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From The Twenty-Year Revolution. Chesly Manly 1954
. . . Hiss deftly outmaneuvered Byrnes and Panuch with a duplicitous plan to introduce American Communists into the U.N. Secretariat. Early in 1946, he obtained approval of a State Department rule that no recommendations would be made regarding American applicants for U.N. jobs. Whether this rule was approved by Acheson, in Byrnes' absence, or by Byrnes, on Acheson �s recommendation, is not clear, but State Department officials told a House Judiciary Subcommittee in 1953 that such a policy was adopted. Trygve Lie, former U.N. Secretary General, told the General Assembly on March 10, 1953, that one of his first acts was to request the United States government for help in finding qualified personnel for the Secretariat. He said the United States refused, on the ground that it wished to avoid the appearance of influencing the selection of personnel.
If the State Department had complied with Lie�s request for help, applicants for U.N. jobs would have been screened by the department�s Security Committee, under Panuch�s jurisdiction, by the Civil Service Commission, or by the FBI, and that would have been awkward for Hiss � communist friends. With the no-recommendation rule in force, however, Hiss clandestinely recommended job seekers to his friends who already held influential positions in the U.N. Secretariat. According to the report of the Judiciary Subcommittee, Hiss secretly recommended nearly five hundred persons for U.N. employment. Many of them were employed, and some of them later became �public issues,� the subcommittee reported. The �public issues� referred to had refused, on the ground of self-incrimination, to tell the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee whether they were or had been Communists, or were engaging or had engaged in espionage or subversive activities against the United States. Eighteen Secretariat members and five others recently separated from the payroll took refuge under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution when questioned in 1952 and 1953 about communist activities. Lie fired these and about twenty
others as a result of hearings by the Senate subcommittee and a federal grand jury in New York. However, nineteen of those dismissed appealed to the U.N. administrative tribunal, which ruled that membership in the Communist Party or refusal to testify on the ground of self-incrimination is not a valid ground for the discharge of a Secretariat member. U.N. employes dismissed for refusing to testify about communist or espionage activities must either be reinstated or compensated, the tribunal ruled. If upheld by the assembly, this decision would cost the U.N. more than $200,000 for �termination indemnity� payments to eleven employes whose appeals were upheld.
Lie disclosed that the State Department refused to give him any information whatever regarding reports of subversive activities by American members of the Secretariat until late in 1949, when the U.N. entered into a secret agreement with the department. Under this agreement, the department gave the U.N. no information except its bare opinion, and then only when the opinion was adverse on security grounds. Often the report would consist of a single word, Lie said. The House Judiciary Subcommittee reported that the department submitted only fifty-six adverse comments from 1949 to 1953, eight of them on applicants for jobs and forty-eight on employes. It reported that nearly 100 U.N. employes were questioned by the federal grand jury. It said the FBI reported highly derogatory information on fifty-three of these to the State Department, but in some cases the department refrained from making adverse reports to Lie and in others it waited up to three years before submitting such reports.
( pages 190 - 191 )
Chicago : Regnery 1954.
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