Charles C. Patton Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

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else, I don't know, but they did intercept his mail. They had a
little apartment house that was way off on the other side f the
island and I remember it was there on the other side of t e old
cigar manufacturers. They took me over there once and were
telling me all this and how they intercepted his mail an how
they took the letters out of the envelope without unsealing it.
And they showed me how they did that. What they did, they took a
pair of tweezers and went into a corner where there's a little
opening that wasn't sealed on the flap, and they grabbed hold of
the edge of the letter and they'd start rolling it and they'd
roll it up into a roll until it was about the size of a pencil
and pull it out that hale, and then they'd read it, then roll it
back up and put it back in. Nobody could tell that the letter
had been looked at. That was fascinating. Well, one day a
telegram arrived for Dr. Steinberg. We called him doctor. I
guess he had a doctors degree in mathematics or something, and a
telegram arrived from MIT asking him to come back immediately.
It said, and I'm reading from the telegram which I saved for
some reason, it said, "To Arthur Steinberg, care of Surface
Division, ASDEVLANT, section Base, Key West, Fla. March 16,
1946. Imperative. You report to me at MIT, Cambridge, as soon
as you can get here. Preferably Monday, March 18. Wire me when
you can arrive. Signed Philip M. Morse, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology." Well, when he got this telegram. . . of course,
the ON1 knew about it because the telegraph office had been
instructed to let them know if he had received any telegrams, and
they talked to me and they said, "We're just going to let him go
and we'll keep track of him at all times, and we'll pick him up
when he gets to MIT." And so, they. . . the air service out of
Key West was, was rather limited and it was awfully hard to get
passage from Key West to Miami. It was always booked up and you
had to get reservations ahead of time, but, what do you know,
when this guy applied for passage to Miami, he got it
immediately. The ON1 had seen to that, and when he got off the
plane in Miami, there was another ON1 person there to keep track
of him till he got onto another plane to run him back up to
Cambridge. Well, that was the end of the spy business and
nothing more had been said to anybody about it until it was. . .
after March 26, which was a couple of weeks later. The whole
story of the Canadian Russian spy business came out in the
Chicago Tribune, and this guy, Arthur Steinberg, was named in
that story as being one of the Russian spies sent down here to
spy on the United States Navy. He was a graduate of McGill
University and, I understand that was a hothead of Communists
people at that time, and he was recruited by a Russian, by the
name of Colonel Zabotin who was with the Russian Embassy in
Canada, and, well I guess. . . I never heard what happeqed to
this guy. I guess he was picked up and either departed, 'r sent
to jail, but anyway that was the last I heard af that C
1,
nadian
Spy story. It was a big story at the time, and it was br ken by
King, who was the Premier in Canada at that time. The C nadian
Government had discovered that the Russian Embassy was in e spy