Harry Dexter White

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Harry Dexter White (left) with John Maynard Keynes (1946)

Harry Dexter White (born October 9, 1892 in Boston , Massachusetts , †  August 16, 1948 in Fitzwilliam , New Hampshire ) was an American economist and politician . He was convicted as a spy for the Soviet Union.

White, who came from a Jewish family in Lithuania , worked in the US Treasury Department since the 1930s and established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 . There he was US negotiator under Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau . Like John Maynard Keynes , who represented the English position, White had the goal of establishing a fixed rate system between the currencies, but without the rigidity of the gold standard. Contrary to Keynes' will, however, since he had control over the resolution protocols, White set the US dollar as the anchor currency (while Keynes provided an independent, international currency for settlement in payment transactions).

He is also considered to be the draftsman of the Morgenthau Plan . White was US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury at the beginning of the McCarthy era . Prior to allegations of espionage for the Soviet Union, White was also slated for the post of first head of the newly created International Monetary Fund.

White's lack of caution exposed ties to the Soviet Union , so the FBI charged him, as well as Frank Coe , Lauchlin Bernard Currie , William Ludwig Ullmann and Nathan Silvermaster, as Communist agents. As long as Franklin D. Roosevelt was still alive, they enjoyed the protection of immunity .

On November 7, 1945, the defected Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley called him a spy for the Soviet Union. On December 4 of the same year, the FBI received additional data from the Bentley survey that confirmed this. The results of the VENONA project confirmed this information - White had been given the code names “Lawyer”, “Richard” and “Jurist”.

death

White had two heart attacks shortly after being convicted as a spy. He died two days after the second at the age of 55. According to official justification, a digoxin overdose was the cause of death.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Myth of Bretton Woods , Never Mind The Markets, Tagesanzeiger, August 20, 2014
  2. ↑ The Myth of Bretton Woods , Never Mind The Markets, Tagesanzeiger, August 20, 2014
  3. ↑ FBI data: Underground Soviet Espionage Organization (NKVD) in Agencies of the United States Government ( Memento of December 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), October 21, 1946, pages 78-79 (PDF pages 86-87)
  4. ↑ FBI data: Harry Dexter White , p. 54 (PDF; 39.0 MB)
personal data
SURNAME White, Harry Dexter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist and politician
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 1948
Place of death Fitzwilliam , New Hampshire