-Caveat Lector-
Published in Washington, D.C.Vol. 15, No. 5 -- February 8, 1999
www.insightmag.com
American Reds Gave Away Store
By Stephen Goode
Red documents confirm members of the American Communist Party, as well
as highly placed federal employees, took an active part in spying on
the U.S. for the USSR.
If you had asked almost any liberal American not so long ago about
Soviet spies in the United States, like clockwork they would have
responded with two major errors, despite considerable evidence to the
contrary.
First, they would have assured you that the American Communist Party
-- officially called Communist Party U.S.A. -- was made up of
idealistic do-gooder types who never for a moment spied for the Soviet
Union or at any time offered any kind of a threat to the United
States.
Second, you similarly would have been assured that there were no
serious Communists, or at least none of any significance, who spied
for Moscow in any government agency or among the scientists involved
in the Manhattan Project and at Los Alamos in the development of the
atomic bomb. You would have been told that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was
badly misinformed. You would have been told, too, that Alger Hiss was
innocent, the victim of an ambitious congressman (Richard Nixon) and
that the whole effort to uncover nonexistent Communists in Washington
had been launched by conservative Republicans eager to undo the
achievements of the New Deal and the liberal Roosevelt years.
These widely believed errors were dealt a severe blow two decades ago
when Allen Weinstein published his Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,
the book that definitively proved that Hiss was a Soviet agent.
Support for these misconceptions further eroded when Harvey Klehr and
John Earl Haynes in 1995 published The Secret World of American
Communism, a collection of documents they stumbled across in the
Soviet Union, followed in 1998 by a second document collection.
Now comes a third source that should undermine forever (but won't)
belief in the innocence of the American Communist Party and the
absence of serious Soviet spies in Washington and elsewhere in
America. The Haunted Wood by Weinstein and former KGB agent Alexander
Vassiliev covers what the two authors call "Soviet espionage's golden
age" in the United States. Those were the years between 1933, when the
United States initiated diplomatic relations with the USSR, broken
after the Bolshevik Revolution, and 1945, the year when American
Soviet agent in Washington Elizabeth Bentley broke with her Soviet
connections, named names to the FBI and threw Soviet espionage in this
country into a tailspin from which it never fully recovered.
Thanks to a 1993 agreement between the American publisher Random House
and the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers -- an
organization of former KGB agents --Weinstein and Vassiliev had access
for a two-year period to KGB Stalin-era archives, access the
association offered in exchange for payments from Random House.
For the first time outsiders were allowed to read the reports filed
from the United States by Soviet agents operative in America -- and by
Americans who worked for the Soviet Union, turning over secret
documents and reports to officials of a nation not technically an
enemy at the time. Nonetheless, it was a foreign power and the home of
a social and economic ideology deeply opposed to American ways and
traditions and a country whose leaders had made very clear that they
regarded the triumph of communism worldwide as an inevitability.
Weinstein describes The Haunted Wood to Insight as "The Canterbury
Tales of Soviet espionage because there are a lot of extraordinary
stories that go well beyond what we knew before we started this book":
how the Americans came to spy for the Soviet Union, for example; their
personal idiosyncrasies; their sex lives; the day-to-day problems of
spycraft.
The authors take their title from W.S. Auden's poem, "September 1,
1939," in which the great poet described Europeans on the day when
Nazi Germany launched its invasion of Poland and began World War II as
"Lost in a haunted wood/Children afraid of the night/Who have never
been happy or good." Weinstein calls the book "nonjudgmental history"
-- it's more the kind of book that could be described as "here's what
we can tell happened from their files. There's nothing shrill about
it. It is the record of what went on," he says.
And a whole lot did go on. Weinstein and Vassiliev write that due to
the often very dedicated work of the American spies -- who were, it
cannot be overemphasized, betraying their own country -- "Russian
intelligence agencies received substantial and sometimes critical
information (including many classified documents) concerning U.S.
government policies on highly sensitive subjects, its confidential
negotiating strategies and secret weapons developments, including
essential processes involved in building the atomic bomb."
Some of the Soviet Union's U.S. spies came from the "best" and most
privileged rungs of American society. Hiss, a graduate of Johns
Hopkins University, is an example. Vassar-educated Bentley, who
supervised a network of spies in Washington, was the descendent of an
old New England family.
