Cornelius V. S. Roosevelt

Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt III was born on October 23, 1915, and died on August 3, 1991. He was an American intelligence officer, business executive, and World War II veteran. Roosevelt was the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, being the son of Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Eleanor Butler Alexander. His siblings included Grace Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt IV, and Quentin Roosevelt II.

Roosevelt received higher education at Harvard University and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1938. At MIT, he was a member of the fraternity St. Anthony Hall. He was associated with the Oyster Bay Roosevelt family and was a descendant of the Schuyler family through his ancestry, including Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt (1794–1871).

Between 1938 and 1941, Roosevelt was employed as a mining engineer for the American Smelting and Mining Company in Mexico. During World War II, he served in the United States Navy, being commissioned as an ensign on May 28, 1942. He was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) on July 1, 1943, and remained in the Naval Reserve after the war, achieving the rank of lieutenant commander in 1951.

From 1946 to 1949, Roosevelt managed the mining division of William Hunt & Co. in Shanghai. Following the Communist takeover of China in 1949, he relocated to Hong Kong, where he served as president of William Hunt & Co. in 1950. He also served as president of International Industries Inc. in Hong Kong during this period.

In 1952, Roosevelt transitioned to intelligence work and joined the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C. Prior to this, he held positions including vice president of Security Banknote Co. in Philadelphia, research administrator for the Office of Naval Research, and president of Linderman Engineering Co. His career with the CIA included serving as the chief of the Technical Services Division (TSD) from 1959 to 1962. He also chaired the Technical Surveillance Countermeasures Committee, which was responsible for protecting U.S. facilities against electronic eavesdropping.

Roosevelt is noted in reports by Evan Thomas for initially suggesting a CIA project aimed at poisoning Fidel Castro. During his tenure at the CIA, he supervised Sidney Gottlieb, who brought a biological poison to the Congo in 1960. Roosevelt publicly maintained that his work involved developing devices to detect listening devices and stated that he participated as a subject in CIA experiments involving LSD, which were part of the MKULTRA program. He retired from the CIA in 1973 and afterward served as a defense consultant and was a board member of Aerospace Corporation.

Roosevelt's personal interests included archaeology, specifically of Peru, the history of early sugar processing machines in the Caribbean, Japanese Netsuke carvings, and scuba diving. He donated a collection of over 50 M.C. Escher prints to the National Gallery of Art. He was a member of the Metropolitan Club and the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C.