Welcome to the sixth installment in my ongoing examination of the sinister forces behind the rise of
Donald J. Trump. This series grew out of
a prior post I had published late last year examining Trump's ties to the infamous gaming interest
Resorts International. As was noted before there, Resorts had extensive ties to both organized crime as well as the deep state, even owning its own private intelligence company (Intertel) heavily staffed with former US intelligence officers.
Resorts grew out of a Florida-based company known as the Mary Carter Paint Company that was widely believed to be a CIA front active in anti-Castro activities during the early 1960s. By the end of the decade it had transformed into Resorts, with its own private fiefdom on the Bahama's
Paradise Island. It had contacts with such Overworld figures as billionaire
Howard Hughes and President
Richard Nixon while also rubbing shoulders with various
Lansky associates and "rogue" financiers such as
Robert Vesco and William Mellon Hitchcock.
By the time Trump took over Resorts as its CEO in 1987, the gaming interest had taken a lower profile but still had ample connections throughout the Over and Underworlds in addition to the deep state. In many ways, Trump's ascension to the CEO-ship of Resorts was a kind of coming out party, announcing that he had arrived a a major player. As was noted in parts
one and
two of this series, Trump's rise in such circles had begun less than a decade ago when he began making extensive contacts among the
Syndicate and other curious criminal enterprises, such as The Company, a Kentucky-based drug-and-arms smuggling network extensive staffed by "former" law enforcement and US military personnel.
With part
three of this series I began to focus in on the man who initiated Trump into such rarefied circles, his longtime attorney and political mentor
Roy Cohn. Cohn had cut his teeth as
Joseph McCarthy's attorney during the
Red Scare of the early 1950s before returning to New York City, where he emerged as a major pawnbroker both within the city itself and nationally. The source of Cohn's power was long reputed to be various sexual blackmail operations he was involved in. His ties to such infamous figures as former CIA director
William Casey, Republican lobbyists
Craig Spence and
Robert Keith Gray and the
Franklin scandal were considered in
part four of this series.
With the
fifth and most recent installment I began to consider one of Cohn's longtime associates, private detective
Thomas Corbally. Corbally spent decades under covering various sex scandals across the West. His involvement in a Hollywood sex scandal that unfolded during the early 1990s was considered there.
As I was wrapping up I began to move onto Corbally's involvement in what is commonly referred to as the
Profumo affair. The scandal began in 1961 when UK Secretary of State for War
John Profumo began an affair with
Christine Keeler, who at the time was also sleeping with
Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attache working for the
GRU (the Soviet Union's military intelligence). The scandal eventually emerged in 1963 and brought down the
Conservative government of
Harold Macmillan.
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| Christine Keeler |
The man who set up Keeler with both Profumo and Ivanov was an osteopath named
Stephen Ward. Well known among UK high society, Ward had established contacts with both
MI5 and
MI6 in addition to becoming a close friend of
Viscount William Waldorf Astor II. As was noted in that
installment, the
Astor family has been one of the most powerful Anglo-American dynasties around for centuries now. Lord Astor's
father had helped establish the
Round Table network, from which the infamous
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the
Royal Institute of International Affairs emerged from.
In the years leading up to World War II the senior William Waldorf Astor and his compatriots became major backers of Nazi Germany while frequently meeting at
Cliveden, the Astor family country estate. Cliveden would later play a key role in Profumo, being the site of many trysts the British aristocracy engaged in with the assistance of Ward.
Strange Goings-On and Stranger Friends
By the time Ward made the scene at Cliveden, he was an old hand at aristocrat sex parties. Reportedly he had gotten his start in the late 1940s and had early on made contacts in very high society. He was reputed, for instance, to have hobnobbed with
Prince Philip at his now infamous
Thursday Club gatherings. As the 1950s set in, things appear to have gotten especially strange at these parties.
