Word: secretariat
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Early in October in New York's stolid old Foley Square Courthouse, the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security began an investigation of U.S. subversives in the United Nations Secretariat. Senator O'Connor, a Maryland Democrat, the Committee's acting chairman, said the probe would be "solely to safeguard the internal security of the United States." The Committee, he promised, would steer clear of any interference in U.N. affairs...
This assurance, however, was little more than paper thin. In ensuing months, the Committee's loyalty check rapidly turned by innuendo into an attack on the Secretariat itself. When secretary-general Trygve Lie ordered employees to be silent on official U.N. business, O'Connor claimed this obstructed the Committee. He threatened any witness who followed Lie's order with punishment for contempt, and labeled the Secretariat a home of subversive activities in the United States...
However, in the first two weeks of their investigation, the Committee had pressured Lie into suspending or dismissing some 13 Secretariat members who refused to answer the Committee's questions on the grounds of incrimination. Under further pressure in later months, the number of dismissals swelled to over 20. The Committee's batting average was high--it had only called some 30 Secretariat members to testify...
...more the conflicting claims, the shrugs, the protests of legalities tended to fuzz up the record, the more they clarified it too. U.S. Communists and fellow travelers were allowed to congregate in the U.N. secretariat because no top-ranking official thought the matter very important. It was, indeed, a case of "mechanical" slippage. Neither Acheson nor Lie did much about it until the New York grand jury began taking testimony and the congressional investigations made the matter headline material-to the infinite damage of U.N. prestige in the U.S. (and vice versa). Never had the case for public investigation...
Ever since Joseph Stalin abolished the Politburo last October, the mystery inside an enigma (as Churchill once called it) of the Kremlin has only deepened. Who really administers the country now, the 36-man Presidium or the loman Secretariat (kitchen cabinet)? On the theory that it is the smaller, tighter Secretariat, Western intelligence agents and analysts last week were keeping an eye on a newly powerful figure in it, Nikita Khrushchev...