TRANSCRIPT OF BROADCAST BY FULTON LEWIS, JR.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP63T00245R000100220136-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 3, 2006
• Sequence Number: 136
• Publication Date: January 28, 1958
• Content Type: TRANS

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L
TRANSCRIPT OF BROADCAST
By
Fulton Lewis, Jr.
Station WGWS at 7-7:15 P. M.
28 January 1958
Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, has to do with a man by the
name of Fletcher Bartholemewo A chunky athletic, soft-floating
individual now 39 years old, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
He has a semi-crew cut and a talented, pretty and very intel-
ligent wife by the name of Cynthia, and, at the time this story
took place in the summer of 1956, he had three children. They
now have four. His mother and father are both living, are peo-
ple of culture and modest dignity and they too live in Minne-
apolis, Fletcher Bartholemew worked his way through MIT, Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most exacting, dif -
ficult institutions of learning in the world, and he was on the
dean?s list. for six semesters out of a possible seven. There
was no dean?s list the first semester, of course. He spent two and
a half years-as a test pilot for the air force, came out with
an excellent record. He is a meteorologist,-by profession and
held jobs in the Far East and in South America. As of 1954,
he was employed in the big meteorological section of General
Mills in Minneapolis.
When the Free Europe committee decided to set up its
balloon propaganda program across the iron curtain, General
Mills loaned Bartholemew' to the so-called Free Europe press in
Munich, which was operating the balloon program, as a technical
adviser. It was necessary to have a staff of technicians who
could compute wind drifts and directions at various altitudes,
so as to'have some reasonable idea where the propaganda balloons
were going and how to trigger the mechanism-that would release
the propaganda leaflets at the proper time over the target areas
of population. I might add that this was done by the use of dry
ice, which slowly evaporated--the speed of evaporation depending
on the air temperature, which was variable between different al-
titudes, thus making these computations a more or less complicated
but very important job.
So Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher Bartholemew and their three young
children landed in Munich, Germany, in early 1955, to become part
of the Radio Free Europe community there. With him, in the De-
partment of Meteorology was one J. Richard Smith, also on loan
from General Mills and now the head of Raven Industries Incor-
porated, New Falls, South Dakota, manufacturing plastic special-
ties, and I might add a very smart and up-and-coming young man.
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Above the two of them, as head of the over-all (garble),
was Howard F. Weaver and above Weaver in New York, as'head of
the entire Free Europe press, was Samual S. Walker, Jr., graind-
son of the National City Bank millions, Weaver and Walker are
both in their very early thirties and were friends at Yale,
The general head of all Free Europe operations in Munich was a
man by the name of Richard Condon, who directed the Radio Free
Europe and the Free Europe press operations alike,
Fletcher Bartholemew was in Munich in this balloon project
job for about 23 months, all told. The work was very exacting,
the hours even more so, and he was somewhat disappointed, as
was Dick Smith, J. Richard Smith, in the fact that there was no
element of ideology involved, no contact with policy-making
or the planning of the propaganda. And at the end of a year and
eight months, Fletcher Bartholemew decided to give Free Europe
two and half month's notice and get ready to go back home to
Minneapolis,
By way of completing the general picture for you, the
stage setting, I might add that there was a considerable colony
of Americans on the scene there in Munich, There was a pleasant
social relationship among the various families. They baby-sat
for each other and dined together, and it was pretty much what
you would expect of an American colony of young people doing a
job in a foreign country. Munich is a beautiful life-loving,
stimulating city anyway,
Fletcher Bartholemew made his plans to'leave for home on
Tuesday the 31st of July. Now remember that date, please, if
you will, because it becomes all important--Tuesday the 31st
of July, And he had passage booked for himself aboard the
Italian line from Genoa about 10 days later. He and Mrs.
Bartholemew planned to leave Munich by car, first thing Tuesday
morning, end to ta.Ye a leisurely motor trip with their three child-
ren down through the Bavarian Alps and the Swiss Alps, reaching
.Genoa in time to catch the ship back home.
About two weeks before that final departure date of Tuesday,
the 31st of July, Fletcher Bartholemew sat himself down and
gathered together a lot of notes and a lot of ideas that he had
collected over the period of his stay in Munich concerning some
of the people in the organization, some of the things that had
happened, and some of the things he thought called for correction.
He put these together in a final sort of memorandum i'n which he
also expressed the suspicion, together with some of his reasons,
that some of the people in the organization in Munich were homo-
sexuals. He showed the memorandum to Dick Smith, his closest
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friend, with whom he had discussed these matters from time to
time. The two families spent a great deal of time together.
