Blacklisted By History Page 3

  Given all these anonymity/secrecy issues, it’s apparent that virtually no one other than the people physically controlling the secret records really knew much about security affairs at State or the facts about McCarthy’s cases. How, then, was it possible to make categorical statements about the bogus nature of his charges? And on what basis was it decided that no problem of Communist penetration existed? These were daunting questions, for which a variety of complex responses would be invented. Generally speaking, however, there was one simple, overriding answer that for many in media/academic circles resolved all such knowledge issues: McCarthy’s charges of a vast Soviet conspiracy and Communist infiltration were so far out, so alien to the experience of most people, as to defy all credence.

  That being so, the denials of the Truman administration and findings of the Tydings panel seemed to carry decisive weight, though nobody could get the specifics on which these were founded. As this not-to-worry version matched what many observers thought to start with, a lack of definite information wasn’t seen as a huge problem. The authorities who were supposed to know such things said all was well, few hard facts were available to disprove this, and the shards of data brought forward by McCarthy were dismissed as fictions. Thus the whole drill was premised, not on the availability of proof, but rather on its absence. This seems a strange method of proceeding, but so the matter was expounded at the time, and so it is expounded still.

  Luckily, in recent years, the state of our knowledge about such topics has changed in dramatic fashion, and greatly for the better. Things known only to a handful of people circa 1950 are now accessible to journalists and scholars, as many formerly secret records have been made public and certain long-lost documents have surfaced. Most notably, with the fall of the Soviet empire, records from some of the Communist archives have become available to outside researchers. Likewise, information from our own formerly confidential files has become in some measure open to inspection. These new sources supply a wealth of information about what was actually going on fifty or sixty years ago in the dark back alleys of the Cold War.

  The most widely noted of these new disclosures are the so-called Venona papers, in possession of the U.S. government since World War II but made available to the public only in 1995. These are coded messages, exchanged between the intelligence bosses in the Kremlin and their agents over here, dating to the early 1940s. Having intercepted thousands of these missives, U.S. Army cryptologists succeeded in breaking the code in which they were embedded, and by a painstaking process were able to figure out the meaning of many cables and the matters they pertained to.2

  In substantial part, the Venona messages dealt with efforts of the Soviet global apparatus later known as the KGB and other Red intelligence units to penetrate the U.S. government to engage in spying and other species of subversion. Numerous cables back and forth concern these topics and also provide considerable information about the identities of Communist agents in the United States then working on behalf of Moscow. This intel was shared by the Army with the FBI in a long-running, super-secret project to track, counter, and ultimately break certain of the Soviet networks.

  A second major source of information is a sizable cache of data from the vaults of the former Soviet Union and various of its satellite states, obtained in the early 1990s when the Communists were toppled from power in these countries. These records include extensive data on the activities of the KGB, the Soviet military intelligence service GRU, and correlative doings of the Communist International (Comintern), the worldwide web of Communist parties and controlled front groups that took marching orders from the Kremlin. Such records have been amplified by the memoirs of former intelligence officers in the USSR, Red China, and other Communist nations—plus a handful of revelations from their confreres in the United States and the United Kingdom.3

  Yet another important source of information—in some ways the most important—is the huge, formerly secret counterintelligence archive of the FBI, which was closely tracking Communist and pro-Communist activities in the United States well before the advent of the Cold War. These records, running to hundreds of thousands of pages, include agent reports, surveillance files, data from wiretaps and informants, and memoranda that synthesize the Bureau’s major findings on its cases. These materials have become in part available in recent decades through Freedom of Information requests and legal actions. And while they are often heavily censored, they are a gold mine of information.

  There are still other sources to be noted, but these are the main ones. And what they reveal about the clandestine Cold War record is remarkably consistent. Severally and jointly, all of them tell us that the Soviet Union was running a worldwide espionage and influence operation aimed at infiltrating the societies and governments of the West. These efforts were geared to obtaining diplomatic and other official information useful to the Kremlin, securing weapons technology and data, acquiring industrial know-how, and influencing the policies of target nations in favor of the Soviet interest. In the United States specifically, there was indeed an extensive Soviet effort to penetrate our institutions for all these reasons, and this was in many ways successful.

  Also confirmed by the new materials is something known from other sources but frequently contested: that the Communist Party USA was a faithful creature of the Soviet Union. Far from being mere indigenous radicals working for peace and social justice, as sometimes argued, the party and its members were subservient tools of Moscow—and those who weren’t subservient didn’t stay very long as members. The party was funded by the USSR, sent its delegates to Russia to be vetted and receive instructions, and was withal a functioning part of the Kremlin apparatus, enmeshed in spying, policy sabotage and disinformation projects at the behest of Stalin and his agents.

