3
NO COMMUNISTS HERE!
A typical account of the McCarthy era is given in the 1978 book The Great Fear by David Caute. As the title suggests, the book portrays a period much like Stalin’s “Great Terror,” only worse. It seems a baseless “sweat drenched fear” of Communists seized America during the fifties. Caute writes, “There is no documentation in the public record of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period.”1 In 1994, McCarthy biographer Ellen Schrecker sniffed at J. Edgar Hoover’s “longstanding contention that all Communists were potential Soviet agents” and pronounced, “There was no evidence of espionage and no one confessed. When questioned by federal investigators, the alleged spies either took the Fifth Amendment or . . . denied the charges against them.”2
Liberals’ insistence that there was “no evidence” of Soviet spies apparently meant, “We were Soviet spies.” Even before Soviet cables proved the existence of a vast Soviet-run espionage network in America, there was lots of evidence. There were, for example, the detailed accounts given in sworn testimony by various ex-Communists like Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and Louis Budenz. There were Chambers’s Pumpkin Papers. There were Soviet defectors who brought reams of KGB documents with them, identifying Soviet agents in America. There were confessions of arrested spies, such as David Greenglass, who informed on his sister Ethel Rosenberg and her husband, Julius. There was the arrest of Judith Coplon, who was actually apprehended in the act of handing a U.S. counterintelligence file to a KGB officer.
“No evidence”!
It turned out that, all along, there was also evidence in the form of decrypted Soviet cables to their agents in America. Though not revealed for half a century, the U.S. government had broken the Soviet cable code beginning in the forties in a top-secret undertaking known as the Venona Project. In the most patriotic act of his career, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan would push through the declassification of the Venona Project, which was finally unveiled on July 11, 1995. After the cables were revealed, liberals became a little less argumentative about evidence of Soviet spies. Here was enough “evidence” even for those who demand a shockingly high level of proof before defending America.
The Venona Project was begun in 1943 by Colonel Carter Clarke, chief of the U.S. Army’s Special Branch, in response to rumors that Stalin was negotiating a separate peace with Hitler.3 Only a few years earlier, the world had been staggered by the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Unaccountably, Colonel Clarke did not share President Roosevelt’s trust in the man FDR called “Uncle Joe.” Cloaked in secrecy, Clarke set up a special Army unit to break the Soviet code. Neither President Roosevelt nor President Truman was told about the Venona Project.4 This was a matter of vital national security: The Democrats could not be trusted.
The Soviets used a code that was, in theory, unbreakable. But by the war’s end, the Americans had cracked it. And when the Venona cryptographers read the Soviet cables they discovered something far more sinister than Stalin’s war plans: The Roosevelt administration was teeming with paid agents of Moscow. Stalin’s handmaidens held strategic positions at the White House, the State Department, the War Department, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Treasury Department.
Only a small number of the intercepted Soviet cables have been decoded. But even that much proves McCarthy was absolutely right in his paramount charge: The U.S. government had a major Communist infestation problem. It is treated as a mere truism that McCarthy was reckless, made mistakes, and was careless with his facts. It can now be said that McCarthy’s gravest error was in underestimating the problem of Communist subversion.
The scale of the conspiracy was unprecedented. Hundreds of Soviet spies honeycombed the U.S. government throughout the forties and fifties. America had been invaded by a civilian army loyal to a hostile power. There was no room for denying it. Soviet operatives were stealing technical information from atomic, military, radar, aerospace, and rocket programs. The cables revealed the code names of the spies, their technical espionage, and the secret transmission of highly sensitive diplomatic and strategic policies.
McCarthy was accused of labeling “anyone with liberal views” a Communist. As we now know, that wouldn’t have been a half-bad system. Contrary to Caute’s preposterous claim that Communists were innocent idealists, the American Communist Party was linked to Stalin like an al-Qaeda training camp to Osama bin Laden. As John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr wrote in their book Venona, the American Communist Party was “a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the Cold War.”5 The cables “expose beyond cavil the American Communist party as an auxiliary of the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union.” They said, “While not every American Communist was a spy, hundreds were.”6 It was a striking admission coming from Haynes and Klehr. In their earlier book on American Communism, they had stated matter-of-factly that “few American Communists were spies.” The disgorging of decrypted Soviet cables forced the professors to revise that assessment.
