Richard M. Bissell Jr.
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Richard M. Bissell Jr.
Richard Mervin Bissell Jr. (September 18, 1909 – February 7, 1994) was an American Central Intelligence Agency officer responsible for major projects such as the U-2 spy plane and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He is seen as one of the most important spymasters in CIA history. Early years Richard Mervin Bissell Jr. was the son of Richard Bissell, the president of Hartford Fire Insurance. He was born in the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, and went to Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts. Two of his fellow pupils at Groton were Joseph Alsop and Tracy Barnes. He studied history at Yale University, turning down membership in Skull and Bones, and graduating in 1932, then studied at the London School of Economics. He returned to Yale where he obtained a Ph.D. in economics in 1939. His brother, William, also attended Yale and became a member of Skull and Bones. Marshall Plan In July 1947, Bissell was recruited by W. Averell Harriman to run a committee to lobby for an e ...
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Hartford, Connecticut
Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since the 2010 United States census have indicated that Hartford is the fourth-largest city in Connecticut with a 2020 population of 121,054, behind the coastal cities of Bridgeport, New Haven, and Stamford. Hartford was founded in 1635 and is among the oldest cities in the United States. It is home to the country's oldest public art museum (Wadsworth Atheneum), the oldest publicly funded park (Bushnell Park), the oldest continuously published newspaper (the ''Hartford Courant''), and the second-oldest secondary school (Hartford Public High School). It is also home to the Mark Twain House, where the author wrote his most famous works and raised his family, among other historically significant sites. Mark Twain wrote in 1868, "Of all the beautifu ...
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Skull And Bones
Skull and Bones, also known as The Order, Order 322 or The Brotherhood of Death, is an undergraduate senior secret student society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The oldest senior class society at the university, Skull and Bones has become a cultural institution known for its powerful alumni and various conspiracy theories. It is one of the "Big Three" societies at Yale, the other two being Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head. The society's alumni organization, the Russell Trust Association, owns the organization's real estate and oversees the membership. The society is known informally as "Bones," and members are known as "Bonesmen," "Members of The Order" or "Initiated to The Order." History Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 after a dispute among Yale debating societies Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and the Calliopean Society over that season's Phi Beta Kappa awards. William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft co-founded "the Order of the Skull and Bones". Th ...
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Philip Graham
Philip Leslie Graham (July 18, 1915 – August 3, 1963) was an American newspaperman. He served as publisher and later co-owner of ''The Washington Post'' and its parent company, The Washington Post Company. During his years with the Post Company, Graham helped ''The Washington Post'' grow from a struggling local paper to a national publication and the Post Company expand to own other newspapers as well as radio and television stations. He was married to Katharine Graham, a daughter of Eugene Meyer, the previous owner of ''The Washington Post''. Graham, who had bipolar disorder, died by suicide in 1963, after which Katharine took over as publisher, making her one of the first women in charge of a major American newspaper. Early life Graham was born to a Lutheran family in Terry, South Dakota. He was raised in Miami where his father, Ernest R. ("Cap") Graham, made a career in farming and real estate, and was elected to the State Senate. His mother, the former Florence Morri ...
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Thomas Braden
Thomas Wardell Braden (February 22, 1917 – April 3, 2009) was an American CIA official, journalist (best remembered as the author of ''Eight Is Enough'', which spawned a television program), and co-host of the CNN show ''Crossfire''. Intelligence service in OSS and CIA After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1940, Braden enlisted in the British Army while the U.S. was still neutral in World War II, and he saw combat in Africa in the King's Royal Rifle Corps. When the United States entered the war, he was recruited by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and he was parachuted behind enemy lines into Nazi-occupied France. At the end of the war, with the encouragement of OSS Director William "Wild Bill" Donovan, who thought of Braden as a protégé, he and his OSS paratrooper compatriot Stewart Alsop wrote a journalistic book about the OSS, two years before it was replaced by Harry Truman with the CIA. Afte ...
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Stewart Alsop
Stewart Johonnot Oliver Alsop (May 17, 1914 – May 26, 1974) was an American newspaper columnist and political analyst. Early life Alsop was born and raised in Avon, Connecticut, from an old Yankee family. Alsop attended Groton School and Yale University. His parents were Joseph Wright Alsop IV (1876–1953) and Corinne Douglas Robinson (1886–1971). Through his mother, he was a grandnephew of Theodore Roosevelt. Early career After graduating from Yale in 1936, Alsop moved to New York City, where he worked as an editor for the publishing house of Doubleday, Doran. World War II After the United States entered World War II, Alsop joined the British Army because his high blood pressure precluded his joining the US Army. On June 20, 1944, Alsop married Patricia Barnard "Tish" Hankey (1926-2012), an Englishwoman. A month after the wedding, Alsop was allowed to transfer to the US Army, and he was immediately sent on a mission planned by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Fo ...
