Posted on 01/28/2003 4:43:29 AM PST by JohnHuang2
American preparatory schools have large numbers of graduates who have faithfully and courageously served this country in time of war – many having given their lives.
It is no discredit upon them or the universities they attended that three eastern U.S. prep schools also produced two of Adolf Hitler's and one of Joseph Stalin's most valuable spies.
Tyler Gatewood Kent
St. Alban's and Princeton
On May 20, 1940, reports Joseph Persico's superb Random House book and New York Times best-seller, "Roosevelt's Secret War," Scotland Yard, MI5, and two other officers arrived at 47 Gloucester Place in London.
After having to break down the door, they confronted U.S. Embassy code clerk Tyler Kent, and began searching his flat. They found 1,929 U.S. Embassy documents including secret correspondence between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
They arrested this 29-year-old member of an old Virginia family, who had lived all around the world with his father, a career officer in the State Department's Consular Service.
Mr. Kent was also a graduate of St. Alban's school in Washington, D.C., as well as Princeton. He attended the Sorbonne and spoke French, Greek, German, Russian, Italian and Spanish.
Kent, in carefully pondering all of the secret messages between FDR and Churchill, concluded (at a time when a Roper poll reported that less than 3 percent of Americans wanted the U.S. to enter the war on the side of Britain and France) that FDR "was secretly and unconstitutionally plotting with Churchill to sneak the United States into the war."
There was another reason for Kent's concern that he expressed: "All wars are inspired, fomented and promoted by the great international bankers and banking companies which are largely controlled by Jews."
Earlier in 1940, Kent met a daughter of Czarist refugees whose parents ran a Russian tea room. Anna Wolkoff believed her parents had been the victims of communist Jews who incited the Russian revolution. She introduced him to a decorated veteran of the British army in World War I, a distant relative of the royal family named A.H.M. Ramsay, who had become a member of Parliament. Ramsay was convinced Britain was about to be taken over by a vast Jewish conspiracy.
So Tyler Kent, recognizing a fellow anti-Semite, took Ramsay to his flat and showed him all the secret correspondence he had stolen from the U.S. Embassy code room.
Anna gave copies of these papers to Don Francesco Maringliano, Duke of Del Monte – and a Lt. Col. in Mussolini's Italian army.
He delivered copies to Rome and, shortly thereafter, Hans Mackenson, German ambassador to Italy sent them to Berlin. Included was a May 16 message sent by FDR to Churchill six days after he took over as prime minister when France was falling. This message, about sending 50 U.S. destroyers to the British would have been a disaster if learned about by a strongly isolationist Congress.
The arresting British found in Kent's apartment duplicate keys to the U.S. Embassy code room, and steel cabinet plastered with stickers proclaiming: "THIS IS A JEW'S WAR."
The British took Kent to U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK, who strongly denounced this traitor. Then the British took Kent to Brixton prison.
Kent was denied any diplomatic immunity. Upon recommendation by Ambassador Kennedy, he was fired by the State Department.
A British jury, during a secret trial, after four days of testimony, sentenced Kent to 7 years on the Isle of Wight, at a camp for political prisoners. And that led to a massive round-up of British fascists, including Kent's lady friend Anna and Col. Ramsay.
In December 1945, the British deported Tyler Kent to the United States. His former employer the Department of State showed no interest in prosecuting him – with one official (whom the State Department has not identified) commenting: "We do not give a damn what happens to him." So, this well-educated traitor went free for the next 43 years and died in a Texas trailer park, when he surely should have been in prison for the rest of his life.
At St. Alban's, the alumni office recalled that Tyler Kent disassociated himself entirely from the school and died in 1988.
Fifteen other St. Alban's alumni gave their lives in the service of this country during World War II, the best known being Jimmy Trimble who played pro baseball with the Washington Senators before he was killed in action at Iwo Jima.
Duncan Lee
Woodberry Forest, Yale, Oxford (Rhodes Scholar)
In 1944, he was 30 years old, having been born to missionary parents in Nanking, China.
After graduation from one of the South's best prep schools, in Orange, Va., he graduated from Yale, then became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and returned to Yale Law School.
Upon graduation, he was taken into the law firm of Donovan and Leisure – and he followed one of its heads, World War I hero "Wild Bill" Donovan to Washington, where Donovan became head of the CIA's predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services.
It is now known that the KGB's predecessor the NKVD, in 1942 made the OSS a priority target. Lee had received a direct commission as a captain in the U.S. Army. He worked as Donovan's executive assistant and whatever happened in the OSS was known to Duncan Lee.
Early in 1943, NKVD spy Elizabeth Bentley made contact with the Soviet-receptive young Capt. Lee, to whom she later testified as telling him, "I am the gal who is going to be your contact."
Bentley, a descendant of Mayflower passengers was a 1930 graduate of Vassar. During the Depression, she became disillusioned with capitalism and was drawn to the Communist Party.
She later testified that Lee passed to her "highly secret information on what the OSS was doing". Bentley's superior, and lover, Jacob Golos, notified Moscow concerning Lee: "Cables coming to the State Department go through his hands. He collects them and shows them to Donovan at his discretion. All the agent information from Europe and the rest of the world go through his hands."
When Elizabeth Bentley asked Lee about activities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., she testified: "He told me that he had word that something very secret was going on in that location. He did not know what, but said it must be something super secret, because it was shrouded in such mystery and so heavily guarded."
