It seems I’ll never be short of reasons to dislike FDR’s ‘Office of Strategic Services’, the forerunner to our beloved CIA. Today I’m going to tell the sordid tale of how and why OSS/BSC heavy-weight Ernest Cuneo attacked Gen. George S. Patton in 1943.
Cuneo, a New York lawyer who represented radio personalities, used his client and BSC pet-journalist Drew Pearson to spread a story about Patton: that Patton had cruelly slapped a shell-shocked soldier during one of his hospital visits. In the original story Cuneo said that because of the attack, Patton would no longer be used in the European war theater. This is how Michael S. Sweeney explains the incident in his book Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press:
Pearson publicly defended what he had published and broadcast about Welles and Hull, but privately he fretted about some of this audience abandoning him. He conferred with Ernest Cuneo, his radio lawyer, who served the government as a liaison among British intelligence, the FBI and the Office of the Coordinator of Information. Cuneo said a big, exclusive story would make people forget the president’s criticism. And since his government job gave him access to military intelligence, he suggested Pearson broadcast a Patton story he had heard.79
Pearson apparently had no doubts about the story’s authenticity. He discussed the details with the War Department which declined to issue a denial. 80 Pearson’s radio network took the story to the Office of Censorship. On the afternoon of November 14th, 1943, WMAL’s Neel sent Pearson’s script to the censors’ Broadcasting Division. The sixth and seventh pages included the following item:
Algiers– General George Patton, nicknamed “Blood and Guts,” will not be used in any European war theatre anymore. He was a bit too bloody for the morale of the Army. Inspecting an American hospital in Sicily, General Patton noticed several soldiers listed as “fatigue” patients. Fatigue means a cas of nerves or shell-shock. Patton ordered one man to stand up. The soldier, out of his head, told the General to duck down or the shells would hit him. Instead, Patton struck the soldier, knocking him down. The commanding doctor rushed in, told Patton that in the field Patton was in command of his troops, but in the hospital he, the doctor was in command of this patients. He ordered General Patton not to interfere. General Patton started to draw a gun, but was disarmed. He will not be used in important combat anymore.81
Sweeney, the author writing above, says Pearson’s story can’t be corroborated and is almost entirely false. Neither Pearson nor the US government appear to have taken any action against Ernest Cuneo. (It’s worth noting that the CIA is pleased with Sweeney’s depiction of US censorship efforts during WWII, because his book “focuses on the success of the program“.)
Sweeney suggests that Pearson’s story resulted in Patton being given less control over the European front, ultimately leaving more of Eastern Europe under Soviet control. Never the less, Patton continued to prove himself to be an excellent commander and by the end of the war he had immense prestige and popular appeal– a dangerous place to be under the FDR administration!
Why would a man like Cuneo attack Patton, especially in the middle of a war?
Ernest Cuneo with Margaret Watson.
Ernest Cuneo was a trusted member for FDR’s “palace guard”, perhaps more honestly named ‘traitorous spy ring’. General William Donovan, the head of the OSS, made Cuneo a liaison between the OSS, British Security Coordination (BSC), the FBI, the United States Department of State (‘Surrogate’ to the Rooskies!!), and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Prior to his spook appointment, Cuneo was a New York City lawyer/political wheeler-dealer and ‘fixer’ for the Roosevelt Administration.
General George S. Patton was the political opposite of Ernest Cuneo. Patton made a career out of the US Army: he served in the Pancho Villa Expedition, WWI and finally WWII. Patton distrusted the Soviets, Cuneo’s close-working allies. As early as 1943, one year after the OSS was officially formed, pro-Soviet OSS operatives like Cuneo were working out how to dispose of prominent Americans who didn’t support their agenda.
Gen. George Patton
What frightened Cuneo about Patton’s views? Consider that at the end of WWII, Patton suggested the USA should protect Europe by continuing to fight the Soviets. As you can imagine, this view was an anathema to the good OSS’ers who’d “drank the milk of FDR,” as Bill Colby’s boy Carl describes them. Shortly after airing his opinion, Patton died under mysterious circumstances.
It’s incredible to me that Cuneo could get away with smearing a general like Patton during WWII, especially under Washington’s pernicious ‘self-censorship’ regime. However, Cuneo’s actions are even more creepy when you compare them to what Soviet agents were trying to do in the US at the same time. There was little difference between FDR/BSC operations and Soviet operations against the American press, except maybe that FDR/BSC operations were more successful.
