Background
Hugh Montgomery was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on November 29, 1923.
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Hugh Montgomery
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He was educated at Harvard University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 1947, an Master of Arts in 1948, and an Doctor of Philosophy in 1952.
Career
He served for 63 years with the Central Intelligence Agency and has been called one of the Central Intelligence Agency"s founding fathers. Montgomery was wounded while serving as a paratrooper in World World War II and joined the Office of Strategic Services"s counterintelligence branch, known as X-2. Montgomery joined the Central Intelligence Agency, the successor to the Office of Strategic Services, in 1953 and served in many Central Intelligence Agency positions over a career that spanned six decades.
During the Cold War, Montgomery served in Athens, Rome, Paris and Vienna.
During a Central Intelligence Agency assignment in Berlin, he helped tap Soviet communications lines running under the city. In Moscow, he ran one of the most famous and productive Central Intelligence Agency assets in history, the Soviet officer Oleg Penkovsky.
Montgomery temporarily left the Central Intelligence Agency in 1981 when President of the United States Ronald Reagan nominated him as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the United States Department of State, an office he held from October 19, 1981 until January 6, 1985. From 1985-1989 he served as a deputy United States. ambassador to the United Nations.
He returned to the Central Intelligence Agency after this assignment and served with the Agency until he retired in 2014.
Montgomery received an honorary doctorate from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, District of Columbia in 2010.
