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Select Resources on Soviet Espionage Against the United States

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/resources-on-soviet-espionage-against-the-united-states/

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a murderous parasitic regime responsible for the deaths of over sixty million of its own subjects by its state security forces, and over twenty seven million persons killed during the Second World War. This later devastating conflict was enabled by the duplicitous actions of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his Politburo of killers and that of German National Socialist Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and his murderous henchmen. Here are books on the story of the Cold War which followed that conflict.

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.

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.

Taking on leading history journals and prominent scholars like Ellen Schrecker, Eric Foner and Victor Navasky, the authors accuse revisionists of ignoring, downplaying and distorting the mounting evidence of communist espionage and subversion in the United States. Instead of facing facts, they argue, revisionists have propagated a mythology of American communism as a benign, idealistic, home-grown progressive movement destroyed by McCarthyite persecution, a caricature that “resembles more the chaotic New Left of the late 1960s than the rigid Leninist party it was.” The authors champion a liberal, anticommunist “traditionalist” historiography, asserting that America’s post-war campaign against communist subversion (McCarthy’s excesses aside) was “a rational and understandable response to a real danger to American democracy.”

While their confrontational tone and penchant for academic score-settling will inflame rather than settle these rancorous debates, their incisive analysis and meticulous attention to evidence make this a formidable rejoinder to left-wing orthodoxies.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Drawing upon previously secret KGB records released exclusively to Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood reveals for the first time the riveting story of Soviet espionage’s “golden age” in the United States, from the 1930s through the early cold war.

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.

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 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.

Using primarily information provided in the Navy’s official investigation of the death of America’s first Secretary of Defense, which had been kept secret for 55 years,The Assassination of James Forrestal thoroughly demolishes the widely believed view that Forrestal’s fall from a 16th-floor window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 22, 1949, was an act of suicide. The official report, in fact, did not conclude that Forrestal committed suicide. It concluded only that the fall caused his death and that no one in the U.S. Navy was responsible for it. A major reason why the suicide thesis is still widely believed is that the news of the release of the official report, which the author obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2004, has been effectively suppressed.

Building upon what he has long made available on his DCDave.com web site, and in the manner of his 2018 book,The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, co-authored with Hugh Turley, David Martin breaks through the wall of silence and misinformation. This meticulous examination of the violent death of the leading government critic of American support for the creation of the state of Israel is vital to an understanding of U.S. and world history since the mid-20th century.

Accused of creating a bogus Red Scare and smearing countless innocent victims in a five-year reign of terror, Senator Joseph McCarthy is universally remembered as a demagogue, a bully, and a liar. History has judged him such a loathsome figure that even today, a half century after his death, his name remains synonymous with witch hunts.

But that conventional image is all wrong, as veteran journalist and author M. Stanton Evans reveals in this groundbreaking book. The long-awaited Blacklisted by History, based on six years of intensive research, dismantles the myths surrounding Joe McCarthy and his campaign to unmask Communists, Soviet agents, and flagrant loyalty risks working within the U.S. government. Evans’s revelations completely overturn our understanding of McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the Cold War.

Drawing on primary sources—including never-before-published government records and FBI files, as well as recent research gleaned from Soviet archives and intercepted transmissions between Moscow spymasters and their agents in the United States—Evans presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets. Most shocking of all, he shows that U.S. officials supposedly guarding against this danger not only let it happen but actively covered up the penetration. All of this was precisely as Joe McCarthy contended.

Blacklisted by History shows, for instance, that the FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the atomic bomb project, had been identified by Communist leaders as a party member; that high-level U.S. officials were warned that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy almost a decade before the Hiss case became a public scandal; that a cabal of White House, Justice Department, and State Department officials lied about and covered up the Amerasia spy case; and that the State Department had been heavily penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents before McCarthy came on the scene.

Evans also shows that practically everything we’ve been told about McCarthy is false, including conventional treatment of the famous 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that launched the McCarthy era (“I have here in my hand . . .”), the Senate hearings that casually dismissed his charges, the matter of leading McCarthy suspect Owen Lattimore, the Annie Lee Moss case, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and much more.

In the end, Senator McCarthy was censured by his colleagues and condemned by the press and historians. But as Evans writes, “The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him.” Blacklisted by History provides the first accurate account of what McCarthy did and, more broadly, what happened to America during the Cold War. It is a revealing exposé of the forces that distorted our national policy in that conflict and our understanding of its history since.

CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton was one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States government in the mid-20th century, a ghost of American power. From World War II to the Cold War, Angleton operated beyond the view of the public, Congress, and even the president. He unwittingly shared intelligence secrets with Soviet spy Kim Philby, a member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring. He launched mass surveillance by opening the mail of hundreds of thousands of Americans. He abetted a scheme to aid Israel’s own nuclear efforts, disregarding U.S. security. He committed perjury and obstructed the JFK assassination investigation. He oversaw a massive spying operation on the antiwar and black nationalist movements and he initiated an obsessive search for communist moles that nearly destroyed the Agency.

In The Ghost, investigative reporter Jefferson Morley tells Angleton’s dramatic story, from his friendship with the poet Ezra Pound through the underground gay milieu of mid-century Washington to the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate scandal. From the agency’s MKULTRA mind-control experiments to the wars of the Mideast, Angleton wielded far more power than anyone knew. Yet during his seemingly lawless reign in the CIA, he also proved himself to be a formidable adversary to our nation’s enemies, acquiring a mythic stature within the CIA that continues to this day.

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.

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5:06 pm on August 5, 2020

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