John Rees (journalist)

John Herbert Rees is a British right-wing journalist and government informant resident in the United States. He was active in the Western Goals Foundation and the John Birch Society. Rees was born in Britain. In the early 1960s, Rees worked in a business position for the London Daily Mirror, but was fired for misusing personal accounts, according to an FBI memo. Agents in the FBI office at the London U.S. Embassy also found that during 1962 Rees, who was married and had five children, was dating an FBI stenographer, who resigned. Rees moved to the United States in 1963 for a reporting job that fell through. Rees became the lover of Peyton Place author Grace Metalious. Metalious, who had cirrhosis from heavy drinking, changed her will hours before her death at age 39 in 1964, and left her whole estate to Rees. There was a public furor, and Rees dropped claims to the estate, which was insolvent. Rees remarried. He launched at a job training program in Newark, New Jersey, in 1967; it was partly funded by the United States Labor Department, which cut off funding when it determined Rees had overcharged the city. Rees became a police informant in Newark. He began his newsletter Information Digest in 1967. He also marketed his new organization called National Goals, "specializing in areas of education, training and law enforcement". He sought work with the FBI, which rebuffed him, determining in a 1968 internal memo that he was unethical. Rees went undercover in Chicago, covertly taping political meetings for testimony he gave to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He married his third wife, Sheila Louise O'Connor, and they moved to Washington in 1971. He was a police informant in Washington. She became an office manager at the National Lawyers Guild, which was representing activists and antiwar groups; he gave internal Guild documents to the FBI. In 1975, Congressman Larry McDonald hired Rees to his office staff. Rees traded information with police and informants, publishing some of it in Information Digest.