Amerasia editor Philip Jaffe

Amerasia

Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs edited by Phillip J. Jaffe (a friend of CPUSA general secretary Earl Browder), funded by Frederick Vanderbilt Field and employing, among others, GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent Joseph Bernstein, a contact for Soviet agents in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Board of Economic Warfare.

Communist Party boss Earl Browder

On June 6, 1945, OSS agents raided the offices of Amerasia, discovering some 1,260 stolen classified Government documents concerning U.S. policy in China. Six people were arrested on charges of conspiracy and espionage, including three U.S. government officials: Andrew Roth, the Office of Naval Intelligence liaison officer with the Department of State, and State Department officials Emmanuel Larsen and John Stewart Service.

John Stewart Service, Department of State

Service, one of John Carter Vincent's "China Hands", had formerly been stationed in Shanghai, where he had shared living quarters with Solomon Adler of the Treasury Department—identified as a Soviet agent by both Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley—along with Communist secret agent Chi Ch’ao ting. Service and Adler had sent a steady stream of dispatches from China attacking Chiang Kai-shek and urging that the U.S. cut off aid to his regime in its civil war against the Soviet-backed Communist rebels. Upon his return to the United States, Service spent much time in the company of Jaffe, whom he attested he had just met, delivering copies of his reports.

Andrew Roth, Office of Naval Intelligence

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that the Justice Department had an "airtight case," but through the influence of New Deal "fixer" Tommy Corcoran, the Truman administration mysteriously lost interest in Amerasia. The whole matter was covered up and swept under the rug: Service was restored to State Department duties; Jaffe and Larsen received only fines; no others were prosecuted.