The period since the collapse of the Soviet Union has not been kind to the dozens of Americans accused of collaboration with Soviet intelligence during the 1930s and 1940s. Each new revelation from Russian archives, and each new release of decrypted Soviet communications from declassified top-secret American archives, has brought more bad news to the left-wing intelligentsia, among whom hope springs eternal that someday a document will turn up — preferably signed by Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy — ordering the framing of distinguished public servants as Soviet spies. Instead, the verdicts have come in a cascade. Alger Hiss, guilty. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, guilty. Harry Dexter White, guilty. I. F. Stone, guilty. And on and on.
There have been two major exceptions. New evidence has confirmed that Robert Oppenheimer, architect of the atomic-bomb project, while a secret Communist, did not cooperate with Soviet agents. And, more than 15 years ago, Ronald Radosh and I concluded that John Stewart Service, one of the State Department’s China hands, pilloried as a spy for his involvement in the Amerasia case, was, in fact, innocent. Service had been arrested in 1945 along with several others and charged with providing secret documents to a pro-Communist magazine editor. The case against him soon fell apart and a grand jury unanimously refused to indict. Five years later, Senator McCarthy revived the charges, and Service was denounced for having contributed to the fall of China to Mao Tse-tung’s forces. After losing his security clearance in a protracted legal battle, he won vindication in the courts and returned to minor postings in the State Department. Although we found no evidence that Service had ever been a spy, we argued, based on then newly released documentary materials, that he had been secretly trying to undermine American policy in China by leaking confidential documents and inadvertently become enmeshed in an espionage plot.
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