ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

AND RESEARCH CENTER

George Blake, notorious Cold War double agent who helped Soviets, dies at 98

By

T. Rees Shapiro
Dec. 26, 2020 at 8:31 a.m. EST

George Blake, a British intelligence official who betrayed closely guarded secrets to the Soviets and was among the most damaging traitors of the Cold War, then made a daring escape from a London prison in 1966 and lived out his days as a national hero in Moscow, has died at 98.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, known as SVR, announced his death on Dec. 26 but provided no further details. Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Mr. Blake as a “brilliant professional” and a man of “remarkable courage.”

News accounts from the 1960s described Mr. Blake as a “Super Spy,” and perhaps one secret to his successful treachery was that he hid in plain sight. As one of his friends, a Salvation Army executive, told a reporter at the time, Mr. Blake resembled “a typically blasé bowler-hatted, rolled umbrella government official.

George Blake in 2001.

George Blake in 2001. (Alexander Natruskin/Reuters)

In fact, he was the last high-profile survivor of a string of British turncoats who spied for the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s, a badge of dishonor that included the Cambridge Four: Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby.

Dick White, a former chief of British intelligence, once said Mr. Blake wrought the most damage. The information he turned over reputedly led to the deaths of scores of highly placed Western agents, including Robert Bialek, a top-ranking East German police official.

He also betrayed to his Soviet handlers a joint mission between British and U.S. intelligence known as Operation Gold. The goal was to dig a tunnel underneath East Berlin to tap Soviet phone lines in the early 1950s. Mr. Blake sabotaged the multimillion-dollar operation before a shovel had ever struck German soil.

“There was not an official document on any matter to which I had access which was not passed on to my Soviet contact,” Mr. Blake confessed at his closed-door trial in 1961, news accounts reported at the time. According to a CIA report, Mr. Blake passed more than 4,720 pages of classified documents to the Soviets.

Mr. Blake spent nearly a decade leading a double life before he was arrested, tried and sentenced to 42 years in prison for espionage. At his trial, the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Hubert Parker, said that Mr. Blake had “rendered much of [Britain’s intelligence] best efforts useless.”

Five years into his term, Mr. Blake escaped in the middle of the night using a ladder made of knitting needles and rope. He was smuggled into East Berlin while hidden inside a secret compartment of a camper van and later traveled to the Soviet Union.

In his adopted motherland, Mr. Blake was bestowed with the Order of Lenin, the highest civilian award in the Soviet Union. A countryside dacha, a Volga car and a pension, along with his ribbons for courage and dedication to the communist cause, were the trappings Mr. Blake earned for his 9½ years of service to the KGB.

“It is hard to overrate the importance of the information received through Blake,” Sergei Ivanov, an official for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, told Russian media in 2007. “It is thanks to Blake that the Soviet Union avoided very serious military and political damage which the United States and Great Britain could have inflicted on it.”

He was born Georg Behar on Nov. 11, 1922, in Rotterdam. His mother was Dutch, and his father was a Jewish businessman of Middle Eastern descent who earned British citizenship while fighting for the Allies in World War I. After his father died, his mother married a man with the last name Blake.

As a youth, he spent summers with family in Cairo. It was there, Mr. Blake later said, that his interest in communism was sparked by cousins with left-wing views.

During World War II, Mr. Blake served in the Dutch underground as a bicycle courier before making his way to Britain. He joined the British navy in the early 1940s and, because of his facility with languages, was recruited to British intelligence.

As a covert officer for the British Secret Intelligence Service — often called MI6 — Mr. Blake held posts in Vienna, Berlin, Milan and Beirut. He studied Russian at Cambridge and developed a specialty in the Soviet Union.

He was assigned to the British diplomatic mission in Seoul when North Korean forces invaded the capital city in 1950. Mr. Blake spent 34 months as a prisoner, subsisting on a diet of rice and turnips in a North Korean camp. With the other prisoners, Mr. Blake sometimes displayed his creative ability to take on personas.

“He loved to imagine himself . . . a great officer of the crown ennobled for gallant and devoted service,” journalist Philip Deane, who spent time imprisoned with him in North Korea, wrote in The Washington Post in 1961. “Lightly we would tap him on the shoulder and say solemnly: ‘Arise, Sir George.’ We promoted him to baron, earl, marquess. He never quite made duke; captivity ended too soon.”

Mr. Blake said his decision to spy for the Soviet Union came after witnessing what he described as atrocities perpetrated by the West. In the PBS documentary “Red Files,” Mr. Blake described watching American bombers obliterate small Korean villages.

“It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering technical superior countries fighting against what seemed to me quite defenseless people,” Mr. Blake said in the broadcast. “I felt I was committed on the wrong side. And that’s what made me decide to change sides. I felt that it would be better for humanity if the communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war, to wars.”

