In support of this, Hickenlooper described certain subjects covered in the papers: the location of American naval units in the Pacific as of November 1944; a Navy plan to set up counterintelligence operations in the United States; a document giving the composition of allied forces in Malaysia; a confidential forecast of trends in the Pacific fighting; two 1944 messages from President Roosevelt to Chiang Kai-shek, marked “eyes only,” saying General Stilwell should be made commander of all armies in China, including the Communist forces at Yenan.
Hickenlooper also said the papers included a State Department cable, headed “Hull to Chungking,” dated June 28, 1944, summarizing the contents of Amerasia itself as a source of insight on Far East affairs, including its view that American strategy in Asia should repeat the pattern followed in the Balkans (which, as seen, is more or less what happened). All this sounded rather portentous and not very much like “teacup gossip.”
With the dispute thus out in the open, McInerney counterattacked, saying Hickenlooper was in error about the papers. McInerney said he was familiar with the Amerasia holdings and no documents such as those described by Hickenlooper were among them.9 The Iowa senator, said McInerney, was “100 per cent wrong” in his assertions. Tydings would, as ever, reinforce the Justice version of the matter.
These exchanges prompted the FBI to go through the papers again to see who was telling the truth about them. In every instance, the Bureau found, documents in the Amerasia file matched exactly or very closely with those that Hickenlooper cited. “It would appear,” said the Bureau rundown, “that Senator Hickenlooper is correct in his statements as evidenced by the nature of the documents which have been possibly identified and are attached hereto…Mr. McInerney is obviously incorrect in his statement that documents containing ‘highly secret wartime information’ were not among those found in the Amerasia case as evidenced by the attached exhibits.”10
Meanwhile, in another revealing contrast between public spin and backstage candor, Tydings counsel Edward Morgan drafted an angry memo for the subcommittee files, denouncing Hickenlooper’s release of info on the papers. This transgression Morgan laid (correctly) at the door of Robert Morris, saying “the fact that these documents and their contents were released to the press presents a very embarrassing problem to the committee and its staff.” Morgan’s memo, recapping the contents of the disputed papers, makes it clear that the Hickenlooper data were very much on target, though Tydings and McInerney were denying this in broadsides to the press.11
In fact, the papers Hickenlooper cited were by no means the only or most important of the Amerasia holdings in terms of military content. The extensive FBI compilations disclose one document after another that by title alone could easily be identified as dealing with military, intelligence, and strategic matters. A brief conspectus reveals little by way of “teacup gossip” but a great deal that looks like military data. Following are the headings of some of the reports and official memos taken from the Amerasia office:
“Survey of the Efficacy of the Field Units of the ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] in China” “Report from Captured Personnel and Materials Branch, Military Intelligence Service, U.S. War Department” “Typewritten report entitled ‘Intelligence Systems,’ dated January 9, 1945” (Feb. 10, ’45); “Comments on Current Intelligence for the information of OSS Personnel” (Mar. 26, ’45); “Military Affairs Report from China” (May 18, ’44); “Disclosure of Military Information to the Chinese” (Jan. 8, ’44); “Military Attaché Report from China” (May 18, ’44).
And further: “A Military Intelligence Division Report classified ‘Confidential’ bearing the penciled notation ‘war plans,’ entitled ‘Chinese Guerrilla Training School’”…“An OWI document dated March 21, 1945, classified ‘confidential,’ entitled ‘Chinese Coast Physical Geography and Coastwise Shipping Routes.’” This bore the penciled notation, “war plans, coastal areas…mined areas”…“Document classified ‘secret’…dated March 3, 1944, entitled ‘Changes to Order of Battle of Chinese Army as of February 29, 1944’”…“A document classified ‘secret’ prepared by the Military Intelligence Division dated February 1, 1944, entitled ‘Order of Battle of the Chinese Army as of December 31, 1942’…”12
While downplaying the significance of the Amerasia papers, Truman Justice also minimized the gravity of handing them over to the likes of Philip Jaffe, saying it was just a matter of supplying background to a member of the press. Hitchcock had endorsed this line before Judge Proctor and repeated it to Hobbs. At the time of the original fix, according to one Bureau memo, “Hitchcock advised that the main reason for the grand jury not indicting all the defendants was that it felt the practice engaged in by the defendants was a common practice, and that the government agencies involved were the ones who were actually at fault in view of the laxity in caring for official documents.”