  From a composite of all these data, it’s evident the Soviet/Communist operation in the United States, as elsewhere, was vast, sophisticated, and effective, nowhere more so than in seeking positions of official influence. The Red networks reached into virtually every important aspect of the U.S. government, up to very high levels, the State Department notably included. All of which was obviously congruent with the warnings of McCarthy and others who sounded the alarm about such matters in the late 1940s and early ’50s. There was in fact an immense conspiracy afoot, there were secret Communists burrowing in the woodwork, and these Communists were, in case after case, devoted agents of the Soviet Union.

  None of this necessarily means McCarthy was right about specific issues or individuals, which is a separate matter. It would have been possible for him to have had the bigger picture right, more or less, but to have erred as to details (a formula sometimes heard in discussion of these topics). What the disclosures do mean is that the whole question of his cases needs to be reexamined in the light of the new information, and can’t be dismissed out of hand with sweeping statements about the absurdity of the larger thesis.

  However, there has to date been no revaluation of McCarthy’s cases, or effort to reassess his reputation, based on the new disclosures. Despite occasional suggestions that he might have been on to something, the standard treatment of McCarthy and his charges rolls on today as vigorously as ever. Indeed, the usual negative view not only prevails but is reinforced in some excellent studies of Venona, the Soviet archival sources, and other now-available records. These comments are usually dicta, without much indication that the authors have made any particular study of McCarthy. To all appearances, these writers have simply rephrased the usual version of the story before proceeding on to the main business of their own researches.

  Such reluctance to tackle the McCarthy question in the light of the new information may seem odd, but is understandable in context. “McCarthyism” is the third rail of Cold War historiography—and of our political discourse in general—and any contact with it could prove fatal to writers trying to get their work accepted in academic or mainstream media circles. It’s hard enough trying to rewrite the larger history of the East-West str
uggle and of pro-Communist infiltration on the home front, without the extra burden, God forbid, of reassessing the untouchable likes of Joe McCarthy.*4

  In attempting such reassessment here, we are fortunate that still other records are now also available for viewing. The most significant of these are several tranches of McCarthy papers that by some miracle have survived the decades—including lists naming his anonymous suspects, backup files pertaining to these, and related data on other of his cases. In addition, there is a large amount of information on the McCarthy suspects strewn throughout the records of the FBI. Other useful databases include the personal files of two of McCarthy’s main antagonists in the Senate, Maryland’s Millard Tydings and Connecticut’s William Benton. The Tydings papers are of special interest, as they include entries that can be cross-checked with McCarthy’s records, plus data on security issues that Tydings was surreptitiously receiving from the State Department at the height of the McCarthy furor.4*5

  Any attempted revaluation of McCarthy and his charges is of course very much a matter of specifics, a great number of which—despite lacunae in the records—can be extracted from these sources. And while no summary can possibly do justice to the complex reality of the story, a brief synopsis of what happened on security matters in the federal government before the advent of McCarthy may be helpful in seeing how the infiltration problem came to be and produced the ferocious battles that rocked the country in the 1950s.

  By far the most important factor in this sequence was the political astigmatism that prevailed in official circles beginning in the early to mid-1930s and extending—with one notable hiatus—up through the end of World War II. In this roughly ten-year span, Communist entry into the federal government was typically viewed as no big deal, and was thus a relatively easy matter for the comrades to accomplish. Because of the ideological atmospherics of the depression and the war years, few U.S. officials seemed to be concerned about such penetration—though there were some nominal safeguards against it—and in certain instances it was actively encouraged. The Communists and their fellow travelers were prompt to take advantage of these conditions. That’s where the problems reflected in Venona and other intelligence archives came from.

  While many in the federal government were blithely ignorant of such infiltration or considered it of small importance, there were investigative agencies that saw it in a different light. One such was the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which in 1938 began monitoring, in sporadic fashion, Communist or pro-Communist penetration of federal programs and departments. Another was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also began tracking the comrades closely at this era. From the early 1940s onward, the FBI picked up on numerous attempts by the Communist Party and Soviet agents to infiltrate official agencies and programs, there to engage in theft of secrets, policy sabotage, and pro-Red propaganda.

  From these investigations, the Bureau assembled a huge mass of data about the security problem, the places where it was most acute, and a considerable list of suspects on the federal payroll. Beginning in 1942, innumerable FBI reports about these matters were presented to high officials, naming identified Soviet agents, Communist Party members, and fellow travelers in a host of federal agencies. Though the information was extensive, nothing much was done about it at the time or for some while to follow. In many instances, the Bureau reports were challenged or ignored, in others dealt with in hesitant manner. In few cases was there decisive action.

  All these responses would be manifest in the U.S. State Department, which inherited via postwar merger hundreds of cases that had developed in the Office of Strategic Services, Office of War Information, and other wartime units where security was especially lax and the penetration most extensive. This merger was of utmost importance in the security troubles that developed later, as the majority of the suspects who turned up at State were alumni of the wartime bureaus. Security officials in the department were uncertain how to deal with this enormous problem, divided in their views about it, and often deadlocked on handling cases. The net outcome was a series of subliminal, halfway measures that got rid of some of the most egregious suspects but left still others on the payroll.