He passed a note written in Russian to his guards and was granted an audience with a KGB official, offering his services to the Soviets.

As a highly placed mole, Mr. Blake leaked secrets to the Soviets that few British spies were even cleared to know. Among the most damaging to be revealed was the Berlin tunnel operation.

Although the tunnel was built and the phone lines were tapped, no worthwhile intelligence ever resulted from the intercepts by the CIA or MI6. The projected ended up wasting the equivalent of $51 million in today’s dollars, according to the Cold War Museum in Warrenton, Va.

Instead, the Soviets used the phone lines for a disinformation campaign. To protect Mr. Blake, they allowed the operation to toil for 11 months before the tunnel was “accidentally” discovered after rainstorms washed up the handiwork of the British and American intelligence branches.

Mr. Blake’s downfall came after a Polish officer defected to the West and described — but did not identify — a top-ranking British officer who was a Soviet mole. While posted to Lebanon, Mr. Blake was called back to MI6 headquarters under false pretenses, accused and arrested.

His trial at the Old Bailey was considered so sensitive that the judge ordered the courtroom vacated, the doors locked and the windows shuttered.

Mr. Blake was found guilty, and his 42-year sentence was one of the harshest in British history for such a crime. (Klaus Fuchs, the physicist who betrayed atomic secrets to the Soviets in the 1950s, was sentenced to 14 years.)

In 2007, Mr. Blake received the Order of Friendship from Putin. “You and your colleagues made an enormous contribution to the preservation of peace, to security and to strategic parity,” Putin said in 2007. “This is not visible to the eyes of outsiders, but very important work deserves the very highest acknowledgment and respect.”

No information on survivors was immediately available. His first wife, an Englishwoman with whom he had three children, divorced him after his defection. He later was said to have married a Soviet woman and had a son with her.

Mr. Blake embraced his new life with a new name: Giorgi Ivanovich Bekhter. Early on, he naively planned to drive across his new homeland in his gifted Volga.

“At the time, I knew very little about Russian roads,” Mr. Blake later said.

Instead, Mr. Blake remained in his wooded dacha outside Moscow, reading Gogol and Chekhov. He described his life in Russia as happy and peaceful. Contemplating his legacy on occasion of 90th birthday, Mr. Blake said he had no regrets.

“I do not believe in life after death,” Mr. Blake told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official government newspaper, in 2012. “As soon as our brain stops receiving blood, we go, and after that there will be nothing. No punishment for the bad things you did, nor rewards for the utterly wonderful.”

READ MORE at THE WASHINGTON POST

Rafer Johnson, Winner of a Memorable Decathlon, Is Dead

His triumphant performance at the 1960 Olympics was his farewell to track and field. He went on to become a good-will ambassador for the United States and a close associate of the Kennedy family.

The gold medalist Rafer Johnson carried the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the 1984 Games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. In 1960, he carried the American flag into Rome’s Olympic Stadium.
Credit…Robert Riger/Getty Images

By Richard Goldstein

Rafer Johnson, who carried the American flag into Rome’s Olympic Stadium in August 1960 as the first Black captain of a United States Olympic team and went on to win gold in a memorable decathlon duel, bringing him acclaim as the world’s greatest all-around athlete, died on Wednesday at his home in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles. He was 86.

Michael Roth, a family friend and spokesman, confirmed the death.

Johnson never competed after that decathlon triumph. He became a good-will ambassador for the United States and a close associate of the Kennedy family, taking a leadership role in the Special Olympics, which were championed by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and joining Robert F. Kennedy’s entourage during Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968. He was remembered especially for helping to wrestle the senator’s assassin to the ground in Los Angeles in 1968.

Johnson’s national profile was largely molded at the 1960 Olympics, one of the most celebrated in the history of the Games, a moment when a host of African-American athletes burst triumphantly onto the world stage. Muhammad Ali, known then as Cassius Clay, captured boxing gold in the light-heavyweight division. Wilma Rudolph swept to victory in the women’s 100- and 200-meter dashes and combined with her Tennessee State teammates for gold in the 4 x 100 relay. Oscar Robertson helped take the United States basketball team to a gold medal.

Johnson had been chosen to speak on behalf of the American Olympians at a sendoff rally at City Hall in New York.

He “flawlessly called out the names of the dozens of teammates who stood at his side,” David Maraniss wrote in “Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World” (2008). “He had a firm grasp of the occasion, and team officials took notice. His performance in New York, along with his stature as the gold medal favorite in the decathlon, convinced the officials that Johnson should be the U.S. captain in Rome and the first black athlete to carry the U.S. flag at an Olympic opening ceremonies.

