RALEIGH—Magazine publisher and espionage enthusiast Bernie Reeves urged attendees at a luncheon Monday to visit an upcoming International Spy Conference in Raleigh. The conference, “Spies, Lies, and Treason: The KGB in America,” will feature speakers from the CIA, Britain’s MI6, and a former KGB major general.
Reeves, publisher of the Raleigh-based Metro magazine, said he got the idea for the conference through a series of talks with longtime friend Dr. Christopher Andrew, chairman of the history department at Cambridge University and the world’s leading espionage scholar. Andrew was recently commissioned to write a history of the secret services in Britain and was sworn into the MI6 in order to gain access to the necessary documents.
Originally, Reeves said, he intended to invite Andrew to Raleigh to give a small lecture on the history of espionage. Yet when the international intelligence community found out about the conference, Reeves said, many experts expressed keen interest. Reeves said he chose five speakers, including Andrew as the headliner, for the conference, which is scheduled for Aug. 27-29.
Others chosen to speak at the conference are intelligence historian H. Keith Melton, former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, security and intelligence expert Nigel West, and head of the historical collection at the CIA Hayden Peake. Also speaking will be longtime CIA agent Brian Kelley, the man originally accused in the Robert Hanssen espionage investigation.
Reeves’ interest in espionage dates to 1956, when at the age of 9 he watched his great uncle Sir Leslie Munro of New Zealand step down as president of the United Nations General Assembly after the U.N. refused to heed his call for action after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. The brave act by Munro made the young Reeves conscious of the fact that the Soviet Iron Curtain was real.
Reeves said he retained his interest in espionage through his college years at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he witnessed left-wing protests over the Vietnam War. “Not until I happened upon film footage 20 years later did it hit me that the campus uprisings looked fixed. Some group was organizing all this,” he said.
In the 1980s, Reeves said, he became interested in organizing a World War II seminar at UNC and contacted Dr. James Leutze, professor of peace, war, and defense, to put on the event. Leutze suggested that they invite Andrew to speak at the seminar. Still relatively unknown, Andrew was surprised when more than 1,000 people showed up to hear him speak at the seminar.
It was through this event in 1986, Reeves said, that he and Andrew became friends. Now their relationship has become the basis for the spy conference in Raleigh, he said.