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Frank Wisner
Frank Gardiner Wisner (June 23, 1909 – October 29, 1965) was one of the founding officers of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and played a major role in CIA operations throughout the 1950s. Wisner began his intelligence career in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II. After the war, he headed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), one of the OSS successor organizations, from 1948 to 1950. In 1950, the OPC was placed under the Central Intelligence Agency and renamed the Directorate of Plans. First headed by Allen Dulles, Wisner succeeded Dulles in 1951 when Dulles was named Director of Central Intelligence. Wisner remained as Deputy Director of Plans (DDP) until September 1958, playing an important role in the early history of the CIA. He suffered a breakdown in 1958, and retired from the Agency in 1962. He committed suicide in 1965. Education and early career Wisner was educated at the University of Virginia, where he received both a B.A. and a LL.B. degree ...
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Gregg Herken
Gregg Herken is an American historian and museum curator who is Professor Emeritus of modern American diplomatic History at the University of California, Merced, whose scholarship mostly concerns the history of the development of atomic energy and the Cold War. Biography In 1969, Herken received a B.A. from University of California, Santa Cruz.Peggy Townsend"Gregg Herken: Unraveling history's mysteries" UC Santa Cruz, April 2, 2012 In 1974, he received a Ph.D. in modern American diplomatic history from Princeton University.James Leonard"History Professor Gregg Herken Creates Intriguing Courses Based on Scholarly Research" UC Merced, January 22, 2004 Herken held teaching positions at California State University, San Luis Obispo, Oberlin College, Yale University, and California Institute of Technology, and was a Fulbright-Hays senior research scholar at Lund University. During 1988–2003 he was senior historian and curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Spac ...
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Georgetown Set
Georgetown or George Town may refer to: Places Africa *George, South Africa, formerly known as Georgetown *Janjanbureh, Gambia, formerly known as Georgetown *Georgetown, Ascension Island, main settlement of the British territory of Ascension Island Asia *Georgetown, Allahabad, India *George Town, Chennai, India *George Town, Penang, capital city of the Malaysian state of Penang Europe *Georgetown, Blaenau Gwent, now part of the town of Tredegar in Wales * Georgetown, Dumfries and Galloway, a location in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland *Es Castell in Minorca, Spain, originally called Georgetown North and Central America Canada *Georgetown, Alberta *Georgetown, Newfoundland and Labrador *Georgetown, Ontario *Georgetown, Prince Edward Island Caribbean *George Town, Bahamas, a village in Exuma District, Bahamas * George Town, Belize, a village in Stann Creek District, Belize *George Town, Cayman Islands, the capital city on Grand Cayman *Georgetown, Saint Vincent and the Grenadine ...
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Office Of Policy Coordination
The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was the covert operation wing of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Created as a department of the CIA in 1948, it actually operated independently until October 1950. OPC existed until 1 August 1952, when it was merged with the Office of Special Operations (OSO) to form the Directorate of Plans (DDP). History OPC was preceded by the Special Procedures Group (SPG), whose creation in March 1948 had been authorized in December 1947 with President Harry Truman's approval of the top-secret policy paper NSC4-A. SPG was located within the CIA's Office of Special Operations (OSO), the CIA department responsible for intelligence collection, and was first used to influence the Italian election of 1948, a policy success which demonstrated that psychological/political warfare could be the key to winning the Cold War. OSO, the successor to the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), was headed by an Assistant Director for Special Operations (A ...
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Economic Cooperation Administration
The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) was a U.S. government agency set up in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan. It reported to both the State Department and the Department of Commerce. The agency's first head was Paul G. Hoffman, a former leader of car manufacturer Studebaker; he was succeeded by William Chapman Foster in 1950. The rest of the organization was also headed by major business figures such as Arthur A. Kimball (who was a key contributor to the ECA's founding) as well as David K.E. Bruce (who worked at the Office of Strategic Services in Europe during World War II). The ECA had an office in the capital of each of the 16 countries participating in the Marshall Plan. In theory the ECA served as joint administrator of the Marshall Plan development projects in each European country. In practice, local officials knew far more about what was needed than ECA representatives, who developed a management strategy of listening to local officials and allowed them to s ...
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Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between the Baltic and North seas to the north, and the Alps to the south; it covers an area of , with a population of almost 84 million within its 16 constituent states. Germany borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, and France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands to the west. The nation's capital and most populous city is Berlin and its financial centre is Frankfurt; the largest urban area is the Ruhr. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity. A region named Germania was documented before AD 100. In 962, the Kingdom of Germany formed the bulk of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th ce ...
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