Virginius Frank Coe | |
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Born | 1907 Richmond, Virginia, United States |
Died | June 2, 1980 Beijing, China |
(aged 73)
Virginius Frank Coe (1907–June 2, 1980) was a United States government official who was identified by Soviet defectors Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers as being an underground member of the Communist Party and as belonging to the Soviet spy group known as the Silvermaster ring.
Born in 1907 in Richmond, Virginia, he attended public schools in Tennessee, Alabama, and Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago, earning his bachelor of philosophy in 1926 and continuing graduate work into 1928. From 1928 to 1930, he was a member of the staff of the Johns Hopkins University Institute of Law, returning to the University of Chicago as a research assistant and to write his thesis from 1930 to 1933. From 1933 to 1934, he was a member of the staff of the Brookings Institution. In the summer of 1934, he was a consultant in the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury Department; in the summer of 1936 and spring-summer 1939, he was again a consultant at the Treasury. From the autumn of 1934 until the spring of 1939, he taught economics at the University of Toronto, remaining a member of its staff on leave for several years thereafter (in his testimony, Coe says "4, 5, or 6 years"). Beginning in 1939, he worked adviser to Paul McNutt, then head of the Federal Security Agency, and in 1940 as assistant to Leon Henderson in the Office of Price Administration (then known as the National Defense Council).
Late in 1940, he returned to the Treasury Department as an assistant director of monetary research, where he stayed for about a year, during which he was special assistant to the United States Ambassador in England. In 1942, he became Executive Secretary of the Joint War Production Committee of the United States and Canada and an assistant to the Executive Director of the Board of Economic Warfare (later renamed the Foreign Economic Administration). In late 1944/early 1945, Coe was named Director of the Division of Monetary Research in the Treasury Department, serving as technical secretary at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944, he accepted a position as Secretary of the International Monetary Fund in 1946, his successor at Treasury being Harold Glasser.