“There could be no more valuable figure in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, which wasted no opportunity to denounce the racial inequities of the United States.”

Continue reading at The New York Times

DENIAL of AARC’s PETITION FOR CERTIORARI, 23 November 2020

The United States Supreme Court has denied the AARC’s petition of certiorari.

Case no. 19-1273, Assassination Archives and Research Center v. CIA

AARC seeks documents related to a briefing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 25, 1963 by CIA Cuban operations head Desmond Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald informed the Joint Chiefs that CIA was studying in detail a parallel in history to develop an approach to dealing with Fidel Castro- the July 20, 1944 plot by German military officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  One-time CIA Director Allen Dulles was in close contact in 1944 with the German plotters from his position as head of European operations for OSS in Bern Switzerland.  CIA denies finding any such records and instead has pointed to the National Archives as a possible source for information.  Clear Supreme Court case law holds that federal agencies cannot shirk their duties under the Freedom of Information Act by pointing requesters to another agency of the government, as CIA has done.

AARC v. CIA12 CIA Waiver Letter 19-1273 AARC v. CIA12 CIA Waiver Letter 19-1273

Related:

Relevant to the AARC’s efforts to seek the release of critical assassination-related materials being withheld by the U.S. federal government:

In the Supreme Court of the United States. ____________________

Assassination Archives and Research Center,

Petitioner,

-v-

Central Intelligence Agency,

Respondent. _____________________

On Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit _____________________

PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI ____________________

This Court granted of a writ of certiorari on February 28, 2020 in case # 19-547, Fish and Wildlife Serv., et al. v. Sierra Club, Inc. That case presents an issue closely similar to one in Petitioner’s case involving the deliberate process privilege under Exemption 5 of the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”), 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(5). The results of the two cases arising from different circuits are in conflict. The Fish and Wildlife Service case presents an issue of compelled release under the FOIA of draft documents for which the government asserts a deliberative process privilege under FOIA Exemption 5. Petitioner AARC’s case involves the Central Intelligence Agency’s successful assertion of the Exemption 5 deliberative process privilege for information reflecting CIA’s search activities in responding to Petitioner’s FOIA request. Petitioner’s FOIA request relates to a matter of public importance- new information about the circumstances of the assassination of President Kennedy.

AARC v. CIA12 cert petition

AARC v. CIA12 final appendix

 

RELATED:

AARC FOIA suit on CIA’s 1963 study of plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler

Doc. 26. Reply in Support of AARC’s CMSJ & Opp. to CIA’s MSJ (180220)

Doc. 26-2. AARC FOIA suit on CIA’s 1963 study of plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler

 

RELATED:

CIA Responds to AARC FOIA suit on CIA’s 1963 study of plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler

 

RELATED:

Center Seeks CIA Documents on Plots to Kill Hitler, Castro

Robert Sam Anson, journalist, author of ‘They’ve Killed the President’, dies at 75

From The Washington Post print edition of 10 November, 2020

Robert Sam Anson, journalist who chronicled war, power and social ills, dies at 75

By

Matt Schudel
November 7, 2020 at 8:14 p.m. EST

Robert Sam Anson, a journalist known for his immersive stories about ex-presidents, social change and conflict, including his own captivity by North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia, died Nov. 2 in Rexford, N.Y. He was 75.

The death was announced by Vanity Fair magazine, for which he was a longtime contributor. The cause was complications from dementia.

Throughout his career, Mr. Anson was considered one of the leading magazine writers of his generation, contributing to Time and Life magazines, New Times, Esquire, the Atlantic and Vanity Fair, where he began working in 1995. He published several books and was known for his fearless, sometimes combative approach to reporting — and his dealings with editors.

Mr. Anson emerged from the New Journalism movement of the 1960s, which held that reporters should immerse themselves in their stories and employ dramatic literary devices to make their tales more compelling. He was 24 when he was sent to Vietnam to cover the war for Time magazine and narrowly escaped death after being held captive in Cambodia.

Later, after he joined the magazine’s New York bureau, one of Mr. Anson’s first assignments was to write about boxer Joe Frazier.

“I thought this guy was completely out of his mind,” former Time writer Chris Byron said of Mr. Anson in a 1995 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “He got in the ring with Joe Frazier, and I think Frazier hit him so hard with the first punch, he got a broken leg or a dislocated shoulder. That guy hit him into the next county.

“Everybody said, ‘Did you hear what Bob Anson did?’ ”

Mr. Anson often wrote about the troubled legacies of powerful or once-promising men, including in-depth examinations of the post-presidential years of Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton. He often chronicled lives cut short by tragedy or mystery, including those of hip-hop star Tupac Shakur, comic writer Doug Kenney and Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was killed by his terrorist captors in Pakistan in 2002.

