Posing as Journalists, Soviet Agents Deliver China to Destruction: The Amerasia Case

One skill needed for successful covert operations is the ability to establish a good ‘front’ — a seemingly innocuous activity or organization, behind which an intelligence agency can assemble its destructive efforts. Such was the case of the magazine Amerasia, which managed to hide the workings of both Soviet agents and Maoist insurgents.

Aside from its obvious pro-communist prejudices, the periodical seemed to be an innocent enough collection of articles about the politics and policies of east Asia. In reality, however, the offices of the journal served as a junction for a network of spies. Once detected, the web of individuals and other ‘front’ organizations connected to Amerasia showed itself to be both large and significant.

As reported in the Taiwan Today newspaper, the unraveling of the magazine’s facade began when one of its articles contained text which could have only come from a confidential source:

The strange case of Amerasia, like many a fictional spy thriller, opened quite accidentally. One day in February, 1945, Kenneth E. Wells of the Office of Strategic Services picked up a recent issue of the magazine, dated January 26, and found himself quoted — but not cited. Wells was head of the Southern Asian Section of the research branch of the OSS. To his amazement he read, in an article entitled “The Case of Thailand,” the very language he had used in a highly classified memorandum describing the lack of harmony between British and American policies in that part of the world. The article contained, verbatim, whole paragraphs out of a secret OSS report prepared by Wells himself some months earlier. Obviously, the magazine writer must have had the document itself be­fore him as he wrote.

It was clear that secret government documents had been stolen and were in the hands of people who had no clearance to have them. Further, passages from those documents had been published. This was a crime, a breach of national security, and posed a danger to the lives of both Americans and Chinese.

The need for immediate action was obvious, as Taiwan Today explains:

Wells properly called the matter to the attention of Archibald Van Beuren, OSS security chief, who was sufficiently alarmed to fly to New York on February 28. There he instructed his director of investigation, Frank Brooks Bielaski, to find out how and why the document had gotten out of OSS files. Bielaski was given a list of the names of some 30 persons to whom copies had been sent. Most of them were in the OSS, but a few were in the Department of State, and at least one in both Army and Navy Intelligence. Copies had gone also to a half-dozen Foreign Service officers on duty in the Far East. With secretaries and assistants counted, perhaps 100 employees of the United States Government had access to the OSS report on Thailand. Biela­ski’s task was to locate the leak. Figuring that it would take 10 men to maintain a close watch on each person in Washington, Bielaski estimated that he would need at least 1,000 OSS agents for the job. Such a force was not available. It was decided, therefore, to make a preliminary investigation of the magazine itself. An agent was sent to the New York Public Library to analyze past issues of Amerasia, and its editorial offices at 225 Fifth Avenue were put under round-the-clock surveillance. Bielaski himself made some inquiries re­garding the staff of the magazine.

Already early in the case, a number of OSS agents were involved: Kenneth E. Wells, Archibald Van Beuren, and Frank Brooks Bielaski. Soon more OSS operatives would be part of the events, as well as FBI agents and eventually investigators acting on behalf of the U.S. Congress.

The cast of characters on the other side would grow as well. What began as a question about a small and even obscure little publication would turn into a catalogue of many of the most dangerous Soviet agents of the era.

The Soviet Socialists understood that the future success or failure of Mao’s insurgents would not only shape the history of China, but also the history of the United States. In turn, America’s policies toward China would nudge Mao’s terrorists in one direction or the other: toward success or toward failure. The Amerasia case uncovered one of Stalin’s key weapons in this struggle: Soviet agents acting covertly — as “moles” — inside the U.S. government. Those who shaped America’s policies toward China were acting, not on reliable information provided by honest civil servants, but rather on fabrications and opinions provided by Soviet espionage agents planted within the U.S. State Department.

Even as the battles of WW2 still raged, the Soviets were planning the postwar destruction of the Chinese government and the creation of Mao’s Marxist dictatorship.

OSS agents investigating Amerasia found not only that the publication’s staff had obtained stolen documents, but that many of the magazine’s writers were actually Soviet agents, part of a larger network which led to still more Soviet agents in the government and in other organizations, as Time magazine reports:

Chunky, spectacled Frank Bielaski, an ex-Wall Street broker turned Government secret agent, had handled many cases for OSS during the war. One midnight, tracing down the document quoted in Amerasia, Bielaski and four aides let themselves into a dark, empty building at 225 Fifth Avenue. They took an elevator to the eleventh floor and there, by what Bielaski later called “deceit and subterfuge,” entered Amerasia’s office. Once inside, they began a careful inspection. They found one room fitted out with photocopy equipment, a desk in another room spread with copies of Government documents. Behind a door were a bellows-type suitcase and two briefcases packed with other papers — altogether close to 300 originals and copies of documents stolen from the Offices of Naval Intelligence and Censorship, G2, OSS, State Department and British Intelligence. A few of them were marked “Top Secret” and “Secret”; all of them were labeled for official scrutiny only.

