The Comintern's Open Secrets
Haynes, John & Klehr, Harvey
Harvey Klehr and John Haynes The Comintern's Open Secrets The archives of the late Communist Party of the Soviet Union reveal a clear picture of subversion in the United States. W ith only a...
...Not only did Donovan approach Wolff to recruit Communists for commando missions, but he was in contact with Dennis specifically because of Dennis's role as the CPUSA liaison with American intelligence...
...But the REV IEW isn't just for converts...
...According to Chambers, these groups provided the CPUSA with information and promoted Communist influence within the government...
...Although Weinstein's Perjury supports Chambers, numerous historians refuse to accept Chambers's story about Communist infiltration of New Deal agencies...
...Based on the 1942 Son message, "drivers" appears to be a euphemism for radio operators...
...Using the name Tim Ryan, he served as a Comintern agent in the Philippines, South Africa, and Shanghai before returning to the United States as Eugene Dennis in 1935...
...Dennis said that Wolff took this proposal to the CPUSA and received its approval...
...Baker emphasized that he had made improvements in Peters's arrangements...
...Legal mail service was disrupted, and in response, "we . . . use seamen to deliver" packages, although, Son noted, "seamen communications . . . are also unpredictable" due to the irregularity and secrecy of wartime ship movements...
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...he was one of those later moved over to work for Soviet intelligence, with Chambers as his contact...
...The FBI identified Zubilin as Cooper when its hidden listening devices recorded a secret meeting between Steve Nelson, a Communist party organizer, and Cooper/Zubilin in 1943...
...The report, dated January 1939, went on to say: "The Secret Apparatus of the U.S...
...In fact, as Dennis reported, Donovan asked Wolff to recruit International Brigade veterans for the British, who would use them for "diversionary work in the rear of Axis countries...
...One document is a five-page report dated 1943 on the network, written by its chief member, who used the code-name "Son...
...At that time the CPUSA shifted from ardent opposition to FDR's policies to bellicose support for them...
...That same year a Comintern official, B. Vassiliev, sent a memo to the CPUSA insisting that "all legal Parties are now under the greater responsibility in respect to the creation and strengthening of an illegal apparatus...
...In it, General Pavel Fitin, head of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate of the NKVD (the KGB of that era), told Georgi Dimitroff, head of the Communist International, that one of his NKVD officers in the U S. had met with "Comrade Ryan...
...Nelson, born in Croatia, had shared an apartment with Baker in the late 1920s and, like him, had worked abroad for the Comintern...
...Yet even now there are converts, of exceptionally high quality, and their number is increasing with the tenure of the present Pope...
...They are co-authors of The American Communist Movement: Stoiming Heaven Itself (Twayne), and are editing a three-volume collection of documents from the Russian archives to be published by Yale University Press...
...He said that, without Dennis's help, it was very difficult to recruit International Brigade veterans, but stressed that he had become irritated with the OSS because it was not planning to operate against Franco...
...The California portion of the apparatus was particularly hard-hit, since several "drivers" had gone into military service...
...Son said, "While the [Communist]party generally is functioning on the war efforts entirely openly and enjoys greater legal freedom than ever, the FBI and military intelligence has not decreased its surveillance...
...A dramatic example of these links—and how they involved American intelligence during gent that had fought in the Spanish Civil War with the International Brigades...
...Dennis explained that the meeting had been arranged by Diana Sheehan, the wife of journalist Vincent Sheehan...
...T he Comintern's files include two documents showing that Rudy Baker's Secret Apparatus had ties to the NKVD and recruited American Communists for Comintern operations during World War II...
...which describe Comrade Peters as the leader of a delegation to a regional party conference...
...These two American citizens were also in agreement with the orders of the Comintern to halt Wolff's recruiting for the OSS because it might jeopardize Communist apparatuses...
...The biography describes Bridges as "President of the Dockers' and Port Warehouse Workers' Union...
...Consequently, Baker explained, a "shortcoming of the Secret Apparatus project was that everyone found out Peters was in charge...
...Some segments of the American left and some historians not only refuse to believe that Alger Hiss was a spy, but remain incredulous that any kind of Communist underground existed...
