Cord Meyer

[William Kelly]

Since the late Cord Meyer is now being mentioned as a possible suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, I've excerpted a few sections of his bio to get an idea of his background, friends and associations. This is about half of what I think is important. Will add more later if there's interest. -BK

Cord Meyer – Facing Reality – From World Federalism to the CIA (University Press of America, Latham , MD, 1980).

Acknowledgments: Winthrop Knowlton (H&R), Cass Canfield, Erwin Glikes, Georgetown U., Prof. Roy Godson, Peter Krogh (Dean of foreign Service), Richard Helms, Samuel Halpern Carmilla Hersh.

Preface. In this book I've attempted to tell enough of the story of my life for the reader to understand a career that almost ended at its beginning in a night battle on a Pacific island….In retracing with me thirty years of involvement in the foreign affairs of this country, readers will, I hope, be persuaded to think afresh and to reconsider opinions that may be firmly held…At the outset I want to make it clear that I submitted this text for security review by the CIA in accordance with the obligation that Agency employees must accept as a condition of their employment.

Unlike so much of the recent literature on American intelligence, this book attempts to describe the activities of the CIA in their historical context…..

Chapter 3 Peacemaking. (p.34- )

From Hawaii, I was flown to a hospital in the San Francisco area and finally back to New York City in September of 1944. I lived with my parents and communted to the Brooklyn Naval Hosptial,…I was ready to face the world and began seeing a lot of Mary Pinchot, whom I'd known slightly before the war and who was working in New York as a free-lance magazine writer……I saw Dean Acheson….(who)…offered me a job….Vienna. I would have taken it but by that time was so much in love with Mary Pinchot that trying to persuade her to marry me seemed far more important than a diplomatic assignment. As a result, I enrolled in the Yale Law School in January with the help of the G.I. Bill, and we saw each other on weekends…..

In April of 1945 Mary and I were married in her mother's New York apartment by Reinhold Niebuhr. He was more familiar with the intricacies of theological argument than with the marriage ceremony,…A few days later I boarded the official train in Washington that was taking the lower-ranking members of the national delegation to San Francisco, and Mary flew out to join me with press credentials from the North American Newspaper Alliance.

As the train rolled westward, I could not help comparing this trip with the voyage across the country by troop train in that innocent springtime of two years before. I felt myself much the wiser man, but I must have seemed incredibly naïve to a legal advisor to the Soviet delegation named Golunsky, whose acquaintance I made in the course of the trip….

p.35)

In a luncheon conversation with Alger Hiss, who was the secretary of the conference,….I became friends with Emery Reves. A Hungarian by birth, he had become a British citizen, had run an international press syndicate before the war, and was also Churchill's literary agent…..The Anatomy of Peace,….My other new friend was E. B. White, who was covering the conference for the New Yorker….

Suddenly, in the middle of May, reality crowded in upon me in a much more personal way. I was awakened one morning by a telephone call from my parents in New York, who told me through their tears that they had just been informed that my twin brother had been killed in action. He was a lieutenant with the First Marine Division, which I knew was engaged in the desperate fighting against the entrenched Japanese in Okinawa….Although we were not identical twins, we were very close and shared together all the days of our childhood and youth…

…I accepted eagerly a proposal by Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic, that I write an analysis of what had been achieved in San Francisco from the perspective of someone who had been in the war. My wife and I took a long-delayed honeymoon at a ranch in Montana….I finally made the decision not to return to law school but to enter the Harvard Graduate School….We moved to Cambridge, and my wife worked as an editoral assistant at the Atlantic Monthly,…Edward Weeks proposed me to join the Society of Fellows,…

…..They formed a group called the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, with the purpose of trying to get these convictions across to a complacent public. I was invited to attend one of their early meetings of the organization in Princeton….met Einstein, Leo Szilard,….Peace or Anarchy…..In the spring of 1946, I learned from (Charles) Bolte that the American Communist Party was attempting to infiltrate and gain control of the American Veterans Committee…..In 1949, I became convinced that our attempts to transform the United Nations had been overtaken by events that could no longer be ignored or explained away…..

(p56

…In the fall of 1949, I resigned as president of the Untied World Federalists, to be

succeeded by Alan Cranston, who later was elected to the Senate from California…..

(p. 60)

…..My mentor was a Harvard professor named Arthur Smithies, who combined theoretical brilliance with the practical experience derived from his previous position in Washington as chief of the fiscal policy division of the Bureau of the Budget….

