Whitney Shepardson

[Jim Root]

I have recently stumbled accross a large amount of collected information written by a man named Wilho Tikander. For those of you who have been interested in some of my posts I would suggest you recall the information that I have written about the role of Tikander in Operation Stella Polaris. Tikander is recognized for his contributions in the early events surrounding the "Venona" project and the breaking of Soviet Codes. Closely connected to the Venona project are Frank Rowlett and Meredith Gardner who would later investigate Lee Harvey Oswald for intelligence connections. Of special interest is that both Rowlett and Gardner had worked with a man named John Hurt who, at a minimum, shares a name with a man whom Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to contact within hours of his own murder. Tikander's Operation Stella Polaris was set in motion by information that was collected by the same John Hurt. With that in mind please add these tidbits to the Wilho Tikander story.....

In June of 1959 there was a flurry of activity generated by Whitney Shepardson. For background:

Whitney H. Shepardson (1890-1966)

"Whitney Shepardson was an international business executive, editor, and author whose strong interest in international affairs began when he attended the Versailles peace conference in 1919. He returned to New York and helped found the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921. From 1934 to 1940, he was the principal editor of The United States in World Affairs, the Council’s annual review of world events. During World War II, Mr. Shepardson headed the Secret Intelligence unit of the Office of Strategic Services (which became the CIA). From 1953 to 1956, he served as president of the Free Europe Committee, operator of Radio Free Europe." (Information from the Council on Foreign Relations web site)

This Shepardson activity took the form of numerous letters and personal meetings with a number of former OSS agents that had been involved in Sweden and Finland during WWII. In particular they had been involved in Operation Stella Polaris, the penetration of Finnish Intelligence agencies and had gathered information about Soviet codes and intelligence networks in the region. There also seems to have been interest in Japanese intelligence operations in the area and how Japanese, and Soviet intelligence agencies cooperated during the war. The information was being gathered under the guise of writting a book although there seems to be no publication that resulted from the gathering of this information.

Five years later, on March 17, 1964, TiKander was questioned about some of the material that he had supplied Shepardson (let me just say for dramatic effect, by a known CIA asset) and Wilho Tikander makes this comment, "You must remember that when I supplied this to Whitney Shepardson (of which I sent you a copy) I understood that he was preparing to write a book under official auspices and I had no hesitation in supplying it to you as you had personal knowledge of all of it anyway. If then, Washington has no objection, it is O.K. with me...but be sure Washington authorites approve any mention of codes!!"

Other persons that Shepardson gathered information from in 1959 include, Calvin Bryce Hoover, R. Taylor Cole, Walter Surrey, Mr. Seaton, Alexander Klein as well as information about the true activities of Eric "Red" Erickson (whom Klein had written about in a book titled, The Counterfeit Traitor"). Apparently the information contained in "The Counterfeit Traitor" lacked a geat deal of information about Ericksons penetration into Japanese intelligence operations during World War II and Shepardson was interested in Tikanders take on this facet of Ericksons espionage activities.

It seems that Richard Helms was involved in the collection of this material as well. Little is published about Helms activities in Sweden and Finland during WWII but Tikanders association with Richard Helms during WWII gave him the ability to refer to Helms as "Dick." I was aware of Helms activities in Sweden during WWII but did not realize that Tikander and Helms remained close associates for a long period of time thereafter.

There is a document that suggests that Tikander has a conversation with "Dick" just prior to meeting with "Whitney." The next morning Tikander receives a "letter from Col. Steve (Col. Martin Stewen, a former Finnish military attaché)". The subject of the letter is that a "wartime chief of Russian Intelligence, RADO, (Alexander Rado) at Geneva, Switzerland, who was of Hungarian birth, subsequently disappeared in K(?)airo in 1945 and was presummed to have been liquidated in Russia, has currently reappeared in Stockholm at an international conference of scientists..." Prior to this information is this statement, "If you will check my 'history' bottom of page 40 and top of page 41 (using Preface as page 1) you will note references to material which was supplied to us without a request." The "history" is contained in the documents that I have aquired and the information is about an intelligence cell in Finland that was believed to be working for US intelligence during WWII when it was discovered that they were in fact working for the Soviets. The information from this cell was then no longer considered useful by Tikander. Why is this information about RADO attached to a letter that also states, "I shall pass this on to you as you may wish to pass this on" written in a manner that requires the reader to have a second document to understand the whole of the information that was provided to the reader years before?"

Of particular interest to me is a statement # 32 made by Tikander in 1959 to Shepardson.

"It is quite likely that a considerable part of one's wartime experience issecret intelligence work could be employed in a peace time or cold-war period. Experience acquired can at times play the role of a trstraining hand whereas those who lack the experience tend to lunge forward without heed to unseen torpedoes. Merly as an illustration: (I) had had a good coverage of developments in Finland during the time othe Finns were fighting the Russians. Then came the Armistice and with it a Russian control Commission to Helsinki. to determine what policies the Russians were to pursue in Finland, (I) arranged for a surveillance of the Russian Control Commission. this enterprise turned out to be far more successful than could have been anticipated. In a short time OSS was getting reports directl from the home office of the Russian Control Commission at Leningrad. The atmosphere in Russo-Finnish relations settled down. (I) decided it was time to discontinue the surveillance of the Control Commission because of the catastrophic consequences which could ensue were the operation exposed. Hardly had (I) done so, however, when (I) was called upon by ONI to assist ONI in installing an effective surveillance on Russian Naval movements, with the help of the Finns. (I) proceeded to voice (my) protest on the grounds that the operation as planned was extremely dangerous. (I) called attention to a provision of the Armistice Agreement which evidently had been overlooked by the Navy braid, to-wit: That should official organs of the Finnish government be discovered in a conspiracy with foreign intelligence services conductin espionage against Russia, such a violation would give the Russians a right to occupy all of finland. On this particular occasion the ONI project was called off.'

"Unfortunately some of (my) successors in CIA have not given heed to some of the warnings (I) left behind in the 'Memoranda for the Files.' In one such instance, (my) successors launched an operation which was successfully carried through, but was then 'blown:--with rather unfortunate results. The 'grapevine' says that this case is due for a 're-play' in the year, 1960."

Interesting,

Jim Root

[Jim Root]

A little futher digging:

Whitney Spepardson, besides being a close friend of John J. McCloy, was a founder of the Free Europe Committee and Radio Free Europe along with Allen Dulles, and Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt (brother of George De Mohrenschildt).

I know some of you have had some thoughts on the Free Europe Committee before but I have never seen the name of Dimitri Von Mohreschildt so closely related to some of my targets of research before. Dimitri and family have suddenly gotten a little more intersting for my research along these lines. Father was Swedish and associated with the Nobel family and the Baku Oil fields in Russia...........

Small world.... and I'm thinking the hole may get deeper.

Jim root

[William Kelly]

A little futher digging:

Whitney Spepardson, besides being a close friend of John J. McCloy, was a founder of the Free Europe Committee and Radio Free Europe along with Allen Dulles, and Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt (brother of George De Mohrenschildt).

I know some of you have had some thoughts on the Free Europe Committee before but I have never seen the name of Dimitri Von Mohreschildt so closely related to some of my targets of research before. Dimitri and family have suddenly gotten a little more intersting for my research along these lines. Father was Swedish and associated with the Nobel family and the Baku Oil fields in Russia...........

Small world.... and I'm thinking the hole may get deeper.

Jim root

Jim,

Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt was affiliated with the Hover Institure at Stanford University, California. He wrote a few books, one on intelectuals in 18th Century Europe.

BK

[Jim Root]

Lee Harvey Oswald sails for Astugi, Japan in March of 1958.

The following is information taken from "Oswald and the CIA" by John Newman (pg 65):

"On April 10, 1958 CIA headquarters sent a cable to a place that is still classified but which, from all indications, was one of its stations in Western Europe. It conatained (a) detailed ... descritption of Pricilla (Johnson)..." "The releasing official listed on the bottom left of this cable was then the CIA's chief of Investigations and Operational Support. His name was Cord Meyer, Jr."

"Cord Meyer's cable in April occured after her (Pricilla Johnson) visa application, during the period she was waiting for it to be approved. 'I went to Cairo in February 1958,' Pricilla remembers, 'to see a boyfriend. Then in March of 1958 I went to Paris, and did a little translating in a building on Haussmann Boulevard.' There she worked for 'someone I knew either for Radio Liberty or the Congress for Cultural Freedom." ("The Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA's more daring and effective Cold War covert operations." from Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50)

Radio Liberty was of course operated by Whitney Shepardson.

On June 11, 2007 this article appered:

By Priscilla J(ohnson). McMillan

After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.

Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At eighteen, huddled in his Marine Corps barracks in Japan, he studied Russian from a Berlitz phrase book. And at nineteen, he wangled a hardship discharge from the Marines and made the arduous journey by steamship and train to the USSR.

Arriving there as a tourist, he immediately proclaimed ­ to Russian authorities and officials of the U.S. embassy in Moscow ­ that he intended to relinquish his U.S. citizenship and become a citizen of the USSR. It was at that moment in his life, November, 1959, that I happened to meet and talk with him.

I was a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance in search of a human interest story and he had just marked his twentieth birthday. I had no way of knowing that this boy ­ dressed in a dark gray suit, white shirt, and dark red tie—he looked like an American college student—had, two weeks earlier, slashed his wrists in his hotel bathtub in a gesture of desperation after being informed by Soviet officials that he could not remain in the Soviet Union. Throughout our conversation, which took place over several hours in my room at the Metropole Hotel, I asked Oswald why he was defecting to the USSR, while he tried to engage me in a discussion of Marxist economics.

When I asked what would become of him if he returned to the United States, he replied that his lot would be that of “workers everywhere.” He would be ground down by capitalism as his mother, a practical nurse, had been. He spoke bitterly of racial discrimination in the United States, but did not disclose that as a schoolboy he had taken action against it by riding in the black section of the segregated buses of New Orleans.

While I realized that Oswald was angry at the country he was hoping to leave behind, I also sensed that his desire to live in the Soviet Union had something theoretical about it. He had traveled thousands of miles to get there, but had ventured no more than two blocks on his own and preferred to sit by himself in his hotel room rather than go sight-seeing in Moscow. So far as I could see, his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was based on neither knowledge of, or curiosity about, everyday life there.

The Russians refused Oswald’s plea for citizenship but allowed him to remain in their country. He, whether from anger at the way he claimed to have been treated by U.S. consul Richard E. Snyder, or from desire to leave himself an “out,” refused to return to the American embassy to reclaim the passport he had left behind.

