INVESTIGATIONS: The Case Against I.P.R.

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Hint of Espionage. It was left to General MacArthur's former intelligence chief, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, to introduce a hint of espionage into the I.P.R. hearings. Willoughby testified that I.P.R. writer Guenther Stein and the late Agnes Smedley (no I.P.R. writer, but an I.P.R. member) were part of the notorious Sorge Red spy ring in the Far East. When Richard Sorge, masquerading as a Nazi newsman, arrived in Japan in the early 19303 to set up his Red-spy network, he used Miss Smedley's contacts as his Japanese coconspirators, said Willoughby. The Sorge ring was so effective that two months before Pearl Harbor, it warned Moscow that Japan was planning to attack the U.S. and Great Britain in the Pacific. "The real cause for the Communization of China," said Willoughby, "is the long-range subversive operation, over the last two decades, conducted by professional Communists under orders of the Kremlin-controlled Third Comintern."

Neither Counsel Morris nor the committee was claiming that I.P.R. itself was an espionage network. In fact, with commendable restraint, nobody was claiming much of anything until the committee had heard all of its witnesses. But from the I.P.R. files and the testimony, Morris was obviously trying to show that I.P.R. was art intellectual instrument for inserting Communist policies into the U.S. Government, the U.S. press and U.S. academic life. If he could prove that in the hearings yet to come, he would make tales of espionage sound like child's play.