This one's for Len Colby

One of the agents for the SIS who made the transition to the new agency was Birch O’Neal who would become the trusted lieutenant to James Jesus Angleton at CI/SIG (Counterintelligence Special Investigations Group). O’Neal was practiced in major cases involving international intrigue, even prior to his stints in South and Central America. In 1940, he was involved in investigating a case which culminated in charges of sedition being brought against a number of members and associates of the Christian Front who were allegedly plotting to overthrow the government.xxvii The defense team which included Walter Thayer relied upon portraying those they represented as victims of communist provocateurs. Nine were duly acquitted, while the jury was unable to reach a verdict against the others.xxviii Thayer would later become trustee of the John Hay Whitney Foundation, a CIA conduit for funding organizations and individuals representing minority groups. Ostensibly this was to increase cultural opportunities, but in reality, it was to steer the cultural agenda and to develop potential assets and agents.11 Two of the protagonists then, in the Christian Front conspiracy case, O’Neal and Thayer, would eventually become cogs in the same intelligence machine.12

11 One recipient of this largesse was Richard Gibson, a co-founder of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1960. Gibson, living on this Whitney Foundation money, had already wreaked havoc among the small but influential American Black enclave of artists and writers in Paris, many of whom were critical of both US and French foreign policy.

12 Thayer had also previously worked on cases with William J Donovan, most notably a 1939 smuggling case in which famed comedian Jack Benny had tried to avoid paying duty on jewelry for his wife. Donovan would later become known as the “father of Central Intelligence”.

One of the accused; the alleged ring-leader and a person the defense tried to paint as Communist Provocateur No. 1 was William Gerald Bishop. Bishop, who was one of those the jury failed to find a verdict on, was allegedly an Austrian who had been an internee not just during the war,xxix but also prior. He escaped deportation and was released on that first occasion after supposedly convincing authorities he was born in Salem, Massachusetts.xxx He therefore had an established relationship with the FBI prior to his involvement with the Christian Front, and it is possible - even likely that he was a provocateur on behalf of Hoover rather than Communists – who in turn, may have been the actual targets all along. Indeed, the person named as Communist Provocateur No. 2 by Thayer, Dennis J. Healy, testified that he acted with the knowledge of the FBI and reported to that agency.xxxi Some journalists writing on the case expressed the opinion that those on trial were the most pathetic looking group of individuals seen in many a year before a judge; a hint that the group would have been incapable of storming a crèche, let alone the White House.13

13 For the modern equivalent, look at the case of the Liberty City Seven, an alleged terror group entrapped by the FBI with offers of money to plan terror activities. The group lacked any connection to international terrorist groups, had no funds, intent, nor apparently any mental sharpness.