...Kirk quoted him as calling the charge he did secret work for the American Communist party "nonsense...
...But now, a new wave of converts is entering the Church...
...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Wolff in 1992 confirmed this meeting and Diana Sheehan's role...
...Son said, "We should be informed whether you are primarily interested in the Jap comrades born in Japan (Issei) or also in American born Japanese (Nissei...
...This plan was canceled at the last minute and they went into the camps...
...Son/Baker also reported that a member of the network had been temporarily loaned to Cooper for "auto building work," which likely referred to setting up a radio station...
...That Dimitroff shared Fitin's judgment is demonstrated by a handwritten notation on the document stating "an order was given in New York to stop [indecipherable] this work...
...Donovan's agency, soon to become the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was the chief intelligence arm of the U.S...
...Eugene Dennis and Wild Bill Donovan Of course, much of the suspicion surrounding American Communists stemmed from charges about the party's close ties to Soviet intelligence...
...Another memo, labeled "Top Secret," is addressed to Dimitroff and dated March 5, 1943...
...First, the exiled Spanish Communists wanted to cooperate with Donovan because they needed American help to establish communications centers in Lisbon and Marseilles...
...His message to Dimitroff read: "The audibility is good, 8-9...
...Dennis reported that in November 1941, Wolff had met with Colonel (later General) William Donovan, recently appointed head of the Office of the Coordinator of Information by President Roosevelt...
...Son/Baker noted difficulties with his organization's work because most members of the apparatus were under 40 and had been drafted or had taken jobs in war-related industries to gain exemption...
...Communist Party has operated for about four years...
...Donovan once remarked to an aide, "I'd put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help us defeat Hitler...
...Not only did Donovan approach Wolff to recruit Communists for commando missions, but he was in contact with Dennis specifically because of Dennis's role as the CPUSA liaison with American intelligence...
...Speaking to these issues are other documents found in Comintern files...
...On [indecipherable] June 1938, Peters was (continued on page 42) The American Spectator December 1992 39 reassigned to other work and replaced by Comrade Baker...
...we have passed all necessary measures toward halting this activity and to prevent his influencing leftist organizations to join in with him...
...Baker's special work remains unnoticed and secret...
...Berkeley, CA 94706 PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER French politics, becoming once again aviation minister for a time...
...The image of American Communists as subversives was one of the most powerful legacies of that era...
...They forced their way past us anyway, thank God...
...to Moscow indicating that Cot was recruited as a Soviet agent in 1942 by Vasily Zubilin...
...suppression of the party, the CPUSA sent several hundred key cadres underground in a carefully prepared and elaborate replay of the 1939-41 exercise...
...entry into the war...
...citizen, and after investigators discovered he had used false passports to travel to the USSR, he was deported to Hungary in 1949...
...William Weiner was the party's financial secretary...
...A recent history of Soviet intelligence notes that after World War II U. S. cryptographers decoded wartime NKVD messages from the U.S...
...From 1938 to 1956, the U.S...
...Peters did not have a full-time party post that provided cover for his secret work...
...Over the last quarter century, the number of converts to Roman Catholicism slowed to a trickle...
...In January 1939, Baker visited Moscow for consultations with Comintern officials...
...This requires that we . . . maintain our contacts with Father and other vital comrades with greatest care...
...In 1950, expecting a Soviet-American war and U.S...
...in 1929 they had pledged to "make all necessary preparations for illegal functioning of the leading organs of the Party...
...Pat Toohey was the CPUSA's representative to the Communist International in Moscow in 1939...
...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 561 1069 Kains Ave...
...The forum for the new generation of converts is the NEW OXFORD REVIEW, a monthly magazine that takes its name from the 19th-century Oxford Movement in England...
...Kirk felt badly for having "intruded upon the inner contentment they have known here since the turmoil of their lives in America...
...Two comrades, "Joe" (Joe Koide) and "Saito" (Shuji Fuji), were originally ordered to move to Colorado to avoid internment and to publish a Communist Japanese-language paper...
...The longest section of the report dealt with "your request for Japanese comrades...
...Wolff acknowledged in 1992 that he shut down his OSS recruiting operation in mid-1942 but was reluctant to attribute this to CPUSA orders...
...operations...
