Nathaniel Weyl
Nathaniel Weyl (born 20 July 1910, died 13 April 2005) was the son of Walter Weyl, an editor of the New Republic. As a student at Columbia College, Weyl became one of the youth leaders of the Socialist Party.
Weyl received his Bachelor of Science Degree from Columbia College in 1931 and did postgraduate work at the London School of Economics. After his return to the United States he joined the Communist Party. In 1933, he obtained a medium level policy job in the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Weyl later recalled that he was "sucked into a so-called nuclear cell of government officials supposedly destined to rise rapidly, I found secret membership in this cell while a US official duplicitous, and resolved my personal problem by resigning from government." This cell known as the Ware group included Alger Hiss.
In 1939 Weyl left the Communist Party after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Weyl now accepted the post as head of the Latin American research unit at the Federal Reserve Board. Later he moved to the Board of Economic Warfare. He also spent two years in the United States Army during World War II.
After the war Weyl worked as a journalist. In 1961 he published the best-selling Red Star Over Cuba. Weyl also helped John Martino write I Was Castro's Prisoner (1963). He also worked for a while with the former United States diplomat, William Pawley, on his autobiography.
In an article published in January 1964, John Martino claimed he had important information about the death of John F. Kennedy. Martino argued that in 1963 Fidel Castro had discovered an American plot to overthrow his government. It was therefore decided to retaliate by organizing the assassination of Kennedy. In his book Someone Would Have Talked (2003), Larry Hancock wrote: "In 1964... both he (John Martino) and Nathaniel Weyl actively promoted the story that Oswald had been in Cuba beforehand and that he had been in contact with Cuban intelligence and Castro himself. Their story described Castro's motivation as revenge for continuing attempts on Castro's life (Operation Mongoose) by the United States government."
Shortly before his death in 1975 John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination. Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive."
Weyl is the author of books and articles "relating to communism, especially in Latin America; espionage and internal security in the United States; and racial, ethnic and class analyses of political and intellectual elites."
Books by Nathaniel Weyl
- The Jew in American Politics (1968)
- Traitors' End; the Rise and Fall of the Communist Movement in Southern Africa (1970)
- American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro (1971)
- Creative Elite in America (1979)
- Karl Marx, Racist (1979)
- Encounters With Communism (1981)
- Geography of American Achievement (1990)