A Very Principled Boy: The Story of Duncan Lee

Mark A Bradley (Virginia & Christ Church 1978) is the author of A Very Principled Boy which tells the story of Duncan Lee (Virginia & Christ Church 1935). Mark has recently retired after a long career in public service with the CIA, on the Hill, the Department of Justice, and at the National Archives.

Give us an overview of who Duncan Lee was.

He was a member of the very distinguished Lee family from Virginia. He was related to Richard Henry Lee, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, and to Robert E Lee, the Confederate General. He was a graduate of Woodberry Forest, which was an elite prep school in Virginia for boys, of Yale, and of Oxford, where he read Jurisprudence and also took a BCL in 1937.

When the war started, he joined the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner to the CIA. He became a Lieutenant Colonel and, after the war, he became a very successful, wealthy corporate lawyer. He was also, unfortunately, one of the best moles the Soviets ever had inside the US intelligence services. 

He spied for the Soviets from the summer of 1942 until the spring of 1945 when he finally lost his nerve. This was aided by the fact that his handler defected to the FBI and began to out all her sources. This forced  the Soviets to shut down their spy networks in the United States, including Lee.

In 1946, Lee went to work for Tommy Corcoran, one of the great Washington political fixers.  Corcoran planned to make a lot of money after the war in China, and Lee had grown up in China as the son of a missionary and spoke reasonably good Chinese. He was also very familiar with the country because his last billet in the OSS was chief of its Far Eastern branch. After the war, Corcoran knew that the Chinese infrastructure been destroyed and needed to be rebuilt. One way to get a jump on that was to create an airline, Civil Air Transport, which later became the CIA’s covert action air wing called Air America. Lee was the airline’s lawyer and, through some brilliant legal maneuvering, was able to keep the planes out of the hands of Mao Zedong’s communists. He had transformed himself into a rabid cold warrior.

Unfortunately for him, politics in the United States had gotten rather nasty with the coming of the House Un  American Activities Committee, Joe McCarthy, and  the Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs cases. Lee was identified by the FBI as being a Soviet spy - not only did they have his handler who defected, but they also had the benefits of a codebreaking program in what later became the National Security Agency. Through these codes, the FBI and the NSA were able to determine that 11 applied to Duncan Lee. The FBI was certain then that Elizabeth Bentley, his handler who defected, had told the truth when she said that Lee had been a Soviet spy.

This led J Edgar Hoover to start a 13-year manhunt to try to bring Lee to justice. He was never able to do that. Lee was extraordinarily wary when he was spying for the Soviets. He never gave them any actual documents; everything was oral, so there were no documents that anybody could point to that Lee had handed over.

Second, the FBI and the NSA didn't want the Russians to know they had broken their codes. They were adamant that the fruits of their codebreaking were not going to be used in any open proceeding, much less a court trial.

Lee was thus able to avoid being charged with espionage, but these charges followed and haunted him for the rest of his life. It really changed the trajectory of what he saw himself becoming. He had a very keen interest in politics and foreign affairs. I believe he saw himself as becoming a prominent figure in Washington after the war but, because of his communist  and espionage pasts, he was always deemed a security risk. He eventually became American Insurance Group's general counsel and made a lot of money. He retired to Toronto, Canada and died there in 1988.

At the very end of his life, he wrote a semi-confession called A Letter to My Children, where he got close to admitting what he had done. He didn’t, but he did lament the fact that his relationship with what he called left wing politics at the time destroyed his political future and what he called his “future usefulness”. Usefulness to do something greater than to serve himself. So ultimately, the story is, I think, rather tragic. Lee had enormous promise, but he sacrificed it for a cause that he later came to despise.

What interested you in Lee? What drew you to his story?

I ran across this story in 1998 after I went to work for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat from New York. Moynihan chaired something called the Secrecy Commission – his idea was that the government classified too much, didn't declassify enough, and if it did, its citizens might believe it more. For instance, they would actually see for themselves that Alger Hiss was guilty, and that the Rosenbergs had done what they were accused of doing.  Senator Moynihan believed that the government is its own worst enemy by keeping too much away from its citizens.

