The Amerasia Spy Case
Klehr, Harvey & Radosh, Ronald
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Amerasia Spy Case" Same Old, Not So Long Ago The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh University of North Carolina Press 266 pages / $29.95 REVIEWED BY John...
...Jaffe and his assistant editor, Kate Mitchell, had to develop new contacts, and Jaffe began visiting Washington...
...Soviet archives, among other things, now have proved they were right, but memories of old injustices still grip the battered right-wingers...
...Obviously there are matters here still applicable...
...What are the facts...
...The cast of characters in the spy case was thus complete...
...Presumably, this was true...
...as a navy lieutenant in 1944, he was the Naval Intelligence liaison to the State Department...
...Israel occupied the Golan Heights and in 1981, for all practical purposes annexed the area...
...Service was exonerated unanimously...
...The Golan Heights To Whom Do They Belong...
...Jaffe was eager to cooperate with Joseph Bernstein, a former Amerasia staffer, whose career, according to Klehr and Radosh, "strongly suggests he was a Comintern agent and linked to Soviet intelligence...
...As Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh show in their meticulously researched The Amerasia Spy Case, Service was not a spy himself...
...he didn't know...
...Moreover, Philip Jaffe, the magazine editor, had offered his services to Soviet intelligence...
...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mall ^ My contribution is in the amount of $50 or more...
...David Caute, in The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower, declared that no one at Amerasia wanted "to pass information to a foreign power...
...Its main fury is directed at Israel, which is perceived as a bulwark of Western influence and civilization, both of which Syria totally rejects...
...Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had been arrested two days before...
...They are burdened by their own idealism...
...In fact, none of this was true...
...De Toledano wrote a piece for the Washington Times, in which he said that Corcoran recruited "left-wingers for government posts...
...It is classified by the U.S...
...An aggressor will attack only if confident of victory...
...Now that Gaza and part of Judea/Samaria (the 'West Bank") have been turned over to the Palestinians, the clamor for peace with Syria becomes ever more stridenth is understood that in order to attain such peace, it will be necessary for Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria...
...Corcoran called Attorney General—nominee Tom Clark and said he would get him through his upcoming Senate confirmation fight...
...News of the arrests shared space on the front pages of newspapers with stories about Stalin's plans for the occupation of Germany...
...The paradox is that when he finally was dismissed by the State Department, in 1951, the dismissal was merited, even though the McCarthyites who brought it about—including, of course, McCarthy himself—had raised spurious charges...
...Ever since Amerasia many right-wingers have dragged themselves about like wounded bears, persuaded of injustice at large and nursing grievances against the dominant culture...
...The charge against Roth was eventually dropped...
...A grand jury heard the evidence and apparently voted indictments, although Clark, by now the attorney general, never filed them...
...zip Mail to FLAME PO...
...When the committee report reached the full Senate, William Jenner called the Amerasia section, correctly, "a whitewash of a whitewash...
...Eventually, after a day of rudeness and bad manners—Democrats shuffled papers or talked among themselves whenever a Republican had the floor—the Senate approved the report...
...In Stilwell and the American Experience, Barbara Tuchman wrote that when Service was arrested, it was the first step toward McCarthy's "tawdry reign of terror...
...In 1986, after information about Corcoran's role in the Amerasia cover-up was first disclosed, M. Stanton Evans declared in Human Events that "McCarthy's charges were true—more so than he imagined...
...It also said that Isaac Don Levine and Ralph de Toledano, the editors of the right-wing Plain Talk, were "despicable" and "beneath contempt" for having said there was...
...He agreed that Jaffe had been motivated by an "excess of journalistic zeal...
...Tydings said Jenner was a traitor, and likened him, improbably, to Stalin...
...His connection there was Andrew Roth...
...It is...
...E.J...
...History has been kind to him...
...The Golan is the source of over onethird of Israel's fresh water...
...It was the beginning of a fissure between left and right that even now is not yet healed...
...Facts and Lo* about the Middle East FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit 501 (c)(3)organizaPon...
