Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

by Liaquat Ahamed

White also happened to be a Soviet agent, originally recruited in 1935 to the same spy ring that included Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. During the war, along with several colleagues at the Treasury’s Division of Monetary Research, whom he talked into the cause, he did much to support the Soviet war effort and beyond. As the principal Treasury representative on interagency committees dealing with international affairs, White handled more pieces of classified information than any other single official in the administration, including the president, and passed on secrets about the whole range of U.S. financial policies to Soviet intelligence, including U.S. strategy on financial aid to the USSR. He helped the Communist cause in China by delaying payments of American aid to Chiang Kai-shek, and arranged for the U.S. government to furnish the Soviets with a duplicate set of printing plates of the currency to be issued under the Allied occupation of Germany—thereby allowing the Soviets to finance their share by printing American money with American-supplied plates. When these activities eventually came to light after the war, he insisted that he had not been a Soviet agent—he was neither a member of the Communist Party nor had he accepted any money from the Soviets—but had only been acting in the best interests of the United States, believing that the United States and the Soviet Union, allies at that time, had closely aligned objectives. But in 1942, no one was yet aware o...