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Ben Bradlee


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I have already written about Ben Bradlee's involvement in the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3520

However, I think he deserves his own thread. He is also still alive and might want to comment on my views on his work for the CIA.

One of Bradlee's closest friends as a child was Richard Helms. While at Harvard University Bradlee married Jean Saltonstall, the daughter of Leverett Saltonstall. Saltonstall also had close links to the intelligence services.

After graduating in 1943 Bradlee joined naval intelligence and worked as a communications officer. His duties included handling classified and coded cables.

At the end of the war Bradlee went to work as a clerk for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great) points out that as the ACLU is an "organization that promotes various progressive causes, including conscientious objection to war. This job, so out of character for the young patriot, may or may not have been an intelligence assignment."

As a result of a family friend who knew Eugene Meyer, Bradlee found work on the Washington Post as a crime reporter. Bradlee also got to know Philip Graham, Eugene Meyer's son-in-law, and associate publisher of the newspaper. In 1951 Graham helped Bradlee to become assistant press attache in the American embassy in Paris.

In 1952 Bradlee joined the staff of the Office of U.S. Information and Educational Exchange (USIE), the embassy's propaganda unit. USIE produced films, magazines, research, speeches, and news items for use by the the Central Intelligence Agency throughout Europe. USIE (later known as USIA) also controlled the Voice of America, a means of disseminating pro-American "cultural information" worldwide. While at the USIE Bradlee worked with E. Howard Hunt and Alfred Friendly.

Bradlee officially worked for the USIE until 1953, when he began working for Newsweek. While based in France, Bradlee divorced his first wife and married Antoinette Pinchot. At the time of the marriage, Antoinette's sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was married to Cord Meyer, a key figure in Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to influence the American media.

Antionette Bradlee was also a close friend of Cicely d'Autremont, who was married to James Angleton. Bradlee worked closely with Angleton in Paris. At the time Angleton was liaison for all Allied intelligence in Europe. His deputy was Richard Ober, a fellow student of Bradlee's at Harvard University.

In 1957 Bradlee created a great deal of controversy when he interviewed members of the FLN. They were Algerian guerrillas who were in rebellion against the French government at the time. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great) this had all the "earmarks of an intellgence operation". As a result of these interviews, Bradlee was expelled from France.

Bradlee now began working at Newsweek in Washington. While working for the journal Bradlee became a close friend of JFK. This included publishing stories beneficial to the career of the ambitious politician. Bradlee later wrote two books about Kennedy: That Special Grace (1964) and Conversations with Kennedy (1975).

In 1961 Richard Helms tipped off Bradlee that his grandfather, Gates White McGarrah, was willing to sell Newsweek. Bradlee went to Philip Graham with the story. Graham was interested in buying the journal and gave Bradlee a handwritten check for $1 million to convey to McGarrah as a down payment.

Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was Antoinette Bradlee's sister, divorced Cord Meyer. The Bradlees set up Mary's apartment and art studio in their converted garage. In January, 1962, Mary began a sexual relationship with President John F. Kennedy. She told her friends, Ann and James Truitt, that she was keeping a diary about the affair.

On 12th October, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead as she walked along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Georgetown. Henry Wiggins, a car mechanic, was working on a vehicle on Canal Road, when he heard a woman shout out: "Someone help me, someone help me". He then heard two gunshots. Wiggins ran to the edge of the wall overlooking the towpath. He later told police he saw "a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman."

Soon afterwards Raymond Crump, a black man, was found not far from the murder scene. He was arrested and charged with Mary's murder. The towpath and the river were searched but no murder weapon was ever found.

The media did not report at the time that Meyer had been having an affair with John F. Kennedy. Nor did it reveal that her former husband, Cord Meyer, was a senior figure in CIA's covert operations. As a result, there was little public interest in the case.