...Then Jaffe and Roth began dealing with Mark Gayn, a journalist under contract to both Collier's and the Chicago Sun, who was also a frequent contributor to Time...
...Amerasia supported Communist policy, and although its circulation never rose JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...62 June r 9 9 6 • The American Spectator...
...But with the Golan in Syrian hands, and without the radar installations that would give Israel warning of any military movements, thousands of tanks—backed up by missiles and airplanes—could overrun Israel in a matter of hours...
...Liberals and lefties, of course, were outraged...
...Service, meanwhile, already was cooperating with Jaffe and Roth, "practically pushing documents under their noses...
...Historical Background—The Golan was always part of the Jewish homeland...
...But there had been a cover-up, and Levine and de Toledano were being maligned...
...In 1950, five years after the grand jury hearings, in a speech in Reno, Nevada, Joe McCarthy said Service was one of fifty-seven "card carrying" Communists in the State Department...
...They cite, as a contributing factor, "his hubris...
...But the research is impeccable, and the judgments are judicious...
...In a bugged conversation with Roth, he said: I would say that the first test of a real radical is, do you trust the Soviet Union through thick and thin, regardless of 60 June 1996 • The American Spectator You deserve a factual look at...
...To hand the Golan to Syria is a prescription for war and for Israel's destruction...
...Military Security—The Golan is about 10 miles wide, with a plateau on either side of a crest...
...Syria and its President—Syria is the most destabilizing influence in the Middle East...
...Joseph Stilwell, who detested Chiang, wanted to testify...
...Those choke points are defensible and made possible the repulse of the 1400 Syrian tanks that attacked Israel in the 1973 war...
...Syria, as a political entity, did not exist at all until after the first World War...
...Many classified documents—some containing sensitive military information—had been found in the Amerasia offices...
...Even the Republican Herald-Tribune worried about "red baiting...
...How else to explain, say, supercomputers for China, nuclear technology for North Korea, and the establishing of an Iranian foothold in Bosnia...
...He asked Service only perfunctory questions...
...I include my Itax-deductible contribution in the amount of AS/49A FLA what anybody says?...It's the workers' government, the one shining star in the whole damned world, and you got to defend that with your last drop of blood—and Izzy Stone hasn't done it all the time, and there's no excuse for it...
...Writers like Anna Louise Strong could no longer file dispatches from China, while scholarly contributors in America became preoccupied by government service...
...The investigation began when a team from the Office of Strategic Services, acting on a tip from British intelligence, surreptitiously broke into the magazine offices on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and discovered the government documents...
...If it were part of Syria it would be less than 1% of its territory...
...As a Columbia graduate student in 1941, Roth had been an Amerasia researcher...
...It still harbors Nazi bigwigs who found welcome there after the World War...
...When questioned about this after his arrest, however, Service dissembled...
...Syria's President, Hafez Assad, is a tyrant, every bit as cunning as his Iraqi counterpart, Saddam Hussein...
...Soong, of all people, would be rejoicing over the Amerasia arrests," Klehr and Radosh note dryly...
...Think of the hired guns and other flacks who drift in and out of the White House...
...In the 1967 Six-Day War, Syria attacked Israel and was defeated...
...But Israel should not return to the "death trap" borders of 1967 or anything close to it...
...With the Golan in Israeli hands, attacking Arabs could be confident of defeat and peace would be preserved...
...Klehr and Radosh sift through an enormous amount of material here...
...It is more than likely that, given another opportunity, Syria would once again attempt to destroy Israel's water supply...
...Whether Service was a spy may be almost irrelevant...
...Earlier in the year, Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury, and Klaus Fuchs had confessed to spying...
...In his memoir, A Time of Change, Harrison Salisbury called Service a "McCarthyite victim...
...Hitchcock, who had been a U.S...
...On the Golan itself, there are only two natural terrain bottlenecks through which tanks can advance...
...A definitive history of the Cold War and all its battles surely will include a chapter on hubris, showing that the arrogance of intellectuals often complemented the stupidity of Communists...
...Kate Mitchell and Gayn were cleared...
