-Caveat Lector-
The USA CREATED the USSR starting with Bronstein/Trotsky from New York in
1917 setting out with his troop to take over the Red Army. The USA ran
USSR as a subsidiary until ca. 1990 when it decided to put a end to this
tyranny and create another. Comprende? I keep telling you the USA stands
for neither PRINCIPLE (as in a principled CONSTITUTION) nor democracy.
FWP.
On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Mike Moxley wrote:
-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