INFORMERS, G-MEN, AND FREE MEN
Rauh, Joseph L. Jr.
Informers, G-Men, and Free Men By Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. FBI Agent: What can you tell me about the loyalty of Mr. Blank and his wife? Informer: Will I be kept out of this? FBI Agent: Yes. Informer:...
...Alongside the ex-Communists are the ex-undercover agents of the FBI in the Communist Party...
...I for one am willing to hazard a guess that it won't be listed for some time for reasons which have nothing to do with whether it is Communist-controlled...
...Let the Government stick to its job of detecting and preventing crime, but let it abolish resort to the techniques of the police state...
...Have informers produced any information showing that our institutions are endangered...
...A: Well, any literature that brings up the names of Karl Marx and Lenin is not literature that has anything to do with football games...
...This first became clear when Congress overrode the Supreme Court's decision in the Strecker Case and re-established past membership or past of filiation with an organization while aimed at overthrow of the Govern ment by force and violence as new grounds for deportation...
...A new army of informers was shaping up under this "stool pigeon" clause which was finally dropped by tie Navy only after strong protests were made by such organizations as Americans for Democratic Action, the American Veterans Committee, and the Harvard faculty...
...The Review Board chairman insists, in fact, that the program has actually "improved" the morale of Government workers...
...The accused, baffled and frustrated in their efforts to clear themselves, are under constant pressure to purchase immunity by informing on others and implicating persons who may also be innocent...
...There is no reason to quarrel with Mr...
...of gossip, gleaned from friends, neighbors, ex-wives, landlords, teachers, janitors, dancing partners, and drinking companions, do contain evaluations of witnesses most damaging to loyalty suspects...
...De Voto's suggestion...
...He reported that Communists were also present...
...III Bernard De Voto, in his brilliant article in the October 1949 issue of Harper's, has served notice on the FBI that he for one won't talk in private with any Government investigator...
...Y. was holding Communist meetings in his apartment...
...IV The time has come to return to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded and which made us great...
...The Supreme Court has similarly warned that "the evidence of such a witness [a confessed accomplice] ought to be received with suspicion, and with the very greatest care and caution, and ought not to be passed upon by the jury under the same rules governing other and apparently credible witnesses...
...During the war he served with Gen...
...Qs The literature could be labeled as Communist...
...I can see the FBI file all the way from here: "Subject's associate, one B. De Voto, reputed to be a leftist writer, refused to confirm or deny whether subject had ever done, said, or joined anything disloyal...
...I cannot recall any specific statement he may have made at any time...
...When the accuser was put on the witness stand the dialogue at the loyalty hearing went like this: Q: Can you tell us what the nature of this literature was...
...and the tragic wreckage of lives by irresponsible persons seeking political and private gain...
...He finally prevailed on an amiable janitor, approaching senility, to take the witness stand...
...The extent of the injustice which results from the use of some of this FBI material has been revealed in cases where, through accident or good fortune, the accused was in fact confronted by the chief witness against him...
...These dossiers carried the names of many prominent individuals whose conservative political views were common knowledge...
...The case of Elizabeth Bentley, Who had herself a headline binge as "ex-Spy Queen," should stand as a warning against unqualified acceptance of the tales told by exCommunists...
...But she did repeat them on a television program and recently Remington's libel suit against her was settled for a substantial sum of money...
...II In another case a Federal employe was accused by an ex-landlord of having received regular shipments of Communist literature at his home...
...He is chairman of the executive committee of Americans for Democratic Action...
...It might have been anti-Communistic...
...dossiers on public and private persons in the hands of a large national police agency...
...In actual practice such a donation made 13 years ago has set the whole machinery of loyalty in motion and let the donor in for a full field investigation by the FBI...
...But most reliable reporters I know decline to take notes on unprintable stories supplied by unreliable informants...
...Anyone with extensive experience defending loyalty cases learns with depressing frequency, and sometimes by sheer accident, that the chief informers are irresponsible and unreliable...
...Richardson, the conservative Republican head of the Loyalty Review Board, says emphatically not...
...Richardson, long known as a leading conservative Republican, and other loyalty officials have been eager to publicize these figures as widely as possible to demonstrate that the Loyalty Program has inflicted only minor injuries...
...Either the janitor had forgotten what he said in 1943, or his remarks were misunderstood by the FBI...
...This growing system of informing is not turning up spies and saboteurs...
...it turns hundreds of well-meaning citizens into amateur spies and gives dignity and status to all the irresponsible tipsters who simply want to talk about their neighbors, sometimes from motives of personal gain or personal vengeance...
...She confesses, however, that she didn't enjoy her work...
...Y. was ultimately cleared...
