Spy-Fever in America
Public opinion in every country tends to credit foreign intelligence systems with possessing much more ability than its own. American public opinion is today going through a bad attack of spy-fever, uneasily suspicious of Communist agents round every corner, but uncertain of how to deal with them. In the past week a girl em- ployed by the Department of Justice has been arrested on suspicion of passing secret information to a Russian employee of the United Nations, and the trial of these two is likely to create as much uneasiness as the still undetermined charges brought last year by a self-confessed ex-Communist against a former State Department official, Alger Hiss. If (which has yet to be proved) treason exists in high places, how can a check be put upon it ? The known leaders of the Communist Party in America have been on trial in Washington for the past eight weeks, but so far the entire proceed- ings have been devoted to hearing defending counsel's objection to the nature of the court, the composition of the jury and the person- ality of the judge. In any case it is not open propagandists such as these who are to be feared, but secret neophytes, particularly if they occupy positions of trust in the Administration. The House Com- mittee on Un-American Activities is supposed to be in pursuit of these individuals, but as yet the outside world has learned more about the prejudices of the inquisitors than the heresies of the victims. The committee has now been spurred into starting work on a Bill to control Communists by making them register, refusing them passports and so on. More significantly, the House of Repre- sentatives has passed a Bill which takes America over to the offensive by granting exceptional powers to the young Central Intelligence Agency including the right to offer U.S. citizenship to aliens who provide useful information. In their efforts to recruit spies as devoted as those in the service of Moscow, the Americans have brought out a bait which is still a great deal more enticing to ninety per cent. of Europeans than the brave new world of Marxism.
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