(p.64)

My next interview was with Allen Dulles, who was at the time deputy director for plans of the Central Intelligence Agency. We had met as participants on radio and TV talk shows in New York and we had a number of friends in common at whose houses we had played tennis together on Long Island weekends. However, I did not know him well and knew little about his wartime career in the OSS. He was kind enough to give me more than an hour of his time, and we had a fascinating discussion. In a series and careful way,

he spelled out the nature of the world situation as he saw it and the complex challenge with which we were confronted by Stalin's regime. He was well-informed concerning my active role in the struggle for control within the American Veterans Committee, and we discussed at some length the strength and influence of the Communist parties of Western Europe. At the end of the meeting, he made me a firm offer of a job with the Agency at a middle level of executive responsibility and assured me that the work would be suited to my abilities and past experience, although for security reasons he could not describe the job in detail. I took with me the voluminous personal history forms that had to be filled out and said I would let him know within a week.

While in Washington, I looked up an old college friend who had joined the CIA a year before. I needed some reassurance about what life was like inside a large secret bureaucracy. He turned out to be enthusiastic about his work and high in his praise of the ability and quality of his colleagues…..I asked Walter Lippmann on his advice on whether to take the job. I had met him during the time I was active in the federalists movement…….On return to Cambridge, I found that my wife was all in favor of the move to Washington. Her sister and other good friends lived there and she looked forward to a change in scene…..By October 1951 I was at work with the Central Intelligence Agency in one of the dilapidated buildings along the reflecting pool that lies below the Lincoln Memorial.

After a brief period of training, I was assigned to what was then the Office of Policy Coordination, headed by Frank Wisner, which was responsible for the conduct of cover operations abroad. By chance, I arrived just as a new presidential directive called for an intensification of covert action operations to cope with what was seen as a worldwide Communist political propaganda offensive. This directive, NSC 10/5, was issue on October 21, 1951, and clearly assigned to the CIA the responsibility for mounting an expanded cover action program with policy guidance to be supplied by an NSC subcommittee. (65)

…..on August 31, 1953, I was summoned to a meeting with Richard Helms. At that time, Helms was chief of operations and second in command under Frank Wisner of what had become the Directorate of Plans. Although we later became close friends, I did not kow him well at the time…..

(70) ….On September 4,....I was called into Larry Houston's office and handed a memorandum that contained the summary of the charges contained in the FBI report……Under the provisions of Section 8(a)(5) of Executive Order 10450, there is evidence that you have appeared before or otherwise associated with the following organizations: National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (cited as a Communist front by the HCUA)….Massachusetts Citizens Political Action Committee….National Council Against Corruption…..Your wife, Mrs. Mary Pinchot Meyers, is alleged to have registered as a member of the American Labor Party of New York in 1944….Your wife…acquainted with James Aldridge….L.K. White (ADDA, CIA)…..

….Driving home I wondered who it was at the FBI who had spent so much time and effort researching every corner of my past to weave together this tapestry of unrelated incidents designed to prove my disloyalty. I speculated what his motives might have been and guessed that probably he was an ambitious bureaucrat who, sensing the climate of the times, believed he could make a name for himself by forcing the resignation of a ranking CIA official….Senator (Joe) McCarthy and Allen Dulles had already crossed swords over a number of cases where Dulles had refused to bow to McCarthy's pressure to fire certain Agency employees….

….I asked for advice from my then brother-in-law Steuart Pittman, an old friend and practicing lawyer. He introduced me to Walter Surrey, a young Washington attorney who had successfully handled a number of security cases before loyalty review boards. Surrey turned out to be exactly what I needed…..A colleague and friend, John Bross, was generous enough to offer financial assistance while I was deprived of my government salary…My immediate boss, Tom Braden, was consistently supportive....

….When Tom Braden decided to resign from the CIA in order to publish a newspaper in California, Dulles approved my appointment as Braden's successor as chief of the International Organizations Division in September of 1954. In that capacity I became head of one of the major operating divisions of the Directorate of Plans, with a growing budget and a wide policy mandate under a new National Security Council directive….In March of 1962, the International Organizations Division was merged with the Covert Action Staff. As the new head of the expanded Covert Action Staff, I became responsible not only for international operations but also for reviewing and providing policy guidance to the geographical area divisions in their conduct of covert activity authorized by NSC directives.

