-Caveat Lector-
The Secret World of U.S. Communism
0n March 27, 1962, the U.S. Communist newspaper The Worker exuberantly
reported the following story: �Attorney General Robert E Kennedy admitted,
in effect, in a press conference in Los Angeles on Saturday, that the
persecution of the Communist Party reflects a monstrous hoax perpetrated on
the American people. He declared at the press conference that the Communist
Party of the U.S. is �no danger� to the security of the U.S�.
For the CPUSA, such a statement from the then-highest official of the U.S.
Justice Department (as well as the brother of the U.S. President) was
astonishing and unexpected. Especially so, since the Kennedy administration
had experienced an embarrassing Communist public relations victory in its
botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba the previous April 17, 1961.
What Atty. General Bobby Kennedy supposedly did not know at the time, but
the CPUSA did, was that the American Communist party then � and back to its
beginnings in 1919 � was bankrolled by the Kremlin. CPUSA sent its members
for military, espionage and terror training to the USSR, maintained an
illegal underground apparatus to steal U.S. documents (including atomic
secrets), penetrated both the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
forerunner of the CIA, and Office of War Information (OWI) during the
Roosevelt WWII administration. It even commissioned CPUSA officials to
Soviet secret police posts to spy on each other and on suspected unorthodox
leftists, such as Stalin�s nemesis Trotsky, who was murdered with an axe to
his skull in Mexico City, all arranged by the CPUSA and Kremlin
fellow-henchmen.
After decades of deceit, the truth about the CPUSA is finally out. With the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the archives of the Comintern (Communist
International), the Soviet Communist Party, and other formerly super-secret
documents have become available to historians and researchers. Under an
agreement with the Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of
Documents of Recent History, Yale University press is undertaking a gigantic
project to publish an annotated selection of these official records in a
series called Annals of Communism.
A total of 18 volumes is planned (in English and Russian editions) dealing
with such topics as History of the Soviet Gulag System, 1920-1989, The Last
Days of the Romanovs, and Soviet Politics and Repression in the 1930s. The
great value of the project is already apparent in volume one, entitled The
Secret World of American Communism with Soviet documents authoritatively
annotated by Harvey Klehr of Emery University, John Earl Haynes of the
Library of Congress and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, now curator of the
Comintern archives.
�The documents in this volume demonstrate that the widespread popular belief
that American Communists collaborated with Soviet intelligence and placed
loyalty to the Soviet Union ahead of loyalty to the United States was well
founded,� they say. �Concern about the subversive threat of the CPUSA and
worries that Communists employed in sensitive government jobs constituted a
security risk were equally well founded.� So much for the Party and its
fellow-travellers� line that �anti-communism was an irrational and
indefensible persecution of a group of American reformers or that it was
impossible for the CPUSA to have engaged in nefarious activities.� Documents
from the Soviet secret archives prove that is exactly what CPUSA agents were
doing.
�Many historians have failed to come to grips with the issue of Communist
infiltration in government agencies or the dubious nature of the Popular
Front alliance between. Communists and a segment of liberals during the
1930s and 1940s, � the editors of this volume note. �Previously, evidence of
the Communist presence could be trivialized or its reliability questioned.
In addition to their own evidentiary weight, they lend crucial support to
the large mass of direct and circumstantial evidence indicating a
substantial organized presence in a number of government agencies...�
The CPUSA, Klehr, Haynes and Firsov pronounce, was �a conspiracy financed by
a hostile foreign power that recruited members for clandestine work,
developed an elaborate underground apparatus, and used that apparatus to
collaborate with espionage services of that power�.
Official Soviet documents that have become available in recent months shed
much light on secret Kremlin activities and directives over the past
decades. For example:
Proof that the Kremlin directly ordered the massacre of 5,000 Polish
military officers at Katyn Forest in 1940 � and possibly 15,000 other
intellectuals, religious and prominent Polish citizens at POW camps in
Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostashkov, USSR who simply vanished after WWII.
Proof that Stalin ordered the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 �
and used �respected� foreign journalists such as I.E Stone and Wilfred
Burchett (both Soviet agents) to blame South Korea for attacking the
Communists and to blame the U.S. of engaging in �germ warfare.�
Proof that the Soviets had extensive information about Korean Air Lines
Flight 007, the passenger airliner it had shot down over the Sea of Japan on
Sept. 1, 1983 with 269 innocent lives lost (101 more than died in bombing of
the U.S. Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995). The Secret
World of American Communism book goes back to the early days of the CPUSA
and clears up scores of celebrated controversies that have become myths of
disinformation over the years. (Younger readers of the Mindszenty Report
will not be familiar with some particulars or names, but the book itself
provides excellent background.)
