Washington Confidential 16 – Mortimer · Library Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 16Part 2 · THE LITTLE RED HERRINGS
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 16
Part 2 · THE LITTLE RED HERRINGS
MortimerEnglish
The district headquarters of the Communist Party--the local setup, not the Washington nest of the national outfit--is only a block away from the doorway of the F.B.I., on 9th near F Street. So close is the line of battle drawn.
This Union Square of the District of Columbia is, appropriately, on Skid Row. It is the apparatus that recruits government employes. And sometimes 9th Street is more active and important than 16th Street--the White House. The District chairman is Roy H. Wood.
This book does not bandy the right or wrong of Communism. It accepts and proclaims it all wrong. But it will stay within its limitations of discussing Washington, the city. So it will conduct you mostly through the muck where crawl the punks in the ranks.
The State Department boys call foreign Reds “Agrarian reformers.” We call them cobras. The real story of the extent of their infiltration into the government will never be told. Hundreds of files have been impounded or destroyed, and their subjects cleared.
The following tale is no exception. It is, rather, the rule. One night a mysterious informant called on Constantine Brown, brilliant and patriotic foreign news analyst of the Washington Star, with a photostatic copy of an order from a Deputy Chief of Staff, directing the Army to destroy the records on several thousand subversives.
Brown hurried to the home of Senator Styles Bridges with the evidence. By 9 A.M., Bridges had called the Military Affairs Committee together. An hour later it met and phoned the offices of the Secretary of War with an ultimatum not to destroy any orders. When the officer who had issued the order met with the committee, Bridges looked coldly at him and said, “I can forgive an officer who makes a mistake or loses a battle, but an officer who betrays the security of his country ought to be shot.”
Meanwhile, a similar order was given the Navy, but was not caught in time to head off the destruction of the records. F.D.R. was President at the time.
We are hopeful these things will come to an end, but do not expect too much. That is because we know the C.I.A.--Central Intelligence Agency--is loaded with Commies at the lower level, with some seeping right up into the upper brackets.
A bright spot, however, is the advancement to the position of ranking minority member of the House Un-American Activities Committee of Harold Velde, young ex-F.B.I. agent, now representing Abraham Lincoln’s old Illinois district in Congress. Velde, at 40, has been a G-man, a county judge, and is in his second term in the House. His training under J. Edgar Hoover sets him up as a canny spy-catcher; his hatred of subversives, left or right, will make him a brake on Commie-coddling. His predecessor on the committee was California’s new Senator Nixon, who nailed Alger Hiss, and in Congress, Senator Dirksen, who beat Scott Lucas. The Senate’s own Red probing committee is also good news.
Your authors delved into how the rank-and-file protectors and comforters of Communists in Washington got that way. We know about the over-educated Harvard prodigies, recommended to key spots by Felix Frankfurter, but how does a $3,000-a-year file clerk in State, or Defense, meet Reds in the first place? By what means is he wooed and won to betray his country? Jim Walters of the Times-Herald exposed a lot. Here is more:
Red spies came here as soon as Lenin and Trotsky pulled their successful November coup in 1917. But not until the late Roosevelt handed diplomatic recognition to the enemies of civilization in 1933, did a sizeable apparatus begin to build openly in Washington. In the early years of the New Deal it became fashionable to be “liberal,” to love all radicals, including revolutionaries.
The government was overloaded with Reds, pinks, fellow-travelers, social planners, do-gooders, proletarians, boondogglers and Socialists. The federal establishment is still up to its neck in conspirators and collaborationists, despite a few publicized firings.
Let’s take the case of this humble clerk who is seduced by Reds. Seduced is just that. We covered the modus operandi used by the Pervert Sections of foreign chancelleries in the previous chapter. But not all government employes are homos or susceptible. The normal must be romanced with natural methods. Sex-starved government gals are enticed by smooth, suave, good-looking men. Meek male clerks, in soporific jobs at standardized sustenance-pay, are awakened with a sudden whiff of the esoteric when fast-working, trained good-lookers make a play for them. These happenings are not cribbed from E. Phillips Oppenheim novels. They are planned that way and they come off.
Wealthy left-wingers with mansions in Georgetown cooperate avidly. Humble government employes are invited to exotic, erotic parties. This sudden entrance into a world of wealth, taste, refinement, liquor and libido is irresistible to hoi polloi.
Smart Red undercover agents try to get a hold of some kind on their victims, something insidious. Soviet agents press a systematic campaign to bring women employes of the State Department under their control by enticing them into acts of adultery and abnormality. Parties are staged in rich surroundings with pornographic exhibitions, unlimited liquor and every form of dope--and a hidden, talking moving picture camera recording it all.