The Soviet cables indisputably proved the guilt of all the left’s favorite “Red Scare” martyrs—Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Appropriately, the Soviet’s code name for Communist spy Julius Rosenberg was “Liberal.” Because of Venona, the FBI and certain top Justice Department officials were absolutely sure “they were prosecuting the right people.”7 But throughout the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, J. Edgar Hoover risked acquittal rather than reveal that the U.S. had cracked the Soviet code. Without realizing that the U.S. government had confirmed the accounts of such informers as Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley with Soviet cables, the left smeared ex-Communist informers as lunatics and perverts. Now the world knew what J. Edgar Hoover knew at the time: The informers were telling the truth.
Bentley, long maligned the way liberals malign all women who cause them trouble, was known as the “Blonde Spy Queen.” Her testimony was roundly dismissed as “the imaginings of a neurotic spinster.”8 With flawless timing, just one year before the Venona Project was declassified, The Nation magazine sniffed that Bentley was “hardly a reliable informant.” (In 1994, the moral flaws of ex-Communist informants from the fifties were still a burning issue at The Nation.) The magazine called Bentley “an alcoholic who embraced both fascism and communism before she turned professional and converted to Catholicism.” Though Bentley named “nearly 150 people,” The Nation said, “the bureau never corroborated her story. It was inconsistent from the start and she kept adding names and details over the years.”9 So there you have it. After fifty years on the case, The Nation magazine could proclaim Bentley still a liar. In the definitive book about the decrypted cables, Venona, Haynes and Klehr state simply, “The deciphered Venona cables show that Elizabeth Bentley had told the truth.”10
Here was the DNA evidence of Communist crimes during the Cold War. But for some reason, liberals did not brandish this evidence as excitedly as they do newly discovered evidence allegedly “exonerating” murderers on death row. A lot of books, documentaries, articles, movies, and graduate student theses had already been deployed in the effort to portray an irrational hysteria that seized the nation about phantom Communists. The unveiling of Venona was as close to Judgment Day for liberals as we’ll ever get in this life.
The only indication that liberals have even heard of the Venona Project is that they haven’t been as prolix on the subject of innocent victims of anti-Communism lately. In moments of nostalgia, they will sometimes pretend they missed that day’s newspaper and impulsively attach the word “suspected” to the names of proved Soviet spies. But except for a few doddering Stalinists on college faculties and at The Nation magazine, it was: Game Over. The long, lachrymose tales of woe have disappeared. All liberals can hold on to now is the slogan “McCarthyism.” Just don’t ask for details.
After all the righteous indignation at the New York Times about “McCarthyism,” to say nothing of that paper’s vehement defense of Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Owen Lattimore—and for the record, Stalin, in the classic reportage of Walter Duranty—the Venona Project might have been at least as important as the July 2001 story on how, if you don’t count the military ballots, George Bush might have won Florida by only two hundred votes. But when the Venona Project was declassified, revealing decades of cable traffic between Soviet espionage agents and their American spies, it was barely noticed at the Times. Only about a dozen Times articles have ever mentioned the Venona Project even in passing. Not one article on Venona ever graced the front page or the op-ed page.11
The Times showed a rather more heightened interest in the release of internal documents from the House Un-American Activities Committee six years later. In a lengthy op-ed piece—something the Times never accorded the release of the Venona Project—Rick Perlstein complained that the unveiling of the HUAC documents “may have lacked the ceremony” of the declassification of Venona but was just as important nonetheless.12 The “ceremony” surrounding Venona’s release had been a demure affair at the New York Times. No matter. The HUAC documents, Perlstein said, should “share its import.”
Heretofore we had heard only smears against the beloved Soviet Union. Now, at last, we would hear the other side in the battle of relatively equal evil forces: Soviet gulags and fascistic oppression by HUAC. Needless to say, there was nothing new in the HUAC documents and neither Perlstein nor anyone else ever mentioned them again.13 If Reagan hadn’t defeated the Soviet Union, thereby relieving liberals of their duty to defend Communist spies, they would refuse to acknowledge the existence of the Venona Project even now.