In early 1960, a couple of months after I met him, Oswald was sent to the provincial city of Minsk and given a job at the Minsk Radio Plant. There he distinguished himself as a below-average worker, but embarked on an eight-month romance with a woman named Ella German of which he seemed to be proud. But Ella jilted him, and Oswald, to spite her, married nineteen-year-old pharmacist Marina Prusakova. Her friends and his co-workers quickly taught him the daily realities of Soviet life.

His disenchantment with the poverty, lack of amusement, and ubiquitous spying can be found in what he called his “Historic Diary” and in “The Collective,” an essay he started to write in the USSR. After less than two years in Minsk, Oswald opened a correspondence with the once-hated U.S. consul, Richard E. Snyder, in Moscow, seeking to return to the United States. Snyder’s superiors in Washington determined that, having left his passport at the embassy that angry autumn of 1959, Oswald had retained his citizenship.

In June, 1962, he was allowed to return to America, bringing Marina and their three month-old daughter, June. That summer and fall, and throughout the following winter, he held a series of menial, disheartening jobs, first repairing houses in Fort Worth, then as apprentice at a printing plant in Dallas. Oswald’s criticisms of the society around him returned with a vengeance, and his reading of two left-wing publications, The Worker, mouthpiece of the U.S. Communist Party, and The Militant, newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, helped focus his discontent. Oswald said of The Militant that “you can see what they want you to do by reading between the lines.”

That winter the two newspapers were filled with diatribes against the far-right John Birch Society and a like-minded figure, Major General Edwin A. Walker (Resigned, U.S. Army), who happened to live in Dallas. Although Oswald was barely able to feed his family, he nonetheless ordered two guns by mail, a revolver and a $19.95 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a scope. On a Sunday afternoon in late March, 1963, he had Marina photograph him in their Dallas backyard holding both guns and copies of The Militant and The Worker. Ten days later, on April 10, 1963, Oswald fired a shot at General Walker that missed Walker’s head by only an inch or two. And a few days after that, Oswald, his pistol strapped at his waist, told Marina that he was going to “have a look” at former Vice-President Richard Nixon, who he said was in Dallas that day. Marina managed to keep him at home, and when Oswald subsequently announced that he meant to leave Dallas and seek a job in New Orleans, she was relieved, thinking that he might get over his obsession with politics there.

She was wrong. Within days of his arrival in New Orleans, Oswald was standing on the docks, handing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets. New Orleans, despite what Marina hoped would be the restraining influence of his cousins and aunt, proved to be no more salutary than Dallas. Oswald read books about Mao Tse-tung, John F. Kennedy, and Fidel Castro that he found in the public library, and spent the long summer evenings sighting his rifle on the porch, and working the bolt action. He explained to Marina that he wanted to go to Cuba to teach Fidel’s army how to repel an American invasion. And he sketched out his newest scheme. He would hijack an airplane headed to Florida and redirect it to Cuba. While he was in the cockpit, she was to stand at the rear, holding June with one hand and pointing Lee’s pistol at the passengers with the other, and together they would join Fidel.

Marina was alarmed by this latest “crazy” scheme, but succeeded in laughing Lee out of it. Go to Cuba if you must, she said, but do it a legal way. And so, in late September, 1963, he boarded a bus to Mexico City, where he attempted to secure entry visas for Cuba and the USSR. After failing on both counts he returned, crestfallen, to Dallas, where Marina ­was expecting their second child, having been taken in by a generous couple, Ruth and Michael Paine.

Oswald’s intentions were now a jumble: that fall he wrote to the Soviet embassy in Washington, requesting visas for Marina and June to enter the USSR. As Marina was to analyze it later, he meant to stash his family in Russia and then travel by himself to China, to see whether Communism there was less bureaucratic and closer to the ideal than the Cuban or Soviet varieties. But things worked out differently.

Oswald found a job at the Texas School Book Depository and lived by himself in Dallas while Marina and the children ­ (their second daughter, Rachel, was born in October) lived with the Paines in the nearby suburb of Irving. On weekends Oswald would come to visit.

A new political vista opened for Oswald on Tuesday, November 19. That day he spotted a story in either the Dallas Morning News or Times Herald that described the parade route of President Kennedy’s upcoming visit to Dallas. The presidential motorcade would be passing directly by the windows of the Texas School Book Depository. The precise moment when Oswald made up his mind is not known, and never will be, but the first external manifestation of what he was thinking occurred on Thursday morning, when he asked a co-worker, Buell Wesley Frazier, for a ride home after work. Frazier was accustomed to giving Oswald a ride to Irving on Fridays, but thought nothing of this change in plans.

On departing for work Friday morning, Oswald left behind his wedding ring and nearly all the money he had. He brought to work the rifle he had originally purchased for the purpose of killing General Walker, but unlike the previous April, this time he did not miss his intended target. At almost exactly 12:30 CST, he fired three shots and assassinated the embodiment of the American polity he despised.

Everything in Oswald’s life proclaims that this was a man prepared to take dangerous and dramatic action for the sake of his political beliefs. Joining with others in street demonstrations or precinct work were not for him. He wanted no part of the “system.” To the contrary, he wanted to bring it down. He considered himself a “Marxist” or a “Socialist.” He was attracted to socialism in Cuba and the USSR, but repelled by the bureaucratic reality. And despite his disappointments with both, by the autumn of 1963 he was still hoping to find the Socialist paradise in China.

