CNN Cold War: Comrades 1917-1945 (a good introductory overview)
CNN Cold War: Iron Curtain 1945-1947– Documentary
George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” to the State Department
“The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (1947) — George Kennan article
CNN Cold War: Marshall Plan 1947-1952 – Documentary
Col. L Fletcher Prouty: Secret Team – The Formation & Purpose of The NSC – PT 1 of 4
Col. L Fletcher Prouty: Secret Team – The CIA’s Origins Of Covert Operations – PT 2 of 4
Col. L Fletcher Prouty: Secret Team – Covert Operations & Their Consequences – PT 3 of 4
Col. L Fletcher Prouty: Secret Team – Conclusion – PT 4 of 4
Colonel Prouty served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. He spent 9 of his 23 year military career in the Pentagon (1955-1964): 2 years with the Secretary of Defense, 2 years with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and 5 years with Headquarters, U.S. Air Force. In 1955 he was appointed the first “Focal Point” officer between the CIA and the Air Force for Clandestine Operations per National Security Council Directive 5412. He was Briefing Officer for the Secretary of Defense (1960-1961), and for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At times he would be called to meet with CIA director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at their homes on highly classified business. He was assigned to attend MKULTRA meetings.
RELEASE OF THE DULLES-JACKSON-CORREA REPORT
The Dulles–Jackson–Correa Report — Wikipedia entry
The Dulles–Jackson–Correa Report (also known as Intelligence Survey Group (ISG) and the Dulles Report) was one of the most influential evaluations of the functioning of the United States Intelligence Community, and in particular, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The report focused primarily on the coordination and organization of the CIA and offered suggestions that refined the US intelligence effort in the early stages of the Cold War.
The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World — Book by Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty
American Machiavelli: James Burnham Reveals How Our Oligarchy Rules — Daniel McCarthy article
The CIA and the Nazis – Documentary
The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt — Carl Oglesby article
America’s Nazi Secret with Author John Loftus — Video Interview
NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe — Book by Daniele Ganser
Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War — Book by Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda
National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects
Why the Futile Crusade — Leonard Liggio article
The Foreign Policy of the Old Right — Murray N. Rothbard article
The American Empire –– Garet Garrett article
JOSEPH MCCARTHY, WHEELING SPEECH, WEST VIRGINIA, FEBRUARY 9, 1950
McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare — Landon R. Y. Storrs article
The CIA Versus Joe McCarthy – Charles Burris article
CNN Cold War: Reds 1948-1953 – Documentary
Blacklist: Hollywood On Trial — Documentary
Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Blacklist — Jacob G. Hornberger article
Reds and Radicals in Hollywood — Jack R. Fischel article
When Bogie and Bacall Were Duped by Hollywood Communists — Paul Kengor article
Hollywood’s Red Decade — J.R. Dunn article
Remembering When Hollywood Was Radical –Paula Rabinowitz article
Paul Robeson: Here I Stand — Documentary
To You Beloved Comrade — Paul Robeson on the death of Josef Stalin
OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on United Europe, 1948-60 — Richard J. Aldrich article
Euro-Federalists Financed by US Spy Chiefs — Ambrose Evans-Pritchard article
The Ford Foundation and the CIA: A Documented Case of Philanthropic Collaboration with the Secret Police — James Petras article
In the Pay of the CIA – Documentary
The CIA and the Media — Carl Bernstein article
The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know — James F. Tracy article
In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) : “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.”
Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked — Patrick Iber article
Exclusive: The Paris Review, the Cold War and the CIA — Joel Whitney article
Hijack: The CIA and Literary Culture — Antony Loewenstein article
Modern Art Was CIA ‘Weapon‘ — Frances Stonor Saunders article
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters — Book by Frances Stonor Saunders
Art and the CIA — Richard Cummings article
I’m Glad the CIA is ‘Immoral’ — Thomas W. Braden article
How the CIA Bamboozled The Public For 70 Years — Charles Burris article
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard — Charles Burris article
The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr. — Charles Burris article
The New York Intellectuals and the Invention of Neoconservatism — Denis Boneau article
Neoconservatism and the CIA — Greg Pavlik article
Witness — Book by Whittaker Chambers
#1 New York Times bestseller for 13 consecutive weeks!