Clearly, there were moles at work inside the State Department. In addition to Amerasia, secrets were being passed on to the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a policy think-tank, and to the IPR’s publications. The IPR’s main publication was a periodical titled Pacific Affairs.

The Soviet Socialist espionage network inside the United States did more than steal secret documents. It was also active in shaping America’s policies. Individuals working the State Department who were associated with the IPR wrote briefings for decision-makers in the U.S. government.

The Soviets, who sought the ultimate destruction of the United States, were shaping the decisions by which America was to defend itself against the Soviets. The USSR had managed to subvert the American system against itself.

The OSS gained physical evidence which revealed how widespread the Soviet infiltration was, as Time magazine reports:

The raiders picked up a dozen documents to show the kind of material they had found, and left. A few hours later Bielaski laid his report and the documents before officials in Washington.

Amerasia was co-edited and co-founded by Philip Jaffe. Jaffe was connected to a number of known Soviet spies, including Earl Browder, Owen Lattimore, and John Stewart Service. Each of these was connected to still others. In the end, a dizzyingly large network of Soviet operatives were related directly or indirectly to the Amerasia case.

Ultimately, some of these were tried in court and jailed. Others were rendered useless to the Soviets because their identities had been revealed. But some of them also managed to slip away and continue their espionage activity.

The case expanded from the OSS to the FBI, and then culminated in legal actions, as Time magazine explains:

The case was assigned to the FBI. For almost three months FBI agents kept Jaffe and his office under surveillance. Other agents tailed Jaffe on frequent trips to Washington where he met assorted small-bore Government officials. By late May, James Mclnerney, first assistant to Tom Clark, who was in charge of criminal prosecution for the Justice Department, was ready to collar the crowd, start prosecutions for espionage.

All of this would be mere historical trivia, except for the fact that Mao’s terrorists ultimately destroyed both China’s government and much of Chinese society. Mao’s victory is due, in part or in whole, to less-than-energetic American support for Chiang Kai-shek. Had Chiang been able to defend China against Mao, and had Mao’s communist dictatorship not been able to oppress China for several decades, then millions of Chinese would not have been murdered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Not only would millions of Chinese lives have been saved, but also lives in Korea and Vietnam, including American lives.

Why did America fail to stoutly oppose Mao’s genocidal takeover of China? In part because the network of individuals who were associated with Amerasia had persuaded U.S. policy makers that Mao was benign and that Chiang Kai-shek was useless. Acting on disinformation — a step worse than misinformation — U.S. policy makers were lulled into letting Mao have China. Philip Jaffe’s network of Soviet spies is directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings.

When a Magazine Is More Than Simply a Magazine: Amerasia As a Front for Maoist-Stalinist Espionage

In June, 1950, Time magazine reported that Congress was examining a collection of classified government documents. These documents had been found, not securely stored under lock and key in a federal office, but rather in the offices of a magazine title Amerasia. The questions presented themselves: What information did these secret papers contain? How did they come to be in the offices of a quirky little periodical?

More questions were prompted by the fact that the FBI had discovered the trove of confidential documents in 1945, and yet the Congressional investigations into the matter were underway in 1950. Why the five-year delay into an incident which revealed a stunning breach of national security? Wouldn’t such a discovery demand quicker action?

The Time article reports:

In a Justice Department office last week, staffmen of a Senate subcommittee combed through three large boxes containing hundreds of documents seized five years ago in the Amerasia case. Around the boxes swirled a storm of argument. Republican Senators, none of whom had actually seen the contents, cried that the Administration had put the fix on the Amerasia case, and that a real probe of the case would prove it. From Iowa, where he was campaigning in a primary election, Bourke Hickenlooper charged that at least some of the documents were important U.S. wartime secrets. Didn’t one of them show the disposition in 1944 of U.S. submarines in the Pacific? Wasn’t one of them a highly confidential (“for eyes only”) message from Roosevelt to Chiang Kaishek? Said Hickenlooper: “I think that all Americans will be appalled when the whole truth becomes known.”

It seemed that the administration — in this case, the Truman administration — was dragging its feet. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had confirmed Amerasia’s illegal possession of the papers in March 1945. Why would the government slow-walk a matter of national security?

Was Truman himself involved in deciding the pace at which the Amerasia case would be handled? Or were underlings making these choices without the president’s knowledge?

The Time article records the administration’s reaction to the congressional concerns:

Such talk, Administration sources replied, was hogwash; the documents were nothing much. Said Assistant Attorney General James M. Mclnerney: Hickenlooper is “100% wrong.”

While obfuscation about the processing of the case muddied the waters, the facts of the case were simple and clear. Someone had stolen classified documents from the OSS. Those documents were found in the offices of Amerasia. This was a crime. In the words of historian Stan Evans, it was “felonious.”

