Object Lesson

Colonel Alfred Redl was a master of his craft. While still in his 30s he rose to the General Staff and became chief of counter-intelligence for Austro-Hungary. His agents spider-webbed czarist Russia, and at home he confounded Russian spies who sought Austro-Hungarian military secrets. But talented Alfred Redl had one terrible weakness: he was a homosexual. Russian agents contrived a trap and caught him one day; then they threatened to expose him unless he turned traitor. Redl turned, for eleven years served Russia as a master spy-within-a-spy. The extent of his treason was discovered after war broke out in 1914: Russia knew the Austro-Hungarian and German war plans. Two fellow officers visited Alfred Redl one night, left him a loaded pistol. Alfred Redl took the hint, stood before a mirror and fired a bullet through his brain.

Last week, a Senate investigating committee resurrected the case of Alfred Redl as an object lesson for the U.S. For 27 weeks, North Carolina's frock-coated Clyde Hoey, with three other Democratic Senators and three Republicans, had been quietly looking into a sordid matter: the problem of homosexuals in the Government. The problem had been the subject of nervous explanations, joke-cracking and effective campaign sneers ever since last February, when Deputy Under Secretary of State John Peurifoy offhandedly told Congress that State had gotten rid of 91 employees for homosexuality.

Firings & Hirings. Senator Hoey's investigators had compiled a shocking history. They had found a record of homosexuality or other sexual perversions among workers in 36 of 53 branches of Government, as well as in the armed forces. Between Jan. 1, 1947 and last April, 4,954 cases had come to light among some three and a half million people in Government service. Most were in the armed services, which are far larger than civilian Government departments and traditionally aggressive at searching out perverts.

There were 574 cases involving civilian Government employees and 69 are still under investigation; in all the other cases the accused had either quit, been cleared or fired. The investigators found the greatest batch of civilian cases--143--in the State Department. State had cleared or gotten rid of all but a dozen whose cases were still pending. A surprise second in the totals was the Veterans Administration, with 101 cases. Others: Atomic Energy Commission, 8; EGA, 27; Congress' legislative agencies (Library of Congress, congressional employees, etc.), 19; White House office, none.

Laxity & Negligence. What bothered the Senators most was the memory of Master Spy Redl. "It follows," they said, "that if blackmailers can extort money from a homosexual under threat of disclosure, espionage agents can use the same type of pressure to extort confidential information . . ."

The investigators feared that some sex perverts would inevitably go undetected in Government jobs, but most federal bureaus and agencies, they concluded sharply, had been lazy or downright negligent about cleaning house. The Senators recommended tighter laws and harsher punishment for sex perversion in the District of Columbia, more intensive examination of job applicants.

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