Looking for Spies in All the Wrong Places

On June 6, 1945, barely a month after Germany surrendered to the Allies and two months before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested six Americans directly or indirectly associated with the magazine Amerasia, a leftist publication on Asian affairs. FBI agents and operatives of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, had earlier broken into the magazine’s offices in New York City where they discovered hundreds of official documents—many labeled “secret” and “confidential”—relating to American and British policies in Asia. The six were charged under the Espionage Act with unauthorized possession of documents related to national defense. ¹

Among the six arrested were Philip Jaffe and Kate Mitchell, the editors of Amerasia, and a rising star in the foreign service in China, John Stewart Service. Two of the six, Jaffe and Emmanuel “Jimmy” Larsen, another State Department employee, later pleaded guilty to unauthorized possession of government property and received fines. All criminal charges against the others, including Service, a sharp critic of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China, were ultimately dropped when grand juries failed to indict.

The Amerasia case was one of the incidents that spurred President Truman to instigate a sweeping federal loyalty and security program which would subject thousands of executive branch employees to FBI investigations and formal hearings that probed their friendships, associations, political beliefs, and sexual habits. As a result, many lost their jobs and reputations, charged with disloyalty on the basis of confidential information never disclosed or subject to cross-examination. ² Among the victims was Service, arguably the State Department officer most knowledgeable about China’s new communist rulers. ³ In 1951, the federal Loyalty Review Board (having previously ruled six times in Service’s favor) now questioned his loyalty. He was fired immediately. Although the Supreme Court reversed this verdict in 1957, his diplomatic career was ruined.

Amerasia also became the focus of two raucous congressional hearings, one featuring Senator Joseph McCarthy, who regarded the affair as proof positive that domestic traitors in the American government, including Service, had engineered the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek and the “loss of China.” McCarthy and his allies in Congress and the press viewed the Amerasia case as part of the long train of betrayal, espionage, and cover-ups that had characterized the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and weakened the nation’s response to communist expansion in Europe and Asia.

Liberals ridiculed the idea of espionage, stressed the long tradition of government leaks to friendly journalists, and saw the Amerasia arrests as examples of the Truman administration’s brazen efforts to silence its foreign policy critics with Gestapo-like tactics that included illegal searches and seizures, wiretapping, and other violations of civil liberties.

Ronald Radosh, coauthor of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth (1983), and Harvey Klehr, coauthor of The Secret World of American Communism (1995), have now revisited the Amerasia case and reached conclusions that echo those advanced by an earlier generation of right-wing investigators: Amerasia was an important espionage case where truth and justice were thwarted by an extensive cover-up orchestrated by influential persons in the Justice and State Departments, and the White House. ⁴

Consistent with their earlier writings, Radosh and Klehr advance two fundamental propositions, both staples of right-wing red-baiting: (1) Soviet espionage, before and after World War II, penetrated the highest levels of the federal government; and (2) naive liberals, generally soft on communism, wittingly or unwittingly aided these Soviet conspiracies.

Radosh now believes that his pursuit of the truth about Soviet spying has led to his ostracism in the profession by latter-day academic Stalinists. He recently cried political persecution when the history department at George Washington University voted 17-3 against his appointment to a special position funded by the conservative John Olin Foundation. Radosh saw the vote as a...