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.