Cold War intrigue still surfaces in Virginia

August 11th, 2010

By Peter Vieth

A barn in a remote part of Culpeper County has given up up secrets about a  World War II and Cold War era clandestine espionage agency viewed as one of the predecessors of the CIA.

The operation, bearing the enigmatic name “the Pond,” was responsible for the 1947 rescue of an anti-communist leader in Hungary along with other intelligence successes.

We’re just hearing about the Pond because its leader, fervent anti-communist John V. Grombach, retired to an estate in rural Boston, Va., bringing with him tens of thousands of documents he intended to keep secret. Grombach died in 1982 and the cache of papers emerged by accident in 2001.

The nation’s current spy agencies have finally finished going through the papers and the Associated Press got a look at many of them in April.

The editors of the Culpeper Star-Exponent take understandable pleasure in helping bring out the story of the mysterious Longlea property where Grombach held forth in his later years. They should not overlook another piece of Cold War history in their own backyard – the Mount Pony facility where, for 19 years, the Federal Reserve Board hid a substantial wad of cash in case of nuclear Armageddon.

Excerpt from Jennifer Lake's Blog:

Files belonging to The Pond, when picked up in 2001, were in the possession of the Freedom Studies Center of the American Security Council Foundation (ASCF, est.1958), a private non-profit lobby group for the private American Security Council founded by John Morris Fisher in 1955. Mr. Fisher, then a resident of the town of Culpeper, was the Director for National Security of  Sears Roebuck and Co., the Rosenwalds' vast holding, and just up the road from the town of Culpeper lay Brandy Rock Farm, Strauss’s 1600-acre estate bought in 1933. 

Congressional Record, V. 144, Pt. 14, September 9, 1998 to September 21 1998

Alice Glass was born on October 11, 1911, in Lott, Falls County, Texas, to George William and Judith (Ligon) Glass. She graduated from high school in Marlin and attended Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and Columbia University in New York. After a short second enrollment at Texas Christian University, she moved to Austin and worked as secretary to state senator William Robert Poage.

Charles E. Marsh

A New Deal supporter from Waco, Poage favored rural electrification and rural telephone service while campaigning in 1936 for his first term in the U.S. Congress. Poage kept a home in Waco, less than three miles from Ephraim S. Fentress' residence. Fentress and Charles Edward Marsh had first met in Iowa while each worked for the Des Moines Daily News, and together they gained control of the Waco Morning News in 1917, soon buying Waco's other newspaper, the Tribune, merging them. They then bought newspapers in numerous other mid-size Texas towns. Marsh moved from Waco to Austin after buying the newspaper there in late 1921.

In 1932 his Newspaper Publishing Co. had offices on the seventh floor of the Littlefield Building (104 East 6th Street). Three years later the Austin directory shows part of those offices were occupied by the newly created Texas Racing Commission, whose head was Robert Bernerd Anderson; the Texas State Tax Board, of which the racing commission was a part, was a couple of doors down the hall. Lyndon Johnson also had his Texas branch of the National Youth Administration office in Room 601 of the Littlefield Building in August 1935, one floor down from the Racing Commission's office at 715. Another part of Marsh's old office would be leased to the Texas Relief Commission, which by 1935 was taking up offices on every floor of the Littlefield Building. 

By that time, however, Marsh had moved his office to the Norwood Building at 114 West 7th Street. Years later the Norwood Tower would be acquired by one Lyndon Johnson's daughters, with the penthouse serving as their downtown residence. For 35 years previously, the penthouse was occupied by Thomas J. Butler, the building's former owner, whose wife was a niece of Eugene Bremond, an early banker in Austin with close ties to Col. E.M. House. His State National Bank would become the Capital National Bank in 1934, the year the bank moved its headquarters into the Norwood Building. Marsh moved into the new building as did former governor Dan Moody and other men who would prove to be powerful several years later:  

Norwood Building tenants

State Sen. Poage (D-Waco) maintained an office in the Texas Capitol from 1930 until his election to Congress, and Marsh allegedly met 20-year-old Alice Glass there in 1931. Charles, who married his first wife the same year Alice was born, lived with his family in a large but relatively modest home a few blocks west of the old House mansion near 15th (Enfield) Street.

The purchase by Marsh and Fentress of the Laredo newspaper near the Mexican border, however, resulted in a lawsuit in 1932 to regain title by its former owner, W.P. Allen. During the time Marsh spent in Webb County, he went into an partnership in an oil well being drilled by Herman Brown, a man from central Texas who would eventually become one of Lyndon Johnson's biggest financial supporters.

According to Bryan Burrough in his book, The big rich: the rise and fall of the greatest Texas oil fortunes, Marsh also began financing Sid Richardson's oil ventures in the early 1930's. Citing Marsh's papers stored in the LBJ Library, Burrough says that it was with profits from his partnership with Richardson in the Keystone Field, while in the throes of divorce from his wife, Leona, that he purchased Longlea for Alice in 1938, but that he was forced to sell his interest to Richardson in late 1941 because, in addition to paying Leona in the divorce settlement, he owed taxes to the IRS. 

Roald Dahl

After selling off his newspapers, in 1947, he founded the Public Welfare Foundation . He died in 1964. Before his death, Charlie Marsh even brought in a friend who had actually spied on him for British intelligence to work for the foundation--Roald Dahl--according to one of Dahl's biographers, Donald Storrock, in Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl.

Alice had divorced Marsh not long after they finally married, and she went on to marry numerous times, the last time to Col. Richard J. Kirkpatrick in 1959, to whom she remained married until his death in 1974. In the last few months of her life she moved from Virginia to Marlin, Texas, where she died of cancer in late 1976.

Marsh's daughter, from his marriage to Leona, Antoinette Haskell, operated the Public Welfare Foundation after Charles' death, according to her obituary:

Antoinette Wade Marsh Haskell, 95, of Martinsville, Va., an officer of the Martinsville Bulletin, died Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2009, at Stanleytown Health and Rehab Center. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1914 to Leona Marsh and Charles Edward Marsh, a Texas oil and newspaper man. She was reared in Austin, Texas, where her father was editor and publisher of the Austin American Statesman and other newspapers. She attended the University of Texas for her freshman year and then transferred to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where she graduated in 1936. She then lived in Orlando and Miami in Florida. During World War II she lived in Manhattan in New York City, where she worked as assistant purchasing agent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her husband, Robert H. Haskell, served with the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, and in 1947 the couple moved to Martinsville where he was publisher of the Martinsville Bulletin. He died in 1971.

In addition to serving as an officer of the Bulletin, Antoinette Haskell served as a director of the Public Welfare Foundation until 2008. The foundation was begun in 1947 by her father. She had two sons, Robert H. Haskell of Martinsville and the late Charles T. Haskell; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. The funeral and burial will be private.