BOOK REVIEW: Life of a ‘designated leaker’

HONORABLE SURVIVOR: MAO’S CHINA,

MCCARTHY’S AMERICA,

AND THE PERSECUTION OF JOHN S. SERVICE

By Lynne Joiner

Naval Institute Press. $37.95, 450 pages

Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

In the matter of John Stewart Service, a diplomat of the China experts generation, even critics of Joseph McCarthy must admit that this is one case where the blustery senator had things half-right, at least.

By Service’s own admission, he supplied secret State Department documents to a publication run by a man with strong communist ties. Further, the legendary Democrat political fixer Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran persuaded the Truman Justice Department to drop charges against Service without a trial under circumstances that can only be described as very smelly.

But where McCarthy overstepped was to accuse Service of being a member of a State Department coterie of communists who were bent on turning China over to Mao Zedong. To be sure, Service was guilty of extraordinary misjudgment in passing around secret documents, some of them pertaining to military matters. Nonetheless zealotry - and stupidity - do not equate with treason.

Lynne Joiner, a West Coast journalist, was a friend of Service for 30 years, and unsurprisingly, her book gives him the benefit of the doubt at every turn. Service, she asserts, was the “designated leaker” for State Department officials who wished to end U.S. support for the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. These officers felt the Nationalist regime had failed by 1945 and that the United States should recognize that the communists would prevail in the civil war raging in the country. Whatever materials he gave to journalists was at the behest of superiors. Or so he argued, and Ms. Joiner buys his story.

(Professors Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh are far more skeptical of Service in their 1996 book “The Amerasia Spy Case.” They also provide far more detail on the background of persons arrested with him.)

Service seemed bound for a distinguished diplomatic career. Born of missionary parents in China in 1904, Service spent much of World War II there and immersed himself in the fierce political battle over the nation’s future. Then came a fatal stumble.

In early 1945, the Office of Strategic Services was startled to see a near-verbatim version of a secret report, “British Imperial Policy in Asia,” printed in Amerasia, a small publication edited by Phillip Jaffee. Part of the report - not published in Amerasia - dealt with a top secret anti-Japanese operation in Thailand. OSS recognized that the leak was serious. Investigators crept into the Amerasia office and found a treasure trove of documents from throughout government, some marked top secret.

The FBI put Jaffee under FBI surveillance, and one of the people seen in frequent contact with him turned out to be Service, who often handed Jaffee bulging envelopes of documents. Agents established that Jaffee, who had made a small fortune in the stationery business, had long lent his name (and pocketbook) to communist causes.

Other contacts also had pro-communist backgrounds. One was Andrew Roth, a young lieutenant in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Oddly, ONI did a background check and concluded that Roth was a communist but gave him a commission anyway. Emmanuel S. “Jimmy” Larsen worked for the Navy and then the State Department, compiling biographical material on Chinese warlords and politicians; he, too, had a “fellow traveler” background. Another was Mark Gayn, a journalist who wrote for such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s.

Story Continues →