“The why is always the hardest question for a journalist to answer,” Mr. Anson wrote in the August 2002 issue of Vanity Fair, “and it’s what brought Danny Pearl to Pakistan. ‘I want to know why they hate us so much,’ he said. Why he died trying to find out brought me.

“My qualification is having been in a similar circumstance a long time ago—August 1970, in Cambodia, to be precise . . . The difference is, I came back.”

Mr. Anson also wrote a searching 1987 book, “Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry,” about a young African American graduate of the elite Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire who was killed on a Harlem street by a White police officer. Edmund Perry, who went to Exeter through a program designed to bring students from underprivileged backgrounds to top prep schools, had been accepted to Stanford University.

He “had everything going for him, all the things anyone was supposed to need to climb out of poverty and make it in America,” Mr. Anson wrote. But when Perry’s bright future was snuffed out after a late-night encounter with an undercover police officer, Mr. Anson discovered the story had many unexplored dimensions, including Perry’s history of drug-dealing and violence.

“Something had gone dreadfully haywire,” Mr. Anson wrote, “not only for this one 17-year-old boy but, by extension, for the country itself.”

In 1989, Mr. Anson published a memoir, “War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina,” which “deserves its own special place in the literature of the Vietnam experience and in the annals of journalism,” former Washington Post foreign correspondent Thomas W. Lippman wrote in a review.

In the book, Mr. Anson described the excitement of being in a war zone, the feeling of being under fire and living to tell the tale.

“Every day you could test yourself, your willingness to push the limits,” he wrote. “And God knows it was fun, not just the doing of it, but the recounting of it later at cocktail time, when everyone claimed the day’s closest call.”

Mr. Anson was born Robert Sam Zimdar in Cleveland on March 12, 1945. After his parents divorced, he grew up with his mother and maternal grandparents, taking their last name. His grandfather, Sam Anson, was a journalist who often quizzed his grandson about current events.

At Notre Dame, Mr. Anson said he found his first father figure — the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, the university’s president. Mr. Anson, who studied English and international relations, began contributing to Time as an undergraduate and was hired by the magazine after his graduation in 1967.

During the 1970s, Mr. Anson was a freelance writer and author, writing a biography of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George S. McGovern and another book that questioned the results of investigations into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A 1981 book, “Gone Crazy and Back Again,” traced the rise of Rolling Stone magazine and its influence on the 1960s and ’70s.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Anson was working on a book about the Walt Disney Co. when his publisher, Simon & Schuster, canceled the project. Mr. Anson sued for $1 million, suggesting that the publisher was pressured by corporate overlords. He settled out of court.

Mr. Anson was named editor of Los Angeles magazine in 1995, setting off a tumultuous period in which 17 of the magazine’s 19 contributing editors were gone within two months. Employees complained that he was moody, dismissive and prone to making sexist remarks.

“Robert Sam Anson is a bull who carries his own china shop around him,” Rod Lurie, the magazine’s onetime film critic, said at the time. After five months at the magazine, Mr. Anson was fired.

Even in the best of circumstances, he could be hard to manage and was known to get in the occasional fistfight.

“I would say he’s a great journalist and an excellent kick boxer, as anyone who’s wrangled with him knows,” former Esquire editor David Hirshey told the Los Angeles Times.

“There was a lot of blood on the walls, most of it mine, but in the end I always got a fax congratulating me on staying in the trenches with him.”

Mr. Anson’s marriages to Diane McAniff, Sharon Haddock and Amanda Kyser ended in divorce. Survivors include two children from his first marriage; a daughter from his third marriage; a sister; and a grandson.

In his book “War News,” Mr. Anson wrote that, after quarrels with his editors at Time over his coverage of the Vietnam War, he was sent to Cambodia, only to have the war follow him there.

He was captured by North Vietnamese forces in 1970, at a time when several other Western journalists were abducted and killed.

Mr. Anson was thrown into a foxhole with a trenching tool and ordered to keep digging.

“My mind was filled with a jumble of things — how I wished they’d kill me on the road so my body could be found; how I’d let down my kids and my wife; how I wanted to be shot in the chest, not the head,” he wrote.

“Another soldier moved forward and shouted at me to stop . . . I felt . . . the coldness of his AK being pressed against my forehead. I began saying the Hail Mary.

“Above me I heard the metallic click of a weapon being locked and loaded. . . . Then something strange swam into my head . . . the Vietnamese word for peace.

