Amerasia

Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.

In 1937 Amerasia was founded by Frederick Vanderbilt Field, who also chaired the editorial board, and Philip Jaffe, a naturalized American born in Russia. It was edited by Jaffe and Kate L. Mitchell. Field was the publication's chief financial backer. Jaffe was a friend of Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States. The journal's staffers and writers included a number Communists or former Communists, including Chi Ch'ao-ting, and at one time Joseph Milton Bernstein, who has been alleged to be a Soviet agent. The journal had a small circulation and sold for fifteen cents a copy. It ceased publication in 1947.

Kenneth Wells, an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), noticed that an article printed in the January 26, 1945, issue of Amerasia was almost identical to a 1944 report he had written on Thailand. OSS agents investigated by breaking into the New York offices of Amerasia on March 11, 1945, where they found hundreds of classified documents from the Department of State, the Navy, and the OSS.

The OSS notified the State Department, which asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate. The FBI's investigation indicated that Jaffe and Mitchell had probably obtained the documents from Emanuel Larsen, a State Department employee, and Andrew Roth, a lieutenant with the Office of Naval Intelligence. Other suspects were free-lance reporter Mark Gayn, whose coverage of the war in Asia appeared regularly in Collier's and Time magazine and State Department "China Hand" John S. Service.

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