TO UNDERSTAND HOW DEEP WERE THE SOVIET TENTACLES IN the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, try to imagine a parallel universe today.
Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s deputy secretary of defense, would be a member of al-Qaeda taking orders from Osama bin Laden.
Alger Hiss, assistant to the secretary of state under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Identified as a Soviet spy in Venona.14
The assistant to the secretary of the Treasury would be a member of al-Qaeda. He would be furiously employing a dozen other members of al-Qaeda at the Treasury Department. When their loyalty to America was questioned, he would leap in to defend them and save their jobs. With his secret al-Qaeda allies, he would intervene to block a crucial promised loan to Israel while at the same time encouraging the administration to make an absurdly generous loan to Saddam Hussein. When Israel imploded, historians and experts would rush in to say no one “lost” Israel. Bush would then promote the assistant to run the International Monetary Fund.
Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Identified as a Soviet spy in Venona. White secured high-level government positions at the Treasury Department for at least eleven other Soviet agents—all named in Venona.15White conspired with his fellow Soviet spies Frank Coe and Solomon Adler to kill a critical loan to Nationalist China, while at the same time trying to persuade Roosevelt to give the Soviet Union a $10 billion loan on extremely favorable terms (repayable over thirty-five years at a rate of 2 percent).16
Despite repeated warnings from the head of the FBI that White was a Soviet agent, President Truman retained White at Treasury and then appointed him the top U.S. official at the International Monetary Fund.
Bush aide Andrew Card would be a member of al-Qaeda, sent on important international missions for President Bush.
Lauchlin Currie, administrative assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and deputy administrator of the Board of Economic Warfare.17 Identified as a Soviet spy in Venona.
The assistant to CIA Director George Tenet would be a member of al-Qaeda. It would raise no eyebrows in the Bush administration that the assistant was identified as a member of al-Qaeda by an FBI informer. Nor that he had honeymooned in Tora Bora.
Duncan Lee, chief of staff to the head of the Office of Strategic Services—the precursor to the CIA—under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Honeymooned in Moscow and identified as a Soviet spy in the sworn testimony of ex-spy Elizabeth Bentley. Confirmed as a Soviet spy in Venona.18
Bush aide Karl Rove would be referred to by al-Qaeda leaders as their most valuable asset. He would push the Bush administration to sell military and industrial equipment to Osama bin Laden on a special lend-lease deal. Years later, an al-Qaeda operative would claim Rove was working for them.
Harry Hopkins, special advisor to President Roosevelt and so described by a member of the Soviet underground, Anatoly Akhmerov.19 In K.G.B.: The Inside Story, former KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky identified Hopkins as a Soviet agent “of major significance.”20
Dick Cheney would be starstruck by Saddam Hussein and would counsel restraint in response to Hussein’s every hostile act. At the same time, he would regularly denounce the U.S. and Britain as empire-building fascists. In other words, he would be Jimmy Carter.
Roosevelt’s vice president Henry Wallace, 1940–1944, who believed “America’s main enemy was Churchill and the British Empire.” He insisted that peace would be assured “if the United States guaranteed Stalin control of Eastern Europe.”21 When Stalin seized Czechoslovakia, Wallace sided with Stalin. When Stalin blockaded Berlin, Wallace opposed the U.S. airlift. After visiting a Soviet slave camp, Wallace enthusiastically described it as a “combination TVA and Hudson Bay Company.”22
Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would surround himself with members of al-Qaeda in and out of government. He would invariably take the position most advantageous to al-Qaeda.
Owen Lattimore, the foreign policy sage loitering around the State Department, surrounded himself with Communist spies, both as editor of Pacific Affairs, the journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations think tank, and at the State Department building, where he kept a desk and was deferred to as the wise man on China (which no one “lost”).
The American ambassador to Iraq would heatedly deny that Saddam Hussein had gassed his own people. He would defend Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program and state that Iraq has “every moral right to seek atomic-bomb information”—including by espionage.
