The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism

In February 1945, Kenneth Wells, chief of the South Asia division of the Office of Strategic Services, happened upon a leftist magazine called Amerasia. In its pages he found a story on British-American political relations in recently liberated Indochina. Wells recognized the story, for he had written it in a report to which only a few senior government analysts had access. When government agents raided the magazine's offices they found many such documents, some marked "Top Secret." The magazine's spies had infiltrated the State Department with ludicrous ease. No one was punished, thanks to government prosecutors' ineptitude, until some years later Joseph McCarthy, an obscure first-term Republican senator of little distinction, revived the case. McCarthy was zealous and had small regard for the Constitution, but in this case he had a point; as Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh slyly remark, not everyone accused of disloyalty or espionage was innocent. Students of Cold War history will find much of interest in these pages.