Lauchlin Currie - Allegations of Soviet Intelligence Activity

Allegations of Soviet Intelligence Activity

After the war, Currie was one of those blamed for "losing" China. As far back as 1939, Currie had been identified by Communist defector, Whittaker Chambers, in a meeting with Roosevelt security chief Adolf Berle, as a Soviet agent. Elizabeth Bentley, like Chambers, a former Soviet espionage agent, had claimed in Congressional testimony in 1948 that Currie and Harry Dexter White had been part of the Silvermaster ring. Though she had never met Currie and White personally, Bentley testified to receiving information through cutouts (couriers) who were other Washington economists (later determined to be Soviet agents). White and Currie appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in August 1948 to rebut her charges. White, who was also implicated as a source of Soviet intelligence (later confirmed in VENONA intercepts and review of Soviet KGB notes of NKVD official Gaik Ovakimian) had a serious heart problem, and died three days after his appearance at the hearings.

Currie was not prosecuted and in 1949 he was appointed to head the first of the World Bank's comprehensive country surveys in Colombia. After his report was published in Washington in September 1950, he was invited by the Colombian government to return to Bogotá as adviser to a commission established to implement the report's recommendations. In December 1952, Currie gave evidence in New York to a grand jury investigating Owen Lattimore's role in the publication of secret State Department documents in Amerasia magazine.

However, when Currie, as a U.S. citizen, tried to renew his passport in 1954, he was refused, ostensibly on the grounds that he was now residing abroad and married to a Colombian. However, he may have in fact been identified with the then-secret VENONA project, which had decrypted wartime Soviet cables where Currie was identified as a source of Soviet intelligence.

Currie pops up in nine KGB cables translated by American cryptographers in what is known as the Venona Project, which became public in 1995. From these and other archival sources we have learned that Currie passed secret documents and shared sensitive political intelligence with Soviet spymasters.

He appears in the VENONA cables under the cover name 'PAGE', and in Soviet intelligence archives as 'VIM' and an unwitting source for the Golos and Bentley spy networks.