To flesh out that point, I’m going to describe a Soviet operation; an operation carried out and disclosed to the FBI by USSR agent Elizabeth Bentley. I’m also going to describe how Cuneo took over a huge swath of the American press on behalf of the OSS/BSC and then finally on behalf of the CIA. By the end of this you may feel that, from the perspective of the American people, there’s little difference between Moscow and Washington.
Soviet and OSS strategies were very similar with respect to the American media: they both wanted to control as much of it as possible so that they could broadcast their own messages, messages which were similar for the most part. To put Cuneo’s OSS propaganda in context, let’s look at what Elizabeth Bentley was doing for the Soviets.
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.
Elizabeth Bentley was a Soviet spy working in the 1930s- early ’40s. She was managed or ‘run’ by her lover Jacob ‘Golos’ (real name ‘Gold’). Neither of the pair were very good spooks because they were sloppy about security procedures. However, Elizabeth was given at least one interesting mission from my perspective: Gold told her to infiltrate the McClure publishing concern to find out if its editor (and owner) had ‘fascist’ sympathies– which really means Elizabeth was to find out if he could be useful to the Soviets. Kathryn S. Olmsted says this in Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley:
Unlike [Whittaker] Chambers, Elizabeth succeeded in rationalizing and accepting the Stalinist purges and the Hitler-Stalin pact. Timmy’s [Jacob Gold's] argument that the Soviets remained anti-fascist at heart seemed persuasive, especially after Elizabeth received her next assignment.
Timmy directed her to try again to spy on New York fascists. He wanted her to infiltrate the staff of a right-wing newspaper publisher, Richard Waldo of the McClure syndicate, to determine if he was a fascist agent. Elizabeth obediently took a job as Waldo’s secretary, but she reported to her disappointed lover that she found no evidence that her boss had fascist connections.
This mission appears to have happened sometime between August 1939 and November 1943, when Waldo died. It strikes me that what the Soviets couldn’t achieve by manipulating Waldo, their sympathizers ultimately achieved through the resources of allies at the OSS, namely Ernest Cuneo, who bought the McClure syndicate in 1952 after Waldo’s widow has sold it to James L. Lenahan. Lenahan had struggled to meet financial demands associated with the syndicate’s stock. According to a 1952 ‘News of Yore’ article by Erwin Knoll:
Control of the syndicate passed to the new owners with the purchase of a 1,000-share block of capital stock for $47,250 by Mr. Cuneo at an auction Thursday, Sept. 4. Mr. Cuneo outbid James L. Lenahan, former president and editor of the syndicate, and Guggenheimer & Untermeyer, attorneys for the estate of the late Adelaide P. Waldo.
The attorneys had held the block of shares as security for a debt, and had themselves offered them for sale at auction.
Whatever financial pressure Lenahan was under, it was being ‘overseen’ by Guggenheimer & Untermeyer, the infamous Wall Street law firm. Samuel Untermeyer, the firm’s namesake, was a Woodrow Wilson supporter and active in carving up Austro-Hungarian resources after WWI. Untermeyer was a Zionist like his contemporary Herman Bernstein, and also like Bernstein, he dabbled in espionage:
After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Untermyer acted as counsel to the German and Austro-Hungarian embassies. He also assisted an agent of the German government who wished to covertly purchase newspapers to influence public opinion.[93] After America’s entry into the war, Untermyer had to temporarily suspend his sympathies with the Central Powers. After the war, however, he became counsel for an American syndicate that had acquired a one third share of the confiscated Habsburg Estates.[94] Following the resolution of a dispute between the syndicate and Archduke Frederick of Austria, Untermyer represented the Habsburg heir, who was seeking restitution of the other two-thirds of the estates.[95] He also represented eighteen of the heirs of the late Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who claimed ownership of oil fields in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq).[96]
So I’m sure there were no conflicts of interest when Mr. Untermeyer’s firm took up the Waldo account!
Lenahan’s financial distress coincides with a notable period for the McClure syndicate: the later war years through 1952, when comic strips were used to promote Washington’s domestic and international agenda. Lenahan’s McClure syndicate had a special focus on distributing comic strips such as ‘Superman’, in which ‘the Man of Steel’ (who wasn’t Stalin) did fictional battle with Washington’s WWII enemies like Hitler and Emperor Hirohito.
The comic-book propaganda didn’t end inside the US border. In 1946 ‘Superman’ did battle with American domestic political opposition the Ku Klux Klan. All this government collaboration didn’t make Lenahan enough money to get out from under the debts arranged through Guggenheimer & Untermeyer, which ended up costing Lenahan the company. Shades of Disney’s ‘The Golden Touch’?
Cuneo bought McClure in 1952, after having made an initial investment in the syndicate one year earlier with his partner John F.C. Bryce. However, Cuneo’s interest in the media went back to his OSS days.