The possibility that Oswald’s political convictions may have played a decisive part in his shooting John Kennedy was downplayed in the early sixties because President Johnson and other officials did not want the assassination to become a casus belli with the Soviet Union. And to the public, this explanation, at a moment when capitalism was riding high, appeared ludicrous. Besides, for a Marxist, killing this president appeared wildly inconsistent. Kennedy was a liberal. Shooting at him, unlike the attempt on General Walker, appeared to conflict with Oswald’s beliefs about racial discrimination and better relations with the USSR.

But to Oswald the believing Marxist, it did not matter much whether the president was liberal or conservative. What mattered was that he was leader of the greatest capitalist nation on earth. Oswald wanted to decapitate capitalism as he, almost literally, decapitated the president of the United States. Seen in this light, an observation by Marina, the person closest to him at this period of his life, makes perfect sense. Had her husband survived to be tried for the president’s murder, Marina believed, not only would he have confessed—he would have boasted about what he had done and proclaimed that it was all for the Socialist cause.

Oswald did not succeed, of course, in bringing down American capitalism, any more than Timothy McVeigh succeeded in sparking a national uprising when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. But Oswald’s act of violence indisputably ushered in an era of unease and suspicion in American life that was not there prior to the Kennedy assassination.

Oswald was not responsible for all of the damage that has befallen American society since 1963, much as he would have wished to be. Some of that damage is the result of events related only tangentially to the assassination of President Kennedy. But some of the injury can, with justice, be attributed to conspiracy theorists who have gone to superhuman lengths to avoid facing the truth.

They have constructed wildly-implausible scenarios, far-out, fictitious “conspirators,” and have scandalously maligned the motives of Kennedy’s successor, rather than take a hard look at the man who actually did it. They have, ironically, done more to poison American political life than Lee Oswald—with the most terrible of intentions—was able to do.

© 2007 by Priscilla J. McMillan

Priscilla J. McMillan is the author of Marina and Lee (Harper & Row, 1977), and more recently, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (Viking, 2005).

Interesting,

Jim Root

Edited May 9, 2008 by Jim Root

[William Kelly]

I started another thread on Whitney Shepardson, having missed this one previous.

Thought they could be joined or one hooked to the other.

Very interesting guy.

BK

[Robert Howard]

I started another thread on Whitney Shepardson, having missed this one previous.

Thought they could be joined or one hooked to the other.

Very interesting guy.

BK

When World War II ended, Frank Wisner and John Foster Dulles returned to corporate law, Richard Helms, signed on as Whitney Shepardson’s SI assistant in the War Department’s intelligence remnant. Another prominent figure in the history of post-war intelligence was William Casey. In Casey’s biography by Joseph Persico, VOSS, or the Veterans of the Office of Strategic Service is mentioned. 1

......William F Casey was, like Reagan a lifelong anticommunist. Reared in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Queens, he absorbed his anti-communism with his religion in Catholic parochial schools, at Fordham University at a time when the Jesuit college was an Irish enclave, and at St. John’s University Law school. World War II introduced him to the world of espionage and covert operations when he served in the OSS under William Donovan, first head of the London’s secretariat, finally as chief of Secret Intelligence for Europe. He was working for the Polish government in exile in London when the Yalta agreements handed power to Stalin’s communist puppets in Lublin. “I never forgot what caving in to the Russians did to that people,” he recalled. After the war Casey joined the conservative, Taft wing of the Republican Party. He was a McCarthy supporter because he thought it took a roughneck like McCarthy to “flush out the Communists.” Afterwards he stayed active in right-wing anticommunist circles in New York, “a very small club, maybe fifty members,” William F. Buckley, Jr. used to joke where “there was practically a secret handshake." Casey sat on the board of directors of the conservative publishing house, Henry Regnery, kept the conservative magazine Human Events alive after its publishers death and drew up the financial plans for Buckley’s National Review. As a member of the Veterans of Office of Strategic Service (VOSS), he maintained connections to the OSS veterans network in the CIA and the business world.

page 394, Not Without Honor by Richard Gid Powers

Then there is Veterans Strategic Service (VSS).

If I am not mistaken, these are two different groups, but I wouldn’t swear to it, even with two different designations being used, as sometimes, information about obscure groups can be documented with errors, although it seems that these are two distinctly different organizations. Both, I believe, are mentioned on the OSS website Bill Kelly posted the link to earlier.

See

http://www.osssociety.org/

It appears that these are two different groups which came into being after the OSS had it’s budget severely curtailed, around the time that it was disbanded, and these two groups arose from the ashes, so to speak.

http://books.google.com/books?q=Veterans+o...nG=Search+Books

Allen Dulles: Master of Spies - Page 403

by James Srodes - Biography & Autobiography - 2000 - 576 pages

Almost as soon as the OSS was officially closed in October 1945, Donovan moved to create the Veterans

of Strategic Service, nominally an alumni group to lobby in behalf of a strong intelligence service to the government. By 1948 the Veterans of Strategic Service had 1,300 members.

The Shadow Warriors: O.S.S. and the Origins of the C.I.A. - Page 410

by Bradley F. Smith - Political Science - 1983 - 507 pages

Donovan and his colleagues were able to make full use of the well-established methods of lobbying politics and media pressure. In October 1945, Donovan suggested helping the cause by the creation of a “quiet organization” of former OSS men. The purpose of the group , as Ned Buxton informed James Rogers, would be “to keep the idea and functioning of Central Intelligence” alive “any way we can find to do so”. The suggestion of a “committee of 100” analogous to the 1940 "aid to Britain" group was quickly expanded, and the resulting Veterans of Strategic Service (VSS) organization had 1300 members as early as 1948.