During the trial Wiggins was unable to identify Raymond Crump as the man standing over Meyer's body. The prosecution was also handicapped by the fact that the police had been unable to find the murder weapon at the scene of the crime. On 29th July, 1965, Crump was acquitted of murdering Mary Pinchot Meyer. The case remains unsolved.

In 1965 Katharine Graham appointed Bradlee as assistant managing editor of the Washington Post under Alfred Friendly, his former colleague at USIE. Later that year Bradlee replaced Friendly. I suspect that both Friendly and Bradlee were part of Operation Mockingbird.

Graham was pleased with the way Bradlee edited the Washington Post and in 1968 she appointed him vice president of the company. Bradlee became a strong supporter of the Vietnam War. This was reflected in the journalists he selected to report on the conflict.

Daniel Ellsberg was member of the McNamara Study Group that in 1968 had produced the classified History of Decisionmaking in Vietnam, 1945-1968. Ellsberg, disillusioned with the progress of the war, believed this document should be made available to the public. He gave a copy of what later became known as the Pentagon Papers to William Fulbright. However, he refused to do anything with the document, so Ellsberg gave a copy to Phil Geyelin of the Washington Post. Katharine Graham and Bradlee refused to publish the contents on the document.

Ellsberg now went to the New York Times and they began publishing extracts from the Pentagon Papers on 13th June, 1971. This included information that Dwight Eisenhower had made a secret committment to help the French defeat the rebellion in Vietnam. The document also showed that John F. Kennedy had turned this commitment into a war by using a secret "provocation strategy" that led to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents and that Lyndon B. Johnson had planned from the beginning of his presidency to expand the war.

Bradlee was criticised by his own journalists for failing to break this story. He now made attempts to catch up and on June 18, 1971, the Washington Post began publishing extracts from the Pentagon Papers. However, Bradlee concentrated on the period when Dwight Eisenhower was in power. The first story reported on how the Eisenhower administration had delayed democratic elections in Vietnam.

While editor of the Washington Post Bradlee promoted the career of Bob Woodward. Like Bradlee, Woodward had been a communications officer for naval intelligence. In July, 1972, Bradlee arranged for Woodward to work with Carl Bernstein on a story about a growing political scandal concerning the Nixon administration.

On 3rd July, 1972, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord were arrested while removing electronic devices from the Democratic Party campaign offices in an apartment block called Watergate. It appeared that the men had been to wiretap the conversations of Larry O'Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

The phone number of E.Howard Hunt was found in address books of the burglars. Reporters were now able to link the break-in to the White House. Woodward began receiving information from a secret source using the codename "Deep Throat". He told Woodward that senior aides of President Richard Nixon, had paid the burglars to obtain information about its political opponents. There has been much speculation about the identity of "Deep Throat" but one possibility is Bradlee's CIA friend, Richard Ober.

In March, 1976, James Truitt, a former senior member of staff at the Washington Post, gave an interview to the National Enquirer. Truitt told the newspaper that Mary Pinchot Meyer was having an affair with John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated. He also claimed that Meyer had told his wife, Ann Truitt, that she was keeping an account of this relationship in her diary. Meyer asked Truitt to take possession of a private diary "if anything ever happened to me".

Ann Truitt was living in Tokyo at the time that Meyer was murdered on 12th October, 1964. She phoned Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary. Bradlee, who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair with Kennedy, knew nothing about the diary. He later recalled what he did after Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start looking until the next morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to Mary's house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking for Mary's diary."

James Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief, admitted that he knew of Mary's relationship with John F. Kennedy and was searching her home looking for her diary and any letters that would reveal details of the affair. According to Bradlee, it was Mary's sister, Antoinette Bradlee, who found the diary and letters a few days later. It was claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The contents of the box were given to Angleton who claimed he burnt the diary.

Leo Damore claimed in an article that appeared in the New York Post that the reason Angleton and Bradlee were looking for the diary was that: "She (Meyer) had access to the highest levels. She was involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, 'It wasn't Camelot, it was Caligula's court'?"