"Ward would write, without naming names, of parties devoted to masochism and sadism...:
I remember one dinner party where all round the room were girls and men tied and gagged in various attitudes and they so remained during the entire meal. Suffering was an essential part of this enjoyment. No cruelty was done – I never myself saw any cruelty, though I certainly heard of it being practiced.
It is a kind of ritual sadomasochism... One of the most noticeable things about these people is the high standard of intelligence among them... rather like an intellectual cocktail party. The ceremonies usually start as follows – a large collection of chairs, straps and apparently fierce instruments would be produced and laid out in a formal manner on a low table. A beautiful girl would step forward and remove her clothes. The master, as he was called, would sit on a kind of throne. The girl would kneel before him and kiss his feet... She would be dressed in a wide, studded black leather belt, high-heeled black shoes and straps around her wrists, neck and ankles... A ritual punishment was administered. Finally, long bars were fastened to hooks in the straps... in such a way that the legs were widely separated... and a gag was placed in her mouth.
Drinks would now be brought and the secured girl would be left lying or standing while the guests stood around discussing the finer points... When this was over everyone looked normal again... There we were back at a normal cocktail party again.
"Ward also described satanic rituals – he had a fascination with black magic, according to Michael Bentine. 'At one such party in Kensington, there was a huge and obscene priapic emblem in the middle of the room. All the girls, and there were about a dozen, knelt down around it and made obeisance... the spontaneous way in which it was done made me realise they had all done it many times before...' "
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pgs. 47-48)
The sadomasochistic nature of these sex parties is a reoccurring theme among the networks Corbally investigated, so do keep it in mind. Ward's interest in the occult is most interesting as well, for reasons that shall be evident in a future installment.
There are indications that these ritualistic sex parties were carried on at Cliveden in the early 1960s when Profumo was unfolding as well. In the aftermath of the scandal, Lord Astor's health deteriorated rapidly. His wife blamed this on the forces Wad had unleashed at Cliveden.
"Astor's health declined to such an extent that his wife decided to have Cliveden exorcised and as the well-known Roman Catholic exorcist Dom Robert Petipierre to perform the ceremony. A few weeks later Dom Robert returned to exorcise Ward's cottage – the new tenant had committed suicide by drowning himself in the kitchen sink. Bronwen remembers, 'Dom Robert wouldn't let me near the cottage otherwise I would have been knocked sideways. Even he could hardly walk through the door.' According to Dom Robert's own account, 'the evil powers emanating from the cottage were some of the strongest I've ever experienced.' "
(An Affair of State, Phillip Knightly & Caroline Kennedy, pg. 257)
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| Stephen Ward's cottage at Cliveden |
If Lord Astor did in fact have an interest in the occult, he would just be carrying on a family tradition the American branch of the Astor clan appears to have been especially devoted too. For instance, in 1894
John Jacob Astor IV (one of the wealthiest men in the world who famously drowned on the
Titanic) published an early science fiction novel called
A Journey in Other Worlds. Set in the year 2000, the work considers the vast space exploration humanity has embarked upon, having reached both Jupiter and Saturn at the onset of the twenty-first century in this account. On Saturn they encounter spirit-like beings who provide the explorers with insights into their own deaths. Beyond Neptune, the explorers encounter an icy world known as Cassandra that houses the souls of "unworthy humans."
Clearly,
A Journey has a bit of an occult flavor to it. These duel interests in the occult and science fiction had an enormous influence on Astor's daughter,
Ava Alice Muriel Astor, more commonly known as Alice Bouverie. During the late 1940s, Alice Bouverie became one of the chief financial patrons of
ARTICHOKE scientist
Andrija Puharich. In 1948, Puharich established the Round Table Foundation with the financial assistance of Bouverie, which is curious considering the English branch of the Astor had their own far more notorious Round Table group noted above. Puharich would use the Round Table Foundation to initially explorer his theories concerning
ESP, but later it would become deeply involved in early research into
entheogens, specifically
magic mushrooms, in the 1950s. Alice Bouverie was deeply involved in this aspect of the research as well, as was noted before
here.