VOSS......The following two excerpts are from the bio of Casey by Persico

page 98.......a place on Fire Island, one afternoon [Henry] Hyde told Casey, that he, Whitney Shepardson and some of the other fellows were forming an organization, Veterans of the Office of Strategic Service— the VOSS,

page 257......Geoffrey M.T. Jones, the executive director of the Veterans of the OSS had gone out to Long Island to visit another member and a mutual friend of his and Casey’s, the oil developer John Shaheen, “Bill’s in the soup this time,” John said over drinks on the Shaheen’s patio.” 2

While previously classified documents concerning Ultra are now largely available to the public, a review of the primary sources reveals that many still contain blank pages that are marked “not releasable” while others contain portions that have been blanked out with no explanation. Thus, even though we know much more today than we did 15 years ago about these activities, public access remains unavailable for much of it.

These continuing restrictions may well be the result of comments made on 15 April 1943 by Col Alfred McCormack in a memorandum to Col Carter W. Clarke. McCormack, then “Mr McCormack,” had earlier been appointed as special assistant to the secretary of war to study the uses of Ultra and establish procedures for making the best use of this source. At the time of the memorandum, McCormack was deputy chief of the Special Branch and worked for its chief, Colonel Clarke. The purpose of the Special Branch was to handle signals intelligence. McCormack’s memorandum consists of 54 pages on the origin, functions, and problems of the Special Branch, Military Intelligence Service (MIS). In this memorandum, McCormack describes, in his view, Ultra security requirements as follows:

One lapse of security is all that is necessary to dry up a radio intercept source. Therefore, both on the officer level and below, only persons of the greatest good sense and discretion should be employed on this work. This consideration is basic since intercept information involves a different kind of secrecy than does most other classified information. It will make no difference a year from now how much the enemy knows about our present troop dispositions, about the whereabouts of our naval forces or about other similar facts that now are clearly guarded secrets. But it will make a lot of difference one year from now—and possibly many years from now—whether the enemy has learned that in April 1942 we were reading his most secret codes. Not present secrecy, not merely secrecy until the battle is over, but permanent secrecy of this operation is what we should strive for. 3

This secrecy was maintained throughout the war. Only carefully selected individuals in Washington and in the field had access to the information produced through these intercepts. The procedures for use by field commanders and their personnel, including controls established to protect the information and its source were laid out in a letter to General Eisenhower from General Marshall on 15 March 1944. These procedures lasted at least through the end of the war. 4

1. page 394, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism - Richard Gid Powers - New York: The Free Press, 1995

2. Casey: From the OSS to the CIA - Joseph E. Persico - Viking Publishers, Inc. 1990

3. John Mendelsohn, ed., Covert Warfare: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and Military Deception During the World War II Era 18 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989), Volume 1, Ultra Magic and the Allies, Chapter. 8, “Origins, Functions, and Problems of the Special Branch, MIS,” 27.

4. Ibid., Mendelsohn, Vol. 1, Chapter. 4, “Synthesis of Experiences in the Use of ULTRA Intelligence by U.S. Army Field Commands in the European Theater of Operations,” 4.

Note: Dean Acheson’s book, Present at the Creation, also delves into the various infighting and competition which both McCormack and Acheson faced in the aftermath of World War II, relating to the re-organization of the Intelligence Agencies leading up to the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency.

See pages 159-69

Also See:

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchro...attle/chp7.html

As a final note, I would mention that I have no idea, when or if, either of these organizations were dissoved, or just faded away. My main point is that even if they did, the dynamics of the group, or group, would certainly seem a possibility when considering a parallel organization to the CIA.

Robert

Edited December 26, 2008 by Robert Howard

[Robert Howard]

I started another thread on Whitney Shepardson, having missed this one previous.

Thought they could be joined or one hooked to the other.

Very interesting guy.

BK

When World War II ended, Frank Wisner and John Foster Dulles returned to corporate law, Richard Helms, signed on as Whitney Shepardson’s SI assistant in the War Department’s intelligence remnant. Another prominent figure in the history of post-war intelligence was William Casey. In Casey’s biography by Joseph Persico, VOSS, or the Veterans of the Office of Strategic Service is mentioned. 1

......William F Casey was, like Reagan a lifelong anticommunist. Reared in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Queens, he absorbed his anti-communism with his religion in Catholic parochial schools, at Fordham University at a time when the Jesuit college was an Irish enclave, and at St. John’s University Law school. World War II introduced him to the world of espionage and covert operations when he served in the OSS under William Donovan, first head of the London’s secretariat, finally as chief of Secret Intelligence for Europe. He was working for the Polish government in exile in London when the Yalta agreements handed power to Stalin’s communist puppets in Lublin. “I never forgot what caving in to the Russians did to that people,” he recalled. After the war Casey joined the conservative, Taft wing of the Republican Party. He was a McCarthy supporter because he thought it took a roughneck like McCarthy to “flush out the Communists.” Afterwards he stayed active in right-wing anticommunist circles in New York, “a very small club, maybe fifty members,” William F. Buckley, Jr. used to joke where “there was practically a secret handshake." Casey sat on the board of directors of the conservative publishing house, Henry Regnery, kept the conservative magazine Human Events alive after its publishers death and drew up the financial plans for Buckley’s National Review. As a member of the Veterans of Office of Strategic Service (VOSS), he maintained connections to the OSS veterans network in the CIA and the business world.

page 394, Not Without Honor by Richard Gid Powers

Then there is Veterans Strategic Service (VSS).