This line would be repeated by McInerney, saying “the grand jury took the position that these government agencies were very sloppy in their handling of documents, and almost invited this type of violation. Second, that the same thing that was being done by these people was being done by regular newspapers…”13
Why a grand jury would have believed these things was not made clear. It seems unlikely a federal grand jury, usually guided in such matters by U.S. attorneys, would have independently reached this conclusion, particularly if given the facts about the sensitive nature of the papers. Based on the initial fix, Hitchcock’s expressed desire to clear John Service, and the prosecutor’s stipulation that it was all just zealous journalism, it’s not hard to guess how the jurors might have come to this opinion.
Truman Justice also sought to obscure the Red connections of Jaffe and his contacts with then–Communist Party chief Earl Browder, Soviet agent Bernstein, Chinese Communist Tung Pi-wu, and the Soviet consulate in New York. None of this information had been given to Judge Proctor when Jaffe was in the dock. Now that the case was being revived before the Tydings panel, the department’s efforts to gloss over Jaffe’s Communist ties would continue and be expanded.
This was one of the points on which Justice and Bureau agents would tangle in hammering out what to say to Tydings. One FBI memo on this relates that “Mr. Ford objected to the conclusions on page 14 pertaining to the Communist connections of Jaffe…” (The Bureau draft had stated, “We knew then of the Communist connections of Jaffe, and had every right to assume that the information would have been used, had the practice continued, against the best interests of the United States.”*215 ) Such hand-to-hand combat on the phrasing of responses would recur throughout the process.14
These matters were annoying to Hoover but almost minor irritants compared to certain other issues. Foremost among these was that department spokesmen told both Hobbs and Tydings the Amerasia case was deplorably weak because it was bungled from the outset. In this view, the case had been tainted by the Bureau’s warrantless entries into the premises of Amerasia and Larsen’s apartment in D.C. (in some versions, also by the earlier entry of OSS). Worst of all, said Justice spokesmen, Larsen had found out about the entry to his lodgings and filed a motion to quash the whole proceeding. It was this Larsen move, supposedly, that caused Justice to fold its hand and get the best deal it could in lame plea bargains with the suspects.
Such arguments were doubly outrageous to the FBI, which not only knew the case was fixed but deeply resented the effort to scapegoat its methods. The Bureau accordingly fought back hard on this one, noting that all the facts about the prior entries had been known to Truman Justice from the outset. Equally to the point, said the FBI, no documents were seized on these occasions. Rather, all evidence used in the indictments had been taken at the time of the arrests—this also known to Justice. As Mickey Ladd put it in a memo to Hoover:
I informed [prosecutor Tom] Donegan that the Bureau had entered the apartments of the subjects and the office of Amerasia prior to the arrests but that no evidence was obtained at that time and that the only documents obtained w
ere those obtained during the course of serving the warrants of arrest; therefore, the documents were obtained legally. The Bureau had no objection to the matter coming out indicating that the Bureau had been in these places prior to the arrests and that this was merely a smoke screen on the part of the department’s attorneys.*216 15
This aspect of the backstage struggle is stressed repeatedly in the Amerasia records, probably more than any other. The files are replete with disdainful Bureau comments on what Hoover called “the Morgan-McInerney line” scapegoating the FBI for failure of the prosecution. “I have no doubt,” said Hoover in one early memo, “Dept. representatives are trying to hang blame on the FBI to cover their own actions.” Thereafter, the Bureau would prepare a point-by-point rebuttal of Justice’s memo on the case, debunking both the “teacup gossip” line and the bungled-from-the-outset thesis.16
Especially galling to the FBI were written questions posed by Tydings, so worded as to suggest the Bureau had derailed the case with its intrusive methods. One question asked by Tydings was “Did you enter these places surreptitiously and by stealth?” Enraged by this, Hoover threatened to expose the fix by way of rebuttal and retaliation. The Tydings language, he told Peyton Ford, “was outrageous, and if this question was going to stand, I was going to insist on putting in the Cohen-Corcoran information” about the rigging of the case, since he didn’t “intend to let Senator Tydings smear the record and scapegoat the Bureau in this manner.”17 This undoubtedly sent a chill down some high-level spines at the White House, State, and Justice, and the offending language would be altered.
