Trump’s getting heat for mocking a disabled NYT reporter, Serge Kovaleski. I have no sympathy for NYT reporters, so I support Trump attacking them.
Anyway, Serge is the son of Frederick Kovaleski. Frederick Kovaleski was a tennis player who worked as a CIA spy for a decade, recruiting other spies. Serge wrote of Fred’s work as a spy in the Washington Post in 2006. Oddly, Fred doesn’t have an English wiki, although, he does a French one, which, run through Google Translate, states this:
He grew up in a small town Hamtramck Michigan near Detroit and mainly populated by Eastern European immigrants where most people converse in Polish. Poland is the country of his parents, he speaks Polish and Russian. At school he first played handball and his gym teacher sees him as a tennis player potential. There is no court in the city then it draws a line on the gym wall and asked if his parents can buy her a racket. After asking 10 dollars to his father who does not see what sport it is, it advises instead to play baseball or something like that. His teacher, Jean Hoxie who became a local legend of tennis, provides him a racquet and tennis teaches him, he is 11 years old. It will be selected for the US Junior Davis Cup Team and spotted by several universities of Michigan, where he will visit but for a short time since October 1942 he had to make war from the Philippines.
On his return his tennis success earned him invitations to tournaments, USTA and then left to tour Europe with the financial support of Jean Hoxie in 1950, after a 1/8 finals at Roland Garros is classified in the top 15 worldwide for Wimbledon where he also reached the 1 / 8th. His many successes throughout the world earned him a further invitations chaining in France, Italy, Pakistan, India, Hong Kong, Philippines etc. He met many US diplomats in various embassies. At Monte Carlo in 1951 the question arose to turn pro after an offer from Calcutta tournament, but he refused because only a handful of players at that time could make a living as a pro.
His contacts then offered her to work for the CIA. His first mission was to support defectors from the Soviet army because of his knowledge of the language. He continued in parallel its business coverage, tennis player. He meets in Cairo Manya Jabes, of Russian origin. The CIA considered too high risk and asked him to choose. He chose to marry her, in Lebanon or it will just find a position for Pepsi. They then go to Sudan and the CIA back in touch with him and asked him to make recordings of translations after reconsidering her marital situation.
He works after Yemen and South Africa in Cape Town, still for Pepsi. In 1961 Serge and his son was born, and he decided to leave the CIA. He left for Australia and Pepsi situation at Revlon, not before had an MBA at Columbia University. The family moved to New York and then go to Washington to follow their son Serge who works for the Washington Post. It is for this newspaper that Serge will tell the story of his father in 2006. Following the article the family returned back to Manhattan the son to follow in his new post at the New York Times where he will pick the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. That year Fred Kovaleski won the USTA National Men’s Grass Court Championships for over 85 years, and in 2010 and 2011. n June 2014, nearly 90 years he decided to speak for the first time in his past secret agent
According to Serge’s article linked above, Serge knew his father by 1973 and Fred worked in the upper echolons of Pepsi, Revlon, and Nabisco. There’s also this little tidbit:
Soon after my father arrived in Cairo, a socialite friend introduced him to an exotically fetching Egyptian woman of White Russian parents. He started to court Manya Jabes, even though she was married to a wealthy Egyptian banker, Rene, and devoted to her young son and daughter, who were at school in Europe.
…
To be inconspicuous, she and my father would meet at his apartment, take drives outside of Cairo or have drinks at a bar on a Nile house boat. After knowing her for two years, my father asked my mother to marry him. She said yes and divorced Rene several months later. She has seen her other children — my half siblings — often over the years.My father was exalted about marrying my mother, but apprehensive. He knew how the CIA felt about agents wedding foreigners, especially a foreigner whose father had returned to the Soviet Union. His fears were justified. In March, 1957, his boss received a cable from Washington: If my father married Manya Jabes, he would have to resign.
…
Now out of the CIA, my father found civilian work with Pepsi, which sent him to Khartoum, Sudan, for training at a local bottling plant. Ironically, it wasn’t long before he got a call from the CIA chief of station there who offered him a job translating tapes from taps on Khartoum’s Soviet Embassy. My father declined, but said he knew someone for the job: his new wife, who spoke six languages, including Russian.
This article elucidites a bit more:
While Kovaleski’s cover story eventually changed from tennis pro to travel agent, he continued his work in Cairo with the CIA. There he fell in love with a woman named Manya Jabes of Russian descent. Marriage, however, required approval by his boss at the agency. “I supplied her name, birthdate, family members, et cetera, all of which was cabled back to D.C. for security processing,” says Kovaleski. “They discovered that Manya’s father had divorced Manya’s mother, married another Russian woman who was a poet and returned to the Soviet Union.”
She was considered a security risk. The CIA told Kovaleski he had to choose his career or Manya. He chose Manya and resigned as an officer of the CIA.
Manya ended up working for the CIA a few years later. Serge was born in Cape Town in 1961, which, as near as I can tell, would have been around the time Manya was working as a spy. Serge graduated from William & Mary, one of the original Public Ivies and has worked the rounds of newspapers: The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Money Magazine, and The Miami News.
Interestingly, he won a Pulitzer in 2009 for his work in writing on Spitzer’s prostitution scandal. 28 Sherman has connected Spitzer’s scandal to Maurice Greenberg, who himself has numerous known CIA connections and has been accused of even deeper connections.
Also, Greenberg and Trump have been feuding for a while now, starting around the time Greenberg was forced out of AIG by Spitzer and is backing Bush in this election.
I don’t see a direct link between Greenberg and Kovaleski,* but it would be doubtful that someone who wrote for Money Magazine didn’t know someone as involved in the financial world as Greenberg. It seems at the very edge of coincidence that the man who was awarded for destroying Spitzer, which just happened to benefit the big hedge funds and got revenge for Greenberg, is also the man who is at the centre of a manufactured controversy against Trump, who is also warring against hedge funds and is feuding with Greenberg.
Don’t forget, Serge’s entrance into the controversy was when he backtracked on his article in 2001 which stated:
In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.
Which directly supports Trumps assertions on this issue and which the usual suspects are attacking him on.
If you look around, Kovaleski has been involved in pushing numerous other left-wing causes in his “reporting”. Here he is sympathizing with Tsarnaev, painting Zimmerman as creepy and crazy, and pushing the poor, victimized Michael Brown narrative.
None of this amounts to proof of anything, but the coincidences of a left-wing NYT reporter being involved in two scandals to destroy the enemies of AIG and Greenberg, are rather interesting. In fact, it’s almost amazing how little there is on the internet about the Kovalski family despite (because of?) the two parents being known CIA spies, the father being an executive at multiple MNC’s and a world-class tennis player, and the son being a NYT reporter at the heart of two different national headline political controversies. I suspect there’s probably more to this than the superficial outrage generation.
What NRx and the alt-right really need is a wiki/encyclopedia/editable web so we can track the web of connections between all these people. It would be a huge project, but if we mapped the web of connections within the Cathedral over the last century, I’m sure it would provide reams of interesting information.
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* There’s a Dan Kovaleski who works as an Assistant VP at AIG, but I don’t see any linkages but the name (Dan Kovaleski is almost non-existent on the internet), and Kovaleski isn’t rare enough to assume a family connection on last name alone.
