Wednesday, October 12, 2016

More Than a Difference of Opinion

Starting around the time of WW1, and lasting until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989/1991, there were small but significant numbers of pro-Soviet individuals in the United States.

American society, in accord with its nature, wanted to extend tolerance to those whose political opinions were outside the mainstream. The United States articulated, after all, freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights.

But it soon became clear that this was no mere difference of opinion. Those who sympathized with the international communist conspiracy were not simply expressing a political point of view: they were terrorists.

The Communist Party in the United States (CPUSA) was not interested in the political process, nor was it engaged in attempting to persuade the voters about its ideology. Instead, it was engaged in espionage.

As part of the Soviet spy network, the CPUSA worked both to smuggle secrets out of the U.S. government and send them back to Moscow, and to infiltrate the ranks of advisors and appointees within the government and thereby nudge U.S. foreign policy away from the interests of ordinary American citizens and toward the interests of the USSR.

Soviet operatives worked their way into very sensitive positions in the federal government. Communists like Alger Hiss were advisors at the highest levels, meeting face-to-face with the president and shaping major diplomatic decisions.

Alger Hiss was a confidant to President Roosevelt. Under Hiss’s guidance, or misguidance, FDR allowed Stalin to ravage large parts of eastern Europe, and paved the way for Mao to bully Chiang Kai-shek out of China.

The CPUSA was even prepared for violence, and asserted in its written materials that it sought a “violent” revolution inside the United States.

Pro-Communists inside the United States were not merely people with alternative opinions. They were actively engaged in supporting Stalin’s murderous drive for world domination, as historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:

As the record further shows, Communists and fellow travelers on official rosters in case after case were agents of the Soviet Union, plighting their troth to Moscow and striving to promote the cause of the dictator Stalin. This is of course contrary to the notion that American Reds were simply idealistic do-gooders, perhaps a bit misguided but devoted to peace and social justice, and thus shouldn’t have been ousted from government jobs just because of their opinions. In countless instances, we know that domestic Communists in official posts were actively working on behalf of Russia, and thus were the minions of a hostile foreign power.

Stalin explicitly sought to overthrow the western-style democracies in Europe, South America, and North America. His effort to bring the world under totalitarian subjugation relied on various factors, one of which was an extensive Soviet espionage network inside the United States.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Soviet Spy Ring Bigger Than First Suspected

The massive amount of data which historians have found concerning Cold War espionage has led to a reappraisal of the extent to which the Soviet spy network infiltrated the United States.

Shocking cases, like the fact that Soviet operative Alger Hiss infiltrated the State Department in the 1930s, and was advising President Roosevelt in face-to-face meetings, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

The international communist conspiracy operated an extensive spy network inside both social institutions and government agencies.

Millions of pages of formerly secret documents are now available to scholars. Researching the dark underworld of Soviet espionage inside the United States, historians Stan Evans and Herb Romerstein write:

Looking at this considerable body of data, and matching one set of materials with another, we can draw certain definite conclusions about the scope of Soviet-Communist activity in the United States and other target nations. First and foremost, it’s evident from now-available records that Communist penetration of our government — and our society in general — was, over a span of decades, massive. Hundreds of Soviet agents, Communist Party members, and fellow travelers were ensconced on official payrolls, beginning in the New Deal era then increasing rapidly during World War II, when the Soviets were our allies against the Nazis.

Under the influence of Alger Hiss, FDR made odd policy decisions, ceding millions of square miles - and millions of innocent lives - to Stalin’s expansionist imperialism.

Historians are now learning that, from the 1930s onward, the Soviets had an espionage network larger and more effective than researchers had previously imagined.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Historians Sort Cold War Data

When the Cold War ended, sometime between 1989 and 1991, historians went to work. Massive amounts of behind-the-scenes data became available.

Scholars would now be able to learn the secrets of the massive Soviet espionage network which had been active for decades inside the United States.

The narrative of the international communist conspiracy, and how it infiltrated various social institutions and government agencies, would be pieced together with data from a wide variety of sources.

Information became declassified from various Soviet intelligence agencies, like the KGB, once the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Private collections of papers from various former Soviet agents also became public.

Other sources included surveillance files from the FBI, and data from the U.S. Army’s Venona project. In late 1946, officers were able to break secret Soviet codes. Venona, begun in 1943, revealed extensive communist infiltration into various government offices.

Reviewing these various sources of Cold War data for researchers, historians Stan Evans and Herb Romerstein write:

To all of which there should be added — though this too is much neglected — a sizable trove of information about Red activity in the United States collected by committees of the Congress, based on the testimony of ex-Communist witnesses, the findings of staff investigators, and information from intelligence agencies, security squads at the State Department, and other official bodies. Like the endeavors of the FBI, the work of the committees was often downgraded or ignored while the Cold War was in progress. As may be seen today in the light of the new disclosures, the hearings and reports of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and other panels of the Congress were (and are) a gold mine of useful information on Cold War issues.

Taken together, the bits of information formed a verifiable idea of the Soviet espionage network inside the United States. The first Venona decrypts revealed that communist spies had infiltrated the Manhattan Project and the facilities at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Spies were also shown to be in several different offices within the federal government, including the State Department and the Treasury Department.

In total, Soviet infiltration and subversion inside the United States was more extensive than scholars had previously suspected.