...Accompanying the list are brief biographies in Russian...
...Rudy Baker and Son The "Short Report on the Work of the Secret Apparatus of the U.S...
...In a second coded telegram, delivered in late June through NKVD channels, Dennis reported directly to Dimitroff, saying that the CPUSA leaders "fully agree with your suggestions regarding Wolff's activity...
...On the other hand, Landis found Bridges's straight-forward denials impressive and convincing...
...No, they are attracted by the Catholicism of the ages, the Magisterium, and the inspiring leadership of the current Pope...
...Kirk found Peters (then calling himself Jozsef Peter) to be "a skeptic, an intellectual who cannot help but perceive humor in the posturing and maneuvering...
...Baker's report also mentioned that "Comrade Andreev has suggested that the [CPUSA] Central Committee think about the question of preserving the leading cadres in the case of [war] mobilization, and the possibility of transferring them to 42 The American Spectator December 1992 illegal [underground] positions...
...The CPUSA, in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, fervently attacked FDR's policy of assisting those fighting Hitler...
...Son reported that his network was "kept strictly isolated from party as before...
...The American Communist party simultaneously carried on open radical political activity, concealed political activity, and secret cooperation with and participation in Soviet intelligence activities...
...A Comintern biographical report on Baker stated that in the early 1930s Historians must recognize the extent to which the cooperation of American Communists with Soviet intelligence in the 1940s compromised those who reached out to Communists and treated them as legitimate political allies...
...Catholics watched with a mixture of pity and amusement as the excellent Anglo-Catholic New Oxford Review argued and agonized itself into the [Roman] Catholic Church...
...Fitin describes Wolff as "U...
...When he returned to the U.S...
...Among them, it may be hoped, is another Chesterton, another Maritain, another Newman, another Ronald Knox, another Dorothy Day, another Gerard Manley Hopkins, another Edith Stein — converts all...
...Under his real name, Francis Waldron, he had fled to Moscow in 1930 after his work for the CPUSA's Trade Union Unity League led to a California indictment for criminal syndicalism...
...Later he became a member of the Central Control Commission, a body charged with maintaining internal party discipline and ideological purity...
...What's more, contrary to the shibboleth that Catholicism is a superstitious religion for the ignorant, an unusually high proportion of the new Catholics consists of writers and intellectuals...
...While the apparatus had lost contact with Saito, Son reported that "it does not necessarily follow that he has betrayed the party by accepting such a post...
...In his 1943 report Son/Baker noted that the war had made communications a problem...
...None of this justifies the excesses of the McCarthy period, the use of anti-Communism as a partisan weapon through the mendacious blurring of the distinction between Communism and liberalism, or the irresponsible use of unverified charges and even faked evidence for political gain...
...We feel it expedient to continue this contact, and to place people in the radio broadcast division, of course, if you agree...
...There were innocents who were unjustly treated, but the Soviet archives also show that some of the so-called innocents were liars...
...Donovan did remove a number of 36 The American Spectator December 1992 Orthodox Catholics: DON'T DESPAIR...
...Group existed...
...In addition to Chambers, Nathaniel Weyl and Lee Pressman confirmed they had been members, and Josephine Herbst confirmed her husband's membership...
...Navasky agreed that Peters was "a well-known Communist Party official in the 1930s" but reported that he "denied participation in any 'Communist underground," suggesting by use of quotation marks that there was no such thing...
...Those who have insisted that suspicions about the loyalty of American Communists in the 1940s and 1950s were without basis were wrong...
...I will take all of this to my meeting with comrade Browder upon my return...
...Saito soon was hired by the Office of War Information for work on Japanese language radio propaganda...
...He championed French-Soviet friendship and in 1953 received the Stalin Peace Prize...
...Peters, a Hungarian-born Communist, immigrated to the U.S...
...Ryan was the pseudonym for Eugene Dennis, then a member of the cPusA's Political Bureau and from 1946 to 1959 General Secretary of the CPUSA...
...He stated that California Communists put forward Rossi/Bridges for the Central Committee, and the national CPUSA convention ratified Rossi's election at its 1936 convention...
...Bridges, in four different federal hearings, denied his CPUSA membership under oath...