If I am not mistaken, these are two different groups, but I wouldn’t swear to it, even with two different designations being used, as sometimes, information about obscure groups can be documented with errors, although it seems that these are two distinctly different organizations. Both, I believe, are mentioned on the OSS website Bill Kelly posted the link to earlier.

See

http://www.osssociety.org/

It appears that these are two different groups which came into being after the OSS had it’s budget severely curtailed, around the time that it was disbanded, and these two groups arose from the ashes, so to speak.

http://books.google.com/books?q=Veterans+o...nG=Search+Books

Allen Dulles: Master of Spies - Page 403

by James Srodes - Biography & Autobiography - 2000 - 576 pages

Almost as soon as the OSS was officially closed in October 1945, Donovan moved to create the Veterans

of Strategic Service, nominally an alumni group to lobby in behalf of a strong intelligence service to the government. By 1948 the Veterans of Strategic Service had 1,300 members.

The Shadow Warriors: O.S.S. and the Origins of the C.I.A. - Page 410

by Bradley F. Smith - Political Science - 1983 - 507 pages

Donovan and his colleagues were able to make full use of the well-established methods of lobbying politics and media pressure. In October 1945, Donovan suggested helping the cause by the creation of a “quiet organization” of former OSS men. The purpose of the group , as Ned Buxton informed James Rogers, would be “to keep the idea and functioning of Central Intelligence” alive “any way we can find to do so”. The suggestion of a “committee of 100” analogous to the 1940 "aid to Britain" group was quickly expanded, and the resulting Veterans of Strategic Service (VSS) organization had 1300 members as early as 1948.

VOSS......The following two excerpts are from the bio of Casey by Persico

page 98.......a place on Fire Island, one afternoon [Henry] Hyde told Casey, that he, Whitney Shepardson and some of the other fellows were forming an organization, Veterans of the Office of Strategic Service— the VOSS,

page 257......Geoffrey M.T. Jones, the executive director of the Veterans of the OSS had gone out to Long Island to visit another member and a mutual friend of his and Casey’s, the oil developer John Shaheen, “Bill’s in the soup this time,” John said over drinks on the Shaheen’s patio.” 2

While previously classified documents concerning Ultra are now largely available to the public, a review of the primary sources reveals that many still contain blank pages that are marked “not releasable” while others contain portions that have been blanked out with no explanation. Thus, even though we know much more today than we did 15 years ago about these activities, public access remains unavailable for much of it.

These continuing restrictions may well be the result of comments made on 15 April 1943 by Col Alfred McCormack in a memorandum to Col Carter W. Clarke. McCormack, then “Mr McCormack,” had earlier been appointed as special assistant to the secretary of war to study the uses of Ultra and establish procedures for making the best use of this source. At the time of the memorandum, McCormack was deputy chief of the Special Branch and worked for its chief, Colonel Clarke. The purpose of the Special Branch was to handle signals intelligence. McCormack’s memorandum consists of 54 pages on the origin, functions, and problems of the Special Branch, Military Intelligence Service (MIS). In this memorandum, McCormack describes, in his view, Ultra security requirements as follows:

One lapse of security is all that is necessary to dry up a radio intercept source. Therefore, both on the officer level and below, only persons of the greatest good sense and discretion should be employed on this work. This consideration is basic since intercept information involves a different kind of secrecy than does most other classified information. It will make no difference a year from now how much the enemy knows about our present troop dispositions, about the whereabouts of our naval forces or about other similar facts that now are clearly guarded secrets. But it will make a lot of difference one year from now—and possibly many years from now—whether the enemy has learned that in April 1942 we were reading his most secret codes. Not present secrecy, not merely secrecy until the battle is over, but permanent secrecy of this operation is what we should strive for. 3

This secrecy was maintained throughout the war. Only carefully selected individuals in Washington and in the field had access to the information produced through these intercepts. The procedures for use by field commanders and their personnel, including controls established to protect the information and its source were laid out in a letter to General Eisenhower from General Marshall on 15 March 1944. These procedures lasted at least through the end of the war. 4

1. page 394, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism - Richard Gid Powers - New York: The Free Press, 1995

2. Casey: From the OSS to the CIA - Joseph E. Persico - Viking Publishers, Inc. 1990

3. John Mendelsohn, ed., Covert Warfare: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and Military Deception During the World War II Era 18 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989), Volume 1, Ultra Magic and the Allies, Chapter. 8, “Origins, Functions, and Problems of the Special Branch, MIS,” 27.

4. Ibid., Mendelsohn, Vol. 1, Chapter. 4, “Synthesis of Experiences in the Use of ULTRA Intelligence by U.S. Army Field Commands in the European Theater of Operations,” 4.

Note: Dean Acheson’s book, Present at the Creation, also delves into the various infighting and competition which both McCormack and Acheson faced in the aftermath of World War II, relating to the re-organization of the Intelligence Agencies leading up to the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency.

See pages 159-69

Also See:

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchro...attle/chp7.html

As a final note, I would mention that I have no idea, when or if, either of these organizations were dissoved, or just faded away. My main point is that even if they did, the dynamics of the group, or group, would certainly seem a possibility when considering a parallel organization to the CIA.

Robert

This is just an FYI, to all interested......