Joseph Davies, a Roosevelt-appointed ambassador to the USSR, insisted Stalin’s show trials were honest searches for the truth. He told the Associated Press in 1946 that “Russia in self-defense has every moral right to seek atomic-bomb information through military espionage if excluded from such information by her former fighting allies.”23
Gale Norton, Bush’s secretary of the interior, would be a member of various al-Qaeda front groups, such as the Benevolence International Foundation,24 publicly lending her name to their events.
Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s interior secretary (and father of Clinton deputy chief of staff by the same name), was a member of the Stalinist front group League for Peace and Democracy. He wrote a letter welcoming them to Washington for its fifth national gathering.25
In the midst of all this, President Bush would be referring to America’s mortal enemy with warmth and affection, calling him “Uncle Osama.” In his inaugural address, Bush would explain that his posture toward al-Qaeda was, “In order to make a friend, one must be a friend.”
President Roosevelt, who called Stalin “Uncle Joe,” said of the Soviet Union in his fourth inaugural address: “In order to make a friend, one must be a friend.”
Bush’s Republican successor as president would be telling a top aide that “Saddam was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing.” He would write in his diary, “The Iraqis have always been our friends and I can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t always be.”
President Truman said this about Stalin in October 1945, and wrote in his diary that the Russians “have always been our friends and I can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t always be.”26
THE PRINCIPAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FIFTH COLUMNISTS IN the Cold War versus the war on terrorism is that you could sit next to a Communist in a subway without asphyxiating. The second difference is, by the end of World War II, Roosevelt’s pal Joseph Stalin had murdered twenty million people. (“One death is a tragedy but a million is only a statistic.”) Even the Religion of Peace has not come close to that record. In far more time, Islamic terrorists of all nationalities, in all their manifestations, have not murdered even 0.1 percent as many people.
Incredibly, if Roosevelt had died one year earlier, Stalin might have immediately gained control of the United States presidency, Treasury Department, and State Department. Soviet dupe Henry Wallace would have become president, and it is very possible that he would have made Soviet spy Harry Dexter White his Treasury secretary and Soviet spy Alger Hiss his secretary of state.
In a formulation that would make Harvard-educated traitors titter, Joe McCarthy called it “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”27 With a campaign of lies, liberals have turned McCarthy into the object “forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.” Summarizing the views of all liberals, President Truman said, “I like old Joe. Joe is a decent fellow.”28 Not McCarthy, of course, but Stalin. Truman loathed Joe McCarthy.
Among the most notorious Soviet spies in high-level positions in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations—now proved absolutely, beyond question by the Soviet cables—were Alger Hiss at the State Department; Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, later appointed to the International Monetary Fund by President Truman; Lauchlin Currie, personal assistant to President Roosevelt and White House liaison to the State Department under both Roosevelt and Truman; Laurence Duggan, head of the Latin American Desk at the State Department; Frank Coe, U.S. representative on the International Monetary Fund; Solomon Adler, senior Treasury Department official; Klaus Fuchs, top atomic scientist; and Duncan Lee, senior aide to the head of the OSS.
The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan made a valiant effort to defend Roosevelt’s and Truman’s maddening obtuseness to Soviet agents in their employ, arguing that since they weren’t told of the Venona Project, how could they be sure?
From 1945 to 1946, J. Edgar Hoover deluged Truman, the attorney general, and the secretary of state with increasingly urgent memos indicating that Harry Dexter White was a spy.29 The evidence was neither flimsy nor ambiguous. In 1945, the prime minister of Canada flew to Washington to warn the director of the FBI about a spy who clearly had to be White. A Soviet defector, Igor Gouzenko, had left the Soviet embassy in Canada, bringing hundreds of pages of documents with him. His information led to twenty-two arrests in Canada. Gouzenko’s information identified White as a Soviet spy. Ex-spies Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley had also “independently and without knowledge of each other’s stories” named White as a Soviet spy.30 In the words of Sam Tanenhaus, biographer of Whittaker Chambers, Hoover provided the Truman administration with “stark confirmation” that Harry Dexter White (as well as Alger Hiss) was a Soviet agent.31 Truman responded by making White the top U.S. representative at the International Monetary Fund.
