CLOAK AND DAGGER JOB ON STATE DEPARTMENT
In a front-page story April 3, entitled "Passport Chief | Flouts Orders On CIA Phone," the New York Herald Tribune indicated: . what may be the source of the mysterious power which Frances Knight, director of the Passport Office, appears to wield in the State Department. Miss Knight's superior, Abba Schwartz, recently resigned when he learned that his office had secretly been marked for dis- © mantling. Schwartz, a liberal Democrat, had been warring with the reactionary Miss Knight over passport policy. Three years ago she was ordered to end direct connections with the CIA and "especially to remove a private’ CIA line she had then. "
According to the Herald Tribune, Miss Knight "has ordered a direct 'scrambler" telephone to the Central Intelligency Agency installed in her office.
The Herald Tribune also said that it had learned "from reliable official sources that Miss Knight has on her staff at least three persons in ‘intimate' contact with the CIA -- if not directly in that agency's employ." a os
Through these secret links, the CIA is able to by-pass the State Department's own secret service, the Intelligence and Research Bureau, in getting "special passports" or. having ordinary applications turned: down or ‘tagged. ne
Miss Knight: has also been. in the news because of a recent rather sensational exposure that her office had requested the Paris and Moscow embassies to keep an eye on the Harvard historian Prof. H. Stuart Hughes who plans a trip to Europe. Miss Knight revealed that the request originated with the FBI, the agency that serves. as America's secret political police, and that: “such procedures have been going on for thirty years!
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