Maxwell Taylor

http://books.google.com/books?id=egIPFBz18...+Taylor&lr=

Autobiography of one of the foremost military heroes of recent American history. This volume tells of his command of the 101st Airborne Division, Kennedy's naming of him as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his embassy to Vietnam in 1965.

More details

Swords and Plowshares

By Maxwell D. Taylor

Published by Da Capo Press, 1990

ISBN 0306804077, 9780306804076

468 pages

More details

General Maxwell Taylor: The Sword and the Pen

By John M. Taylor

Published by Doubleday, 1989

Original from the University of Michigan

Digitized Nov 21, 2006

ISBN 0385243812, 9780385243810

457 pages

The son of the distinguished general profiles his father's long career and his key role in such events as the Vietnam War, nuclear retaliation, and the Bay of Pigs invasion

Early History of the Council on Foreign Relations

By Whitney Hart Shepardson, Overbrook Press

Published by Overbrook Press, 1960

19 pages

Whitney Shepardson is also mentioned in a French book entitled Les secrets de l'affaire Jean Moulin By Jacques Baynac

http://books.google.com/books?id=o1muAAAAI...p;q=&pgis=1

Key words and phrases

Jean Moulin, Caluire, René Hardy, Gestapo, Henri Frenay, Daniel Cordier, Pierre Cot, BCRA, Alger, Philippe Monod, Henri Calef, Allen Dulles, NARA, Raymond Aubrac, Lydie, Pierre Kaan, Berty Albrecht, Claude Bourdet, Lucie Aubrac, général Delestraint

More details

Les secrets de l'affaire Jean Moulin: contexte causes et circonstances

By Jacques Baynac

Published by Editions Du Seuil, 1998

ISBN 2020331640, 9782020331647

511 pages

Edited January 16, 2009 by Robert Howard

[Robert Howard]

I started another thread on Whitney Shepardson, having missed this one previous.

Thought they could be joined or one hooked to the other.

Very interesting guy.

BK

When World War II ended, Frank Wisner and John Foster Dulles returned to corporate law, Richard Helms, signed on as Whitney Shepardson’s SI assistant in the War Department’s intelligence remnant. Another prominent figure in the history of post-war intelligence was William Casey. In Casey’s biography by Joseph Persico, VOSS, or the Veterans of the Office of Strategic Service is mentioned. 1

......William F Casey was, like Reagan a lifelong anticommunist. Reared in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Queens, he absorbed his anti-communism with his religion in Catholic parochial schools, at Fordham University at a time when the Jesuit college was an Irish enclave, and at St. John’s University Law school. World War II introduced him to the world of espionage and covert operations when he served in the OSS under William Donovan, first head of the London’s secretariat, finally as chief of Secret Intelligence for Europe. He was working for the Polish government in exile in London when the Yalta agreements handed power to Stalin’s communist puppets in Lublin. “I never forgot what caving in to the Russians did to that people,” he recalled. After the war Casey joined the conservative, Taft wing of the Republican Party. He was a McCarthy supporter because he thought it took a roughneck like McCarthy to “flush out the Communists.” Afterwards he stayed active in right-wing anticommunist circles in New York, “a very small club, maybe fifty members,” William F. Buckley, Jr. used to joke where “there was practically a secret handshake." Casey sat on the board of directors of the conservative publishing house, Henry Regnery, kept the conservative magazine Human Events alive after its publishers death and drew up the financial plans for Buckley’s National Review. As a member of the Veterans of Office of Strategic Service (VOSS), he maintained connections to the OSS veterans network in the CIA and the business world.

page 394, Not Without Honor by Richard Gid Powers

Then there is Veterans Strategic Service (VSS).

If I am not mistaken, these are two different groups, but I wouldn’t swear to it, even with two different designations being used, as sometimes, information about obscure groups can be documented with errors, although it seems that these are two distinctly different organizations. Both, I believe, are mentioned on the OSS website Bill Kelly posted the link to earlier.

See

http://www.osssociety.org/

It appears that these are two different groups which came into being after the OSS had it’s budget severely curtailed, around the time that it was disbanded, and these two groups arose from the ashes, so to speak.

http://books.google.com/books?q=Veterans+o...nG=Search+Books

Allen Dulles: Master of Spies - Page 403

by James Srodes - Biography & Autobiography - 2000 - 576 pages

Almost as soon as the OSS was officially closed in October 1945, Donovan moved to create the Veterans

of Strategic Service, nominally an alumni group to lobby in behalf of a strong intelligence service to the government. By 1948 the Veterans of Strategic Service had 1,300 members.

The Shadow Warriors: O.S.S. and the Origins of the C.I.A. - Page 410

by Bradley F. Smith - Political Science - 1983 - 507 pages

Donovan and his colleagues were able to make full use of the well-established methods of lobbying politics and media pressure. In October 1945, Donovan suggested helping the cause by the creation of a “quiet organization” of former OSS men. The purpose of the group , as Ned Buxton informed James Rogers, would be “to keep the idea and functioning of Central Intelligence” alive “any way we can find to do so”. The suggestion of a “committee of 100” analogous to the 1940 "aid to Britain" group was quickly expanded, and the resulting Veterans of Strategic Service (VSS) organization had 1300 members as early as 1948.