Just months into his presidency, Eisenhower would take the astonishing step of directing his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, to go on national TV and announce that President Truman had appointed a Soviet spy to be the top U.S. official at the IMF with full knowledge that White had been reliably identified as a Soviet agent. It was a breathtaking revelation. This would be like President Bush instructing Attorney General John Ashcroft to hold a press conference announcing that President Clinton had appointed Mohammed Atta to be secretary of the Department of Transportation after being told Atta was a Muslim terrorist. Truman responded to Brownell’s statement by indignantly denying he had ever seen an FBI report suggesting that White was a spy. The FBI then produced the report. Next, Truman said he had moved White to the IMF only to get him out of the Treasury Department, expecting the FBI to continue its surveillance of White.32 So putting a Soviet spy in charge of the IMF was really a security measure. At least there was a good explanation.
But Moynihan claimed that if only Roosevelt and Truman had been told about the precise mechanics of the Venona Project, perhaps the Democrats would have finally expressed curiosity about the many Soviet spies in their employ. More likely, the Democrats would have told their Soviet pals that their cables were being read. In fact, that actually happened. The Venona Project had just gotten under way when trusted Roosevelt advisor Lauchlin Currie informed the Soviets that the Americans were about to crack their code. Thanks to the Soviet work ethic, the KGB reacted by making only superficial changes to the code.33 (Perhaps a profit motive would have inspired the Soviet code-makers to be more thorough.) Incredibly, a year later, someone in Roosevelt’s White House, “most likely” Currie again, directed that the entire code-breaking project be stopped. The head of the Venona Project ignored the order.34 The problem was not that Democrats were not given sufficient proof of Communist spies in their administrations. It was that they didn’t give a damn.
Even before the Venona Project was declassified, there were subtle clues that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were having staffing problems. After showing up to testify before HUAC with Dean Acheson at his side, Harvard-educated Currie fled to Colombia. Coe pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked if he was a “Soviet agent,” and then escaped to Red China, where he became a top advisor to the Communist government until his death. (His efforts on behalf of totalitarianism were better rewarded than those of another Soviet spy, Noel H. Field, who fled to the workers’ paradise in Hungary—and was immediately imprisoned.)35
With all the innocent victims of the “Red Scare” flinging themselves from windows in the fifties, you would think you couldn’t walk down a street in Manhattan without a body falling on you. In fact, Harry Dexter White and Laurence Duggan were the only casualties. After denying he was a Soviet spy in sworn testimony before HUAC, White had a heart attack and died. After being questioned by the FBI, Duggan fell from the sixteenth floor of a Manhattan building, an apparent suicide. And now we know why. They were Soviet spies, and House investigators were closing in. It wasn’t the “Red Scare” that drove them to their deaths. It was their guilt.36 At least they spared us the habeas petitions.
A few years earlier, when State Department investigators were circling, Duggan told his KGB handler that he would henceforth “only work openly within American leftist circles.”37 Apparently he made a lot of friends. After Duggan’s death, the moaning and gnashing of teeth from the liberal aristocracy almost surpassed Hollywood’s bleating about lost movie credits. Such liberal luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, poet Archibald MacLeish, journalist Drew Pearson, and broadcasting personality Edward R. Murrow denounced the idea that Duggan could possibly have been a spy. Truman’s undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles, defended Duggan. Attorney General Tom Clarke pronounced Duggan “a loyal employee of the United States Government.”38
Though all half-serious people knew the left’s various celebrity martyrs were traitors without having to see Soviet cables, liberals would never, ever relent in their lies.
Most astonishing was the left’s defense of the Rosenbergs. There had been mass protests all around the world over the Rosenberg case. The Communists assembled large crowds in Paris, Brussels, Rome, and all the usual hot spots. It was a real international cause célèbre. American liberals were exuberant. They had finally won recognition and support from all over the world. It was a good issue for them. The American left kept carrying on about the horrors of McCarthyism, but even their fellow Communists couldn’t quite work themselves into a lather over most of the “horror.” You mean he couldn’t do screenplays under his own name and had to fire the gardener and clean his pool in Bel Air by himself? No! That is shocking!