  Inevitably, information about all this would make its way to Congress. In the period 1946–48, several flagrant security cases at State and elsewhere became known to members of the House and Senate, who exerted pressures behind the scenes to have some of the more obvious suspects ousted. There then followed a series of congressional investigations, the most famous the Hiss-Chambers case that surfaced in the summer of 1948. At this point, however, congressional efforts to learn more about the problem would be stalled out by secrecy orders from President Truman, denying FBI and other executive data on security problems to members of the Congress. Investigation of State Department and other cases was accordingly stymied, and the whole matter was left hanging behind a veil of omerta and denial.

  By accident of circumstance and timing, all these combustible elements would come together and reach their flashpoint with the arrival on the scene of the virtually unknown Senator Joe McCarthy in the winter of 1950. As the records clearly show, his lists of cases and much of his information about subversion in the federal government were derived from rosters previously put together by the FBI, State Department security screeners, and some of his congressional colleagues. In most instances, the dossiers had simply been sitting there for two years or more when McCarthy came along and found them. Likewise, the secrecy policy that shrouded the facts about the cases, and would be a huge McCarthy issue, had long been a grievance to the Congress.

  McCarthy thus touched off an explosion that had been years in the making. In so doing, he blew the lid off some major security cases, foremost among them the long-buried Amerasia scandal, in which hundreds of official documents had been funneled to this pro-Communist publication and the facts about the matter hidden from the public. Linked to this were still other cases tied to events in Asia and the Far East division of the State Department, which harbored many of McCarthy’s suspects. As all this followed closely in the wake of the Communist takeover of China in late 1949, McCarthy’s charges of pro-Red infiltration occurred at a time when the American people were asking questions about that debacle and the issue of China was front and center.

  Still other aspects of McCarthy’s timing would give his charges even greater traction. A few weeks before the initial McCarthy speeches on the infiltration problem, Alger Hiss had been found guilty of lying about his connection to former Soviet espionage courier Whittaker Chambers. The Hiss verdict convinced large sectors of the public, if not the intelligentsia, that there had indeed been pro-Soviet infiltration of the State Department, contra many denials and obfuscations. And while anti-McCarthy spokesmen would treat Hiss as a mere unfortunate aberration, the thought occurred to others that if there had been one Soviet agent on the payroll at State, there might well have been more than one, possibly a great many more, just as McCarthy was contending.

  Adding to the build-up of concern about security matters was the case of Judith Coplon, an employee of the Justice Department arrested in 1949 for passing secret data to Soviet official Valentin Gubitchev. Early in 1950, also, contemporaneous with the verdict in the Hiss case, nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs would under tough questioning in England confess that he had been an atom spy for Moscow. And although the case was a British legal matter, it had dire implications for the United States, as Fuchs had spent considerable time at America’s secret nuclear project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It would prove to be but one of many instances in which U.S. and British security woes crisscrossed and interacted.

  As the first Senate hearings provoked by McCarthy neared their conclusion in the summer of 1950, there would occur an even more traumatic event that underscored his message. In late June, the armies of Communist North Korea launched an invasion of the non-Communist South, and in a matter of days the United States would be embroiled in a shooting war with the Reds of Asia. Short term,
the shock of the invasion eclipsed McCarthy in the headlines and showcased President Truman in a Communist-fighting guise quite different from earlier U.S. policy in the region. Otherwise, the war served to make McCarthy’s charges seem more salient. Equally important, what had been merely a Cold War was now armed conflict in the open, and anti-Communist feeling in the country not unnaturally ran high.

  While anti-Communism per se was McCarthy’s central issue, the secrecy question would be from the beginning a strong subdominant theme, and crucial to the story. Nor was such secrecy confined to withholding data needed to judge McCarthy’s charges; it affected nearly every other facet of the struggle, from early New Deal efforts to obscure the problem, to the felonious cover-up of Amerasia, to many other topics touched on in the conventional histories. In nearly all such cases, there is a jarring contrast between the accepted version of events and what is actually in the records.

  The reasons for all this secrecy were several, but one motive that led all the rest stands out clearly from the data. Officials at the White House, State Department, and elsewhere in the government weren’t eager to have the unvarnished facts about the level of Communist penetration on their watch, and their failure to do much about it, set forth clearly before the nation. Joe McCarthy, by some quirk of fate, managed to focus the blazing spotlight of public notice on these issues in a way nobody had ever done before him. He and his charges were thus viewed in certain quarters as a serious menace to be dealt with quickly, and in most decisive fashion. And so in fact they would be.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Caveman in the Sewer