Spies on Harvard Street

It has been said that the best place to hide a spy is in plain sight, and it seems that this is also the best place to hide an office full of spies. During World War II in these parts, “in plain sight” was 325 Harvard Street in Brookline, the home to 150 special agents of the Counterintelligence Corps. The neighborhood never had a clue they were there.

Today, if you walk past the nondescript building in question, you’ll find a playground where a small plaque can be found in the grass next to Zaftig’s Delicatessen. The plaque also seems to be hiding — about as undercover as those that it is there to honor. It reads in part: “Secret headquarters for World War II Counterintelligence Corps.”

The Brookline-based CIC agents were definitely on the downlow — they wore plain clothing, used fake names, and possessed untraceable license plates and unlimited gas ration cards. Some carried fake dishonorable discharge letters to explain their civilian status — just in case. Their second-floor office was previously a Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Company, so when the CIC moved in during the early days of the war, they simply neglected to change any of the signage (although one does wonder what curious vacuum cleaner seekers were told). The office was apparently used as a kind of home base — most officers came in to get their latest instructions and then worked elsewhere — pursuing undercover leads, taking foreign language courses, learning code-breaking techniques, and infiltrating labor unions. 

What was their mission? Largely to investigate what the army called “The Zone of Interior.” The CIC did a range of Homefront spying but the bulk of the work was in performing background checks on anyone in a position to access U.S. government secrets — including the Manhattan Project that would eventually result in the creation of the atomic bomb. The United States military was ramping up the arsenal of democracy at top speed in 1941 and ’42 and the CIC was certainly a vital check on those who were joining the ranks. 

However, in a 1995 interview with the Brookline Tab, former CIC officer Isadore Zack recounted that at the 325 Harvard office he led two dozen men in a “subversive squad” whose job was to “investigate our own people.” Of course, for many, that word “subversive” conjures up a whole range of government activity in the decades to follow the war, when what constituted “subversive” seemed to be extremely broadly defined. So were the boys on Harvard Street patriotically keeping government secrets out of the hands of bad actors? Or were they part of an effort to push suspicion on loyal citizens with left-leaning ideology or foreign ancestry? It seems it could have been a bit of both. 

In a history of the CIC published by the army’s Military History Institute, it is noted that the organization’s “largest volume” of work was investigations of so-called “disaffection” cases — that is, recruits possessing “a state of mind indicating a lack of affection for the United States government.” The report goes on to explain that such cases “usually concerned persons with German, Italian, or Japanese backgrounds.” Given the U.S. government’s lamentable World War II record of putting more than 120,000 American citizens of Japanese descent behind barbed wire for the duration of the war, readers of the report could be forgiven for viewing any group with investigative powers like the CIC with some suspicion.

The same history of the CIC makes this comment about subversives being investigated: “What damage these persons might have wrought on the war effort is only a matter of conjecture.” While that is certainly true, it also remains a matter of conjecture what damage might have been wrought among the subjects of such investigations.