Charles W. Thayer

Thayer died during a heart operation in Salzburg on August 27, 1969. He was interred at the Church of the Redeemer Cemetery in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

He also wrote a book about his mother, Muzzy (1966).

In 1959, he accompanied W. Averell Harriman, who was reporting for a newspaper syndicate, on a 6-week tour of the Soviet Union,

His sister Avis Howard Thayer visited him during his Moscow posting and met Charles E. Bohlen, with whom Thayer shared an apartment. She later married Bohlen, who served as American Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1957.

Finally, at the end of March 1953, after much bureaucratic infighting, Thayer was forced to resign in order to win Senate confirmation of his brother-in-law, Charles Bohlen, as Ambassador to Russia. The Süddeutsche Zeitung regretted his departure and expressed concern that the effect on government operations of a "wave of McCarthyism ... must be devastating".

Senate pressure forced the State Department to review Thayer's status. He returned from Germany to testify that "he had never performed a homosexual act." Though cleared, he remained under surveillance by the State Department's security division. When Thayer was moved to a new post in Munich and Senator Pat McCarran demanded a full report on his "experience, qualifications, moral character, and loyalty," the State Department waited a month to respond with a glowing report, which included no qualifications. McCarthy renewed and expanded his attacks following Republican gains in the 1952 elections when the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, decided to co-operate with Senate investigators.

Thayer married Cynthia Dunn Cochrane, a divorcée and the daughter of James Clement Dunn, U.S. Ambassador to Italy, on March 28, 1950. He was fluent in Russian, French, German, Spanish, Serbian, Italian, Bulgarian, Slovene, and Persian.

Thayer held consular positions in Germany from 1949 to 1953. Beginning in 1950, when Thayer was serving as political liaison officer in the Bonn embassy, several anonymous letters denounced him to Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Senate allies as a Communist sympathizer with a history of financial profiteering and sexual immorality both homosexual and heterosexual. He was being protected, according to one of the anonymous sources, by allies in the State Department, especially his brother-in-law, Charles E. Bohlen. Senate investigators used these letters and other documents obtained from a variety of government security investigations to target a series of government officials, starting with the forced resignation of Carmel Offie from the CIA in May 1950.

Returning to the State Department, Thayer served briefly as consul general in Munich before returning to the United States to direct the Department's International Broadcasting Division (later known as the Voice of America) in 1948-49. He developed an antagonistic relationship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover when he complained publicly that the FBI's slow processing of security clearances was hampering the Division's staffing. Hoover's investigation of Thayer's secretary revealed that she had borne his child. The FBI pursued an investigation (although he did not require a security clearance from the FBI), and found he had "communist sympathy" and was "undoubtedly a homosexual". Hoover failed in two attempts (in 1949 and 1950) to persuade other government agencies that Thayer posed a security risk.

He attended the Naval War College for a year at the end of the war. After the war, Thayer headed the OSS in Austria and served in 1946 on the Joint United States-Soviet Commission on Korea. He played a key role in developing the secret Office of Policy Coordination, later merged into the CIA, to counter and destabilize the Soviets (including its clandestine recruitment of former Nazis and collaborators for paramilitary operations).

The evidence against Thayer collected by Senate investigators was based on "hostile gossip and speculation by Thayer's enemies, and premised on guilt by association." They learned, for example, that during his OSS service "Thayer was waited on regularly by a native Yugoslav waiter named Marko, who was a known homosexual." Thayer's marriage to Maria Petrucci, the daughter of an Italian diplomat, lasted less than two years, which one informant attributed to homosexuality, though she later denied this. Thayer was a friend of Alexander Kirk, a Foreign Service officer with a homosexual reputation who had retired in 1945, and others. Much of the impulse behind the investigations of political and sexual irregularities reflected resentment of the foreign policy establishment, their elite backgrounds, cosmopolitanism, and association with bohemians and the politically unorthodox.

In 1937, Thayer became a Foreign Service officer, after passing his exams. In 1942, he was appointed chargé d'affaires in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1942. He was assigned for a time to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in Belgrade. Thayer served in London on the European Advisors Committee which drafted the German terms of surrender at the end of World War II.

Charles Wheeler Thayer was born in Villanova, Pennsylvania, the son of George Chapman Thayer, a shipbuilding engineer, and Gertrude May Wheeler Thayer. He attended St. Paul's School and the U.S. Military Academy, where he played polo, and graduated in 1933. He served for a few months as a cavalry lieutenant.

Charles W. Thayer (February 9, 1910 – August 27, 1969) was an American diplomat and author. He was an expert on Soviet-American relations and headed the Voice of America.