A week after the Duran presentation, a member of McCarthy’s staff would discuss with the FBI security information on Cora Dubois, a former OSS employee and McCarthy suspect who had moved to the State Department in 1945 and was still on the payroll there in 1950. Dubois was McCarthy’s case No. 60 on the Senate floor and was also a Lee case. However, the information covered in this exchange obviously wasn’t from the Lee list. A March 21 Bureau report on this says that “———of Senator McCarthy’s staff had in his possession a memorandum which contains information regarding [Dubois], a State Department employee. The memorandum quotes information from the report of SA Kelly and SA Clancy of the Bureau in June of 1948.”7
From the phrasing, it’s evident the McCarthy staffer had, not an original FBI report, but a memo quoting or condensing such a report—a not uncommon type of information in State Department and other security records. McCarthy and his researcher J. B. Matthews had a fair number of such memos in backup files about their suspects, and the Dubois memorandum sounds like one of these. In which event, the State Department itself was the most likely source, though the LRB was again a possibility. In any case, the information, dating from June of 1948, clearly wasn’t from the Lee list, which was compiled in the fall of 1947 and published in January of 1948.
On March 25, 1950, in executive session, McCarthy flagged to the attention of the Tydings panel the name of Charles W. Thayer, yet another State Department employee who wasn’t on the Lee list. While not going into detail, McCarthy indicated that Thayer was an extremely bad security risk who should be ousted. (He would call the case to the attention of the FBI, as well.) This focus on Thayer is of added interest as McCarthy had in his backup files a rather complete dossier on Thayer, which was to all appearances a copy of the investigative record assembled by the loyalty board at State. The most obvious explanation of this material in McCarthy’s papers is that someone in the department leaked it to him.8
On March 30, McCarthy again took to the Senate floor, setting forth a substantial body of data on several of his cases, including Service, Philip Jessup, and Haldore Hanson. He also at that time read into the Congressional Record a paraphrased version of a 1943 confidential letter Owen Lattimore, then with the West Coast branch of OWI, had written to Joe Barnes, his counterpart in the New York office. This Lattimore missive discussed the cases of Chew Hong and Chi Kung Chuan, two ethnic Chinese then working for OWI who were accused of Red connections and were under security investigation by the Civil Service Commission.
These cases would later prove significant not only in the Lattimore dispute but also for the Amerasia scandal, in which Chew Hong would figure as a suspect. For now, their main relevance concerns the question of McCarthy’s sources. In a subsequent Senate statement, McCarthy would amplify his revelations on the OWI affair by inserting into the Congressional Record the full text of the Lattimore letter to Barnes, plus the reports of security screeners who opposed retention of the two Chinese. This was all Civil Service material but would have been supplied to State, since OWI had been absorbed into the department in the latter part of 1945.9
In addition to putting such documents in the Record, McCarthy on a back-channel basis continued to flag suspects and pass information to the FBI, including the Barnes-Lattimore correspondence, which the Bureau apparently didn’t have, and still other data from unknown sources (identities redacted in the records). An April 20 Bureau report reflects that McCarthy provided the FBI a fairly detailed memo on diplomat O. Edmund Clubb (source redacted, but apparently someone familiar with State Department doings in China). At this same period, McCarthy also brought to the attention of the Bureau the names of Leander Lovell and David Weintraub (FBI memos of April 20 and May 1).10
Each of these was, in its way, a significant case. Lovell had been McCarthy’s suspect No. 28 on the floor of the Senate, but would like John T. Fishburn vanish from the State Department’s tabulation of McCarthy cases. Weintraub was of interest to McCarthy as the U.N. official who had been responsible for sending Owen Lattimore on a mysterious mission to Afghanistan. (Weintraub had been identified, somewhat indirectly, in testimony by Whittaker Chambers—confirmed by data from the Soviet archives—as a Communist operative at the National Research Project in the 1930s.)