Lee also provided Bentley the information that OSS security staff had compiled a list entitled: "Persons Suspected of Being Communists on the Agency's Payroll."
In 1944, Lee's wife discovered he was having an affair with another communist courier named Mary Price. Lee feared that Donovan suspected him. Another NKVD agent code named "X" reported, after dealing with Lee: "He came so scared to both meetings that he could not hold a cup of coffee since his hands trembled".
Bentley described Lee to Moscow as "one of the weakest of the weak sisters – nervous and fearing his own shadow ... a long time ago I had to promise him that I would not write down data communicated by him. Therefore, I have to remember his data until I am elsewhere and can write it down."
After two years of reporting whatever the OSS shared with the White House, and vice versa to the NKVD, Lee broke off with the Soviets and never spied for them again.
After Lee stopped providing secrets to the Soviets, he was still not detected so that Gen. Donovan made him chief of the OSS Japanese section.
After the end of World War II, Elizabeth Bentley visited FBI headquarters on Nov. 30, 1945. Three years later Bentley appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. She exposed Soviet spies Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss and Duncan Lee, among others. But Duncan Lee was never prosecuted for what she revealed he had done. Lee lived until 1988.
At Woodberry Forest School, the alumni office recalled that Lee was a member of the Class of 1931 who died in 1988 in Toronto, where he moved after remarrying and living in Bermuda.
His father, a former Episcopal missionary in China, was the Rev. Edmund Lee, who became the beloved headmaster of Chatham Hall, Virginia's boarding school for girls.
And that makes Duncan Lee a distant cousin of mine, whom I never met.
Woodberry Forest produced, by contrast to this one spy, thousands of dedicated servicemen in the second world war – 25 of whom gave their lives in the service of our country.
William Kolepaugh
Admiral Farragut Academy, M.I.T.
Willy Kolepaugh came from a respected Connecticut family who were friends of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Attorney General Frances Biddle.
He attended New Jersey's Admiral Farragut Academy, and then M.I.T., where he studied Marine engineering – but too much drinking and too little study led to his flunking out.
Willy was something of a loner. He developed a pride in the fact that his maternal grandparents had migrated to the United States from Germany. When Hitler's forces initially won so many battles, Kolepaugh took vocal pride even after he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. In 1943, his expressions of Nazi sympathies led to his being discharged "For the good of the Service."
In 1944, Kolepaugh got a job aboard the Swedish liner Gripsholm and he jumped ship in Lisbon. He made his way to Germany, where was he was recruited into the SD by the legendary German special forces leader, Maj. Otto Skorzeny, the rescuer of Bonito Mussolini. Kolepaugh was sent to spy training in The Hague. He was teamed with Erich Gimpel, eight years his senior, who was an expert in high-frequency radio.
But Kolepaugh was put in command of "Operation Magpie" in which they were ordered to spy on U.S. shipyards, airplane factories and rocket-testing sites, after being landed by U-boat in Maine.
Kolepaugh managed to persuade his SD supervisors that he and Gimpel would need a great deal of money. With the average U.S. family annual income being $2,378, the SD gave these two $60,000 in cash, plus 99 diamond clips.
On Nov. 29, 1944, the U-1230, after eight days on the bottom, just off Maine's coast to avoid patrols, slipped into Frenchman Bay and put Gimpel and Kolepaugh ashore. They then traveled to New York City, where commander Kolepaugh began drinking and womanizing with all that German expense money. Much of this was a mask to conceal Kolepaugh's growing anxiety.
On Christmas, he went to the Queens, Long Island home of an Admiral Farragut Academy friend named Edward Mulchay. He told Mulchay everything and they spent most of the day wrestling with the question of what Kolepaugh should do.
The following day, Kolepaugh turned himself in to the FBI and volunteered to help them find his co-spy Gimpel.
When the FBI contacted Willy's mother, Havel Lina Kolepaugh, she claimed that her son's third cousin was Franklin Delanor Roosevelt.(!)
When J. Edgar Hoover revealed this claim – and her further claim that the president had a Kolepaugh Bible on which he took the Oath of Office at one of his inaugurations – the president replied: "He is no relation of mine and the family Bible on which I took the Oath of Office happens to be a Roosevelt one, with manuscript notations of births and deaths as far back as the 17th century. Enough said!"
On Feb. 14, 1945, Kolepaugh and Gimpel were convicted by a military tribunal of espionage. They were sentenced to death. But their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. In 1955, Gimpel was released and deported to Germany. Kolepaugh was released in 1960.
At Admiral Farragut Academy, which is now located entirely in St. Petersburg, Fla., (The northern branch in Toms River, N.J. having been closed down in 1944) Adm. Richard Wheeler, chairman of the board, recalled Kolepaugh's having attended the academy: "But we have no information as to where he is now or even if he is alive, he has disappeared."
Adm. Wheeler recalled that among the many alumni who served faithfully were dozens who gave their lives. He added: "This academy produced a number of admirals and generals as well as two space walkers, Alan Shepard and Charles Duke.
Glad to see that Gore is carrying on the St. Albans tradition.
Oh! What an ignominious end! [/sarcasm]
Who, as we all know, were a better class than descendants of the Mayflower's crew.
Frankly, yes. See what you got from descendants of the crew...
Les pulls no punches; in other words, he takes his job seriously.
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