JFK, Bay of Pigs and Hadley Cantril

[John Simkin]

In the Lend Lease Conspiracy thread I mentioned the way British Security Coordination (BSC) "penetrated" the George H. Gallup polling organization and managed to manipulate poll data to get the Lend Lease legislation through Congress.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=19331

One of the men they used to do this was Hadley Cantril who had established the Office of Public Opinion Research (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation) at Princeton University Department of Psychology in 1938. Ernest Cuneo, who was a BSC agent has claimed that agents working for the organisation then went on to work for the OSS and then the CIA. (This view was supported by Thomas F. Troy, a staff officer of the CIA, in his book, "Wild Bill and Intrepid: Donovan, Stephenson and the Origins of the CIA" published in 1996). This was definitely true of Cantril and in 1960 the CIA commissioned a poll in Cuba that demonstrated great support for Fidel Castro. However, this information was not passed over to Kennedy and he did not know of its existence until after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

In 1962 H. Montgomery Hyde, a former BSC agent, wrote "The Quiet Canadian" about William Stephenson, the head of the organisation. David Ogilvy, another BSC agent who worked for Gallup during the war, saw a copy of the manuscript and requested that Stephenson put pressure on Hyde to remove all references to Cantil and Gallup in the book: "I beg you to remove all references to Hadley Cantril and Dr. Gallup... Dr. Gallup was and still is, a great friend of England. What you have written would cause him anguish - and damage. One does not want to damage one's friends... In subsequently years Hadley Cantril has done a vast amount of secret polling for the United States Government. What you have written would compromise him - and SIS (MI6) does not make a practice of compromising its friends."

Recently released files show that the CIA was deeply concerned by the contents of "The Quiet Canadian". A recently declassified CIA review said: "The publication of this study is shocking... Exactly what British intelligence was doing in the United States was closely held in Washington, and very little had hitherto been printed about it... One may suppose that Mr. Hyde's account... is relatively accurate, but the wisdom of placing it on the public record is extremely questionable." The CIA carried out a policy of discrediting the book. This was highly successful and the book was generally considered to be unreliable.

At the end of the Second World War the files of British Security Coordination were packed onto semitrilers and transported to Camp X in Canada. Stephenson wanted to have some record of the activities of the agency, "To provide a record which would be available for reference should future need arise for secret activities and security measures for the kind it describes." He recruited Roald Dahl, H. Montgomery Hyde, Giles Playfair, Gilbert Highet and Tom Hill, to write the book. Stephenson told Dahl: "We don't dare to do it in the United States, we have to do it on British territory... He pulled a lot over Hoover." Dahl commented "He (Stephenson) pulled a few things over the White House, too, now and again. I wrote a little bit but eventually I called Bill and told him that it's an historian's job... This famous history of the BSC through the war in New York was written by Tom Hill and a few other agents." Only twenty copies of the book were printed. Ten went into a safe in Montreal and ten went to Stephenson for distribution. The book, British Security Co-ordination: British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-45, edited by Nigel West, was eventually published in 1998. It showed that Hyde's book, "The Quiet Canadian" was accurate. However, the book received little publicity and quickly went out of print.

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

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

I am currently working on an article on George H. Gallup, the CIA and polling organizations, and would be grateful for any information anyone has on the subject.

[Michael Hogan]

I am currently working on an article on George H. Gallup, the CIA and polling organizations, and would be grateful for any information anyone has on the subject.

Elmo Roper would certainly be a person of interest.

http://www.ropercent...ml#.UBFTLGGPmAg

[John Simkin]

I am currently working on an article on George H. Gallup, the CIA and polling organizations, and would be grateful for any information anyone has on the subject.

Elmo Roper would certainly be a person of interest.

http://www.ropercent...ml#.UBFTLGGPmAg

Sure is. Thank you for that. People with Roper's left-wing views did not find it difficult to work with the BSC and the OSS during the war. However, they tended to be marginalized during the Cold War.

[Michael Hogan]

John, your Spartacus page on Edwin Wilson lists David Corn's book Blonde Ghost as a primary source. Corn wrote:

The next year, (Edwin) Wilson jumped to the Special Operations Division, which was in charge of covert actions. First, he served as an advance man for Hubert Humphrey's vice-presidential campaign, allowing the Agency to keep tabs on Johnson's running mate. After the election, Wilson opened a front business: Maritime Consulting Associates, an ocean freight forwarder that handled sea logistics for CIA programs. The Agency man in charge of Maritime was Tom Clines, deputy chief of the division's maritime branch.