There was one further aspect of the Justice memo that raised questions about the collapse of the prosecution. The main reason alleged for having to default the case was Larsen’s discovery that his apartment had been entered and his motion to quash the evidence on this basis. This didn’t occur, however, until late September, some six weeks after the grand jury no-billed Service. The Larsen motion obviously had nothing to do with these proceedings, which as the Bureau knew were simply products of the fix.
INDEED, though concern to cover up the scandal was generic, the evidence on the deep-sixing of the case shows throughout the intent to exculpate Service. He was the main subject of the manipulations by Thomas Corcoran, Lauchlin Currie, et al., and also the chief object of solicitude by Justice. However, it would have been impossible to bring out all the facts about the Red connections of the Jaffe crowd while simultaneously clearing Service. Thus, all the defendants got a free ride because of his exalted status.
The obsession with whitewashing Service is apparent in every aspect of the record. A prime example arose when Tydings addressed questions to the Bureau and Truman Justice about specific evidence on the FSO. This produced a further dispute between Peyton Ford and Bureau agents concerning Service’s talks with Jaffe, in which Service had referred to the “military plans” that were “very secret.” Ford wanted to cut this out or change it; the Bureau, hanging tough, insisted it stay in.*217 18
More generally, the official line on Service was that his involvement with Amerasia was tangential. He thought Jaffe was a legitimate newsman, was simply providing “background information,” and really didn’t do much of that. This was of course Service’s own explanation of the matter. In his many statements on the subject, Service minimized the number, as well as the nature, of the papers shared with Jaffe. As he told both the State Department loyalty board and the Tydings subcommittee, it was perhaps “eight or ten,” and these of no great value.
As with virtually everything else in the Amerasia case, these statements were in jarring conflict with the confidential records. On May 25, 1950, the FBI provided James Hatcher, the chief investigator for the Civil Service Commission, a complete rundown on documents traceable to Service that had been found at Amerasia.19 Rather than being “eight or ten,” the list included no fewer than fifty papers that, according to the Bureau, had initially come from Service. This huge batch of papers didn’t jibe very well with the story of negligible Service-Jaffe contact, few documents provided, or casual “background” chats between the parties.
The solution to this thorny dilemma was to pin the rap on Larsen—a tactic adopted early on by Robert Hitchcock and repeated by McInerney before the Tydings panel. As one FBI memo relates, “Hitchcock stated that he was favorably impressed by Service’s statement to him that Service had given no State Department documents to Phil Jaffe. Hitchcock further informed that Jaffe’s attorney had told him, off the record, that Larsen had furnished copies of some 1945 Service reports to Jaffe.”20 So Larsen, not Service, was the actual culprit.
This raised some further questions, such as why an experienced prosecutor would be “impressed” by the self-justifying statements of an arrested suspect caught consorting with Red agents. Still more puzzling is why Jaffe’s attorney would be so helpful in clearing Service and fingering Larsen. That information on the face of it would have made no difference in Jaffe’s own defense. It thus appears the Jaffe forces were as eager to exculpate Service, and make Larsen the fall guy, as was the prosecution.