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| Alice Bouverie |
On New Years Eve 1952 Puharich conducted a seance in which he channeled entities that referred to themselves as The Nine. These beings claimed to be extraterrestrials who had transcended space and time. Puharich conducted another seance to invoke The Nine in 1953 that Bouverie participated in.
And here we find that less than a decade later her distant relative Lord William Waldorf Astor II appears to have been conducting his own curious rituals at the family estate of Cliveden. Clearly, the Astor family had developed some strange interests by at least the 1950s.
Lord Astor was not Ward's only high society friend with curious interests either. There was also
J. Paul Getty Jr., the son of the American oil tycoon from Texas.
"Ward knew the oil baron's executive assisting Claus von Bulow – real name Claus Borberg – a Danish aristocrat whose functions for Getty reportedly included obtaining a supply of 'rejuvenation' drugs and organising parties. Getty, a relentless womaniser, once boasted of having had sex with five women in a single day."
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pg. 192)
Several years after the Profumo affair blew up, Getty would become one of the chief financial patrons of infamous filmmaker and occultist
Kenneth Anger. Anger was a devotee of
Aleister Crowley and his films often featured occultic and fascist themes. In the wake of the relative success of 1963's
Scorpio Rising, Getty brought Anger to the UK where he quickly made
in roads among high society:
"The screenings also opened up new streams of finance, as younger heirs to foundational American fortunes became entranced with the burgeoning hippie movement and wanted to participate, or at least invest. One such scion, John Paul Getty Jr., invited Anger to London, where he was scooped up by the demimonde and soon found himself at parties with the art dealer Robert Fraser, hanging with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and eventually living with Mick Jagger and his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, and later Keith Richards and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. Both couples soon became interested in the occult movement and devil worship, dabbling in it to the extent that Anger’s teachings pushed them to record a new song called 'Sympathy for the Devil,' with new converts Faithfull and Pallenberg singing backup."
Anger would go on to make his most famous film,
Lucifer Rising, several years later. Initially set to feature a soundtrack by
Led Zeppelin's
Jimmy Page, the film starred Mansonite and convicted murderer
Bobby Beausoleil (who ultimately did the soundtrack, from prison, as well). Anger is now widely considered to be an icon of underground and gay cinema, the inventor of the "
Midnight Movie," an an enormous influence on the then-emerging
1960s counterculture.
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| Kenneth Anger |
The scion of at least one other wealthy and powerful American family that would play a key role in bank rolling the American counterculture also appears to have been a part of Ward's circle. His name was William Mellon Hitchcock, whose name should be familiar to those of you who have been following this series. As was noted in
the examination of Resorts International, "Mr. Billy" (as Hitchcock was known to his family and friends) had been an early investor in Resorts' Paradise Island casino.
Around the time of Profumo affair going public, Mr. Billy had hooked up with
Timothy Leary and had opened up his estate at
Millbrook to Leary's psychedelic evangelicalism. Mr. Billy would later become the banker for the
Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which by the end of the 1960s had become the largest LSD syndicate in the world. To say that Mr. Billy played an enormous role in the spread of LSD would be an understatement. And given the curious interests of the Astor and Getty families, he would have certainly been in receptive company. More on Mr. Billy's role in the Profumo scandal will be noted in a moment so do keep him in mind.
Before moving along, it is worth noting one final reputed member of Ward's circle: Mary Ann MacLean, more commonly known as Mary Ann De Grimston. Along with her husband
Robert, Mary Ann founded the infamous
Process Church of the Final Judgment, the cult that has long been linked to the
Manson and
Son of Sam killings. It should be noted though that no compelling evidence has emerged linking Mary Ann to the Profumo scandal and former Process member (and apologist) Timothy Wylie is quick to dismiss such notions:
"It's been suggested in some recent articles that Mary Ann might have had some involvement with the Profumo affair, the sex scandal that brought down a cabinet minister and the conservative government. Before I joined The Process I bumped into Christine Keeler, one of the two call girls called as witnesses, who had heard nothing of Mary Ann. Besides, I'm perfectly certain that had she played a part in the scandal she'd have been only too ready to tell us all about it."
