 1963-08
|
||||
fn: 9
|
||||
fn: 13
|
||||
- type: contractor_to
|
||||
with: "[[J. Allen Hynek]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "scientific consultant"
|
||||
end: 1969-07-01
|
||||
fn: 22
|
||||
fn: 26
|
||||
- type: contractor_to
|
||||
with: "[[Battelle Memorial Institute]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
|
|
@ -58,16 +58,16 @@ relations:
|
|||
role: "University of Colorado study under Air Force contract"
|
||||
start: 1966-10-07
|
||||
end: 1968-10-31
|
||||
fn: 20
|
||||
fn: 24
|
||||
- type: investigated
|
||||
with: "[[Brian O'Brien]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
role: "chairman, Air Force Scientific Advisory Board ad hoc committee to review Blue Book"
|
||||
start: 1966-02-03
|
||||
end: 1966-03
|
||||
fn: 17
|
||||
fn: 21
|
||||
created: 2026-10-01
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-01
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-09
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Project Blue Book was the name of the [[U.S. Air Force]] program for receiving, investigating and cataloging reports of unidentified flying objects, headquartered at [[Wright-Patterson Air Force Base]], [[Ohio]]. It followed [[Project Sign]] (1947 to 1949) and [[Project Grudge]] (1949 to 1951 and after), and on 17 December 1969 the Secretary of the Air Force announced its termination. An Air Force fact sheet gives 12,618 sightings reported to the project from 1947 to 1969, of which 701 remained "Unidentified."[^1]
|
||||
|
|
@ -90,49 +90,53 @@ Air Force Letter 200-5 of 29 April 1952 directed bases to telegraph reports to b
|
|||
|
||||
In January 1953 the Panel, convened by the [[Central Intelligence Agency]], heard Ruppelt, Hynek and [[Dewey Fournet]], who had been project officer for Blue Book at the Pentagon for fifteen months, and watched the Navy's analysis of the [[Tremonton, Utah|Tremonton]] and [[Great Falls, Montana|Great Falls]] films. It recommended a training and "debunking" program integrated with the Air Technical Intelligence Center's work and an expanded Air Technical Intelligence Center staff, and recorded Brigadier General [[William N. Garland]]'s wish to declassify reports and enlarge the unit. The Condon Report stated in 1968 that "little was done to implement" the Panel's recommendations and that the Blue Book status reports were not declassified until 9 September 1960.[^4][^7][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Reports from Wilhelm Reich and William Moise, 1954
|
||||
|
||||
According to [[Wilhelm Reich]], in January 1954 he and [[Ilse Ollendorff]] of [[Rangeley, Maine|Rangeley]], Maine, sent a report of lights seen on the night of January 28, 1954 to "U.S. Airforce Intelligence." A letter of March 10, 1954 from Flight 3-G, 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, [[Presque Isle Air Force Base]], states that the report had gone to headquarters at Colorado Springs and enclosed a USAF Technical Information Sheet; 1st Lt. Andrew Matyas wrote on 16 March, and Reich returned the form on March 19, 1954 with a manuscript.[^9] According to [[William Moise]]'s report as published by Reich, Moise telephoned General Watson, whom he identified as commander of the Air Technical Intelligence Center, on October 11, 1954 to report that Reich had disabled two UFOs on 10 October; Watson told him a group from the CIA was coming on the Friday; at Dayton on 14 October Dr. W. H. Byers, Captain D. M. Hill and Harry Haberer met him, and on 15 October Colonel Wertenbaker, whom Moise called deputy commander, received his report and said a request that the Air Force tow Oranur radium to Arizona would be forwarded to Washington.[^10] Reich's petition for certiorari states that Moise reported the "cosmic event" to Air Force Technical Intelligence at Dayton on October 14, 1954 at 4:00 p.m., and a letter of October 9, 1954 over Moise's signature as "Oranur Weather Control Operator" listed the "Commander, Air Technical Intelligence Center, U.S. Air Force" among its recipients.[^11] A statement under Moise's signature to the FBI on February 26, 1957 states that he met "General Trumend Landon USAF Inspector General" at the Pentagon in the summer of 1954 concerning Cosmic Orgone Engineering work, and sent communications to the CIA and Air Force Intelligence.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
### Staffing and direction
|
||||
|
||||
Captain [[Charles Hardin]] headed Blue Book from March 1954, Captain [[George T. Gregory]] from 1956, Major [[Robert J. Friend]] from 1958 and Major [[Hector Quintanilla]] from August 1963. A chronology hosted by the [[National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena]] and drawing on the writer [[Jerome Clark]] states that the Air Force decided in 1955 that the goal of Blue Book should be to reduce the number of unidentified reports to a minimum, and that a revised [[Air Force Regulation 200-2]] issued under Gregory emphasized that unexplained reports must be reduced to a minimum.[^9]
|
||||
Captain [[Charles Hardin]] headed Blue Book from March 1954, Captain [[George T. Gregory]] from 1956, Major [[Robert J. Friend]] from 1958 and Major [[Hector Quintanilla]] from August 1963. A chronology hosted by the [[National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena]] and drawing on the writer [[Jerome Clark]] states that the Air Force decided in 1955 that the goal of Blue Book should be to reduce the number of unidentified reports to a minimum, and that a revised [[Air Force Regulation 200-2]] issued under Gregory emphasized that unexplained reports must be reduced to a minimum.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
Cases classed "Unidentified" numbered 42 in 1953, 46 in 1954, 24 in 1955, 14 in 1956 and 14 in 1957, then between 10 and 19 each year to 1965. [[Gerald K. Haines]] of the Agency's history staff gave the unexplained share as 5.9 percent in 1955 and 4 percent in 1956.[^4][^10]
|
||||
Cases classed "Unidentified" numbered 42 in 1953, 46 in 1954, 24 in 1955, 14 in 1956 and 14 in 1957, then between 10 and 19 each year to 1965. [[Gerald K. Haines]] of the Agency's history staff gave the unexplained share as 5.9 percent in 1955 and 4 percent in 1956.[^4][^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Hynek, Battelle and Project Stork
