History Forum / General / General Topics / April 2005

Propaganda is the bread and butter of covert action.
--Gregory Treverton

            Andy Rooney, War Propagandist, Liar

http://www.dcdave.com/article4/050423.htm

When the usually humorous octogenarian 60 Minutes commentator, Andy
Rooney, turned serious on the eve of America's air assault on
Yugoslavia and issued what amounted to a journalistic blank check for
any military adventure our rulers might deign to embark upon, I was
understandably appalled.

Just as understandably, his words were very well received by the
beneficiaries of the blank check.  When Vice Admiral James W. Metzger,
Commander, U.S. Seventh Fleet, addressed the Foreign Correspondents
Club of Hong Kong on
December 8, 2000, he began his remarks this way:

I must tell you that I have a lot of respect for the journalism
profession. The media play a critical role in American society, as they
do elsewhere. Each of you is in a position to educate the public in a
very powerful way. In a sense you ensure that fairness and openness
prevail.

About 20 months ago, a journalist impacted me most profoundly. On that
Sunday, veteran CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney's 60 Minutes
commentary recharged my sense of purpose as a naval officer. I would
like to share with you his words because I feel they explain -- in Mr.
Rooney's own eloquently unique style -- why we do what we do in the
U.S. military. This story gives sense to a national military strategy.

Andy Rooney said: "When I was in college, Adolf Hitler was trying to
take over Europe. There was a political movement here called America
First, led by a senator from Montana named Burton K. Wheeler. America
First was telling everyone that Europe's problem was none of our
business, and I agreed. Some philosopher I'd read in college had
written  that any peace is better than any war, and that seemed true to
me. Why  should I die for someone else's freedom? I was certain it was
wrong for  Americans to get involved in the war in faraway Europe. The
draft board  didn't care what I thought, and I was dragged out of
college and into  the army, kicking and screaming.

"After following the tanks and infantry across France and into Germany
as a reporter for the 'Stars and Stripes,' I got to a small prison camp
in a town named Thekla (ph). About 250 Jewish prisoners in it had been
forced as slave labor to make wings for German fighter planes.

"When the guards heard we were coming, they poured gas on the roofs of
two of the barracks, and with the prisoners still inside, set them on
fire.

"Two days later, I got to Buchenwald. By this time, I knew how wrong
the idea of America First was.

"I've never forgotten how dumb I was, thinking it was someone else's
war. I smile and shake my head now when I hear a young senator say the
slaughter of the Albanians in Kosovo is none of our business.

"It's not really a smile, I guess. I don't know what it is. I'm saying
to myself, 'I understand, Senator. I used to be as wrong as you are.'"

Rooney continued:

"The argument against our involvement in Yugoslavia is that we can't
correct every evil in every part of the world. Of course we can't, but
that doesn't make it wrong for us to stop the slaughter in Kosovo. A
doctor doesn't turn you down as a patient because he can't cure the
whole world. We have the weapons, we have the money, and we have the
moral authority. We even have some help from other countries this time.

"There's nothing in it for us. No big oil company is going to make
money, no bankers. All we'll get out of it is the good feeling of
knowing we're helping a lot of poor folks who don't have the power to
help themselves.

"It didn't seem as if I'd ever say it about him a few months ago, but I
trust President Clinton in this matter. I trust my country. I'm proud."

Ladies and gentlemen, that says it all. I would imagine that Mr. Rooney
influenced public opinion that Sunday evening. I can tell you--without
question --he influenced me. I knew without a doubt as I listened to
him speak that evening that Andy Rooney was right on the mark. And so,
it is clear to me that it is imperative for the nations of the Pacific
Rim, including the United States, to work together toward the common
good of the people of this region, just as Andy Rooney talked about a
commitment in Europe. (end speech excerpt)

The United States embassy in Tokyo thought so much of Admiral Metzger's
remarks that they have posted them on their web site at
http://tokyo.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-c243.html .

Poor Logic

The nonsense of Rooney's argument, on several levels, should be
apparent to anyone with critical faculties.  First, and most obviously,
there's no reason why Rooney's experience should have anything to do
with turmoil in the Balkans.  And he as much as admits that the
internal dispute between the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo
has nothing at all to do with America's vital interests.  Furthermore,
Rooney's experience really has little to do with whether we should have
entered World War II on the side of the British and the Soviet Union
against the Germans, Italians, and Japanese.  He's talking about one
small atrocity late in the war, but before our decision to get
involved, the atrocity score was already pretty heavily on the side of
Stalin and the Soviet Union, what with the artificial famine
http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/  inflicted on the Ukrainians in
the early 1930s and the massacre of the Polish officer corps at Katyn
Forest  http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/ in 1939, to take
just two examples.

