Talk:Catherine Caradja

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External links modified

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The affair

This proposal is motivated by email sent to Wikimedia ticket:2019073110010294 but it is not necessary to see the original email to comment here.

I'm looking at two articles (and I will post this to the talk page of both):

• Frank Wisner
• Catherine Caradja

The article on Frank contains a statement and includes a link to the article on Catherine:

The FBI provided details of Wisner's affair with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war; the FBI counterintelligence claimed that Princess Caradja was a Soviet agent.

The article about Catherine includes this statement which includes a link to the article about Frank:

According to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Princess Caradja had an affair during the war with Frank Wisner, who was working in Bucharest as chief of OSS operations in southeastern Europe. Claiming that Caradja was a Soviet agent, Hoover passed that information to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was investigating at the time Wisner and the Office of Policy Coordination.

Each of the two statements is supported by a reference. The respective references are:

• Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. pp. 98–106.
• Evan Thomas (1996). The very best men: four who dared: the early years of the CIA. New York, NY: Touchstone. ISBN 0-684-82538-4.

The first reference has a publication date of 1995 but presumably that's an error and it should be 1996. There is a minor difference in the title, but these appear to be the same source.

The book is partially available at Google books Link

The following citation is derived from the Google books link:

• Evan Thomas (10 December 1996). The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-82538-0.

(As a minor note I see that the ISBNs do not match. I think this turns out to be a minor issue as the one in the article about Catherine is the paperback version, while the other one may be the hardcover version.)

Unfortunately, the Google books link does not display pages 95 to 138, so without having a copy of the book I cannot read the exact text used to support this claim.

However, on page 139 of the book, the following sentence occurs:

Wisner had been the subject of "vicious rumors" from our Romanian émigrés, Dulles wrote Hoover on April 19, 1954, but he stood by an earlier "eyes only" report that the CIA's own investigation "discloses no association with Mr. Wisner since approximately 1945 nor any indication that he had any knowledge of espionage activities on the part of Tanda Caragea [Caragea is the original Romanian spelling]"

We don't know the exact year of the alleged affair, other than the generalized assertion that it occurred during the war (but there's reason to believe it was 1944).

If we pick 1944 as a representative year, then Frank, born in 1909, was 35 at the time, while Catherine, born in 1893, was 51. It is not impossible to envision that a 35-year-old man would have an affair with a 51-year-old woman but it is much more plausible that he might have an affair with her daughter. I don't have a birthdate, but it seems likely she would be in her early 30s.

The article on Frank makes reference to an affair with Princess Caradja. Is my supposition that someone leapt to the erroneous conclusion that this was a reference to Princess Catherine Caradja. Keep in mind that her daughter would also be referred to as a princess, so a reference to Princess Caradja is not necessarily the mother, it might be the daughter.

So far, this is largely circumstantial. It is not impossible for 35-year-old man to have an affair with a 51-year-old woman, and if we had no other information, we would some concerns about what could be said in these two articles.

However, note that this CIA document Specifically talks about Frank, in 1944, being "billeted at the home" of a woman known as Tanda Caragea. This is the daughter of Catherine and presumably also a princess.

As additional information, this CIA document specifically talks about allegations of an "intimate relationship with Tanda Caragea"

Both of those CIA documents are primary documents, and we must use primary documents with extreme care, but I don't see much doubt that the reference should be to the daughter not to the mother.

I think it is clear that we need to make edits to both of these articles but I'd like some feedback from anyone interested, especially those who have edited this article, before taking next steps. S Philbrick(Talk) 23:32, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

I responded to this post on the Frank Wisner talk page. Since this article clearly errs in attributing an affair to Frank Wisner and Catherine Caradja, I've deleted the paragraph that made this false claim. The article also has a link to a lengthy declassified document from NARA dealing primarily with Catherine's daughter Tanda. Since this is theoretically relevant to the Wisner article, I have moved the link there. I have no opinions about other elements in this article. Rgr09 (talk) 13:23, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

"Over the entire war, she eased the burden of captivity for more than one thousand downed pilots", I'm sure that for the most part this whole story about the mass rescue of captured pilots may have saved a couple of pilots, but nothing more Цйфыву (talk) 14:40, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• Catherine Caradja.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 17:37, 23 October 2022 (UTC)