|
||||
|
||||
J. Allen Hynek served as astronomical consultant to the Air Force from 1948, and told a congressional committee in 1968 that the Air Force asked him twenty years earlier to weed out reports arising from astronomical objects.[^8][^11]
|
||||
J. Allen Hynek served as astronomical consultant to the Air Force from 1948, and told a congressional committee in 1968 that the Air Force asked him twenty years earlier to weed out reports arising from astronomical objects.[^8][^15]
|
||||
|
||||
In 1953 Hynek ran [[Project Henry]] from [[Ohio State University]], reviewing teletype reports from Wright-Patterson. His assistant [[Jennie Zeidman]], later a board member of the [[Center for UFO Studies]], wrote in 1991 that Hynek told her she was "working for a contractor" who "doesn't want to be known," that the weekly courier who delivered the reports was, as she established from a Columbus city directory, an employee of the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, and that Blue Book Special Report 14, the statistical study of the reports, was in her words "a product of" [[Project Stork]], whose mission was, as she put it, "to ascertain the capability of the Soviet Union to engage in technological warfare."[^12] The minutes of the Robertson Panel record Hynek describing "the Project STORK support at Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus."[^7]
|
||||
In 1953 Hynek ran [[Project Henry]] from [[Ohio State University]], reviewing teletype reports from Wright-Patterson. His assistant [[Jennie Zeidman]], later a board member of the [[Center for UFO Studies]], wrote in 1991 that Hynek told her she was "working for a contractor" who "doesn't want to be known," that the weekly courier who delivered the reports was, as she established from a Columbus city directory, an employee of the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, and that Blue Book Special Report 14, the statistical study of the reports, was in her words "a product of" [[Project Stork]], whose mission was, as she put it, "to ascertain the capability of the Soviet Union to engage in technological warfare."[^16] The minutes of the Robertson Panel record Hynek describing "the Project STORK support at Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
From 1967 the consultancy ran through Subcontract 130-7000 between [[F. W. Dodge Company]], a division of [[McGraw-Hill]], and Hynek, dated 4 August 1967, covering 1 July 1967 to 30 June 1968 at $10 per hour for 750 hours, a maximum of $7,500, "for use under Prime Contract Number F33657-67-C-1447." Its stated objectives were to determine whether the phenomena "constitute a threat to the security of the United States," whether they "reveal any new, unique, or revolutionary scientific or technical information or techniques," and "methods of exploiting the possible scientific or technical potential of these phenomena/objects." A schedule filed with the subcontract, hosted by [[Jan Aldrich]]'s Project 1947, tabulates Hynek's services for the "Aerial Phenomena Office" for fiscal years 1964 to 1968 at $23,322.50, with $10,082.94 in expenses.[^13]
|
||||
From 1967 the consultancy ran through Subcontract 130-7000 between [[F. W. Dodge Company]], a division of [[McGraw-Hill]], and Hynek, dated 4 August 1967, covering 1 July 1967 to 30 June 1968 at $10 per hour for 750 hours, a maximum of $7,500, "for use under Prime Contract Number F33657-67-C-1447." Its stated objectives were to determine whether the phenomena "constitute a threat to the security of the United States," whether they "reveal any new, unique, or revolutionary scientific or technical information or techniques," and "methods of exploiting the possible scientific or technical potential of these phenomena/objects." A schedule filed with the subcontract, hosted by [[Jan Aldrich]]'s Project 1947, tabulates Hynek's services for the "Aerial Phenomena Office" for fiscal years 1964 to 1968 at $23,322.50, with $10,082.94 in expenses.[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
### Regulations and reporting channels
|
||||
|
||||
Air Force Regulation 200-2, which succeeded Letter 200-5, was classed under "Intelligence Activities." The Condon Report quotes a paragraph of the regulation headed "Reduction of Percentage of UFO 'Unidentifieds'" that states "Air Force activities must reduce the percentage of unidentifieds to the minimum," while adding that "the elimination of all unidentifieds is improbable." Regulation 80-17 of 19 September 1960 and 80-17A of 8 November 1966 reclassed the UFO program under "Research and Development" and placed contact with the public and news media with the Secretary of the Air Force's Office of Information, to which private organizations seeking Air Force briefings or discussions on UFOs were to direct requests; base commanders could release information on a local sighting only after it had been "positively identified." The Condon Report's authors read the "reduce the percentage" paragraph as an instruction to investigate seriously and described critics of it as having "tried to read into this paragraph an exhortation that investigation is to result in common-place identifications at all costs."[^4][^14] [[JANAP 146|Joint Army Navy Air Publication 146]], "Canadian-United States Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings," issued by the [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]], covers reports of vital importance to the security of the [[United States]] and [[Canada]] requiring "very urgent defensive and/or investigative action." Its list of reportable sightings includes "Unidentified flying objects" as item (c), and its section 208 states that unauthorized disclosure of such a report may expose a person to prosecution under Title 18 of the [[United States Code|U.S. Code]], chapter 37, while not requiring classification of the messages. The Condon Report wrote of such reports that "it would be most unwise that the military response to such circumstances be publicized, nor for that matter should the circumstances themselves be a matter of public knowledge."[^15]
