In order to uncover what Jay Reid was doing on behalf of the CIA while he worked in the press office at the International Monetary Fund in the mid-to-latter part of the 20th century, it is critical that we fully unearth the dormant secrets surrounding his cousin, and only known direct connection to the Agency, Karl Harr.
I have written extensively about Karl, and I am still just scratching the surface. The controversies around him continue into the presidency of George H.W. Bush.
Sill, the foundational aspects of Karl’s life story that bear the greatest impact on Jay’s still-classified relationship with the CIA are:
Did he join the OSS in the last days of World War II and train on Santa Catalina Island?
Was Fred Dearborn murdered in February 1958 in order to elevate Karl into the role of Special Assistant to the President for Security Operations Coordination?
This article falls (mostly) into the first category.
Before detailing all the nuggets found in the personnel files of the key players in the training program at the West Coast A site, I am going to place Santa Catalina Island in a larger, weirder context.
It is the home to many strange, intelligence-connected phenomena dating back nearly a century.
Unidentified aerial (UAP) and submersible objects (USO)
During the course of my research, I have turned up documents and articles about UAP and USO around Santa Catalina Island.
There have been enough documented sightings, and enough witnesses willing to go on the record about what they saw, for an independent researcher named Preston Dennett to write an entire book on the topic titled Undersea UFO Base: An In-Depth Investigation of USOs in the Santa Catalina Channel.
As the book’s summary notes, “Mile for mile, this area is one of the top producers of USOs (unidentified submersible objects) in the entire world.”
There have also been dozens of UAP sightings around Santa Catalina Island.
Some objects, like the one found on Santa Catalina Island in November 1961, likely originated in the United States, or at the very least were created by humans.
However, other sightings remain unresolved:
On July 8, 1947, the very same day that Roswell’s Daily Record was reporting the initial “flying disc” story, a remarkable incident reportedly occurred in the skies above Avalon. An article on the front page of the week’s issue of the Catalina Islander details an alleged sighting by three visiting Army veterans of six “flying discs” traveling at high speed from the northeast and passing directly over Avalon before disappearing over East Peak.
According to the story, the six discs appeared at about 1 p.m. and flew in a formation of two sets of three and were witnessed not only by the veterans, but by “hundreds” of others as well.
Alvio Russo, one of the reported witnesses and an Army Air Corps veteran who had flown 35 bombing missions over Germany with the Eighth Air Force, estimated the velocity of the discs at “850 miles an hour,” according to the story.
Bob Jung, listed as a “former aerial photographer” agreed with this estimate and said they were flying roughly as fast as the U.S. Navy’s “Tiny Tim” rocket, which he had photographed numerous times for the Navy.
In the coming months, the sightings of discs around the nation waned, at least for the time-being, and public interest in them faded as well…
No mention of the Catalina incident was ever made again in the Catalina Islander nor, apparently, in the Los Angeles Examiner.
A similar sighting two years later also remains unresolved to this day.
The Air Force had a project designed to investigate UAPs and USOs that was called Blue Book. According to the National Archives:
On December 17, 1969, the Secretary of the Air Force announced the termination of Project BLUE BOOK, the Air Force program for the investigation of UFOs.
From 1947 to 1969, a total of 12,618 sightings were reported to Project BLUE BOOK. Of these 701 remain "Unidentified." The project was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, whose personnel no longer receive, document, or investigate UFO reports.
When I was scrolling through NARA’s Project Blue Book page I found a possible connection to Fred Dearborn:
Majestic 12 or "MJ-12" Reference Report
The National Archives has received many requests for documentation and information about "Project MJ-12." Many of the inquiries concern a memorandum from Robert Cutler to Gen. Nathan Twining, dated July 14, 1954. This particular document poses problems for [many] reasons…
Robert Cutler, at the direction of President Eisenhower, was visiting overseas military installations on the day he supposedly issued this memorandum--- July 14, 1954. The Administration Series in Eisenhower's Papers as President contains Cutler's memorandum and report to the President upon his return from the trip. The memorandum is dated July 20, 1954, and refers to Cutler's visits to installations in Europe and North Africa between July 3 and 15. Also, within the NSC Staff Papers is a memorandum dated July 3, 1954, from Cutler to his two subordinates, James S. Lay and J. Patrick Cone, explaining how they should handle NSC administrative matters during his absence; one would assume that if the memorandum to Twining were genuine, "Lay or Cone would have signed it."
