page_title: Laurence Duggan
section_title: Deaths of W. Marvin Smith and others
hierarchical_section_title: Laurence Duggan / Personal and death / Deaths of W. Marvin Smith and others
caption_attribution_description: English: James Forrestal
context_page_description: Laurence Duggan, also known as Larry Duggan, was a 20th-century American economist who headed the South American desk at the United States Department of State during World War II, best known for falling to his death from the window of his office in New York, shortly before Christmas 1948 and ten days after questioning by the FBI about whether he had had contacts with Soviet intelligence.
  Despite public accusations by Whittaker Chambers and others, Duggan's loyalty was attested to by such prominent people as Attorney General Tom C. Clark, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Duggan's close associate journalist Edward R. Murrow, among others. However, in the 1990s, evidence from decrypted Soviet telegrams revealed that he was an active Soviet spy for the KGB in the 1930s and 1940s.
context_section_description: On October 20, 1948, W. Marvin Smith, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney and notary with whom Alger Hiss had worked, was found dead in the southwest stairwell of the (then) seven-story Justice building.  Just after Laurence Duggan's death, the Associated Press reported:  
  The widow of W. Marvin Smith, a justice department employee who died in a five story plunge 2 months ago, expressed belief today that his death was simply an accident.
  She told a reporter she feels certain it was not a suicide and was not connected in any way with his appearance as a minor witness in congressional hearings.  Smith's death had been recalled in some newspaper accounts of the death of Laurence Duggan in New York City.
  On Oct. 20, Smith hurtled to his death down circular stairwell in the justice department. That was also the opinion of justice officials.
  Smith, 53, was an attorney in the solicitor general's office. Last summer, he figured in a minor way in the house committee on un-American activities.
    In 1951, the Chicago Tribune newspaper speculated about "several suicides and mysterious deaths" among spies and government officials mostly related to the Hiss Case, including: 
  Nov 1947:  John Gilbert Winant (suicide). US ambassador to England, following personal depression
  Aug 1948: Harry Dexter White (heart attack)
  Oct 1948: W. Marvin Smith (suicide)
  Dec 1948:  Laurence Duggan (suicide). Regarding Duggan, like Hiss a former State Department official, the newspaper commented, "There was speculation that he might have fallen accidentally or that he might have been thrown from the window, but it was widely believe he committed suicide."  (Duggan fell sixteen stories with one snow boot on.)
  May 1949:  James Forrestal (suicide), first US Secretary of Defense
  1949, Morton Kent, another State Department official, committed suicide after his implication in the trial of Judith Coplon
  Feb 1950:  Laird Shields Goldsborough (suicide).  Goldsborough was a senior editor at Fortune and TIME magazines and former boss of Whittaker Chambers:  he fell out of a ninth-floor building – and left his estate to the Soviet government.
  Apr 1950:  Francis Otto Matthiessen (suicide).  The Harvard professor jumped from the 12 floor of his Boston hotel, according to his sister because of proceedings in the trial of Harry Bridges (defended by Carol Weiss King, who also defended J. Peters, head of the Ware Group).
  Nov 1952:  Abraham Feller (suicide). The UN legal counsel (and friend of Alger Hiss) jumped out his window when Adlai Stevenson Jr. lost the 1952 presidential elections, UN Secretary General Trygve Lie resigned, and a US grand jury and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee continued investigations into Americans working at the UN.
caption: James Forrestal, another mysterious death
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