In an apparent effort to illustrate political simple-mindedness, Carroll Quigley derisively wrote in his noted (at least by the John Birch Society) Tragedy and Hope, that the "same groups who were howling about Soviet espionage in 1948-1955 were also claiming that President Roosevelt expected and wanted Pearl Harbor."1 In a previous contribution to The Occidental Quarterly, I dealt with the latter; here I will do some "howling" about the former. According to what until recently has passed as conventional wisdom for the liberal establishment, America in the late 1940s and early 1950s was gripped by a terrible Red scare, a period of anti-Communist hysteria and witch hunts. Malicious "red-baiters" slandered innocent liberals as Communists in order to destroy the reforms of the New Deal and impede peace with the Soviet Union. At most, some of the more "anti-Communist" liberals would concede that there may have been a few Communist subversives, but nothing to justify the terrible anti-Communist overreaction, above all the antics of the demagogic Joe McCarthy. From the 1960s through the 1980s, one of the strongest taboos in American political discourse was the subject of Soviet influence within the United States.
During the 1990s, the release of the Venona documents (see p. 49) by the U.S. government and the partial opening of the Soviet archives forced establishment minds to a reconsideration. Yes, Virginia, there really were Communist spies in the United States during the so-called “McCarthy era.”. In fact, it now appears that even the slandered and smeared "red-baiters" of the period were unaware of just how far Soviet Communist subversion had penetrated. It must be added that even during the period of the so-called "witch hunt" there was more than enough evidence to prove the reality of Soviet Communist spying to any objective person. But, of course, if one is going to pass for an "educated," "respectable" person, objective thinking must be eschewed—it's simply not a Darwinian survival trait in modern America.
From Lenin onward Soviet Communist leaders have preached the necessity of underground activities, with foreign governments the key target for infiltration. The evidence for this from many countries is overwhelming. Communists in government engaged in espionage and acted to influence policy in a pro-Soviet direction. Many of the individuals engaged in these activities were Communist Party members; others were fellow travelers, who despite their lack of party discipline, sought to advance the interests of Soviet Communism.
Franklin Roosevelt's diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 provided the Soviets with their first opportunity for effective penetration of the U. S. government. With diplomatic recognition, Soviet intelligence could function under legal cover through its embassy and consulates. The liberal New Deal agencies provided a fertile field for the recruitment of Soviet spies. Many of those who staffed these agencies sympathized with the government planning of the Soviet "experiment" and with Soviet opposition to fascism. This sympathy for Communism increased during World War II, when the Soviets could be seen as comrades-in-arms. That the Soviet Union was combating the great evil of Nazism has often been used to explain (and to justify) the disproportionate number of subversives of Jewish ethnicity.
Soviet intelligence benefited immensely from the support of the Communist Party of the United States, many of whose members acted as agents. Thus during the 1930s and 1940s, Communist subversives, under direct Soviet control, came to permeate key agencies of the federal government: the Treasury and State departments, the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the CIA), and even the White House itself.
Soviet intelligence consisted of three separate organizations: the KGB (NKVD or NKGB--the leading state security organ),2 the GRU (military intelligence), and the U.S. Communist Party (technically, the Communist Party of the United States of America, or CPUSA), which was supervised by the Comintern (the Communist International, run by Stalin). The KGB and GRU ran parallel "legal" and "illegal" intelligence networks in the United States. "Legal" networks were run by intelligence officers working under legal, usually diplomatic, cover in "residencies" located clandestinely in Soviet diplomatic missions and other official organizations. "Illegal" networks, in contrast, were run by Soviet intelligence officers who used false identities and had no apparent connection to Soviet organizations.
