William Bullitt

That's why it's so crucial to CIA operations in foreign countries.

And in fact, it's gonna in- be instrumental in, uh, key figures connected with the Dulleses like, um, William Bullitt, who we'll get to in a moment.

Bullitt is a key figure for turning the international embassy consulate structure into networks of espionage and tradecraft.

All right, this song is a little, a little too annoying here.

So it's really hard to pit a lot of these figures into, uh, one or the other position.

A lot of times they're playing both sides.

Um, now enters the figure William Bullitt.

Now, this was a person that I was not super familiar with.

Uh, she had more than 50 marriage proposals before she was 18 years old.

Um, her first husband was Bill Bullitt, who was a newspaper man at the time.

He later became our first ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Um, when she broke up with him, she had an affair with the artist Rockwell Kent, and then she took up with the opera composer Samuel Barlow.

Um, like I said, the Polish documents, um, a, uh, a, uh, after the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht, a, uh, an SS battalion seized these documents, um, from, uh, I can't remember if it was the foreign ministry or if it was... or if it was somewhere else.

But in any event, the crux of these documents was that there have been diplomatic overtures to Poland, wherein Roosevelt, through William Bullitt, had given Poland a formal guarantee that if they held out against Germany, they would support them in an event of war.

And that, I believe, probably stiffened their resolve even more than Chamberlain's guarantee did.

I mean, obviously, Chamberlain's guarantee was above board And the Roosevelt, the New Dealers guarantee was not.

But you've got to consider in context what had been going on between the New Dealers and Poland leading over to that point.

Ambassador Petroski, I always butcher the pronunciation of these Slavic names, but When he'd been in Washington several months before the outbreak of hostilities, you know, late 1938, early 1939, I think it was around holiday season 1938, he ran across William Bullitt.

William Bullitt was ambassador to France, but he was something of a minister without portfolio in Roosevelt's administration.

He was kind of the defective secretary of state.