“As long as humanity speaks of virtue and dreams of freedom, the life and writings of Whittaker Chambers will ennoble and inspire.” – PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN
First published in 1952, Witness is the true story of Soviet spies in America and the trial that captivated a nation. Part literary effort, part philosophical treatise, this intriguing autobiography recounts the famous Alger Hiss case and reveals much more. Chambers’ worldview and his belief that “man without mysticism is a monster” went on to help make political conservatism a national force.
Classic book in the body of literature about the liberal/progressive/communist political ascent in the US, and a surprisingly (to me) thoughtful assessment of the psychology that drives the disdain/hatred for one’s countrymen that the liberal/progressive/communists evidenced. Ralph de Toledan was quite an interesting character himself, but the subject of another book.
Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government — Book by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein
The first thorough examination of the shocking infiltration of Stalin’s Soviet intelligence networks by members of the American government during WWII.
Until now, many sinister events that transpired in the clash of the world’s superpowers at the close of World War II and the ensuing Cold War era have been ignored, distorted, and kept hidden from the public. Through a meticulous examination of primary sources and disclosure of formerly secret records, this riveting account of the widespread infiltration of the federal government by Stalin’s “agents of influence” and the damage they inflicted will shock readers.
Focusing on the wartime conferences of Teheran and Yalta, veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans and intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein, the former head of the U.S. Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation, draw upon years of research and a meticulous examination of primary sources to trace the vast deception that kept Stalin’s henchmen on the federal payroll and sabotaged policy overseas in favor of the Soviet Union. While FDR’s health and mental capacities weakened, aides such as Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins exerted pro-Red influence on U.S. policy—leading to massive breaches of internal security and the betrayal of free-world interests. Along with revealing the extent to which the Soviet threat was obfuscated or denied, this in-depth analysis exposes the rigging of at least two grand juries and the subsequent multilayered cover-up to protect those who let the infiltration happen. Countless officials of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations turned a blind eye to the penetration problem. The documents and facts presented in this thoroughly researched exposé indict in historical retrospect the people responsible for these corruptions of justice.
In The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West diagnosed the demise of Western civilization by looking at its chief symptom: our inability to become adults who render judgments of right and wrong. In American Betrayal, West digs deeper to discover the root of this malaise and uncovers a body of lies that Americans have been led to regard as the near-sacred history of World War II and its Cold War aftermath.
Part real-life thriller, part national tragedy, American Betrayal lights up the massive, Moscow-directed penetration of America’s most hallowed halls of power, revealing not just the familiar struggle between Communism and the Free World, but the hidden war between those wishing to conceal the truth and those trying to expose the increasingly official web of lies.
American Betrayal is America’s lost history, a chronicle that pits Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight David Eisenhower, and other American icons who shielded overlapping Communist conspiracies against the investigators, politicians, defectors, and others (including Senator Joseph McCarthy) who tried to tell the American people the truth.
American Betrayal shatters the approved histories of an era that begins with FDR’s first inauguration, when “happy days” are supposed to be here again, and ends when we “win” the Cold War. It is here, amid the rubble, where Diana West focuses on the World War II–Cold War deal with the devil in which America surrendered her principles in exchange for a series of Big Lies whose preservation soon became the basis of our leaders’ own self-preservation. It was this moral surrender to deception and self-deception, West argues, that sent us down the long road to moral relativism, “political correctness,” and other cultural ills that have left us unable to ask the hard questions: Does our silence on the crimes of Communism explain our silence on the totalitarianism of Islam? Is Uncle Sam once again betraying America?
