Institute of Pacific Relations

The Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) was a private association of ten independent national councils in ten countries concerned with affairs in the Pacific in the second quarter of the twentieth century. ^[1] Professor Carroll Quigley has said of the IPR and persons associated with it, "Many of these experts which were favored by the Far East "establishment" in the Institute of Pacific Relations were captured by Communist ideology. Under its influence, they propagandized, as experts, erroneous ideas and sought to influence policy in mistaken directions.^[2] ...the whole subject is of major importance in understanding the twentieth century." ^[3]

The Institute of Pacific Relations was established in 1925 to provide a forum for discussion of Asian problems and relations between Asia and the West. It was governed by an international body in which each nation interested in the Pacific was represented and had its own national council. The constituent nations were the United States, United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Netherland-Netherlands East Indies, Philippines and France. The overall international ruling body was called the Pacific Council. The IPR had two organs of expression. One was a quarterly journal called Pacific Affairs, under the auspices of the International or Pacific Council. The other was Far Eastern Survey, published by the American Council. Owen Lattimore was the editor of Pacific Affairs and Lawrence E. Salisbury was the editor of Far Eastern Survey. The executive secretary of the American Council was Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a notorious professional Communist and popularly known as the "Millionaire Communist." Field was enlisted for the job by Dr. Edward C. Carter in 1928, when Field became assistant secretary and very soon after executive secretary. He remained a member of the governing executive committee until 1948 and executive secretary until 1940.^[4] Edward Carter was also member of the board of directors of the American Russian Institute and a contributor to Soviet Russia Today in which Carter defended the infamous Moscow show trials during the Stalinist terror.^[5] Carter tried to get Field, who was owner and chairman of the editorial board of Amerasia which recieved stolen classified documents from the U.S. Government, a commission in Army Intelligence.

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. Prof Quigley states there is considerable truth in the contention that the American experts on China were organized into an interlocking group of a Leftish character. It is also true that this group, from its control of funds, academic recommendations, and research of publication opportunities, could favor persons who accepted their consensus and could injure, financial or in professional advancement, persons who did not. And this group, by its influence on book reviewing in the New York Times, the Herald Tribune and the Saturday Review, a few magazines and professional journals, could advance or hamper any specialist's career. Professor Quigley goes on to state it is true these things were done in the United States by the Institute of Pacific Relations, that this organization had been infiltrated by Communists and Communist sympathizers, and that much of this group's influence arose from its access and control over the flow of funds from financial foundations to scholarly activities.^[6]

Mary Van Kleeck espoused the official Soviet version in 1938 of the Great purge in IPR's Pacific Affairs. Owen Lattimore defended the show trials in Moscow in the same publication as "an evidence of democracy."^[7]

In July of 1938 IPR had a grant of $90,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to make a study. Carter was managing it. Lattimore wrote to Carter, “I think you were pretty cagey to turn over so much of the China section of the inquiry to Asiaticus, Han-seng and Chi. They will bring out the essential radical aspects, but can be depended upon to do it with the right touch!” Lattimore went on to say "my hunch is that it will pay to keep behind the official Chinese Communist position, " and "as for the USSR—back their international policy in general, but without using their slogans, and above all without giving them or anybody else the impression of subservience." ^[8] Carter appointed the three persons named by Lattimore to the study commission and defended his decision to knowingly employ Soviet communists to the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigating IPR in 1953. The Committee questioner needed to point out to Carter that this particular case occurred in 1940, when the Soviet Union, by virtue of the Communazi Peace pact, was not an ally of the United States, but an ally of Hitler.^[9]

Lattimore recommended highly Challenge of Red China, written by member of the Richard Sorge ring in Japan—Guenther Stein. Of Israel Epstein's Unfinished Revolution in China Lattimore said: "When he pleads his case the arguments pile up like a wedge." When Lattimore resigned he was succeeded by Michael Greenberg, a Communist Party member. Lattimore then became a member of the editorial board of another IPR organ, the notorious Amerasia magazine.

During World War II an IPR resource packet was adopted by 1300 public school systems, and the War Department purchased over three quarters of a million IPR pamphlets for instructing military personnel. ^[10]

Main article: Amerasia

Frederick Vanderbilt Field testified that he had discussed with associates in the IPR the project of starting Amerasia in 1937. Amerasia was established with the full approval of the Institute leaders. This property belonged to Fredrick Field and Philip Jaffe, with Field holding the controlling interest. Field testified that he owned 50 per cent of the stock, while Jaffe owned 49 per cent. A good many of Field's associates in IPR were on the editorial board of Amerasia. Field named Owen Lattimore, Kate Mitchell, Harriet Moore, T. A. Bisson, Benjamin Kizer, a trustee of the Institute, and Philip Jaffe, who also was a member of the Institute and a contributor to its periodical. When Field made his effort to get into Army Intelligence, it was in writing on the letterhead of Amerasia, showing Field as chairman of the editorial board with Owen Lattimore and William T. Stone as members of the board. There was no change in ownership of this magazine from 1937 to 1943, when Field resigned and Jaffe took over.^[11]

There appeared in Amerasia a long account which was recognized in General William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (the OSS) as verbatim reproduction of a government top secret document. On June 6, 1945 the FBI raided the offices of Amerasia. Six persons, Philip Jaffe, Mark Gayn, Kate Mitchell and three others who were U.S. government officials, Andrew Roth, Emmanuel Larsen, John S. Service, were arrested on conspiracy and espionage charges related to the possession of over 1,000 stolen classified Government documents. Documents from Military Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Bureau of Censorship, British Intelligence, Office of Strategic Services and the U.S. State Department were confiscated. Among these documents were military reports giving secret information on the position and disposition of Chinese Nationalist armies of Gen. Chiang Kai-shek.