There would be still other cases of like nature. In early June, McCarthy somehow obtained all or part of the Sam Klaus memo, discussed in Chapter 12, concerning the number of alleged Soviet agents and Communists who had been in the State Department and what Klaus thought was an FBI chart reflecting these statistics. McCarthy read verbatim excerpts from this memo into the Congressional Record, including the table that showed the number of asserted agents, Communists, suspects, and so on. As a comparison with the original shows, all these citations were letter perfect.
McCarthy’s ability to come up with this report was especially noteworthy as the FBI itself didn’t at this point have a copy. As the Bureau learned more about the matter, its comments confirmed the accuracy of McCarthy’s statements, the inside nature of his sources, and the likelihood that these were in the State Department. FBI official Mickey Ladd observed, for instance, that State indeed had in its possession a chart that listed individuals under “the exact breakdown given by McCarthy.” It was thus apparent, said Ladd, that “the material used by McCarthy originated from the State Department….A copy of this report is undoubtedly in the hands of McCarthy.”11
Nor were there any alternative sources outside of State known to the Bureau that might have supplied Klaus’s memo to McCarthy. As Director Hoover put it, “McCarthy is getting his material out of the State Department because no one else had such a chart in his possession.”12 McCarthy must have had a pretty good pipeline to the State Department to obtain a memo nobody else outside of State, including J. Edgar Hoover, had previously seen or, apparently, even been aware of.
As noted, the Klaus memo and “chart” reflected a phenomenal number of alleged Soviet agents, Communists, and suspects who had tunneled in at State as of the summer of 1946. At that time, the matter had been glossed over by the subliminal way the cases were handled, permitting such as Hiss, Robert Miller, et al. to resign in decorous fashion rather than being ousted as security risks, or worse, via the McCarran rider. The whole thing had been swept under the rug, and despite the exposure of Hiss by Congress in the meantime, the full scope of the wartime and postwar infiltration was still a huge and scandalous secret.
McCarthy’s having come up with the Klaus report, and its delivery to Tydings after McCarthy made an issue of it, presented the administration with a problem. We may be sure Truman-Acheson forces weren’t anxious to have this kind of information spread out on the record, especially not in the context of their death struggle with McCarthy. To handle this dilemma, a somewhat awkward solution was arrived at. While passing on the Klaus report to Tydings, John Peurifoy drafted a convoluted cover letter, tap-dancing around the substance of the memo and dilating on a secondary topic: that the “chart” referred to by Klaus was not an FBI chart—which indeed it wasn’t—as if this were the major point at issue.13
This proved satisfactory to Tydings, who reproduced the Peurifoy letter as the definitive statement on the subject with no more that needed saying about it. (In fact, Tydings liked the letter so much he reproduced it twice—once in the report of the committee and again in the appendix.) Meanwhile, the memo itself and the data it contained would disappear from the hearing record and thereafter from the subcommittee archive. So all that remains in the exhibits is Peurifoy’s obfuscating letter, plus a couple of equally obfuscating State Department press releases on the topic.
Thanks to this Peurifoy-Tydings treatment, the “FBI chart” is often cited as an example of McCarthy’s lying. (It would form, for instance, one of the ten charges William Benton later brought against McCarthy in urging his ouster from the Senate.) This argument, though oft repeated, was yet another smoke screen. For of course it wasn’t McCarthy who said the chart was prepared by the FBI, but
the State Department’s own official, Klaus. McCarthy made no claim to knowledge of the chart other than what was in Klaus’ memo, and his somewhat incredulous statements about FBI involvement with the case were based strictly on its contents. The State Department, not McCarthy, committed the error that was complained of.
So far as the official record shows, these efforts to obscure the substantive meaning of the Klaus report were the main focus of State Department energies in this conflict. Though it seems certain the administration would have wanted to know how McCarthy got the memo, the available data don’t reflect this. However, the Truman sleuths would soon be back on the trail of McCarthy’s supposedly nonexistent sources. The provocation this time was a McCarthy speech on the floor of the Senate on July 25 concerning Edward Posniak, an employee of the State Department whose name McCarthy had given to Tydings by registered letter of March 18.
