Jewish Reports of “communist Infiltration” on Refuge Ships Received by State Dept

A spokesman for the State Department today told newsmen that the U.S. Government has unofficially received from the British Government Information concerning alleged infiltration of Communist agents among the 15,000 passengers on the immigrant ships Pan York and Pan Crescent which carried visa less Jewish refugees to Palestine. He declined to say whether the State Department had any independent information on the subject.

(Moshe Shertok, head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, described this “information” as ”fantastic and malicious untruths.” He accused Britain of “attempting to mobilize American opinion against the establishment of a Jewish state by playing on American, susceptibilities regarding Communists. He emphasized that the Jews on the two ships were carefully screened prior to their departure from Rumania and that the Jewish Communist press in Rumania protested their departure.)

The question of implementing the Palestine partition plan was injected into a hearing on the oil situation before the House Armed Services Sub-Committee this morning but a witness, James Terry Duce, vice-president of the Arabian American Oil Company, declined to say whether he would recommend that the partition plan not be implemented in the interests of safeguarding American middle eastern oil supply. This was a political matter, he said.