“ ‘Hoa-binh,’ I whimpered. Then louder: ‘Hoa-binh . . . Hoa-binh!’ ”

He finally persuaded his captors that he was a journalist, not a U.S. pilot who had been shot down. After three weeks, he was released, noting that the North Vietnamese had treated him “like a brother.”

He announced that he could no longer cover the war in Southeast Asia, saying, “I have friends on both sides now. I don’t want to see my friends dead.”

 

* * *

 

From The New York Times, 6 November, 2020 edition:

Robert Sam Anson, ‘Bare-Knuckled’ Magazine Writer, Dies at 75

He covered wars, politics and brash, complicated men — like himself. His profile subjects included Oliver Stone, Tupac Shakur and David Geffen.

Robert Sam Anson in 1985. He was a master of the vividly reported, sharply etched long-form magazine piece. He also produced six books.
Credit…Sigrid Estrada

By Katharine Q. Seelye

A bear of a man who resembled the actor James Coburn, Mr. Anson wrote mostly for Vanity Fair, where he was a contributing editor for more than two decades, but also for Esquire, Life, The Atlantic and New Times, a short-lived crusading magazine of the left in the mid-1970s.

He was “the last of a breed of broad-shouldered, bare-knuckled, ’70s magazine journalists who will chopper into any hellhole on earth and come back with an epic story,” his Esquire editor, David Hirshey, once said.

Mr. Anson’s byline promised vigorous writing, vivid scene-setting and insight into complicated, sometimes difficult men, of whom he was one.

“He, too, was magnetic and brash, turbulent and complex, passionate and fascinating,” David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair, wrote in a tribute after Mr. Anson’s death.

Among those he profiled were the director Oliver Stone, who at the time was making his controversial movie about the assassination of John F. Kennedy; Tupac Shakur, in a piece written after the rap star’s death; David Geffen, the music mogul, who allowed Mr. Anson a glimpse into his kaleidoscopic life; and Doug Kenney, the comic genius and co-founder of National Lampoon, whose life was anything but funny.

“The thing about Bob was that he was both vulnerable and imposing at the same time,” Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair, said in an email interview. “The wild man of his youth — and he was really out there — gave way to a journalist of towering bravery and ingenuity.”

As a 24-year-old correspondent for Time magazine in Cambodia, Mr. Anson was taken prisoner of war in 1970 and held for weeks by the North Vietnamese and their murderous allies, the Khmer Rouge.

Mr. Anson in Cambodia in 1970. Taking risks while covering war “was a means where every day you could test yourself, your willingness to push the limits,” he said.

Mr. Anson in Cambodia in 1970. Taking risks while covering war “was a means where every day you could test yourself, your willingness to push the limits,” he said.Credit…via Anson family

“Bravery isn’t just about launching yourself into a war zone — although he did that,” Mr. Carter said. “It’s also the stories you’re willing to take on. Bob was especially brilliant covering the dark side of the male psyche.”

Mr. Anson probed his own psyche in the last of his six books, “War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina” (1989), a personal story of camaraderie, competition and the thrill of danger.

He was so exhilarated to be covering the war, he was hardly aware of the bullets flying around him. He frequently traveled over dangerous roads where some of his colleagues had been killed or kidnapped.

Such daredevilry, Mr. Anson wrote, “was a means where every day you could test yourself, your willingness to push the limits.”

“And God knows it was fun,” he added, “not just the doing of it, but the recounting of it later at cocktail time, where everyone claimed the closest call.”

In reviewing the book for The New York Times, Harrison E. Salisbury called it “the story of a very young man at war, a tale that is told with gusto and excitement and captures a correspondent’s almost reckless pursuit of danger.”

An opinionated man who was fiercely protective of his work, Mr. Anson was not an easy edit. “He talked back to editors,” Ken Auletta, a media writer for The New Yorker and a longtime friend, said in a phone interview.

“And he would call people out,” he added. “If a fellow reporter was cutting corners or not being aggressive in his questioning, he would call them out. He made enemies that way. But from his point of view, he was telling the truth.”

Robert Sam Anson was born on March 12, 1945, in Cleveland. His mother, Virginia Rose Anson, was a schoolteacher. His father was not in the picture, and his mother and her parents raised him. His grandfather, Sam B. Anson, was a major figure in journalism in Cleveland, where he held publishing and editing jobs at the city’s daily papers. His grandmother, Edith (McConville) Anson, was a homemaker.

Life at home was something of a journalistic boot camp. When Robert was a child, he later told friends, his grandfather would quiz him on current events. If he gave a wrong answer, his grandfather would throw something at him.

As Mr. Anson recounted in his LinkedIn profile, he was expelled from one school for what he said was his “resistance to idiotic rules.” His punishment for one misdeed was to copy, by hand, Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” which “proved useful” when he covered Vietnam, he wrote.

