Because of its initial West Coast angle, this probe mainly featured staffers in OWI’s Pacific office, where Kinkead and Lilienthal worked, and where others would later draw the notice of the Bureau. One such was a Japanese-American with the euphonious name of Shujii Fujii, who handled Japanese-language matters for OWI, then did a stint for OSS. When asked in a congressional hearing, “Were you a member of the Communist Party when you were working for OWI?” Fujii invoked the Fifth Amendment. He likewise took the Fifth when asked about his party status while on the staff at OSS.4
Another instructive case later brought out by Congress was that of journalist William Hinton, sent by OWI to China in 1943 to assist the wartime efforts of Chiang Kai-shek and Allied forces in the region. Hinton also invoked the Fifth when asked by a congressional panel if he were a CP member. After the Red takeover of China, he returned to work with the regime there and was photographed in Chicom gear addressing a Communist Party meeting. As shall be seen, Hinton was one of several U.S. officials involved with affairs of China who wound up on the Beijing payroll.5
Among the more prominent staffers in the Pacific sector who would get the attention of security forces was the head of the division, Professor Owen Lattimore of the Johns Hopkins University and the IPR and later a principal target of Joe McCarthy. The FBI would in time develop a huge Lattimore file, running to many thousands of pages, plus thousands of others on the IPR in general. In 1943, the Civil Service Commission zeroed in on two ethnic Chinese who worked for his division, Chew Hong and Chi Kung Chuan. This investigation would itself become in the McCarthy era something of a cause célèbre.
While the Pacific section led the way, the East Coast offices of OWI under Joseph Barnes were fertile of many suspects also. Among these—to pick a few from a lengthy roster—were James Aronson, Julia Older Bazer, and Peter Rhodes. At the conclusion of the war, as seen, Aronson would team up with Cedric Belfrage in the “de-Nazification” of the German press and later take the Fifth when asked about membership in the Communist Party. Julia Bazer, who handled OWI’s cable file to Moscow, likewise invoked the Fifth when asked if she were a party member.6 (Bazer was the sister of Drew Pearson’s legman Andrew Older, identified by FBI undercover operative Mary Markward as a Communist agent.)7 Peter Rhodes worked for both OWI and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) before moving to the State Department. He would be named by former Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley as a member of her spy ring.
Drawing attention from the FBI and other security experts were the personnel on various European desks. According to the Mandel report, the chief influence on the German desk was one Paul Hagen (né Karl Frank), a former member of the German Communist Party who became a naturalized American citizen but would develop passport trouble in the 1940s because of alleged security problems.*31 8 Hagen was a close friend of the agency’s informal guru for Yugoslav affairs, the writer Louis Adamic. An incessant promoter of the Communist Yugoslav leader known as Tito, Adamic had also been linked in a publishing venture with OWI’s Alan Cranston. Serving on the Italian desk was one Carlo a Prato, who, according to Eugene Garey, general counsel of a congressional panel that looked into such matters, “was expelled from Switzerland for life as a Soviet agent who received and disbursed funds from Moscow….”9
Getting the most public scrutiny in the war were the agency’s Polish-language unit and its handling of the Katyn murders. In this instance, OWI chief Elmer Davis had personally gone on the air giving the pro-Soviet version of the story. Thereafter, according to Polish exile groups, OWI refused to broadcast items showing the Kremlin’s complicity in the killings. In June 1943, Rep. John Lesinski (D-Mich.) charged that “the story of what happened to thousands of Polish officers who were murdered in the Katyn Forest was completely quashed” by OWI. Ambassador Jan Ciechanowski, who represented the Polish exile government in the United States, likewise asserted that OWI broadcasts on Poland “could only be termed pro-Soviet propaganda.” He further charged that “notorious pro-Soviet propagandists and obscure foreign Communists and fellow travelers were entrusted with these broadcasts.”*32 10
As many people at the language desks were not American citizens, there was some mystery in the fact that they could so readily enter the United States and go to work for such an important wartime unit. The answer to this puzzle was a private group called Short Wave Research, Inc., the guiding spirits of which included Hagen the German émigré and Edward Carter, a leader of the American Russian Institute and chief officer of the IPR. Short Wave turned out to be another handy trapdoor for entry to federal service, not unlike the National Research Project of the 1930s as described by Whittaker Chambers (as OWI itself would later become a trapdoor to the State Department).
