The Cops & the Comrades

For more than 13 years, the New York Police Department and the Communist Party have been secretly and successfully planting spies in the innermost echelons of each other's organizations. They have engaged not only in mutual theft of all kinds of information, but also in a never-ending game of blindman's buff calculated to ferret out the opposition's operatives. The details of this undercover competition became public for the first time last week, as the department prosecuted one of the Communists' most successful plants --a 42-year-old lieutenant named Arthur Miller, who has spent 16 years on the force and, before being unmasked, stood 16th among 633 officers in line for promotion to captain.

The tale of the department's Special Squad No. 1, a group which was ordered to infiltrate the party back during World War II, came to light when a secret report to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was made public during Miller's trial. The report, dated April 4, 1944, noted that 28 detectives and policewomen had become dues-paying members of the party and had supplied daily reports on its inner workings. "So deeply did some of our investigators bore into the party," it stated, "that one of them acted as a courier between the American Communist Party and an agent in Portugal ..."

The Communists' parallel activities were disclosed when one John Lautner, former security chief for the New York State Communist Party, took the stand for the prosecution. The police had wondered for years how twelve of their 28 World War II spies were discovered and thrown out of the party. The Communist informant, said Lautner, was Lieut. Miller, who joined the force in May 1937, and faithfully sent the party inside information. After he reported that the anti-Communist squad was being formed, the Communists managed to get four police-department members assigned to it.

In 1949, however, Miller asked Lautner to let him resign from the force: he had been suspected of Communist activity, had been shunted to a harmless police post near Prospect Park. Brooklyn, and was afraid his wife was about to betray him. Lautner refused to let him quit: if New York's Communist-dominated American Labor Party gained more political power. Miller might well have become police commissioner. The Communist lieutenant accepted the verdict, stayed faithfully on duty until the department finally gathered enough solid evidence to cite him for trial. But Miller disappeared in a flash after that, and last week's proceedings (which resulted in his dismissal from the force) were conducted with the defendant's chair empty.

As the case against Miller drew to its close, the department announced that it was investigating 15 more officers, one of them an old-hand woman detective, who were also suspected of being Communists. The cops and the comrades, it seemed obvious, were still spying on each other as busily as ever.

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