And though they played some serious catch-up later, one can make a
strong case that the Germans never came close to the Soviets in the
oppression and slaughter  http://www.orwelltoday.com/stalinbook.shtml
game.  Basing foreign policy decisions on who's mean to whom is also
pretty dodgy business.  The small-scale episode that Rooney describes
might even be dismissed as just the work of some low level bad apples,
like the United States has treated the My Lai massacre and its ongoing
dismissal of its own torture practices in the "war on terrorism."  In
this instance, Rooney's discovery of the viciousness of some Germans is
used to justify not only U.S. participation in World War II, but the
clear implication is that it also justifies government leaders'
decisions to go to war from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq.  A good title
for his little vignette could be "How I Learned that Big Brother Always
Knows Best."  In fact, he comes pretty close to that with his summing
up, equating the war-making president with the nation: "I trust my
country. I'm proud."

And just as such reasoning serves as permanent justification for any
U.S. presidential war against anybody, it would serve just as well for
anyone else to go to war against us.  All the adversaries would need to
do would be to refer to the My Lai massacre or to the napalming of a
friendly Vietnamese village http://www.dcdave.com/article1/061098.html
and point their own young Andy Rooneys in our direction.  The Rooney
logic is a blueprint for permanent war.

Worse Facts

Anyone capable of so torturing logic to justify the wholesale killing
and maiming that is war is hardly to be trusted when it comes to facts,
either.  The cause for which the United States would end up bombing one
civilian target after another in Serbia was, in Rooney's words, "to
stop the slaughter in Kosovo."  But was our air-dropped terror bombing
of Yugoslavia in any way justified? Was there really a slaughter going
on that had to be stopped?  The clear answers are "no" and "no."  In
the words of Nebojsa Malic, it was nothing but an "Evil Little War,"
http://www.antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=5312  like the current one in
Iraq, embarked upon for ginned up reasons.

"Most of the criticism of the 1999 war has focused on its conduct
(targeting practices, effects, 'collateral damage') and consequences.
But though the conduct of the war by NATO was atrocious and the
consequences have been dire and criminal, none of that changes the fact
that by its very nature and from the very beginning, NATO's attack was
a war of aggression: illegal, immoral, and unjust; not 'unsuccessful'
or 'mishandled,' but just plain wrong."

If Rooney could be so wrong, so pernicious and propagandistic about
Kosovo, one has to wonder if he is telling us the truth about what he
saw in Germany in 1945.  He was a reporter for the U.S. military
newspaper, Stars and Stripes, after all.

Before going any further, I would like to remind readers that we are
now beginning to tread upon some very politically risky ground.  You
see, Rooney described all the victims at Thekla as Jewish.  Since the
atrocity occurred as part of World War II, that means that their deaths
would be considered part of the Holocaust.  In many countries of the
world, laws have been passed making it an imprisoning offense to raise
doubts about the official Holocaust story.  Questioning Rooney's
veracity in this ticklish Thekla matter might well fall into that
category.

There are more reasons to question Rooney's truthfulness about this
episode than the ones we have raised.  This particular fit of
viciousness on the part of the German guards seems rather irrational.
With the Americans and the Russians well on their way to taking over
all of Germany, the likelihood that the perpetrators would be found and
punished, quite likely with the death penalty, would seem to be rather
high.  As low-level functionaries doing their job guarding prisoners,
on the other hand, one can presume that they would have been relatively
safe.  Their behavior in this instance would seem to go against the
elementary human urge toward self-preservation.  I must admit that the
moment I heard Rooney tell his story on 60 Minutes, I was suspicious
for this reason.

Admiral Metzger's rendering of Rooney's remarks provide an additional
reason for suspicion.  He gives the impression that he is repeating
Rooney's words verbatim.  He is not.  Rooney said that he was
accompanied by New York Times reporter, Frederick Graham. Might there
be some less than innocent reason for Metzger leaving that part out?
My suspicions sent me to the library to see what Graham had reported in
The Times.

