Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

United Press International - Wikipedia

The E.W. Scripps Company controlled United Press until its absorption of William Randolph Hearst's smaller competing agency, INS, in 1958 to form UPI. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Pr…

In 2000, UPI was purchased by News World Communications, an international news media company founded in 1976 by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon.

UPI famously scooped the AP in reporting the assassination of US President John Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963. UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith was an eyewitness, and he commandeered the press car's only phone to dictate the story to UPI as AP reporter Jack Bell

tried—without success—to wrest the phone away so he could call his office. Smith and UPI won a Pulitzer Prize for this reporting.

He was the first to publicly use the term "grassy knoll" regarding the assassination.
In the 1960s, Smith was a frequent guest on television interview programs hosted by Jack Paar and Merv Griffin. Despondent over the death of his son in the Vietnam War and perhaps suffering from

PTSD as a result of witnessing the Kennedy assassination, Smith died at his home in Washington, D.C., on April 13, 1970 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Senior UPITN executives later helped Ted Turner create CNN, with its first two presidents, Reese Schonfeld and Burt

Reinhardt, coming from UPITN ranks. Scripps wound up giving the agency away to two inexperienced businessmen, Douglas Ruhe (son of David Ruhe, a member of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing body of the Baháʼí Faith) and William Geissler, originally associated

with two better-known partners, who soon departed. Ruhe and Geissler obtained UPI for $1. It also sold UPI's U.S. photo library, which included the archives of predecessor Scripps photo agency Acme and the pictures and negatives of International News Photos, the picture component

of Hearst's INS to the Bettman Archive. Bettman was later sold to Microsoft founder Bill Gates's separate Corbis Corporation, storing them underground in Pennsylvania and digitizing them for licensing, frequently without any notation of their UPI origins. UPI was purchased in May

2000 by News World Communications, a media conglomerate founded by Unification movement founder Sun Myung Moon, which also owned The Washington Times and newspapers in South Korea, Japan, and South America. In 2000, Microsoft (a fellow venture of Gates) purchased the rights

through Corbis to the image Bucolic Green Hills, which it renamed to Bliss for the default wallpaper of Windows XP. In March 2009, Steele and fellow MI6-retiree Chris Burrows co-founded the private intelligence agency Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd., based in Grosvenor Square

Gardens. Between 2014 and 2016, Steele created over 100 reports on Russian and Ukrainian issues, which were read within the United States Department of State, and he was viewed as credible by the United States intelligence community. In early December, McCain obtained a copy

of the dossier from David J. Kramer, a former U.S. State Department official working at Arizona State University. On 9 December 2016, McCain met with FBI Director James Comey to pass on the information.

Kramer moved to Washington, D.C., and began working at the Center for

Strategic and International Studies for Stephen Sestanovich in 1993, on Ulam's recommendation. When Henry Kissinger retired from his position as U.S. Secretary of State in 1977, Harvard University declined to offer him a professorship. He decided to teach part-time at

Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and to make CSIS the base for his Washington operations. When Zbigniew Brzezinski joined the center in 1981 after the end of the Carter administration, he worked on issues related to the Soviet Union and Poland's transition

to a market economy. A gifted talent scout and teacher, in 1944 he discovered young Henry Kissinger, whom Kraemer had recruited into Army division. In 1961 Kraemer also discovered Alexander Haig, and in 1969 Kraemer recommended Haig as the Military Assistant to then

National Security Advisor Kissinger. Sven Kraemer, Fritz G. A. Kraemer's son, also served in the Nixon-Kissinger National Security Council.
He was drafted and became a U.S. citizen as an inductee and joined the United States Army in April 1943 ("with two PhDs and one monocle")

as an infantryman in the 84th Infantry Division (the "Railsplitter"). His time served at Camp Ritchie classifies him as one of the thousands of Ritchie Boys.

Rockefeller enlisted in the U.S. Army and entered Officer Candidate School in 1943; he was ultimately promoted to Captain

in 1945. During World War II he served in North Africa and France (he spoke fluent French) for military intelligence setting up political and economic intelligence units. He served as a "Ritchie Boy" secret unit specially trained at Fort Ritchie, Maryland. For seven months he

also served as an assistant military attaché at the American Embassy in Paris. During this period, he called on family contacts and Standard Oil executives for assistance. They were trained at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, later officially

known as Fort Ritchie, and closed in 1998 under the 1995 Base Realignment and Closure Commission. They were specially trained in methods of intelligence, counterintelligence, interrogation, investigation and psychological warfare. The first-ever reunion of the Ritchie Boys took

place from 23–25 July 2011 at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan.