The Amerasia Affair and John Stewart Service: Weighing the Evidence of History

Abstract

Amerasia was a small, left-wing monthly magazine, now defunct, dedicated to the discussion of Asian political and cultural affairs. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, it was openly critical of the Chinese Nationalist government and laudatory of the Chinese Communists. Philip Jaffe, a co-editor, was outspokenly pro-Communist. Despite its small circulation (approximately 1700 copies per month) and political orientation, the magazine was well-known to Far Eastern experts. . . . On June 6, 1945, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents arrested John Stewart Service, Philip Jaffe, Mark Gayn, Kate Mitchell, Emmanuel Larsen, and Andrew Roth. Their arrests came after months of surveillance and several illegal entries into their homes and offices by Bureau agents. Federal investigators had established that Amerasia had obtained numerous copies of highly-classified government documents. The Justice Department charged the six with illegal possession of those documents and brought them before a grand jury . . . Beyond these facts, numerous issues are much less clear. They fall into three principal categories. First, the prosecution and handling of the suspects; second, John Service's involvement with the magazine and other defendants; third, the objectivity of Service's reports from China found at Amerasia and their influence on American Far Eastern policy. . . . The problem for the historian in trying to answer such questions is the lack of objective sources to draw on. Congressional investigations of the case provide some answers, but partisan politics taint their objectivity. [From Preface]