An Orwellian Glimpse

As a Washington lawyer, 32-year-old Adam Yarmolinsky, onetime law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed, found frequent occasion to wonder about the mysterious operation of the U.S. Government's security program, conducted behind closed doors, with vague charges, unnamed witnesses, and questionable verdicts. Yarmolinsky, along with some other inquisitive lawyers, decided to try to find out about the security program. Working under a $50,000 grant from the Fund for the Republic, the Yarmolinsky group has studied some 300 security cases over the past year.

Last week Yarmolinsky made public his findings in 50 of the cases, selected as typical samplings of the entire survey. The reports are necessarily incomplete, since the Government's files were not made available to Yarmolinsky's lawyer-interviewers. To atone for this defect, Yarmolinsky made a special effort to rely on such documentary evidence as the written charges, the written responses of the employees under investigation, and the transcripts of the hearings furnished to the employees. As such, the Yarmolinsky report affords an Orwellian glimpse behind the closed doors of the security program. Some of the case histories:

Case No. 39 was a Signal Corps civilian typist, with no access to classified documents. He was charged with being "closely associated" with his father, who had been reported to be a Communist. The employee said that he himself disapproved of Communism, indicated that partly because of politics, he never got along well with his father.

At the employee's hearing in 1954, says the Yarmolinsky report: "The attorney adviser [to the loyalty board] inquired about reading habits, and found out that the employee seldom strayed beyond the sports page. He was asked what headlines attracted his attention and whether he followed the U.N. . . . Then followed questions about the purpose of the Korean war, the nature of the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the New York Communist trial, and tidelands oil . . . One member of the board brought out that the employee [during the Korean war] dated Japanese girls. Another member tried to establish the fact that the father sought to be patriarchal in his relations with the employee, as fathers were in his homeland of Lithuania. The employee responded that actually the mother wore the pants. The first member asked if the employee traveled around Japan sightseeing, and learned that in addition to his dates with Japanese girls, he had divided his other spare time between the baseball park and the Far East track team."

About six months after the case against him was instituted, the employee was reinstated in his job--but, shaken by the experience, he declined re-employment.

Case No. 75 was a clerical civilian employee with the Signal Corps, handling documents labeled "Secret." She was suspended from work for maintaining "a close and continuing association" with her brother, who was suspected of being a Communist sympathizer. In her hearing came this series of questions and answers:

Board Member: Are you prepared to refrain from joining the Communist Party? Do you understand what I mean? Are you prepared not to join the Communist Party?

Employee: I never had thought about joining the Communist Party.

Board Member: If you had knowledge of your brother's belonging to any of these organizations that are listed in the Attorney General's list, would you come forward and give that information or would you try to shield him?

Employee: I don't understand what you mean, try to shield him. Try to shield him from what?

Board Member: Suppose you were reinstated and found out later that your brother was involved in any one of these organizations . . . Would you come forth and tell your supervisor in this agency that your brother was connected in any one of these organizations?

Employee: Would that be part of my duties?

Board Member: You don't know; is that your answer? You don't know what you should do?

Employee's Counsel: What she would do, not should do.

Employee: I don't know what I would do. Some things you don't know until they really happen . . .

Board Member: If you knew your brother was going to or was in the process of committing an act of sabotage or espionage, would you warn the authorities?

Employee: If I knew he was going to commit sabotage? Certainly I would tell them, because he would only be hurting himself.

Nearly a year after she was suspended from work, the employee received word that her record was "not clearly consistent with the interest of national security." She was dismissed.

Case No. 107, a substitute postal clerk, was accused, among other things, of having Communist art hung on the wall of his home. At his hearing, the employee said he owned reproductions of Picasso, Matisse, Renoir and Modigliani. He was rated ineligible for permanent Civil Service appointment and barred from competing in Civil Service examinations for three years.

Case No. 190 was a Negro woman, employed by the Agriculture Department as a tabulator machine operator. She was questioned about her relationship with a suspected Communist, whom she said she had met only two or three times. This aimless exchange ensued:

Q. You say he was dark brown?

A. Yes.

Q. And you say you are a light brown?

A. No, but he was darker than I am.

Q. What would you say your color was?

A. I would call myself dark brown.

Q. You call yourself dark brown?

A. Yes.

Q. And--

A. But he was darker than I am.

Q. Considerably darker or just a little darker?

A. I would say two or three shades darker, I guess.

The employee eventually went back to work at her old job.

Time, Money, Agony. Some of the cases cited by Yarmolinsky involved obvious security risks; others just as obviously involved reliable, patriotic citizens. In some instances, the employees got their jobs back; in others, dismissal was the end result. But in virtually none of the cases was anything accomplished by the loyalty boards, with their mass of rules and regulations and their fumbling procedures, that could not have been done by an individual bureaucrat with a modicum of common sense and the simple right to hire and fire in the interests of national security. And a great deal of time and money, not to mention human agony and governmental dignity, could have been saved.

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