John Reed, for example, was actually one of the founders of the CPUSA, but
that has been overshadowed by lore of his celebrated book Ten Days That
Shook the World which chronicled the illegal takeover of the Russian
government by Lenin in 1919. Documents from the Soviet archives show that
John Reed was a highly-paid Soviet agent. The very first document in this
volume in fact records that he was given more than $1 million�an enormous
sum at the time�in confiscated gold, silver and jewels to help export
revolution to the U.S. In 1981, actor/director Warren Beatty won an Academy
Award for directing a film of Reed�s life entitled Reds to much critical
acclaim. At the time, the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation argued that the
film should be withdrawn as a blatant piece of propaganda for Communism even
as the Soviets were then occupying Afghanistan.
After Reed�s death and burial in the Kremlin Wall, his widow Louise Bryant
married Roosevelt�s first ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt. Among the
documents in The Secret World of American Communism is a sensitive
communication written by Bullitt to Roosevelt�s assistant secretary of state
R. Walton Moore in Washington, D.C. How the Russians got hold of it, the
authors cannot explain. One possibility is pretty obvious. Another is that
Alger Hiss was then working in the State Department.
Of some 1,000 documents Klehr, Haynes and Firsov reviewed for this volume
(92 are reproduced in the book), the name of Alger Hiss does not appear. In
the most celebrated and controversial spy scandal of the century,
ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers, an editor of Time magazine, identified
Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official, as one of those
Communist party members stealing documents for the Soviets. They write:
�The evidence against Alger Hiss was sufficient to convict him in 1950;
subsequent documentation has further substantiated the case that Hiss was a
spy. Nevertheless, Hiss�s defenders have continued to attack Whittaker
Chambers� credibility and have clung to the belief that there was no
Communist underground in Washington or that, if one did exist, it was not
involved in espionage.�
Some 17 Soviet documents reprinted in The Secret World of American Communism
prove that a Communist spy underground network did indeed exist, thus while
�these documents do not prove that Alger Hiss was engaged in
espionage...what these documents do demonstrate, however, is the accuracy of
the story told by the chief witness against Hiss, thus greatly strengthening
the credibility of that witness.�
Nor do the documents here represent the final word on Hiss or anyone else.
The Soviet KGB and military also have files still closed full of
information. Most important of all are top-secret documents sealed in the
presidential Archive set up in the final days of Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev. Only Gorbachev�s successor, Boris Yeltsin � or his successor �
can release information from these sensitive files, or can keep them locked
forever. (According to Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute,
�Yeltsin, after repeated promises to open the Communist Archives, last
summer summarily issued a 30-year secrecy edict that sealed virtually
everything in them after 1965.�
One document in The Secret World of American Communism at long last proves
that the much maligned Elizabeth Bentley, wife of Soviet Secret Police agent
in the U.S., Jacob Golos, was correct about Communist infiltration of the
Roosevelt administration. Her testimony that she was used by the Soviet
espionage apparatus to collect information from Communist contacts in
Washington, D.C. has long been dismissed by leftist historians as fantasy.
Bentley, herself, was mocked as a plump, unfashionably dressed �Blond Spy
Queen� in media headlines during her testimony to a Congressional committee
in 1948. Newsweek dismissed her as �a New England spinster wearing slinky
black silk�. The New Yorker�s journalistic icon A. J. Liebling denounced her
as a �nutmeg Mata Hari� as if either wardrobe or hair colour had something
to do with her testimony. Even FDR�s wife Eleanor Roosevelt, got into the
anti-Bentley act in her syndicated news column (Spy Queen�s Story New York
World-Telegram 8/4/48): �one can only regard her with regret and pity. She
is probably an intelligent woman. She graduated from Vassar College, so she
must have had some brains�, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote, then went on to suggest
�in the future I should think it might be difficult for her to find any
acquaintances who would be willing to say even �Good Morning� and �Good
Evening� to her...�.
On the other side, there was Judith Coplon who worked in the U.S. Justice
Department and was arrested for turning over documents on
counterintelligence to her Soviet lover, stationed at the United Nations
headquarters in New York City. By conservative estimates, this information
identified over 500 anti-Communist underground contacts in countries behind
the Iron Curtain who were tortured and put to death. Coplon was tried and
convicted as a Soviet spy in a sensational, headline-grabbing trial � and
then all charges dismissed on legal technicalities. She went on to work in
urban renewal and U.S. city planning. Document 78 in The Secret World of
American Communism labelled "top secret" demonstrates that Judith Coplon had
a long-standing relationship with Soviet intelligence. Document 78 is
addressed to Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, who gained
international fame as a defendant in the Reichstag fire trial in Nazi
Germany in 1933.