In American Betrayal, Diana West shakes the historical record to bring down a new understanding of our past, our present, and how we have become a nation unable to know truth from lies.
This highly acclaimed book―hailed as the definitive account of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case―now includes a new introduction that discusses the most recent evidence. It provides information from the Khrushchev and Molotov memoirs, the Venona papers, and material contained in a Discovery Channel documentary that was first aired in March 1997.
“A fresh and fast-paced study of one of the most important crimes of the twentieth century” (The Washington Post), The Brother now discloses new information revealed since the original publication in 2003—including an admission by his sons that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy and a confession to the author by the Rosenbergs’ co-defendant.
Sixty years after their execution in June 1953 for conspiring to steal atomic secrets, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg remain the subjects of great emotional debate and acrimony. The man whose testimony almost single-handedly convicted them was Ethel Rosenberg’s own brother, David Greenglass, who recently died. Though the Rosenbergs were executed, Greenglass served a mere ten years in prison, after which, with a new name, he disappeared. But journalist Sam Roberts found Greenglass, and then managed to convince him to talk about everything that had happened.
Since the original publication of The Brother, Roberts sued to release grand jury testimony, which further implicates Greenglass and demonstrates how the prosecution was tainted. One of the defendants, Morton Sobell, admitted to Roberts that he and Julius Rosenberg were spies. Furthermore, Michael and Robert Meeropol, the Rosenbergs’ sons, acknowledged to Roberts that although their mother was not legally culpable, that the “secret” to the atomic bomb was not compromised, and that the death penalty was excessive, their father was, in fact, guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.
Now released with this important new information, The Brother is more than ever, “A gripping account of the most famous espionage case in US history…an excellent book, written with flair and alive with the agony of the age” (The Wall Street Journal).
Ted Hall was a physics prodigy so gifted that he was asked to join the Manhattan Project when he was only eighteen years old. There, in wartime Los Alamos, working under Robert Oppenheimer and Bruno Rossi, Hall helped build the atomic bomb. To his friends and coworkers he was a brilliant young rebel with a boundless future in atomic science. To his Soviet spymasters, he was something else: “Mlad,” their mole within Los Alamos, a most hidden and valuable asset and the men who first slipped them the secrets to the making of the atomic bomb.
In a book that will force the revision of fifty years of scholarship and reporting on the Cold War, award-winning journalists Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal for the first time a devastatingly effective Soviet spy network that infiltrated the Manhattan Project and ferried America’s top atomic secrets to Stalin. At the heart of the network was Hall, who was so secret an operative that even Klaus Fuchs, his fellow Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet agent, had no idea they were comrades. Bombshell tracks Hall from his days as a brilliant schoolboy in New York City, when he came under the influence of his older brother’s radical tracts, and on to Harvard, Los Alamos, and Chicago, where Hall continued to spy even after the war was over, passing more secrets while the Soviets were trying to build the Hydrogen bomb.
For forty years only a few Russians knew what Ted Hall really did. Now Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal the astonishing true story of the atomic spies who got away. Bombshell is history at its most explosive.
Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies — Documentary
A 2002 PBS Nova History Documentary narrated by Liev Schreiber. NOVA reveals startling new evidence that Soviet spies penetrated America’s deepest secrets, including the Manhattan Project, in the 1940’s.
By cracking the code of Soviet diplomatic cables, the FBI was able to hunt down “atom spies” such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg. But the true “master spy,” a physicist named Ted Hall, got away – and his gripping story is presented for the first time by NOVA.
Recently de-classified documents prove that as many as 300 Americans-including top-level Roosevelt Cabinet members-may have spied for the Soviets during World War II.
But one of the most important spies, a physicist named Ted Hall, got away without punishment. See the startling new evidence kept hidden from the American public for over 50 years.
In August 1945 the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, developed after an unprecedented top-secret crash program. Four years later, the Soviet Union stunned the world by testing an atomic bomb of its own.