The Rosenberg case was the sort of thing Europeans could relate to—a bookish middle-aged couple sentenced to die in the electric chair and not even allowed to do forced labor but sent right away to some fiendish capitalist high-technology killing implement! It was also important in the background that everyone knew the Rosenbergs were Jewish. The Communist message was: America is becoming a fascist police state! What better proof than the execution of a harmless Jewish couple from the Bronx. The Rosenbergs became the most compelling proof for the line that Eisenhower was turning the United States into a fascist state. It wasn’t easy to put grinning Ike and “fascism” in the same sentence—unless it was to say that Ike destroyed fascism with his resolute wartime leadership. So the left held very tightly to the one piece of evidence that seemed to substantiate their crackpot vision of the fifties.
If liberals ever admitted the Rosenbergs were guilty, they would have to admit that all those people protesting on their behalf—and warning of impending fascist tyranny in America—were total Communist stooges or complete idiots. At least they wanted to hold on to the suggestion of symmetry: “Yes, Stalin committed many excesses—but there was also McCarthyism in America!” So no matter how much evidence kept rolling in, liberals clung to the theory that the Rosenbergs were innocent.
Among the evidence tending to prove the Rosenbergs’ guilt was the detailed confession of Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass implicating his sister and brother-in-law. There were the scores of eyewitnesses who painted a clear picture of a Soviet spy ring with Julius Rosenberg at its center. There was the fact that two members of the Rosenbergs’ circle fled the country upon the Rosenbergs’ arrest. And, of course, there was a unanimous jury verdict—or as patriot Ethel Rosenberg called it, “American fascism.” As Rosenberg prosecutor Roy Cohn said, “To ask for any more, is to ask for the impossible.”39
In 1983, Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton wrote a book about the case, The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth. They, too, had been “idealists,” and fervent believers in the Rosenbergs’ sublime innocence. And then they looked at the evidence and concluded otherwise. Indeed, so overwhelming was their case against the Rosenbergs, even O.J. defender Alan Dershowitz proclaimed it “definitive.” Henceforth, he said, all “reasonable” discussion of the case must begin with the “fact that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage.”40
Alan Brinkley, also then a Harvard professor, said The Rosenberg File presented “a vast accumulation of small but incriminating facts, an accumulation so large (and thus far so uncontradicted) that even the most determined conspiracy theorist will have difficulty believing that it could have been the result of a calculated frame-up.”41 And yet, the title of Brinkley’s book review called it “A Story Without Heroes.” The accusations against the Rosenbergs “may have been generally correct,” Brinkley admitted, but the government’s “tactics were consistently questionable and at times shamefully unethical.”42 On one hand, the Rosenbergs had spied on their own country and turned over atomic secrets to a grisly totalitarian regime that would threaten American citizens with nuclear annihilation for the next fifty years. On the other hand, the prosecutors had played rough. So there were mistakes on both sides.
Yet more evidence of the Rosenbergs’ guilt appeared with the publication of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs in 1990. The late Soviet premier gushed with praise for the Rosenbergs, saying they had provided “very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb.” Indeed, Khrushchev was unrestrained in his gratitude: “Let this be a worthy tribute to the memory of those people. Let my words serve as an expression of gratitude to those who sacrificed their lives to a great cause of the Soviet state at a time when the U.S. was using its advantage over our state to blackmail our state and undermine its proletarian cause.”43
The New York Times reacted to Khrushchev’s stunning if inadvertent admission of the Rosenbergs’ guilt by saying it was “unlikely to settle a matter that has generated passionate books and an endless debate.”44 As long as liberals refuse to concede a point, it remains “unsettled.” Indeed, the Times reported that reaction was “fervent and inconclusive.”45 Liberals think they can defeat the truth with loudness. Unhappy with the way the real evidence was going, in 1993, the American Bar Association staged a “mock trial” of the Rosenbergs and proclaimed them innocent.46
And then, two years later, the Soviet cables that had indisputably identified Rosenberg as a spy were declassified.
