• Military
• WMD

• Intelligence Menu               

• Systems
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Imagery
• Links

• Homeland Security
• Space

Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO)

Between 1940 and 1943 the federal government had screened federal employees for "loyalty" using a secret "Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations" (AGLOSO). The original legal basis for this list was the August 1939 Hatch Act, which banned from government employment any person who held "membership in any political party or organization which advocated the overthrow of our constitutional form of government in the United States." Similar provisions were regularly included thereafter in congressional appropriations acts. Pursuant to these congressional mandates, Attorney General Francis Biddle created a temporary interdepartmental committee to investigate alleged subversion within the federal government. Biddle and the Dickinson Committee (named for Special Assistant to the Attorney General Edwin Dickinson), which he created in early 1942, designated 47 organizations by May 1942 as falling within the Hatch Act criteria, membership in which raised a "flag" with regard to federal employees or applicants for federal jobs.

A brief reference to the secret AGLOSO was contained in a Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum that was published as part of a report that Attorney General Francis Biddle made to Congress in September 1942. Without naming the organizations, beyond the Communist Party (CP) and the pro-Nazi German American Bund, whose inclusion under the Hatch Act mandate had been previously announced by the Civil Service Commission (CSC), the FBI document reported that the Dickinson Committee had designated 47 organizations as coming "within the purview" of the congressional mandates, including "12 Communist or Communist 'front' organizations; 2 American Fascist organizations; 8 Nazi organizations; 4 Italian fascist organizations; and 21 Japanese organizations."

Under the Hatch Act, the FBI investigated a federal employee only if there were "definite and substantial indications that he is a member of one of the 47 organizations declared subversive by the Attorney General" or allegations that he personally advocated the overthrow of the government or belonged to an organization advocating such.

During closed July 1946 hearings, U.S. Civil Service Commission [CSC] head Arthur Flemming told the HCSC subcommittee that, in the light of congressional passage of the 1939 Hatch Act and other legislation, the CSC had "no difficulty" in determining that Communist Party members or followers of the party "line," along with "persons actively associated with groups or organizations whose primary loyalty was to Nazi, Fascist or Japanese governments," should be barred from federal employment.

Flemming vigorously defended the CSC policy of not asking federal applicants about their association with certain organizations, including pro-Spanish loyalist groups, since, along with "some Communist Party liners," those "whom you and I would never in the world classify as anything but very good progressives or liberals" had supported the loyalists, including "undoubtedly plenty of people in the Government right now" viewed "as responsible leading progressives."

At the end of World War II, a widespread belief that good relations with the Soviet Union would continue briefly diminished the concern over alleged Communist and other subversive infiltration of the federal government that had led to the Hatch Act and the Biddle AGLOSO. In October 1945 the Gaston Committee (named for Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Herbert Gaston and created in early 1943 to replace the Dickinson Committee) recommended that it be abolished and its functions turned over to the U.S. Civil Service Commission. In December 1945 the new attorney general, Tom Clark, drafted a proposed executive order to implement this recommendation.

However, the rapid development of Cold War tensions after 1945 and concerns about possible Communist infiltration of the government soon created a drastically changed political climate in the United States. President Truman in late 1946 appointed yet another commission to study governmental employee loyalty, which eventually led him to inaugurate a sweeping new federal loyalty program in March 1947.

The so-called "Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations" (AGLOSO) was one of the most central and widely publicized aspects of the post–World War II Red Scare, which has popularly become known as "McCarthyism." AGLOSO burst into the American consciousness in December 1947, when it was published in connection with President Harry S. Truman's "loyalty program," more than two years before Senator Joseph McCarthy made his first publicized allegations of widespread Communist infiltration of the American government in early 1950.

It originated with President Truman's Executive Order 9835 of March 21, 1947, which required that all federal civil service employees be screened for "loyalty." The order specified that one criterion to be used in determining that "reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal" would be a finding of "membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association" with any organization determined by the attorney general to be "totalitarian, Fascist, Communist or subversive" or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking "to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means."

The "Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations" (AGLOSO) was one of the most central and widely publicized aspects of the post–World War II Red Scare, which has popularly become known as "McCarthyism." AGLOSO burst into the American consciousness in December 1947, when it was published in connection with President Harry S. Truman's "loyalty program," more than two years before Senator Joseph McCarthy made his first publicized allegations of widespread Communist infiltration of the American government in early 1950.

Although AGLOSO itself was massively publicized, the Justice Department and other agencies of the federal government released little or no information about key aspects of the list, including how it was compiled, what criteria were used to list groups, why the decision was made to publish the list, and why listed organizations were not provided with any notice, charges, or hearings before they were designated. Moreover, when AGLOSO was first published in late 1947, only the briefest of references were made to the fact that the government had been maintaining in secret an AGLOSO to aid in screening federal employees for loyalty ever since 1940.

The publication of the list transformed what was supposedly a tool solely designed to help screen federal employees for loyalty into what effectively became an official government proscription blacklist, whose influence spread across American society, severely damaged or destroyed the listed organizations, and cast a general pall over freedom of association and speech in the United States.

The gathering of information by intelligence agents, especially in wartime, is an age-old strategy for gaining superiority over rivals. Intelligence officers, working for government intelligence agencies, advance their nation s interests by gathering information. Among their best sources are citizens of rival nations who give or sell them information they seek. Acts of espionage like these betray the obligation, implicit in citizenship, to support the nation and avoid helping those who would harm it.