Now through never-before-seen interviews with scientist Ted Hall and his wife Joan, and information from a recently revealed code-breaking operation, NOVA uncovers the secret of the Soviets’ sudden atomic success.
Secrets, Lies & Atomic Spies takes viewers inside one of the most extraordinary decryption breakthroughs in history–VENONA, which in 1943 began probing the seemingly unbreakable Soviet code for a loophole. NOVA interviews several surviving officials involved with VENONA, including crack code breaker Meredith Gardner, who explains how he exploited Soviet mistakes to uncover their atom spy ring, and retired FBI agent Robert Lamphere, who worked with Gardner to identify spies.
Against all odds the code breaker’s effort finally succeeded, and with the help of the FBI, exposed a vast network of spies operating in the United States, including highly placed agents at the clandestine facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was designed and built. The VENONA operation stayed in business for decades, unraveling the complex spy network that operated in the United States in the 1940s and allowing authorities to gauge the extent to which American secrets had been compromised.
Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies — Transcript
“The movers and shakers of today have little interest in digging for the truth. Who knows what one may come up with? You may start out with the Communists and end up with yourself.” —Vladimir Bukovsky
Bukovsky’s Judgment in Moscow, called “stunning” by Richard Pipes and “a massive and major contribution” by Robert Conquest, has been published for the first time in English. Margaret Thatcher gave a grant to support the writing of the book, and the initial publication in Russia was paid for by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. The book has an introduction by Edward Lucas and an afterword by David Satter.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, legendary Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky had the opportunity to steal thousands of classified documents from the Soviet archives. Judgment in Moscow is about the secrets exposed by those documents. It reveals the inner workings of the Soviet regime and the complicity of many in the West with that regime.
Judgment in Moscow was an international bestseller published in nine languages, but has only now been published in English for the first time. It was previously at Random House, but Bukovsky refused to rewrite parts of the book which accused prominent Westerners of behind-the-scenes dealings with the Soviets. In this edition, the author quotes correspondence with his editor, who says, “I don’t disagree, but I simply can’t publish a book that accuses Americans like Cyrus Vance and Francis Ford Coppola of unpatriotic — or even treacherous — behavior.”
“Vladimir Bukovsky uses the Kremlin’s own documents to show how the Soviet Union provided a false face to the world and how Soviet leaders used Western leaders as dupes or willing actors. Judgment in Moscow provides the written Nuremberg trial the Soviets never got when the USSR fell.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History (Pulitzer Prize)
“An essential warning of the dangers of collaborating with authoritarian regimes.” — Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and author of Winter is Coming
“The most important work to appear for decades on the Soviet empire and its aftermath.” — Edward Lucas, former senior editor of the Economist, from the introduction
In Double Lives, Professor Koch meticulously details the manipulation by the Soviets’ master propagandist Willi Munzenberg of thousands of European and American progressive intellectuals in the inner-war period of the 1920s and 1930s by his vast publishing network and interlocking front organizations under the covert direction of the Communist International (Comintern) and the Soviet secret services of the NKVD and the GRU.
He particularly concentrates upon the intellectual elite that fell under Munzenberg’s sway in this cultural war against the West.
This includes such persons as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Andre’ Malraux, Andre’ Gide, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Parker, George Grosz, Lincoln Steffens, John Dos Passos, Bertolt Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
This volume shatters myth after historical myth of this critical period.
Munzenberg, Koch states, “developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is political.”
The notion that – the ethical is the political – and that the highest form of ethical expression was “anti-fascism,” – with the Soviet Union as the publicly-identified, ideologically most dedicated opponent of fascism, thus holding the moral high ground.
This myth was actually built upon the basest of lies.
As Koch demonstrates, from the earliest days of the National Socialist regime in Germany, beginning with the Reichstag Fire less than a month after Hitler became Chancellor, a sinister covert relationship existed between Nazi secret intelligence and their Soviet counterpart.
