He first gained nationwide attention in December 1949 when he testified to the United States Congress about wartime Lend-Lease deliveries to the Soviet Union, in the process implicating Harry Hopkins and other high officials in the transfer of nuclear and other secrets to the USSR.
According to his own writings, he enlisted in 1917 and was sent to Kelly Field, Texas, and served as a corporal in the U.S. Army Air Service in France with the 147th Aero Squadron under Captain Eddie Rickenbacker's 1st Pursuit Group.
On account of business experience, he was assigned as a Lend-Lease control officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps, with rank of captain.
With the opening of the ALSIB route via Alaska, Major Jordan was transferred to Gore Field, Great Falls, Montana, the last air transshipment station within the United States.
In 1944, Major Jordan returned to business, and although he had a sideline as a public speaker, he attracted little attention until 1949 when interest in Soviet nuclear espionage was at its peak.
[2] Hearing of his experiences, Senator Styles Bridges took contact with Jordan, whose evidence was given to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
He also stated that he found in the diplomatic suitcases letters on White House stationery, signed H.H., to Soviet Lend-Lease commissar Anastas Mikoyan.
[citation needed]Jordan also testified: I distinctly remember five or six State Department folders, bound with stout rubber bands.
Jordan (and General Groves) were called back to testify before HUAC on 3 March 1950, then providing further details and causing several agency investigations.
General Groves did not refute or confirm Jordan's testimony, but noted that he had done what he could to maintain atomic secrecy at a time when the USSR was receiving almost everything it demanded.
He also wrote about many subjects of which he had only incidental knowledge as a cargo controller, such as the transfer of U.S. currency printing plates to the Soviet Union in 1944.
He was quoted as follows: "I know fluoridation to be a very secret Russian revolutionary technique to deaden our minds, slow our reflexes, and gradually kill our will to resist aggression.
[12] Whatever Jordan's later political activism, he gave a detailed and revealing personal account of how Soviet Lend-lease worked in practice during 1943–44.
Rather, Jordan's testimony was dismissed out-of-hand by liberal voices at the time, and later discounted in part due to his association with right-wing causes, his unwelcome implication of high-ranking officials, and his own career of limited breadth and narrow distinction.
[14] The New York Times, in reviewing Jordan's first book, provided a snapshot of the author hereby: "What emerges in the way of self-portrait is an earnest, conscientious, deeply patriotic and limited man – a World War I "retread," as he wryly calls himself – who has got mixed up in an argument whose end is not in sight.