Helen Rogers Reid

Helen Rogers, the youngest of eleven children of Benjamin Talbot Rogers and Sarah Johnson Rogers, was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, on 23rd November, 1882. She graduated from Barnard College, in 1903 and became the social secretary to the wife of Whitelaw Reid. She went to London with the family when Reid became ambassador to Great Britain.

In 1911 Helen married Ogden Mills Reid, the son of Whitelaw Reid. The following year his father died and he inherited New York Herald Tribune. Ogden had a serious drink problem and by 1922 Helen had effective control of the newspaper.

Jennet Conant, the author of The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (2008) argues that Ernest Cuneo, who worked for British Security Coordination, was "empowered to feed select British intelligence items about Nazi sympathizers and subversives" to friendly journalists such as her son, Whitelaw Reid who "were stealth operatives in their campaign against Britain's enemies in America". Cuneo also worked closely with editors and publishers who were supporters of American intervention into the Second World War. This included Helen Rogers Reid and the New York Herald Tribune.

According to Anthony Cave-Brown, the author of C: The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Graham Menzies,Spymaster to Winston Churchill (1988), Stewart Menzies was a family friend of Reid. Thomas E. Mahl has argued in Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1998): "No newspaper in the United States was more useful to British intelligence during World War II than the Herald Tribune. A description of BSC's work with the Herald Tribune fills a dozen pages of the secret BSC Account".

Helen Rogers Reid died on 27th July, 1970.

Primary Sources

(1) Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1998)

Helen Rogers parried Whitelaw's son, Ogden Mills Reid, in 1911. Mrs. Reid had effective control of the paper not only because she was a strong-willed and talented woman but because her husband, Ogden Mills Reid, had a drinking problem... No newspaper in the United States was more useful to British intelligence during World War II than the Herald Tribune. A description of BSC's work with the Herald Tribune fills a dozen pages of the secret BSC Account