...The loyalty suspect himself, on trial for disloyalty, ends up in the witness chair with virtually no alternative but to inform on a wide variety of friends and acquaintances in his frantic efforts to clear himself of the anonymous charges...
...He was in a spot where if he failed to inform on an acquaintance, his reticence might be held against him...
...No, I never saw his Communist card...
...Increasingly the Government is becoming a refuge for the timid and unimaginative...
...But Mr...
...Let us do away with confidential informants, dossiers, political spies, wire-tapping, and headlines for publicity-seeking ex-Communists...
...The case collapsed and Mr...
...She refused to repeat the charges which she had made before a Congressional Committee—out of reach of the libel laws...
...At one hearing an accused Government worker under cross-examination by a member of the Board admitted he was acquainted with a physician in private practice whose views on various subjects were possibly Communistic or pro-Communist...
...Up to a few weeks ago « Navy applicant had to sign an oath swearing that he had listed the names and addresses of everyone whom he had met socially or otherwise at gatherings which in the opinion were sponsored by any organization on the Attorney Gen-eral's list...
...It would be a unique Government employe who would admit today even in an intimate discussion that he once saw some good in our biggest World War II ally...
...So far the Progressive Party has not appeared on the Attorney General's list...
...And why didn't you report this to the proper authorities...
...nor do I have any proof of his membership in the Communist Party...
...MacArthur in the Pacific...
...As an indispensable first step, we must banish that fear of the future which generates hysteria and rewards informing, and go back to the essentials which made this nation proud to call itself the land of the free and the home of the brave...
...So with some embarrassment the uncomfortable victim blurted out an equivocal reply to the effect that it hadn't occurred to him that the doctor was in a position to ply his profession in such a way as to undermine the republic...
...And it frequently turns out that even the FBI records contain serious factual errors...
...Certainly there are instances where disclosure would destroy valuable sources of information...
...Moreover, the FBI dossiers that came to light during the Cop-Ion trial showed that the practice of informing is encouraged against private citizens not charged in any way with committing or threatening any criminal offense...
...Chairman Seth Richardson of the Loyalty Review Board has stated that there was no question of treason or espionage in any one of the 150 to 160 cases of persons who have been dropped from the Federal payroll on grounds of disloyalty...
...The EGA legal staff had stretched the law to bar the employment of anyone who was, ever a member of any organization now on the Attorney General's subversive list, even though President Truman has stipulated that the list should not be used as a sole criterion of guilt...
...Miss Calomiris was approached by FBI agents and asked to join the Communist Party...
...Miss Bentley declined...
...Despite repeated denials, FBI reports, including the most trivial sort JOSEPH L. RAUH, Jr., prominent Washington attorney, has been counsel in a number of cases involving civil liberties and led the successful legal fight which brought exoneration, reinstatement, and a damage award for William Remington...
...But certainly the majority of people who have had anything to do with loyalty investigations find it hard to believe that the program is making people happier and more secure in their jobs...
...past two years only eight out of every 100,000 Federal employes have been dismissed as a result of loyalty investigations...
...Some clues to their far-flung operations have turned up in the testimony and writings of two such agents, Angela Calomiris and Matthew Cvetic...
...He recently boasted to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had joined Henry Wallace's back-room caucuses on Progressive Party strategy...
...The one memorable occasion on which Miss Bentley found herself speechless was when William Remington, whom she had accused of being a former Communist co-conspirator, was brought before the Government Loyalty Review Board on charges of disloyalty...
...Q: Why do you say that...
...Anglo-Saxon law has consistently recognized that the testimony of a confessed accomplice must be treated with extreme caution...
...Among the wide variety of citizens approached by the FBI or who for reasons of their own volunteer information, there are at least two very special categories on whom the FBI apparently places particular reliance...
...If there are many Communists in the Federal Government, the relentlessly administered Loyalty Program has failed to uncover them...
...Naturally, when you see these names in literature you know what it is about...
...Rauh was private secretary to the late Supreme Court Justice Cardozo, and ¦ - subsequently filled major legal posts for the Federal Communications Commission, Lend-Lease Administration, and the Labor Depart-ment...
...The suspect was in no position to speak up and tell the Board he thought it was nobody's business what political views a doctor in private practice held...
...Of course, an effective espionage system must rely, to some extent, on under-cover informers...
...The assurance that Federal employes are loyal has been purchased at incalculable cost...
...De Voto's advice is scarcely practical for the subject under investigation...
...She reports that she never attempted to entrap her friends and was deeply reluctant to inform on Communist school teachers...
...To what avail this growing informer system in our land...
...A: Possibly it could have been...
...First there are the ex-Communists...
...But the time is rotten-ripe for the American people to realize the extent to which the whole informer system is growing and to recognize that the probings and pry-ings of the FBI have already touched the lives of millions of citizens whose personal habits and morals, as well as political views, are officially recorded in Washington...
