Courtney A. Evans Dies

[John Simkin]

Courtney A. Evans, 95, a top FBI official who served as a liaison among FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, died on 11th December.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0010503663.html

Interestingly, Evans is mentioned in Christine Keeler's autobiography, The Truth at Last (2001):

When the FBI investigated they were able to involve Maria Novotny with a Hungarian madam in New York. What alarmed them further was my association with Eugene Ivanov. You could see how two and two could add up to a very big number indeed with all this information. I believe the Americans were convinced that a worldwide sex-for-information network, an elaborate blackmail operation, was going on. And that the most powerful man in the world, their president, had sampled the pleasures of these female sex spies. Certainly, Bobby Kennedy did not conceal the concerns of himself and his brother.

The Bowtie files talk of Stephen's American connections such as Averell Harriman, the former US ambassador to London, and the billionaire Paul Getty. There is mention of the "Man in the Mask" party. Mariella's story was published on 29 June 1963, and she talked only of Suzy Chang and "a US government official who holds a very high elected post".

At 3.05 p.m. that same afternoon, the President's brother called Courtney Evans, a senior deputy of the FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, to tell him about the story and order an investigation. According to a memo, "the Attorney General stated that the President had expressed concern regarding this matter'. The FBI, which had been concentrating, foolishly, on the air force guys, now went all a flutter. Memos were circulated between Hoover and his deputies about the possibility of "an espionage-prostitution ring operating in England with American ramifications".

Bowtie files show that FBI agents were sent out all over America, where Suzy Chang and Maria Novotny had worked. They identified Chang as Esther Sue Yan Chang, the daughter of two Chinese immigrants who lived in New York, but who had herself been refused a visa to live in America.