Graham's article appeared on April 22, 1945, on page 12.  He calls the
prison camp, Camp Thekla, and he describes what appears to be the same
atrocity that took place on April 18.  He also mentions the presence of
the Stars and Stripes reporter, Andy Rooney.  Interestingly, he goes
into great detail as to the nationality of the victims, describing them
in editorial style as "inferior" (in Nazi eyes) Poles, Russians,
Czechs, Belgians, and French.  He doesn't say how he found out the
roasted victims' nationality.  The really interesting thing, though, is
that, in contrast to Rooney, in Graham's account, none of them are
Jews.  He never uses the words "Jew" or "Jewish" in his story.
In one stroke, Graham gets me off the hook as a "Holocaust doubter,"
needing in the future to be wary about traveling in Europe, while he
makes my doubts of Andy Rooney's veracity look even better.

More Inconsistencies

But no one, as it turns out, undermines Rooney's credibility any more
than Rooney himself.  Since Rooney was writing for Stars and Stripes,
he must have reported on the Thekla incident at the time.  I contacted
the librarian for the Stars and Stripes in Washington, DC, and was
promptly sent the following story from their archives under Rooney's
byline:

LEIPZIG, Germany, Apr. 20 (delayed)

--Listen a minute to one more horror story.

At 11 o'clock Wednesday morning, with the Americans a few hours away,
two SS
guards climbed to the roof of a clapboard barracks in the concentration
camp.
Two more handed gas cans up the ladder to the men on the roof.

A few minutes before they had hand-picked 100 political prisoners who
had   given them the most trouble and stuffed them in the long wooden
shack they used as barracks. The SS men carefully pulled down blackout
curtains and rammed home
bolts on the flimsy wooden doors.

The two men atop the barracks dumped their cans of gasoline over the
roof and
scrambled down. They made their way to one small exit left open for
them through the ten-foot electrically-charged fence and 12 feet of
curled barbed
wire which fitted close around the barracks.

Several of them broke open cases of incendiary grenades, and while
others stood in towers at corners of the enclosure, they tossed their
grenades into the gasoline-soaked tinder box with its hundred trapped
humans.

The men inside started to burn and the smell of burning flesh filled
the air.
They clawed at the windows and doors. Twenty struggled out and pulled
their
scorched bodies to the barbed wire. They were cut down by machine-guns
from
the towers.

A few of them got as far as the barbed wire, where they were trapped on
snags
and burned to death from the heat of the flames. A few lucky ones were
shot as
they threw themselves on the barbed wire.

Two got over the barbed wire, their bodies burned and torn, only to be
shot
dead by Nazis sitting quietly in the tower where they could watch the
whole
scene.

Four men who escaped from the camp told American soldiers the horror
story, but their words were unnecessary. The story told itself in one
glance at the burned ruins and the burned and half-burned men. (end
article)

Notice that in this story, there is no reference at all as to the
ethnicity of the victims, although it is replete with many tiny details
such as the exact time of the atrocity and what each of the German
guards did as they carried it out.  So specific is Rooney about what
happened before he arrived and so vague is he as to what he actually
saw, one gets the distinct impression that this is not really the
report of an eyewitness after the fact, as he told us on 60 Minutes.

"The story told itself in one glance at the burned ruins and the burned
and half-burned men."

Maybe so, but was it from Rooney's glance?

"Two days later, I got to Buchenwald," he says in his 60 Minutes
account.  His Thekla story is reported from Leipzig, and from further
research we learn that Thekla is a Leipzig suburb.  Buchenwald is to
the southwest of Leipzig, and at that time the U.S. Army was advancing
to the northeast toward Berlin.  Young Rooney, for some reason, seems
to have been going in the opposite direction from the assault.

Furthermore, he appears to be in disagreement with himself over the
number of victims.  Initially, he made it the nice round number of 100.
In the 60 Minutes account he speaks of 250 Jewish slave laborers and
we are given to believe that all of them were killed.  For his part,
Graham, of The New York Times, said there were 300 victims.

At this point, one gets the distinct impression that Mr. Rooney and Mr.
Graham, as well, are engaging in what H.L. Mencken politely calls, the
"synthesis of news."  Mencken, in his autobiographical "Newspaper Days,
1899-1906," admits to having fabricated large portions of his stories
as a young reporter covering some of the seamier portions of his native
Baltimore.  His purpose was to save time and labor.  How much more
likely is it that military and New York Times reporters would have done
it in wartime for political purposes!  The most important thing in such
news synthesis, according to Mencken, is that the stories by the
various reporters agree with one another.

