[1] The Keeneys moved to Berkeley, California, where they became members of the Marin County CPUSA Club, according to Mary Jane's diaries.
[6] As he was not a librarian, the American Library Association (ALA) opposed MacLeish's candidacy, but when FDR made his appointment, the PLC candidate got the nod.
During the Hitler-Stalin pact, the PLC sent a letter to FDR urging him not to aid Poland, France or the United Kingdom, all fighting for their lives under the Nazi onslaught.
[4] The Keeneys had a long list of political affiliations with alleged "Communist fronts" such as the Washington Book Shop,[9] identified in 1944 by Biddle[10] and in 1948 by Truman administration Attorney General Tom Clark[11] as a subversive organization.
In 1940, "Keeney and his wife were signed on apparently by the Neighbors,"—code name for Soviet military intelligence (GRU)—according to a 1944 report by NKVD agent Sergey Kurnikov.
[15] In late 1945 he was hired as a social science researcher in the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Tokyo in occupied Japan.
After investigating the Librarian, Archibald MacLeish, concluded that there was no evidence to support the charge and, when challenged, Hoover did not provide any and Keeney was retained.
Later that year, State Department official Samuel Klaus prepared a 106-page confidential memo summarizing security data on each of the cases listed on the chart.
[3] In their later years, the Keeneys are variously reported to have founded and run a cinema club in Washington, D.C. between 1952 and 1958, showing art films, and reportedly opened a beatnik theatre in Greenwich Village called Club Cinema to air mostly foreign-language films with subtitles, with occasional folksingers or poetry readings.
After the National Security Agency declassified the Venona project in 1995, John Earl Haynes, Cold War historian in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, identified Philip Keeney with the code name "Bredan.