Wilson ran Maritime Consulting as if it were a regular company. He recruited a figurehead president and worked hard: weapons to Angola, communications equipment to Morocco, materiel to Laos.He also found non-Agency business to conduct-activity that put cash in his pockets. For Langley's fronts, profits meant better cover. Wilson had a golden gig. There was little auditing of his books. No one noticed when he padded his costs. He could be both a secret agent and a wealthy man.

In their 2004 book with a lengthy title (All is Clouded by Desire; Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized Crime) authors Alan Block and Constance Weaver wrote that Wilson's Maritime Consulting Associates "was also a front for a polling firm established in the Philippines in collaboration with George Gallup to influence Philippine politics."

http://books.google.... wilson&f=false

[John Simkin]

John, your Spartacus page on Edwin Wilson lists David Corn's book Blonde Ghost as a primary source. Corn wrote:

The next year, (Edwin) Wilson jumped to the Special Operations Division, which was in charge of covert actions. First, he served as an advance man for Hubert Humphrey's vice-presidential campaign, allowing the Agency to keep tabs on Johnson's running mate. After the election, Wilson opened a front business: Maritime Consulting Associates, an ocean freight forwarder that handled sea logistics for CIA programs. The Agency man in charge of Maritime was Tom Clines, deputy chief of the division's maritime branch.

Wilson ran Maritime Consulting as if it were a regular company. He recruited a figurehead president and worked hard: weapons to Angola, communications equipment to Morocco, materiel to Laos.He also found non-Agency business to conduct-activity that put cash in his pockets. For Langley's fronts, profits meant better cover. Wilson had a golden gig. There was little auditing of his books. No one noticed when he padded his costs. He could be both a secret agent and a wealthy man.

In their 2004 book with a lengthy title (All is Clouded by Desire; Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized Crime) authors Alan Block and Constance Weaver wrote that Wilson's Maritime Consulting Associates "was also a front for a polling firm established in the Philippines in collaboration with George Gallup to influence Philippine politics."

http://books.google.... wilson&f=false

Fascinating. Thank you for that. Are you aware of any biographies written on Gallup?

[Michael Hogan]

Fascinating. Thank you for that. Are you aware of any biographies written on Gallup?

I am not aware of any mainstream biographies. Susan Ohmer wrote this book about Gallup and Hollywood: http://books.google.... gallup&f=false

Dorothy D Corey knew and worked with both Gallup and Roper: http://books.google....ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ

Columbia University has Gallup's Oral History interviews: http://clio.cul.colu...5&bibId=4076868

John, I've saved the best for last. Gallup's biography was written by a Russian and originally published in Russian last year. Fortunately,

an English version is available. Although I suspect it is sanitized to a certain degree, there is a wealth of information contained within:

http://www.romir.ru/GGallup_en.pdf

[John Simkin]

Fascinating. Thank you for that. Are you aware of any biographies written on Gallup?

I am not aware of any mainstream biographies. Susan Ohmer wrote this book about Gallup and Hollywood: http://books.google.... gallup&f=false

I have just ordered Susan Ohmer's book, sounds very interesting. Did you know Alfred Hitchcock was a British Security Coordination agent who was sent to Hollywood to join up with producer Walter Wanger, also a BSC agent and the founder of the Anti-Nazi League in the USA. Their first film together was Foreign Correspondent (1940). This was based on BSC agent's Vincent Sheean's political memoir Personal History (1935). All this is important as it was the beginning of how the intelligence services gained control of Hollywood. In fact, McCarthyism was the main way that the CIA got back control of the industry. The "Hollywood Ten" were writers, producers and directors, who had been working on these anti-Nazi films in the 1930s and 1940s. Nine of them were Jewish. After the war, Wanger went along with this and made anti-communist films. The most important of these was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Ironically, the title of his biography by Matthew H. Bernstein is "Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent" (2000)

I have also ordered:

Michael Wheeler, Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: The Manipulation of Public Opinion in America (2007)

George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-71 (1972)

[John Simkin]

My page on George Gallup can be found here:

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