"This labor-saving device was in use the whole time I covered South
Baltimore for the Herald, and I never heard any complaint against it.
Every one of the three city editors, comparing his paper to the other
two, was surprised and pleased to discover that his reporter always got
names and addresses right, and all three of us were sometimes commended
for our unusual accuracy....

"Thus, in my tenderest years, I became familiar with the great art of
synthesizing news, and gradually took in the massive fact that
journalism is not an exact science."  (reprinted in H. L. Mencken, A
Choice of Days, Edward L. Galligan, editor, Vintage Books, 1980, pp.
210-211)

As it happens, Rooney wrote about Thekla at least one other time, and
then he was more carefully on the same page as Graham, saying that the
guards "...herded 300 prisoners into barracks..." before burning them.

The account is from his 1995 book, "My War," pp. 259-260.  In that
telling, not only was his head count the same as Graham's, but he was
moving in the right direction, with the troops toward Berlin:

"For all the impact Buchenwald had on all of us who saw it in that
first week, it was a much smaller camp I saw several days later, on
April 20, that is more vivid in my mind.  It was called simply Thekla
for the name of the town in what became East Germany...

"The Fifth Armored Division had blown through Thekla the day before we
arrived...

"The compound had housed several thousand slave laborers who worked in
the adjacent aircraft factory and about 1,200 Jews, but we were never
sure, from what our guide said, how the Jewish prisoners worked in
relation to the other prisoners."

Here, apparently for the first time, Jews are introduced into the
narrative.  Rooney doesn't yet describe them as the victims of the
massacre, but leaves readers with that impression by immediately
launching into a section on the Nazi laws that were passed
discriminating against Jews.

If his memory of Thekla was so vivid, one would think he would remember
whether he saw it before or after he saw Buchenwald.  You'd also think
he would know which army outfit happened upon Thekla.  According to
their official history, available in the National Archives, the Fifth
Armored Division never got anywhere near Leipzig or its suburb, Thekla.
As we can see from their official map,
http://www.dcdave.com/article4/rooneymap.JPG compared to a map of
Germany,
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mapshells/europe/germany/germany.htm their
line of advance kept them at least 100 kilometers to the north of
Leipzig.  Not surprisingly, in their account of their operations, they
make no mention of having come upon a German labor camp where an
atrocity had recently occurred, and, of course, they make no mention of
the town of Thekla.  Why should they, when this Leipzig suburb was so
far from where they were?

Did It Happen at All?

At this point we must seriously question not only whether the victims
of the Thekla atrocity were Jewish, but whether any such atrocity took
place at all.  If it had to come down to taking Rooney's word for it,
we'd have to rule it out, so thoroughly is his account contradicted by
official documents and by his own words.  Given 60 Minutes precedent
and CBS history, we should not be surprised if this is all one big lie.
We still remember Mike Wallace, in his piece on the death of Deputy
White House Counsel Vincent Foster, looking straight into the camera
and saying most solemnly, "The forensic evidence shows that the fatal
bullet had been fired into Foster's mouth from the gun found in
Foster's hand and that Foster's thumb had pulled the trigger."

That was a patent lie.  No bullet was ever found, and Foster's
fingerprints were not on the gun.  Further discussion of Wallace's
mendacity on that program can be found at "The Reign of the Lie."
http://www.dcdave.com/article1/990720.html

The longtime connection of CBS founder and chairman of the board,
Colonel William S. Paley, to the intelligence community is discussed at
some length in "Clinton and Cronkite: Odd Couple?"
http://www.dcdave.com/article2/082798.html There, he is described by
author Deborah Davis as a man "who believed that the commercial media,
as well as the military, must develop 'all manner of propaganda' to
help in the war effort...."  In Andy Rooney, it would appear, he found
a reliable veteran in that cause, whatever war that might be.

Admiral Metzger's Navy doesn't have the best of records when it comes
to "official investigations," either, considering the ones they have
done on the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty,
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ul-boston.html the gun turret
explosion on the USS Iowa, http://www.iprr.org/Reviews/IOWAreview.html
and the death of former Navy and Defense Secretary, James V. Forrestal,
http://www.dcdave.com/article4/040927.html to cite three of their more
notable cover-ups.