...Under Assad, Syria is a world center for terrorism...
...Kate Mitchell turned to her uncle, a wealthy Republican lawyer in Buffalo...
...The authors are understated here as always...
...In order to survive within such borders, Israel would have to rely on the goodwill of the Arab states, all of which—with the recent exception of Jordan and of the cold peace with Egypt—are still in a declared state of war with Israel...
...Meanwhile, Lauchlin Currie, the government economist, who soon would be identified by Elizabeth Bentley as a source of information for a Soviet spy ring, called Ben Cohen, the State Department legal counsel...
...Even before the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Syrians subjected the villages in northern Israel to almost daily shellings, making normal life impossible...
...FBI wiretaps and surveillance subsequently revealed that Jaffe yearned to be a Soviet spy...
...much above 2,000, it was read by almost everyone who specialized in Far Eastern politics...
...Klehr and Radosh call the Amerasia affair "a case without heroes...
...Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world...
...A second grand jury was sworn in, but Robert Hitchcock, Clark's unexpected choice as prosecutor, undermined his own case...
...They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines...
...He oversees one of the largest narcotics operations in the world...
...After all, Amerasia was best known for its criticism of Chiang and its support of the Communists...
...The arrests of the Amerasia six—Service, Jaffe, Roth, Larsen, Gayn, and Kate Mitchell—met with skepticism...
...Within a year, Churchill would give his "iron curtain" speech...
...attorney in Brooklyn, Celler's bailiwick, joined the law firm of Kate Mitchell's uncle...
...But it may be that de Toledano, Evans, and others like them (the late Victor Lasky comes to mind) were victims, far more than supposed victims like Service...
...Its loss would obligate Israel to maintain a state of readiness and mobilization that would be economically and socially untenable...
...Soong, Chiang Kaishek's brother-in-law, was the power behind the company...
...The United States was on the brink of the Cold War, and Amerasia was the first of the great spy cases...
...In 1964, with the Golan in Syrian hands, Syria attempted to divert these headwaters and to cripple Israel's water supply...
...Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome...
...Please send me your booklet containing 24 of the ads that you have published in national media over the last few years...
...He criticized FBI tactics...
...Liberal-left Democrats already were decrying witchhunts, but ordinary party hacks had not yet taken sides...
...On the other hand, they write, "the whitewash that did occur certainly gave right-wingers a ready-made cause célèbre and deep suspicions about the loyalty of government employees...
...Few doubt that Assad was the mastermind in the suicide attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in which 241 Americans died, and in the explosion of PanAm flight #103 in which 270 people lost their lives...
...In his pie-eyed zeal for Communism, he thought that even the Stalin apologist I. F. Stone lacked commitment...
...Its high ground provides early-warning capability, without which Israel would be subject to surprise attack by the Syrians...
...There were, though, a number of knaves...
...When the Senate endorsed the Tydings report, however, it did so on straight party lines—Democrats for, Republicans against—and the schism became official...
...Can Israel Survive Without Them...
...The committee's final report, which Henry Cabot Lodge and Bourke Hickenlooper refused to endorse, said there was not a "shred of evidence" to suggest there had been a cover-up in the Amerasia case...
...Field lost interest a few years later, and Jaffe carried on alone, sustained by the money he had made in the greeting-card business and a Marxist faith deeply burnished by a four-day visit he once paid to Mao at Yenan in China...
...Box 590359 San Francisco, CA 94159 My name is I live at In State This ad has been published and paid for by les, I want to help in the publication of these ads and I in clarifying the situation in the Middle East...
...Amerasia was founded in 1937 by Jaffe and Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a wealthy New York dilettante with an affinity for Communist causes...
...But it is of a supreme strategic importance to Israel...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Same Old, Not So Long Ago The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh University of North Carolina Press 266 pages / $29.95 REVIEWED BY John Corry 0 n June 6,1945, the FBI arrested five men and one woman on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage...
...He couldn't remember...
...A schism had opened in politics...
...We have virtually no overhead...