The hunt for Communists in the United States reached the point of hysteria by the early 1950s, but what is too often overlooked is that it had its origins in a very real phenomenon. Soviet agents had penetrated the US government before and during World War II, in some cases at very high levels. The best-known cases of the early Cold War era, those of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, helped feed the growth of McCarthyism and then took on long political lives of their own.

Typically, the Soviets focused on infiltrating émigré groups to protect the fledgling Soviet state from counterrevolution, but they also sought economic and industrial data about America, and they laid a groundwork of committed agents on which to develop sources within the federal government. Once the United States recognized the USSR in 1934, the Soviets used their new diplomatic cover to facilitate collecting intelligence and making contacts with Americans. Starting in 1935, several groups of well-placed Americans gradually drifted into service as Soviet agents.

These American agents often acted from idealistic calculations about a world order so drastically changed by subsequent events that now it is difficult to recapture that vanished time. The severe worldwide depression of the 1930s and the rise of militant fascism in Europe shook the complacency of many about capitalism s merits, and led progressive-minded Americans to take a friendly interest in the Soviet experiment.

Before Stalin's paranoia, purges, and murderous campaigns against the Russian people were documented in the West, before Communist theories were publicly discredited by decades of failure and opportunism, it was possible for idealistic Americans in the grip of romantic anti-fascism to see the USSR as the world s best remaining hope.

The United States made a tempting espionage target for allies and adversaries alike in the 1940s. Berlin, Tokyo, and Moscow all wanted to discover Washington's strategic plans and the progress being made in American factories and laboratories. From its founding in 1917, the Soviet Union conducted a determined espionage program in the United States that attempted to recruit American citizens to spy for the Soviets. From several dozen spies in the 1930s, the number of Americans committing espionage for the Soviets grew during World War II to several hundred.

Some KGB and GRU networks had no apparent connections to Soviet establishments and were run by "illegals" -- Soviet intelligence officers usually living under false identities. In addition, some GRU and KGB agents were themselves CPUSA officers whose clandestine activities were known, to a greater or lesser extent, to the CPUSA leadership and the Comintern.

The Soviet Union was an ally and therefore was able to post large numbers of officials on American soil in various liaison capacities. Beyond this, many Americans regarded their Russian allies as comrades-in-arms who should be helped with material as well as rhetorical support. There were some instances of American citizens volunteering actual secrets to Soviets during the war, and Soviet officials in the United States sometimes enjoyed considerable hospitality and access.

Finally, Soviet intelligence benefited directly and indirectly from the activities and infrastructure of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) had thousands of members, a disproportionate number of whom were highly educated and likely to work in sensitive wartime industries. Given the size of the pre-existing Soviet espionage network within the United States and the number of Americans who were sympathetic to communism or even members of the CPUSA themselves, it seems highly unlikely in retrospect that penetrations of the Manhattan Project, or other wartime projects, could have been prevented.

The entry of the United States into the war at the end of 1941 marked the end of the first small-scale phase of espionage by the Soviets in this country, and the development of expanded and centralized professional agent networks. The Soviet Union became the United States ally in the European theatre, and American perceptions of the Communist state made an abrupt if temporary about-face. From disapproval, Americans now found themselves urged to admire the stalwart Russian people and the heroic Red Army that was holding Hitler on the Eastern Front. Wartime cooperation between these uneasy allies allowed Soviet intelligence to dig into the burgeoning bureaucracy in Washington, where its recruits swelled from dozens in the late 1930s to several hundred during the war.

According to transcripts of Soviet wartime cables deciphered by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the Venona project, codenames of some 350 cooperating Americans appear in Soviet wartime cable traffic. The KGB and GRU stations cabled their important messages over commercial telegraph lines and sent bulky reports and documents -- including most of the information acquired by agents -- in diplomatic pouches. The contents of these pouches, and thus the actual products of Soviet espionage, were not released at the end of the Cold War. Much of this activity would have have been reflected in the messages broken by the Venona program.

Between 1940 and 1943 the federal government had screened federal employees for "loyalty" using a secret "Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations" (AGLOSO). The original legal basis for this list was the August 1939 Hatch Act. As of mid-1943, the FBI had only just begun investigating the extent of Soviet operations in the USA. FBI resources were heavily dedicated to Axis espionage and sabotage cases.

Although officially the only purpose of AGLOSO was to provide guidance for federal civil service loyalty determinations, AGLOSO, once published, was quickly adopted by a wide variety of public and private groups, including state and local governments, the military, defense contractors, hotels, the Treasury Department (in making tax-exemption determinations), and the State Department (in making passport and deportation decisions), to deny employment or otherwise discriminate against listed organizations or persons alleged to be affiliated with them.

As various scholars wrote contemporaneously and subsequently, AGLOSO, which was massively publicized in the media, became what amounted to "an official black list." In the public mind it came to have "authority as the definitive report on subversive organizations," understood as a "proscription of the treasonable activity of the listed organizations" and the "litmus test for distinguishing between loyalty and disloyal organizations and individuals."

The influence of the list could be very far-reaching. For example, the November 1956 issue of Elks Magazine carried an article entitled "What the Attorney General's List Means," which began by accurately noting that "there are few Americans who have not heard of 'the Attorney General's subversive list'" and concluded by declaring, "There is no excuse for any American citizen becoming affiliated with a group on the Attorney General's list today."