President Roosevelt was oblivious to the danger of Soviet subversion. In 1939, Adolf A. Berle, Roosevelt's assistant secretary of state and adviser on internal security, presented the President with a list of leading Soviet agents in the United States, including Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, after receiving this information from ex-Communist spy Whittaker Chambers. Roosevelt simply laughed this off as ridiculous.3
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, however, was concerned about Communist infiltration of the government, and the Nazi-Soviet pact provided him with the opportunity to move against suspected Soviet agents. In 1939 FBI special agents raided the facilities of several organizations linked to the U.S. Communist Party and arrested General Secretary Earl Browder on charges of passport fraud. In April 1941, the FBI arrested the senior KGB officer in the United States, Gaik Ovakimian, for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 caused the U.S. government to halt this early FBI effort to counter Soviet subversion quickly. Ovakimian was allowed to leave the country and President Roosevelt commuted Browder's sentence.4
Although the United States had enacted a number of laws and regulations proscribing Communists from the federal government, during World War II these were only loosely enforced. Members of the Roosevelt administration did not distinguish between support for the Soviet effort to defeat the Axis and support for Soviet Communism. They seemed to believe their own war propaganda: Since Stalin was fighting Nazism, Stalin and the Soviet Union must be beneficent. While some of this cooperation with the Soviet Union was open, other aspects took place behind the scenes. For example, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) actually cooperated with the KGB. OSS Director William Donovan made an effort to establish a formal exchange with the KGB, which would have included allowing an official KGB mission in the United States. Donovan was not pro-Communist, but was entranced by wartime and postwar collaboration with the Soviet Union. Donovan's proposal had considerable support in the ranks of the Roosevelt administration. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, however, was adamantly opposed. Roosevelt ultimately rejected the proposal in March 1944 for political reasons, fearing conservative Republican attacks abetted by Hoover. As historian Bradley F. Smith writes, what motivated Roosevelt in rejecting the exchange was "not distrust of the Soviet secret policy but apprehension about what Hoover and his conservative friends might do." The decision represented "less a fear of communists than of anti-communists."5 Despite the failure to establish a formal exchange, informal cooperation developed between the OSS and the KGB, which involved the exchange of a broad range of highly classified material. It should be added that that OSS was also infiltrated by a substantial number of Soviet Communist agents.
U. S. cooperation with the Soviet Union demonstrated the intellectual obtuseness of the American leadership. While America was preaching a war for freedom and railing about Nazi barbarities, it was in bed with a government that maintained an absolute tyranny and killed millions of people. And even if morality could be discounted, it was apparent that Soviet Communism never intended to be friendly with the United States, but openly called for a Communist-controlled world—a "World Federation of Socialist Soviet Republics." The Soviets were not fighting the war to protect Western capitalist democracy but rather to protect and expand Soviet Communist interests. In fact, Stalin deliberately sought to bring about war in 1939 because he, like other Communists, expected a prolonged war to facilitate revolution in an exhausted Europe, as had been the case in World War I.6
Wartime propaganda in the United States, directed by the Office of War Information (which many in the government actually seemed to believe), presented Stalinist Russia as a beneficent country that was a true friend of the United States. Vice President Henry Wallace even portrayed Stalin's "economic democracy" as superior in important ways to the "political or Bill-of-Rights democracy" of the United States, which brought about "exploitation, impracticable emphasis on states' rights and even… anarchy."7 Given the widespread admiration for Soviet Communism, it can be well understood how Soviet spies could freely operate in the federal government and not appear substantially different from those Americans, especially liberals, who simply wanted to help their Soviet allies during the war and extend that cooperation into the postwar era.
Historian John E. Haynes sees similarities between the anti-fascist hysteria and the actions of postwar anti-communism.84 Obviously, one major difference is that while the alleged postwar anti-Communist hysteria has been a never-ending focus of establishment concern, the earlier anti-fascist hysteria has been almost totally blotted from historical memory. An even greater dissimilarity between the two movements is that while there was substance to the beliefs of Communist subversion, the fascist fifth-column was totally imaginary, and individuals were persecuted solely for their opinions—as unsavory as some of them may have been. Even Haynes must conclude: "For all its sporadic ugliness, excesses and silliness, the anticommunism of the 1940s and 1950s was an understandable and rational response to a real danger to American democracy."85
As is apparent today, the concern for freedom of opinion no longer reigns as supreme in the establishment liberal pantheon of virtues as it (purportedly) did during the McCarthy years. It is liberals who have been at the forefront of restricting so-called "hate speech," which has been made a crime in much of the "democratic" Western world. (Given the liberals' soft spot for totalitarian Communism, it is hard to believe that they ever truly regarded freedom of opinion as the highest social goal.)