...This presented a problem, said Son...
...Leech, however, was a strange person, a dandy who spoke at interminable length, frequently insisting on pursuing side issues of little relevance and about which he appeared to know little...
...Peters was in Moscow in 1932 as an instructor at the Lenin School for Communist cadres...
...Dennis and the others resurfaced after Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941...
...Communist Party" was written by Peters's successor, Rudy Baker...
...It is likely that "Peter" is "J...
...during World War II and predecessor to the CIA...
...intelligence on such matters as anti-Fascist radio propaganda...
...It will take years for scholars to assimilate and evaluate the evidence, but our research already gives us a number of leads on suspects—from Bridges to Alger Hiss—whose Communist party affiliations will soon be confirmed or disproved...
...in 1924 and held a variety of positions in the CPUSA, heading its Hungarian bureau, serving as Organizational Secretary and gaining membership on the Central Committee...
...He joined the American Communist party at its founding in 1919 and studied at the Lenin School in Moscow from 1927 to 1930...
...Evidence linking American Communists to espionage has never been persuasive to those who see the testimony of ex-Communists as suspect, do not trust U. S. government files, and believe that the major reason for Communist secrecy was government persecution...
...After a stint in Moscow in 1937 as the CPUSA's representative to the Comintern, he came back to America in 1938 to join the party's national leadership...
...Landis, repelled by Leech's effete manner, accused him of "verbal hemophilia" and doubted his honesty...
...Seven of them are my godchildren, and I must confess that some of us, to our shame, earnestly tried to delay them, on the grounds of the growing disorder in the Catholic Church...
...government tried to deport the Australian-born Bridges, alleging that he was a Communist...
...This confirms a Louis Budenz assertion in 1948 that Baker had worked for Soviet intelligence in Canada...
...It was not just their ideas that were anathema but the suspicion that they were agents of the Soviet Union—burrowing away in American institutions to weaken the democratic political system...
...His wife told Kirk that Peters was "very good-natured . . . very jolly...
...This group, first supervised by the Communist farm policy specialist Harold Ware, initially consisted of young professionals who worked for the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration...
...Those who had access to important information were turned over to Soviet intelligence...
...Eight months later World War II began...
...But Peters's life in America had been full ofturmoil precisely because Peters was a key link between the CPUSA and Soviet intelligence...
...Wolff has given the English 12 Yugoslays, 3 The American Spectator December 1992 35 Czechs and 1 Italian...
...The Comintern's Cadre Department sent Baker's report to Dimitroff with a cover letter stating, "The report was written at our request...
...He deceived and committed perjury before Dean Landis in 1938, lied to and perjured himself before an immigration examiner in World War 11—comes in a coded May 1942 memo from the Comintern archives...
...Most of our writers are cradle Catholics and a significant minority belongs to various other churches...
...A newly discovered Comintern document entitled "Short Report on the Work of the Secret Apparatus of the U. S. Communist Party," said of Peters that the Central Committee of the CPUSA "upon his return from Moscow...
...Those who have insisted that there was a fire break between the CPUSA and Soviet intelligence operations were wrong...
...Harry Bridges Consider the late radical Harry Bridges, who made his WestCoast International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union a powerful force in labor relations and California politics...
...Bridges won his court battles, and a number of historians have endorsed his veracity and denounced the government for baseless persecution...
...Although the new Russian intelligence and military intelligence agencies have limited access to the archives of the KGB and the GRU, the files of the officially disbanded Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) are available for perusal...
...Indeed, the Yeltsin government regards these files as invaluable in its campaign to complete the destruction of Soviet Communism...
...Peters never became a U.S...
...By contrast, Baker continued in his existing party posts on the Central Control Commission and several other party commissions, making "it unnecessary for anyone to think about or guess in which kind of work Baker engages...
...There is no basis for denying that the Wareafter stepping down as head of the party underground...
...The party ordered its hidden cadres to surface in 1955...
...Wolff in 1992 denied formal membership in the CPUSA but otherwise confirmed the major points of the memo...
...Jack Stachel was the party's organizational secretary...
...Anne Roche Muggeridge, daughter-in-law of convert Malcolm Muggeridge, has said in her recent book, The Desolate City: Revolution in the Catholic Church (Harper & Row): "Because the integrity of its message has been betrayed, the Catholic Church is in ruins...
...And we cover the full range of issues of concern to today's reflective and believing Christians, including the quest for a more just and compassionate society...
...This is so stupid—the `secret Communist' and 'not-secret Communist,' " Peters said...
...He is a strong leader of the union movement and a mass worker but up till now has only limited party knowledge and experience...
...Dennis notes that he and Browder awaited Comintern "instruction" about whether the CPUSA should cooperate with American intelligence to mount campaigns against Nazi Germany...
...True, most American Communists were not spies, and many did not see any conflict between Communism and democratic values...
...In 1992, the University of Washington even established the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies...
...Baker explained that the organization set up by Peters was financed by a secret group with "no ties to any party organization and their names are secret...
...Joe was still in the camps...
...The Comintern's records contain a significant amount of KGB material...
...Recently Wolff gave over to American intelligence 10 Americans, 1 Greek and 3 Yugoslays, all of whom are undergoing training in special groups ("commandos...
...government in Washington during the 1930s...
...in 1930 he became head of the CPUSA' s Organizational Department and in 1931 became a member of the prestigious Central Committee...
...Dennis, in short, had extensive experience in clandestine work...
...to the newly created Office of War Information [OWI...
...All of them must immediately undertake measures to have within the legally existing Party committees an illegal directing core...
...In part due to these problems, the network was "cooperating very closely with Cooper which accounts also for his helpful aid in communications with you...
...Fitin told Dimitroff that from the NKVD perspective, "this entire affair is a political mistake on the part of the leadership of the U S. Communist party...
...Father" is thus identified as the link between the network and the CPUSA leadership...
...Hiss, Peters, and Navasky In the post–World War II era no episode did more to implant the notion of a Communist underground in American minds than the Hiss-Chambers case...
...In 1950, after years of denying party membership, Pressman testified that in the 1930s he had been a Communist and a member of the Ware Group, and had met with Peters...
...One confirmation of Peters's role in supervising Washington Communists is in the just-discovered minutes of the CPUSA's "District Buro #34" (Maryland-D.C...
...Amazingly, while the REVIEW is a lightning rod for "papist" pilgrims, it is also ecumenical in spirit...
...This group is headed by Central Committee worker 'Peter.— This Soviet memo does not identify the members of this group and could not be referring to the Ware Group, which had long dispersed by 1943...
...He said that in 1943 Donovan tracked him down and offered him OSS work in Italy, which he accept-ed...
...Further, the Nation asked journalist Donald Kirk to stop by Peters's home in Budapest in 1978 for a chat...
...The most controversial part of Chambers's story involved Peters's supervision of several small groups of Communists employed by the U.S...
...Dennis also described Donovan's contacts with exiled Italian Communists and relayed queries from Spanish Communist party leaders exiled in Cuba about what they should do in response to requests from American However, he was assigned to longshore work in an Indian port rather than combat duty because of, he felt, his Communist links...
...government...
...Donovan's OSS retained some propaganda operations aimed at enemy nations...
...not to say that the suspicions were groundless, particularly since a new source of documentation on this issue has become available: the Soviet archives in Moscow...
...Included in the old CPSU Central Party Archives (now called the Russian Center for the Storage and Study of Documents of Recent History) are the records of the Communist International, or Comintern, which until 1943 promoted Soviet Communism abroad...
...The head of operations for the entire period had been Comrade Peters...
...T hese documents from the Comintern archives provide a glimpse of the hidden world of American Communism...
...We found in the Soviet files a list of CPUSA members elected to its Central Committee at the party's 1936 convention...
...He remained in that capacity until June of 1938...
...While Sanzo Nosaka, a leading Japanese Communist who spent the 1930s in the United States, knew a number of reliable cadres, the detention of West Coast Japanese and Japanese-Americans had cut off communications with them...
...Several of the issues discussed in the Son report were also discussed by Nelson and Zubilin when they met in April 1943...
...T he person chosen to head the secret apparatus was jolly J. Peters...
...The messages document another point: Communist involvement with the OSS was initiated by the OSS...
...Today there is a new Oxford Movement afoot in America...