Cuneo’s OSS mission was propaganda-centered: he would manipulate a swathe of the American media, much like his boss/co-conspirator William Stephenson who used his NYC connections to pervert reporting at the Herald Tribune and other broadsheets. While working for the OSS Cuneo fed friendly journalists BRITISH propaganda. ‘Friendly journalists’ include the following: Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, Robert Ingersoll, Whitelaw Reid, Dorothy Thompson, Edmond Taylor; and very likely include Edward Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith and William Shirer. Cuneo worked alongside newspaperman (and Roald Dahl mentor) Charles Marsh, Eleanor Patterson (Washington Times Herald, NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune owner), A. H. Sulzberger (owner of the NYT), George Baker (owner of the New York Post), and Ogden Reid (owner of the Herald Tribune). Only Hearst publications declined to join the FDR/BSC propaganda campaign, according to Jennet Conant in The Irregulars. That would explain Orson Wells’ 1941 movie ‘Citizen Kane’!
Rosebud! I’ve just realized why I’m such a miserable old codger– forgive me, Franklin!
By 1952 the OSS had become the CIA and the war was over, but the intelligence services never decolonized American media. After Cuneo and John F. C. Bryce (another old OSS agent and James Bond inspiration) purchased the McClure syndicate, Bryce was made president.
According to plans announced just before E&P went to press, John Wheeler, chairman of the board of the four affiliated Bell concerns, will serve in a similar capacity at McClure. John F. C. Bryce, who with Mr. Cuneo purchased a substantial interest in the group in March, 1951, will be president of the new acquisition. He holds the same title in Consolidated News Features and Associated Newspapers. Joseph B. Agnelli, executive vice-president and general manager of the four companies, will be executive vice-president of McClure.
(Joseph B. Agnelli may actually be Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat heir. I couldn’t find *anything* on ‘Joseph B. Agnelli’, but Gianni was in NYC at about the right time to be involved in the McClure purchase– his only son was born in NYC in 1953.)
The McClure syndicate wasn’t Cuneo’s only purchase. He was on something of a newspaper-buying spree in the early 1950s: Cuneo also purchased NANA (North American Newspaper Alliance). NANA was famous for having sent communist sympathizer (and future KGB agent!) Ernest Hemingway to cover the Spanish Civil War, in which he also fought alongside the Communists. Hemingway would later become a rather lack-luster OSS agent, even by their standards.*
By the mid-1950s Cuneo and John F. C. Bryce had control of four newspaper networks: McClure, NANA, Associated Newspapers (now DMG Media, publishers of UK’s Daily Mail) and Consolidated News Features. Cuneo made sure other OSS buddies had sweet jobs in his new empire– he made BSC agent and ‘James Bond’ creator Ian Flemming NANA’s European Vice President. All this spookage has naturally lead more reflective observers like Rolling Stone and Playboy contributor Jules Siegel to question if Cuneo’s NANA was a simple CIA front.
I hope I’ve shown that what happened to Gen Patton was not an isolated instance of ‘shadow government’ overstepping its bounds and interfering in the intellectual life of a nation. What happened to General Patton is a symptom of a much larger infection; I believe that what Elizabeth Bentley tried to do was no worse than what Cuneo or any of his pet-journalists did. Of course, the dark specter hanging over all of this is Patton’s sudden heart failure on Dec 21st 1945. (What is it with spooks and heart failure?!)
I’m not an expert on the death of General Patton, however, it appears that some evidence has come to light suggesting that the General was assassinated after his initial recovery from a car accident in Germany. If you’re interested in the details, I recommend reading this article by Robert K. Wilcox. Given the vicious nature of Soviet sympathizers close to the White House– consider the case of Walt Disney and Leonid Andreyev– I can easily believe that Eisenhower worked with OSS/NKVD contacts to assassinate Patton. It certainly wouldn’t have phased the Commander in Chief!
“George, the only limit to our realization of tomorrow is your doubts today.”
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*Hemingway’s KGB work was outed by the Venona decrypts, a selection of which were made public in the mid-1990s. Some CIA-aligned historians have a hard time accepting that Hemingway would do such a thing and bend over backwards to convince themselves that Hemingway’s heart wasn’t with the KGB by pointing to Hemingway’s uselessness to the Russians. Hemingway was so useless that the KGB soon dropped him. These historians’ rosy-lensed view of Hemingway’s KGB work ignores the fact that Hemingway was all but useless to the OSS too. Hemingway apologists may find themselves in a similar dilemma to the battered wife who insists “He loves me”!
