Final_Judgment

[372] Final Judgment 469
Washington Post Empire, created quite a ruckus when it was first issued.
The book was so inflammatory that Mrs. Graham put forth her immense
clout and had it pulled from the bookstores and pulped.
But what is even more intriguing is the fact that Davis's book has been
perhaps the only work (until now) that documented the long-hidden
Angleton connection to the Watergate affair (but which has somehow gone
un-noticed and forgotten).
ANGLETON AND THE WASHINGTON POST
Initially, Davis describes the long-standing and intimate connections
between Angleton and Benjamin Bradlee, the Washington Post editor who
supervised reporters Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Post's
coverage of the Watergate scandal:
"Nineteen fifty-six. Ben Bradlee, recently remarried, is a European
correspondent for Newsweek. He left the [American] embassy [in Paris,
where he served as press attaché] for Newsweek in 1953, a year before CIA
director Allen Dulles authorized one of his most skilled and fanatical
agents, former OSS operative James Angleton, to set up a
counterintelligence staff. As chief of counterintelligence, Angleton has
become the liaison for all Allied intelligence and has been given authority
over the sensitive Israel desk, through which the CIA is receiving eighty
percent of its information on the KGB.
"Bradlee is in a position to help Angleton with the Israelis in Paris, and
they are connected in other ways as well: Bradlees' wife, Tony Pinchot,
Vassar '44, and her sister Mary Pinchot Meyer, Vassar '42, are close friends
with Cicely d'Autremont, Vassar '44, who married James Angleton when
she was a junior, the year he graduated from Harvard Law School and was
recruited into the OSS by one of his former professors at Yale." 961
Davis also cites another Bradlee-Angleton connection that would
become critical during the Watergate period:
"Also at Harvard in the early 1940s were Ben Bradlee and a young man,
Richard Ober, who would later become Angleton's primary
counterintelligence deputy, and work with the master in Europe and
Washington throughout the fifties, sixties and early seventies.
"The Harvard yearbook for 1943-44 shows Bradlee and Ober, who are four
months apart in age, both to have been in the Hasty Pudding club as lower
classmen; it is a four-year club and students join as freshmen. According to a
Hasty Pudding club historian, 'the eating clubs at Harvard had only about
forty members' then and were often the source of close, even lifelong
friendships among the young men . . . " 962
Despite all this, Bradlee denied knowing Ober then—or later. But
there's no question that by the time Bradlee had begun his work for
Newsweek and was collaborating with James Angleton "with the Israelis in
Paris," Ober was Angleton's trusted deputy. And this was during the time