In a talk that touched on other facets of the security issue, McCarthy inserted into the Congressional Record excerpts from a lengthy Posniak-related document, which he described, and was labeled, as a report from the Civil Service Commission. This consisted of excerpts from nine FBI reports on Posniak, some indicating that he was a very bad security risk indeed. The most shocking of these, said McCarthy, included statements from an FBI undercover agent that he personally knew Posniak to have been a member of the Communist Party. Yet Posniak, contra the Truman–State Department assurance that all the bad security risks were long ago disposed of, was still at work in the department.
In presenting this material to the Senate, McCarthy struck one of his most effective blows at the elaborate cover-up stitched together by the Truman White House, State Department, and Tydings panel. The FBI data on Posniak were extensive and, for security purposes, highly damning. Yet he had somehow been “cleared” by the State Department’s unfathomable loyalty process. (He would a few months later, as noted in Chapter 22, be permitted to resign in discreet, below-the-radar fashion—undoubtedly as a result of the McCarthy pressure—and then pop up at the International Monetary Fund.)14
Simultaneously, however, McCarthy had in this case committed one of his own most egregious gaffes, though how and why he did so aren’t apparent from the record. While the Posniak data were authentic, the form in which they were packaged wasn’t. The alleged “Civil Service Commission” report wielded by McCarthy was not in fact such a report, but rather a document so formatted as to conceal the proximate source of the security data. The FBI files are replete with comments on this, as well as speculation as to where the information may have come from.
If ever there were a case in which McCarthy’s critics could have had a field day at his expense, this would seem to be the obvious candidate. Amazingly, however, this wasn’t a point much exploited by his foes, who in other cases did far more with less (though Edward Morgan would refer to it while campaigning against McCarthy two years later in Wisconsin).*190 One possible reason for this default is that the underlying data on the case were so shocking the State Department thought the less said about them the better. Another possible motive, evident from the Bureau updates, is that concern about where the material might have come from was so intense it trumped all other issues.
Some insight into how the matter was viewed inside the administration, and how urgently the Truman forces looked for pro-McCarthy moles, is provided at several places in the Bureau records. In the wake of the Posniak speech, the FBI soon determined that the Civil Service format was ersatz and interviewed officials of the CSC, State Department, and Loyalty Review Board as to possible sources of the information. As one Bureau memo relates:
Colonel Hatcher pointed out that while the FBI reports referred to in the McCarthy “exhibit” did actually pass through the Office of the Investigative Division, Civil Service Commission, at no time was the [Posniak] material ever contained in the files of the Investigative Division…Colonel Hatcher stated his belief that the likely sources of the information in the case were either in the State Department or in the Loyalty Review Board, since these are the only two places where the information reposed.*191 15
Exactly where the “exhibit” came from would remain a mystery. At least two FBI memos indicate that McCarthy staffer Don Surine had said the Posniak file was treated in this fashion to disguise its true proximate source, which led some in the Bureau to think Surine (a former FBI agent) was the person who did it. If so, of course, this still wouldn’t have answered the larger question, since it would have raised the further issue of how Surine obtained the reports in question. However, after the death of Sen. Pat McCarran in 1954, the identical document was discovered among his papers, together with other information relating to the case, which may have been the solution to the puzzle.
