A Forgotten Spy Case
LYONS, DONALD
A Forgotten Spy Case By Donald Lyons On a recent Charlie Rose program, New York Times columnist Abe Rosenthal's anxieties about the aggressive expansionism of China were "balanced" by a young...
...Loose-cannon Larsen, addicted to "confessing," published an article in the right-wing magazine Plain Talk naming Service and four others at State as agents of a gigantic conspiracy...
...Stone, writing in the New York fellow-traveling tabloid PM, called the arrests political persecution, claiming the officials were just leakers and asking, "Is the leak to be a right-wing monopoly...
...A Forgotten Spy Case By Donald Lyons On a recent Charlie Rose program, New York Times columnist Abe Rosenthal's anxieties about the aggressive expansionism of China were "balanced" by a young Asian woman, Alice Young, who denounced such fears as imperialist and expressed doubt that China was even worth worrying about...
...All in all, a piece of Soviet-style overkill that betrayed guilt and nervousness...
...It called McCarthy's accusations a Nazi-like "big lie...
...He met Lt...
...there were no oaths and no staff counsel...
...By 1944, Jaffe and assistant Kate Mitchell were writing the whole mag, which cost a then-substantial 15 cents and was printed on good glossy paper, by themselves...
...Corcoran was counsel and partner of financier TV...
...I wish I could admire Klehr and Radosh as much for their story-telling knack as I do for their scholarly industry and for the moral fineness and courage it took to tell this tale honestly even today...
...under surveillance...
...Hitchcock presented the evidence to a grand jury, supposedly seeking indictments on charges both of embezzlement of government property (Jaffe had paid Roth and Larsen) and, more seriously, of conspiracy to commit espionage...
...He and fellow Republican Bourke Hickenlooper filed a minority report accusing the subcommittee of ignoring the official sabotaging of the case...
...Corcoran called in Hill favors and soon all was well...
...Field appointed one-time greeting-card manufacturer and maverick never-quite-Communist China specialist Philip Jaffe as editor...
...The Hobbs committee's October 1946 majority report whitewashed Justice and lambasted State's "lax" handling of the purloined documents...
...Chairman Hobbs squelched affidavits about White House and State pressures to delay the arrests and to clear Service...
...It was a performance our authors very charitably call "lacking in candor...
...On the stand, Larsen said he had no idea Jaffe and Roth were Reds and that he really gave them only, oh, "eight or ten" documents...
...The Democrats were long in power and swollen with arrogance...
...Service showed up with State Department papers...
...Service boasted to Jaffe that he had, while in China, been getting the Office of War Information to disseminate copies of Amerasia...
...their bugs had recorded Service promising to procure for Jaffe military secrets (American fleet movements, possible American troop landings in China) and, in general, anything harmful about Chiang's regime...
...The majority report found "no shred of evidence" of a coverup...
...About their high-born collaborators there is...
...There's a sobering truth about McCarthy's role in all this...
...Did the grand jury vote to indict...
...Four weeks later, a special subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee- chaired by Democrat Millard Tydings-met to consider this and other charges by McCarthy against State...
...Then during the summer of 1948-in an eerily similar case-Whittaker Chambers accused State official Alger Hiss of what amounted to espionage for the Soviet Union, and the spy-case focus moved elsewhere for a time...
...Sessions were held in secret in his office...
...Like the ward heelers so many of the Trumanites were, they manipulated Justice and State to cover up an explosive situation-prelude to Watergate!-and then sat on Congress to cover up the coverup-prelude to Whitewater, pre-1995...
...Soong, Chiang's brother-in-law...
...In court, Hitchcock torpedoed his own case, slamming FBI methods and saying those arrested were guilty only of "an excess of journalistic zeal...
...The Democrats expected to expose McCarthy's list as nonexistent (it was), and his charges as unjust (well, up to a point, Lord Copper...
...Hitchcock blamed the FBI's clumsiness...
...In 1937, Jaffe made an enthusiastic tour of the Communist-held part of China...
...Jaffe took the Fifth, was cited for contempt, and was acquitted in 1951...
...Soon after, a second grand jury was sworn in, but Hitchcock himself kept Service from being indicted...
...In 1936, radical socialite Frederick Vanderbilt Field and the Institute for Pacific Relations started a new magazine, Amerasia, a left-leaning journal about China...
...What can we learn from the Amerasia spy case...
