On the other hand, the Grand Jury voted a no-bill when Eugene Desvernine, 34, acting officer-in-charge of Caribbean affairs in the State Department, was arrested for an alleged sex offense against a 13-year-old boy. Desvernine, suspended from the department after his arrest in East Potomac Park, has been restored to duty.
The original charges against fairies in the State Department listed only 91, but considerably more than a hundred have been discharged from it since. More are asked to withdraw. And there are believed to be hundreds not yet shown up.
Republicans who tried to get a special “pervert squad” formed were voted down on straight party lines by Democrats, who found themselves having to protect strange bed-fellows. When you read of a fag being fired or quitting, don’t think Washington’s homosexual population is reduced that much. It isn’t. Odds are the discharged degenerate is shifted up on some other government payroll. At least eight were transferred from the State Department to Agriculture. Hundreds of others driven from one department minced into others.
At the end of 1950, State said they were all gone. But on the first day of 1951, the Washington papers carried this brief item under the heading: “Two Men Face Sex Charges.”
“Alan A. Wakefield, 26, State Department employe, was released under $300 bond pending a hearing on a disorderly conduct charge. Vice Squad detectives arrested him in the men’s room of a downtown hotel.” He was since convicted of disorderly conduct.
Dr. Kinsey wasn’t appalled by the 6,000 fags in government jobs. According to his calculations, 56,787 Federal workers are congenital homosexuals. He includes 21 Congressmen and says 192 others are bad behavior risks.
We still favor the two-party system.
16. THE LITTLE RED HERRINGS
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.