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Andrew J. Reid, chief intelligence agent at Fort Monmouth, testified that in 1946 a guard caught Coleman leaving the radar laboratories with secret documents. Coleman was asked if he had other such papers at home. "At first, he denied it," said Reid. "The second time, he said 'maybe.' and the third time, he said 'yes.' " A search revealed 43 documents, many of them marked classified, on a desk in Coleman's room. Coleman, called to the stand, told McCarthy he had taken the papers home to study.
To Harvard? At that, Coleman was one of the most cooperative witnesses. In ten days of hearings, 23 witnesses, not all of them Fort Monmouth alumni although most had worked for the Signal Corps, refused to answer questions. Some of them need not have bowed even to McCarthy in the calculated art of making news. Among them:
¶Albert Shadowitz, an employee from 1943 to 1951 of a company doing Signal Corps work, refused to answer questions. The day after he received his subpoena to appear before McCarthy, Shadowitz said, he drove to Princeton, and talked for an hour to Dr. Albert Einstein, whom he had never met before. Said Shadowitz: "I discussed this matter personally with Dr. Einstein in Princeton, and he advised me not to cooperate with this or any otl.er committee of the same nature." Replied McCarthy, by no means loth to have Einstein's name help his own into print: "I would suggest if you don't want to spend considerable time in jail that you advise with your lawyer rather than Dr. Einstein."
¶Leonard E. Mins thoughtfully provided newsmen with a typewritten translation of Latin quotations which he read to McCarthy from a black, loose-leaf notebook. Mins, described by McCarthy as a veteran Communist writer who had access to classified radar information in 1943, was asked if he had ever engaged in espionage for Russia. He answered: "Nemini delatorum fides abrogata."* Then he added wryly: "My answer also includes a citation from the Fifth Amendment." McCarthy, who knows a good performer when he sees one, was almost tolerant of Mins.
¶Mrs. Sylvia Berke, who was employed at Fort Monmouth in 1943. denied that she was a member of the Communist Party then. With her lawyer beside her, a study in distress, Mrs. Berke said that she was not a Communist last Sept. 15, but refused to say if she had been one Sept. 13. McCarthy told her that if she is fired from her position as a school clerk in The Bronx, she "might apply for a job over at Harvard—there seems to be a privileged sanctuary over there for Fifth Amendment cases."
¶ Harry A. Hyman, a New York insurance man whom McCarthy called "a sleazy character and an underground espionage agent for the Communists," refused to tell anything except his age—31. Four witnesses identified Hyman as a Communist. McCarthy produced records indicating that Hyman in the last two years had made nearly 500 telephone calls to U.S. defense installations, including Fort Monmouth.