...In 1950, Sen...
...They were then willing to cooperate with professional Communists by giving them, for uses to be determined by the Communists, government secrets, even military ones...
...They made a lunch date for the next day...
...Larsen started giving Jaffe official China documents, which Jaffe published virtually verbatim...
...This public mention of military documents was a bombshell, alerting the world at large for the first time that the Amerasia case involved real espionage and not just bitter differences about China...
...On June 8, the leftist I.F...
...Bielaski's men took a few with them to Washington...
...Henry Cabot Lodge, who was on the Tydings committee, grilled Justice witnesses about the military significance of some of the documents...
...Clark let Mitchell off...
...The case would not die...
...Still, The Amerasia Spy Case is good and necessary and-even 46 years later- timely...
...he didn't even like Jaffe...
...Not for good, however...
...By 1941, Field had withdrawn his financial support from Amerasia and World War II had cut off the receipt of propaganda from China...
...Service's defenders were later to describe this as being "helpful to journalists...
...Justice waffled and blamed the FBI again for its sloppiness and excess of zeal...
...it was a "political fix...
...All the well-connected defendants were off...
...McCarthy's charlatanism stands as a warning to conservatives not to let their noble causes into the hands of demagogues...
...President Harry Truman gave the okay, and-after a mysterious delay-on June 6, 1945, Jaffe and his assistant were arrested at the New York magazine office, while Roth, Larsen, and Service were picked up around Washington...
...Klehr is the coauthor of The Secret World of American Communism, which once and for all demonstrated that the American Communist party was primarily an arm of Soviet espionage...
...Roth introduced Jaffe to Emmanuel Larsen, a civilian "China expert" who worked at State...
...With Service threatening to make a stink at trial about the Chiang corruption he was "merely" trying to expose, New Deal wheeler-dealer extraordinaire Tommy Corcoran sprung into action behind the scenes...
...But the book is a trial to read, jumping back and forth in time and requiring at times almost a jigsaw-puzzle-like reassembly of its data...
...This became the party line of anti-Stalinist liberals, too: Max Lerner and Drew Pearson promptly denounced the arrests...
...In April 1945, Jaffe was approached by Soviet agents, whose advances he welcomed, feeling as he did that "the first test of a real radical is, do you trust the Soviet Union through thick and thin, regardless of what anybody says...
...With their eyes wide open about American Communists and sympathizers, the writers have an amazing tale to tell...
...Nothing defined the early Cold War times so much as spectacular spy cases, the very first of which- the forgotten story of Amerasia magazine-gets an airing in The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism by Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh (University of North Carolina Press, 266 pages, $29.95...
...Republican Sen...
...One more rewrite with a sharp editor looking over their shoulders would have done the trick...
...Jaffe and Mitchell were defiant and legalistic...
...Roth was silent...
...The unconnected and truculent Roth was left dangling, but charges against him were also eventually and quietly dropped in February 1946...
...Larsen, who had given the magazine its first State Department documents, fingered Jaffe and Service, but then waffled...
...Clark was a mediocre hack whose nomination was in trouble in the Senate...
...Jaffe's assistant, Kate Mitchell, turned to her uncle, a rich Buffalo Republican lawyer...
...and he barely knew Tommy Corcoran, the fixer who had feared what Service might say about his client, Chiang Kai-Shek...
...On April 19, 1945, the FBI tapped a hotel-room meeting between Jaffe and John Stewart Service, a brilliant upper-level State Department China hand, the China-born child of missionaries and Berkeley graduate who'd been the American liaison-and an increasingly critical one-at the corrupt court of Chiang Kai-Shek until six days before...
...Astoundingly, no one yet knows, for Attorney General Clark shelved and sealed the grand jury results...
...he misspoke when he promised to deliver "military plans" because he had never been privy to such stuff anyway...
...Jaffe was fined $2,500, Larsen $500...
...Without approving of him, one has to note that his publicity-seeking flamboyance did get the Amerasia case the only thing resembling a public hearing it has ever had, and that his "investigator" Tydings did not come off as much of a moral improvement...
...Larsen crumbled and began the first of many contradictory and self-exculpating confessions...
...About the Red agents there is little that needs to be said...
...The Department of Justice picked as prosecutor the very unenthusiastic Robert Hitchcock...
...Radosh is co-author of The Rosenberg File, whose damning conclusions about the executed couple have been confirmed by recent decodings of Soviet material...