General Charles A. Willoughby, chief of Army Intelligence in Japan, testified that the IPR Council in Japan was used as a spy ring by the Soviet Union. Hozumi Ozaki and Kimikazu Saionji attended the 1936 conference of the IPR at Yosemite, one as secretary and the other as an officer of the IPR in Japan. Ozaki was a journalist who enjoyed close relations to Japanese cabinet officials.

Saionji was secretary of the Japanese Council of the IPR. Saionji became a consultant of the Japanese Foreign Minister. He had access to the highest official circles and enjoyed a special intimacy with the Prime Minister, Prince Konoye. He introduced Ozaki into these circles, and both men—Ozaki and Saionji—became members of what Konoye's "breakfast group," an intimate group of high level advisers. Associated with them was Ushiba, Saionji's predecessor as secretary of the Japanese IPR.

When, on June 15 1943, Owen Lattimore instructed Joseph Barnes^[12] 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 Maoist 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. ^[13]

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.^[14]

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, and 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 government.

The 1952 Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) reviewed some 20,000 documents from the files of IPR, including letters, memoranda, minutes and reports. ^[15] During the Senate hearings on the IPR, 46 persons connected with the IPR were identified as Communist Party members. ^[16] 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. ^[17]

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 stated:

"The IPR itself was like 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. . ." ^[18]

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.

The Eighty-third Congress set up in 1953 a Special Reece Committee to investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. An interesting report showing the Left-wing associations of interlocking nexus of tax-exempt foundations was issued in 1954 rather quietly.^{[19][20][21][22]} Four years later, the Reece Committee's general counsel, Rene A Wormser, wrote a book on the subject called Foundations: Their Power and Influence. ^[23]

• James Walter Miller

1. ↑ Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, Carroll Quigley, Collier-Macmillan, 1966, pg. 946. ISBN 0-945001-10-X
2. ↑ Tragedy and Hope Quigley, pg. 935.
3. ↑ Tragedy and Hope Quigley, pg. 935.
4. ↑ While You Slept : Our Tragedy in Asia and Who Made It, John T. Flynn, New York : The Devin - Adair Company, 1951, pg. 116 - 119 pdf.
5. ↑ Soviet Russia Today, May 1938.
6. ↑ Tragedy and Hope Quigley, pg. 935.
7. ↑ Pacific Affairs, September, 1938.
8. ↑ United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security Hearings, July 26, 1951.
9. ↑ United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security Hearings, July 25, 1951.
10. ↑ Anthony Kubek, How the Far East Was Lost, Chicago 1963, pgs. 350-351.
11. ↑ United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security Hearings, July 25 and 26, 1951.
12. ↑ Tongue-Tied, Time magazine, Feb. 07, 1944.
13. ↑ The Yalta Betrayal, Felix Wittmer, Caxton Printers, 1953, pg. 36.
14. ↑ Yalta Betrayal, Wittmer, 1953, pg. 58. Retrieved from GELO.com of Czechoslovakia 05/08/07.
15. ↑ National Archives and Records Administration, Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
16. ↑ U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Report on the Institute of Pacific Relations, Washington 1952, pg. 11.
17. ↑ McCarthyism: Waging the Cold War in America, by M. Stanton Evans, Human Events, 05/30/1997. Updated 05/08/2003.
18. ↑ U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Report on the Institute of Pacific Relations, Washington 1952.
19. ↑ Dodd Report to the Reese Committee on Foundations-1954.
20. ↑ Tax Exempt Foundations Hearings-Reece Committee-1953 4-1000 pgs. Part 1.
21. ↑ Tax Exempt Foundations Hearings-Reece Committee-1953 4-1086 pgs. Part 2.
22. ↑ Tax Exempt Foundations Hearings-Reece Committee-1953 4-2086 pgs.
23. ↑ Tragedy and Hope, Quigley, Collier-Macmillan, 1966, pg. 954. ISBN 0-945001-10-X

• FBI Silvermaster file, Vol. 106, pgs. 10 - 56 pdf, April 8, 1947. 55-page report on Maynard Gertler [1] a former State Department and Office of Strategic Services employee said by the FBI to have "in his possession approximately 1,000 documents, some of which are stamped restricted, confidential and top secret." According to FBI surveillance and background checks, Gertler was a contact of Philip Dunaway, Maurice Halperin, David Wahl, Bowen Smith, and others of their circle. His academic connections included Robert Brady, Franz Neumann, Robert Lynd, and Owen Lattimore.