|
||||
Air Force Regulation 200-2, which succeeded Letter 200-5, was classed under "Intelligence Activities." The Condon Report quotes a paragraph of the regulation headed "Reduction of Percentage of UFO 'Unidentifieds'" that states "Air Force activities must reduce the percentage of unidentifieds to the minimum," while adding that "the elimination of all unidentifieds is improbable." Regulation 80-17 of 19 September 1960 and 80-17A of 8 November 1966 reclassed the UFO program under "Research and Development" and placed contact with the public and news media with the Secretary of the Air Force's Office of Information, to which private organizations seeking Air Force briefings or discussions on UFOs were to direct requests; base commanders could release information on a local sighting only after it had been "positively identified." The Condon Report's authors read the "reduce the percentage" paragraph as an instruction to investigate seriously and described critics of it as having "tried to read into this paragraph an exhortation that investigation is to result in common-place identifications at all costs."[^4][^18] [[JANAP 146|Joint Army Navy Air Publication 146]], "Canadian-United States Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings," issued by the [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]], covers reports of vital importance to the security of the [[United States]] and [[Canada]] requiring "very urgent defensive and/or investigative action." Its list of reportable sightings includes "Unidentified flying objects" as item (c), and its section 208 states that unauthorized disclosure of such a report may expose a person to prosecution under Title 18 of the [[United States Code|U.S. Code]], chapter 37, while not requiring classification of the messages. The Condon Report wrote of such reports that "it would be most unwise that the military response to such circumstances be publicized, nor for that matter should the circumstances themselves be a matter of public knowledge."[^19]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Central Intelligence Agency and Blue Book
|
||||
|
||||
According to Haines, after the [[U-2 Spy Plane|U-2]] began test flights in 1955, Blue Book investigators who knew of them tried to explain the sightings to the public by natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions, and by checking with the Agency's U-2 project staff in Washington attributed many sightings to the aircraft, "careful, however, not to reveal the true cause of the sighting to the public." Haines wrote that Agency officers on the U-2 and [[OXCART]] programs later estimated that more than half of all reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights, and that "this led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."[^10]
|
||||
According to Haines, after the [[U-2 Spy Plane|U-2]] began test flights in 1955, Blue Book investigators who knew of them tried to explain the sightings to the public by natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions, and by checking with the Agency's U-2 project staff in Washington attributed many sightings to the aircraft, "careful, however, not to reveal the true cause of the sighting to the public." Haines wrote that Agency officers on the U-2 and [[OXCART]] programs later estimated that more than half of all reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights, and that "this led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
The Agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence had asked in 1952, through the Deputy Director for Intelligence, for research and development on the subject through the Air Force and the Research and Development Board, and the Robertson Panel followed; the Agency's history records that any mention of Agency sponsorship of the Panel was forbidden.[^16] In 1964 [[Director of Central Intelligence]] [[John McCone]] asked for an updated evaluation; the Office collected samples from the acting director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, [[Richard Hall]], and the Office's Assistant Director, [[Donald F. Chamberlain]], told McCone on 26 January 1965 that the Office still monitored Blue Book.[^10] Haines cites an article by Quintanilla, "The Investigation of UFOs," in the fall 1966 issue (volume 10, number 4, pages 95 to 110) of the Agency's journal [[Studies in Intelligence]].[^10]
|
||||
The Agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence had asked in 1952, through the Deputy Director for Intelligence, for research and development on the subject through the Air Force and the Research and Development Board, and the Robertson Panel followed; the Agency's history records that any mention of Agency sponsorship of the Panel was forbidden.[^20] In 1964 [[Director of Central Intelligence]] [[John McCone]] asked for an updated evaluation; the Office collected samples from the acting director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, [[Richard Hall]], and the Office's Assistant Director, [[Donald F. Chamberlain]], told McCone on 26 January 1965 that the Office still monitored Blue Book.[^14] Haines cites an article by Quintanilla, "The Investigation of UFOs," in the fall 1966 issue (volume 10, number 4, pages 95 to 110) of the Agency's journal [[Studies in Intelligence]].[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Review in 1966
|
||||
|
||||
An Air Force memorandum of 28 September 1965 from Major General [[E. B. LeBailly]] said 9,265 reports had been investigated by 30 June 1965, of which 663 could not be explained. The Scientific Advisory Board ad hoc committee under [[Brian O'Brien]], including [[Carl Sagan]], met on 3 February 1966 and reported that 646 of 10,147 sightings from 1947 through 1965 were listed as unidentified, that the program had "only one officer, a sergeant, and secretary," and that it should be strengthened by contracting university teams.[^17]
|
||||