He graduated from the Jesuit-run St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland in 1963 and went on to Notre Dame, where he majored in English and international relations. He graduated in 1967.

Mr. Anson’s three marriages ended in divorce. His brief first marriage, to Diane McAniff, whom he had met in college, was in the late 1960s. He was married, again briefly, to Sharon Haddock, a lawyer, in the mid-1970s. He married Amanda Kay Kyser, an artist, in 1985; they divorced in 2017.

In addition to his son, Mr. Anson is survived by two daughters, Christian Anson Kasperkovitz and Georgia Grace Anson; a sister, Edith Schy; and a grandson.

Time magazine hired him soon after college to work in its Los Angeles bureau. He covered politics, organized crime and what he once described as “a smorgasbord of mayhem,” which included the sensational killing of the actress Sharon Tate and others by followers of Charles Manson.

After he returned from Southeast Asia, he followed the 1972 presidential campaign, which led to his first book, “McGovern: A Biography” (1972). It was the authorized story of Senator George McGovern, the South Dakota Democrat who lost that election in a landslide to President Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Anson probed his own psyche in this last of his six books, in 1989.
Credit…Random House
Mr. Anson followed the 1972 presidential campaign for this biography.
Credit…Harcourt Brace

His other books include “Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise and Fall of the Rolling Stone Generation” (1981), a history of Rolling Stone magazine and its editor, Jann Wenner; “Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon” (1984), which examined the former president’s life after he left the White House; and “Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry” (1987), about a Black honors student from Harlem who was killed by a white police officer in 1985.

In a departure for a man so identified with being a writer, Mr. Anson accepted an offer in 1995 to become editor of Los Angeles magazine. His brief tenure was a disaster.

Shortly after he took the reins, The Los Angeles Times wrote a scathing piece about him, portraying him as mercurial, pugnacious and sexist, “the kind of writer colleagues imagined nursed a Hemingway complex.”

Others believed he was a gifted editor whose disruption of a stodgy workplace was bound to ruffle feathers. Still, he and the magazine parted ways after just five months.

He soon moved back east, “where he continued to torment editors, commune with friends and hunch over his keyboard for the rest of his days,” his son wrote in a letter to friends.

Mr. Anson in 2003. “Bob was especially brilliant covering the dark side of the male psyche,” said Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair.Credit…Gasper Tringale, via Vanity Fair

Mr. Anson did most of his writing from an Airstream trailer, which he kept behind his house in Sag Harbor, on Long Island’s East End. He survived a bout with cancer and became a mentor to other patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York through its Visible Ink writing program.

Almost two decades after leaving Los Angeles magazine, Mr. Anson reflected on his editing experience in a blog called “About Editing and Writing.”

He said he was glad that he had gone back to writing, “where you’re responsible solely for the words you put on paper, not the lives and families of an entire staff.”

But the editing experience made him a better writer, he said, adding, “And boy, did it open my eyes about what editors have to put up with 24/7.”

Apollo board panel to review Leon Black’s ties with Jeffrey Epstein, 21, 26 & 29 October Reports

Law firm Dechert is selected to examine private-equity firm CEO’s dealings with disgraced financier

  • October 21, 2020

A group of Apollo Global Management Inc.’s APO +4.08% independent board members will review Chief Executive Leon Black’s relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, according to people familiar with the matter.

At a regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday morning, Mr. Black requested that the board’s conflict-committee members, which include Michael E. Ducey, A.B. Krongard and Pauline Richards, hire a law firm to examine his business dealings with Mr. Epstein, the people said. The committee interviewed a number of firms and selected Dechert LLP on Tuesday afternoon.

APOLLO CEO, CO-FOUNDER LEON BLACK AND THE $75 MILLION CONNECTED TO JEFFREY EPSTEIN: REPORT

Mr. Epstein was indicted last year on federal sex-trafficking charges stemming from an alleged scheme to exploit underage girls.

The move is an effort by the Apollo co-founder to put to rest renewed speculation into the nature of his ties to Mr. Epstein, who was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell last year in a suicide.

Mr. Black has said Mr. Epstein provided him with tax-and-estate-planning advice, for which the billionaire paid millions of dollars over a multiyear period. Mr. Epstein also previously served on the board of Mr. Black’s family foundation. Mr. Black made a day trip with his family to Mr. Epstein’s private island and met with Mr. Epstein at the adviser’s Manhattan townhouse.

Mr. Black is among those who have received subpoenas in a civil investigation in the U.S. Virgin Islands into Mr. Epstein’s businesses. He has said he intends to cooperate with the inquiry.

