ABSTRACT
In September 1958, the USA and the People’s Republic of China resumed high-level diplomatic talks in Warsaw. The resumption of diplomatic negotiations came in the wake of the second Taiwan Straits crisis that began on 23 August 1958 when Communist forces began shelling Quemoy, an island controlled by the nationalist government in Taiwan. The Warsaw revelations sharpened an on-going argument in Washington over the perceived liberalism of the new Kennedy regime. The state department’s Otto Otepka, a senior civil servant seen as a holdover from the McCarthy era, had become a focus of the new administration’s wrath after Otepka tried to block certain top Kennedy appointees from entering government service for security reasons. Otepka was fired in November 1963 for passing classified information to Jay Sourwine, the Senate internal security subcommittee’s chief counsel. During the leak investigation, Otepka’s phone was bugged, his safe was surreptitiously opened with a high-speed drill, and his ‘burn bags’ were secretly examined.
