- Joseph Milton Bernstein
Joseph Milton Bernstein was an American accused of spying for the
Soviet Union .Bernstein allegedly recruited his fellow Communist
T.A. Bisson who had stopped working at theBoard of Economic Warfare (BEW) and began working in theInstitute of Pacific Relations (IPR) and in the editorial offices of Bernstein’s periodical "Amerasia ". Bisson passed to Bernstein copies of four documents: (a) his own report for BEW with his views on working out a plan for shipment of American troops to China; (b) a report by the Chinese embassy in Washington to its government in China; (c) a brief BEW report of April 1943 on a general evaluation of the forces of the sides on the Soviet-German front; and (d) a report by the American consul in Vladivostok.Bernstein is supposed to have functioned as the contact between Soviet Military Intelligence (
GRU ) andPhilip Keeney of theOffice of Strategic Services (OSS) and his wife,Mary Jane Keeney of theBoard of Economic Warfare and later theUnited Nations .In 1945 the
Office of Strategic Services Security Division and theFBI searched the offices of the magazine "Amerasia", which was suspected of holding classified government documents. The staff of the publication included accused Communist spies and agents, including Joseph Bernstein. In subsequent years, the case resulted in several convictions, none major, and a number of congressional hearings were held on the case.Bernstein's code with the GRU and in the
Venona project is "MARQUIS".Source
* John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America," Yale University Press
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