Yes, A CIA Angle!

Does this partially explain that convoluted Yalta reference in his suicide e-mail? Let the conspiracy theories begin:

The four-story Upper East Side town house that was destroyed in a gas explosion yesterday once served as a clandestine meeting place for a circle of prominent New Yorkers who informally gathered intelligence for President Franklin D. Roosevelt before and during World War II, according to several published histories.

Known simply as “the Room,” the covert network held monthly meetings to exchange gossip and tips in a bland rented apartment in the building at 34 East 62nd Street, as early as 1927.

No one lived in the apartment, and the phone number was unlisted. It is not clear where the apartment was in the building, which was completed in 1882. The meetings apparently continued until the early 1940’s.

. . .

The covert group, founded in 1917, included the real estate heir Vincent Astor, a close friend of Roosevelt; the book publisher Nelson Doubleday; Winthrop W. Aldrich, the president of the Chase National Bank; Kermit Roosevelt, a son of Theodore Roosevelt; David K. E. Bruce, a son-in-law of Andrew W. Mellon and a future ambassador to France, West Germany and Britain; the philanthropist William Rhinelander Stewart; and Marshall Field III, a newspaper publisher and heir to the Chicago department store fortune.

Members of the Room, which had close ties with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, reported on their conversations with world leaders and gathered to hear speakers like the polar explorer Richard E. Byrd and the writer W. Somerset Maugham, who had been a secret agent in World War I.

. . .

After World War II began in Europe in 1939, the group shifted its efforts to counterespionage; at President Roosevelt’s request, it drew up plans to guard arms factories against sabotage and tighten border controls to prevent foreign spies from entering the United States, according to Mr. [Phillip] Knightley’s “Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the 20th Century” (Norton, 1987).

The Room used its contacts to examine bank accounts suspected of being used by foreign spies; monitor Japanese naval activities in the South Pacific; and report on conditions in the Canal Zone, the Caribbean and Peru.

The group was eventually supplanted by the more formal intelligence-gathering efforts that resulted in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.