Stalin's Agents
NOVAK, ROBERT D.
Stalin's Agents None dare call it spying. BY ROBERT D. NOVAK The president's most trusted adviser is a Soviet agent. The nation's leading nuclear scientist is turning secrets over to the Kremlin....
...Romerstein, an expert for the United States Information Agency and congressional committees on Soviet espionage and disinformation, finished the book...
...The Venona Secrets reveal successful efforts to infiltrate American journalism...
...The impact of Moscow's effort was profound...
...Only two days later, Hopkins "pressed for the removal of Ambassador Standley on the grounds that the ambassador had lost Stalin's confidence...
...The rough quality of The Venona Secrets makes it read a little like FBI raw files—though that, however unintentional, heightens the dramatic impact...
...Truman ignored J. Edgar Hoover's advice and retained Harry Dexter White, an influential Treasury official he inherited from Roosevelt and a secret agent who pressed the Kremlin's policy at the highest level...
...Hopkins's role was truly remarkable...
...The transmission of those secrets bore bitter fruit...
...Soviet agents are working in the offices of renowned American columnists, and one beloved journalist is actually on Moscow's payroll...
...This isn't the plot of a second-rate spy thriller...
...It hastened the Kremlin's development of the atom bomb, permitting Stalin to give the green light to the Communist invasion of South Korea...
...Perhaps the most startling revelation is the thorough Soviet penetration of Wild Bill Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA...
...Janet Ross, Moscow correspondent for the Communist Daily Worker, was an NKVD agent who in 1943 reported U.S...
...None is bolder than their treatment of Roosevelt's confidant Harry Hopkins, who has been canonized by mainstream historians as a hero gallantly battling chronic illness in the cause of winning the war...
...It also vindicates the two early sources about Communist espionage, Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley...
...The result: Service was not indicted, and Amerasia owner Philip Jaffe (a friend of Earl Browder) got off with a small fine...
...Ishak Akhmerov, a Soviet spy-master during World War II, delivered a lecture to KGB officers during the 1960s in which he mentioned Alger Hiss but called Hopkins "the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States...
...But Currie was also a Soviet agent who reported to his Kremlin masters that the Americans were on the verge of breaking the Soviet code...
...Soviet influence in the Roosevelt administration is shown killing any chance for an early Nazi surrender to the Western allies...
...When foreign service officer John Stewart Service was arrested in 1945 for passing secrets to the pro-Communist magazine Amerasia, Currie went into action...
...It is surely logical to suppose," Moynihan wrote, "that such a man would sense the political peril of a Communist espionage ring operating within his own government...
...Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times...
...What's more, the Venona messages reveal he did it for money...
...When Soviet official Victor Kravchen-ko defected in Washington in 1945, Hopkins pleaded with Roosevelt to send him back to Russia...
...Could it have been, the authors ask, that Hopkins was "an unconscious agent" who did not realize that his left-wing ideology was drawing him toward treason...
...The FBI and U.S...
...The result in each instance was heavy loss of life by American soldiers...
...In truth, McCarthy had nothing to do with the events revealed in this book...
...David Karr, a well-known reporter for columnist Drew Pearson, was an agent who regularly handed information to Soviet intelligence (and, in return, apparently received military secrets for Pearson's column from Alger Hiss's office...
...The Venona Secrets also demolishes the old liberal saw that the Communist Party USA was just another political party...
...A mainstream publishing firm voided its contract— on the pretext of Breindel's death, but in reality because it could not deal with the exposure as traitors of such icons of the "greatest generation" as Harry Hopkins and J. Robert Oppenheimer...
...The value to the Soviets of the Amerasia espionage operations, protected by corruption and special favors," Romerstein and Brein-del write, "was grasped only after the decryption of the Venona messages...
...The decrypted messages prove that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg genuinely were spies...
...Given the code name "Venona," these messages, Romerstein and Breindel write, "are the mortar that holds together information from Soviet archives and U.S...
...The journalist Eric Breindel, had he lived, would have smoothed out the final manuscript...
...Perhaps Truman would have done better had he been let in on the Venona secrets...
...Venona shows that most of the agents working for the NKVD during World War II were members of the Communist party...
...The inspiration of this book was the release by the National Security Agency of intercepted and decrypted communications between Soviet spies and their spymasters...
...But Romer-stein and Breindel are convinced by the testimony of Pavel Sudoplatov, the Moscow-based chief of atomic-bomb espionage, who fingered Oppenheimer in 1994...
...The Venona files have settled many arguments once and for all, silencing liberal claims that had persisted for half a century...
...Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, a middle-level bureaucrat who worked in several government agencies, ran a spy ring that included Chambers and Bentley—and that won him the Order of the Red Star and a place in the KGB Hall of Fame...
...some were Party officials...
...The Venona Secrets is a breathtaking expose...
...government investigations...
...Joseph Barnes, foreign editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, had a "long relationship with Soviet intelligence...
...American intelligence agencies are infested with Russian spies...
...Mary Price in 1944 was "assigned as an undercover Soviet agent" in Walter Lippmann's office, and the esteemed columnist's secretary supplied the KGB with his private files during the Cold War...
...This is the actual truth about the astounding Soviet penetration of the United States during Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, as carefully researched and dispassionately presented by Herbert Romer-stein and Eric Breindel in The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors...
...The government of a great power was infiltrated by the ideological supporters of another great power, for the purpose of stealing secrets and influencing policy...
...The first 1995 Venona release "sent shock waves through the ranks of the Rosenberg defenders...
...The book was nearly completed when Breindel, who had served more than a decade as the editorial page editor of the New York Post, died in 1998 at the age of forty-two...
...The conservative publisher Regnery stepped in to prevent The Venona Secrets from being spiked, but what is still in question is whether this work will get the attention it deserves...
...ambassador William Standley's criticism of Soviet policy made to a small group of American journalists...
...Army counterintelligence were suspicious, but were brushed off by Roosevelt administration officials...
...Such penetration by Soviet espionage was pervasive...
...The "Agent 19" described in Venona decrypts as meeting secretly with Churchill seems nobody but Harry Hopkins...
...So was Duncan Lee, Donovan's assistant who kept his spymasters informed of secret missions...
...Romerstein and Breindel leave no doubt about I.F Stone, the leftist journalist still venerated by many liberals: "It is clear from the evidence," they conclude, "that Stone was indeed a Soviet agent...
...Together, they give a clear picture of Soviet World War II espionage against the United States...
...We can say for certain," the authors write, "that Oppenheimer did in fact knowingly supply classified information on the atom bomb to the Soviet Union...
...Getting it published, however, proved no easy task...
...Instead of presenting to Stalin the American desire for a free Poland, Hopkins told the Soviet dictator "that the United States would desire a Poland friendly to the Soviet Union...
...Their loyalty was to a foreign power," the authors write, "and their goal was nothing less than the subversion and destruction of American democracy...
...Non-Communist wartime operatives who had been recruited by the Allies in target countries now behind the Iron Curtain were ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated," Romerstein and Brein-del write, adding that it gave the KGB a "crucial advantage" early during the Cold War...
...In a section headed "Harry Hopkins—Soviet Spy," the president's top adviser is shown lobbying relentlessly to give tons of uranium to the Kremlin...
...The loss of Oppenheimer's clearance as a security risk during the Eisenhower administration was widely condemned as McCarthyism...
...The authors write that "despite FBI attempts to educate him, Truman paid little attention to Soviet spying in the United States...
...Truman was present for the final stage of massive Soviet espionage in Washington, and—contrary to their own conclusion—Romerstein and Breindel make clear that he did not distinguish himself...
...In his 1998 book Secrecy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan revealed that the president was not informed because General Omar Bradley decided he had no need to know...
...The entire federal government is honeycombed with Communists...
...That included party leaders Earl Brow-der and Eugene Dennis...
...Robert Patterson, one of the celebrated wartime "wise men," pressed for Silver-master's continued access to secret information...
...Lauchlin Currie—admin-istrative assistant to Roosevelt and deputy administrator of the Foreign Economic Administration—told suspicious FBI agents that he "did not believe" Silvermaster was a Communist...
...Hopkins earlier had insisted, over the objections of Army intelligence, on sending pro-Soviet military officer Philip Faymonville (called by his colleagues the "Red Colonel") to Moscow as a lend-lease administrator...
...The Venona files suggest but do not definitely prove that Oppenheimer collaborated with the NKVD...
...He went to legendary Washington fixer Thomas Corcoran, who in turn went as high as Attorney General Tom Clark...
...Maurice Halperin, chief of the Latin American division, was an NKVD agent...
...Romerstein and Breindel are even bolder in their treatment of Oppen-heimer, the father of the atom bomb who has been portrayed in books and films as a heroic figure and defended even by such staunch anti-Communists as the Alsop brothers...
...These former spies had become government witnesses after years of soul-searching, "only to be called liars by the Left and vilified in numerous books and articles...
...But Romerstein and Breindel combine the Venona files with other sources to make bold assertions...
...My only real complaint with the book is the conclusion that Harry Truman was "a more effective foe of Soviet subversion" than Joe McCarthy...
Vol. 6 • December 2000 • No. 15
