Difference between revisions of "John Stewart Service"

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John Stewart Service was a U.S. State Department official and Foreign Service Officer during World War II.

Subversion in China

In 1944, Service was Second Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Chungking, China. There he shared a house with U.S. Treasury attaché Solomon Adler^[1] and Chinese Ministry of Finance official Chi Chao-ting.^[2]

Adler had been identified five years before by confessed former Comintern-GRU courier Whittaker Chambers as a member of the Communist underground apparatus.^[3] In 1945, defecting NKVD courier Elizabeth Bentley would likewise identify Adler as a Treasury official in Chungking who was also a member of an NKVD espionage ring known as the Silvermaster group.^[4] In 1948, Chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S. Anatoly Gorsky identified Adler (in KGB archives summarized by former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev) as the agent code-named "Sachs,"^[5] who appears in Venona as an NKVD source on China.^[6] Chi, meanwhile, was a Communist propagandist^[7] and intelligence agent.^[8] After the fall of China to the Communists, both Adler and Chi would abscond to Beijing, where they would become officials of the new Communist government, Chi as a propagandist,^[9] Adler as a foreign espionage official.^[10]

During the early war years, Service and Adler wrote favorable reports on the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek, which were keeping the Japanese busy, so they could not attack the Soviet Union. But once the defeat of Japan became likely, Soviet policy shifted to hostility toward the Chinese government, and support for the Communist rebels seeking to overthrow it. Service began an increasingly harsh series of attacks on the Nationalist government as "fascist," "undemocratic," and "feudal,"^[11] while praising the Communists as "progressive" and "democratic."^[12] In one memo, he called the government "politically bankrupt" and wrote, "The Communists are in China to stay and China's destiny is not Chiang's but theirs."^[13]

Service and his Soviet agent roommate Adler wrote that the Communists were doing most of the fighting against the Japanese, while the Nationalists were sitting out the war or actually collaborating.^[14] For example, Adler reported (attributing information to Service): "The Communists have successfully resisted the Japanese for seven years... with no active support from Chungking."^[15] In contrast, General Albert Wedemeyer, commander of American forces in China reported: "No Communist Chinese forces fought in any major battles of the Sino-Japanese war.... Chinese Communist leaders were not interested in fighting the Japanese," he wrote; "their main interest was to occupy the territory which the Nationalist forces evacuated in their retreat."^[16] "[T]he war was to [Mao] an opportunity to have Chiang destroyed by the Japanese," agreed Jung Chang, a former member of Mao's Red Guards. "He ordered Red commanders to wait for Japanese troops to defeat the Nationalists, and then, to seize territories below the Japanese line."^[17] Indeed, in May 1945, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) team code-named "Spaniel" that parachuted into China to link up with Communist forces was instead taken prisoner by the Communists, whom they found coexisting with Japanese troops. The Americans were held incommunicado until October, some two months after the end of the war. When finally freed, they reported, "The amount of actual fighting being carried on by the 8th R.A. [the “Eighth Route Army,” i.e., Communist Chinese rebels] has been grossly exaggerated. It was their policy to undertake no serious campaign against the Japanese..."^[18] Even so ardent a pro-Communist as Theodore White^[19] would have to admit, "The Communists...claimed that they held down most of the Japanese troops in China and that they bore the main weight of resistance; this was untrue." In fact, wrote White, "it was the weary soldiers of the Central Government who bore the shock, gnawed at the enemy, and died."^[20]

On July 30, 1944 Service wrote, "...the Communists base their policy toward the Kuomintang on a real desire for democracy in China under which there can be orderly economic growth through a stage of private enterprise to eventual socialism without the need of violent social upheaval and revolution." ^[21]

According to an FBI report, "A highly confidential source, which is completely reliable, has advised that Max and Grace Granich, both of whom have been engaged in Communist and Comintern activities for many years, were advised in the fall of 1944 that Service was returning to Washington from China, and that they should contact him because he could furnish fullest details as to the latest developments."^[22] Max Granich (brother of Communist Party cultural commissar^[23] "Mike Gold") was the bodyguard and chauffeur of C.P. General Secretary Earl Browder; Grace Granich was Browder's personal secretary. During the 1930s they had been Comintern agents stationed in China.^[24]

Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins

Upon his arrival in D.C., Service met with^[25] with White House aide Lauchlin Currie (who would be identified by Gorsky as the Soviet spy code-named "PAZh/Page,"^[26] who is recorded in Venona giving information to Akhmerov^[27] and "handing over documents" to Silvermaster;^[28]—and was the NKVD agent^[29] in the White House^[30] who tipped the Kremlin off in 1944 that the U.S. was on the verge of breaking the Soviet code),^[31] along with FDR's personal emissary to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Harry Hopkins (whom Iskhak Akhmerov, the leading NKVD illegal in the U.S.,^[32] called "the most important of all Soviet war-time agents in the United States," according to Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB agent ever to defect),^[33] and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, the "most important member of the Silvermaster network and the most highly placed asset the Soviets possessed in the American government."^[34]

Institute of Pacific Relations

Service also visited the Washington headquarters of the Institute of Pacific Relations, which would be identified by the Senate Judiciary Committee as "a vehicle used by the Communists to orientate American far eastern policies toward Communist objectives."^[35] FBI surveillance recorded that Service then met with the Communist^[36] Philip Jaffe on April 19, 1945 at D.C.'s Statler Hotel, reporting: "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."^[37] Among the documents Service gave Jaffe was a report by his and Adler's other Soviet agent housemate, Chi, about which Service warned Jaffe that his source would "get his neck pretty badly wrung"^[38] if it got out. The surveillance also caught Service admitting to Jaffe, "what I said about the military plans is, of course, very secret."^[39]

Amerasia scandal

After OSS and FBI investigators broke into in the offices of Amerasia, finding hundreds of government documents, many labeled "secret," "top secret," or "confidential,"^[40] Service was arrested as a suspect. In the wake of the arrests, the Soviet agent Currie told New Deal "fixer" Thomas Corcoran he wanted the charges against Service dropped.^[41] An FBI wire tap then caught "Tommy the Cork"^[42] trying to "throw a monkey wrench into the Amerasia prosecution,"^[43] in the form of a "political fix."^[44] One FBI memorandum, under the heading "Political Manipulations," citing "technical surveillance on the offices of Thomas J. Corcoran," reported:

The FBI surveillance logs in question recorded the Soviet agent Currie talking to Thomas Corcoran about Service, telling him, "the important thing is to get him out"; Corcoran telling Service that he had informed Attorney General Tom Clark "about the understanding we had below about the cutting out of your name"; James McGranery, assistant to the Attorney General, telling Corcoran, "Your man is Service. I got it" (to which Corcoran replies, "Yeah. So that we can cut him out. OK?"); Service telling Corcoran that federal prosecutor Robert Hitchcock told his attorney "we want to have Service cleared"; Corcoran telling Service, "I have a flat deal like that you are going to be cleared"; etc. ^[46]

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover later wrote, "in the event I had been asked at the time the arrests were made whether I thought we had an airtight case, I would have stated that I thought we had. Further, if I were asked today, I would have to so state."^[47] As Richard M. Fried admits, "Conservative suspicions of a high-level fix were correct."^[48]

PSI investigations

Service was accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy of being a security and loyalty risk. Between the years of 1942 and 1945, Service submitted memos to the U.S. State Department supporting the Chinese Communists and Mao and advocated that the U.S. destroy Chiang Kai-shek. According to Senator McCarthy, "Service was named by the U.S. Ambassador to China as one of the men who was serving the cause of Communism in China. He asked the President to remove Service. He said that this man's actions are not good for the United States, they are good for Russia. While in China, Service, in secret recommendations to the State Department, urged that the Communists were the only hope for China. On June 6, 1945, Service was arrested by the F.B.I. for, "having transmitted, without authority, classified documents to the editors of Amerasia, a Communist magazine". Service had in effect turned over to a known Communist, not only State Department documents, but also secret military information. In December of 1951, Service was fired from the U.S. State Department, "as a result of an adverse finding as to his security qualifications by the Loyalty Review Board of the Civil Service Commission." ^{[49] [50] [51]}