Returning to the civil liberties violations of the McCarthy era, it should be added that often even erroneous charges by anti-Communists do not merit the harsh condemnation conventionally meted out by the establishment. The errors were quite understandable. Since liberal policies were so similar to those of Soviet Communism, it was hard to determine whether a person was following a pro-Soviet policy because he was a Soviet agent or merely out of sincere, liberal beliefs. Instead of showing a grave flaw in anti-Communism, however, this would seem to show something seriously amiss with liberalism. In short, liberalism propounded views beneficial to Soviet Communism that were completely contrary to reality and harmful to the interests of the United States. Objectively speaking, it did not really matter whether an individual was aiding the Soviet Union because he was a Communist or from a liberal vision of world peace, support for the underdog, destruction of evil, etc. To combat Communism successfully, it was essential to remove liberals from critical posts in the government. As James Burnham pointed out "What communism does is to carry the liberal principles to their logical and practical extreme…. The liberal's arm cannot strike with consistent firmness against communism, either domestically or internationally, because the liberal dimly feels that in doing so he would be somehow wounding himself."86 That Soviet Communism eventually fell came about largely despite the efforts of American liberalism.
One final issue concerns what constitutes historical proof. Why was it necessary to have new evidence from Venona and the Soviet archives to prove extensive Soviet subversion? Why wasn't this believed before? Why was the extensive, converging evidence of ex-Communist agents, Soviet defectors, FBI reports, and even public documents insufficient? This very stringent standard of proof for Soviet subversion might be contrasted with the rather lenient standard applied to some Nazi German atrocities, which rely heavily on eyewitness accounts in the absence of—for whatever reason—of documents and physical evidence. This says something about the establishment's version of truth. Evidence that would constitute proof on one topic is dismissed when applied to another. In short, the establishment has drastically different standards of proof. But probably the readers of this journal already understand the meaning of the establishment's version of truth.
1. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: MacMillan Company, 1966), p. 919.
2. This paper will consistently use the term KGB, by which the top Soviet security agency was best known, although this agency had different names throughout its history. During much of WWII, it was officially named the NKGB, while earlier it was the NKVD.
3. Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2000), pp. 124–25.
4. National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, "Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957,"
Preface, 1996.
http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/venona/preface.htm
5. Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors: O.S.S. and the Origins of the C.I.A. (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 345–46.
6. The idea that Stalin pushed for war has been bandied about for some time. See, for example, Ernst Topitsch, Stalin's War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987). In recent years this view has been given greater credence by the work of Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun), Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990). Suvorov brings up the more controversial argument that Stalin had intended to attack Hitler in 1941, and that the German attack was preemptive. For a review of this issue, see: R. C. Raack, "Stalin's Role in the Coming of World War II,” World Affairs, 158:4 (Spring 1996) http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/raack.htm and “Stalin's Role in the Coming of World War II: The International Debate Goes On," World Affairs, 159:2 (Fall 1996). http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/raack2.htm.
7. Benjamin Colby, 'Twas a Famous Victory: Deception and Propaganda in the War with Germany (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House Publishers, 1974). An example of some of the effective pro-Soviet propaganda from the private sector includes Joseph E. Davies's best-selling Mission to Moscow, which became a movie, and Quentin Reynolds, Only the Stars Are Neutral. Both of these works went so far as to defend Stalin's purges as a positive good. For a discussion of the pro-Soviet propaganda fest see Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House Publishers, 1974), pp. 299–302.
8. Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
9. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, pp. 52–53; Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History (Washington: Brassey's, 2002), pp. 118.
10. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, p. 454.
11.Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. II, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1956), p. 291.
12. A number of individuals writing on American counterintelligence vaguely alluded to the secret project. For example: Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shactman, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story (New York: Random House, 1986) and David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Ballantine Books, 1981).
13. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
14. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995) and Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and K. M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
15. Haynes and Klehr, Venona, p. 7.
16. Ibid., p. 19.
17. Ibid., p. 332.
18. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990).
19. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
20. Pavel and Anatoli Sudoplatov with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness: A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995).
21. Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, Secret World of American Communism, pp. 18–19.
22. Ibid., p. 326.
23. Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America: The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999). The "haunted wood" in the title is taken from a W. H. Auden poem "September 1, 1939," written upon his hearing of the German invasion of Poland.
24. Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, p. xix.
25. Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978).
26. Ibid., Perjury.
27. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona, pp. 136–37.
28. Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets, pp. 128–31.
29. William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies (Chicago: Regnery, 1954), p. 10.
30. Allen Weinstein analyzes these various and conflicting pro-Hiss conspiracy theories in Perjury, pp. 569–89. There have also been claims that Hiss was framed by elements of the Left—Trotskyites, the American Communist Party, the KGB, the Soviet super-secret agency SMERSH—but these have not taken hold among Hiss partisans.