The Smith's had four children about the same age as the
Bartholemew children. Fletcher Bartholemew was an excellent
tennis player and Dick Smith sometimes was his partner in
doubles matches,
Fletcher Bartholemew made, three copies of the memorandum,
the first of which he took personally to the United States
consul general in Munich, a man by the name of Edward Page,
Jr,,--who incidently is still there according to the latest
available State Department information.
A second copy he sent to a friend in New York, to be de-
livered to the then president of the Free Europe committee, a
man named Whitney Sheppardson--who incidently was replaced
three months after this incident took place by the present
president, Willis B. Frithburger,retired lieutenant general
and close friend of President Eisenhower,
The third copy Bartholemew sent to a friend in Washington,
D. C,, to be delivered to the Central Intelligence Agency, the
CIA, headed by Mr. Allen,Dulles, Incidently, I have the names
and identities of these other individuals, but there's no rea-
son to clutter this report and confuse your mind because they
are of no importance in the scheme of things. This, then, was
about the 15th of July, or possibly a day or so earlier. Two
weeks before the Bartholemew family and his wife were to leave
for Genoa to catch the ship back home.
About a week immediately prior to the scheduled departure,
the fellow class members of the Free Europe operation in Munich
gave a big gala going-away party for the Bartholemew with
all the bon voyage trimmings and the Bartholemews in turn
gave another party with champaigne punch, no less. These get
to be very important events in American colonies overseas.
When someone is about to leave for home, there is nostalgic
stimulation, slight thoughts of wistful envy perhaps, and these
parties were no exception except that they were particularly
grand parties and everyone enjoyed themselves.
On the morning of Saturday, July the 28th, the Saturday
immediately before the departure Tuesday, Father Peter F. Rush
of the Army Chaplain Corps, with the rank of colonel, came by
the Bartholemew home and invited Fletcher Bartholemew out to
lunch with him.
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As of this stage, of the game, the Bartholemew belongings
had been packed up and crated for shipment back to the states,
and Mrs. Bartholemew had taken the children to the home of a
friend to spend the day, She and her husband had an appoint-
ment at 4000 P. Ma that afternoon for an early dinner with the
children included with some other friends.
Father Rush and Fletcher Bartholemew had lunch together
and, in the course of the luncheon, Father Rush suggested that
Bartholemew go by the Army General Hospital with him for a talk
with some of the doctors, And Bartholemew said he would be
glad to do so. At the hospital, Mr. Bartholemew says he was
introduced to a Captain Alfred Cam, and Father Rush identified
Captain Cam as a psychiatrist, They sat down in an office,
the three of them, and Captain Cam began asking questions and
filling out a printed forma Mr. Bartholemew said after a few
minutes of this he began to realize that all the questions
pertained to him personally, and he demanded to know that was
going on, At this point, let me quote Mr. Bartholemew's own
words- "Captain Cam said he thought I should stay at the
hospital a few days, and I said that I would be glad to co-
operate in the case in any way possible. But that if I were
to stay at the hospital, it would have to be under force,"
Captain Cam replied that, "that is the way it will have to be."
From one of the numerous sources that I have contacted in
the course of tracking down this story, I,was informed that at
this point, Captain Cam wrote the word "violent" across the
form he was filling out. Mr. Bartholemew, however, said that
he cannot, of his own knowledge, confirm that fact because he
was not paying particular attention and probably could not
have seen it anway from where he was. In any event, Father
Rush and Captain Cam took Fletcher Bartholemew to the hospital
registration desk, where they registered him
in,
and from there
to the elevator, where he was escorted to a
room
in the mental
ward of the hospital, where he was to stay.
The
room had bars
on the windows; he was required to keep his
door
open
at all
times. There was a guard posted outside the
door
at
all times.
His clothes were taken away from him, so were all
his
posses-
sions, including a set of shoe plates, even, that
he
had in
his shoes for the correction of some foot trouble. Attendants
appeared with some drugs which they insisted that he take at
intervals of-a few hours and at this stage the drugs were in
capsule form.
In the meantime, Mrs. Bartholemew was at home in consider-
able of a panic, with more panic to come, Late in the after-
noon, Father Rush came by again--this time to tell her that
the husband whom~she had seen last about noon in perfectly
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normal condition had been committed as a mental patient at
the Army General Hospital, From this point, we will pick up
again tomorrow night and give you the story of what happened
to Fletcher Bartholemew from there on, and what you've heard
thus far only scratches the surface.
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