Norman Holmes Pearson

Norman Holmes Pearson (April 13, 1909 – November 5, 1975) was an American academic at Yale University, and a prominent counterintelligence agent during World War II. As a specialist on American literature and department chairman at Yale University he was active in establishing American Studies as an academic discipline.

He was born in Gardner, Massachusetts, to a locally prominent family that owned a chain of department stores. Pearson attended Gardner schools and Phillips Andover Academy (1927-1928). He graduated Yale College in 1932 with a A.B. in English. After a scholarship at Oxford University he was awarded a second A.B. and later an M.A. from Oxford. In 1937, while still a Yale graduate student, he and William Rose Bénet published the two-volume Oxford Anthology of American Literature and later co-edited five volumes on Poets of the English Language with poet W.H. Auden. He became a Yale faculty member, Instructor of English, and eventually Professor of English and of American Studies. He took his PhD in 1941 and was a specialist on Nathaniel Hawthorne. He maintained close personal relations with major literary figures, especially including poets H.D. (whose daughter became his secretary in the OSS) and Ezra Pound, promoting their careers and helping Pound avoid a charge of treason. "Throughout his life he played the role of the man of letters, encouraging poets, writers, painters, and scholars..." He was twice a Guggenheim Fellow, in 1948 and 1956.

Pearson was recruited by Donald Downes to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in London during World War II. By 1943 Pearson was working under James R. Murphy as part of the new X-2 CI (counterintelligence) branch that served as the link between the OSS and the British Ultra crypoanalysis project in nearby Bletchley Park. Working with British Special Intelligence (SI), X-2 helped turn all of Germany's secret agents in Britain and exposed a network of 85 enemy agents in Mozambique. By 1944 there were sixteen X-2 field stations and nearly a hundred on staff. Pearson said the British 'were the ecologists of double agency: everything was interrelated, everything must be kept in balance.'" In addition, the Art Looting Investigation Unit reported directly to him; the 2013 movie "Monuments Men" concerns that unit. Robin Winks says "Some of his best work, done for the OSS in its final months, were analyses of the intelligence services of other nations." Following the war he helped organize the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). To head counterintelligence for the new agency he helped recruit James Jesus Angleton, who had been his "number two" in the OSS in London and head of X-2 Italy.

...
Wikipedia