Duncan Lee
Woodberry Forest, Yale, Oxford (Rhodes Scholar)
In 1944, he was 30 years old, having been born to missionary parents in
Nanking, China.
After graduation from one of the South's best prep schools, in Orange, Va.,
he graduated from Yale, then became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and returned
to Yale Law School.
Upon graduation, he was taken into the law firm of Donovan and Leisure –
and he followed one of its heads, World War I hero "Wild Bill" Donovan to
Washington, where Donovan became head of the CIA's predecessor, the Office
of Strategic Services.
It is now known that the KGB's predecessor the NKVD, in 1942 made the OSS a
priority target. Lee had received a direct commission as a captain in the
U.S. Army. He worked as Donovan's executive assistant and whatever happened
in the OSS was known to Duncan Lee.
Early in 1943, NKVD spy Elizabeth Bentley made contact with the
Soviet-receptive young Capt. Lee, to whom she later testified as telling
him, "I am the gal who is going to be your contact."
Bentley, a descendant of Mayflower passengers was a 1930 graduate of
Vassar. During the Depression, she became disillusioned with capitalism and
was drawn to the Communist Party.
She later testified that Lee passed to her "highly secret information on
what the OSS was doing". Bentley's superior, and lover, Jacob Golos,
notified Moscow concerning Lee: "Cables coming to the State Department go
through his hands. He collects them and shows them to Donovan at his
discretion. All the agent information from Europe and the rest of the world
go through his hands."
When Elizabeth Bentley asked Lee about activities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., she
testified: "He told me that he had word that something very secret was
going on in that location. He did not know what, but said it must be
something super secret, because it was shrouded in such mystery and so
heavily guarded."
Lee also provided Bentley the information that OSS security staff had
compiled a list entitled: "Persons Suspected of Being Communists on the
Agency's Payroll."
In 1944, Lee's wife discovered he was having an affair with another
communist courier named Mary Price. Lee feared that Donovan suspected him.
Another NKVD agent code named "X" reported, after dealing with Lee: "He
came so scared to both meetings that he could not hold a cup of coffee
since his hands trembled".
Bentley described Lee to Moscow as "one of the weakest of the weak sisters
– nervous and fearing his own shadow ... a long time ago I had to promise
him that I would not write down data communicated by him. Therefore, I have
to remember his data until I am elsewhere and can write it down."
After two years of reporting whatever the OSS shared with the White House,
and vice versa to the NKVD, Lee broke off with the Soviets and never spied
for them again.
After Lee stopped providing secrets to the Soviets, he was still not
detected so that Gen. Donovan made him chief of the OSS Japanese section.
After the end of World War II, Elizabeth Bentley visited FBI headquarters
on Nov. 30, 1945. Three years later Bentley appeared before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. She exposed Soviet spies Harry Dexter
White, Alger Hiss and Duncan Lee, among others. But Duncan Lee was never
prosecuted for what she revealed he had done. Lee lived until 1988.
At Woodberry Forest School, the alumni office recalled that Lee was a
member of the Class of 1931 who died in 1988 in Toronto, where he moved
after remarrying and living in Bermuda.
His father, a former Episcopal missionary in China, was the Rev. Edmund
Lee, who became the beloved headmaster of Chatham Hall, Virginia's boarding
school for girls.
And that makes Duncan Lee a distant cousin of mine, whom I never met.
Woodberry Forest produced, by contrast to this one spy, thousands of
dedicated servicemen in the second world war – 25 of whom gave their lives
in the service of our country. EXTRACT FROM...
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30721
