Files on Parade

It was a startling statement: if the Department of State has in its files evidence that an employee is a sex pervert, the evidence should be withheld from the board that passes on promotions. This viewpoint, held by a departmental officer, went into the record last week as the Senate Investigating Committee, under the chivvying chairmanship of Senator Joseph McCarthy, began to look into the State Department files. Almost as striking was the news also dug out in the first week that classified files, containing personnel information about foreign service officers, are as open as a public library to many people around the State Department. And it looked as though untrustworthy hands had been removing embarrassing records--especially information about homosexuals and suspected Communists.

The committee's first witness was Mrs. Helen Balog, fluttery supervisor of the Foreign Service file room. Her files, she testified, were accessible to virtually any department hand who chose to open them. She knew of several instances where derogatory information had been removed. For example, she cited a case where a foreign service officer's reference, signed by Owen Lattimore, had vanished--at a time when Lattimore's name was high in the headlines.

John E. Matson, a foreign service security officer, corroborated Mrs. Balog's statements: it was a "deplorable" fact that almost anybody from the department could get into the files and could take papers out. He had some additional evidence of file-milking. One department employee had been ousted on a morals charge,*but later the damning evidence was removed from his file and the man was certified, on the basis of the remaining information, for an Air Force assignment in Germany

Witness No. 3 was Vladimir I. Toumanoff, 29, formerly a department recruiting officer, now concerned with efficiency rating. With his testimony, the investigation turned specifically toward the question of homosexuals. At the outset Chairman Joe McCarthy struck a wild blow: Witness Toumanoff, he observed, was born "in the Russian Legation [in Constantinople] subsequent to the Communist revolution, so that of necessity his parents had to be acceptable to the Communist regime." The facts are that Toumanoff's parents were titled White Russians, and the legation was still a czarist enclave at the time of his birth.

Toumanoff was asked if he thought it a good idea to deny the promotion board knowledge that an employee was a sexual deviate. He replied: "Yes sir, I think it is a good idea." Then Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, freshman from Washington, put a hypothetical case before the witness: Suppose that the files showed a candidate for promotion was a convicted homosexual? Would you then withhold the evidence? Toumanoff was silent.

"It's hard to answer, isn't it?" said McCarthy. "It certainly is," Toumanoff replied.

*Since it first declared homosexuals loyalty risks, the State Department has flushed out and dropped more than 300 employees on morals charges.

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