See also

• Koji Ariyoshi

References

1. ↑ FBI recording summary, Philip Jacob Jaffe, April 19, 1945 (FBI file: Amerasia, Section 39); "A highly confidential source has advised that Sol Adler was the roommate in Chungking, China, of John Stewart Service." (FBI summary: The Comintern Apparatus, March 6, 1946, p. 20 [PDF p. 24]); "I moved into an apartment in the city [Chungking] with Solomon Adler." [United States Department of State Loyalty Security Board Meeting in the Case of John S. Service, May 26, 1950, State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1950), Part 2: Appendix, p. 1967; The Amerasia Papers: A Clue to the Catastrophe of China, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), p. 592
2. ↑ "During 1944, Service was sharing a house in Chungking with Solomon Adler... Upstairs, in a separate flat, lived Chi Cha’o-ting." Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ISBN 978-0807822456, p. 21
3. ↑ Adolf Berle’s Notes on His Meeting with Whittaker Chambers. Under the Heading “Underground Espionage Agent,” Berle listed (Under “TREASURY“) “Shlomer Adler (Sol Adler?)”
4. ↑ Statement of Elizabeth Terrill Bentley, November 30, 1945 (FBI file: Silvermaster, Volume 6), p. 26 (PDF p. 27)
5. ↑ A. Gorsky, “Failures in the USA (1938-48),” Dec. '48, in Alexander Vassiliev, Black Notebook, original, p. 78 (PDF p. 40), transcribed, p. 78, translated, p. 78. Under “‘Sound’ [Jacob Golos] and ‘Myrna’s’ [Bentley’s] group,” Gorsky listed “‘Sachs’ – Solomon Adler, former employee of the U.S. Dept. of the Treasury”
6. ↑ 14 KGB New York to Moscow 4 January 1945, p. 2
7. ↑ Gregory Lewis, "Bridging the Guomindang-Chinese Communist Party: Ji Chaoding in New York, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Beijing, 1933-1963," Zhongguo Shangye Shi (Chinese Business History), Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall 2001) ISSN 1090-834X, p. 1; Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, Institute of Pacific Relations, S. Rpt. 2050, 82d Cong., 2d sess., Serial 11574, pursuant to S. Res. 306, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), p. 67
8. ↑ Lifu Chen, The Storm Clouds Clear Over China: The Memoir of Chen Li-fu, 1900-1993 (Hoover Press, 1994) ISBN 0817992723, p. 181; Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Simon and Schuster, 1999) ISBN 0684836254, p. 126
9. ↑ Sidney Rittenberg, The Man Who Stayed Behind (Duke University Press, 2001) ISBN 0822326671, p. 253
10. ↑ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999) ISBN 0300077718, p. 144
11. ↑ Senate Internal Security Committee, The Amerasia Papers: A Clue to the Catastrophe of China, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), pp. 577, 592, 1015
12. ↑ Senate Internal Security Committee, The Amerasia Papers: A Clue to the Catastrophe of China, January 26, 1970, pp. 406, 410, 577, 579, 589, 1014
13. ↑ The Amerasia Papers: A Clue to the Catastrophe of China, pp. 113, 112
14. ↑ Edward M. Collins, Myth, Manifesto, Meltdown: Communist Strategy, 1848-1991 (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger/Greenwood, 1998) ISBN 0275959384, p. 93
15. ↑ M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (New York: Crown Forum, 2007) ISBN 978-1-4000-8105-9, pp. 99-106
16. ↑ Albert C. Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports (Holt, 1958), p. 285
17. ↑ Jung Chang, Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005) ISBN 0-224-07126-2, p. 211
18. ↑ Maochun Yu, OSS in China (Yale University Press, 1997) ISBN 0300066988, pp. 220-223
19. ↑ Edward Carter, head of the Communist front American Russian Institute confided to White—in the midst of the Nazi-Soviet pact—"A trusted member of the IPR staff is about to take a journey on my behalf to certain countries that are not too popular at the moment in Wall Street or in Jewish circles." (Edward C. Carter to Theodore H. White, January 8, 1940 [FBI file: Institute of Pacific Relations, Vol. 54, Sec. 11, PDF p. 120])
20. ↑ Theodore Harold White, Thunder out of China [Da Capo Press, 1980] ISBN 0306801280, p. 210)
21. ↑ E. J. Kahn, Jr., The China Hands: America's Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them, New York, 1972, pg. 118.
22. ↑ FBI Report: Soviet Espionage Activity in the United States, November 25, 1945, p. 46
23. ↑ Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (Eds.), Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Taylor & Francis, 2004) ISBN 1579584578, p. 240