Moynihan was able to persuade John Deutsch, who was then the director of Central Intelligence, to ask the NSA to declassify its Venona codebreaking program. The NSA did not declassify how they broke the codes but the essence of what the Soviets’ cables contained, including the 11 that pertained to Duncan Lee.

What interested me about Lee was that he was from Virginia. He was a member of the Lee family;  I did my undergraduate work at Washington & Lee, and he was a fellow Rhodes Scholar. In fact, we were both at the same college, Christ Church, and  we both lived in the Meadow Building our first year. He was there from 1935-1938, I was there from 1978-1980, so we didn't overlap, but I was fascinated by what could cause somebody from that sort of background to do what he was accused of doing. And so I reached out to some of my old colleagues in CIA, and found that they were still interested in Lee from a counterintelligence perspective.

Eventually, the real breakthrough came when I got to know Lee’s children, and they gave me 4 boxes of his papers and letters. These are now at Yale. So I had a pretty good history of Lee from his time at Woodberry Forest until his death. He was a copious letter writer - awful handwriting – his mother was forced to send  him a typewriter, because she couldn’t read his poor handwriting.  But among the letters were those from his time at Oxford so I could trace his trajectory. He was very upset about what was happening in Spain. Only the Russians were helping the Republicans fight off Franco, the Germans, and the Italians.

He also went to Nazi Germany twice, and he realized that what was happening there was probably going to lead to war. And then in 1937, he went to the Soviet Union for a highly scripted  three week trip, part of a lawyer's group out of London, led by Dudley Collard, who was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Lee took his trip during the height of  Stalin's purges.  Accordingly, he was only shown the best of what Moscow had to offer. He swallowed it hook, line and sinker and got back from the trip and said that it was extraordinary what they've done, they've built this paradise. And he told his parents he was going to join the Communist Party of Great Britain. Well, they said, wait a minute -  they'd been Christian missionaries in China from 1902 until 1928 – and they knew that their son had a brilliant future ahead of him. But Lee was adamant he was going to join the party, and he joined the Communist Party of the United States of America while at Yale Law School in 1939.

To me, Lee’s life was a fascinating study of how one decides to  betray his country. And then his reaction that, oh, it was probably one hell of a mistake. Now what do I do? How do I extricate myself from this?

The book includes a quote from the then Warden of Rhodes House, Carleton Allen. He “understood that Rhodes had expected Scholars to participate fully in Oxford’s intellectual life” and, “we cannot help it if Rhodes scholars become communists and it is perfectly certain in the present state of affairs that an increasing number of them will do so”. There were two other Scholars from the 1930s known to have been spies - there’s a book about Ian Milner (New Zealand & New College 1934), but there hasn’t been one about Donald Wheeler (Oregon & Pembroke 1935), who you say was the most damaging of the three.

No one has written a book about Wheeler. There’s a book called Spies by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr and it's got several pages  on Wheeler and he's mentioned in another book called The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein, but nobody's ever written a book about  Wheeler. I don't really know why – he’s a fascinating figure. Lee became an alcoholic, but he also  became a wealthy lawyer. Wheeler was listed as an oil burner mechanic at one point. Here was a man who was a brilliant economist but couldn't get work because he had been accused of being a spy for the Soviets too. Still, he was lucky. Like Lee, he was never tried and convicted for being one.

The next book you wrote is being turned into a movie. 

It's called Blood Runs Coal – it’s the true account of  three murders in the Pennsylvania coal fields in 1969. Joseph “Jock” Yablonski was a member of the United Mine Workers who was trying to clean up the union. Instead, the autocratic head of the union ordered his henchmen to kill Yablosnki on New Year's Eve 1969. Sadly, they also killed his wife and daughter. This is a book about his crusade to clean up the United Mine Workers of America, his assassination, and its aftermath. It's been optioned by Universal Studios and Cillian Murphy has been attached to play the lead role.

And what next?

I'm working on a third book about a double murder the Ku Klux Klan committed in Louisiana in 1922. The KKK of the 1920s was different than the post Civil War Klan - most of its victims were fellow white Protestants. The Klan at that time was almost an American Taliban - it was obsessed with enforcing old-time morality. Sadly, there are several striking similarities to the 1920s and what is going on now in the United States.