This clandestine cooperation continued throughout the decade: Hitler’s massacre of Ernst Rohm and his S. A. leadership in the Night of the Long Knives; Stalin’s terror purge of CPSU party members, feckless intellectuals, military officers (most notably Field Marshal Tukhachevsky’s betrayal by documents forged in a Gestapo laboratory), and the murder of tens of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, reaching its culmination in the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of August, 1939.
Publicly the Soviet Union and their international Popular Front network (of what were secretly designated “useful idiots” or “Innocents’ Clubs”) preached “anti-fascism.”
Covertly Stalin sought accommodation, appeasement, and eventual alliance with Hitler.
Besides fascinating details dealing with the duplicitous Reichstag Fire trials, the Cambridge Five British espionage scandal, the Spanish Civil War as an international component to Stalin’s Great Terror, and finally Muzenberg’s own mysterious murder, one of the most intriguing aspects of Koch’s study involves the use of women espionage agents.
“Many of the `Muzenberg-men’ were women. The Russian writer and historian Nina Berberova writes with astringent authority about a cohort of agents or near-agents, the women whom she calls the `Ladies of the Kremlin.”
These were women who became influential figures in European and American intellectual life partly on their own, but above all through the men in their lives. The men, most often, were famous writers, `spokesmen for the West,’ Meanwhile, the consorts whom they most trusted were guided by the Soviet services.
“Leading this list were two members of the minor Russian aristocracy: the Baroness Moura Budberg, who was mistress to both Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, and the Princess Maria Pavlova Koudachova. Moura Budberg’s links to the Soviets were shadowy, and remained secret for decades, until they were at last exposed by the Russian historian Arkady Vaksberg in his 1997 book, The Gorky Secret. We have more certain knowledge about the Princess Koudachova, who first became secretary, later mistress, wife, and at last widow to the once enormously celebrated pacifist novelist Romain Rolland.
“Maria Pavlova Koudachova was an agent directly under Soviet secret service control. There is some questionable evidence to suggest that she was trained and assigned to Rolland’s life even before she left Russia after the Revolution. . . That she was a secret service operative, however, and one expressly planted in Rolland’s life, cannot be doubted. Babette Gross (common-law wife of Willi Munzenberg) put it to me plainly in the summer of 1989. `She was an apparatchik,’ she said flatly. `And she ran him.’” (Koch, page 28).
Koch proceeds to discuss other women deep within the Communist apparat, such as the American Ella Winter, and their distinguished men of distinction.
In Winter’s case, the men were pioneer muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, and upon his death, Hollywood screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, part of Hemingway’s circle immortalized in The Sun Also Rises.
Stewart was the Academy Award-winning author of The Philadelphia Story, and one of the highest-paid screenwriters of the day, notes Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley in Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, Crown Forum, 1998. He was also one of “the most vociferous guardians of the Party line,” especially through the vexatious days of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (Billingsley, page 82).
Upon reading these various accounts a pattern soon develops.
The profiles were remarkably similar.
The men were all internationally known novelists, artists, playwrights, etc. celebrated for their independence of mind, their supposed integrity of spirit, but in actuality men who were manipulated by their muses.
The technique proved very successful in this inner war period.
There is no reason to believe that the Communist intelligence services ceased to use such agents of influence during the years of the Cold War.
“Yoko Ono, phone your office.”
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America — Book by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Hayes
The Venona secret US army project of the 1940’s was a monumental achievement in this history of American code breaking and one of the America’s most closely guarded secrets. This book exposes the greatest domestic counter-espionage operation that has ever been launched against the Soviet Union.
“VENONA and Cold War Historiography in the Academic World” –Harvey Klehr, 2005 NSA Cryptologic History Symposium
Dr. John Earl Haynes on Communism, Espionage, and Subversion.
Excellent archive of articles, books, and speeches by one of most authoritative experts on Soviet espionage, counter-intelligence and KGB/GRU penetration of American domestic institutions.
In Denial: Historians,Communism & Espionage — Book by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.