(Love Sex Fear Death, Timothy Wylie, pg. 55)
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| the infamous Mary Ann De Grimston |
As I noted above, there really is nothing compelling to link Mary Ann De Grimston to Profumo and I only mention it because the reputed cult behind the Manson and Son of Sam killings will be addressed at length in a future installment of this saga. What's more, Mary Ann may have had very compelling reasons for keeping her ties to Ward highly secretive. For we shall see, Profumo didn't just bring down a British government, it also almost brought down an American presidency as well.
But even if Mary Ann had nothing to do with Profumo, it cannot be denied that the circle around Stephen Ward would play an enormous role in funding the American counterculture and later
New Age movement. The Astor, Getty and Mellon families were all among the most prominent financial backers and here they are, engaged in bizarre sex parties featuring key members of a Conservative British government. But moving along.
The American Players
Before getting into Corbally's role in Profumo, I now need to address some of the intrigues playing out within the American deep state. Let us begin with Roy Cohn's patron, longtime FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover ruled over the
Federal Bureau of Investigation with the power few dictators enjoy, making it his own person fiefdom for decades. And like his protege, Hoover was an untouchable figure in Washington because of his proficiency in sexual blackmail. Hoover's Official and Confidential Files have become
the stuff of legend.
The only real challenge Hoover faced during long tenure was mounted by the Kennedy brothers, but most especially
Robert. RFK had become increasingly disillusioned with Hoover during the
McClellan hearings, feeling increasingly that the director had been stonewalling him. Upon JFK's election, RFK took over the Justice Department and mounted the nation's first semi-serious war on organized crime. In the process, his disillusionment with the director of the FBI only grew and there were increasing rumblings that the Kennedy brothers would soon move against him.
Hoover has long been alleged to have protected the mob from seriously scrutiny because it had obtained
sexual blackmail on Hoover. While this blackmail material may have existed since the 1930s, there are allegations that Roy Cohn, a longtime attorney for the mob, was regularly engaging Hoover in compromising activities by the late 1950s. These activities also involved
Lewis Rosenstiel, the mob connected founder of
Schenley Industries and a close friend of both Cohn and Hoover. It was Lewis' wife Susan who made the allegations.
"... During 1958 Susan Rosenstiel insists that she was dragged by her husband to the infamous get-together hosted by Roy Cohn in 'a beautiful suite... all done in light blue' at the Plaza in Manhattan at which the Director the FBI confronted her in false eyelashes and a black wig, his short legs crossed demurely beneath his fluffy hemline. A follow-up orgy allegedly featured the Director in a feathered boa, involved with a couple of sleek young street hustlers in a maneuver requiring – this was squeamish old Hoover, after all – rubber gloves!"
(Bobby and J. Edgar, Burton Hersh, pg. 87)
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| J. Edgar Hoover |
While these allegations have been widely dismissed, even by some of Hoover's harshest critics, there is circumstantial evidence Cohn was up to something very unsettling at the
Plaza during the late 1950s.
"One corroboratory sidelight turned up one New York attorney John Koltz began to investigate Roy Cohn on behalf of a client. Declassified New York government files and spadework by a private detective substantiated the allegation that there was indeed a 'blue suite' at the Plaza, Suite 233. 'Roy Cohn was providing protection,' Koltz discovered. 'There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That's where Cohn got his power from – blackmail.' Like scorpions investigating coitus, Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover would continue to circle each other with wary fascination for decades."
(Bobby and J. Edgar, Burton Hersh, pg. 88)
There are some interesting references to
Freemasonry in Cohn's alleged suite at the Plaza. It features the number 33, which is the highest grade in the
Scottish Rite. The suite was also described as blue and the most popular variation of Masonry in the US has long been the "
blue lodges," which feature only the first three grades. Even more curious, however, is the presence of the number 23 in Cohn's suite. This plays into the
23 enigma. But let us return to the matter at hand.