This bureaucratic history is relevant because it explains why my name inevitably came to figure prominently in the wave of publicity that crashed over the Agency in 1967. UP to that time there had been very few leaks, and over a period of fifteen years many American citizens and private voluntary organizations had cooperated secretly with the CIA in joint efforts to cope with the Soviet offensive….National Student Association,….Michael Wood…Ramparts….The New Left…..The James Bond image of the Agency in the public mind as being exclusively associated with the shadowy world of espionage gave credibility to these charges. As the first public exposure of the CIA role, the Ramparts coverage set the tone and colored the content of the massive press and media publicity that followed. (87)

xxxxxxx

Edited May 29, 2007 by William Kelly

[William Kelly]

Did anybody get anything out of this?

I find it interesting that we can add Mary Pinchot Meyer to the list of those young intrepid women who worked for the North American Newspaper Alliance - NANA - Ingrid Avid, Priscilla Johnson, Virginia Prewett, Lucianne Goldberg,....along with Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming, Ernie Cuneo, Ivor Bryce, et al.

BK

[John Dolva]

BK:Did anybody get anything out of this?

________________

There's a lot there, William. From my perspective certain dates and persons stand out.

The illegal CIA mail interception campaign started in 1953, which is around the time that Meyer was investigated and appointed. Helms and Dulles were two of three persons that approached, after a couple of weeks in office, the new Kennedy appointed Postmaster General J.E. Day for compliance. One might assume that it would have been Meyer's job? IF so then the fact that it was his bosses who handled it directly may be significant. No doubt all preceeding PMG's had had similar visits. (J.E. Day resigned in a cloud halfway through 1963.)

The leadup to the NSA 'noise' about CIA infiltration involved the SDS, the NSA, and the YAF in a struggle for the ear of campus youth. There was a before and after just as for certain groupings (KKK, MSC etc) there was a before and after in relation to the Kennedy assasination. I think viewing Meyers accounts parallell with other events and groupings such as YAF and the JBS is relevant.

In the final analysis, I suggest, the NSA was the group that suffered from the Ramparts revelations. It as a theme seems to have 'swamped' the larger theme of the same sourced CIA support for Latin/South American Dictatorships. This apparently also worked counter to Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. So, the revelations while initially seeming to harm the CIA quickly was managed to destroy the NSA and seed distrust in the student/anti-war movements, while the greater harm the CIA were doing in Labor unions on the continent and at home, and their undermining of the AFP and supporting Latin/South American Dicatatorships and other assorted nefarious activities in the region, were overshadowed.

as Halderman wrote once "there's an opportunity in everything"

The same thing occurred with the Watergate scandal which, because of the prominence it got in the mainstream media, over shadowed the much grander scaled surveillance and disruption and outright criminal, including murders under the FBI COINTEL programs.

Edited June 2, 2007 by John Dolva

[William Kelly]

BK:Did anybody get anything out of this?

________________

There's a lot there, William. From my perspective certain dates and persons stand out.

The illegal CIA mail interception campaign started in 1953, which is around the time that Meyer was investigated and appointed. Helms and Dulles were two of three persons that approached, after a couple of weeks in office, the new Kennedy appointed Postmaster General J.E. Day for compliance. One might assume that it would have been Meyer's job? IF so then the fact that it was his bosses who handled it directly may be significant. No doubt all preceeding PMG's had had similar visits. (J.E. Day resigned in a cloud halfway through 1963.)

The leadup to the NSA 'noise' about CIA infiltration involved the SDS, the NSA, and the YAF in a struggle for the ear of campus youth. There was a before and after just as for certain groupings (KKK, MSC etc) there was a before and after in relation to the Kennedy assasination. I think viewing Meyers accounts parallell with other events and groupings such as YAF and the JBS is relevant.

In the final analysis, I suggest, the NSA was the group that suffered from the Ramparts revelations. It as a theme seems to have 'swamped' the larger theme of the same sourced CIA support for Latin/South American Dictatorships. This apparently also worked counter to Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. So, the revelations while initially seeming to harm the CIA quickly was managed to destroy the NSA and seed distrust in the student/anti-war movements, while the greater harm the CIA were doing in Labor unions on the continent and at home, and their undermining of the AFP and supporting Latin/South American Dicatatorships and other assorted nefarious activities in the region, were overshadowed.

as Halderman wrote once "there's an opportunity in everything"

The same thing occurred with the Watergate scandal which, because of the prominence it got in the mainstream media, over shadowed the much grander scaled surveillance and disruption and outright criminal, including murders under the FBI COINTEL programs.

Hi John,

Thanks for the response. I agree with your assessments.

There's more to Cord Meyer than meets the eye.

Have you read John Gerraghty's COINTELPRO paper?

BK

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Did World Federalism grow out of the 1945, 46 desire to share nuclear technology with the USSR? I know that this was a desire among some who worked on the bomb, and even some pretty high ranking politicians in 1945.

