US Foreign Policy Critics Sean Gervasi and Melvin Beck Remembered

Prof. Gervasi taught at Cambridge University, London School of Economics, and the University of Paris and founded the Economics Study Group in New York City. He worked for a variety of United Nations committees, including the office of the Commissioner for Namibia (Nobel Peace Prize winner Sean MacBride), the Committee on Decolonization, and the Center against Apartheid, where he exposed super-secret dealings by U.S. arms merchants with the apartheid regime in South Africa. In 1984, he probed Pretoria's violent war against front-line states of Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. He was a regular contributor to CovertAction Quarterly. He is the brother of Tom Gervasi, author of a number of works on the arms race. Sean Gervasi was 63 when he died while teaching in Belgrade June 19.

Beck, a former NSA and CIA operative, wrote the biographical Secret Contenders: The Myth of Cold War Counterintelligence (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1984). His undercover CIA employment was mostly in Havana and Mexico. He was 82 when he died August 13 of a heart attack at his home in Washington, D.C. Subversity host Dan Tsang indexed Beck's book. Subversity airs tonight from 5-6 p.m. on KUCI, 88.9 FM in Orange County. Both Gervasi and Beck were long-time members of the Association of National Security Alumni; obituaries on both appear in the association's Fall, 1996 newsletter, Unclassified.