Shares of Apollo, a private-equity investing firm with more than $400 billion of assets under management, have fallen roughly 15% since Oct. 12, when the New York Times reported that Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein at least $50 million in the years after Mr. Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl. The article didn’t present any evidence that Mr. Black participated in any inappropriate activity.

THE WOES OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN: HOW HE MAINTAINED WALL STREET CONNECTIONS WHILE DOWNPLAYING CHILD SEX ACCUSATIONS

Though the existence of payments from Mr. Black to Mr. Epstein were known—The Wall Street Journal had reported last year on at least $10 million of them—the front-page Times article cited an internal report by Deutsche Bank AG that showed payments from entities controlled by the private-equity magnate to ones controlled by Mr. Epstein.

Private-equity funds are typically structured in such a way that investors can only vote to pull their money under very specific circumstances, such as if a manager is convicted of a crime. But some of Apollo’s public-pension-fund investors have expressed concern that the issue may continue to produce negative headlines, the people familiar with the matter said.

In an Oct. 12 letter to Apollo’s investors that was reviewed by the Journal, Mr. Black said Mr. Epstein served as an adviser to him between 2012 and 2017 and that he was “completely unaware” of Mr. Epstein’s “reprehensible” conduct. “I deeply regret having had any involvement with him,” Mr. Black wrote.

Apollo has said it never did business with Mr. Epstein.

Mr. Epstein was arrested in July 2019 during scrutiny of a 2007 nonprosecution agreement he signed with federal authorities in Florida to resolve an investigation into improper conduct involving underage girls. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to two state prostitution counts and spent much of his 13-month sentence outside prison.

Mr. Epstein, who grew up in Coney Island, built a fortune of more than half a billion dollars by leveraging close relationships with a who’s who of the nation’s rich and famous, among them retail magnate Leslie Wexner, Johnson & Johnson heiress Elizabeth Johnson and hedge-fund billionaire Glenn Dubin.

After serving his sentence, Mr. Epstein worked to rehabilitate his public image and continued to surround himself with luminaries of politics, academia and finance.

Mr. Black, 69 years old, co-founded Apollo in 1990 with former partners from Drexel Burnham Lambert after the firm filed for bankruptcy protection. Drexel, under the leadership of Michael Milken, had pioneered the use of high-yield bonds as a means of financing corporate buyouts, paving the way for the explosion of the private-equity industry.

New York-based Apollo, which made its name by taking over struggling businesses by buying up their debt, has posted some of the industry’s best returns and boasts its largest credit-investment platform.

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Apollo Clients Await Inquiry’s Findings on Chief and Jeffrey Epstein

Leon Black, Apollo Global Management’s co-founder and leader, has been facing questions from investors over his ties to the convicted sex offender. One has already opted to withhold new investment.

Leon Black, Apollo’s chairman and chief executive, in 2018.
Credit…Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

By Matthew Goldstein, Mary Williams Walsh and Matt Phillips

Leon Black helped start Apollo Global Management three decades ago out of the ashes of a junk-bond scandal and built a $400 billion private-equity powerhouse, handling the investments of institutions around the globe, from public pension systems in California to sovereign wealth funds controlled by foreign governments.

But now some of his clients are asking pointed questions about his judgment, as his association with a notorious sex offender threatens to cloud his future.

In the past two weeks — since The New York Times detailed more than $50 million in payments and contributions from Mr. Black to Jeffrey Epstein — Apollo’s clients have begun demanding answers about that relationship. In at least one case, an investor has decided not to hand Apollo any more of its money for the time being.

Apollo will report its quarterly earnings on Thursday, and an analyst note from investment firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods said the effect of Mr. Black’s dealings with Mr. Epstein on client relations will be a “focal point” of the private equity firm’s earnings call.

“Investors are concerned about reputational risk,” Kenneth Worthington, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase who covers the company’s shares, wrote in a client note.

Mr. Black, 69, is Apollo’s chief executive and chairman. He started the firm with other former employees of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the investment bank that collapsed in 1990 amid a trading investigation that sent the since-pardoned Michael Milken to prison. Mr. Black has long been the face and voice of Apollo: In securities filings, Apollo names five people who are so vital to its business that the loss of their services would have a “material adverse effect” on the firm.

In plainer terms, Apollo’s business suffers without a few key people. And in the list of names, Mr. Black’s comes first.

“Apollo has always been closely associated with its founder and leader,” said Sabrina T. Howell, an assistant professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business who has studied private equity firms. In the short term, she said, “Apollo’s brand will certainly suffer.”

Mr. Black — who is one of Apollo’s largest shareholders along with his co-founders Josh Harris and Marc Rowan — asked the firm’s independent board members to conduct an investigation into his financial ties with Mr. Epstein, who died in a Manhattan jail cell last year while facing federal sex-trafficking charges.