To what extent was World Federalism infiltrated by US intelligence? Did it have any association with any liberal protastent groups such as the Quakers and Unitarians that Dulles had been cultivating only because of the discrediting of the right in Europe?

[John Dolva]

Hi John, Thanks for the response. I agree with your assessments. There's more to Cord Meyer than meets the eye.

Have you read John Gerraghty's COINTELPRO paper?

BK

You're welcome William.

Yes, I did read John's draft COINTELPRO paper a few weeks ago. A good summary* by John G., worth reading IMO. A few pages past, (I may have missed an update if posted elsewhere.)

* http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...ic=9744&hl=

Edited June 2, 2007 by John Dolva

[Miles Scull]

Did anybody get anything out of this?

BK

Did. Picked up a copy of Facing Reality .

Thx BK

M

[William Kelly]

In light of the recent MFF posting of the HSCA testimony of Priscilla Johnson McMillan, I thought I'd bring back this thread, especially since two of the most notable things about PJM are not mentioned in the HSCA testimony at all.

For one, her father, who she says committed "concealed suicide" in 1969, was the patron of Sevtlana Stalin when she defected, allowing for Priscilla to be the translator of her book Letter to a Friend, putting PJM in the defector zoo before LHO.

In addition, the Johnson's neighbor, and apparent friend of the family, Cord Meyer, is not mentioned in the HSCA testimony at all, though that might be because it was not developed (Newman, LHO & CIA) until afterwards.

BK

[William Kelly]

Since the late Cord Meyer is now being mentioned as a possible suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, I've excerpted a few sections of his bio to get an idea of his background, friends and associations. This is about half of what I think is important. Will add more later if there's interest. -BK

Cord Meyer – Facing Reality – From World Federalism to the CIA (University Press of America, Latham , MD, 1980).

Acknowledgments: Winthrop Knowlton (H&R), Cass Canfield, Erwin Glikes, Georgetown U., Prof. Roy Godson, Peter Krogh (Dean of foreign Service), Richard Helms, Samuel Halpern Carmilla Hersh.

Preface. In this book I've attempted to tell enough of the story of my life for the reader to understand a career that almost ended at its beginning in a night battle on a Pacific island….In retracing with me thirty years of involvement in the foreign affairs of this country, readers will, I hope, be persuaded to think afresh and to reconsider opinions that may be firmly held…At the outset I want to make it clear that I submitted this text for security review by the CIA in accordance with the obligation that Agency employees must accept as a condition of their employment.

Unlike so much of the recent literature on American intelligence, this book attempts to describe the activities of the CIA in their historical context…..

Chapter 3 Peacemaking. (p.34- )

From Hawaii, I was flown to a hospital in the San Francisco area and finally back to New York City in September of 1944. I lived with my parents and communted to the Brooklyn Naval Hosptial,…I was ready to face the world and began seeing a lot of Mary Pinchot, whom I'd known slightly before the war and who was working in New York as a free-lance magazine writer……I saw Dean Acheson….(who)…offered me a job….Vienna. I would have taken it but by that time was so much in love with Mary Pinchot that trying to persuade her to marry me seemed far more important than a diplomatic assignment. As a result, I enrolled in the Yale Law School in January with the help of the G.I. Bill, and we saw each other on weekends…..

In April of 1945 Mary and I were married in her mother's New York apartment by Reinhold Niebuhr. He was more familiar with the intricacies of theological argument than with the marriage ceremony,…A few days later I boarded the official train in Washington that was taking the lower-ranking members of the national delegation to San Francisco, and Mary flew out to join me with press credentials from the North American Newspaper Alliance.

As the train rolled westward, I could not help comparing this trip with the voyage across the country by troop train in that innocent springtime of two years before. I felt myself much the wiser man, but I must have seemed incredibly naïve to a legal advisor to the Soviet delegation named Golunsky, whose acquaintance I made in the course of the trip….

p.35)

In a luncheon conversation with Alger Hiss, who was the secretary of the conference,….I became friends with Emery Reves. A Hungarian by birth, he had become a British citizen, had run an international press syndicate before the war, and was also Churchill's literary agent…..The Anatomy of Peace,….My other new friend was E. B. White, who was covering the conference for the New Yorker….