...71 The American Spectator December 1992 43...
...S. Communist party member Wolff...
...broadcasts in German...
...The Baker report indicates that this action stemmed from a Soviet suggestion and that the Secret Apparatus may have been charged with establishing the underground...
...This is one of three departments of the so-called Tonovan Committee' it answers directly to the White House...
...According to Chambers, Hiss belonged to this group...
...In 1930, the Comintern reminded non-Soviet Communist parties that "legal forms of activity must be combined with systematic illegal work...
...This document corroborates evidence given against Bridges in 1938 before Harvard Law School Dean James 34 The American Spectator December 1992 Landis, then serving as a special immigration examiner...
...at an early age and became a naturalized citizen...
...Even so, he succeeded in getting into combat by volunteering for one of General Stilwell's raids into Burma...
...John Leech, a former official in the California Communist party, testified that within the party Bridges went under the pseudonym of "Rossi...
...Moreover, Dennis noted that "we have discussed this matter with Earl...
...Baker wrote that when he was named head of the Secret Apparatus, "this was known only to comrades Browder, Stachel, Weiner, Peters and now Pat Toohey...
...Chambers asserted that Peters, in addition to his public role, was head of CPUSA secret work and liaison between the CPUSA underground and Soviet intelligence...
...One of the names on the Central Committee list is that of a comrade "Rossi"—identified in the accompanying biography as the pseudonym of "Bridges...
...It does mean, however, that historians must recognize the extent to which the cooperation of American Communists with Soviet intelligence in the 1940s compromised those who reached out to Communists and treated them as legitimate political allies...
...Ostensibly, Donovan wanted to discuss Wolff s interest in the release of the high-ranking Italian Communist and International Brigade officer, Luigi Gallo, from a French internment camp...
...Among the converts to Roman Catholicism who have written for the REVIEW are Sheldon Vanauken, John C. Cort, Walker Percy, L. Brent Bozell, Avery Dulles, and Peter Kreeft...
...Son, thus, was Rudy Baker...
...commissioned him to work in the secret apparatus...
...It also means that historians dealing with American Communism and anti-Communism must recognize that the CPUSA was not just another political party, albeit a radical one...
...Peters's direction of the Secret Apparatus in the period 1934 to 1938 raises the question of involvement of the CPUSA underground in Communist infiltration of the U.S...
...But Leech, weird though he was, was telling the truth...
...Periodically all questions are discussed and considered [by Father and Son...
...Finally, the CPUSA had "contact with Communist involvement with the OSS was initiated by the OSS...
...The other document is a 1942 memo from Fitin of the NKVD conveying a message to Dimitroff signed by Son...
...A lthough the Wolff matter had been settled, Dennis said in his June 1942 telegram that he and Browder had requested that Dimitroff instruct them on three other issues...
...John Haynes is editor of the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism...
...The message read: "According to a report from our representative in the USA, a group of Communists assigned by the leadership of the American Communists for informant work is active in Washington...
...But that is Harvey Klehr is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University...
...Baker, born in Yugoslavia in 1898, immigrated to the U.S...
...Initially, Donovan's agency included a large information and propaganda operation, most of which FDR moved intelligence for recruits and information...
...Hiss denied Chambers's charges, and was convicted of perjury...
...W ith only a hundred thousand members at its height in 1939—and a fraction of that number for most of its history—the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) has had an impact on American life far out of proportion to its size...
...Wolff established an office in New York, and earns 60 dollars per week and gets additional funds from intelligence...
...the department of foreign propaganda and with the USA information coordinator...
...Its damning words about "a group of Communists assigned by the leadership of the American Communists for informant work" proves that at least one of the Communist clubs in Washington did more than discuss Marxist theory...
...He later edited the International Review, a Soviet-sponsored journal of international press opinion...
...However, Pressman depicted the group as an innocuous club of government employees who got together to discuss Marxist theory...
...During the controversy over Allen Weinstein's Perjury (1978), a book that concluded that Hiss was guilty, Victor Navasky, editor of the Nation, cast doubt on Weinstein's assertion that J. Peters, a central figure in Whittaker Chambers's story, was the head of the CPUSA' s underground operations in the 1930s...
