Michael Josselson

Michael Josselson (born March 2, 1908 in Tartu , † January 7, 1978 in Geneva ) was an American publicist and employee of the CIA . In particular, he acted as a liaison between the American secret service and the Congress for Cultural Freedom .

Origin and education

Josselson was born the son of a Jewish timber merchant. He attended an Estonian elementary school. He completed secondary school lessons from 1920 to 1927 in Berlin . He then attended the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in 1927 and 1928 .

Commercial activities

After attending university, Josselson worked as a buyer for a department store (Gimbel-May) and was responsible for Europe-wide purchasing, where he benefited from his good language skills in German , Russian , French and English . In 1935 he left Germany and took a job as a manager in Gimbel's Paris office. In 1937 he emigrated to the United States , accompanied by his French wife Colette. He worked in New York City as General Manager of all of Gimbel's European offices.

Because of the world-war-related collapse of European markets Josselson 1941 was forced to work again as a buyer for Gimbel. The Josselson couple separated; while she stayed in New York, he turned to Pittsburgh for professional reasons . The divorce followed in 1949.

Military service

Josselson took American citizenship in 1942 and joined the United States Army the following year . In the army he went through a training program of the military secret service and then acted as a translator in a news unit in the European theater of war. In 1946 he left the army with the rank of Lieutenant ( 1st Lieutenant ), but remained until 1950 as an officer of military intelligence in the reserve .

Activities for US authorities in post-war Germany

From 1946 to 1949 Josselson worked as an officer for cultural affairs for OMGUS in Berlin. From 1949 to 1950 he was responsible for public affairs for the American high commissioner in Germany, John McCloy . In both positions, one of his central tasks was to ensure the denazification of leading German intellectuals and to take care of the dissemination of anti-communist propaganda . Contacts with the CIA came from this time.

Congress for Cultural Freedom

After Josselson left the service of the US Department of Defense in 1950 , he took care of steering the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF ). As secretary of this organization, his area of ​​responsibility included financing issues. He arranged the inflow of CIA funds.

His background work also included the organization of CCF meetings, the production of various CCF publications and the establishment of regional offices around the world. After journalists publicized the financing of the CCF from CIA funds in 1966, Josselson resigned from his offices in the CCF in 1967.

After this step, he advised the successor organization of the CCF, the insignificant International Association for Cultural Freedom , which denied all connections to the CCF and the CIA despite having a comparable content.

Study on Barclay de Tolly

In the early 1970s, Josselson began a comprehensive study of Mikhail Bogdanowitsch Barclay de Tolly (1761-1818), a Russian field marshal and minister of war . Due to health problems, he was supported by his second wife Diana Dodge Josselson, with whom he had lived in Switzerland since 1961 . The book was published posthumously in 1980 by Oxford University Press .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On Gimbel see the corresponding entry on the family in James Ciment (Editor), Thaddeus Russell (Contributing Editor): The home front encyclopedia: United States, Britain, and Canada in World Wars I and II , ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, Calif., 2007, ISBN 1-57607-849-3 , pp. 599 f .
2. ^ Michael Josselson and Diana Josselson: The commander. A life of Barclay de Tolly , Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York 1980, ISBN 0-19-215854-6 .

Web links

• Overview of Josselson's estate in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin .