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316 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
Rex Lampman had been in the public relations department of the
Treasury Department during the 1930s. He says,
"Men who had been in the Treasury Department all their lives
were suddenly shunted aside and stripped of their power. We were
told to clear everything with new officials, such as Harry Dexter
White, people who were brought down from New York, and some
who were sent in from China and Russia. Who were these people?
Some of them we still don't know. They had a different name every
time we cleared something with them."
White, or Weiss, as he was sometimes known, was in charge of
this strange task force in Washington. He turned over U.S. Government
printing plates for currency to his Soviet bosses, was named
as a Communist agent, and supposedly committed suicide when he
was due to testify before a Congressional committee. A body was
hastily buried, and he has since been reported in Uruguay.
Ezra continued his comments in Strike: "Mr. Morgenthau (Henry
Jr.) has stated that he did not know what Dexter White was up to.
If his claim contains the slightest fragment of truth, we recommend
that the government trade young Henry for any of the less-qualified
persons it has recently clapped into homes for the mentally deficient.
The government has twice put this product of degenerate
nepotism into a witness stand for the sole purpose of paying him
public praise."
During the time that White functioned as an unofficial Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury (he dared not accept an official
appointment, for fear that the necessary Senate confirmation might
expose his position as second-in-command of the Soviet Fourth
Bureau—top-level espionage unit operating in the United States),
he carried out many important missions for the Soviet government.
Not the least of these was the occasion when he turned over
the Treasury printing plates for German occupation currency to
Moscow. The Russians printed billions of German marks, which
we had to redeem.
When the scandal could no longer be concealed, we changed
our plates. In an attempt to stop the issue of the new marks, the
Russians blockaded Berlin, and this strategy resulted in the first
battle of the cold war, the Berlin airlift. General Lucius Clay, the
hero of the airlift, never explained publicly what the disagreement