The golden gimmick of Short Wave was that it could recruit and put aliens on its payroll, as OWI at that time could not. Here they would do broadcasting work, translations, script writing, and other chores as Short Wave employees (though on the premises of OWI). The group would then bill OWI for services rendered, taking a 10 percent commission. According to documentation supplied by one Short Wave official, some 60 percent or so of foreign personnel at OWI were recruited in this manner. (Meanwhile, a considerable number of American staffers, according to other inquiries, were inherited from the Federal Writers Project exposed earlier by the Dies Committee.)
As revealed by Short Wave spokesmen, they had another mission as well—helping OWI and the Federal Communications Commission identify malefactors on domestic foreign-language stations who said things that weren’t approved of (especially, as further testimony showed, if these were adverse to Moscow). Among OWI staffers working on this censorship project was Alan Cranston, later a U.S. senator from California. As spelled out in congressional hearings, Cranston and others from OWI would confront broadcast officials, backed by the implicit sanction of the FCC with its power over the station license, and suggest that this or that person shouldn’t be on the air, or that another should. This was done despite the fact that neither OWI nor FCC had any legal authority over domestic program content.11
Testimony on these matters was developed before the House Select Committee on the FCC in 1943–44, and later by the committee on Katyn chaired by Madden. Beyond these inquiries, many aspects of OWI’s activities and personnel were brought out in the debates of Congress. Lesinski was especially vocal, but other lawmakers from time to time would join him in spotlighting the personnel behind the broadcasts. The tenacious Martin Dies discussed a number of OWI employees in his floor presentations. Dies and other congressional critics also delved into the staff setup at the FCC, which not only worked with OWI in targeting domestic foreign-language stations but otherwise exerted its broadcast powers in curious manner.*33
Given later partisan battles on these issues, it’s worth observing that all congressmen here referred to as critics of OWI were members of the Democratic Party. However, one GOPer who took particular notice of OWI was Rep. Fred Busbey of Illinois, who served on the House Committee on Un-American Activities and often addressed security issues. In November 1943, Busbey supplied a rundown on some twenty-two staffers or broadcasters at OWI who in his view had pro-Communist records and affiliations. Among those he mentioned were Joe Barnes, Robin Kinkead, and the well-known Polish-American Communist Boleslaw Gebert. (Busbey also highlighted the role of Cranston, noting that he was a longtime sidekick of Adamic.) Busbey’s remarks on this occasion prefigured the leading role he would play in security battles of the future.12
THE problems spotted at OWI were likewise present at OSS, if not a good deal more so. In fact, close students of such matters have long regarded OSS as the most heavily infiltrated of the wartime units, with estimates of the number of Communists there ranging as high as a hundred staffers. This is, however, an estimate only, so the number was conceivably smaller but might also have been a good deal larger. Partially this was the result of Bill Donovan’s freewheeling ways, pragmatically using any instrument at hand to accomplish his objectives.
As shown in several treatments of the era, OSS under his direction explicitly recruited Communists for certain missions on the premise that they would be good fighters against the Nazis.
Though its posthumous reputation as a den of Communists and Soviet agents would exceed that of OWI, less was known about OSS back in the 1940s. The secret nature of the service allowed its employees to roam about the globe at will, engaging in all sorts of actions concealed from Congress and the public. Some aspects of the problem would, however, come to view when Donovan made his 1945 appearance at the Thomason subcommittee hearings.
At this session, Donovan said there were no Communists on his payroll and that he personally could vouch for the bona fides of his people. In support of this, he cited the cases of two staffers—George Vucinich and David Zablodowsky. Though Donovan considered them true blue, these turned out to be unfortunate choices. Vucinich would show up in Venona as a contact of the Soviet GRU. Quizzed later in congressional hearings, he said he hadn’t been a Communist while with OSS but refused to say whether he was a party member before or after—claiming the Fifth Amendment on both questions.13
As for Zablodowsky, he had been an editor of the publication Fight, organ of the American League for Peace and Democracy. Told the League had been named as a Communist front in the list supplied by Biddle, Donovan said he didn’t know this. Rather, he said, he had personally interviewed Zablodowsky, who denied he was a Communist, and “Wild Bill” found this persuasive. (Episodes in which supervisors asked employees if they were Reds and accepted denials at face value were fairly common at this era.)
Two other OSS employees vouched for by Donovan were Lts. Milton Wolff and Irving Fajans, both veterans of the Communist-sponsored Abraham Lincoln Brigade that ostensibly fought for the Loyalist cause in Spain. In Donovan’s view, Wolff and Fajans were good soldiers and thus certifiably patriotic. But in a later investigation, Wolff refused to say whether he had been a Red while at OSS, served under Soviet officers in Spain, or been involved in the execution of U.S. citizens there (this last asked several times). Fajans also refused to say whether he was a Communist, had been such in Spain, or was trained by foreign commissars in that country.*34 14
Like many others at OSS, Wolff and Vucinich were much involved with affairs of Yugoslavia, which in the early war years were a major focus of U.S. and British clandestine efforts. Guerrilla actions there were encouraged, as Yugoslavia was one of the few spots in Europe where there was serious armed resistance to the Nazi Wehrmacht. It was also a spot where Communist and anti-Communist forces came to an early parting of the ways while the war was still in progress.
When Hitler declared war on Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941, the pact with Stalin was still in force and the sole effective opposition to the German onslaught had been mounted by a breakaway group of Yugoslav army officers. The leading figure of this unit was Serbian Gen. Draja Mihailovich, an anti-Red as well as anti-Nazi leader whose followers were called the Chetniks. Only after Hitler invaded Russia, three months later, did a second, Communist resistance group called the Partisans appear under the leadership of Stalin protégé Josip Broz, who took the nom de guerre of Tito. As would occur with Poland, the rival forces were soon in mortal opposition, and the question for Anglo-American policy was which of the two should be supported.
Beginning in late 1942 and ramping up in ’43, broadsides from Moscow and Communist spokesmen in the West would provide an answer, launching a campaign to promote the cause of Tito and denounce Mihailovich as a collaborator and traitor. Though Tito hadn’t lifted a finger against the Nazis until they invaded Russia, he was now portrayed as the only legitimate Balkan leader in the battle against Hitler. In the United States this pro-Tito line was promoted by Adamic, Communist writer Howard Fast, and a group called the American Slav Congress, later officially cited as a Communist front. Articles, manifestos, and speeches abounded arguing that Mihailovich was “collaborating with the Nazis” while Tito did all the fighting.*35
Though there were people in the U.S. government who resisted this pro-Tito blitz, strong pressures were at work that pushed our policy in this direction. Among these was the predominance of Whitehall interests in the Balkans, where British experience outranked our own by a substantial margin. A contributing factor was the close relationship between Donovan and William Stephenson, the Canadian who ran British intelligence operations in North America. Both were unusual personalities given to unorthodox methods, and they worked together on many projects. (A further parallel was that each unwittingly had as a top assistant a Bentley-and Venona-identified Soviet agent—Duncan C. Lee in Donovan’s office, and Cedric Belfrage, as noted, at Stephenson’s shop in New York City.)15
Symbolizing this Anglo-American cooperation was a super-secret Canadian training site called “Camp X,” forty miles outside Toronto. One Donovan-Stephenson venture at this location was the recruitment of Canadian-Croatian Communists and veterans of the Spanish Civil War as guerrilla forces for the Yugoslav fighting. The go-between with the Communist vets picked by Donovan was Milton Wolff, whose service with the pro-Moscow cause in Spain was thought to fit him for this duty.