Suddenly, in the middle of May, reality crowded in upon me in a much more personal way. I was awakened one morning by a telephone call from my parents in New York, who told me through their tears that they had just been informed that my twin brother had been killed in action. He was a lieutenant with the First Marine Division, which I knew was engaged in the desperate fighting against the entrenched Japanese in Okinawa….Although we were not identical twins, we were very close and shared together all the days of our childhood and youth…

…I accepted eagerly a proposal by Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic, that I write an analysis of what had been achieved in San Francisco from the perspective of someone who had been in the war. My wife and I took a long-delayed honeymoon at a ranch in Montana….I finally made the decision not to return to law school but to enter the Harvard Graduate School….We moved to Cambridge, and my wife worked as an editoral assistant at the Atlantic Monthly,…Edward Weeks proposed me to join the Society of Fellows,…

…..They formed a group called the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, with the purpose of trying to get these convictions across to a complacent public. I was invited to attend one of their early meetings of the organization in Princeton….met Einstein, Leo Szilard,….Peace or Anarchy…..In the spring of 1946, I learned from (Charles) Bolte that the American Communist Party was attempting to infiltrate and gain control of the American Veterans Committee…..In 1949, I became convinced that our attempts to transform the United Nations had been overtaken by events that could no longer be ignored or explained away…..

(p56

…In the fall of 1949, I resigned as president of the Untied World Federalists, to be

succeeded by Alan Cranston, who later was elected to the Senate from California…..

(p. 60)

…..My mentor was a Harvard professor named Arthur Smithies, who combined theoretical brilliance with the practical experience derived from his previous position in Washington as chief of the fiscal policy division of the Bureau of the Budget….

(p.64)

My next interview was with Allen Dulles, who was at the time deputy director for plans of the Central Intelligence Agency. We had met as participants on radio and TV talk shows in New York and we had a number of friends in common at whose houses we had played tennis together on Long Island weekends. However, I did not know him well and knew little about his wartime career in the OSS. He was kind enough to give me more than an hour of his time, and we had a fascinating discussion. In a series and careful way,

he spelled out the nature of the world situation as he saw it and the complex challenge with which we were confronted by Stalin's regime. He was well-informed concerning my active role in the struggle for control within the American Veterans Committee, and we discussed at some length the strength and influence of the Communist parties of Western Europe. At the end of the meeting, he made me a firm offer of a job with the Agency at a middle level of executive responsibility and assured me that the work would be suited to my abilities and past experience, although for security reasons he could not describe the job in detail. I took with me the voluminous personal history forms that had to be filled out and said I would let him know within a week.

While in Washington, I looked up an old college friend who had joined the CIA a year before. I needed some reassurance about what life was like inside a large secret bureaucracy. He turned out to be enthusiastic about his work and high in his praise of the ability and quality of his colleagues…..I asked Walter Lippmann on his advice on whether to take the job. I had met him during the time I was active in the federalists movement…….On return to Cambridge, I found that my wife was all in favor of the move to Washington. Her sister and other good friends lived there and she looked forward to a change in scene…..By October 1951 I was at work with the Central Intelligence Agency in one of the dilapidated buildings along the reflecting pool that lies below the Lincoln Memorial.

After a brief period of training, I was assigned to what was then the Office of Policy Coordination, headed by Frank Wisner, which was responsible for the conduct of cover operations abroad. By chance, I arrived just as a new presidential directive called for an intensification of covert action operations to cope with what was seen as a worldwide Communist political propaganda offensive. This directive, NSC 10/5, was issue on October 21, 1951, and clearly assigned to the CIA the responsibility for mounting an expanded cover action program with policy guidance to be supplied by an NSC subcommittee. (65)

…..on August 31, 1953, I was summoned to a meeting with Richard Helms. At that time, Helms was chief of operations and second in command under Frank Wisner of what had become the Directorate of Plans. Although we later became close friends, I did not kow him well at the time…..

(70) ….On September 4,....I was called into Larry Houston's office and handed a memorandum that contained the summary of the charges contained in the FBI report……Under the provisions of Section 8(a)(5) of Executive Order 10450, there is evidence that you have appeared before or otherwise associated with the following organizations: National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (cited as a Communist front by the HCUA)….Massachusetts Citizens Political Action Committee….National Council Against Corruption…..Your wife, Mrs. Mary Pinchot Meyers, is alleged to have registered as a member of the American Labor Party of New York in 1944….Your wife…acquainted with James Aldridge….L.K. White (ADDA, CIA)…..

….Driving home I wondered who it was at the FBI who had spent so much time and effort researching every corner of my past to weave together this tapestry of unrelated incidents designed to prove my disloyalty. I speculated what his motives might have been and guessed that probably he was an ambitious bureaucrat who, sensing the climate of the times, believed he could make a name for himself by forcing the resignation of a ranking CIA official….Senator (Joe) McCarthy and Allen Dulles had already crossed swords over a number of cases where Dulles had refused to bow to McCarthy's pressure to fire certain Agency employees….