Bradlee retired as executive editor of the Washington Post in 1991, but continued as a vice president of the company. In 1995 he published his memoirs, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.

Bradlee is often portrayed as someone who was responsible for exposing corrupt American governments. In reality, he used his position to cover up corruption. I believe he became a key CIA asset in the late 1940s and was heavily involved in Operation Mockingbird.

However, there is no doubt that Bradlee did help to remove Nixon. Therefore, it is possible that the CIA was involved in ditching Nixon. Why?

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  • 2 weeks later...

On of things removed from the first edition of Deborah Davis's book, Katharine the Great was a Justice Department memo from a assistant U.S. attorney in the Rosenberg case which specifically indicated that Ben Bradlee was helping to manage European propaganda regarding the Rosenberg's conviction and death sentences. Bradlee denied that he had ever worked with the CIA and with the help of Katharine Graham got the first edition shredded by the publisher. The book was republished in 1989. This time it included the Bradlee memo.

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John,

You have uncovered the Truth Squad, no wonder they sink these references during the Search Engine process.

You have uncovered evidence of systematic and chronic manipulation of the media by the CIA and joint agencies, an interlocking of CIA and US MEDIA personalities within the extended family and social scene. Antoinette Pinchot (pronounced Pan-shot, I believe) married Ben Bradlee, Mary Meyer married Cord Meyer, Dick Helms brokered the sale of NEWSWEEK with a million dollar check changing hands, Bradlee and Angleton working in Europe together for VOA and USIA projects, all this is horribly enlightening about the suspicions so many have had concerning the corporate newspaper and magazine industry.

Mary Meyer's murder on the Towpath as the Warren COmmission Report was released looks like a clean up operation, and the BRADLEE/WOODWARD control of the Watergate burglary issue looks like sustained damage control

visavis HUNT, GONZALES, MARTINEZ, STURGIS, BARKER and MCCORD.

Thank you for shedding light on the tight linkages between Dallas, Watergate, the US Agencies and the press.

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John,

You have uncovered the Truth Squad, no wonder they sink these references during the Search Engine process.

You have uncovered evidence of systematic and chronic manipulation of the media by the CIA and joint agencies, an interlocking of CIA and US MEDIA personalities within the extended family and social scene. Antoinette Pinchot (pronounced Pan-shot, I believe) married Ben Bradlee, Mary Meyer married Cord Meyer, Dick Helms brokered the sale of NEWSWEEK with a million dollar check changing hands, Bradlee and Angleton working in Europe together for VOA and USIA projects, all this is horribly enlightening about the suspicions so many have had concerning the corporate newspaper and magazine industry.

Mary Meyer's murder on the Towpath as the Warren COmmission Report was released looks like a clean up operation, and the BRADLEE/WOODWARD control of the Watergate burglary issue looks like sustained damage control

visavis HUNT, GONZALES, MARTINEZ, STURGIS, BARKER and MCCORD.

Thank you for shedding light on the tight linkages between Dallas, Watergate, the US Agencies and the press.

As I have pointed out at:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3520

Ben Bradlee is still alive (and hopefully getting very upset by my postings about him).

There are still several people left alive who know a great deal about this case. This Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee, Anne Truitt and Cicely d’Autremont Angleton. Mary’s son, Quentin Meyer, is also still interested in finding out who murdered his mother. Peter Janney is another one worth interviewing. His father, Wistar Janney was a top CIA official who was part of the Georgetown Crowd. Peter believes the CIA murdered Mary.

In his autobiography, A Good Life, Bradlee admits that it was Wistar Janney who told him that Mary Meyer had been murdered. He does not mention that Janney was a senior CIA operative.

For the latest information I have on Ben Bradlee, Mary Meyer, Cord Meyer and Operation Mockingbird, see:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbradleeB.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerM.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerC.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm

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Mr. Simkins,

Look into Woodward as well. To easy for such a case as Watergate given to him at the extreme early years of his life.

