Berent Friele

Berent Johan Beyer Friele (born 29 March 1895 in Bergen, Norway; died 15 September 1985 in Bronxville, New York) was a Norwegian-American coffee importer with deep Brazil connections who served as Nelson Rockefeller's private representative in Brazil for three decades, functioning as the informal intelligence link between Rockefeller's New York operations and the Brazilian political and business establishment. A member of Rockefeller's inner circle from the late 1930s, Friele participated in the "Junta" of trusted advisers that Rockefeller assembled before World War II and carried that role into the CIAA, postwar development operations, and the political maneuvering that preceded the 1964 coup.¹

Bergen Origins and Family

Friele came from a prominent Bergen merchant family. His father, Berent Johan Friele (1862-1902), was a co-owner of "Berent Friele & Sønner," a Bergen wholesale firm dealing in coffee since 1854 and one of the city's leading commercial houses. After his father's death in 1902, young Berent completed commercial training in Hamburg in 1912 and worked briefly in the Hamburg coffee trade before relocating to Brazil during World War I. He was a great-grandson of zoologist Herman Friele and great-great-grandson of Fredrik Beyer. Though he was destined for a senior role in the family firm, he spent his working career in American-controlled coffee operations rather than the Bergen house.²

His brother Einar B. Friele (1901-1944) later joined the Bergen family firm and became a Norwegian resistance member, killed in 1944.

The American Coffee Corporation

Friele established his own coffee firm in Santos, Brazil during World War I, developing deep contacts across the cultivation and export trade. In 1918, during a New York visit, he made contact with The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), the largest American chain-store company in the colonial goods trade. He was hired full-time in 1919 to supervise A&P coffee purchases in Brazil, and A&P shortly incorporated the American Coffee Corporation (ACC), installing Friele as its head. He led ACC's New York headquarters from 1924, became general director and vice president by 1926, and served as ACC president from 1929.³

By the late 1920s Friele had become, as both the Store Norske Leksikon and the Rockefeller Archive Center's biographical summary confirm, the world's largest single coffee buyer, responsible for importing approximately 15 percent of US coffee consumption, or roughly 5 percent of global demand. The US-Brazil coffee trade was at that time America's largest bilateral trade relationship with any South American country, giving Friele structural leverage across the Brazilian political and economic establishment.⁴

The American Coffee Corporation records are held at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.⁵

Early Brazil Network and American Brazilian Association

Friele was elected president of the American Brazilian Association in 1934, formalizing his role as the institutional bridge between American business interests and Brazilian counterparts. During the 1930s he also facilitated Norwegian-Brazilian clearing agreements, exchanging Norwegian clipfish for Brazilian coffee. He was awarded Knight First Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 1932, cited for contributions to Norway's participation in the 1932 Lake Placid Winter Olympics. He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.⁶

During Brazil's 1932 civil war (the Constitutionalist Revolution), Friele was in Rio de Janeiro negotiating the continued export of coffee from the port of Santos despite the conflict, an early demonstration of the commercial-political function he would later systematize under Rockefeller's direction.

The Junta and Rockefeller's Pre-War Inner Circle

Friele built his Brazil connections through the coffee trade, becoming one of the primary importers of Brazilian coffee to the US market and developing close relationships across the Brazilian business and political establishment. Nelson Rockefeller recruited him in the late 1930s as part of the small inner circle he called "the Junta": a group including Frank Jamieson (journalist and campaign manager), John Lockwood (lawyer), Wallace Harrison (architect), and Friele as Brazil specialist. This group formed the operational core of Rockefeller's wartime and postwar Latin American strategy.⁷

CIAA and Wartime Brazil

During Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) directorship (1940-1944), Friele took leave from the ACC to serve as country director for Brazil within the OCIAA structure. His official role was coordinator of the OCIAA's Brazilian committee, overseeing the "coordinating committees" in Brazil that placed American businessmen in liaison positions with Brazilian counterparts across commercial, cultural, and informational programs.⁸

