Maybe “moron” would be more like it. A few years ago, I found a letter from a former messenger who used to deliver documents to the State Department in the 1930s, and in the letter he talked about how after making deliveries, he would regularly slip unnoticed into the file room to practice his typing on an office typewriter.
Anyway, I thought I would post this document, which supports Harrison Salisbury’s recollection about the lack of security at the State Department (see Lewis Hartshorn’s comment in the previous post). This is from the defense files, and I think it’s pretty clear that security at State was, contrary to the prosecution’s assertions at the Hiss trials, rather lax, to say the least, and there’s no question that stealing files would have been a piece of cake for anyone with such intentions.