An Air Force memorandum of 28 September 1965 from Major General [[E. B. LeBailly]] said 9,265 reports had been investigated by 30 June 1965, of which 663 could not be explained. The Scientific Advisory Board ad hoc committee under [[Brian O'Brien]], including [[Carl Sagan]], met on 3 February 1966 and reported that 646 of 10,147 sightings from 1947 through 1965 were listed as unidentified, that the program had "only one officer, a sergeant, and secretary," and that it should be strengthened by contracting university teams.[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
On 20 and 21 March 1966 reports from [[Dexter, Michigan|Dexter]] and [[Hillsdale, Michigan|Hillsdale]], [[Michigan]], led Hynek to suggest at a press conference that swamp gas might account for them. On 28 March Representative [[Gerald Ford]] wrote to the chairmen of the [[House Committee on Armed Services]] and the [[House Committee on Science and Astronautics]] that "the Air Force sent a consultant, astrophysicist Dr. J. Allen Hynek" who "dismissed all of them," and the accompanying release called Hynek's explanation "flippant." The [[House Armed Services Committee]] held a one-day hearing on 5 April 1966 under [[L. Mendel Rivers]], at which Secretary of the Air Force [[Harold Brown]] announced the O'Brien committee's report.[^18][^19]
|
||||
On 20 and 21 March 1966 reports from [[Dexter, Michigan|Dexter]] and [[Hillsdale, Michigan|Hillsdale]], [[Michigan]], led Hynek to suggest at a press conference that swamp gas might account for them. On 28 March Representative [[Gerald Ford]] wrote to the chairmen of the [[House Committee on Armed Services]] and the [[House Committee on Science and Astronautics]] that "the Air Force sent a consultant, astrophysicist Dr. J. Allen Hynek" who "dismissed all of them," and the accompanying release called Hynek's explanation "flippant." The [[House Armed Services Committee]] held a one-day hearing on 5 April 1966 under [[L. Mendel Rivers]], at which Secretary of the Air Force [[Harold Brown]] announced the O'Brien committee's report.[^22][^23]
|
||||
|
||||
### Colorado, the National Academy and termination
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Air Force Office of Scientific Research]] contracted with the University of Colorado in 1966 for the study directed by [[Edward Condon]] (see the page on the committee), and the report's Section I stated that "only so much attention to the subject should be given as the Department of Defense deems to be necessary strictly from a defense point of view" and that "the defense function could be performed within the framework established for intelligence and surveillance operations without the continuance of a special unit such as Project Blue Book, but this is a question for defense specialists rather than research scientists."[^20][^21] A [[National Academy of Sciences]] panel under [[Gerald M. Clemence]] of Yale, with [[H. R. Crane]], [[David M. Dennison]], [[Wallace O. Fenn]], [[H. Keffer Hartline]], [[E. R. Hilgard]], [[Mark Kac]], [[Francis W. Reichelderfer]], [[William W. Rubey]], [[C. D. Shane]] and [[Oswald G. Villard Jr.]], concurred that "no high priority in UFO investigations is warranted by data of the past two decades."[^1]
|
||||
The [[Air Force Office of Scientific Research]] contracted with the University of Colorado in 1966 for the study directed by [[Edward Condon]] (see the page on the committee), and the report's Section I stated that "only so much attention to the subject should be given as the Department of Defense deems to be necessary strictly from a defense point of view" and that "the defense function could be performed within the framework established for intelligence and surveillance operations without the continuance of a special unit such as Project Blue Book, but this is a question for defense specialists rather than research scientists."[^24][^25] A [[National Academy of Sciences]] panel under [[Gerald M. Clemence]] of Yale, with [[H. R. Crane]], [[David M. Dennison]], [[Wallace O. Fenn]], [[H. Keffer Hartline]], [[E. R. Hilgard]], [[Mark Kac]], [[Francis W. Reichelderfer]], [[William W. Rubey]], [[C. D. Shane]] and [[Oswald G. Villard Jr.]], concurred that "no high priority in UFO investigations is warranted by data of the past two decades."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
An Air Force memorandum dated 20 October 1969, prepared by Major Espey of the Directorate of Research and Development with the signature block of Brigadier General [[C. H. Bolender]], Deputy Director of Development, and titled by the National Investigations Committee site "The Bolender Draft (Not Memo)," states that Blue Book had two officers, one noncommissioned officer and one civilian full time and that Hynek "served as a scientific consultant until 1 July 1969." Its paragraph 4 states: "There is still, however, no evidence that Project Blue Book reports have served any intelligence function. Moreover, reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system." Its paragraph 6 states that termination "would leave no official federal office to receive reports of UFOs." Paragraph 8 recommends that the records of "over 13,000 sighting cases" be transferred to an archive "to prevent charges that the Air Force is concealing facts," and paragraph 9 records that the Air University would accept them if the Secretary's Office of Information answered all inquiries, "rigidly limit the right of access to recognized, legitimate researchers" and screen researchers' notes to ensure that "confidentiality" is maintained. The introduction on the NICAP site that hosts the text states, citing [[Brad Sparks]], that the document had sixteen attachments, that [[Robert Todd]] obtained its release in January 1979 and spent years trying to get the Air Force to find and release the attachments, and that several remain unreleased.[^22]
|
||||
