Amerasia
Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.
Publication
The journal was founded in 1937 by
Government documents case
Kenneth Wells, an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), noticed that an article printed in the January 26, 1945, issue of Amerasia was almost identical to a 1944 report he had written on Thailand.[5] OSS agents investigated by breaking into the New York offices of Amerasia on March 11, 1945, where they found hundreds of classified documents from the Department of State, the Navy, and the OSS.
The OSS notified the State Department, which asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate. The FBI's investigation indicated that Jaffe and Mitchell had probably obtained the documents from Emanuel Larsen, a State Department employee, and Andrew Roth, a lieutenant with the Office of Naval Intelligence. Other suspects include freelance reporter Mark Gayn, whose coverage of the war in Asia appeared regularly in Collier's and Time magazine,[6] and State Department "China Hand" John S. Service.
FBI surveillance established that Jaffe met with Service several times in Washington and New York and reported that at one meeting "Service, according to the microphone surveillance, apparently gave Jaffe a document which dealt with matters the Chinese had furnished to the United States government in confidence."[7]
An FBI summary reported that Jaffe visited the Soviet consulate in New York and that two days after a meeting with Service, Jaffe had a four-hour meeting in his home with Communist Party Secretary Earl Browder and Tung Pi-wu, the Chinese Communist representative to the United Nations Charter Conference.[8]
In carrying out its investigation, the FBI broke into the offices of Amerasia and the homes of Gayn and Larsen and installed
On June 6, 1945, the FBI arrested Jaffe, Mitchell, Larsen, Roth, Gayn and Service.[9] Simultaneously, the Amerasia offices were raided and 1,700 classified State Department, Navy, OSS, and Office of War Information documents were seized.
Because no evidence was found indicating that any documents had been forwarded directly to a foreign power, the
The grand jury indicted Jaffe, Larsen, and Roth. Before the trial began, Larsen's defense attorney learned of the FBI's illegal break-in at Larsen's home. The Justice Department, fearing a loss at trial if evidence were excluded because it was obtained illegally, arranged a deal. Jaffe agreed to plead guilty and pay a fine of $2,500, while Larsen pleaded no contest and was fined $500. The charges against Roth were dropped.[11]
Congressional investigations
The "Amerasia Affair" became a touchstone for those who wanted to raise alarms about espionage and the possible Communist infiltration of the State Department. Senator Joseph McCarthy often spoke of the case in these terms, maintaining it was a security breach and cover-up of immense proportions.[12]
In 1946, a House Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Rep.
The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee published a two-volume report, The Amerasia Papers: A Clue to the Catastrophe of China, in 1970. It ascribed the Chinese Communist Revolution in part to the Communist sympathies of the Chinese policy experts in the Foreign Service, known as the "China Hands".
See also
References
- ^ "Frederick Vanderbilt Field". The Guardian. February 16, 2000. Retrieved January 3, 2016.
- ^ FBI Report: Institute of Pacific Relations, Internal Security – C, November 4, 1944 (FBI file: Institute of Pacific Relations, Section 1[permanent dead link], PDF p. 45)
- ^ a b
ISBN 978-0807822456. Retrieved 19 March 2020.
- ISBN 978-0-7864-9164-3. Retrieved April 22, 2017.
- ^ Klehr and Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case, 28ff.
- ^ Klehr and Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case, 50ff.
- ^ Report of the United States Senate Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, 1950, appendix, p. 2051.
- ^ FBI Amerasia file, Section 52.
- ^ New York Times: "FBI Seizes 6 as Spies, , Two in State Dept.", June 7, 1945, accessed April 19, 2011
- ^ Robert P. Newman, The Cold War Romance of Lillian Helman and John Melby (University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 68
- ^ "The Strange Case of Amerasia | Whittaker Chambers". whittakerchambers.org. Retrieved 2023-10-13.
- ^ M. Stanton Evans, McCarthyism: Waging the Cold War in America Archived 2012-04-15 at the Wayback Machine, Human Events, May 8, 2003.
Further reading
- ISBN 978-0807822456.
- Latham, Earl (1966). The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy. Harvard University Press.
- UC BerkeleyCenter for Chinese Studies.
- Cox, John Stuart; Theoharis, Athan G. (1988). The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. ISBN 0-87722-532-X.
- U.S. Government Printing Office.
- National Archives and Records Administration (1989). Records of the Committee on the Judiciary and Related Committees Archived 2017-08-25 at the Wayback Machine.