One of the mysteries of contemporary publishing has been a cadaverous onetime pulp writer named Joseph Hilton Smyth. Four years ago he suddenly emerged from Greenwich Village obscurity, bought the venerable magazines Living Age and North American Review. Then he bought into Current History. Before long he bought a good slice of the staid Saturday Review of Literature. He also founded a weekly newsletter called The Foreign Observer, a press service called the Negro News Syndicate.
Last week FBI solved the mystery. Publisher Smyth, arrested with two cronies, pleaded guilty to charges that he got $125,000 from the Japs in four years, paid by Manhattan's Japanese Vice Consul Shintaro Fukushima. The down payment on June 21, 1938, was $15,000. Thereupon Living Age promptly denounced the Open Door as a perfidious British invention, sugared Jap aggression, pooh-poohed the U.S. stakes in the Far East ("so small that they would not pay the Federal tax on cigarets smoked by the nation in ten months"). The Japs guaranteed Living Age's deficit of $2,500 a month.
The FBI discovered Publisher Smyth's colleague, Canadian-born Walker Grey Matheson, 40, last week in Nelson Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs. He was writing short-wave broadcasts about the Far East for Latin America. Agent Matheson, who had gone to school in Hawaii, Peking, Shanghai, Rangoon, Tokyo, the Universities of Nevada, California and Mexico, knew the Japs well. In 1937, charged the FBI, they hired him to spy on the U.S. Communist Party. Boastful of his long friendship with Emperor Hirohito, he had taught philosophy at New York City's Queens College. As chief hack for Living Age, the Japs paid Matheson $500 a month and expenses.
In Japan Agent Matheson met up with a Jap-and German-schooled British accountant named Irvine Harvey Williams. Williams became Living Age's president, and last week FBI's prisoner.
If convicted the three face ten years in jail, a $10,000 fine, or both.