Left-wing historians’ sympathy for American communism is an example of ideological bias and self-deception comparable to Holocaust denial, according to this uncompromising manifesto. Haynes and Klehr, historians and authors of The Secret World of American Communism, rehash major Cold War controversies-including Moscow’s financial subsidies to the American Communist Party, the espionage cases against the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, and American communists’ support for the Hitler-Stalin pact-in light of material from recently opened Soviet archives. But their focus is on the response of what they see as a left-wing “revisionist” academic establishment to new revelations about Stalin’s crimes and American communists’ subservience to Moscow.
In The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West diagnosed the demise of Western civilization by looking at its chief symptom: our inability to become adults who render judgments of right and wrong. In American Betrayal, West digs deeper to discover the root of this malaise and uncovers a body of lies that Americans have been led to regard as the near-sacred history of World War II and its Cold War aftermath.
Part real-life thriller, part national tragedy, American Betrayal lights up the massive, Moscow-directed penetration of America’s most hallowed halls of power, revealing not just the familiar struggle between Communism and the Free World, but the hidden war between those wishing to conceal the truth and those trying to expose the increasingly official web of lies.
American Betrayal is America’s lost history, a chronicle that pits Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight David Eisenhower, and other American icons who shielded overlapping Communist conspiracies against the investigators, politicians, defectors, and others (including Senator Joseph McCarthy) who tried to tell the American people the truth.
American Betrayal shatters the approved histories of an era that begins with FDR’s first inauguration, when “happy days” are supposed to be here again, and ends when we “win” the Cold War. It is here, amid the rubble, where Diana West focuses on the World War II–Cold War deal with the devil in which America surrendered her principles in exchange for a series of Big Lies whose preservation soon became the basis of our leaders’ own self-preservation. It was this moral surrender to deception and self-deception, West argues, that sent us down the long road to moral relativism, “political correctness,” and other cultural ills that have left us unable to ask the hard questions: Does our silence on the crimes of Communism explain our silence on the totalitarianism of Islam? Is Uncle Sam once again betraying America?
In American Betrayal, Diana West shakes the historical record to bring down a new understanding of our past, our present, and how we have become a nation unable to know truth from lies.
The Roots of American Communism — Book by Theodore Draper.
In this definitive history of the evolution of the Communist party in America—from its early background through its founding in 1919 to its emergence as a legal entity in the 1920s—Theodore Draper traces the native and foreign strains that comprised the party, its shifting policies, and its secret as well as its open activities. He makes clear how the party in its infancy “was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power.”
“An outstanding contribution to knowledge and understanding of the Communist movement in this country.”—George F. Kennan.
“Provides the indispensable foundations for any understanding of American communism. Mr. Draper has unraveled the knotted threads of factionalism…and has presented the story with clarity, insight, and objectivity. He has woven all aspects—doctrinal, organizational, personal—into a coherent critical narrative.”—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., New York Times.
“An uncommonly good book.”—Sidney Hook.
The Secret World of American Communism — Book by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov.
For the first time, the hidden world of American communism can be examined with the help of documents from the recently opened archives of the former Soviet Union. Interweaving narrative and documents, the authors of this book present a convincing new picture of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), providing proof that it was involved in espionage and other subversive activities. At the same time, they disclose fascinating details about the workings of the party and about the ordinary Americans and CPUSA leaders who participated in its clandestine activities.
“A formidable achievement in archival research. No one will be able to write about the cpusa in the future without reference to this volume.”-Maurice Isserman, Nation
“A memorable, powerful book. . . . One of this year’s most significant books about twentieth-century American political history.”-David J. Garrow, New York Newsday
“This book contains the first new revelation about American Communism in a generation. It is superbly edited and admirably presented. No one interested in the history of the American Communism can afford to miss it.”-Theodore Draper Harvey Klehr, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University, is also the author of The Heyday of American Communism. John Earl Haynes is a specialist in twentieth-century American history at the Library of Congress. Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov is formerly of the Comintern Archive at the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History
The Soviet World of American Communism — Book by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes
Drawing on documents newly available from Russian archives, this important book conclusively demonstrates the continuous and intimate ties between the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and Moscow. Digging even deeper than the authors` earlier volume, The Secret World of American Communism, it conclusively demonstrates that the CPUSA was little more than a pawn of the Soviet regime.
