The Pittsburgh Press (September 16, 1946)
Mysterious whitewash of big shots charged in capital spy case
Defendant accuses State Department of plot to withhold espionage evidence
By Frederick Woltman, Scripps-Howard staff writer
NEW YORK – The sensational charge that there was “a mysterious whitewash of the chief actors” in “the now-famous State Department espionage case which shook the nation” in June 1945 was made today by one of the six persons arrested by the FBI.
Behind the subsequent fiasco of the government’s case, he declared, was a well-organized and successful campaign inside the State Department to shift America’s Far Eastern policy to a pro-Soviet line.
These charges were made by Emanuel Siguard Larsen, Chinese expert for the State Department until his arrest in what the Department of Justice called a conspiracy to take top-secret wartime documents from the State, Navy, War and other government departments.
Mr. Larsen pleaded nolo contendre and was fined $500. The chief defendant, Philip J. Jaffe, pleaded guilty to charges in an indictment by the grand jury of the District of Columbia and was fined $2,500. The charges against the remaining four were dropped
Closely interlaced with the case, Mr. Larsen said, were “many sensational though little-explained developments, such as the Gen. Stilwell affair, the resignation of Undersecretary Joseph C. Grew and Ambassador to China Patrick Hurley and the emergence of a pro-Soviet bloc in the Far Eastern Division of the State Department.”
After “many months of plodding investigation… to establish my innocence,” he concluded that “further probing… might assume proportions even more far-reaching than those of the Pearl Harbor investigation.”
Mr. Larsen’s inside story of the case appeared today in the first issue of the magazine, Plain Talk.
It confirms articles published in the Scripps-Howard newspapers after the FBI arrests on June 6, 1945.
“When word of our arrests had spread through Washington,” Mr. Larsen declared in Plain Talk, “there was general burning of official papers, taken home innocently or otherwise, all over the capital.”
In his personal investigation, Mr. Larsen disclosed, he collaborated with Rep. George A. Dondero (R-Michigan), who was responsible for the creation of a special House committee which is now inquiring into the disposition of the case by the Justice Department.
Some months prior to their arrests, Mr. Larsen maintained, he established an innocent association with the principal defendant. Mr. Jaffe, who edited a pro-Soviet magazine on the Far East, Amerasia. They exchanged biographical data on Chinese personalities.
After his arrest, Mr. Larsen wrote, it was Mr. Jaffe, a prosperous New York businessman, who eventually paid his fine and expenses in the case. They totaled $3,000.
During the FBI raid on the Amerasia office, agents found more than 100 files of confidential government documents, according to Mr. Larsen. They also discovered a large photo-copying department, although the magazine had only a small circulation.
In Mr. Jaffe’s possession, the FBI also found a secret government report titled “Document 58: Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek – Decline of his prestige and criticism of and opposition to his leadership.”
It had been prepared by John Stewart Service, “a leading figure in the pro-Soviet group in the China section of the State Department,” according to Mr. Larsen.
Mr. Service, another of the six defendants, subsequently was cleared of the charges when a Washington grand jury declined to indict him. He has since been reinstated by Secretary Byrnes “for important work in connection with Far Eastern affairs.”
Prior to the arrests, Mr. Jaffe had dealings with Earl Browder, then head of the Communist Party, the Plain Talk article revealed. Although these were unknown to him at the time, Mr. Larsen contended his later inquiry showed:
“That Jaffe is known to have visited Earl Browder’s apartment several times in the spring of 1945; that he dined on more than one occasion at the Soviet consulate in New York; that when the Chinese Communist delegate, Tung Pi-Wu, visited New York he met Earl Browder in Jaffe’s apartment; that Jaffe had been a liberal contributor to pro-Soviet causes and funds; and that at one time Jaffe had in his possession a message sent by Ambassador Hurley to his life, advising her not to rent their home in Chesapeake Bay for the summer inasmuch as he expected to return to the United States before the end of the summer.
It was at the suggestion of Lt. Andrew Roth, another of the four defendants subsequently cleared of the charges, that he first met Mr. Jaffe, according to Mr. Larsen’s story. He described the former Navy lieutenant as “liaison officer between the Office of Naval Intelligence and the State Department, whom I also knew as an adherent of pro-Soviet policies.”
John Davies, who acted as State Department attache with U.S. military observers in China was named by Mr. Larsen as one of this group.
Meanwhile, until they resigned, said Mr. Larsen, Undersecretary Grew and Ambassador Hurley were objects of attack and vilification by the Jaffe-Amerasia group and by the pro-Soviet contingent in the State Department.
During his final conference with Mr. Jaffe last October, wrote Mr. Larsen, Jaffe said: “Well, we’ve suffered a lot, but anyhow, we got Grew out.”
In describing the strange course of the espionage case, Mr. Larsen wrote: “For some unaccountable reasons, the government attorneys presented to the grand jury only part of the evidence in their (the FBI’s) possession.
“At the same time, Congressman Emanuel Celler of New York interested himself in the defense of the New York figures involved. To what extent he exerted his influence has never been determined.”