Lyman R. Bradley, chairman of the NYU German department, was treasurer of a group called the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee which had been named by HUAC in 1943 as a subversive front. Ostensibly the group had been formed to provide assistance to refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Celebrities including editor Bennett Cerf and the actors Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Charles Boyer were recruited to the cause. According to HUAC the organization was a "front" in the truest sense of the word, channeling funds to support espionage activities within the United States. One of the spies they supported was Gerhardt Eisler, a German-born Soviet agent who had previously operated in Spain and China. Eisler traveled under a faked passport and had several aliases. The organization paid him a a monthly $150 stipend. He also wrote for The Daily Worker under one of his aliases
Eisler, who lived modestly in an apartment in Queens, was convicted of espionage based on the testimony of his former managing editor at The Daily Worker and his own sister, a former leader of the German Communist Party. He was a pudgy, courteous, kindly looking middle-aged man who had been called back to Moscow during the purges after attempting to undermine one of the leaders of the German party. This was a bad move. Stalin was displeased. But Eisler escaped execution by making himself useful, testifying against other Communist Party members in the purges. He then was given the job of rooting out and eliminating dissidents within other Communist Party operations outside of the Soviet Union. Eisler contended that he had left the Communist Party some years before coming to the US. While appealing his conviction, Eisler jumped bail, stowed away to England, where he was arrested but permitted to leave for East Germany where he became a leading figure in the Communist Party, mostly as a propagandist. His value as an underground operative had been compromised by his conviction.
Bradley, who had been active in a number of radical organizations, would become a figure of great controversy on the campus in the following years. He was stripped of his chairmanship then suspended without pay and eventually fired. He was jailed for contempt for refusing to testify before Congress or supply information on the activities of Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Most of the faculty voted against his appeal for payment of the salary he had accrued during his suspension. Before his termination the university had offered him a chance to state his case but he chose instead to organize an unruly student protest on his own behalf which led to a complaint filed against him by the head of the school's student government. The tide was turning against the Left on campus and in the city. In subsequent years the politically correct attitude was that Bradley was a heroic victim of anti-Communist hysteria, Eisler's civil rights had been violated, accusations of Soviet espionage activity were entirely fabricated and Uncle Joe Stalin was a sweetie. Khrushchev's denouncement of Stalin broke many a heart. The great secrecy under which the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and similar organizations operated makes it difficult to determine to what degree Bradley was aware of or a participant in espionage activities. But he was a member of the organization's executive board.