There wasn’t much room for any more nails in the coffin of the Rosenbergs’ guilt after that. And still the evidence kept pouring in! In 1997, former KGB colonel Alexander Feklisov gave a television interview in which he identified himself as Julius Rosenberg’s Soviet controller. He praised their important contributions to the USSR’s acquisition of the bomb. Feklisov said, “Julius and Ethel are heroes, real heroes,” and “I don’t want to take this story to my grave.”47 He later boasted that “the Rosenberg network was one of the best-producing groups of agents in the history of Soviet technological espionage.”48
To this day, there are liberals who refuse to admit that Julius Rosenberg was a spy. In 2002, the London Guardian would concede only this: “Recent evidence, from the so-called Venona tapes of wireless traffic between Soviet intelligence and its agents in America and from newly opened Soviet archives, strongly suggests that Julius Rosenberg may have been a spy.”49 There is no comparable refusal to accept facts among conservatives. Even the right-wing militias of liberals’ fevered imaginations are not this insane.
In 1992, ABC’s Nightline was puzzling over the guilt of two engineers in the Rosenbergs’ spy ring who fled to Russia after the Rosenbergs were arrested. Joel Barr disappeared so fast he left all his possessions behind in a Paris apartment. Alfred Sarant left behind a wife and child—but took his neighbor’s wife with him. Once safely ensconced in the mother country, the USSR, Barr and Sarant were set up in fabulous apartments in Leningrad and were paid ten times more than the average Russian worker. They were given their own institute to design technology that would be used to shoot down American planes. Their work helped the USSR develop radar-guided anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles later used against American planes in Vietnam.50 The deciphered Soviet cables revealed that Barr and Sarant were “among the KGB’s most valuable technical spies,” as Haynes and Klehr put it in Venona.51
But in 1992, ABC’s Nightline didn’t know what to make of a Communist Party member fleeing to Russia upon the Rosenbergs’ arrest. In a program titled “American Patriot/Soviet Spy?” Ted Koppel interviewed Barr—who had recently returned to America to collect his Social Security benefits. Koppel treated Barr’s spy status as an open question. As Koppel put it, “You’ll have to make up your own mind.” Barr had been a member of the Communist Party. He happened to know America’s most notorious spy, Julius Rosenberg. And he fled to the USSR the instant Rosenberg was arrested. What evidence was Koppel waiting for? ABC News has accused American corporations of conspiring to maim and addict consumers with substantially less evidence than the evidence tending to show Barr was a Soviet spy.
Amid occasional clips of FBI agents blind with rage, screaming that Barr was a Soviet spy who had done incalculable damage to America, Koppel informed the audience that Barr had “left” the country because he was “pro-Communist.” Koppel quickly explained that being “pro-Communist” was “not such a terrible thing during the U.S.–Soviet alliance of World War II.” Only later, he said, being “pro-Communist” was “no longer acceptable.”
The allies’ compact with Stalin was a military alliance, not an endorsement of Stalin’s murderous ideology. No one took seriously the idea that because of an expedient alliance, Stalin was a fine fellow. Churchill had wanted to crush Soviet totalitarianism back in the twenties. Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover refused to recognize the Soviet regime (though Franklin Roosevelt’s very first diplomatic act as president was to grant the USSR diplomatic recognition, coinciding, as it turned out, with Stalin’s forced Ukrainian famine). Referring to the alliance with Stalin, Churchill said that to defeat Hitler he would have allied with the devil. When the United States made an alliance with mad mullahs in Afghanistan against the USSR, no sensible American would go sign up with the Taliban. In forty years, Nightline will be running a special on American Taliban John Walker Lindh: “American Patriot/American Traitor?” You’ll have to make up your own mind!
Retired FBI agent Robert Royal said of Barr, “He recruited a minimum of 18 of his classmates as Russian spies. There’s no way you can describe the hideous nature of this group of people and what they did to this government, what it cost us.” He said the FBI had identified Barr as a spy. To this Koppel retorted: “That may have been what the FBI concluded, but Joel Barr adamantly denies it, and the FBI has never proved it.” It was a little difficult to prove, on account of Barr’s fleeing the country.