Another Source

We have not completely laid the Thekla atrocity story to rest, however.
Although in the shelves of books that have been written on the
beastliness of the Nazis, the word "Thekla" hardly turns up at all, it
is not entirely absent from the written record.  Most recently, apart
from Rooney, Robert H. Abzug in his 1985 book, Inside the Vicious
Heart, Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, treats
it at some length and detail, complete with ghastly photographs of
burned corpses near a barbed wire fence.  The language is lurid and
evocative:

"Margaret Bourke-White of Life was among the first reporters to view
Thekla, its ruins and corpses left undisturbed pending autopsies and
press coverage.  The terrible charred bodies, caught in motion as they
fled the flames and rifle fire, etched the tragedy of individual humans
in a manner different from what was observed at the larger camps.

"'Some of the victims were so close to freedom,' Bourke-White recalled
soon after, 'that it made my heart bleed to see them.'  She was told of
the Polish professor who had been an aircraft technician (and the
survivors pointed him out)--his body aflame, still he had managed to
squeeze himself halfway through the outer fence.  'The shriveled lower
half of his body lay in cinders within the enclosure,' she wrote, with
his charred crutch close by, but the fine intellectual bald head thrust
through to the outside was still unmarred, with even the spectacles in
place.  He must have been much loved; the survivors shed many tears
over him.'  Another man's blistered body had a silver cross around its
neck.  A returned survivor of Thekla knelt down, touched the medal, and
said, 'Blood on the cross'" (p. 77).

That's at least one victim that we can be sure was not Jewish.

Abzug's sources may not agree on the number killed--from one paragraph
to the next on page 75 the separately-reported number of victims goes
from "about 200" to "about 60"--but he's at least within the realm of
possibility when it comes to which American Army unit happened upon the
war crime scene:

"Men of the First Army were shown a similar atrocity as they surged
eastward toward the Elbe.  On April 18th, as the fight for Leipzig was
winding down, an escaped French prisoner made contact with Lieutenant
Daniel Camous, a French officer attached to the American army.  He led
Camous to the [Leipzig] suburb of Thekla, northeast of the city, and
showed him what remained of a small labor camp that had supplied slaves
for an aircraft factory near by." (pp. 74-75)

Another trip to the National Archives to see what the First Army
reported for its activities in the month of April 1945 revealed that it
was, indeed, all over the Leipzig area:

"On 20 April the remaining area of resistance in the Harz Mountains was
reduced to a pocket around Thale.  The enemy, however, counterattacked
at Bitterfeld, previously the scene of determined fighting and, with
the final occupation of Leipzig, our troops pushed on against weakened
resistance to seize Hohenleina and Rodefeld."
Missing, however, in the extensive report is any mention of the town or
suburb of Thekla or any prison camp or atrocity resembling the one
described by Rooney and Abzug.  One might think that that is because
the report confined itself to purely battlefield operations, but that
is not the case.  Consider the following section:

d.  Violations of the Geneva Convention :  A total of eight violations
were formally reported during the month, and forwarded to the
Commanding General, Twelfth Army Group.  Six of these investigations
were made by Inspectors General from this headquarters, and the other
two by Inspectors General of subordinate commands.

e.  During the period covered by this report First Army troops overran
two more "murder factories", located at Buchenwald and Nordhausen, and
the War Crimes Investigating Team attached to this headquarters from
Twelfth Army Group as well as Inspectors General from this office and
officers from the Staff Judge Advocate's section were engaged upon the
investigation resulting therefrom.
The horrible slaughter of defenseless victims described by Rooney,
Abzug, et al. should have been worth a mention as a war crime and
Geneva Convention violation, it would seem.  But maybe not.

The atrocity to which Thekla was said to have been similar, in the
passage from Abzug above, was, according to Abzug, encountered by the
Fifth Armored Division, and as described it was much worse than the
Thekla incident.  "Hundreds" of prisoners which had been in transit had
been herded into a large barn, the doors had been locked, and the
building had been set afire, burning them all to death.  This
supposedly had taken place near the town of Gardelegen.  This town was
in the Fifth Armored Division's zone of operation.  It is mentioned
twice in that unit's April report as being on the southern border of
the area that they covered.  Somehow, though, the atrocity described by
Abzug, as well as by Time magazine on April 30, 1945, which set the
number of victims at 500, managed to escape mention by the Fifth
Armored Division in its official report.