It seems highly likely that an opening salvo in the feud between Hoover and the Kennedy brothers involved the RFK-led Justice Department's attack on Roy Cohn.
"With John Kennedy president, Cohn sensed a hardening of the atmosphere. He rang up Jim Juliana, who had worked for him on McCarthy committee before signing on with Bobby. Should Cohn be concerned? Let's put it this way, Juliana warned him, 'Hoffa's number one. You're number two. Get out of town.'...
"... Before long Cohn heard that a ten-man team of tax investigators had been detached from the IRS to dig through Cohn's affairs, the 'Get-Cohn Squad.' It was soon evident to Cohn that an extraordinary barrage of covert methodology – mail cover, wiretaps, undistinguished physical surveillance – was starting to pound in, coordinated by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Roberts Morgenthau..."
(Bobby and J. Edgar, Burton Hersh, pg. 390)
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| Roy Cohn |
As was noted in part
three of this series, Cohn and RFK had first run afoul of one another during the McCarthy hearings, but Cohn's close ties to Hoover likely made him an even more appealing target once the Kennedy brothers had assumed power. By 1963, when the Profumo affair broke, there was quite a scorpion duel unfolding between Hoover and the Kennedy brothers.
"... In the 1950s, Meyer Lansky, and other mob figures such as Sam Giancana, supplied women to John F. Kennedy, some of whom were logged into Hoover's growing files of dirt on the young senator. In the 1960s this deep-political equilibrium was threatened by Robert Kennedy's war on organized crime, which alienated Hoover. Feeling increasingly threatening, especially after the Kennedy's began to collect their own files on Hoover, both Hoover and the mob began to escalate their collection of Kennedy sexual dirt. At first Hoover gained White House influenced by protecting the Kennedys against mob blackmail, but in 1963 Hoover, desperate, began to leak some of his own dirt on Kennedy to the public."
(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 228)
Fortunately for Hoover, Cohn's close associate Thomas Corbally had made some interesting discoveries in the UK of late.
Enter Corbally
Corbally first encountered Stephen Ward at some point towards the end of 1962, allegedly. In Corbally's version, the two men were at a party. Corbally was having trouble with his knee from an old injury and Ward, an osteopath, treated him on the spot. From there they soon became fast friends, with Corbally alleging that at one point Ward was visiting his flat at least twice day to treat the knee.
It is likely there was nothing chance about this encounter. In June of 1963, after Corbally had fled the UK in the wake of the scandal unfolding, he told the FBI that he had heard allegations of the Profumo affairs as far back as 1961. These were not the only claims Ward was making that interested Corbally either. Writing on BuzzFeed, Eamon Javers
notes:
"... Ward liked to tell people he had been a back-channel intermediary between the Soviets and the British government during the Cuban missile crisis. 'He knew a lot of pretty girls,' Corbally told the author Anthony Summers. 'And I like pretty girls. He liked to gossip and talked incessantly about the things he knew … I entertained a lot and Stephen was around my flat a lot.' One of the people Ward brought around to Corbally’s flat was the Russian, Yevgeny Ivanov."
Essentially Ward alleged that the UK had used his friendship with Ivanov, a key figure in the Profumo affair, to establish a back channel with the Soviet Union during the height of the
Cuban missile crisis. Corbally told the FBI that he had been advised that this claim was accurate. Corbally then appears to have had an interest in Ward's dealings for at least a year before the two men met.
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| Stephen Ward |
One is thus left with the distinct impression that Corbally was involved in some type of intelligence gathering operation that ultimately led him to Ward. But plying Ward for information on the goings-on in British high society at the time was hardly the extent of Corbally's activities in the UK at this time. A subsequent FBI report noted that Corbally himself "gave wild parties in his flat" (
An Affair of State, Phillip Knightly & Caroline Kennedy, pg. 200).
