Both Keeneys had numerous contacts with Russian agents and sought to provide them with information, exerting "considerable effort" seeking to "contribute something of value to the Soviet cause in which they believed..." Investigations In 1942 J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, demanded that Keeney be fired from the Library of Congress as a subversive. 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. In 1946, the State Department prepared a Top Secret chart identifying 124 loyalty or security cases on the department payroll. 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. One of these was Mary Jane Keeney. A 1946 congressional report named Keeney's wife, and in 1947 both lost their federal jobs and were denied passports. Within three months, Keeney attempted to leave the country without a valid passport, on the same Polish ship on which Comintern agent Gerhardt Eisler had escaped to the East bloc; the lawyer who encouraged him in this unsuccessful attempt to leave the country was Eisler's attorney. During the Judith Coplon spy trial that year, FBI surveillance records were published that implicated Keeney's wife as a courier for the Communist Party, observed upon her return from France in 1946 delivering a manila envelope to Bernstein, which he in turn delivered to Alexander Trachtenberg. Mary Jane herself admitted associating with Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and William Ludwig Ullmann. In 1949, Keeney was a sponsor of the National Conference on American Policy in China and the Far East and the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, both arranged by the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, cited as subversive by the California Committee on Un-American Activities. Despite all this, by the following year, Mary Jane was working in the Document Control Section of the United Nations secretariat. After Sen. Joseph McCarthy publicized this in his 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, she was dismissed. The Keeneys refused to answer questions regarding membership in the Communist Party. In 1952, they were convicted on contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions before a Senate committee, though their convictions were later reversed on appeal. Later life In their later years, the Keeneys are variously reported to