….I asked for advice from my then brother-in-law Steuart Pittman, an old friend and practicing lawyer. He introduced me to Walter Surrey, a young Washington attorney who had successfully handled a number of security cases before loyalty review boards. Surrey turned out to be exactly what I needed…..A colleague and friend, John Bross, was generous enough to offer financial assistance while I was deprived of my government salary…My immediate boss, Tom Braden, was consistently supportive....

….When Tom Braden decided to resign from the CIA in order to publish a newspaper in California, Dulles approved my appointment as Braden's successor as chief of the International Organizations Division in September of 1954. In that capacity I became head of one of the major operating divisions of the Directorate of Plans, with a growing budget and a wide policy mandate under a new National Security Council directive….In March of 1962, the International Organizations Division was merged with the Covert Action Staff. As the new head of the expanded Covert Action Staff, I became responsible not only for international operations but also for reviewing and providing policy guidance to the geographical area divisions in their conduct of covert activity authorized by NSC directives.

This bureaucratic history is relevant because it explains why my name inevitably came to figure prominently in the wave of publicity that crashed over the Agency in 1967. UP to that time there had been very few leaks, and over a period of fifteen years many American citizens and private voluntary organizations had cooperated secretly with the CIA in joint efforts to cope with the Soviet offensive….National Student Association,….Michael Wood…Ramparts….The New Left…..The James Bond image of the Agency in the public mind as being exclusively associated with the shadowy world of espionage gave credibility to these charges. As the first public exposure of the CIA role, the Ramparts coverage set the tone and colored the content of the massive press and media publicity that followed. (87)

xxxxxxx

[Christopher Hall]

Since the late Cord Meyer is now being mentioned as a possible suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, I've excerpted a few sections of his bio to get an idea of his background, friends and associations. This is about half of what I think is important. Will add more later if there's interest. -BK

Cord Meyer – Facing Reality – From World Federalism to the CIA (University Press of America, Latham , MD, 1980).

Acknowledgments: Winthrop Knowlton (H&R), Cass Canfield, Erwin Glikes, Georgetown U., Prof. Roy Godson, Peter Krogh (Dean of foreign Service), Richard Helms, Samuel Halpern Carmilla Hersh.

Preface. In this book I've attempted to tell enough of the story of my life for the reader to understand a career that almost ended at its beginning in a night battle on a Pacific island….In retracing with me thirty years of involvement in the foreign affairs of this country, readers will, I hope, be persuaded to think afresh and to reconsider opinions that may be firmly held…At the outset I want to make it clear that I submitted this text for security review by the CIA in accordance with the obligation that Agency employees must accept as a condition of their employment.

Unlike so much of the recent literature on American intelligence, this book attempts to describe the activities of the CIA in their historical context…..

Chapter 3 Peacemaking. (p.34- )

From Hawaii, I was flown to a hospital in the San Francisco area and finally back to New York City in September of 1944. I lived with my parents and communted to the Brooklyn Naval Hosptial,…I was ready to face the world and began seeing a lot of Mary Pinchot, whom I'd known slightly before the war and who was working in New York as a free-lance magazine writer……I saw Dean Acheson….(who)…offered me a job….Vienna. I would have taken it but by that time was so much in love with Mary Pinchot that trying to persuade her to marry me seemed far more important than a diplomatic assignment. As a result, I enrolled in the Yale Law School in January with the help of the G.I. Bill, and we saw each other on weekends…..

In April of 1945 Mary and I were married in her mother's New York apartment by Reinhold Niebuhr. He was more familiar with the intricacies of theological argument than with the marriage ceremony,…A few days later I boarded the official train in Washington that was taking the lower-ranking members of the national delegation to San Francisco, and Mary flew out to join me with press credentials from the North American Newspaper Alliance.

As the train rolled westward, I could not help comparing this trip with the voyage across the country by troop train in that innocent springtime of two years before. I felt myself much the wiser man, but I must have seemed incredibly naïve to a legal advisor to the Soviet delegation named Golunsky, whose acquaintance I made in the course of the trip….

p.35)

In a luncheon conversation with Alger Hiss, who was the secretary of the conference,….I became friends with Emery Reves. A Hungarian by birth, he had become a British citizen, had run an international press syndicate before the war, and was also Churchill's literary agent…..The Anatomy of Peace,….My other new friend was E. B. White, who was covering the conference for the New Yorker….

