Pleasants, Henry III (0914107): Difference between revisions

Henry was born May 12, 1910. Pleasants studied voice, piano and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, from which he received an honorary doctorate in 1977. On January 4, 2000, Pleasants died aged 89 in a London hospital after suffering a ruptured aorta. You can read more about Henry at the Wikipedia page linked here: You can read a three page article entitled "War and Remembrance" dated July 1995 from Opera News. He was an American music critic and intelligence officer. In 1930, at age 19, he became a music critic for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and was the paper's music editor from 1934 to 1942, when he enlisted in the U.S. In 1948–49, he re-entered the military as an army liaison officer with the Austrian government. He left the army to enter the Foreign Service in 1950, serving as an intelligence officer in Munich. From 1950 to 1956, he was the CIA station chief in Bern, and subsequently from 1956 until his retirement from the CIA in 1964, CIA station chief in Bonn. He was involved in espionage during the Cold War, living with Reinhard Gehlen, a former Nazi general and a top intelligence official for West Germany, to evaluate his "suitability. The Gehlen Organization, which the former general led, became the forerunner of the postwar West German Federal Intelligence Service.