Laurence Duggan

Despite public accusations by Whittaker Chambers and others, Duggan's loyalty was attested to by such prominent people as Attorney General Tom C. Clark, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Duggan's close associate journalist Edward R. Murrow, among others. However, in the 1990s, evidence from decrypted Soviet telegrams revealed that he was an active Soviet spy for the KGB in the 1930s and 1940s.

According to Whittaker Chambers in his 1952 memoir, Egmont Gaines proposed covert group, "insisting" the group approach Duggan, "whom he called 'very sympathetic'." Duggan was then in the State Department, and became chief of its Latin-American Division. According to Boris Bazarov, Duggan told his Soviet handlers, he remained "at his hateful job in the State Department" only because he was "useful for our cause."

In 1951, the Chicago Tribune newspaper speculated about "several suicides and mysterious deaths" among spies and government officials mostly related to the Hiss Case, including:

On December 20, 1948, Duggan fell to his death from his office at the Institute of International Education, located on the 16th floor of a building in midtown Manhattan. His body was discovered around 7:00 PM that evening. A few days later, the New York Police Department made public the result of its investigation, which concluded: "Mr. Duggan either accidentally fell or jumped."

On December 21, 1948, at 7:45 PM (barely 24 hours after Duggan's death), Murrow broadcast on CBS radio:

On October 20, 1948, W. Marvin Smith, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney and notary with whom Alger Hiss had worked, was found dead in the southwest stairwell of the (then) seven-story Justice building. Just after Laurence Duggan's death, the Associated Press reported:

In 1946, a committee of the IIE (comprising Virginia Gildersleeve of Barnard College, Edward R. Murrow of CBS News, Waldo Leland of the Carnegie Institute, and Arthur W. Packard of Rockefeller Brothers Fund) offered Duggan the presidency of the Institute of International Education (IIE) upon his father's retirement. The IIE provided for a flow of exchange students between the United States and several other countries.

On November 1, 1946, Duggan began as IIE president. One of his first actions was to make the board more inclusive by adding women, union representatives ("labor men"), and African-Americans including Benjamin Mays of Morehouse College. He expanded students to include trainees, entrepreneurs, labor leaders, professionals, artists, and musicians. U.S. President Truman appointed Duggan to the ten-member administrators of the Fulbright Act. He provided advice during the establishment of UNESCO. In 1947, he served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the second session of the UNESCO general conference, held in Mexico City.

In 1944, Duggan returned briefly to the private sector, when he served as consultant on Latin American affairs–a "profitable business."

Duggan provided Soviet intelligence with confidential diplomatic cables, including from American Ambassador William Bullitt. He was a source for the Soviets until he resigned from the State Department in 1944.

The Venona project succeeded in decrypting some Soviet intelligence cables that had been intercepted in the mid-1940s. The code name used for Laurence Duggan in the decrypted transcripts is "Frank" and "19". He is referenced in the following Venona decryptions, which provided information to the Soviets about Anglo-American plans for invading Italy during World War II:

Shortly thereafter, Herbert H. Lehman (New York governor) and Dr. Eduardo Santos (former president of Colombia, asked Duggan to serve the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) for six months. (In 1936, his friend Noel Field had taken a position for the U.S. with the League of Nations and then in 1941 become director of the American Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's relief mission in Marseilles.)

Peter Gutzeit, the Soviet Consul in New York City, was also an officer in the NKVD. In 1934 he identified Laurence Duggan as a potential recruit. Boris Bazarov told Hede Massing that they wanted her to help recruit Duggan and Noel Field. The plan, suggested by Gutzeit, was to use Duggan to draw Field into the network. Gutzeit wrote on 3 October 1934, that Duggan "is interesting us because through him one will be able to find a way toward Noel Field... of the State Department's European Department with whom Duggan is friendly."

In 1932, Duggan married Helen Boyd, a Vassar College graduate. They had four children: Stephanie, Laurence Jr., Robert, and Christopher.

In 1930, Duggan moved to Washington, DC, to join the U.S. Department of State—nine of those years as head of the Latin American Division and four as adviser on political relations. (His Harvard friend Noel Field had joined State in the late 1920s.) Duggan assisted Secretary of State Cordell Hull at major conferences in Lima, Peru and Havana, Cuba. Positions he held included Chief of the Division of the American Republics as well as Political Adviser and Director of the Office of the American Republics.

In the mid-1930s, Duggan was recruited by Hede Massing as a Soviet spy. Duggan told the FBI that Henry Collins of the Ware group had also tried unsuccessfully to recruit him to the NKVD.

In 1927, Duggan began his career by working for Harper Brothers publishers. By 1929, his father, then director of the Institute of International Education, created a bureau for Latin America and offered the position to his son. Duggan accepted, learned Spanish and Portuguese, and toured the region to become better acquainted with it. By 1930, he had produced a report that reached Charles Howland, head of studies in international relations at Yale University. Howland forwarded the report to Dana Munro, chief of the Latin American Division, who offered Duggan a position.

Duggan received early education at the Roger Ascham School in Hartsdale, New York, and White Plains Community Church, where he learned simplicity, courtesy, and democracy. In 1923, he graduated cum laude from the Phillips Exeter Academy. In 1927, he graduated with distinction from Harvard University. (Ware Group members such as Alger Hiss and Lee Pressman were 1929 graduates of Harvard Law School.) In 1930, when he joined State, he took postgraduate courses in history, government, and economics at the George Washington University.

Laurence Duggan (May 28, 1905 – December 20, 1948), also known as Larry Duggan, was a 20th-century American economist who headed the South American desk at the United States Department of State during World War II, best known for falling to his death from the window of his office in New York, ten days after questioning by the FBI about whether he had had contacts with Soviet intelligence.

Laurence Hayden Duggan was born on May 28, 1905, in New York City. His father, Stephen P. Duggan, was a professor of Political Science at the City College of New York before founding the Institute of International Education. His mother Sarah Alice Elsesser was a director of the "Negro Welfare League" of White Plains, New York.