The Political Is Personal: John Paton Davies and Operation Tawny Pipit

Photo: Harry S. Truman Library & Museum.

Chair: Dr Aviva Guttman, Visiting Researcher in Intelligence and International Security, War Studies Department

Speaker: Sarah-Jane Corke, Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick and President of the North American Society for Intelligence History (NASIH)

 

This is a Women’s Intelligence Brown Bag Network event

 

In the fall of 1954, America President Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, fired John Paton Davies, a man intellectual historian David Hollinger characterised as one of the two most recognisable men to have ever served in the foreign service. Six years before, Davies had been awarded the coveted Medal of Freedom by President Harry Truman for his “high degree of resourcefulness, intelligence and personal courage.” How did this man go from a Medal of Freedom winner to a disgraced Foreign Service officer in six short years?

Although Davies first security investigation was launched because of a series of events that occurred in China, integral to understanding why he was ultimately fired, six years later, was the fallout from an obscure covert operation, Operation Tawny Pipit. An operation he recommended while he was serving as the liaison officer between the State Department and the CIA in 1949 and ultimately led to a number of underlying factors to come to a head once the operation was exposed. 

In this presentation Sarah-Jane will examine this event and argue that Davies firing owned more to personal grievances, petty animosities and misplaced ambition on the part of his friends and colleagues, than to anything Davies did or did not do. In this case the political was personal.

Register via Zoom

 

Biographical note

Dr. Sarah-Jane Corke is an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick, in Canada. She is also serving as the President of the North American Society for Intelligence History (NASIH). Her first book, US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, The CIA and Secret Warfare was published by Routledge in 2008. Dr. Corke has also published articles in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Intelligence and National Security and The Journal of Conflict Studies. She is currently working on a biography of John Paton and Patricia Grady Davies.