Mr. Black knew Mr. Epstein for decades and was just one of a long list of high-profile figures to have associated with him, from Prince Andrew to a number of business leaders. After Mr. Epstein’s arrest, Mr. Black told investors in a letter that there had been a “limited relationship” with Mr. Epstein, who gave him advice “from time to time” on personal financial matters, such as estate planning. Mr. Black stressed that he was not aware of the conduct that had led to the sex-trafficking case against Mr. Epstein.

Although Mr. Black’s letter described how Mr. Epstein had stepped down from the board of his family foundation in 2007 — shortly before a conviction in Florida for soliciting prostitution from a teen girl made Mr. Epstein a pariah — it said little about the years since. After the Times report earlier this month, Mr. Black acknowledged that he had paid Mr. Epstein “millions of dollars annually” between 2012 and 2017 and had socialized with him, but said he “never tried to conceal” the work Mr. Epstein had done for him. (Mr. Black and Apollo have said Mr. Epstein did no work for the firm.)

William Katz, an analyst who covers Apollo shares at Citigroup Global Markets, said the issue was so-called headline risk: the chance that Mr. Black shows up again and again in negative news reports.

“It will come down to the nature of those headlines,” Mr. Katz said.

If the headlines bring closure — such as the board investigation finding nothing of concern — the pressure could abate on Apollo’s shares, he said. Apollo’s stock priced dipped about 11 percent in the days after the report was published, but has since regained some ground. Even so, its shares are down more than 6 percent since the article was published on Oct. 12. The S&P 500 is down more than 2 percent over the same period.

The largest institutional investor in Apollo, which was first publicly traded in 2011, is the hedge fund Tiger Global Management. The firm declined to comment on Mr. Black and the investigation.

Apollo said it was communicating with shareholders and investors in its funds, saying in a statement that it was “firmly committed to transparency.” Mr. Black, it said, was responding to clients.

“Leon has communicated directly with our investors on this issue and we remain in regular dialogue with our investors and other stakeholders,” the statement said.

Most clients who have given money to Apollo to invest appear to be taking a wait-and-see attitude. It is difficult for private equity investors to suddenly pull out their money; clients must commit for years at a time, and the cash they invest is tied up in funds that hold ownership stakes in a variety of companies.

But in the world of private equity investing, even that can have an impact if it means a client chooses not to commit any new money.

One pension fund that invests with Apollo, the $63 billion Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, said on Wednesday that it had told Apollo it would not invest additional money with the firm until the review was complete. The retirement system “is closely following the ongoing legal issues and the newly launched internal Apollo investigation,” said Steve Esack, a spokesman for the retirement system.

Other pension funds — in Texas, California, Illinois and Ontario — did not go as far, but acknowledged that they were watching the investigation closely.

Wayne Davis, a spokesman for CalPERS — the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, one of Apollo’s biggest clients — said the fund had called Apollo after the Times report about Mr. Black’s relationship with Mr. Epstein. He said the system expects its outside investment managers “to follow the same core values of integrity and accountability that guide our own investment decision-making.”

Still more clients could opt to withhold further investment. Aksia, a major pension and endowment advisory firm that helps manage more than $160 billion in assets, told its clients they should freeze their investments with Apollo until the board review is completed, according to Bloomberg.

While Mr. Black is Apollo’s highest profile figure, it takes the departure of at least two of Apollo’s three senior principal partners to cause a “key person event” permitting all investors to pull their money ahead of schedule, according to the limited partnership agreement for an Apollo fund that is still in force. Even then, the agreement gives Apollo a 120-day window to try to persuade two-thirds of the investors to keep their money in place for the rest of the fund’s natural life span.

The inquiry is being conducted by law firm Dechert and led by Andrew Levander, the white collar criminal defense lawyer who a decade ago represented Jon Corzine, the former New Jersey governor and U.S. senator, over the collapse of the trading firm MF Global. Mr. Levander declined to comment.

Mr. Black has said he will cooperate with the investigation and is expected to turn over bank and other records that document the wire transfers to Mr. Epstein’s businesses in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Apollo would suffer if the inquiry turns up unflattering information about Mr. Black, said John Longo, a professor at Rutgers University Business School and chief investment officer for Beacon Trust, $3 billion investment advisory firm. But even if Mr. Black had to step away from Apollo, the firm would still be able to thrive in the long term, he said.

Mr. Longo said Apollo, which is publicly traded and has more than 1,500 employees, is far less dependent on a single person than, for example, a hedge fund, which is often tied to the fate of its founder and most seasoned trader.

Given Apollo’s size, Mr. Longo said, “they will be able to continue without interruption.”

READ MORE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

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