This is especially interesting in light of Corbally's flatmate:
"Sharing Corbally's London apartment was another American, William 'Billy' Hitchcock IV, grandson of the founder of Gulf Oil and a nephew of the immensely wealthy Mellon family. His monthly income was estimated at $100,000, an extraordinary sum in those days. Some of that money went to financing drug guru Timothy Leary's project to spread LSD use worldwide."
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pg. 249)
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| Mr. Billy is on the right |
Mr. Billy would begin bankrolling Leary in 1963, months after his role in the Profumo affair would come to a close. Thus, Mr. Billy was sharing a flat in London by at least 1962 with Thomas Corbally, a former
OSS and military intelligence officers long reputed to maintained ties with the CIA over the years and a close friend of far right luminary Roy Cohn. Corbally's own political ideology was considered quite conservative as well.
Nonetheless, Corbally appears to have been running orgies out of this flat that involved Stephen Ward and the same circle of British aristocrats caught up in the Profumo affair. And in the aftermath Mr. Billy, a scion of the deeply intelligence-connected Mellon clan (noted before
here), begins bankrolling Timothy Leary. And as noted above, eventually Mr. Billy would end up as the financier for the largest LSD smuggling ring in the world while simultaneously serving as an investor in Resorts International. The same Resorts International Roy Cohn's good friend and frequent client Donald Trump would end up as CEO of in 1987. While I've found no indication that Mr. Billy and Trump knew one another, both men shared at last one common friend: Thomas Corbally.
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| Thomas Corbally |
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let us return to the Corbally/Hitchcock flat for a moment. All of this is highly suggestive of some type of intelligence operation being run by both men and subsequent events appear to bare this out. For you see, it would be Corbally and Hitchcock who would ultimately confirm the Profumo affair to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whose government would be brought down by it.
Macmillan had been hearing rumblings about the affair for months, but in January of 1963 he turned to a most curious source to confirm or deny them.
"Macmillan's closest American friends was the ambassador, David Bruce, a great Anglophile, with whom he lunched regularly at Bucks Club. Macmillan had been hearing rumors about Profumo and Keeler since November the previous year. He had begun to suspect that his own advisers were not telling him the truth about the affair, either because they were involved in it themselves, or they were trying to cover up to avoid a scandal. So at one of his lunches with Bruce, the Prime Minister asked the ambassador to make discreet inquiries to see what he could discover.
"Bruce went to Thomas Corbally, the American businessman who was a friend of Ward. Bruce knew of this friendship from his nephew, Billy Mellon Hitchcock, the cousin of Center Hitchcock, the American who had taken Mandy Rice-Davies to Paris three months earlier. Corbally recalls, 'Ambassador Bruce asked me to find out what was going on and to let him know as quickly as possible. I telephoned Ward from Bruce's office and arranged a lunch --Ward, me, the ambassador's secretary Alfred Wells, and Billy Hitchcock.
" 'The lunch was held upstairs at Simpson's in Piccadilly in a booth where, we hoped, none of us would be recognised. There Ward told Wells the full story, including Christine's dealings with the newspapers and the letter from Profumo she had kept which made clear her relationship with him.' "
(An Affair of State, Phillip Knightly & Caroline Kennedy, pg. 157)
In
The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril give a slightly different chain of events. In their account, Ward confessed the affair to Hitchcock and Corbally on January 28th or 29th of 1963, at which point Mr. Billy promptly contacted his uncle,
David Bruce, who had married into the Mellon family. Corbally was then asked to visit the ambassador, who was also quite friendly with Lord Astor and who had visited Cliveden previously, the next day. Bruce asked Corbally to get to the bottom of the matter. This led to the meeting with Ward that included Corbally, Hitchcock and Alfred Wells, Bruce's secretary, on February 13th.
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| David Bruce |
As such, it is possible, maybe even probable, that it was Corbally and Hitchcock who formally blew the whistle on the Profumo/Keeler/Ivanov triangle. This is again highly suggestive of an intelligence agenda on the part of Corbally and Hitchcock, a possibly further bolstered by the fact that they turned to Hitchcock's uncle, US Ambassador David Bruce.
