-Caveat Lector-
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/08/obituaries/08ROSI.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
November 8, 2002
Harry Rositzke, Linguist and American Spymaster, Dies at 91
By PAUL LEWIS
Harry Rositzke, an American spymaster whose career veered from
researching the origins of the English language
to probing the inner workings of Nazi Germany and, later, the
Soviet Union, died on Monday at a hospital in
Warrenton, Va. He was 91 and lived in Middleburg, Va.
An intelligence officer for nearly 30 years, first with the Office of
Strategic Services and with its successor, the Central
Intelligence Agency, Mr. Rositzke found himself at the center of
wartime and then cold war covert activity.
Occasionally, however, he also found himself in an unwanted limelight.
Once, an office he led was accused of
involvement in a failed attempt on the life of the Chinese leader Zhou
Enlai. On another occasion there were
suspicions, never substantiated, that he had been picked to lead an
illegal C.I.A. domestic spying operation.
By the time America entered World War II, Mr. Rositzke had established
himself as a promising scholar of linguistics,
specializing in Anglo-Saxon.
Harvard had sent him to Hamburg University as a Sheldon Fellow and
awarded him a doctorate for a dissertation on
"The Speech of Kent Before the Norman Conquest." He had also taught
Anglo-Saxon at Harvard as well as at the
universities of Omaha and Rochester.
But the war carried him into strategic services, for which he was chief
of military intelligence in London, Paris and
Germany. After the war, Mr. Rositzke moved to the C.I.A.
The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., wrote in his preface to Mr.
Rositzke's book "The C.I.A.'s Secret Operations"
(Readers Digest Press, 1977), "War had made him a professional,"
adding, "Peace evidently offered him scope for
analysis and action on questions more urgent than Anglo-Saxon grammar."
Mr. Rositzke was the first chief of the C.I.A.'s Soviet division. From
1952-54, he ran agents against the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe out of Munich. From 1954-56, he was in charge of the
operations schools in the agency's training
division.
In 1957, he moved to New Delhi as station chief, operating against
Soviet, Chinese and Tibetan targets.
In 1962, Mr. Rositzke returned to Washington where he recruited Soviet
and Eastern European diplomats as informers
there and in New York. But in 1967 a former State Department code
clerk, John Discoe Smith, who served in India
from 1954 to 1959 and later defected to the Soviet Union, published a
pamphlet in which he asserted that Mr.
Rositzke had been expelled from India at his instigation.
Mr. Smith said he had written to Indian officials telling them that the
C.I.A.'s New Delhi station had been involved in the
1955 bombing of a plane carrying the Chinese delegation to the Bandung
Nonaligned Conference in the mistaken belief
that Zhou Enlai was on board. India then expelled Mr. Rositzke in
belated retaliation, Mr. Smith said.
After a period at George Washington's Sino-Soviet Institute, Mr.
Rositzke was coordinator of operations against
Communist parties abroad until his retirement in 1970.
Five years later, however, he found himself back in the news when the
director of central intelligence, William E. Colby,
published a report on the agency's illegal domestic spying operations,
known as Chaos. The operations had begun
under President Lyndon B. Johnson but were greatly expanded by
President Richard M. Nixon. The Colby report
included a memorandum dated Aug. 15, 1967, by the leader of covert
operations, Thomas H. Karamessines,
suggesting that Mr. Rositzke and another official, Richard Ober, be put
in charge of Chaos. Whether this happened
remains unclear.
Heinrich August Rositzke was born on Feb. 25, 1911, in Brooklyn, the
son of German immigrants. He earned his
undergraduate degree at Union College in 1931.
In retirement he turned to writing about intelligence matters and the
cold war.
He is survived by his wife, Barbara Helen Bourgeoise Rositzke; a son,
John Brockman Rositzke of Jackson, Mich.; and
a daughter, Anne Elizabeth Hunt Rositzke of New York.
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