Difference between revisions of "Institute of Pacific Relations"

Revision as of 02:31, August 6, 2007

The Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) was established in 1925 to provide a forum for discussion of Asian problems and relations between Asia and the West. To promote greater knowledge of the Far East, the IPR established a large research program, which was supported financially by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and other major corporations. While the IPR leadership maintained it was a nonpartisan body, others, including some former members, accused it of supporting the Communist line with respect to its analysis of political developments in the Far East.

OWI disinformation

When, on June 15 1943, Owen Lattimore instructed Joseph Barnes^[1] to replace the non-Communist Chinese of the Office of War Information (OWI) with Communists, OWI did so. On July 14 Thomas A. Bisson, in the Institute of Pacific Relations publication, Far Eastern Survey, referred to Moaist forces as the "democratic China." The disinformation was widely repeated among journalists and academics. In July and August 1943, the Chinese Communist forces -- in the midst of the war -- joined with the Japanese armies to inflict a serious defeat on the Kuomintang troops allied with the United States. ^[2]

"agrarian reformers"

Columbia University's Nathaniel Peffer, Owen Lattimore, Frederick Field and others, in the New York Times of May 14, 1944, wrote of China's "agrarian reformers." Vice-President Henry Wallace, celebrated July 4, 1944, in Chita, Soviet Siberia accompanied by John Hazard, Lattimore, and John Carter Vincent, on an official fifty-two-day, twenty-seven-thousand-mile junket to Soviet Asia and China and was the guest of Sergei Arsenevich Goglidze and Ivan Nikoshov, dreaded masters of the Soviet Siberian slave-labor camps.^[3]

The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) described the IPR in 1952 as "a vehicle used by Communists to orientate American Far Eastern policy toward Communist objectives."

IPR was linked closely with the Amerasia publication, sharing writers, offices, and a general policy view, and appeared to mirror the United States Department of State in matters pertaining Asian policy.

Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin repeatedly criticized IPR and its former chairman Philip Jessup. McCarthy observed Frederick V. Field, T.A. Bisson, Owen Lattimore were very active in IPR and worked to turn American China policy in favor of the Communist Party of China. John Carter Vincent, John Service, Alger Hiss, and John Paton Daviesall had links to IPR. Jessup in 1949 was the principal editor of the State Department "white paper" on China that abandoned Chiang Kai-chek and the Nationalist Chinese governmemnt.

SISS investigation

The 1952 Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) reviewed some 20,000 documents from the files of IPR, including letters, memoranda, minutes and reports The finding was beyond all doubt, that the IPR was a vehicle for pro-Communist leverage on American policy in China, a strikingly different conclusion than that reached by the Tydings Committee.

The SISS discovered IPR was run by a circle of insiders, Edward Carter, Owen Lattimore, Frederick Field, and a few others. They were in constant communication, discussing lines of policy, materials to appear in newspapers, magazines and books, or the agenda for some impending conference. Connected to this inner cadre was a far-flung network of writers, researchers, speakers and policy experts, including a substantial number who moved back and forth among the IPR, the press corps, the academy, and the government. Also revealed in the investigation was an extremely large number of Communists.

A list of invited attendees to an IPR conference of 1942, as recommended by Philip Jessup, revealed 30-plus individuals who had been identified under oath as members of the Communist secret apparatus. Committee counsel Robert Morris summarized the situation as follows:

"In reply to [a] question about the 10 people who have been identified as part of the Communist organization on that . . . list recommended by Mr. Jessup, I will point out that we have had testimony that Benjamin Kizer was a member of the Communist Party, testimony that Lauchlin Currie was associated with an espionage ring and gave vital military secrets to the Russian espionage system, the military secret being, in one case, the fact that the United States had broken the Soviet code. . . .

"John Carter Vincent has been identified as a member; Harry Dexter White as a member of an espionage ring; Owen Lattimore as a member of the Communist organization; Len DeCaux as a member of the Communist Party; Alger Hiss as a member of the Communist Party; Joseph Barnes as a member of the Communist Party; Frederick V. Field as a member of the Communist Party; and Frank Coe as a member of the Communist Party."

In the final report the SISS reported:

"The IPR itself was like a specialized political flypaper in its attractive power for Communists. . . . British Communists like Michael Greenberg, Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley or Anthony Jenkinson; Chinese Communists like Chi Chao-ting, Chen Han-seng, Chu Tong, Y.Y. Hsu; German Communists like Hans Moeller (Asiaticus) or Guenther Stein; Japanese Communists (and espionage agents) like Saionji and Ozaki (Hozumi); United States Communists like James S. Allen, Frederick V. Field, William M. Mandel, Harriet Moore, Lawrence Rosinger, and Alger Hiss.

"Indeed, the difficulty with the IPR from the Communist point of view was that it was too stuffed with Communists, too compromised by its Communist connections. Elizabeth Bentley testified that her superior in the Soviet espionage apparatus, Jacob Golos, warned her away from the IPR because ‘it was as red as a rose, and you shouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.’ "

"The IPR has been considered by the American Communist Party and by Soviet officials as an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military intelligence. The IPR disseminated and sought to popularize false information including information originating from Soviet and Communist sources. . . . Members of the small core of officials and staff members who controlled IPR were either Communist or pro-Communist. . . . Over a period of years, John Carter Vincent was the principal fulcrum of IPR pressure and influence in the State Department. . . . The IPR was a vehicle used by the Communists to orientate American far eastern policies toward Communist objectives. . ."

It should be noted Ozaki Hozumi was a member of Richard Sorge's Soviet espionage ring in Tokyo during World War II. Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby who was Gen. Douglas MacArthur's chief of Intelligence in the Pacific, wrote in Shanghai Conspiracy that Guenther Stein was also a member of this ring, as was the well-known Communist writer Agnes Smedley, also involved in the Amerasia Affair.

References

• Hearings before the Senate subcommittee investigating the Institute of Pacific Relations
• National Archives and Records Administration, Senate Internal Security Subcommittee

1. ↑ Tongue-Tied, Time magazine, Feb. 07, 1944.
2. ↑ The Yalta Betrayal, Felix Wittmer, Caxton Printers, 1953, pg. 36.
3. ↑ Yalta Betrayal, Wittmer, 1953, pg. 58. Retrieved from GELO.com of Czechoslovakia 05/08/07.

External links

• McCarthyism: Waging the Cold War in America, by M. Stanton Evans, Human Events, 05/30/1997. Updated 05/08/2003.