From 1928 to 1930, he was a member of the staff of the
Johns Hopkins University Institute of Law, returning to the University of Chicago as a research assistant and to write his thesis from 1930 to 1933. From 1933 to 1934, he was a member of the staff of the
Brookings Institution.
Government service In the summer of 1934, he was a consultant in the Office of the
Secretary of the Treasury Department; in the summer of 1936 and spring-summer 1939, he was again a consultant at the Treasury. From the autumn of 1934 until the spring of 1939, he taught economics at the
University of Toronto, remaining a member of its staff on leave for several years thereafter (in his testimony, Coe says "4, 5, or 6 years"). Beginning in 1939, he worked adviser to
Paul McNutt, then head of the
Federal Security Agency, and in 1940 as assistant to
Leon Henderson in the
Office of Price Administration (then known as the National Defense Council). Late in 1940, he returned to the Treasury Department as an assistant director of monetary research, where he stayed for about a year, during which he was special assistant to the United States Ambassador in England. In 1942, he became Executive Secretary of the Joint War Production Committee of the United States and Canada The IMF announced his resignation on December 3, 1952.
Allegations and evidence of espionage The evidence against Coe stems from his being named by two defected spies and
ex post examinations of his career. In 1939, former Communist underground courier
Whittaker Chambers named Coe to then-Assistant Secretary of State
Adolf Berle as a communist sympathizer who was providing information to the
Ware group. In 1948, former
NKVD courier
Elizabeth Bentley, testifying before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, mentioned Coe, whom she remembered as one of several important Treasury officials who passed on information to
Silvermaster. In late 1952, he was called before a
Grand Jury in New York (presided over by Senator
Herbert O'Conor) and then before the
McCarran Committee on December 1, 1952, both of which were investigating alleged Communist affiliations of U.S. citizens working for the
United Nations and other international organizations. On the latter occasion, he declined to answer the question of whether he was a member of the Communist Party on
Fifth Amendment grounds, citing the example of
Alger Hiss's conviction for
perjury. His final appearance before McCarthy's
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) came on June 5 and 8, 1953, chaired by then Senator
Karl Mundt. Nominally, the investigation was into interference with negotiations to devalue the
Austrian schilling in November 1949 as the Soviets had apparently been profiting from the black market. U.S. officials with the European Cooperation Administration (the
Marshall Plan aid agency) reported that a command came via a
tickertape telecon to break off negotiations at the last minute. The telecon, which was with an anonymous person at the State Department, cited Coe in his capacity as Secretary of the IMF as the source of the order. (In truth, the devaluation had been discussed by and was supported by the Executive Board of the IMF.) The PSI ascertained that Coe could not have been the source of the communication as he was in the Middle East at the time, and quickly turned to investigating Coe's alleged Communist activities. Coe, who consulted constantly with his lawyer Milton S. Friedman, maintained his Fifth-Amendment plea, stating at one point that he did not want to see the blacklist extended to include those who had helped him in his search for work. The subsequent report of the Senate Sub-Committee on Internal Security stated: "Coe refused to answer, on the grounds that the answers might incriminate him, all questions as to whether he was a Communist, whether he was engaged in subversive activities, or whether he was presently a member of a
Soviet espionage ring. He refused for the same reason to answer whether he was a member of an espionage ring while Technical Secretary of the
Bretton Woods Conference, whether he ever had had access to confidential Government information or security information, whether he had been associated with the
Institute of Pacific Relations, or with individuals named on a long list of people associated with that organization.
Later career Coe was Blacklisted, the US denied his passport (in late 1949) and prevented Coe from traveling to neighboring countries (June 1953) due to his ties to Soviet espionage. Coe sought work abroad. He moved to
China, where he was among a group of expatriates working with the government. Like most Americans working in China in the 1950s and 1960s, Coe worked as an English language expert. == Personal life and death==