An Air Force memorandum dated 20 October 1969, prepared by Major Espey of the Directorate of Research and Development with the signature block of Brigadier General [[C. H. Bolender]], Deputy Director of Development, and titled by the National Investigations Committee site "The Bolender Draft (Not Memo)," states that Blue Book had two officers, one noncommissioned officer and one civilian full time and that Hynek "served as a scientific consultant until 1 July 1969." Its paragraph 4 states: "There is still, however, no evidence that Project Blue Book reports have served any intelligence function. Moreover, reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system." Its paragraph 6 states that termination "would leave no official federal office to receive reports of UFOs." Paragraph 8 recommends that the records of "over 13,000 sighting cases" be transferred to an archive "to prevent charges that the Air Force is concealing facts," and paragraph 9 records that the Air University would accept them if the Secretary's Office of Information answered all inquiries, "rigidly limit the right of access to recognized, legitimate researchers" and screen researchers' notes to ensure that "confidentiality" is maintained. The introduction on the NICAP site that hosts the text states, citing [[Brad Sparks]], that the document had sixteen attachments, that [[Robert Todd]] obtained its release in January 1979 and spent years trying to get the Air Force to find and release the attachments, and that several remain unreleased.[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
On 17 December 1969 Secretary of the Air Force [[Robert C. Seamans Jr.]] announced termination, in a memorandum to Air Force Chief of Staff General [[John D. Ryan]] stating that continuation "cannot be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Records
|
||||
|
||||
The Air Force retired the Blue Book records to the Air Force archives at [[Maxwell Air Force Base]], [[Alabama]], and in 1976 turned them over to the [[National Archives and Records Administration|National Archives]].[^10] The National Archives describes the textual records, "excluding names of people involved in the sightings," as about 2 cubic feet of unarranged project and administrative files, 37 cubic feet of case files and 3 cubic feet of records of the [[Air Force Office of Special Investigations|Office of Special Investigations]], available on 94 rolls of microfilm (publication T-1206). On the same page it reports that searches of Air Force and Joint Chiefs of Staff records and of the [[National Security Council]] indexes for MJ-12, "majestic," and unidentified flying objects "were all negative except for" a one-page memorandum for General Twining from [[Robert Cutler]], Special Assistant to the President, titled "NCS/MJ-12 Special Studies Project," dated 14 July 1954, which "refers to a briefing to take place on July 16" and "does not identify MJ-12 or the purpose of the briefing."[^23] A Department of the Navy UFO fact sheet gives the files as 61 feet of case files, 20 reels of motion pictures, 23 sound recordings and 8,360 photographs.[^1]
|
||||
The Air Force retired the Blue Book records to the Air Force archives at [[Maxwell Air Force Base]], [[Alabama]], and in 1976 turned them over to the [[National Archives and Records Administration|National Archives]].[^14] The National Archives describes the textual records, "excluding names of people involved in the sightings," as about 2 cubic feet of unarranged project and administrative files, 37 cubic feet of case files and 3 cubic feet of records of the [[Air Force Office of Special Investigations|Office of Special Investigations]], available on 94 rolls of microfilm (publication T-1206). On the same page it reports that searches of Air Force and Joint Chiefs of Staff records and of the [[National Security Council]] indexes for MJ-12, "majestic," and unidentified flying objects "were all negative except for" a one-page memorandum for General Twining from [[Robert Cutler]], Special Assistant to the President, titled "NCS/MJ-12 Special Studies Project," dated 14 July 1954, which "refers to a briefing to take place on July 16" and "does not identify MJ-12 or the purpose of the briefing."[^27] A Department of the Navy UFO fact sheet gives the files as 61 feet of case files, 20 reels of motion pictures, 23 sound recordings and 8,360 photographs.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The Project 1947 site states that the Blue Book files lack some reports Hynek forwarded under his contract, among them the [[Slidell, Louisiana]] "car buzzing" case of 8 December 1957 and [[Captain Frost]]'s 1945 sighting, and that Hynek held a copy of the microfilm; the researcher [[Loren Gross]], quoted there, wrote that his comparison of the microfilm with files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, the [[Aerial Phenomena Research Organization]], the Center for UFO Studies and the papers of [[James E. McDonald]] found "very little overlap aside from well-known incidents."[^24]
|
||||
The Project 1947 site states that the Blue Book files lack some reports Hynek forwarded under his contract, among them the [[Slidell, Louisiana]] "car buzzing" case of 8 December 1957 and [[Captain Frost]]'s 1945 sighting, and that Hynek held a copy of the microfilm; the researcher [[Loren Gross]], quoted there, wrote that his comparison of the microfilm with files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, the [[Aerial Phenomena Research Organization]], the Center for UFO Studies and the papers of [[James E. McDonald]] found "very little overlap aside from well-known incidents."[^28]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -144,19 +148,23 @@ The Project 1947 site states that the Blue Book files lack some reports Hynek fo
|
|||
[^6]: Condon, Section V, chapter 2, p. 856.
|
||||
[^7]: F. C. Durant, memorandum on the "Report of Meetings of the Office of Scientific Intelligence Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects," Central Intelligence Agency, 16 February 1953, Condon Report Appendix U, https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/appndx-u.htm (Part I, Thursday morning; Part II, "Tremonton, Utah, Sighting" and "Educational Program"; Tab C, "Evidence Presented," listing "Progress Reports of Project STORK (code name for Battelle Memorial Institute contract work supporting ATIC)").
|
||||
[^8]: Condon, Section V, chapter 2, pp. 877-878 and 909-910.
|
||||
[^9]: "Blue Book," NICAP, https://nicap.org/bios/WHO-WAS/BLUE_BOOK.htm.
|
||||
[^10]: Gerald K. Haines, "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90," Studies in Intelligence (1997), sections "CIA's U-2 and OXCART as UFOs" and "The 1960s," notes 4, 5, 44 to 46, 68, 69 and 80, https://sgp.fas.org/library/ciaufo.html.
