[3] Offie began his State Department career at the American embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where he was posted from October 1931 to April 1934.
[5] His duties went beyond secretarial tasks to those of personal assistant, companion, and "all-purpose troubleshooter," even accompanying Bullitt on vacation and managing his medications.
Kennedy wrote to Billings: "Offie and I are now the greatest of pals and he really is a pretty good guy, though I suppose that it will make you a bit ill to hear it.
[18] In 1941, Bullitt allowed Offie to accept a short-term appointment as third secretary to Anthony Biddle when he was named to represent the U.S. to countries occupied by the Germans.
[31] Based on recommendations from Chip Bohlen,[30] he returned to government service in September 1948 as deputy to Frank Wisner, head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a CIA-funded unit within the State Department[32] that was responsible for psychological warfare, propaganda, and surreptitious funding designed to destabilize the Soviet Union and its allies.
[31][33][34] Offie had long been a committed anti-Communist, having seen life in Stalin's Russia in the late 1930s and watched the Soviets take control of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II.
[35] He was widely recognized for his work ethic, rising in the early morning hours to speak to Eastern European contacts,[8] and for an extraordinary ability to process multiple streams of information, digesting complex documents while conducting telephone negotiations.
[10] He continued to ingratiate himself with superiors, helping find a cook for Wisner and laying out funds to bring two servants to the U.S. for George F.
[39] He "helped to establish the paradigm for harnessing the services of Nazis, fascists, and collaborators, and a variety of emigre groups and desperate volunteers from the DP [displaced persons] camps in America's fight against the specter of world communism.
"[40] From Germany he recruited former diplomats and military officers to help spy on and support American propaganda efforts against the Soviets, a program codenamed Operation Bloodstone.
[42][43] In October 1949 Offie made sexual advances in his OPC office while meeting with another government employee, an agent in the Army Counterintelligence Corps, who filed a report of the incident.
When McCarthy testified on March 18 before a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigating his claims about Communists working for the government, he described the case of a "convicted homosexual" who had resigned from the State Department in 1948 and now held a "top-salaried important position" at the CIA.
He raised the case again in the same setting on April 25, 1950, adding details about "the men's room in Lafayette Park," asking subcommittee chairman Senator Millard E. Tydings why he had not seen to the man's dismissal.
That same afternoon, another subcommittee member, Senator Kenneth S. Wherry, a McCarthy supporter, announced that the employee in question had resigned.
He had developed detailed knowledge of the workings of the Mutual Security Administration, successor to the Marshall Plan, which managed purchases from European companies on behalf of the U.S. government.
[47] In August 1953, Offie visited the Majorca home of Charles W. Thayer, a diplomat forced from the State Department as part of the Lavender Scare.
"[51] In an interview with conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler at the end of 1952, Offie explained the 1943 Lafayette Park incident as an attempt to destroy him because of his long and vigorous anti-Communist record.
At one point, Offie had to defend himself to FBI agents and explain how, while working as a private citizen, he knew details of the government's planned procurements in Italy for 1953.