24. ↑ Historical/Biographical Note, Guide to the Grace Granich and Max Granich Papers, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives, New York University
25. ↑ M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (New York: Crown Forum, 2007) ISBN 9781400081059, p. 111
26. ↑ Vassiliev's Black Notebook, p. 78
27. ↑ 1463 KGB New York to Moscow 14 October 1944
28. ↑ 253 KGB Moscow to New York 20 March 1945
29. ↑ Robert J. Hanyok, Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2005), pp. 118-119 [PDF p. 123-124], n. 185; John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) ISBN 0300077718, p. 146
30. ↑ "Cold War Counterintelligence," A Counterintelligence Reader: An American Revolution Into the New Millennium, Vol. 3, Chapter 1 (Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive) pp. 30-31 (PDF pp. 29-30); Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2001) ISBN 0895262258, p. 167
31. ↑ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 2000), ISBN 046500312, p. 130; Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and The American Response (Washington: National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), pp. xiv, xxiv; FBI memo: Belmont to Boardman, February 1, 1956, p. 9 (FBI file: Venona, p. 71)
32. ↑ Christopher M. Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (HarperCollins, 1990) ISBN 0060166053, p. 286
33. ↑ Peter B. Niblo, Influence: The Soviet Task Leading to Pearl Harbor, the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War (Oakland, Ore.: Elderberry Press, 2002) ISBN 1930859147, p. 65. In 2008, Gordievsky would become partially paralyzed, as a result, he told Scotland Yard, of what he suspected was an assassination attempt. The late U.S. Air Force historian Eduard Mark identified Hopkins as Venona's Soviet agent "19." Eduard Mark, “Venona’s Source 19 and the ‘Trident’ Conference of 1943: Diplomacy or Espionage,” Intelligence and National Security, Summer 1998
34. ↑ John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press, 2009) ISBN 0300123906, p. 258
35. ↑ Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, Institute of Pacific Relations (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1952), p. 225
36. ↑ Philip Jaffe, The Amerasia Case from 1945 to the Present (New York: Philip J. Jaffe, 1979), p. 1
37. ↑ Report of the United States Senate Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, 1950, appendix, p. 2051
38. ↑ Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ISBN 978-0807822456, p. 60
39. ↑ Subcommittee on S. Res. 231, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 81st Cong., 2d Sess., State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation, Vol. 1, (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), p. 1404
40. ↑ Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ISBN 0-8078-2245-0, p. 131
41. ↑ Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Regnery Publishing, 2001) ISBN 0895262258, p. 168
42. ↑ David McKean, Tommy the Cork: Washington's Ultimate Insider from Roosevelt to Reagan (Steerforth Press, 2004) ISBN 1586420682
43. ↑ Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ISBN 0-8078-2245-0, p. 112
44. ↑ Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ISBN 0-8078-2245-0, p. 125
45. ↑ FBI memorandum: D.M. Ladd to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Re Philip Jacob Jaffe, was., et al, Espionage – C, May 11, 1950, p. 7 (FBI file: Amerasia, Section 54
46. ↑ FBI recording summary, May 31, 1950: Philip Jacob Jaffe, June 10, 1945-April 19, 1946 (with cover memorandum, Ladd to Hoover, June 30, 1952)
47. ↑ FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to Peyton Ford, Assistant to the Attorney General, re Philip Jacob Jaffe, was., et al., Espionage, May 4, 1950 (FBI file: Amerasia, Section 54)
48. ↑ Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1991) ISBN 0195043618, p. 61
49. ↑ Buckley, Jr., William F. and Bozell, L. Brent (1954, 1995 Printing). McCarthy & His Enemies, The Record And It's Meaning. Regnery Publishing Inc.. ISBN 0-89526-472-2. 
50. ↑ McCarthy, Joseph (1953). Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy Delivered in the United States Senate, 1950-1951. U. S. Government Printing Office. ISBN 0-87968-308-2. 
51. ↑ Klehr, Harvey and Radosh, Ronald (1996). The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism. The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-80782-245-0.