|
||||
[^11]: Hynek's 1968 statement, Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, House of Representatives, 90th Congress, 2d Session, 29 July 1968, p. 3, https://nicap.org/books/1968Sym/1968_UFO_Symposium.pdf.
|
||||
[^12]: Jennie Zeidman, "I Remember Blue Book," International UFO Reporter, March/April 1991, https://www.project1947.com/articles/jzbluebook.htm.
|
||||
[^13]: Subcontract 130-7000, F. W. Dodge Company (McGraw-Hill) and J. Allen Hynek, 4 August 1967, with cover letter of 7 August 1967 from John J. Sweeney, project manager, copied to Major Quintanilla, and schedule of services for the Aerial Phenomena Office, 1 July 1963 to 30 June 1968, as hosted at http://www.project1947.com/hynek/jah_af_contract.htm.
|
||||
[^14]: Condon, Appendix B, "AFR 80-17," pp. 1291-1296, http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/appndx-b.htm.
|
||||
[^15]: Condon, Section V, chapter 2, pp. 886-889.
|
||||
[^16]: H. Marshall Chadwell, memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence, "Unidentified Flying Objects," 1952, CREST document CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020008-2, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81r00560r000100020008-2; Haines, notes 36 and 72.
|
||||
[^17]: Condon, Appendix A, "Special Report of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project 'Blue Book,'" March 1966, https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/appndx-a.htm; Condon, Section V, chapter 2, pp. 902-907 (LeBailly memorandum of 28 September 1965).
|
||||
[^18]: Condon, Section V, chapter 2, pp. 899-900 and 908-910; Gerald R. Ford to Representatives George P. Miller and L. Mendel Rivers, 28 March 1966, with news release of the same date, Gerald R. Ford Congressional Papers, Press Secretary and Speech File, Box D9, folder "Ford Press Releases - UFO, 1966," Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/sites/default/files/pdf_documents/library/document/0054/4525586.pdf.
|
||||
[^19]: Condon, Section V, chapter 2, p. 908 (hearing of 5 April 1966; Brown's announcement).
|
||||
[^20]: Condon, Preface and Section II, "Summary of the Study," pp. v-vi and 11-12, http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/preface.htm and http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/sec-ii.htm.
|
||||
[^21]: Condon, Section I, "Conclusions and Recommendations," p. 6, http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/sec-i.htm.
|
||||
[^22]: Air Force action memorandum, "Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO)," 20 October 1969, routing block and signature block of Brigadier General C. H. Bolender, paragraphs 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 9, with NICAP introduction by Fran Ridge, http://www.nicap.org/Bolender_Memo.htm.
|
||||
[^23]: National Archives, "Project BLUE BOOK - Unidentified Flying Objects," sections "General Information" and "Project BLUE BOOK Reference Report," https://www.archives.gov/research/military/air-force/ufos.
|
||||
[^24]: "A few words about the late Dr J. Allen Hynek," Project 1947, http://www.project1947.com/hynek/index.htm, quoting Loren Gross.
|
||||
[^9]: Same book, chapter "Contact with the U.S. Air Force." Sole source.
|
||||
[^10]: Wilhelm Reich, Contact with Space: Oranur Second Report, 1951-1956 (Core Pilot Press, 1957), pp. 78 to 88, https://archive.org/details/wilhelm-reich-contact-with-space. Sole source.
|
||||
[^11]: Reich and Silvert petition for certiorari and Moise letter of October 9, 1954, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Parts 4c and 5c, https://archive.org/details/WilhelmReichFBI.
|
||||
[^12]: Moise statement of February 26, 1957, Wilhelm Reich FBI file, Part 3 (PDF pages 27 and 28).
|
||||
[^13]: "Blue Book," NICAP, https://nicap.org/bios/WHO-WAS/BLUE_BOOK.htm.
|
||||
[^14]: Gerald K. Haines, "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90," Studies in Intelligence (1997), sections "CIA's U-2 and OXCART as UFOs" and "The 1960s," notes 4, 5, 44 to 46, 68, 69 and 80, https://sgp.fas.org/library/ciaufo.html.
|
||||
[^15]: Hynek's 1968 statement, Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, House of Representatives, 90th Congress, 2d Session, 29 July 1968, p. 3, https://nicap.org/books/1968Sym/1968_UFO_Symposium.pdf.
|
||||
[^16]: Jennie Zeidman, "I Remember Blue Book," International UFO Reporter, March/April 1991, https://www.project1947.com/articles/jzbluebook.htm.
|
||||
[^17]: Subcontract 130-7000, F. W. Dodge Company (McGraw-Hill) and J. Allen Hynek, 4 August 1967, with cover letter of 7 August 1967 from John J. Sweeney, project manager, copied to Major Quintanilla, and schedule of services for the Aerial Phenomena Office, 1 July 1963 to 30 June 1968, as hosted at http://www.project1947.com/hynek/jah_af_contract.htm.
|
||||
[^18]: Condon, Appendix B, "AFR 80-17," pp. 1291-1296, http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/appndx-b.htm.
|
||||
[^19]: Condon, Section V, chapter 2, pp. 886-889.
|
||||
[^20]: H. Marshall Chadwell, memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence, "Unidentified Flying Objects," 1952, CREST document CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020008-2, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81r00560r000100020008-2; Haines, notes 36 and 72.
|
||||
[^21]: Condon, Appendix A, "Special Report of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project 'Blue Book,'" March 1966, https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/appndx-a.htm; Condon, Section V, chapter 2, pp. 902-907 (LeBailly memorandum of 28 September 1965).