Suddenly, in the middle of May, reality crowded in upon me in a much more personal way. I was awakened one morning by a telephone call from my parents in New York, who told me through their tears that they had just been informed that my twin brother had been killed in action. He was a lieutenant with the First Marine Division, which I knew was engaged in the desperate fighting against the entrenched Japanese in Okinawa….Although we were not identical twins, we were very close and shared together all the days of our childhood and youth…

…I accepted eagerly a proposal by Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic, that I write an analysis of what had been achieved in San Francisco from the perspective of someone who had been in the war. My wife and I took a long-delayed honeymoon at a ranch in Montana….I finally made the decision not to return to law school but to enter the Harvard Graduate School….We moved to Cambridge, and my wife worked as an editoral assistant at the Atlantic Monthly,…Edward Weeks proposed me to join the Society of Fellows,…

…..They formed a group called the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, with the purpose of trying to get these convictions across to a complacent public. I was invited to attend one of their early meetings of the organization in Princeton….met Einstein, Leo Szilard,….Peace or Anarchy…..In the spring of 1946, I learned from (Charles) Bolte that the American Communist Party was attempting to infiltrate and gain control of the American Veterans Committee…..In 1949, I became convinced that our attempts to transform the United Nations had been overtaken by events that could no longer be ignored or explained away…..

(p56

…In the fall of 1949, I resigned as president of the Untied World Federalists, to be

succeeded by Alan Cranston, who later was elected to the Senate from California…..

(p. 60)

…..My mentor was a Harvard professor named Arthur Smithies, who combined theoretical brilliance with the practical experience derived from his previous position in Washington as chief of the fiscal policy division of the Bureau of the Budget….

(p.64)

My next interview was with Allen Dulles, who was at the time deputy director for plans of the Central Intelligence Agency. We had met as participants on radio and TV talk shows in New York and we had a number of friends in common at whose houses we had played tennis together on Long Island weekends. However, I did not know him well and knew little about his wartime career in the OSS. He was kind enough to give me more than an hour of his time, and we had a fascinating discussion. In a series and careful way,

he spelled out the nature of the world situation as he saw it and the complex challenge with which we were confronted by Stalin's regime. He was well-informed concerning my active role in the struggle for control within the American Veterans Committee, and we discussed at some length the strength and influence of the Communist parties of Western Europe. At the end of the meeting, he made me a firm offer of a job with the Agency at a middle level of executive responsibility and assured me that the work would be suited to my abilities and past experience, although for security reasons he could not describe the job in detail. I took with me the voluminous personal history forms that had to be filled out and said I would let him know within a week.

While in Washington, I looked up an old college friend who had joined the CIA a year before. I needed some reassurance about what life was like inside a large secret bureaucracy. He turned out to be enthusiastic about his work and high in his praise of the ability and quality of his colleagues…..I asked Walter Lippmann on his advice on whether to take the job. I had met him during the time I was active in the federalists movement…….On return to Cambridge, I found that my wife was all in favor of the move to Washington. Her sister and other good friends lived there and she looked forward to a change in scene…..By October 1951 I was at work with the Central Intelligence Agency in one of the dilapidated buildings along the reflecting pool that lies below the Lincoln Memorial.

After a brief period of training, I was assigned to what was then the Office of Policy Coordination, headed by Frank Wisner, which was responsible for the conduct of cover operations abroad. By chance, I arrived just as a new presidential directive called for an intensification of covert action operations to cope with what was seen as a worldwide Communist political propaganda offensive. This directive, NSC 10/5, was issue on October 21, 1951, and clearly assigned to the CIA the responsibility for mounting an expanded cover action program with policy guidance to be supplied by an NSC subcommittee. (65)

…..on August 31, 1953, I was summoned to a meeting with Richard Helms. At that time, Helms was chief of operations and second in command under Frank Wisner of what had become the Directorate of Plans. Although we later became close friends, I did not kow him well at the time…..

(70) ….On September 4,....I was called into Larry Houston's office and handed a memorandum that contained the summary of the charges contained in the FBI report……Under the provisions of Section 8(a)(5) of Executive Order 10450, there is evidence that you have appeared before or otherwise associated with the following organizations: National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (cited as a Communist front by the HCUA)….Massachusetts Citizens Political Action Committee….National Council Against Corruption…..Your wife, Mrs. Mary Pinchot Meyers, is alleged to have registered as a member of the American Labor Party of New York in 1944….Your wife…acquainted with James Aldridge….L.K. White (ADDA, CIA)…..

