Bradley Earl Ayers (born March 7, 1935) is a former CIA operative.

After a stint in the Army, Ayers was recruited by the Department of Defense in 1962 to work with the CIA training anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Ayers was stationed at JMWAVE and collaborated with Alpha 66. He also took part in Operation Mongoose. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Ayers was ordered to shut down Mongoose.

Ayers was one of the first career officers to voice opposition to the Vietnam War and to speak out publicly against the influence of private and special interests in US politics. He was honorably discharged from active duty in 1965. Ayers had since worked as a commercial pilot, a private detective, and an undercover operative with the Drug Enforcement Administration's South Florida Task Force.

From his home in Frederic, Wisconsin, Ayers continues to be physically active. At the age of 62, he set the record for the fastest one day ascent-descent of Mount Whitney in California (the highest peak in the continental U.S.), conquering the 14,496-foot mountain in 14 hours, 40 minutes while carrying a 25-pound daypack.

Bradley is an English masculine given name. It comes from a surname and a place name meaning "broad wood" or "broad clearing" in Old English.

It is also an Anglicisation of the Irish Gaelic name O’Brolachán (also O’Brallaghan) from County Tyrone in Ireland. The family moved and spread to counties Londonderry, Donegal and Cork.

Bradley (sometimes shortened to Brad) is the first name of several notable people:

Bradley is the surname of these and other notable people:

Bradley Dean is an American stage and screen actor. On March 25, 2008, Dean succeeded Christopher Sieber in the role of Sir Galahad in the musical comedy Spamalot on Broadway. Prior to performing the role on Broadway, Dean played the same role in the show's touring company.

Dean has had other Broadway roles in productions of Company, Man of La Mancha, and Jane Eyre. Screen credits include roles on "All My Children" and Guiding Light."

Dean is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. He is originally from Pottsville, Pennsylvania.

Spalding Rockwell Gray (June 5, 1941 – January 11, 2004) was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, performance artist and monologuist. He was primarily known for his "trenchant, personal narratives delivered on sparse, unadorned sets with a dry, WASP, quiet mania." Gray achieved celebrity status for his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, which was adapted into a film in 1987 by Jonathan Demme.

He began his career in regional theatre, moved to New York in 1967 and three years later joined Richard Schechner's experimental troupe, the Performance Group. He co-founded the Wooster Group ensemble in 1975. He died in New York City of an apparent suicide in 2004. A documentary film about his life, entitled And Everything Is Going Fine, was released in 2010 and was directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Gray was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Rockwell Gray, Sr., the treasurer of Brown & Sharpe, and Margaret Elizabeth "Betty" Horton, a homemaker. He was the middle-born of three sons: Rockwell, Jr., Spalding and Channing. He was raised in the Christian Scientist faith and grew up in Barrington, Rhode Island, spending summers at his grandmother's house in Newport.

William Charles "Bill" Ayers (born December 26, 1944) is an American elementary education theorist and a former leader in the movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s activism as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum, and instruction. In 1969 he co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group that conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings during the 1960s and 1970s, in response to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

He is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar. During the 2008 US presidential campaign, a controversy arose over his contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama. He is married to Bernardine Dohrn, who was also a leader in the Weather organization.

Ayers grew up in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He attended public schools there until his second year in high school, when he transferred to Lake Forest Academy, a small prep school. Ayers earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in American Studies in 1968 (his father, mother and older brother had preceded him there). His parents are Mary (née Andrew) and Thomas G. Ayers, who was later Chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison (1973 to 1980), and for whom Northwestern's Thomas G. Ayers College of Commerce and Industry was named.