Hitchcock had made a similar effort to clear Service in testimony before the Hobbs committee. In the exchange with Congressman Frank Fellows of Maine in which the “teacup gossip” line first appeared, Fellows asked, “Was Larsen the man who did all this?” Yes, said Hitchcock, it must have been Larsen, not John Service. “It had to be,” Hitchcock explained. “Service was loaned to the Army back in 1943…and did not return to the United States until the 18th day of April 1945, which was approximately 6 weeks prior to the time these arrests were made.”*218 21
The meaning of this comment was that, since Service hadn’t been in the United States prior to April of 1945, he couldn’t have been the source of papers that made their way to Amerasia before then, of which there were a sizable number. But as the Bureau knew, this description of Service’s whereabouts was grossly in error. In fact, Service had been in the United States from late October 1944 until January 1945, during which time he met with Andrew Roth, Owen Lattimore, Julian Friedman, the Washington staff of IPR, Harry White, Lauchlin Currie, and others that we know not of. It was on this trip also that he was supposed to get together with Max and Grace Granich, and most probably met with Grace. All these people were part of the extended Amerasia network, and Roth was of course directly implicated in the scandal when it broke the following spring.
The logic of the situation was thus the reverse of that suggested by Hitchcock. The prosecutor was saying Service couldn’t have done it because he wasn’t physically in the United States prior to April of 1945; as Service was physically in the United States from late October of 1944 until January of 1945, it follows that he very well could have done it. Which doesn’t mean he did, merely that he could have. Only a thorough investigation could have brought out the truth about the matter, and a thorough investigation was precisely what the Truman forces were working overtime to stifle.
The rationale for this particular defense of Service was that just because he had written or transmitted a paper found at Amerasia, that didn’t necessarily mean he supplied it directly. Somebody else with access to diplomatic records might have done so. This same logic was adopted by Service’s attorney, Charles Rhetts, in proceedings of the State Department loyalty board, run parallel with the Tydings hearings. Questioning the chronically harried Larsen, Rhetts reviewed a series of Service papers found at Amerasia, trying to get Larsen to say he had—or could have—given these to Jaffe.
After a series of questions in which he was repeatedly asked about these papers, Larsen caught the drift and rebelled at being made the patsy. He admitted to having passed along to Jaffe six or eight Service memos relating to Larsen’s own research concerns (leading personalities in China), but categorically denied the rest. At one phase of the Q & A, Larsen blurted out to Rhetts, “I realize your point is to gather sufficient evidence to protect Mr. Service” and said he wanted the hearing ended. “I was warned,” he said, “to cu
rtail this meeting at any moment when I felt that I was about to fall into a trap that might incriminate me.”22
Though Larsen wasn’t a very appealing figure or reliable witness, one can’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy observing so many powerful forces aligning to have him take the fall for Service. Not only was Service’s attorney eager to pin the rap on Larsen, so was Truman Justice, so was Tydings, and so, per Hitchcock’s statement, was the legal representative of Jaffe. This last alone is sufficient to suggest that, whatever the bumbling and constantly changing stories of Larsen, he wasn’t in on the larger scheme and was probably the least sinister figure in the whole unsavory business.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the Rhetts-Hitchcock argument on this cut both ways. If Larsen or someone else might have passed along Service’s reports to Jaffe, it was also possible Service himself might have passed along the reports of others. In which case, the total Service-provided haul at Amerasia could well have been in excess of fifty papers. But since the fix was in and no proper adjudication attempted, the truth of the matter was not established. Which was, of course, exactly how the Truman forces were content to leave it, then and forever after.
Now, however, the meddling Joe McCarthy had come out of nowhere to revive the case, raising countless troublesome questions and focusing the spotlight of media notice on the long-buried scandal. It was this McCarthy intrusion that provoked the backstage tussle between the Bureau and Truman Justice, which for the administration was bad enough. Worse yet, McCarthy was himself obtaining and making public security intel on the case, contrary to the official line that it was no big deal and Service an innocent briefer of the press corps. This was an unexpected problem that had to be dealt with in decisive fashion if things weren’t to get completely out of hand for the Acheson State Department, Truman Justice, and an increasingly worried White House.
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