|
||||
[^22]: Condon, Section V, chapter 2, pp. 899-900 and 908-910; Gerald R. Ford to Representatives George P. Miller and L. Mendel Rivers, 28 March 1966, with news release of the same date, Gerald R. Ford Congressional Papers, Press Secretary and Speech File, Box D9, folder "Ford Press Releases - UFO, 1966," Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/sites/default/files/pdf_documents/library/document/0054/4525586.pdf.
|
||||
[^23]: Condon, Section V, chapter 2, p. 908 (hearing of 5 April 1966; Brown's announcement).
|
||||
[^24]: Condon, Preface and Section II, "Summary of the Study," pp. v-vi and 11-12, http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/preface.htm and http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/sec-ii.htm.
|
||||
[^25]: Condon, Section I, "Conclusions and Recommendations," p. 6, http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/sec-i.htm.
|
||||
[^26]: Air Force action memorandum, "Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO)," 20 October 1969, routing block and signature block of Brigadier General C. H. Bolender, paragraphs 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 9, with NICAP introduction by Fran Ridge, http://www.nicap.org/Bolender_Memo.htm.
|
||||
[^27]: National Archives, "Project BLUE BOOK - Unidentified Flying Objects," sections "General Information" and "Project BLUE BOOK Reference Report," https://www.archives.gov/research/military/air-force/ufos.
|
||||
[^28]: "A few words about the late Dr J. Allen Hynek," Project 1947, http://www.project1947.com/hynek/index.htm, quoting Loren Gross.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
35
70 - DISPATCHES/2026-10-08 Our Largest Funder.md
Normal file
35
70 - DISPATCHES/2026-10-08 Our Largest Funder.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Our Largest Funder"
|
||||
date: 2026-10-08
|
||||
status: published
|
||||
summary: "For almost five years an Open Philanthropy grantmaker sat on the board of the charity her foundation funded most, which in 2022 to 2023 also took FTX Foundation money."
|
||||
entities:
|
||||
- "[[Claire Zabel]]"
|
||||
- "[[Open Philanthropy]]"
|
||||
- "[[Effective Ventures]]"
|
||||
- "[[Centre for Effective Altruism]]"
|
||||
- "[[FTX Foundation]]"
|
||||
- "[[Nick Beckstead]]"
|
||||
- "[[Atlas Fellowship]]"
|
||||
- "[[Charity Commission]]"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- EffectiveAltruism
|
||||
- OpenPhilanthropy
|
||||
- FTX
|
||||
---
|
||||
# Our Largest Funder
|
||||
|
||||
[[Claire Zabel]] joined [[Open Philanthropy]] as a research analyst in August 2015 and, from December 2019 to January 2022, was described on its team page as leading "our grantmaking on effective altruism."[^1] On July 18, 2019, Companies House records, she became a director of the English company of the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], later [[Effective Ventures]] Foundation (UK), and a person with significant control holding more than 25 percent of its votes. She remained a director until March 28, 2024.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Open Philanthropy grant pages from 2018 to 2022 name her as investigator on twenty grants totalling about 12.6 million dollars, among them several to the Centre: 180,000 dollars in February 2020 for a longtermist project incubator, 500,000 dollars more for the incubator in September 2020, and 5,000,000 dollars to the [[Atlas Fellowship]], via the Centre, in March 2022. Of the September 2020 incubator grant, 451,264 dollars was returned to Open Philanthropy in March 2023.[^3] The largest general-support grant to the Centre, 7,500,000 dollars in February 2021, names a committee as its investigator.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
The charity's accounts for the year to June 30, 2023 describe her in a note on related parties as a program director at "Open Philanthropy, our largest funder," and state that "Claire has significant influence over some of the funding decisions made by Open Philanthropy in relation to several of the charity's projects." That year the charity took 39,037,949 pounds in grants from Open Philanthropy and 2,766,546 pounds in donations from the [[FTX Foundation]]. The same note states that one of its trustees had been the chief executive of the FTX Foundation during the year. The trustee list for that year includes [[Nick Beckstead]], who resigned in August 2023.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The [[Charity Commission]] opened a statutory inquiry into the charity in December 2022. Its report of May 2024 found that trustees were not required to disclose potential conflicts of interest on joining the board until October 2022, and found no evidence of unmanaged conflicts concerning funds from the FTX Foundation. It does not name the trustees or mention Open Philanthropy. The report is marked as withdrawn on May 27, 2026.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Open Philanthropy, "Claire Zabel," team biography, Wayback Machine captures of November 28, 2018, December 12, 2019 and January 19, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20191212003145/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/claire-zabel.
|
||||
[^2]: Companies House, Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), company number 07962181, officers and persons with significant control, viewed October 8, 2026, https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/persons-with-significant-control.
|
||||
[^3]: Open Philanthropy grant pages "Centre for Effective Altruism: Support for Jade Leung" (February 2020), "Centre for Effective Altruism: Longtermist Project Incubator (September 2020)" (amount updated to 48,736 dollars after 451,264 dollars returned in March 2023) and "Atlas Fellowship: Scholarships and Summer Program for Students" (March 2022), Wayback Machine captures, https://web.archive.org/web/20251024104819/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/centre-for-effective-altruism-longtermist-incubator-september-2020/.
|
||||
[^4]: Open Philanthropy, "Centre for Effective Altruism: General Support (2021)," investigator "Committee for Effective Altruism Support," Wayback Machine capture of 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?p=1179.