Guess he got a bit upset as well, when people starting putting inside roles together with the story as to his education and his college club. The who is who is always into a picture that makes the person to advance faster.

Have you ever spoken to Ben Bradlee?

Also, Thanks for this article.

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Nancy is on to this one. Woodward was a Naval Intelligence officer who had a working relationship with High ranking navy and intelligence officers, and he probably briefed (discussed classsified situations with) Al Haig.

John has spelled out the structure of CIA's manipulation of US media and apparently

IT IS THE ONE THING THEY DON"T WANT YOU TO SEE !

Thank God for the Internet, you can't get this in any other media !

(or should I say thank the administrators B) )

Edited by Shanet Clark
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Deborah Davis, author of Katharine the Great, was interviewed by Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press in 1992.

Kenn Thomas: Let's get back to Ben Bradlee. I know part of what's in the book and part of what upset those forces that caused the withdrawal of its first publication is what you've said about Ben Bradlee and his connection to the Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg trial. Would you talk about that a bit?

Deborah Davis: In the first edition, the one that was recalled and shredded, I looked in State Department lists for '52 and '53 when Bradlee was serving as a press attache supposedly in the American embassy in Paris. This was during the Marshall Plan when the United States over in Europe had hundreds of thousands of people making an intensive effort to keep Western Europe from going Communist. Bradlee wanted to be part of that effort. So he was over in the American embassy in Paris and the embassy list had these letters after his name that said USIE. And I asked the State Department what that meant and it said United States Information Exchange. It was the forerunner of the USIA, the United States Information Agency. It was the propaganda arm of the embassy. They produced propaganda that was then disseminated by the CIA all over Europe. They planted newspaper stories. They had a lot of reporters on their payrolls. They routinely would produce stories out of the embassy and give them to these reporters and they would appear in the papers in Europe. It's very important to understand how influential newspaper stories are to people because this is what people think of as their essential source of facts about what is going on. They don't question it, and even if they do question it they have nowhere else to go to find out anything else. So Bradlee was involved in producing this propaganda. But at that point in the story I didn't know exactly what he was doing.

I published the first book just saying that he worked for USIE and that this agency produced propaganda for the CIA. He went totally crazy after the book came out. One person who knew him told me then that he was going all up and down the East Coast having lunch with every editor he could think of saying that it was not true, he did not produce any propaganda. And he attacked me viciously and he said that I had falsely accused him of being a CIA agent. And the reaction was totally out of proportion to what I had said.

Kenn Thomas: You make a good point in the book that other people who have had similar kinds of - I don't even know if you want to call them accusations--but reports that they in some way cooperated with the CIA in the '5Os, that the times were different and people were expected to do that kind of thing out of a sense of patriotism and they blow it off.

Deborah Davis : That's right. People say, yeah, this is what I did back then, you know. But Bradlee doesn't want to be defined that way because, I don't know, somehow he thinks it's just too revealing of him, of who he is. He doesn't want to admit a true fact about his past because somehow he doesn't want it known that this is where he came from. Because this is the beginning of his journalistic career. This is how he made it big.

Subsequent to my book being shredded in 1979, early 1980, I got some documents through the Freedom of Information Act and they revealed that Bradlee had been the person who was running an entire propaganda operation against Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg that covered forty countries on four continents. He always claimed that he had been a low level press flack in the embassy in Paris, just a press flack, nothing more. Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg had already been convicted of being atomic spies and they were on death row waiting to be executed. And the purpose of Bradlee's propaganda operation was to convince the Europeans that they really were spies, they really had given the secret of the atomic bomb to the Russians and therefore they did deserve to be put to death.

The Europeans, having just very few years before defeated Hitler, were very concerned that the United States was going fascist the way their countries had. And this was a very real fear to the Europeans. They saw the same thing happening in the United States that had happened in their own countries. And so Bradlee used the Rosenberg case to say, "No this isn't what you think it is. These people really did this bad thing and they really do deserve to die. It doesn't mean that the United States is becoming fascist." So he had a very key role in creating European public opinion and it was very, very important. This was the key issue that was going to determine how the Europeans felt about the United States.