Recall that Robert Cutler was a friend and political ally of Fred Dearborn’s. Cutler and former Massachusetts governor and then undersecretary of state Christian Herter were the only two federal officials to attend Dearborn’s funeral.
The FBI investigated what purported to be the Majestic 12 memo back in 1988 and concluded that the materials the Bureau received were fraudulent. The FBI has declassified summary documents from that investigation.
Remote viewing
A while back, I considered writing an article about the weirdest things I have found so far in declassified intelligence documents.
At the top of that list is remote viewing, or extra sensory perception, which is “the ability of [a] human being to perceive information and imagery of remote geographical targets.”
During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union employed remote viewing to spy on one another.
The US Government authorities started paying serious attention to investigating the possible applicability of ‘remote viewing’ techniques for military purposes only when a book titled Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, authored by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, was published in 1970. This book appears to have jolted the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) into action, triggering what one journalist has dubbed as the ‘Race for Inner Space’!
Although it took place decades after World War II, Santa Catalina Island was a site where remote viewing research was conducted.
The sheer volume of remote viewing documents that the CIA has declassified shows that it was a topic of great interest, even though much of the R&D was done by private entities.
One set of experiments highlighted in a 1979 report by SRI International involved remote viewing aboard a submarine (emphasis added):
In July of 1977 we carried out two preliminary tests of remote viewing from a submersible submerged in several hundred feet of seawater, approхіmately 500 miles from the target site. This provided an opportunity to investigate the remote viewing phenomenon under conditions of increased distance and shielding.
The submersible used in the experiment was the Taurus, a five-man underwater vehicle manufactured by International Hydrodynamics Company Ltd. (HYCO) of Canada. Experimental time on the Taurus was made available to SRI by Mr. Stephan Schwartz of the Philosophical Research Society of Los Angeles, who, as Director of Project Deep Quest, had arranged for its use in an underwater psi archaeology experiment. During the experimentation discussed here, the submersible operated submerged in the waters near Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of southern California. The goal of the experiment was to provide data on the possible shielding effects of several hundred feet of seawater, known to be a good shield for all but the lowest frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Remote viewing may sound far fetched to the uninitiated ear, but it is a well known phenomena in intelligence-related research circles. It has even garnered coverage on mainstream news networks.
The particulars of remote viewing, beyond the fact that some of the R&D was conducted around Santa Catalina Island, are beyond the scope of my research, but for those interested in learning more, the below embedded full-length documentary Third Eye Spies is a good starting point.
What to make of all this?
At one point, while I was writing this article, I turned to my eight-year old son and said, “I just wanted to know what my grandfather was doing with the CIA, and now here I am writing about aliens and psychic spies.”
You will notice that this article barely goes skin deep on those two topics. There is a reason for that.
The CIA is known to layer operations one on top of another. Some are real, some are fake. Some are real but created to distract. It’s all part of what former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton coined the wilderness of mirrors.
For the purposes of my research, it is irrelevant whether or not aliens or remote viewing are legit phenomena.
What would be relevant is if either topic was used to cover up, or distract attention away from, other misdeeds - in this case on Santa Catalina Island.
I was perplexed when I first learned of a supposed Korean agent named Moon Duck Harr who was trained by the OSS on the island in the waning days of WWII.
Now, after having zoomed out, it is clear that much stranger things have occurred on or around Santa Catalina Island.
And one other thing. This bit about Robert Cutler and Majestic 12. Real or fake, I suspect there is more to the story. I wonder if Fred Dearborn got mixed up in whatever that may have been.