...Desperate for filler, Jaffe began going to Washington to cultivate sources...
...For example, the January 26, 1945, issue of Amerasia contained a top-secret and potentially damaging report on the details of the anti-Japanese Thai resistance movement...
...This is the old anti-anti-Communist line in a nutshell: The Cold War was an excuse for McCarthyite persecution of idealistic progressives at home and an alibi for defense buildups and interventions against a chimerical Red Empire abroad...
...Authorities seized 1,722 documents...
...Donald Lyons writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal and the New Criterion...
...This reckless publishing policy came to the notice of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, whose chief investigator Frank Bielaski promptly put the Amerasia office at 225 Fifth Ave...
...On May 4, 1950, the Tydings panel began a six-week rehash of the Amerasia case alone...
...He really had no idea, he testified, what Amerasia's politics were...
...Then came the last major witness, Service...
...Joe McCarthy named Service as one of those 57 "card-carrying" Communists at State he had on his notorious "list...
...Lodge defended the FBI practices...
...The whole thing stank so thoroughly that even the Democrat-controlled House voted 277-111 to investigate the Amerasia bungle...
...Even his fanatical collaborators were surprised at Service's aristocratic hubris, his blithe air of invulnerability...
...Service and Jaffe went on to a party at Andrew Roth's place...
...The FBI now wanted to move on Amerasia, confident that its entries and tappings were legal because its surveillance had been undertaken to recover documents stolen in wartime...
...Larsen approached McCarthy with a promise to expose Service in public but then got cold feet and changed his story for the umpteenth time...
...Klehr and Radosh cannot track Corcoran's steps exactly and are reduced to sniffing by-paths...
...As a character says in The Manchurian Candidate, "If the Soviet Union had constructed a tool to discredit anti-communism, they could have come up with nothing better than Joe McCarthy...
...Service saw the Chinese Reds as devoted to "agrarian reform, civil rights, the establishment of democratic institutions"- the same Chinese Reds soon to inaugurate one of the three most homicidal tyrannies in human history...
...When the Tydings document came up for debate in the full Senate on July 20, Republican senator William Jenner called its Amerasia section "a whitewash of a whitewash," and Tydings went ballistic in a two-hour harangue, comparing Jenner to Joe Stalin...
...It labeled the editors of Plain Talk, Isaac Don Levine and Ralph de Toledano, as "despicable," and attacked Lodge and Hickenlooper by name as lazy and ill-informed...
...On Sunday night, March 11, 1945, the OSS entered the empty but messy office, finding a well-equipped darkroom and photocopies of some 20 top-secret government documents...
...Two days earlier, Julius Rosenberg had been arrested in New York...
...Lodge-who emerges from this story with credit, one of the very few to do so-did not buy Service's story...
...Corcoran was also making himself very useful to Attorney General-designate Tom Clark (father of Ramsey...
...Corcoran schmoozed Service into shutting up...
...By mid-May, federal agents had entered the Amerasia office six times...
...In a straight party-line vote, the Democrats approved the partisan and mendacious report...
...But the fix was still in: Sleepy, safe Sam Hobbs of Alabama was chosen as chairman...
...these wild charges did more harm than good...
...On March 14, Secretary of the Navy James Forre-stal gave the case to the FBI, which began trailing, bugging, and phone-tapping Jaffe...
...Andrew Roth, the Naval Intelligence liaison to the State Department-a lefty Asia hand whose hobby was Japanese communism...
...Emmanuel Celler...
...Service was haughtily indignant...
...Don't forget the Cold War, she warned, when we were frightened of something we now know didn't exist...
...Sure of their perfect virtue and contemptuous of imperfection, some elitist bureaucrats of the Roosevelt years projected virtue onto communism and imperfection upon the likes of Chiang...
...by contrast, said City College of New York graduate Andrew Roth, "I was very cautious, a working-class kid...
...Of course, McCarthy was a gift to the Democrat establishment...
...Robert Hitchcock, the strangely unenthusiastic Justice Department prosecutor, told the subcommittee it was a pure coincidence he'd gotten a cushy job at the Buffalo law firm run by the uncle of Kate Mitchell (she was, remember, the assistant in the Amerasia offices...
...Jaffe's choice for lawyer was the law partner of powerful Brooklyn progressive Rep...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 28