VOSS......The following two excerpts are from the bio of Casey by Persico

page 98.......a place on Fire Island, one afternoon [Henry] Hyde told Casey, that he, Whitney Shepardson and some of the other fellows were forming an organization, Veterans of the Office of Strategic Service— the VOSS,

page 257......Geoffrey M.T. Jones, the executive director of the Veterans of the OSS had gone out to Long Island to visit another member and a mutual friend of his and Casey’s, the oil developer John Shaheen, “Bill’s in the soup this time,” John said over drinks on the Shaheen’s patio.” 2

While previously classified documents concerning Ultra are now largely available to the public, a review of the primary sources reveals that many still contain blank pages that are marked “not releasable” while others contain portions that have been blanked out with no explanation. Thus, even though we know much more today than we did 15 years ago about these activities, public access remains unavailable for much of it.

These continuing restrictions may well be the result of comments made on 15 April 1943 by Col Alfred McCormack in a memorandum to Col Carter W. Clarke. McCormack, then “Mr McCormack,” had earlier been appointed as special assistant to the secretary of war to study the uses of Ultra and establish procedures for making the best use of this source. At the time of the memorandum, McCormack was deputy chief of the Special Branch and worked for its chief, Colonel Clarke. The purpose of the Special Branch was to handle signals intelligence. McCormack’s memorandum consists of 54 pages on the origin, functions, and problems of the Special Branch, Military Intelligence Service (MIS). In this memorandum, McCormack describes, in his view, Ultra security requirements as follows:

One lapse of security is all that is necessary to dry up a radio intercept source. Therefore, both on the officer level and below, only persons of the greatest good sense and discretion should be employed on this work. This consideration is basic since intercept information involves a different kind of secrecy than does most other classified information. It will make no difference a year from now how much the enemy knows about our present troop dispositions, about the whereabouts of our naval forces or about other similar facts that now are clearly guarded secrets. But it will make a lot of difference one year from now—and possibly many years from now—whether the enemy has learned that in April 1942 we were reading his most secret codes. Not present secrecy, not merely secrecy until the battle is over, but permanent secrecy of this operation is what we should strive for. 3

This secrecy was maintained throughout the war. Only carefully selected individuals in Washington and in the field had access to the information produced through these intercepts. The procedures for use by field commanders and their personnel, including controls established to protect the information and its source were laid out in a letter to General Eisenhower from General Marshall on 15 March 1944. These procedures lasted at least through the end of the war. 4

1. page 394, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism - Richard Gid Powers - New York: The Free Press, 1995

2. Casey: From the OSS to the CIA - Joseph E. Persico - Viking Publishers, Inc. 1990

3. John Mendelsohn, ed., Covert Warfare: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and Military Deception During the World War II Era 18 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989), Volume 1, Ultra Magic and the Allies, Chapter. 8, “Origins, Functions, and Problems of the Special Branch, MIS,” 27.

4. Ibid., Mendelsohn, Vol. 1, Chapter. 4, “Synthesis of Experiences in the Use of ULTRA Intelligence by U.S. Army Field Commands in the European Theater of Operations,” 4.

Note: Dean Acheson’s book, Present at the Creation, also delves into the various infighting and competition which both McCormack and Acheson faced in the aftermath of World War II, relating to the re-organization of the Intelligence Agencies leading up to the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency.

See pages 159-69

Also See:

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchro...attle/chp7.html

As a final note, I would mention that I have no idea, when or if, either of these organizations were dissoved, or just faded away. My main point is that even if they did, the dynamics of the group, or group, would certainly seem a possibility when considering a parallel organization to the CIA.

Robert

This is just an FYI, to all interested......

Maxwell Taylor

http://books.google.com/books?id=egIPFBz18...+Taylor&lr=

Autobiography of one of the foremost military heroes of recent American history. This volume tells of his command of the 101st Airborne Division, Kennedy's naming of him as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his embassy to Vietnam in 1965.

More details

Swords and Plowshares

By Maxwell D. Taylor

Published by Da Capo Press, 1990

ISBN 0306804077, 9780306804076

468 pages

More details

General Maxwell Taylor: The Sword and the Pen

By John M. Taylor

Published by Doubleday, 1989

Original from the University of Michigan

Digitized Nov 21, 2006

ISBN 0385243812, 9780385243810

457 pages

The son of the distinguished general profiles his father's long career and his key role in such events as the Vietnam War, nuclear retaliation, and the Bay of Pigs invasion

Early History of the Council on Foreign Relations

By Whitney Hart Shepardson, Overbrook Press

Published by Overbrook Press, 1960

19 pages

Whitney Shepardson is also mentioned in a French book entitled Les secrets de l'affaire Jean Moulin By Jacques Baynac

http://books.google.com/books?id=o1muAAAAI...p;q=&pgis=1

Key words and phrases

Jean Moulin, Caluire, René Hardy, Gestapo, Henri Frenay, Daniel Cordier, Pierre Cot, BCRA, Alger, Philippe Monod, Henri Calef, Allen Dulles, NARA, Raymond Aubrac, Lydie, Pierre Kaan, Berty Albrecht, Claude Bourdet, Lucie Aubrac, général Delestraint

More details

Les secrets de l'affaire Jean Moulin: contexte causes et circonstances

By Jacques Baynac

Published by Editions Du Seuil, 1998

ISBN 2020331640, 9782020331647

511 pages

My non-existing French is a little bit shaky, but I believe the last book is entitled.

The Secrets of the Jean Moulin Affair: Context, Causes and Circumstances.

As I understand it the backdrop to this scenario is that Jean Moulin was compromised and found out by the Nazi's in 1943....

I don't know much about it, but here is a link that reveals some of the details......

http://www.geocities.com/resistancehistory/hardy.html