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Solomon Adler (August 6, 1909 - August 4, 1994) was an economist who worked as an official in the U. S. Treasury Department, serving as a treasury representative in China during World War II. He was identified by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley as a Soviet spy and resigned from the Treasury Department in 1950. After several years teaching at Cambridge University in England, he returned to China in the 1950s and was a resident there from the 1960s until his death, working as a translator, economic advisor, and possibly with the Central External Liaison Department, a Chinese intelligence agency.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Espionage claims 3 Post-war career 4 See also 5 References 6 Works 7 Sources 8 External links

[edit] Biography

Born in Leeds, Great Britain, Adler studied at Oxford and University College, London. He came to the United States in 1935. In 1936 he began to work for the Federal government, first at the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, and then at the Treasury Department's Division of Monetary Research and Statistics. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940.

[edit] Espionage claims

In 1939, former Communist Underground courier Whittaker Chambers identified Adler to then-Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle as a member of an underground Communist group in Washington, D.C., the Ware group. Chambers correctly identified Adler as then serving in the General Counsel’s Office at Treasury, from which, Chambers said, Adler supplied weekly reports to the Communist Party USA.^[1]

In 1945, former NKVD courier Elizabeth Bentley identified Adler as a Treasury contact of the Silvermaster group in Chungking.^[2]

According to ex-KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev, in 1948 Anatoly Gorsky, NKVD rezident in Washington, identified Adler in the so-called “Gorsky memo” as a Soviet agent designated "Sax."^[3] This agent, transliterated "Sachs (Saks)" in the Venona decrypts is described as supplying information via both Gorsky and Communist Party head Earl Browder about the Chinese Communists.^[4]

In addition to his contacts with U.S. espionage groups, while serving as Treasury attaché in China in 1944, Adler shared a house with Chinese Communist secret agent Chi Ch’ao ting (aka Chi Chao-ting)^[5] and State Department officer John Stewart Service, who was arrested the following year in the Amerasia scandal.

Adler's reports from China strongly opposed a gold loan program of $200 million to help the Nationalist Chinese Government finance its defense against the Japanese invasion in 1943. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White (identified in the Venona decrypts under the code names “Lawyer”^[6]; “Jurist”^[7]; “Richard”^[8]) and Director of the Treasury's Division of Monetary Research V. Frank Coe (Venona code name "Peak")^[9] (who would later be forced to move to Red China with Adler)^[10] supported this view (to de-stabilize the anti-Communist government of Chiang Kai-shek). Hyperinflation in China amounted to more than 1,000% per year between 1943 and 1945, weakening the standing of the Nationalist government domestically in China. This inflation helped the Communists eventually to come to power in China.

[edit] Post-war career

By 1950, Adler was the subject of a Loyalty of Government Employees investigation. Adler resigned just prior to a decision by the Civil Service Commission and Treasury Department. Thereafter, Adler returned to Britain, and when his American passport expired after three years, he was denaturalized and lost his American citizenship.

In the 1950s, Adler emigrated to the People's Republic of China. In addition to his work on economics, Adler was a member of the group translating Chairman Mao's works into English. According to a Chinese source, he worked for twenty years for the Chinese Communist Party's Central External Liaison Department, an agency involved in foreign espionage.^[11][12].

Adler died in China on August 4, 1994.

[edit] See also

• Frank Coe
• Harry Dexter White
• Nathan Silvermaster

[edit] References

[edit] Works

• Solomon Adler: The Chinese Economy (London, Routledge & Paul 1957)
• Joan Robinson, Sol Adler: China: an economic perspective (Foreword by Harold Wilson; London, Fabian International Bureau 1958)
• Sol Adler: A Talk to Comrades of the English Section for the Translation of Volume V of Chairman Mao's Selected Works (Guānyú "Máo xuǎn" dì-wǔ juǎn fānyì wèntí de bàogào 关于《毛选》第五卷翻译问题的报告; Beijing, Foreign Languages Press 1978).

[edit] Sources

• FBI Silvermaster file (PDF format pgs. 44-47) pgs. 130-133 in original
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era, New York: Random House, (1999) ISBN 0679457240
• Adolf Berle notes "Underground Espionage Agent" (1939), reprinted in the Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, 6 May 1953, part 6, 329–330.
• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999). ISBN 0-300-08462-5

[edit] External links

• James Peck: Remembering Sol Adler - an economic advisor to the Chinese government (Monthly Review, December 1994; link to findarticles.com)
• Funeral of Sol Adler (China News Digest, September 7, 1994)
• Foreword to The Translator's Guide to Chinglish by Joan Pinkham (Beijing, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press 2000), mentioning Sol Adler