Time, in the same issue, describes an atrocity identical in almost
every respect to Thekla, but gives the name of the prison camp as
"Erla," the same name that Bourke-White uses for what Abzug says was
the Thekla atrocity.  To further confuse matters, Time has a photograph
of a charred body in repose, leaning on a brick foundation with what
looks like the remains of burned straw in one hand.  That picture,
according to Time, is of an Erla victim.  Abzug has the identical
photograph in his book, which he identifies as a "prisoner burned alive
at Gardelegen, April 16, 1945."

What's going on here?  The following quote from Mark Zepezauer's book,
"The CIA's Greatest Hits," is perhaps germane:

"The three most valuable media assets the CIA could count on were
William Paley's CBS, Arthur Sulzberger's New York Times and Henry
Luce's Time/Life empire. All three bent over backwards promoting the
picture of Oswald as a lone nut in the JFK assassination."
(See
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/Wurlitzer_CIAHits.html)

As we have seen, all three news organizations were involved in
disseminating the Thekla atrocity story as well, and doing it with the
same sort of inconsistencies that undermine confidence in the official
story in the Kennedy assassination.  If they were acting as "media
assets" to the CIA in one case, it should not surprise us to see them
performing in that capacity in the other case as well, although, for
the Thekla story, it would initially have been for the CIA's
predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

But what about the author, Mr. Abzug?  We find from a Net search that
he is a professor of Jewish studies and chairman of the Department of
American Studies at the University of Texas.  The former capacity
suggests that he is a partisan with a axe to grind when it comes to
reporting on World War II, and his book, from its accusatory title to
its almost cartoonish portrayal of the villainous Germans does nothing
to suggest that he is a dispassionate, objective scholar.  The latter
capacity suggests that he might well be in the same business as CBS,
The New York Times, and Time-Life.  You see, because foreign students
tapped for future leadership roles in their home countries are heavy
patrons of the American studies curriculum, the covert community has
heavily penetrated the ranks of American studies faculties in the
country's major universities.  In that regard, it is but a more extreme
example of what has gone on with curricula in area studies in general:

"One returns to McGeorge Bundy's enthusiastic statement about the OSS
and academe: that the area studies programs in American universities
'were manned, directed, or stimulated by graduates of the OSS--a
remarkable institution, half cops and robbers, half faculty meeting.
There was, Bundy told his Johns Hopkins audience, and he hoped there
always would be, 'a big measure of interpenetration between
universities with area programs and the information-gathering agencies
of the United States.' (Robin W. Winks, "Cloak & Gown, Scholars in the
Secret War, 1939-1961," p. 447)

Professor Abzug reminds us of another American studies professor, one
who has weighed in heavily in support of the government's fiction in
both the JFK and Vincent Foster death cases.  That is Professor Jacob
Cohen of Brandeis University.  (See
http://my.brandeis.edu/news/item?news_item_id=102234&show_release_date=1,
http://www.dcdave.com/article1/122297.html, and
http://www.dcdave.com/article2/102998a.html .)

Agent Andy?

For his part, Andy Rooney puts us in mind of no one so much as an old
covert-warrior acquaintance of mine, Scott Runkle, some of whose
propaganda exploits I have described at
http://www.dcdave.com/article1/072198a.html.  His career progression
was, for the record: OSS French specialist during World War II, Time
magazine correspondent in Paris, Paris Match correspondent in
Washington, presidency of his own Washington public relations firm.  In
this latter capacity he showed me how he could write an editorial
promoting his clients' interests that would appear verbatim in
newspapers large and small, represented as the opinion of the
newspaper, itself.  He had particularly good connections with the New
York Times, he explained, because the editor of that paper's editorial
page was an old OSS buddy.  On the day I learned of Runkle's death I
was informed, by a person who was particularly well situated to know,
that Runkle had been an intelligence agent throughout his career.

Et tu, Andy?

--------
DC Dave
Author, "Who Killed James Forrestal?"
"America's Dreyfus Affair, The Case of the Death of Vincent Foster"
"Upton Sinclair and Timothy McVeigh"
"Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression"
http://www.dcdave.com