For you see, in addition to being a member of the Mellon family, Bruce, like Corbally, was also an OSS veteran (noted before
here). As such, it is quite possible Bruce and Corbally already knew each other or were at least aware of one another before the Profumo affair. What's more, this further indicates an intelligence operation as two of the three Americans initially involved in investigating the scandal on the American side were OSS veterans while the third, Mr. Billy, was related to Bruce and part of a family with extensive intelligence connections (noted before
here).
What happened next in regards to how Bruce's office handled then information they received from Corbally is a matter of much debate.
"What then of Ambassador Bruce himself? Did he or his office brief Prime Minister Macmillan in late January, as indicated by the FBI's dossier? A State Department document, an 'Eyes Only' report from Ambassador Bruce to President Kennedy sent in June 1963, offers more food for thought. It reads: 'Few people believe that Macmillan, whose private integrity has never been questioned, would have connived at a clumsy attempt to avoid an almost inevitable disclosure if he had known that Profumo had lied. Nor would it consort with the character of the PM to have done so.'
"How to explain this message, if Bruce had been given information on the Profumo case as early as January? How to explain it if, as memories of others and the file indicates, he had ordered his assistant Wells to investigate, and if Wells had informed the Prime Minister's office of what Corbally and his friend had learned from Ward, then what Wells learned directly from Ward – weeks before Profumo repeated his lie to Parliament?
"We examined not only Bruce's papers as released by the State Department, but also his journals, preserve since his death by the Virginia Historical Society. Bruce kept a meticulous record of each day's activity, down to comments on people he spoke with or met – even details of food served at dinner. The journal is almost pedantically detailed, and the entries for 28 and 29 January – when the Ambassador or his office supposedly told the Prime Minister's office what it had just learned – contain no mention of Profumo. Oddly, though, an entire page is missing from the journal at the relevant point. There is no way of knowing whether it once contained material on a tip-off to Prime Minister Macmillan.
"It may be no coincidence that, in the FBI dossier as released, Ambassador Bruce's response to a report of the FBI's interview with Corbally also turns out to be missing. So is a letter on the subject to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The FBI files indicate, moreover, that the original information given to Ambassador Bruce was not even passed to the State Department in Washington. It seems possible, therefore, that – until the case became public – Bruce simply decided to sit on it."
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pgs. 254-255)
In addition to the allegations that Bruce notified Macmillan of the affair, Corbally also reportedly briefed
Clive Bossom, a British government official, on what he had uncovered. At the time Bossom was the
Secretary of State for Air, a post somewhat akin to the
United States Secretary of the Air Force, but a cabinet level position in the British government nonetheless.
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| Clive Bossom |
And yet neither Corbally, Bruce or Hitchcock appear to have briefed any branch of the US government on these allegations until nearly June of 1963. When Corbally did talk, he approached Hoover's FBI, who in turn appear to have quietly conducted their own investigation without notifying the rest of the government of a scandal that could bring down the government of a crucial US alley.
When the scandal finally broke in the press, the Kennedy White House appears to have called an emergency meeting that featured the Secretary of Defense, the directors of the CIA and DIA and an Assistant Director of the FBI on June 20, 1963. That meeting remains heavily censored to this day and there are strong indications that the Kennedy White House was totally out of the loop in regards to what Corbally, Bruce and Hitchcock had uncovered in the UK.
Why would Corbally and company go to such lengths to block their investigation from the Kennedy White House while working with the UK government? And why was the Kennedy White House in turn so concerned when the scandal broke? Why did JFK initially meet with his Defense Secretary and various key figures in the US intelligence community before consulting with the State Department, which seemingly should have been who was first approached?
Is it because of a realization than an intelligence operation outside the purvey of the mainline US government had turned up something damning to the White House? All these questions and much more will be addressed in a future installment. Until then, stay tuned dear reader.