...The grand jury, in split votes, indicted Jaffe, Larsen, and Roth on a reduced charge of "conspiracy to embezzle, steal and purloin government property...
...A Washington fixer, well liked by the political establishment, turns out to be at best amoral...
...On the other hand, he connived with left-wingers to undermine his own superiors, and to influence U.S.-China policy, and he handed over classified documents to Philip Jaffe...
...They may be excused for believing that a leftist conspiracy shaped a turning point in our national life more than did cynical politics...
...World War II, however, cut off its sources...
...To hand the Golan to Syria is a prescription for war and for Israel's destruction...
...Congressional indolence and cheap politics intervened, however, and the case never went to trial...
...he had no recollection...
...Neither T.V...
...a mark of the authors' dispassion that they use the verb "suggests...
...Corcoran told Currie he would help, but that he could "not afford to be out front" and would "work around the edges...
...Roth introduced Jaffe to Emmanuel Larsen, a civilian employee of the Navy Department, whose job, as well as his hobby, was compiling data on Chinese warlords and politicians...
...Soong nor Corcoran wanted that...
...A month later, the Tydings Committee, named for its chairman, Democratic Senator Millard Tydings, began to consider this and other McCarthy charges...
...Compliant Democrats then abetted him in a cover-up orchestrated by Thomas Corcoran — "Tommy the Cork"—the legendary Washington lobbyist and fixer...
...Soon afterwards, Larsen moved to the State Department, and began passing on documents to Jaffe...
...When they pointed out that Communist agents operated in the highest reaches of government, they were denounced as crazy and rewarded with obloquy...
...Political figures scarcely remembered now turn up frequently, and chronology is often confusing...
...With the Golan in Israeli hands, attacking Arabs could be confident of defeat, and peace would be preserved...
...The Amerasia Spy Case is also a cautionary tale for today...
...Kenneth Wherry called the committee's majority counsel "a dirty son of a bitch," and punched him...
...Kahn of the New Yorker suggested in The China Hands that Service, in his contacts with Amerasia, was only "trying to be helpful to journalists...
...The Syrian claim to the Golan is tenuous...
...Together they agreed that Thomas Corcoran would be the best person to help Service...
...If the case came to trial, however, it could provide Service with a platform to denounce Chiang's corruption...
...Drew Pearson wrote that Amerasia would become "America's Dreyfus case...
...One would think that T.V...
...Gayn, in turn, got in touch with John Stewart Service, a State Department "China hand...
...State Department as a narcotic-dealing and terrorist state...
...The current Israeli government, in its keen desire to bring peace to its people, after almost fifty years of war and bloodshed, would seem prepared to give up the limited strategic security it now enjoys by virtue of its possession of the high ground—the ridges of Judea/Samaria (the "West Bank") and of the Golan Heights...
...By and large, the outcome was now wired...
...Klehr and Radosh believe "it would be going too far" to say that if the Amerasia affair had been handled honestly it "would have defused the impulse that culminated in the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...Service was involved in a spy plot...
...All were connected to the magazine Amerasia, and the case against them seemed airtight...
...At the same time, Jaffe hired the law partner of Emmanuel Celler, a very liberal and very influential Brooklyn congressman...
...Klehr, co-author of The Secret World of American Communism, and Radosh, co-author of The Rosenberg File, believe that Service's principal goal was to discredit the American supporters of Chiang Kai-shek, and that he was willing to take risks to do it...
...Bernstein's long trail in the dark corners of international Communism had left more than a mere suggestion...
...Service was, and fifty years later still is, its most provocative figure...
...Jaffe was fined $2,500, and Larsen $500...
...The brilliant China hand had chosen as partner someone who believed Moscow was the shining star of the whole damned world, and Izzy Stone was too tough on Stalin...
...Tommy the Cork had a financial interest in a company that channeled aid to the Chinese Nationalists...
...The Golan does not make for perfect defense, but it gives Israel a small breathing space for mobilization...
...De Toledano, Klehr and Radosh note, simply could not surrender the belief that the left was responsible for all Washington conspiracies...
Vol. 29 • June 1996 • No. 6
