National Affairs: FBI Scooped

For years the Washington Times-Herald has offered $5 for news tips. Auburn-haired Publisher Eleanor Medill Patterson paid out many a $5, got in return many a 5¢ scoop, many a phony tip, many a headache. But last week “Cissie” Patterson got her money’s worth. From a news tip, a crew of four male reporters from her newshen-house unearthed a story that scooped the entire U. S. press and the Government—particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Cissie Patterson’s Bureau of Investigation, headed by her eye’s apple, tall, lean, tough, red-haired Reporter Jimmy Cullinane, found that:

1) Some 30,000 confidential documents of the Civil Service Commission, chiefly personnel information, had been systematically looted by Harlan G. Crandall, 29, Commission employe, and turned over (for a fee) to two unnamed former Germans, now naturalized U. S. citizens.

2) The records had been hauled in sackfuls past Commission guards by one Lawrence Haynes, to a mail advertising shop he managed; there photostated or copied by ten girls, returned.

3) To the former Germans went names, duties, pay, addresses, backgrounds of virtually every Panama Canal employe; of men who work on the Army’s secret bomb sight; of mechanics who install fire-control apparatus on battleships; of plane designers; of Army intelligence officers’ clerks who file, record or distribute in-&-outgoing secret or confidential matter for war plans, communications, the State Department; names of every U. S. motorboat owner, of confidential secretaries to President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull; names of all machine-tool makers.

At this point, with G-Man J. Edgar Hoover rather red around the ears, FBI took over from the F. B. I., jailed Crandall and Haynes, turned off the spotlight.