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America — Book by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Alexander Vassillev
This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account.
Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, Spies resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. Spies also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted for American nuclear spies. Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.
Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics (Cambridge Essential Histories) — Book by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr
Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of American anticommunism varied from passive disdain in the 1920s to fervent hostility in the early years of the Cold War. Nothing so stimulated the white hot anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had co-operated with Soviet espionage against the United States and had assisted in stealing the technical secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the U.S. State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book reviews the major spy cases of the early Cold War (Hiss-Chambers, Rosenberg, Bentley, Gouzenko, Coplon, Amerasia and others) and the often-frustrating clashes between the exacting rules of the American criminal justice system and the requirements of effective counter-espionage.
Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933-1943 — Book by Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Lynn Visson
Drawing on secret and therefore candid coded telegraphs exchanged between Communist Party leaders around the world and their overseers at the Communist International (Comintern) headquarters in Moscow, this book uncovers key aspects of the history of the Comintern and its significant role in the Stalinist ruling system during the years 1933 to 1943. New information on aspects of the People’s Front in France, civil wars in Spain and China, World War II, and the extent of the Comintern’s cooperation with Soviet intelligence is brought to light through these archival records, never examined before.
The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism — Book by Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh
The Amerasia affair was the first of the great spy cases of the postwar era. In June 1945, six people associated with the magazine Amerasia were arrested by the FBI and accused of espionage on behalf of the Chinese Communists. But only two, the editor of Amerasia and a minor government employee, were convicted of any offense, and their convictions were merely for unauthorized possession of government documents. Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh provide a full-scale history of the first public drama featuring charges that respectable American citizens had spied for the Communists.The Amerasia case remained a staple in American political life for the next half-decade. It provoked charges by conservatives of a cover-up of extensive Communist infiltration of the government and accusations by liberals of a witch-hunt designed to intimidate the press. And it played a significant role in the hearings held to examine Senator Joseph McCarthy’s charge that the State Department had been infiltrated by a clique of ‘card carrying Communists.’ Klehr and Radosh, the first researchers to have obtained the FBI files on the case, show that a cover-up was indeed orchestrated by prominent government officials.
Messengers From Moscow: East – Documentary
This program examines the myth of monolithic Communism; the rise of Mao and Communism in China in 1949; the background of the Kremlin’s role in the Korean War; the death of Josef Stalin and the rise of Khrushchev in the Soviet Union; the Chinese reaction to Khrushchev’s secret speech condemning Stalin and the cult of personality at the 20th Party Congress in 1956; the horrific tragedy of the Great Leap Forward in the cost of lives; and the Sino-Soviet Split between the People’s Republic of China and the USSR.
The Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (The Doolittle Report) is a 69-page formerly classified comprehensive study on the personnel, security, adequacy, and efficacy of the Central Intelligence Agency written by Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle. United States President Dwight Eisenhower requested the report in July 1954 at the height of the Cold War and following coups in Iran and Guatemala. The report compares with other contemporary Cold War documents such as George Kennan‘s “X” article in Foreign Affairs, which recommended a policy of “containment” rather than direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, and NSC-68, the secret policy document produced in 1950, which recommended a similarly restrained policy of “gradual coercion.”
Doolittle wrote with an abandon-all-principles approach that conveyed the national fear that the United States faced the prospect of annihilation at the hands of the Soviet Union: “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost,” Doolittle wrote. “There are no rules in such a game… If the United States is to survive, long standing concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.” Doolittle’s forceful policy and language reflected the fear that motivated American citizens and policymakers in the wake of Soviet communism.
