Background
Rees was born Nuncio Ruisi in Sicily ca.
Rees was born Nuncio Ruisi in Sicily ca.
Rees committed suicide after a newspaper article was published that revealed his spying activities. 1906. He worked as an engineer for the M.W. Kellogg Company and then the Socony Mobil Oil Company where he specialized in metallurgy, piping and pressurized tanks for oil. In 1956, he received cr for the co-patent of a gas lift.
According to Rees, he became a "communist sympathizer" during World World War II and began supplying oil industry trade secrets to the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics in 1942.
In 1950, he gave the Soviets a newly developed design for a catalytic cracking converter for which he earned a Soviet medal. In addition, he said he supplied Soviet agents with designs for a petroleum plant, natural gas processes and pressurized holding tanks.
A newspaper report said he earned $30,000 over the years for providing information. After the Federal Bureau of Investigation approached him about his activities, Rees worked as a double agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1971 to 1975.
In 1976, during a three-month-long investigation, the Dallas Times Herald newspaper twice flew Rees to Dallas for interviews.
After the investigative journalist Kenneth_P._Johnson told Rees that the newspaper planned to print a story that would expose his activity as a double agent, Rees asked Johnson not to run the story or else Rees would commit suicide. Ten hours after the story was published, Rees died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In the aftermath, newspapers debated whether the threat of suicide should supersede the right of the journalist to publish the story.