William Henry Taylor

This article is part of the Venona series.

Secret apparatus

Foreign Economic Administration

Silvermaster group

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Willaim Henry Taylor was born in British Columbia on 30 March 1906 and studied at the Unversity of British Columbia, and attended school with Nathan Gregory Silvermaster at the University of California where he received a Ph.D. from the in 1933, taught economics at the University of Hawaii for 8 years and became naturalized citizen in 1940. In 1934 while living in Hawaii Taylor visited the Soviet Union and spent several months there.

Taylor was able to secure employment within the United States Department of the Treasury through Secretary Harry Dexter White in 1941. The Treasury Department sent him to China and later Lisbon, Portugal for the Foreign Economic Administration. Taylor also was a member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), in violation of federal employment statutes barring membership in an organization seeking the violent overthrow of the United States Government. As a CPUSA member and of the secret apparatus known as the Silvermaster group , Taylor supplied information orally and in document form to Soviet intelligence.

In June 1945 Taylor worked out of the U.S. Embassy in London and later that year Paris.

Elizabeth Bentley told the FBI in 1945 that several Treasury Department officials, Harry Dexter White, V. Frank Coe, and William H. Taylor passed along information to the Soviet intelligence from a cell headed by Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and William Ullman. To handle the volume of material passing through the group, Ullman, who lived in Silvermaster's house, had set up a darkroom in the basement to photograph the documents rather than copy them by hand.

Associates claim Taylor spoke about Communism constantly. He is one of two Soviet agents who used the code name name "Acorn" as deciphered by the Venona project. Code names sometimes were changed by a user and another assigned.

On 19 October 1953 Taylor testified in a private session of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by Sen. Joseph McCarthy regarding stolen occupation currency plates at the end of WWII.