Once guerrilla units were trained for service in the Balkans, they were taken for further briefing to British intelligence headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, then the center of such activities for the region. Here another secret Kremlin agent was at work applying his talents to the Yugoslav question. This was the Cambridge Communist James Klugmann, confrere of Blunt, Philby, Burgess, and Maclean. As shown by the researches of David Martin, Nora Beloff, and other recent students of the matter, Klugmann was the guiding presence at Cairo with respect to Yugoslav affairs, shaping estimates of who was doing what in-country, synthesizing field reports, and sending the results to ministries in London.*36
Unsurprisingly, with this Cambridge comrade on the job, the message that came through to British leaders was identical to that from Moscow. One bizarre Cairo report said Tito presided over a massive force of 200,000 men who were “pinning down some 14 German divisions in the country.” (The true figures for both the Nazis and the Tito forces in Yugoslavia were but a fraction of these numbers.) Another asserted that “the Partisans represent a good and effective force in all parts where only the Quislings [i.e., Nazi collaborators] represent General Mihailovich.” A third said Mihailovich units were either “already annihilated or in close cooperation with the Axis [Germans and Italians].”†37 16
Based on a steady stream of such dispatches, London turned decisively toward Tito. In the latter part of 1943, the British Foreign Office concluded “there is no evidence of any effective anti-Axis action initiated by Mihailovich,” and that “since he is doing nothing from a military point of view to justify our continued assistance,” a cutoff of materials to the anti-Communists was in order. Churchill himself would soon drop Mihailovich entirely and put his chips on Tito.17
U.S. intelligence data and clandestine action closely followed the British pattern. A key player in this démarche was Capt. Linn Farish of OSS, an enigmatic and strangely influential early Cold War figure. When Farish parachuted into Yugoslavia in September of 1943 to work with the Partisans and the British, he was quick to absorb the pro-Tito message and repeat it. After being with the Partisans for six weeks, he filed a report back to OSS that was lyrical in its praise of Tito, while denouncing Mihailovich and the Chetniks as collaborators with the Nazis and traitors to the Allies.*38
Since Farish at this point had no direct knowledge of what Mihailovich was doing, these comments were clearly based on what the Partisans and the British told him. His report also glowed with praise for the Partisans’ “free community,” in which persons “of any religion or political belief can express an opinion,” downplayed the role of the Yugoslav Communist Party in the guerrilla setup, and compared the Tito movement to the American Revolution: “It was in such an environment and under similar conditions that the beginnings of the United States were established.”18
Though so fawning a
s to defy belief, these statements were accepted as authentic by policy makers who read them. In fact, this Farish memo, filed on October 29, 1943, would play a crucial role in shaping Allied policy toward the Balkans. By some bureaucratic legerdemain, it was placed directly in the hands of President Roosevelt on the eve of the Teheran conference with Churchill and Stalin that would open one month later. As shown by the records of OSS, Farish’s pro-Tito missive was passed quickly from one echelon to the next, with the explicit goal of getting it to FDR in time for the Teheran summit.
This double-time drill succeeded, and the Farish memo was in Roosevelt’s hands in time for the Teheran conclave. At the conference, as reflected in diplomat Charles Bohlen’s notes, this U.S. report extolling the Communist Tito and reviling his anti-Red opponent was the first item on the agenda, as the President personally handed it to Stalin (who was no doubt glad to see it). The memo would also receive pride of place in exhibits to the proceedings, where it is again the first item to be dealt with and reproduced in full. (Adding to its apparent authority, Bohlen’s notes incorrectly say Farish had been in Yugoslavia for “six months,” rather than six weeks.)19
Thus did Linn Farish’s tribute to Tito and condemnation of Mihailovich make their way to the loftiest reaches of global power. As Churchill was already persuaded, and Stalin needed no persuading, this priming and conditioning of Roosevelt helped seal the doom of anti-Communist forces in the Balkans. When a joint statement was agreed to at Teheran, unstinting aid to Tito was promised and Mihailovich was nowhere mentioned. It would be only a matter of weeks until renunciation of the anti-Communist leader was explicit.
Some five decades later, when the Venona decrypts were published, further information about Linn Farish would come to light. In these records he appears as a contact of the KGB (code name “Attila”) meeting with an unidentified Soviet controller (“Khazar”) and an official of the Yugoslav Communist apparatus code-named “KOLO.” The latter was Sava Kosanovic, who would serve from 1946 to 1950 as Ambassador to the United States from Tito’s Red regime in Belgrade. In the Venona decrypts, KOLO/Kosanovic appears receiving instructions from KGB boss Pavel Fitin and is discussed as an agent in need of better guidance. Kosanovic also figures in the records of the FBI for 1946, when he was surveilled at a meeting with still another Soviet agent, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, a leading member of the Elizabeth Bentley spy ring.*39
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