The Key West Citizen

PRESIDENTIAL RACE

By Douglas B. Cornell

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP)—Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson bore down on the Communists-in-government issues today with a stand that the GOP is making a "ludicrous" claim it could easily end Red penetration of federal agencies.

The Democratic presidential nominee and his staff intensified, too, efforts to win over independent and other voters through a nation-wide organization of volunteers for Stevenson.

Some 200 leaders of volunteer units from 37 states assembled here today for a major political rally. Stevenson could find time only for a brief reception for them tonight at the gubernatorial mansion.

The Illinois governor was busy, among other things, on a speech for next week to be built almost entirely on the explosive Communist issue.

At the same time, he took steps to head off any exploitation by his Republican rival, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, of Gen. Walter Bedell Smith's statement that Smith believes, or at least operates on the assumption, there are Communists even in the hush-hush Central Intelligence Agency. Smith is chief of the intelligence agency.

Republicans seized on Smith's original statement, that he believes all security agencies including the CIA have been infiltrated, in support of their contention that the present administration has been lax in going after Reds in government. The head of the CIA made his statement in a legal proceeding in Washington.

Eisenhower at first was reported to be injecting the question of Communist penetration of the intelligence agency into a speech for a Midwestern campaign tour starting today.

But later a spokesman on the general's campaign train said Eisenhower would do nothing to endanger the security of this country or the CIA, although he intends to keep on hitting subversives in government.

And a spokesman for the Republican National Committee said in Washington that neither the committee nor Eisenhower intends to make a "political football" of the Smith statements.

Smith backed down a bit from his original statement. He got out another to the effect that what he really meant to say was that any intelligence agency must be on constant guard and would be "criminally negligent" if it did not operate on the assumption that Reds have been able to make a penetration.

The general told reporters the CIA never should become involved in a political campaign and that he had sent his second statement to President Truman and to candidates Eisenhower and Stevenson.

Stevenson seized last night on Smith's statement No. 2 and said that to exploit the original one "for partisan purposes is the kind of political opportunism which will never catch Communists."

"A highly professional, non-political intelligence agency is indispensable to the government, whether a Republican or Democrat is president," Stevenson said in a formal statement of his own. "It must never become a political football."

The Democratic nominee noted, furthermore, that Smith was Eisenhower's chief of staff during the war and "a man in whom Gen. Eisenhower has expressed implicit confidence." He said, too, that Smith's deputy is Allen Dulles, a prominent Republican and brother of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's foreign affairs adviser.