Some of the documents that I had showed him writing letters to the prosecutors of the Rosenbergs saying "I'm working for the head of the CIA in Paris and he wants me to come and look at your files." And this kind of thing. So in the second edition, which came out in 1987, I reprinted those documents, the actual documents, the readers can see them and it's got his signature and it's very, very interesting. He subsequently has said nothing about it at all. He won't talk about it all. He won't answer any questions about it. So I guess the point about Bradlee is that he went from this job to being European bureau chief for Newsweek magazine and to the executive editorship of the Post. So this is how he got where he is. It's very clear line of succession. Philip Graham was Katharine Graham's husband, who ran the Post in the '50s and he committed suicide in 1963. That's when Katharine Graham took over. Bradlee was close friends with Allen Dulles and Phil Graham. The paper wasn't doing very well for a while and he was looking for a way to pay foreign correspondents and Allen Dulles was looking for a cover. Allen Dulles was head of the CIA back then and he was looking for a cover for some of his operatives so that they could get in and out of places without arousing suspicion. So the two of them hit on a plan: Allen Dulles would pay for the reporters and they would give the CIA the information that they found as well as give it to the Post. So he helped to develop this operation and it subsequently spread to other newspapers and magazines. And it was called Operation Mockingbird. This operation, I believe, was revealed for the first time in my book.

The whole interview is well worth reading.

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg1/

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John asked:

However, there is no doubt that Bradlee did help to remove Nixon. Therefore, it is possible that the CIA was involved in ditching Nixon. Why?

John, many of us suspect the CIA was playing a hidden hand in the Watergate affair. However, if the CIA was indeed trying to ditch Nixon it had an unwitting ally in the White House. Nixon himself did a lot to cause, and little to prevent, his ultimate downfall.

It is certainly possible if there was CIA involvement it was due in part to its unhappiness with Nixon's foreign policy.

Now I may differ with many members of the Forum in applauding rather than decrying CIA efforts to undermine Communist governments and parties outside the US. But for the CIA to undermine a Republican President in our own country--now that is really beyond the pale!

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Is it Edward Bennett Williams and Art Buchwald?

Was Buchwald a part of Operation Mockingbird?

Yes. I have been unable to discover if Art Buchwald was part of Operation Mockingbird. Interestingly, Williams urged Bradlee to publish the Pentagon Papers and to continue with the Watergate investigation. Of course, Williams might just have been anti-Nixon.

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Part of the success of both JFK and Ronald Reagan was, I think, that they were personally likeable and even journalists and politicians who did not agree with them politically or philosophically liked them personally. With both Nixon and Carter, on the other hand, it was exactly the opposite: even many who agreed with their politics did not like them personally. It strikes me that Clinton and the current George Bush are similar and differ from all of the above: those who like their politics also tend to like them personally, while those who dislike their politics in fact despise them.

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Is it Edward Bennett Williams and Art Buchwald?

Was Buchwald a part of Operation Mockingbird?

Yes. I have been unable to discover if Art Buchwald was part of Operation Mockingbird. Interestingly, Williams urged Bradlee to publish the Pentagon Papers and to continue with the Watergate investigation. Of course, Williams might just have been anti-Nixon.

Buchwald, Williams and Bradlee were lunch partners. Katherine Graham was sometimes allowed to join in. They were all insiders trading info. Their careers depended on it. I believe Williams was on Nixon's enemies list. I know there's a Watergate tape of Nixon complaining that the IRS is auditing Billy Graham; he makes it plain they should go after Williams instead. It's one of the great ironies of American politics then that Nixon's self-appointed successor Connally only avoided the slammer after Williams rubbed his magic lamp and clicked his ruby slippers.

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