31. Hiss's main supporter, John Lowenthal, contacted Russian Colonel General Dmitry Volkogonov, who had been overseeing the Russian archives, to check material on Hiss. Volkogonov initially said that he could find no material in the KGB files. Lowenthal interpreted this to mean that Hiss was innocent. However, Hiss was an agent not of the KGB but of military intelligence (GRU), the files of which were closed even to Volkogonov. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, p. 139–41.
32. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets , pp. 29–30.
33.The connection between international communism and international finance would not seem so incongruous to persons of a non-establishment rightwing persuasion. Anti-establishment historian Antony C. Sutton has made a connection between international finance and communism. See for example, Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974). http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/
34. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, p. 45; Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets, p. 124.
35. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, pp. 29–30.
36. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, pp. 42–43, The Schecters maintain that White was manipulated by Soviet intelligence to introduce the Soviet goals into his initiatives regarding the Far East without his being aware of the consequences of the demand that the Japanese pull out of China. Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets, pp. 21–41. Romerstein/Breindel and the Schecters rely heavily on a recent Russian work on this subject: Vitaliy Pavlov, Operatziya "Sneg" (Moscow: Gaia Herum, 1996).
37. Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets , p. 124.
38. Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949), p. 15. http://www.fredautley.com/
39. Haynes and Klehr, Venona, pp. 142–45.
40. Ibid., p. 145.
41.Anthony Kubek, How the Far East Was Lost: American Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941–1949 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1963).
42. Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, pp. 140–50.
43. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, pp. 433–39.
44. Ibid., p. 109; Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, pp. 72–83.
45. Venona Intercepts, "The November 12, 1944 cable: Theodore Alvin Hall and Saville Sax," http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/inte_19441112.html; Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, pp. 202–205; Haynes and Klehr, Venona, pp. 314–17; Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy, (New York: Times Books, 1997).
46.Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, pp. 234–35.
47. Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File: A Search for Truth (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983. 2d ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997) argue that while the Rosenbergs were guilty of spying their trial was conducted in an unsavory manner.
48. John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p. 63.
49. Pavel and Antoli Sudoplatov with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), pp. 181–97.
50. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, pp. 275–76.
51. Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets, pp. 49–52.
52.Ibid., pp. 315–17.
53. Ibid., p. 49.
54. Yaakov Eisenstadt, "Stalin's Planned Genocide," Dei'ah veDibur, March 6, 2002, http://www.shemayisrael.com/chareidi/archives5762/vaypek/VP62features2.htm.
55. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, p. 211.
56. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 287.
57. Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, p. 213.
58. Ibid., p. 213.
59. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and the Shield, p. 111.
60.Romerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, pp. 213–15.
61. Harvey Klehr,
"Red Scare Revisited," CNN Interactive,
http://asia.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/06/then.now/.
62. Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator
(New York: The Free Press, 2000).
63. Sam Tanenhaus, "Un-American Activities," Review of Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, New York Review of Books, November 30, 2000, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13910 . Tanenhaus is the author of Whittaker Chambers:
A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997).
64. Herman, Joseph McCarthy, p. 4.
65. William J. Gill, The Ordeal of Otto Otepka (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House Publishers, 1969), p. 38; Buckley and Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, pp. 9–30.
66. Buckley and Bozell, pp. 65–67.
67. Ibid., p. 63.
68. Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), p. 255.
69. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace?, p. 151.
70. Ibid., p. 151.
71. U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Internal Security Subcommittee, Institute of Pacific Relations, Hearings, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Final Report (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1951), p. 224.
72. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace?, p. 151.
73. Herman, Joseph McCarthy, p. 127–28.
74. Anthony Kubek, "Introduction," The Amerasia Papers: A Clue to the Catastrophe of China, vol. I, prepared by the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 91st Cong., 1st sess. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1970), pp. 30–34
75. Ibid., pp. 1–113.
76. Ibid., p. 78.
77. Radosh and Klehr, Amerasia Spy Case, pp. 210–18.
78. Kubek, Amerasia Papers, pp. 65–67.
79. Buckley and Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, pp. 18–30.
80. Herman, Joseph McCarthy, pp. 109–110.
81. Ibid., p. 109.
82. Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, pp. 299.
83. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace?, pp. 22–36.
84. Haynes writes: "Virtually every one of the tactics used in the 1930s and early 1940s to harass fascist and suspected far rightists would after World War II be used against Communists and those suspected of left-wing sympathies." Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace?, p. 27.
85. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace?, p. 200.
86. James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1964), pp. 289–90.