Martha Dodd, another of the highborn set of Soviet agents, was the
daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Germany; a friend, through her
parents, of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Dodd sent Moscow the most
secret cables exchanged between the president and her
ambassador-father.
The Soviet archives show that Dodd literally begged to be given work
by her Soviet bosses. The archives also show her to have been
something of a problem: "a sexually decayed woman ready to sleep with
any handsome man," read one of the reports on her.
The archives show that the Soviets had American agents in the State
Department (Hiss, for example), at Treasury (Nathan Gregory
Silvermaster, among others), in the aviation section of the War
Production Board, whose chief, Frank Perlo, was one of the most
productive of spies, and in many other New Deal agencies (it is of
interest that Moscow advised its American spies that New Deal
ideologues provided good fodder for recruitment).
Lauchlin Currie, a close adviser and confident of FDR, was an active
agent for Soviet interests at the White House. In Congress, the
Soviets had Rep. Samuel Dickstein, a New York Democrat, in their pay.
In the Senate, the Soviets could number among their dependable spies
Charles Kramer, who was on the staff of the Kilgore committee (headed
by liberal Sen. Harley Kilgore). Kramer later served as a speechwriter
for Progressive Henry Wallace when Wallace ran for president in 1948
with Communist Party support. The most effective spies (from the
Soviet point of view), according to the archives, worked out of
dedication to communism. The brilliant young physicist Ted Hall, for
example, who turned over information on the development of the atomic
bomb from his post at Los Alamos, told the Soviet agent he worked for
that he spied because the USSR was the one nation on which "my
generation's fate depends."
The worst, again from the Soviet perspective, were those who worked
primarily for profit. Soviet intelligence's code name for Dickstein
was "Crook" -- a name his Soviet supervisors thought the New York
congressman more than deserved. Soviet archives refer to him as a
"very cunning swindler."
Soviet officials also complained about the lack of discipline among
Americans who worked for them. Treasury's Silvermaster lived in a
ménage à trois with his wife and another American spy for the Soviets,
an arrangement his Soviet bosses didn't like at all. No wonder Soviet
archives are full of complaints from USSR agents who declare the
Americans have "no Bolshevik modesty." Interestingly, one of the most
undisciplined of the Soviet's American crew was Julius Rosenberg,
later executed for turning information on the U.S. atomic-bomb project
over to the USSR, who constantly was being cautioned not to be so open
about his beliefs.
Among the most disturbing of Weinstein and Vassiliev's discoveries is
the degree to which Soviet intelligence had penetrated America's own
international spying outfit, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS
-- the precursor of the CIA. In the OSS Duncan Lee (a descendent of
Robert E. Lee) worked for the Soviets, as did the indefatigable Donald
Wheeler, about whom the authors say, "Presumably Wheeler turned over
to Soviet intelligence anything of interest that came to his
attention."
Hardly surprising, but nonetheless disturbing, is an item in Soviet
archives about Wallace. When running for president, he met with Soviet
intelligence's station boss in Washington and asked him to support
Wallace and other like-minded Americans who were friendly with the
USSR to ensure that Soviet and American relations would be amicable.
Wallace also called President Harry S. Truman a "petty" politician and
emphasized how hard he [Wallace] was working to turn atomic-energy
concerns to the United Nations.
And behind much of the Soviet espionage in this era was Earl Browder,
president of the Communist Party U.S.A., Soviet archives show. Without
Browder's hard work, Soviet espionage in America would have been much
less effective.
The authors regard The Haunted Wood as far from definitive. They
regret the closing of Russian archives to them in late 1995 when
Russian-American relations soured. There is much more to learn from
the KGB files, they say. In addition, U.S. and British intelligence
archives have yet to be opened. But Weinstein and Vassiliev's book is
a beginning and it's unlikely that their conclusion will be altered by
anything new that turns up: "In the end, the enduring legacy of those
Americans who sacrificed country for cause ... remains one of
inglorious constancy to a cruel and discredited faith."
Copyright © 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
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"I would think that, if you understood what communism was, you would
hope, you would pray on your knees that we would become communist."
-Jane Fonda, Michigan State University 1970
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