...The informer is gradually becoming more indispensable as the dangerous doctrine of guilt by association gains wider acceptance...
...Over a century ago, Lord Abinger observed: "The danger is that when a man is fixed, and knows that his own guilt is detected, he purchases immunity by falsely accusing others...
...A: It was Communistic literature...
...One of the chief dangers in the loyalty program springs from the FBI's refusal to disclose to loyalty suspects the identity of the persons who informed against them...
...This same principle was ap-plied by Congress to employment with the Economic Cooperation Ad-ministration...
...The Dies Committee was among the first to exploit fully the doctrine of guilt by association as a highly useful and effective political weapon...
...Thus, not only did "affiliation" in its loosest sense become a mark of guilt, but the guilt was made retro-active...
...Or perhaps the obliging fellow simply told everybody what he thought they wanted to hear...
...I would bet money that Johnny Jones was a member of the Communist Party...
...The bulging files of the FBI have been compared by Director John Edgar Hoover to the "notes of a newspaper reporter before he has culled the printable material from the unprintable...
...Dies' group and its successors fattened on annual increases in funds and gorged their files with dossiers on some 1,000,000 individuals and organizations...
...The man who once gave a dollar to the Spanish Loyalists has good reason to steer clear of the Civil Service...
...Joe McCarthy has simply carried the Dies' formula to its logical conclusion and fabricated a vicious attack on the State Department for political purposes...
...political spies as we have never had them in our history...
...One loyalty suspect was challenged to disprove the anonymous allegation that he held weekly Communist meetings at his apartment...
...The cost in money—the new budget for the FBI is almost 10 times the $6,000,000 spent by that agency in 1939 when the nation was confronted by the_ twin dangers of Nazi and Soviet spies and saboteurs—is insignificant compared to the cost in human values...
...probed the member of the Board...
...This procedure not only jeopardizes the rights of Government workers against whom charges of disloyalty have been lodged...
...While the courts have steadfastly resisted the doctrine, Congress has sought consistently to expand it...
...Informer: I knew him and bis wife both...
...And what would happen to the boy who wanted to join the Navy if he followed Mr...
...A program based on secret informers is as contagious as scarlet fever...
...Have informers turned up any information showing that Government workers are guilty of either treason or espionage...
...Those who have faith in democracy know that the answer is a most emphatic "No...
...What it is producing is a timid and insecure civil service at a time when courage and an aggressive spirit are required to meet a growing world crisis...
...Nevertheless, Cvetic actually entrapped Henry Wallace, private citizen, and went to him offering to round up Progressive Party votes from the American Slav Congress...
...Slowly the fantastic truth dawned on everyone, except possibly the janitor...
...The above is a direct quote from an unidentified informer in an actual FBI report read into the transcript of an actual Federal loyalty case...
...Some former Communists are apparently driven to wild and hysterical exaggeration in their quest for salvation and personal expiation...
...When the FBI arbitrarily characterizes an informant as "reliable," without stating his identity, the accused has no way of knowing whether the chief witness against him is his local pastor or the village idiot...
...The janitor repeated his denial once, then twice...
...No one can guess where this process of informing will end...
...III But are there not more common dangers inherent in these public confessions...
...neighbor gossiping about neighbor...
...Through sheer accident the accused had put his chief accuser on the witness stand...
...Their actions present an interesting contrast in the techniques of paid under-cover agents...
...IN the...
...The loyalty probe is spreading to states, municipalities, school districts, and to major segments of private industry doing business with the Government...
...His figures are reassuring...
...He states flatly that he will not divulge any information to FBI agents...
...She merely operated as a perfunctory Communist and threw her batch of Daily Workers in the ash-can when she was assigned to go out alone on a recruiting drive...
...The Republican-dominated Board cleared Remington after fruitlessly sending repeated invitations to Miss Bentley to appear and present her case...
...The responsibility is clear and the answer is simple if an individual has information on someone who is in a position to threaten the national security...
...When he tried to summon an eccentric neighbor on suspicion that she was the source of the tale, he was stymied by the lack of power of subpoena by the Loyalty Board...
...But Cvetic approached his job in quite a different spirit...
...To a great many citizens who have never doubted the presence of Communists in the Wallace ranks and who have accepted the fact that his party is a Communist-front organization, the reasons why Cvetic was sent underground are somewhat obscure...
...Richardson's arithmetic...
...Each man must, of course, resolve the inevitable conflict between personal morality and social responsibility implicit in the question of exposing old friends and former colleagues...
...When the janitor had told his story, the bewildered chairman of the Loyalty Board questioned him closely: "You mean to say that you did not tell the FBI back in 1943 that Mr...
Vol. 14 • May 1950 • No. 5