….Driving home I wondered who it was at the FBI who had spent so much time and effort researching every corner of my past to weave together this tapestry of unrelated incidents designed to prove my disloyalty. I speculated what his motives might have been and guessed that probably he was an ambitious bureaucrat who, sensing the climate of the times, believed he could make a name for himself by forcing the resignation of a ranking CIA official….Senator (Joe) McCarthy and Allen Dulles had already crossed swords over a number of cases where Dulles had refused to bow to McCarthy's pressure to fire certain Agency employees….

….I asked for advice from my then brother-in-law Steuart Pittman, an old friend and practicing lawyer. He introduced me to Walter Surrey, a young Washington attorney who had successfully handled a number of security cases before loyalty review boards. Surrey turned out to be exactly what I needed…..A colleague and friend, John Bross, was generous enough to offer financial assistance while I was deprived of my government salary…My immediate boss, Tom Braden, was consistently supportive....

….When Tom Braden decided to resign from the CIA in order to publish a newspaper in California, Dulles approved my appointment as Braden's successor as chief of the International Organizations Division in September of 1954. In that capacity I became head of one of the major operating divisions of the Directorate of Plans, with a growing budget and a wide policy mandate under a new National Security Council directive….In March of 1962, the International Organizations Division was merged with the Covert Action Staff. As the new head of the expanded Covert Action Staff, I became responsible not only for international operations but also for reviewing and providing policy guidance to the geographical area divisions in their conduct of covert activity authorized by NSC directives.

This bureaucratic history is relevant because it explains why my name inevitably came to figure prominently in the wave of publicity that crashed over the Agency in 1967. UP to that time there had been very few leaks, and over a period of fifteen years many American citizens and private voluntary organizations had cooperated secretly with the CIA in joint efforts to cope with the Soviet offensive….National Student Association,….Michael Wood…Ramparts….The New Left…..The James Bond image of the Agency in the public mind as being exclusively associated with the shadowy world of espionage gave credibility to these charges. As the first public exposure of the CIA role, the Ramparts coverage set the tone and colored the content of the massive press and media publicity that followed. (87)

xxxxxxx

I wish that some scholar or author (not mutually exclusive terms, I note) would write a book about Cord Meyer.

Ditto for James Jesus Angleton, David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt (I have read and enjoyed St. John Hunt's book about his father, but I would like to see a lengthy biography of this fascinating man).

Jeffereson Morely did a great job with his book on Win Scott, but we need more books like this.

[Guest Tom Scully]

I wish that some scholar or author (not mutually exclusive terms, I note) would write a book about Cord Meyer.

Ditto for James Jesus Angleton, David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt (I have read and enjoyed St. John Hunt's book about his father, but I would like to see a lengthy biography of this fascinating man).

Jeffereson Morely did a great job with his book on Win Scott, but we need more books like this.

JFK's "best friend", Charles Leffingwell Bartlett was close enough to Cord Meyer to share authorship of Bartlett's syndicated newspaper column with Meyer. Bartlett was close enough to Prescott Bush to receive the tip from Bush that won Bartlett the Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting...close enough to Poppy Bush to tip him that Nixon would make Bush Ambassador to the UN if Bush lobbied for that post... Bartlett grew up on Jupiter Island with the Bushes....

Bartlett still lives and someone who does that sort of thing should seek an interview, ASAP:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...st&p=162437

Now Or Then? - Page xiv

by George DeForest Lord - Non-Classifiable - 2007 - 92 pages

....The protest I did participate in carried no threat of harm. In response to Nixon's unlawful invasion of Cambodia by American and South Vietnamese troops, I joined thousands of students and faculty from Yale and other colleges to protest the President's action by calling on our elected officials in Washington. I had called Charles Bartlett, a distinguished reporter and an old friend, to see if he could lunch at the Federal City Club, but he was too busy reporting to take the time.

What he did do was to get another old friend, Cord Meyer, to meet me. Cord then was a hawk in the CIA. He arrived at the Club in a Plymouth painted matte black with a black driver in a black uniform, thus maintaining what might be called an ostentatious incognito. During lunch Cord's beeper summoned him repeatedly to the telephone, and I cannot remember anything we talked about. Since Cord and Charlie later collaborated on a nationally syndicated column, perhaps the lunch arrangement was not a joke of his.

....What especially puzzles me is the way the events of the 1960s dominate my consciousness today, as if the events of....the deaths of Martin Luther king, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy had all happened yesterday. I find myself grieving for the Great Society launched by LBJ and sabotaged by his covert but steadily increasing commitment to the anti-communist crusade in Southeast Asia. I grieve also for brilliant friends who supported the crusade, many of them products of Yale and Skull and Bones...

Edited July 29, 2009 by Tom Scully