A fascinating sidelight of the time of the Bretton Woods conference is that the Soviet Union had not only its own delegation to give it information about American positions on various issues related to international finance; it also had several Americans.
Harry Dexter White, Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury and the chief American negotiator at Bretton Woods, was not formally a spy in the sense of being on the Soviet payroll, taking orders originating from Soviet intelligence agents, or regularly reporting to a spy runner. He did, however, illegally pass classified information to the Soviets, and he used his position to protect persons suspected of espionage and later revealed to have been spies. He may have made his first direct contact with a Soviet spy runner at Bretton Woods. My next post will have more to say about White’s activities, drawn from a minor source I came across in my research that to my knowledge has not so far been used.
N. Gregory Silvermaster, an assistant in the U.S. delegation to Bretton Woods, had been born in Russia. At the time of the conference he was working at the Treasury Department. He was the head of a spy ring that reached into the White House, War Department, Department of Justice, and Department of Agriculture.
Two other spies were members of the conference secretariat rather than the American delegation. V. Frank Coe was the Technical Secretary General, the second-highest official in the secretariat. His regular job was as an assistant administrator in the U.S. Foreign Economic Administration, which gave foreign aid.
William Ludwig “Lud” Ullmann had been Harry Dexter White’s assistant before being drafted into the U.S. Army, where he became a captain.
White is the only one of these who appears in the Bretton Woods transcripts.
The Soviet Union’s well-placed spies at Bretton Woods ultimately yielded it no advantage connected with the conference. Although the Soviet Union signed the IMF and World Bank agreements, indicating its potential willingness to join, it later decided not to join. White and Coe later became high-level officials of the IMF in its early days.
(For more information, see two books by John Earl Haynes and coauthors: Venona [1999] and Spies [2009].)