The Minds of Men — Documentary
“The Minds of Men” is a 3+ year investigation into the experimentation, art, and practice of social engineering and mind control during the Cold War – a mind-bending journey into the past that gives startling insight into the world we are living in today. It reveals [On April 13th 1953, newly appointed CIA director Allen Dulles signed off on MKUltra, the CIA’s top secret mind control project. Three days before that Dulles gave a speech on the battle for mens minds to justify it. For Dulles it was a missive into a newly declared battle for the minds of men and would come just weeks after he became CIA director as a countermeasure to Soviet “brainwashing”. Dulles speech effectively launched MKUltra, he gave a plausible reason for the dark and disturbing research, he would later sign a memo that created the CIAs most notorious secret research project just three days later and ironically only a few weeks after the death of Stalin.
Mind Control: America’s Secret War — Documentary
It is one of the ill-kept secrets of America’s intelligence agencies — for decades, they have worked virtually non-stop to perfect means of controlling the human mind. But while many have suspected the existence of these projects, the details have long been preserved. Mind Control blows the lid off years of chilling experiments, drawing on documents reluctantly released through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with some of the victims, including a woman whose past was literally taken away.
Hear from John Marks, the author of In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, who broke the story of the CIA’s abuses by unraveling the mysteries contained in financial records. All the other records pertaining to the experiments were destroyed by the agency in an attempt to prevent the details from ever being known.
I met John Marks in 1983 and discussed his book and the dangerous consequences of mind control with him.
Bad Trip to Edgewood – Documentary
An ITV Yorkshire (UK) documentary originally broadcast in 1993 about the secret chemical experiments carried out at Edgewood Arsenal on unsuspecting volunteers from the US military.
The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments — Stephen Kinzer article
Mission: Mind Control — Documentary.
This 1979 ABC News documentary delves into the CIA’s secret MKULTRA project which experimented with various purported mind control techniques including giving soldiers and others LSD and various other drug concoctions.
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate – The CIA and Mind Control — Book by John Marks.
A ‘Manchurian Candidate’ is an unwitting assassin brainwashed and programmed to kill. In this book, former State Department officer John Marks tells the explosive story of the CIA’s highly secret program of experiments in mind control. His curiosity first aroused by information on a puzzling suicide. Marks worked from thousands of pages of newly released documents as well as interviews and behavioral science studies, producing a book that ‘accomplished what two Senate committees could not’ (Senator Edward Kennedy).
“Perhaps the most compelling, well-researched, organized and well-written account of CIA operations ever.” (Progressive);
“A comprehensive, detailed and thoroughly readable account of the CIA safehouses, the brainwashing experiments, the involvement of the universities.” (Washington Monthly)
I met John Marks in 1983 and discussed his book and the dangerous consequences of mind control with him.
Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond — Book by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain
Operation Mind Control –– Book by Walter Bowart
Operation Mind Control — an investigative report into government mind control through the use of drugs such as LSD, behavior modification, hypnosis, and other “psycho-weapons”. Bowarts «Operation Mind Control: The Cryptocracys Plan to Psychocivilize You» is a classic in the annals of conspiracy research. It is a disturbing account of the secret use of mind control technology, by a secret government (or «cryptocracy»), with an aim to pacifying whole populations and furthering private global-investment strategies.
Meticulously researched and well-written, it remains – even today – one of the best books on the topic.
The Ghost: The Secret Life Of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton — Book by Jefferson Morley
The James Angleton Phenomenon — David Robarge article
The Diabolic Confession of James Jesus Angleton — Charles Burris article
Cold War Movies — an Amazon DVD list. The precarious “shock and awe” doctrine of preemptive war has become increasingly dominant in national security policy circles. These classic films on the Cold War have again regained a striking relevance and importance. Let them both entertain and educate you on the vital issues of war, espionage, and the deadly terror of nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
10:39 am on September 8, 2020