The Bureau memo on this describes a “photostat [in the McCarran records] of what purports to be a summary of FBI reports in the case of [Posniak] identical with the document distributed on 7-25-50 [by McCarthy] with the exception that Senator McCarthy’s copy had identifying information concerning [Posniak] crossed out.”16 The existence of this more complete version of the Posniak file in McCarran’s records would suggest that McCarthy may have received the “exhibit” from McCarran, though the reverse was also a theoretical, if less likely, possibility.†192
The Posniak case subsided, but the search for McCarthy’s sources was ongoing. In early 1952, he provoked a further uproar when he discussed yet another suspect who would be enshrined as one of his many martyrs. This was a Truman aide named Philleo Nash, who had moved to the White House from OWI in the 1940s. According to McCarthy, the record showed that Nash had been a close associate of Communist operatives in the United States and Canada. McCarthy added that the LRB file on Nash, like other dossiers earlier noted, had been commandeered by the White House.
Nash denounced McCarthy’s charges as a “contemptible lie,” and the White House followed suit. Many discussions of the topic echoed these opinions, citing the case of Philleo Nash as yet another example of McCarthy’s smearing innocent people, citing phony data, and all the rest. Again, however, a different scenario is suggested by the confidential record—which in this case includes a backup file on Nash that was in the hands of the McCarthy forces, found in the files of J. B. Matthews. This indicates that McCarthy-Matthews were in possession of a summary of the official loyalty proceedings against Nash, capsuling the charges against him and the concerns of the Bingham LRB, which had urged a rehearing of the matter.17
Collateral data on the case appear in the records of the FBI. These show that, in the wake of McCarthy’s speech, the Civil Service Commission had hustled over to the Bureau several documents on Nash, including parts of his loyalty file, records relating to his clearance, and a White House request for relevant data on the subject. The purpose of sending these materials to the FBI wasn’t to reassess the case of Philleo Nash, but to discover how McCarthy had found out about it. Specifically, the commission wanted to know if the Bureau could link the papers to its new chief suspect in the great McCarthy mole hunt—an LRB employee named Miriam de Haas.
As FBI official Alan Belmont would explain in a memo to Mickey Ladd: “The following material was made available to the Bureau on January 30, 1952, from the Loyalty Review Board files on Philleo Nash, White House aide, so that the Bureau could treat this material for the latent fingerprints and compare the prints with those of Miriam de Haas…”18 The implications of this don’t need much explaining. Despite the administration’s outraged disclaimers, it wouldn’t have been checking fingerprints on records relating to Nash if it thought McCarthy’s comments were baseless. All too plainly, it thought the reverse, and wanted to find out who supplied the data to him.*193
Miriam de Haas had in fact been on the radar screens of the CSC and Truman Justice for some time before this. She had been a suspect, along with Cyril Coombs, when McCarthy held forth on the Service case in the spring of 1950. Now she was under even more intense suspicion, not only for the Nash disclosures but for transmission to McCarth
y of the LRB minutes he had made public. In these minutes, as seen, members of the Bingham Loyalty Board complained about the dismal record of the State Department in rooting out loyalty risks—exchanges highly embarrassing to the department.
This, too, caused a considerable backstage ruckus—not to clear up the security morass at State, of course, but to determine how McCarthy got the minutes. In this case, it turned out Ms. deHaas was indeed the culprit, though not in the way initially thought. Rather, according to the Bureau memos, she had been providing information to the anti-Communist businessman/activist Alfred Kohlberg, who in turn had furnished some of it to Senator McCarran and, it seems, also to McCarthy. It doesn’t appear from the records of the case, or deHaas’s subsequent statements, that McCarthy had any direct contact with deHaas or even knew of her existence. (DeHaas herself would categorically say, while admitting her role in the affair, that she had had zero contact with McCarthy.)19
Once more, officials at Truman Justice displayed impressive zeal in tracking down and seeking to punish McCarthy’s sources. Not only did they want the deHaas leakage stopped, they wanted a full-fledged investigation by the FBI, grand jury sessions, and prosecution of the offender. Again, however, the Bureau was slow to get involved, beyond its fingerprint checking, on the grounds that the quarrel between deHaas and the CSC was an internal administrative issue. In November 1952—a further notable contrast with the case of Service—she was abruptly fired, having been given five days’ notice.
Blacklisted By History Page 39