|
||||
[^5]: Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), Trustees' Report and Financial Statements for the year ended June 30, 2023, page 1 and note 27, page 48, filed at Companies House March 21, 2024, https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07962181/filing-history/MzQxNDkzNjQ2NGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf.
|
||||
[^6]: Charity Commission for England and Wales, "Charity Inquiry: Effective Ventures Foundation UK," May 22, 2024, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charity-inquiry-effective-ventures-foundation-uk/charity-inquiry-effective-ventures-foundation-uk.
|
||||
36
70 - DISPATCHES/2026-10-09 Neither Cleared Nor Witting.md
Normal file
36
70 - DISPATCHES/2026-10-09 Neither Cleared Nor Witting.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Neither Cleared Nor Witting"
|
||||
date: 2026-10-09
|
||||
status: published
|
||||
summary: "In 1961 the CIA funded a New School graphologist's handwriting lexicon through the Human Ecology Fund, and Sidney Gottlieb closed the file after her death."
|
||||
entities:
|
||||
- "[[Klara G. Roman]]"
|
||||
- "[[Project MKUltra]]"
|
||||
- "[[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]]"
|
||||
- "[[Sidney Gottlieb]]"
|
||||
- "[[New School for Social Research]]"
|
||||
- "[[John R. Everett]]"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- MKUltra
|
||||
- NewSchool
|
||||
- Graphology
|
||||
---
|
||||
# Neither Cleared Nor Witting
|
||||
|
||||
[[Klara G. Roman]], a [[Budapest]]-born graphologist and clinical psychologist, taught graphology at the [[New School for Social Research]] in [[New York City]] from 1948. From 1959 she worked on a lexicon of handwriting.[^1][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
A [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] memorandum of August 24, 1961 opened [[Project MKUltra|MKULTRA]] Subproject 137 "to support the work of Dr." [redacted] "in completing a psycholexicon on handwriting." It states that she "has an international reputation for her work in graphology and speech," that "she is advanced in years and her health is failing," and that the manuscript was "now eighty percent complete." The memorandum cites the Technical Services Division's "general requirement to further the Agency's capability for the indirect assessment of personality," states that the project "will be funded through the" [redacted] "for security and cover purposes," and records that the investigator was "neither cleared nor witting of Agency sponsorship." The curriculum vitae attached to the proposal lists a 1928 diploma, the invention of the Graphodyne for measuring writing speed and pressure, a 1948 research appointment in conjunction with an "Institute for Psychoanalysis," and a faculty post from 1949; each entry matches Roman's record.[^3][^1]
|
||||
|
||||
A treasurer's check for $2,000 was issued on September 11, 1961. Roman died on August 9, 1962.[^3][^2] An accounting memorandum of February 1963 states that she "died in 1962 and did not send in an accounting," that the file held "a letter from her brother stating that the manuscript is almost finished," and that "The Fund will receive its usual acknowledgement in the publication of the manuscript." The closing certification states that the recipient "died in 1962 without rendering an accounting" and that "a manuscript has been published and value received." The accounting form was approved on March 10, 1964 over the signature of [[Sidney Gottlieb]], "DC/TSD."[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The Encyclopedia of the Written Word was published by [[F. Ungar Publishing Company]] in 1968. Its acknowledgments thank "The Handwriting Institute and The Human Ecology Fund," and Dr. Walter P. Pasternak "of the Human Ecology Fund."[^4][^2] Pasternak appears as technical writer in the 1957 annual report of the [[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]], renamed the Human Ecology Fund in 1961.[^5] The Fund's 1963 report, as tabulated by the anthropologist [[David H. Price]], lists $2,000 to "Roman, Klara G." for "Book: The Psychology of Writing."[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The records of New School president [[John R. Everett]] hold a file labeled "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1977-1978." Its description refers to "two projects conducted at the New School in 1962 that received funding through MKUltra," the second of which "concerned graphology and psychopathologies."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: New School Archives and Special Collections, Maurice Edwards papers documenting the work of graphologist Klara G. Roman (NA-0010-01), biographical note. https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/resources/284
|
||||
[^2]: Klara G. Roman, *Encyclopedia of the Written Word*, ed. Rose Wolfson and Maurice Edwards (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1968), acknowledgments and editors' account signed by Rose Wolfson.
|
||||
[^3]: MKULTRA Subproject 137, Central Intelligence Agency release DOC_0000017396: memorandum for the record, August 24, 1961; proposal and curriculum vitae; invoice for check no. 185479, September 11, 1961; accounting memorandum, February 1963; accounting by individual for advance, approved March 10, 1964. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/00017396
|
||||
[^4]: Library of Congress catalog record, LCCN 68-12124, *Encyclopedia of the written word; a lexicon for graphology and other aspects of writing* (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1968).
|
||||
[^5]: Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, *1957 Annual Report*, officers and staff; John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate* (New York: Times Books, 1979), chapter 9, p. 149 n.
|
||||
[^6]: David H. Price, "Buying a piece of anthropology, Part 1: Human Ecology and unwitting anthropological research for the CIA," *Anthropology Today* 23(3), June 2007, fig. 4.
|
||||
[^7]: New School Archives and Special Collections, John R. Everett records (NS-01-01-02), Series 3, Box 7, Folder 29, "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1977-1978." https://findingaids.archives.newschool.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/34220
|
||||
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Reference in a new issue