...Dennis, clearly uneasy, told the NKVD that he wanted "instruction on these issues as soon as possible to the leadership of the American, Spanish, Italian and Canadian Communist Parties...
...The CPUSA sent him underground from 1940 to mid-1941 for safekeeping, in case the party were outlawed for supportWhatever the morality or wisdom of the government effort to deport him, Harry Bridges was not only a member of the American Communist party but a member of its ruling Central Committee...
...American Communists needed little urging...
...He then quit the OSS and joined the U. S. Army...
...If you want to recapture the excitement of when you first really believed, if you feel inundated by "bad news" about the Church, if you despair of all the moral laxity and doubt and dissension within her portals but seek a remedy for that despair, or if you're searching for a "face" of Catholicism that is spiritually vibrant, solidly prolife, doctrinally sound, and socially engaged, it's time for you to subscribe to the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Thanks to it, English and American Intelligence were able to penetrate" several Communist organizations...
...Even so, a number of historians prefer Pressman's characterization of the Ware Group to Chambers's...
...In his cover note for Son's message, Fitin says: "We are sending you a telegram we received from Rudy in your name from New York...
...Dennis went on to report: Similarly, we have a few people working in the Czech and Italian radio operations divisions of this department and some who influence...
...Earl Browder, head of the CPUSA, had been out of active leadership while in prison for passport fraud...
...The FBI summary of the secretly recorded conversation states: "The principal activities which were not being conducted to Nelson's satisfaction were contacts with Japanese Communists in the relocation centers and the handling of literature and other documentary material which was being transmitted to points in the South Pacific by Communist seamen couriers...
...Fitin's report also said that in December 1941 Dennis himself was assigned to negotiate between the CPUSA and U.S...
...One of your new drivers is often negligent in his work...
...He deceived quite a few historians as well...
...Fearing it might be made illegal, the CPUSA sent Eugene Dennis and several other key cadres underground...
...ing the Nazi-Soviet Pact...
...On May 16, 1942, just prior to Dennis's telegram, FDR commuted Browder's sentence to time served and released him...
...In particular, Chambers described the operation of the Ware Group...
...The Bridges case is only a sample—and more sensational than most—of what these newly released documents provide: a description of the long-hidden world of American Communism...
...These new Catholics and the extraordinary Pope to whom they belong are a very present comfort when one is tempted to despair...
...The messages make clear where the loyalty of American Communists lay...
...From the late 1940s through the 1950s the activities, real and imagined, of American Communists were one' of the chief issues of American politics...
...His meeting with the NKVD officer dealt with the activities of Milton Wolff, the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Communist-led American contin1941, deceived a majority of the U S. Supreme Court in 1945, committed perjury at his naturalization hearing in 1945, and lied once again at his 1949 trial for perjury...
...They come because at the highest level of Catholic teaching, the doctrine of the faith, though much embattled, remains uncompromised and is as fearlessly proclaimed by John Paul II as by Peter, Paul, Ignatius, or Augustine...
...Eugene Dennis" was itself a pseudonym...
...In addition to the requisitioned party members whom Wolff gave to American intelligence, there were also 6 nonparty Hungarians and 4 Czechs...
...Further, Dennis reported that Donovan had asked him "to give him [Communist] party organization contacts in France" but he had claimed to possess no such contacts...
...Peters" because he is known to have used "Peter" frequently as a pseudonym, and he worked for the Central Committeehe was "partly involved in illegal work/ Korea, England, Canada...
...The new converts are not attracted to the diluted Catholicism of the Hans Kungs, the Charles Currans, or those who sign ads favoring legal abortion...
...Whatever the morality or wisdom of the government effort to deport him, Harry Bridges was not only a member of the Communist party but a member of its ruling Central Committee...
...I know a substantial number of recent converts like this and am much edified by their purity and ardour...
...Cooper" was the code name of Vasily Zubilin, head of NKVD U.S...
...Second, the CPUSA had given the FBI information on people suspected of pro-Nazi "Fifth-Column" activity, and American Communists wanted permission to hand over more...
...Donovan's acting as a recruiter for British commandos is another illustration of the extent of FDR's policy of all-out aid to Britain even before U.S...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