Friele's language skills, established commercial relationships, and cross-class contacts within Brazil's political and business elite made him irreplaceable to Rockefeller's Brazil operations in ways no diplomat or new appointee could replicate. A July 1940 State Department memorandum documenting the Third Pan American Coffee Conference lists "Mr. Berent Friele, American Coffee Group" among trade representatives consulted by the US delegation on coffee export quota negotiations, confirming his simultaneous role as both a commercial actor and a de facto policy adviser during the period when the OCIAA was being organized.⁹

On 11 January 1943, Friele signed correspondence from Rio de Janeiro in his capacity as "Special Representative," transmitting materials to the Brazilian artist Candido Portinari, whose work the OCIAA supported as part of its cultural diplomacy program.¹⁰

Postwar: Room 5600 and the Rockefeller Development Apparatus

After the war Friele left the ACC entirely and moved onto Rockefeller's personal payroll at the family offices in Room 5600, Rockefeller Center, New York. He was not formally employed by either of the two postwar development vehicles Rockefeller created (the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) and the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC)), but functioned as Rockefeller's informal senior representative across both, leveraging his network to facilitate AIA's agricultural credit programs and IBEC's six Brazilian subsidiaries in agricultural mechanization, transportation, hybrid corn seed distribution, health, sanitation, and construction.¹¹

When Rockefeller was elected governor of New York in 1958, he appointed Friele as his formal advisor on international affairs, a position Friele held throughout Rockefeller's governorship and later vice presidency under Gerald Ford.

AIA Operations and the Lincoln Gordon Briefing

Before Ambassador Lincoln Gordon left Washington for his Rio posting in 1961, Rockefeller's aide Friele briefed him on AIA's Brazil operations, the governors of key states, and the political landscape facing Joao Goulart's government. This pre-appointment briefing connected Gordon to Rockefeller's network before he had arrived in country.¹²

AIFLD and Pre-Coup Political Activity

Friele served as vice president of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the AFL-CIO-linked organization with significant CIA funding that operated labor training programs across Latin America during the Cold War. In that capacity he was described by contemporaries as "an old Brazilian hand belonging to the Rockefeller entourage."

In fall 1963, Friele and AIFLD executive director Serafino Romualdi traveled to Sao Paulo and met with Governor Adhemar de Barros, one of President Goulart's chief opponents. During the meeting, de Barros described plans already under way to mobilize police and military contingents against Goulart. When de Barros complained that the US Embassy was not responding to these signals, Romualdi relayed the complaint in writing to the embassy's labor attaché, John Fishburn. Starting in 1963, AIFLD ran a special all-Brazilian training class of 33 union participants in Washington, focused on countering Communist influence in labor organizations; AIFLD-trained graduates later helped ensure the April 1964 coup proceeded without a successful general strike.¹³

The 1964 Coup

A week before the April 1964 coup, Friele briefed both Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger on Brazil's political crisis, characterizing Joao Goulart's constitutional reform proposals as demagoguery and presenting the opposition's plans favorably. Friele's assessment, reflecting the views of the Brazilian business establishment he had spent decades cultivating, provided Rockefeller's network with a private intelligence assessment aligned with the coup's justifications.¹⁴

Later Career and Unofficial Ambassadorship

Friele remained on Rockefeller's payroll and continued as an informal liaison between US and Brazilian officialdom into the late 1960s and 1970s, when the Brazilian military regime that had seized power in 1964 came under public criticism for human rights violations. He became known in diplomatic circles as "America's unofficial ambassador to Brazil, and Brazil's unofficial ambassador to the US," a characterization that tracked his role during Nixon's presidency when he worked to maintain the US-Brazil relationship despite congressional pressure over the military government's conduct.¹⁵

He died 15 September 1985 in Bronxville, New York, at age 90. His wife Jenny Müller Camps Friele (1897-1985) had died earlier that same year, on 1 January 1985. His papers are held at the Rockefeller Archive Center (collection FA468) in the Rockefeller Family Associates series.¹⁶