Koppel joshed with the American traitor, telling Barr, “You’re a piece of work, you really are.” Barr was, Koppel said, “charming, engaging, at times bewilderingly disingenuous.” Not disingenuous outright, but “bewilderingly disingenuous.” Koppel evidently considered it out of character for Bolshevik traitors to be “disingenuous.” Barr’s children—who, Koppel noted, “share their father’s love for music”—told Koppel the reason their father fled to the Soviet Union was that he “decided to live” there. His decision came, as luck would have it, at the precise instant the Rosenberg cell was broken and David Greenglass began to inform on the cell. Koppel was still unable to draw any firm conclusions. As he said, “Joel Barr makes your head throb.”
Barr had retained his American citizenship and had even voted in recent presidential elections. Guess which party he belonged to? Guess!
KOPPEL: You voted?
MR. BARR: Of course I voted. Are you kidding? I’m a Democrat.52
Of course—“I’m a Democrat.” What else would he be? He should have said—“I’m still a Democrat.”
Koppel concluded with the mind-bogglingly stupid point that Barr didn’t look like a spy: “He still doesn’t seem to fit into any easy preconception of what a spy should be.” What does Koppel think Soviet spies are supposed to look like? Jim Thorpe? Barr was a first-generation Russian Jew, born in Brooklyn, who joined the Young Communist League at the City College of New York. Apart from being a Harvard-educated patrician WASP, there was no more archetypal Soviet spy.
Only after the Venona cables irrefutably identified Joel Barr as a Soviet spy did the damnable question of whether Barr was a Soviet spy finally come into clearer focus for liberals. Clearer, but still murky. When Barr died in 1998, the New York Times wrote in his obituary, “Mr. Barr was suspected of passing secret information about technology advances to the Soviets” (emphasis mine). Dozens of Soviet cables had identified Barr as a Soviet spy.53 He fled to the USSR, where he helped develop Soviet military technology. If the Times ever produced half that much evidence in support of global warming, conservatives would concede the point. Perhaps the ABA could stage another “mock trial,” this time finding Barr innocent of Soviet espionage.
In 1998, several years after Harry Dexter White’s extensive espionage activities were revealed in Soviet cables, the New York Times published a letter from White’s daughter scoffing at the “flimsy” evidence for the claim that her father was a Communist agent.54 Among the copious Soviet cables identifying White as a spy, one reveals that the Soviet Union offered to pay the education expenses of White’s daughter to help keep him in government service where they needed him.55
These are the people who are indignant that McCarthy was not always scrupulous about his facts. Conservatives are compelled to engage in ritualistic self-flagellation over the possibility that Senator Joe McCarthy may have said he had in his hand a list of “205” rather than “57” card-carrying Communists. But liberals will never abandon their provably false assertions about Soviet spies. Listening to liberals discuss Soviet spies is like being trapped in some infernal freshman dorm debate about the meaning of words. How do we know the cat is on the mat and the mat is not on the cat? “Seeing before me a cat on a mat directly causes me to truly believe that the cat is on the mat. Such causation, though, falls desperately short of the call for the epistemic evidence that epistemically justifies beliefs.”56
In 2002, the Seattle Times described the government’s case against accused spy Judith Coplon as “entirely circumstantial.”57 The circumstance was this: In March 1949, she was arrested while handing secret government documents to a Russian agent. I suppose you could call that a “circumstance.” Needless to say, Soviet cables confirmed that Coplon was a Soviet agent. Liberal refusal to accept any evidence that any person ever spied for the Soviet Union would be exasperating if it weren’t so comical.
No amount of evidence proving anyone was a Soviet spy could ever be enough. Blindingly obvious Soviet spies were treated as innocent liberals victimized by anti-Communist hysteria drummed up by Joe McCarthy. Fleeing to the Soviet Union is deemed ambiguous evidence. Handing secret documents to a KGB agent is merely “circumstantial.” One could have a more fruitful discussion with a paranoid schizophrenic about his tinfoil hat than with liberals about Soviet spies crawling through Democratic administrations at the onset of the Cold War. This is the atmosphere in which McCarthy’s charges have been evaluated for the last half century.