As many as 65 or 70 attend these aphrodisiac get-togethers, where many wear rich Oriental costumes and Arabian Nights music completes the intoxication of all the senses. Not only potential friends are thus won and hooked, but dangerous foes are silenced. One gossip writer, a feared crusader, has within the last couple of years become a virtual transmission belt for the Communist line. He was called into a secret projection room and shown a devastating film of his behavior at a drunken, depraved orgy. We have seen “stills” from it.
This use of sex as a means of recruiting is a basic tactic. It has been developed to such an extent by the Reds, they now seek to convert children thereby. Herbert J. Benjamin, long a key figure in the Communist Party in the United States, was arrested recently by vice squad men for selling lewd pictures and literature to Washington children, and convicted of violation of the D.C. code.
Benjamin, a former secretary of the International Workers Order, long a contributor to party magazines and periodicals, was mentioned in a memo by Earl Browder, November 27, 1939, as an alternate to the tenth convention of a national Communist Party committee. Later he was the organization’s national press director and was in charge of the St. Louis office of a Communist political association. He and his wife lived in the Trenton Terrace apartments, on Mississippi Ave., SE, where other tenants were Rob Hall, Washington correspondent for the Daily Worker, and Joseph Forer, a veteran attorney for Reds. Benjamin’s wife was manager of the apartment house.
The pinks are still working strenuously to grab off and bring up new followers from the incubator stage. As these lines were written, three names listed by the District Board of Education as speakers for its in-service-training program were found to be also in the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ files as left-wingers--Dr. Paul B. Cornely, Freedmen’s Hospital medical director; Dr. Alice V. Keliher, of New York University; and Dr. Dora B. Smith, of the University of Minnesota. Superintendent of Schools Corning said, “The names were identical with names in the House Un-American Committee records.” Since then Red and Socialist-slanted text books have been found to be in use in Washington’s schools.
Until two years ago, there was considerable radical financial interest in radio station WQQW. The stock has since been placed in a voting-trust with a good American as trustee. For years this station refused to sign off with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The Dupont Theatre specializes in interracial and foreign films, most of them slanted left. Danny Weitzman, owner of the building, was active in the Wallace presidential campaign.
The Reds and bleeding hearts play up their “love” for Negroes at every opportunity. This often pays off big dividends because so many colored people are employed in government offices. A few Negroes are dumb enough to be misled by the Reds’ baloney about the brotherhood of man. But to their eternal glory, the great mass of Negroes are among the most patriotic citizens in the country. A few malcontents, who have been taken in by the crocodile tears of the Eleanor Roosevelt brand of reformer, occasionally indirectly render aid and comfort to the enemy.
To show how much they love the Negro, the white Communist brethren hold their District powwows at Shilo Baptist Church, a Negro house of worship in the NW section.
It is a Communist strategy to line Negroes into the party through white gals who, to show their complete compliance and condition of servitude, are urged to give themselves to colored men. Into this specialized service they seem to wade with more than token application.
Mrs. Louise Branston Berman, millionaire radical who declines to state if she’s a Communist on grounds of self-incrimination, spends much of her time in Washington. She uses her great wealth to help the enrollment of left-wing recruits through social contacts. Louts who never dined above a cafeteria before are invited to sumptuous banquets in her homes in various parts of the country. Visiting Negro dignitaries who can’t get accommodations in hotels are her house guests. Mrs. Branston will learn for the first time here that when she put up the Negro singer, Paul Robeson, government agents had “bugs” in every room of her house from the parlor to the boudoir--she ought to hear the recordings. We did. They’re neither intellectual nor musical--but they are illuminating.
A principal Communist apparatus and recruiting ground for new Reds on the lower levels was the late but unlamented UNRRA.
The organization was rotten with traitors during the time Mayor LaGuardia was its director. Either he didn’t know what was going on, because he attended meetings only a few times, or he didn’t care.
When UNRRA was disbanded, its Red membership was moved almost en masse to the payroll of the United Nations secretariat. Many are now stationed in New York, where they are sabotaging U.N. work as far as they can. Others are attached to U.N. field offices in Washington.
If anyone doubts it was the policy of UNRRA to aid Communism and that this had the approval of the present administration, which is bent on fighting Communism, let him read the following excerpts from a memo which we filched from the UNRRA files. It is an inter-office communication, written in 1947, and addressed to Col. Katzin, a South African, then an important UNRRA man and now top aide to Trygve Lie.
It follows: (The italics are ours.)
“It should be made clear that the administration, in pushing for distribution to Communist areas and in requesting Edgerton to report on such distribution, has in mind actual shipments into Communist areas and not merely movements out of Shanghai with the expressed intention of making such shipments.”
Another paragraph reads, “In reference to Shanghai 6404, it is interesting to note the U.K. position that the program should be cut proportionately if the (Chinese) Nationalist government does not meet its obligations for Communist area distribution.”
In other words, we strengthened the Chinese Reds so they could kill our boys three years later.
Another batch of Communists and Communist-lovers came into the U.N. through its International Child Fund. This department is loaded with ex-State Department employes fired on suspicion of subversive activities.