Then there is Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum and his father Julius,
an abortionist. Documents 3 and 4 in this volume show the Hammers were
�actually an official part of the Comintern's covert financial network� �
meaning they helped launder money for the Soviet government.
Providence Journal columnist Philip Tertian neatly sums up the
Hammer/Communist history as follows:
�In a career that spanned the years from manufacturing pencils under Lenin's
friendly gaze to trading funny stories with a reverent Johnny Carson, Dr.
Hammer built a fortune promoting U.S.-Soviet trade laundering Soviet money,
disbursing stolen cash, and cutting deals with Stalin, all the while lying
about his fealty to the party. The ironies of history: As despicable as
Hammer was, it is useful to note that a man whose business empire was
sustained by slave labour, and dependent on the patronage of Soviet tyranny,
ultimately run afoul of American law by illegally contributing to the
Richard Nixon re-election campaign, and ended his career presiding over a
payroll that featured Al Gore's father�.
American journalist Walter Duranty, a Moscow correspondent for the New York
Times (Pulitzer Prize 1932) covered-up Stalin's forced starvation of
millions in the Ukraine in 1932-33. In February 1957, the Times published
three front-page exclusive reports from Cuba's Sierra Maestra, by
correspondent Herbert Matthews, on a new political Robin Hood he likened to
Abraham Lincoln. Matthews and his hero, Fidel Castro, even had their
photographs spread across the Times� front page. There is no information in
the documents currently available that these two journalists were Communist
agents, but not so reporter Edmund Stevens of the Christian Science Monitor.
Stevens, who served as an advisor to W. Averell Harriman in 1942 in a
meeting with Stalin, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for a book compiled of 44
of his Monitor articles on the Soviet Union. As it is now revealed, he was a
member of the Young Communist League USA and then July 1995 the CPUSA before
landing earlier jobs at the Manchester Guardian and the London Daily Herald.
As for journalistic objectivity, Stevens praised Stalin as democratic and
defended the infamous Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. He and his wife lived in a
three-story mansion in downtown Moscow, courtesy of the Soviet government,
and were allowed to send art objects to New York galleries to sell. Yet, as
late as 1988, a Newsweek journalist could only say of Stevens: some fellow
reporters thought he might have �some way compromised himself with the
Soviet�.
What was obvious about Pulitzer Prizewinning Edmund Stevens for decades �
and never admitted � is that he was a propagandist for Stalin and Soviet
Communism. Documents 81 and 82 in The Secret World of American Communism
make the official connection Stevens died in 1992. The authors of this
volume, it should be noted, do not editorialise on their findings about
Steven's Communist connections. Rather, they conclude: �Stevens concealed
his membership in the CPUSA throughout his journalistic career. Whether
Stevens had an understanding with the Soviet government may never be known,
but these documents greatly strengthen the suspicion that he was not a
neutral journalist�.
On May 11, 1995 Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion called attention
to the The Secret World of American Communism on the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal, headlined �One Book on Communism That Should Shake the
World�. Said Kimball, it �sets straight the historical record distorted by
decades on conspiracy, cover- ups, propaganda, vain imagings, disinformation
and lie�. The day before, May 10, the book was released by Yale University
Press with a press conference covered and reported on by the Associated
Press, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe and
other prominent news sources. Strangely, only the New York Times, America�s
official �newspaper of record� failed to mention the book�s existence until
several weeks later and buried it in a news report on difficulties the media
had getting access to information in Soviet secret archives. This is the
same New York Times who lent the Daily Worker newsprint when the Communist
journal was short of it,� says former Times reporter Gay Talese (The Kingdom
and the Power, Page 92, World Publishing Co., 1969).
No matter. The book The Secret World of American Communism stands on its own
as one of the most important revelations of recent history from the
Kremlin's own, once secret archives. It belongs in your library now and for
future generations. As Stephen Schwartz of the San Francisco Chronicle sums
up: Soviet communism remains one of the great historical issues of the 20th
century, and our attitudes toward it tell us a great deal about ourselves.
It is not necessary to go all the way to Moscow to understand this
particular issue, but it certainly helps.
>From The Mindszenty Report published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation
http://www.newaus.com.au/uscom.html
The New Austrialian HomePage: http://www.newaus.com.au/
Bard
Visit me at:
The Center for Exposing Corruption in the Federal Government
http://www.xld.com/public/center/center.htm
Federal Government defined:
....a benefit/subsidy protection racket!
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
