The End of the Beginning

A summation of where the case stands at the dawn of the New Frontier

Over the past nine months, I have presented an overview of the main postwar topics pertaining to Jay Reid’s unacknowledged or classified association with the CIA.

This is not the end, nor is it the beginning of the end. Rather, we have reached the end of the beginning.

This article will summarize the main topics and people covered in this series of articles that covered the period from Jay’s birth in 1915 through the end of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency in January 1961.

It will also provide updates on the main hypotheses I have discussed.

Whether you are new subscriber or have been grappling with all the names and places since the beginning, this article will hopefully improve your understanding of my core discoveries so far, which will be helpful as the mystery and intrigue is set to accelerate in the 1960s.

The case

I began this newsletter with a series of articles about the documents I refer to as the roadmap. These primary source documents were in Jay’s possession at the time of his death. I believe they are clues that he purposefully saved, should anyone be curious enough after his death to solve the puzzle that he could not legally acknowledge, much less discuss.

My write-ups of the roadmap documents include:

• A 1954 letter from IMF Managing Director Ivar Rooth informing Jay that the FBI had conducted a full field investigation into him regarding his loyalty to the United States after he was flagged by a failed background check; the investigation came back clean

• A mid-1970s passport that Jay got from the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya with mismatched entry/exit stamps and a stamp indicating the passport was cancelled before it expired (and before Jay stopped using it)

• An official birth certificate copy that appears to merge Jay’s vital information with that of another man, the long-form birth certificate held in the New Jersey archives that matches the incorrect copy, and Jay’s sister’s long-form birth certificate, which presents strong evidence suggesting Jay’s birth certificate was altered

As a reminder, my research seeks to answer the following questions:

1. How did Jay become involved with the CIA?

2. Did Jay work in intelligence or plans (also known as covert operations)?

3. Was the IMF his target or his cover?

4. Who else was in his CIA-affiliated network?

5. Who were the decision makers guiding his CIA activities?

6. What, precisely was he working on?

7. What were the end results?

Post-war areas of inquiry

My overview of the period spanning from 1945-1960 focused on five primary topics of interest:

1. Relations between the intelligence agencies (primarily the CIA, but also the FBI) and members of the media, of which Jay was a member before leaving to join the International Monetary Fund in August 1948

2. The Reid family business (The Charms Company), how it became intertwined with a Cuban conglomerate, and the impact of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro on that business arrangement

3. Karl Harr, Jay’s cousin whose mysterious intelligence ties span from World War II to the presidency of former Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush; Karl worked directly for then future DCI Allen Dulles at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, served in the Department of Defense and the State Department, and ultimately landed a role coordinating security (covert) operations for President Eisenhower

4. The formation and early years of the International Monetary Fund, with a focus on the political battles that would shape what the Fund was to become

5. Per Jacobsson, Jay’s favorite managing director, who served as an economist at the Bank for International Settlements, negotiated peace with Allen Dulles in the summer of 1945, and whose appointment to the top spot at the IMF may have been part of a quid pro quo involving a treasury official who would soon after become the U.S. ambassador to NATO

Hypotheses

So far, I have posited the following hypotheses, all of which I am in the process of testing, and none of which I have been able to reject:

1. Jay’s original birth certificate was removed on or around 1950 and replaced with a forgery that blended most of his real information with the name and father’s name of another person.

2. Jay was recruited, and then assisted, in securing his position at the IMF, by representatives of the U.S. government, possibly in the intelligence community. Circumstantial evidence in favor of this hypothesis is a letter of congratulations from The White House upon Jay’s acceptance of the IMF job.

3. Jay used a correct version of his long form birth certificate to get his first passport, and then used expired passports to get subsequent new ones.

4. Moon Duck Harr, an agent I found in the OSS personnel files, is a pseudonym for Karl Harr. I think that in the summer of 1945 Karl was one of up to 50 Ivy League-educated Americans who were given Korean pseudonyms and secluded at the main training camp at Toyon Cove on Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of California. These “dedicated, serious students” were secretly being prepared for missions in the China-Burma-India theater. Simultaneously, they were evaluated for further grooming in preparation for holding high government office, not in Korea, but rather in the U.S.

5. Moon Duck Harr was run directly from Washington on an operation that pushed boundaries and had the potential to “overstep its authority or clash with [another] agency.”

6. Jay attended his cousin Karl Harr’s wedding to Patricia Adams in October 1947, and there he met people connected to the OSS/CIA.

7. FBI counterintelligence surreptitiously picked up interactions with or involving Jay, which resulted in the loyalty flag that caused him to fail the initial background check. Then, during the course of the full field investigation, the CIA informed the Bureau that “he’s with us”, and the matter was dropped.

8. Jay’s peak period of alignment with the Agency spanned from roughly 1950 to 1975.

9. DCI Allen Dulles played a role behind the scenes in Per Jacobsson becoming the managing director of the IMF and W. Randolph Burgess (who directly persuaded an initially reluctant Jacobsson to take the IMF job) being appointed U.S. permanent representative to NATO.

10. The file that the CIA maintains on me is filled with information collected by other Five Eyes countries, meaning that it is focused on my activities in the U.S., and not while I lived abroad.

Coming up

We are not done with the postwar period.

Not by a longshot.

With the basic outline of the key postwar issues now on the table, this newsletter will begin to blend deep dives into the granular details of this period with articles introducing aspects of the case that arise during the Kennedy and Johnson years.

I still have nearly 1,000 pages of OSS documents to review and process. The question of the “Koreans” on Santa Catalina Island in the summer of 1945 remains extremely important to this entire case.

In May 1958, three months after Karl Harr was promoted to a role coordinating covert operations within The White House, a document from Moon Duck Harr’s file, dated August 1, 1945, was transferred to a different records index file, which remains classified today.

I have yet to encounter another example of the Agency transferring an OSS document to a CIA master file, and I have reviewed the personnel files of multiple controversial figures who began their intelligence careers in the OSS and continued on to the CIA.

My working assumption is that this transfer document contains information that would allow researchers to connect the agent to a real human being.

If that human being is Karl Harr, then that would suggest that he was actually working for the CIA all throughout his career, which would be a major development. It would also align nicely with his career arc.

Karl is ever-present throughout the Jay Reid case, and many other names from the Eisenhower-era will carry over into the New Frontier years.

There will also be many new names.

As the Kennedy team takes power in Washington, Jay, along with his wife and children, makes a fateful move into the newly built house at 7208 Blacklock Rd. in Bethesda, Maryland.

There he would live for the next thirty years, nestled in the embrace of the Central Intelligence Agency.