That is a common habit. If all the homos, spies and other undesirables fired for cause were traced, hundreds would be found snugly ensconced in other bureaus, ostensibly screened, actually given screens of protection and falsification by the radicals in high places.
We are not indicting Eleanor Roosevelt or Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter as Communists. Yet it is impossible to study the set-up of the District of Columbia white collar Communist underground without finding tie-lines from them to members of this group.
The man of mystery in Washington is wealthy, brilliant, daring Max Lowenthal. He wrote the unwieldy book purporting to pulverize the F.B.I. which sold only 6,000 copies. Almost as many were given away. Yet no one knows much about him. He is a shadowy figure who thrives on obscurity, though he has filled public posts of importance. Until Congressman Dondero, of Michigan, investigated him, his name was obscure in Washington. Today not ten people in the government know more about him than the fact that he is frequently more powerful than the President and the Congress of the United States. This is some of what Congressman Dondero charged on the floor of the House of Representatives about Mr. Lowenthal whom he referred to as sinister and surreptitious:
Like the Communist Party, whose cause he has served so well, he operates on two levels. One is seemingly respectable; the other completely underground. He is native-born. His name does not appear in Who’s Who. To secure even a sketch of his biography has been a task.
Born in Minneapolis in 1888, like many other parlor pinks, fellow-travelers, Communists and convicted perjurers, he attended Harvard Law School. In those days he came under the influence of another man who through the years has manipulated Charlie McCarthys in Government office. There is a striking kinship between the master, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and the pupil, Max Lowenthal.
He served as a secretary to Judge Julian M. Mack in New York, then infiltrated the respectable law firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. After a few years he founded his own firm, Lowenthal, Szold & Brandwen.
Later he secured an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the President’s Mediation Board in 1917; in 1918 he was in the War Department; in 1920 he was an Assistant Secretary to the President’s Industrial Conference. He became executive secretary for the Wickersham Commission on Law Enforcement, but when he found he could not run it he resigned. He became research director of the Banking and Currency Commission, was on the staff of the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, also affiliated with the Board of Economic Welfare.
In Germany, known as general counsel to General Clay, he had as an assistant George Shaw Wheeler, the American traitor, Communist and renegade who shocked all America when he denounced the land of his birth and asked Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia for asylum.
Evidence of his unswerving loyalty to Soviet Russia is clear and unequivocal. There is an interesting sidelight. The California authorities raided the office of the Russian-American Industrial Corp., whose head, the late Sidney Hillman, had turned on Communism, but his general counsel still follows the party line.
He was a member of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild, a member of the National Committee of the International Juridical Association with Lee Pressman.
Carol Weiss King, who represented more Communists than any other lawyer, was a law clerk in Lowenthal’s office.
Lowenthal, living in New York, spent much of his time in Washington; his influence is a menace to the best interests of America--so said Congressman Dondero.
Don’t kid yourself. The Reds are not on the run in Washington. No Communist control law means anything if the administration doesn’t want it enforced. The anemic Security Board appointed by the President to apply the McCarran Act, loaded down as it is with left-wing apologists, is the tip-off.
One day after Senator Tydings, who became an ex because he “white-washed” Owen Lattimore, returned to private life he joined the law firm of his father-in-law, Joseph E. “Mission to Moscow” Davies. A senior partner in that firm is Seth Richardson, appointed by Truman to head the Security Board.
Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of Federal employment has forced the government to forego the usual pre-job loyalty checks of tens of thousands of new workers--hundreds of Communists are going on the payroll and will be there for months, possibly years, until their backgrounds are delved into.
With a green light, the F.B.I. could break the back of the Communists’ underground. But J. Edgar Hoover cannot make policies. He is just a cop who has to follow orders. At this writing the orders have not come. The traitors in Washington are safe. On the other hand, those who testify against Reds are frequently harassed by Justice Department lawyers.
If this weren’t so ghastly serious, some phases of the great Communist spy-hunt would be laughable. For instance, there’s the story of the prominent woman lawyer from New York, retained to represent a left-winger about to be questioned by a Congressional committee. This Communist kept his full status well hidden. He couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer who handled Communist cases. So this portly Portia was retained. She had no known Red connections.
On her way to Washington she stopped in Baltimore, to confer with a well-known Communist counsel there, to be briefed. It began as a business confab. They arranged a follow-up rendezvous in Washington. The Baltimore attorney’s wife suspected him, followed him to Washington and caught him in the act with the lady lawyer from New York.
The wife sued for divorce. The co-respondent testified, admitted intercourse but denied adultery.
“I was raped,” she cried.
Cross-examination:
Q.--Did you have intimate relations with the defendant?
A.--Yes.
Q.--Did you consent?
A.--Yes.
Q.--Then how do you make that out rape?
A.--I found out since that he is a damned Communist!
