To Stop the Leak

After almost three months of shadowing and snooping, FBI's quiet supersleuths in New York and Washington last week arrested five men and a woman on charges of conspiracy to violate the espionage laws. Promptly, the U.S. had its biggest State-secrets case of the war.

What distinguished it from World War II 's other "spy" cases was the fact that all those arrested were U.S. citizens. The six:

P: Buffalo-born, Bryn Mawr-educatedKate Louise Mitchell, 36, authoress (IndiaWith-out Fable), pamphleteer and socialite leftist.

P: Ukrainian-born Philip Jacob Jaffe, 48, wealthy Manhattan greeting-card manufacturer, who, along with Miss Mitchell, edited and published a little magazine called Amerasia, devoted to plugging the Chinese (Yenan) Communists and criticizing the Chiang policies which the U.S. State Department supported.

P: Manchurian-born Mark Julius Gayn, 37, free-lance journalist specializing in Asiatic affairs.

P: Navy Lieut. John Andrew Roth, 26, onetime Amerasia researcher, recently in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Cf Emmanuel Sigurd Larsen, 47, specialist in the State Department's China Division.

P: John Stewart Service, 35, State Department employe recently returned from China. Along with three others, he made a trip last summer to the Yenan Communists, was sent back to the U.S. when General Albert C. Wedemeyer took over from General Joseph W. Stilwell. He speaks Chinese fluently.

The Charge. Two days after the arrests, Under Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told a little of what it was all about. For some time, they said, documents labeled "restricted" and "top secret" had been disappearing from the State Department and other Government agencies--War, Navy, OWI, the Federal Communications Commission, and the supersecret Office of Strategic Services. Material from some of the documents had appeared in Amerasia (which had used one OSS report verbatim) and in Free-Lance Gayn's articles in Col lier's and the Saturday Evening Post. Some of the documents, said J. Edgar Hoover, had been found in the possession of those arrested.

In Manhattan, Writer Gayn, who has also written for the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsweek and (for a brief period) TIME, freely admitted that he had used Government reports as background for his articles. He added that all had been cleared by censorship.

The State Department and the FBI did not charge that any of the stolen documents had got into enemy hands. They demanded only the light penalty provided by the espionage law: two years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

The Questions. Few who read further than the headlines supposed that any of those arrested were guilty of actual treason; they had perhaps been trying to force the Government's hand in China, as all Communists, as well as their friends --conscious and unconscious--have long been trying to do. The question at issue seemed to be: how far can a journalist go in divulging official secrets? Top Washington newsmen, who are constantly digging for "confidential" information, began to wonder where they stood. At his press conference, Secretary Grew admitted that the State Department often classifies material "top secret" but makes it available as background for news stories. Irritated for months by leaks, the State Department still rankled over a Washington columnist's revelation last December of a secret Churchill message to General Scobie to treat Athens as a conquered city.

It looked as if the State Department was trying, once & for all, to stop leaks from Government agencies.

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