Mary Bancroft

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Mary Bancroft (October 29, 1903, Boston – January 10, 1997, New York City [1] ) was an American novelist and spy and a member of the Bancroft family, which at one time owned Dow Jones & Company. In 1942, while living in Switzerland, Bancroft was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, and both worked and had a romantic relationship with Allen Dulles. Her most important work was with Hans Bernd Gisevius, a German military intelligence officer who supplied her with details of the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. After the war, Bancroft settled in New York and became a novelist. [1]

Boston Capital city of Massachusetts, United States

Boston is the capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city proper covers 48 square miles (124 km2) with an estimated population of 685,094 in 2017, making it also the most populous city in New England. Boston is the seat of Suffolk County as well, although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999. The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country. As a combined statistical area (CSA), this wider commuting region is home to some 8.2 million people, making it the sixth-largest in the United States.

New York City Largest city in the United States

The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.

The Bancroft family are the former owners of Dow Jones & Company — publishers of the Wall Street Journal — which is now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (NewsCorp).

Contents

Life

Born in Boston [2] and brought up there by her stepgrandfather Clarence W. Barron, Bancroft studied at Smith College in Massachusetts, but dropped out after a year. [3]

Clarence W. Barron American newspaper publisher

Clarence W. Barron is one of the most influential figures in the history of Dow Jones & Company. As a career newsman described as a "short, rotund powerhouse", he died holding the posts of president of Dow Jones and de facto manager of The Wall Street Journal. He is considered the founder of modern financial journalism.

Smith College private womens liberal arts college in Massachusetts

Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college with coed graduate and certificate programs in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters. In its 2018 edition, U.S. News & World Report ranked it tied for 11th among the best National Liberal Arts Colleges. Smith is also a member of the Five Colleges Consortium, which allows its students to attend classes at four other Pioneer Valley institutions: Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

During 1926-1932, Mary Bancroft resided in New York City, New York and spent some of that time attending socials at the apartment of her friend from Massachusetts, Ruth Forbes Paine, and Paine's husband, George Lyman Paine Jr. After divorcing her first husband Sherwin Badger she went on a boat trip to Europe in summer 1933 together with her still married - but now separated - friend, Ruth Forbes Paine known more simply as Ruth Paine, [4] where she met a Swiss accountant, Jean Rufenacht, who became her second husband. [2] She moved to Zurich, Switzerland in 1934, where she learned excellent French and German, [3] and became a close friend and student of Carl Jung, who cured her of chronic attacks of sneezing. [5]

George Lyman Paine Jr., known as Lyman Paine, was an American architect and radical left activist. He is known for his work with the Correspondence Publishing Committee with his 2nd wife Frances Drake Paine, and was closely associated with James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs.

Sherwin Campbell Badger was an American figure skater who competed in singles and pairs. He earned the men's titles at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships from 1920 through 1924. He also captured the pairs gold medal with partner Beatrix Loughran three times, and the pair won the silver medal at the 1932 Winter Olympics. Prior to pairing with Loughran, he competed first with Clara Frothingham and later with Edith Rotch.

Ruth Forbes Young was a member of the Forbes family and a founder of the International Peace Academy in 1970. She also co-founded Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Consciousness with her third husband, Arthur M. Young.

Following the US entry into World War II, Bancroft was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, although she was not initially aware of the fact, being asked by a US Embassy contact to write analyses of German policy based on German public sources for Swiss and American newspapers. [2] [6] She was then introduced to Allen Dulles in Zurich in December 1942 and went on to have a romantic relationship with him, based on Dulles' proposition that "We can let the work cover the romance, and the romance cover the work." [3] Dulles assigned Bancroft to work with Hans Bernd Gisevius, a German military intelligence officer who supplied her with details of the planned 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler; Bancroft soon developed a romantic relationship with Gisevius too. [1] [3] After the war, with her relationship with Dulles cooling, Bancroft became close friends with Dulles' wife Clover, who told her she was aware of their relationship and approved. [3] She remained close friends with Clover until the latter's death in 1974. [7]

Office of Strategic Services United States intelligence agency

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a wartime intelligence agency of the United States during World War II, and a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning. On December 14, 2016, the organization was collectively honored with a Congressional Gold Medal.

Allen Dulles CIA Director

Allen Welsh Dulles was an American diplomat and lawyer who became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and its longest-serving director to date. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, Operation Ajax, the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Dulles was one of the members of the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Between his stints of government service, Dulles was a corporate lawyer and partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, was the Secretary of State during the Eisenhower Administration.

Hans Bernd Gisevius German siplomat and intelligence officer

Hans Bernd Gisevius was a German diplomat and intelligence officer during the Second World War. A covert opponent of the Nazi regime, he served as a liaison in Zürich between Allen Dulles, station chief for the American OSS and the German Resistance forces in Germany.

After the war Bancroft settled in New York and became close friends with Henry Luce. She became "a leading champion of Jung's psychology in the United States", [3] lecturing on the subject and publishing articles in academic journals. [1] [3] She also published several novels in the 1950s, and an autobiography in 1983.

Henry Luce American publisher

Henry Robinson Luce was an American magazine magnate who was called "the most influential private citizen in the America of his day". He launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines that transformed journalism and the reading habits of millions of Americans. Time summarized and interpreted the week's news; Life was a picture magazine of politics, culture, and society that dominated American visual perceptions in the era before television; Fortune reported on national and international business; and Sports Illustrated explored the world of sports. Counting his radio projects and newsreels, Luce created the first multimedia corporation. He envisaged that the United States would achieve world hegemony, and, in 1941, he declared the 20th century would be the "American Century".

Books

William Morrow and Company publisher

William Morrow and Company is an American publishing company founded by William Morrow in 1926. The company was acquired by Scott Foresman in 1967, sold to Hearst Corporation in 1981, and sold to News Corporation in 1999. The company is now an imprint of HarperCollins.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Robert McG. Thomas, Jr., New York Times , January 19, 1997, Mary Bancroft Dead at 93; U.S. Spy in World War II
  2. 1 2 3 Simone Payment (2003), American Women Spies of World War II , Rosen Publishing Group, pp78-83
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Godfrey Hodgson, The Independent , February 17, 1997, Obituary: Mary Bancroft
  4. ↑ Mary Bancroft (1983), Autobiography Of A Spy , pp.54-55, p.59
  5. ↑ James Srodes (2000), Allen Dulles: Master of Spies , Regnery Publishing, p273
  6. ↑ Elizabeth P. McIntosh (1998), Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS , Naval Institute Press, p178
  7. ↑ James Srodes (2000), Allen Dulles: Master of Spies , Regnery Publishing, p340
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