Washington Bookshop

[3] The bookstore was accused several times of being communist-leaning; however, it was not operated under the auspices of the Communist Party and did not profess to be, although the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin and publications like Soviet Russia Today were sold there.

The chair of the bookstore's board, David Wahl, a Library of Congress employee (later with the Bureau of Economic Warfare and the OSS), was accused of being a Soviet spy, and a number of books have repeated this allegation.

He was never formally charged, and the portions of his FBI file which have been made public are so heavily redacted that it is impossible to determine what the substance of the allegations was, although it is known that NSA code experts speculated that he was the Soviet agent who appears in the Venona intercepts under the codename "Pink."

On May 16, 1941, staffers of the Dies Committee with a subpoena raided the bookshop and seized its membership list of 1200 names out of the hands of a woman manager who was attempting to leave with it.

[6] This list was used by the Dies Committee to produce a color coded chart showing the membership interlocks between the bookshop and other alleged communist front groups in Washington.