The case began in a straightforward way, as Time reports:

As thick as the argument was the smoke screen of confusion around the whole affair, which the Administration seemed determined to preserve at all costs. In 1945, Amerasia was a magazine (circ. about 2,000) devoted more or less openly to the Communist line and the Far East, and published sporadically in New York by one Philip Jaffe. The case began that February when the eyes of a Government official fell upon a surprising Amerasia article. It quoted at length and almost verbatim from a secret report which was supposed to be tucked safely away in the Office of Strategic Services’ file. The OSS immediately put a special investigator, Frank Brooks Bielaski, on Amerasia's pink and wispy trail.

As the initial investigation continued, it became clear that the case would involve much more than Philip Jaffe and his magazine.

Jaffe was part of a network of Soviet operatives and communist sympathizers. This network had connections to Moscow and to Mao’s rebels in China. Jaffe’s associates included a number of current and former highly-placed officials in various government offices. Was the administration anticipating embarrassment when it was revealed that the Soviet Socialists had developed a spy network inside significant branches of the U.S. government?

Jaffe’s associates constituted a list of known Soviet operatives, as historians Herbert Romerstsein and Stan Evans write:

The contents of a secret OSS memo had appeared, in some respects verbatim, in the pages of Amerasia — the obvious implication being that someone had been leaking official data to the journal. This led agents from OSS, and then the FBI, to conduct an in-depth probe of the magazine and its personnel, including dragnet coverage of the suspects and their contacts, plus entry into Amerasia’s New York offices to photograph papers being held there. In the course of this inquiry, the Bureau noted Jaffe’s multifarious dealings with Service, Roth, State Department official Emmanuel Larsen, and journalist Mark Gayn. Interspersed with these, Jaffe was also surveilled meeting with U.S. Communist Party chief Earl Browder, visiting Chinese Communist bigwig Tung Pi-wu, officials at the Soviet consulate in New York, and self-described Soviet espionage courier Joseph Bernstein.

John Stewart Service worked in the State Department’s foreign service organization. In addition to stealing classified documents and passing them to Jaffe and Gayn, Service had gerrymandered his internal reports about the China situation: these reports circulated within the State Department and influenced American policy-making. Under the influence of Service, American support for Chiang Kai-shek became less enthusiastic, and Mao’s communists benefitted.

Andrew Roth was a lieutenant in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). He introduced Service to a group who were “avid supporters of the Communists at Yenan,” as Evans and Romerstein write.

Philip Jaffe was not only networked in this way with a constellation of Soviet operatives, but Amerasia was linked to other organizations which, like Amerasia, were fronts for Soviet intelligence agencies.

One such front organization was the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). Allegedly a think-tank for discussing regional problems and writing policy recommendations, IPR staff and board members greatly overlapped with Amerasia’s staff and board members. Both the IPR and Amerasia were located in the same office building, as was another organization, the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. This “committee” was also a facade behind which the Soviet Socialists could run a pro-Mao operation.

The IPR published its own magazine, Pacific Affairs. The list of authors who wrote for this magazine, and for other IPR publications, was nearly identical to the list of authors who wrote for Amerasia.

The network went still further: “Lauchlin Currie,” writes Stan Evans, was “an executive assistant to President Roosevelt in the early 1940s whose portfolio included policy toward China. Currie left the government in 1945.” When investigations of Amerasia and the IPR continued, Currie “would flee the country,” because he had a central organizational role in the IPR. “In trying to retrace the steps by which the U.S. government had been penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents,” congressional investigators “got on the trail of Currie and his multitude of contacts.”

Currie was, for instance, closely linked with Owen Lattimore, and with diplomat John Stewart Service, arrested in the Amerasia case after sending back a stream of dispatches from China denouncing the anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Currie was also extremely thick with John Carter Vincent, the State Department official who played a critical role in shaping U.S. Asia policy in the years before the Red conquest of China.

Owen Lattimore was yet one more link in the chain connecting Moscow, Mao, and the network which included Philip Jaffe and John Stewart Service. Lattimore had been an IPR employee and then a foreign policy advisor in the Roosevelt administration. Lauchlin Currie had recommended to Roosevelt that Lattimore be dispatched to China to advise Chiang Kai-shek.

It is worth noting that Lattimore and Currie were Soviet agents who had direct access to the President of the United States. They were not the only ones. Roosevelt relied on these men for advice, assuming that they were seeking what was best for the common Allied cause in WW2. Instead, these two, along with Alger Hiss and other known Soviet agents who met face-to-face with FDR, were advocating policies which would undermine the Allied cause and which would set up a postwar world framework favorable to the Soviets.

In the end, Amerasia was not simply a magazine discussing foreign policy and thereby exercising its first amendment rights. It was a front for Soviet and Maoist intelligence agencies. It was part of a network which influence American policy in China, which led ultimately to Mao’s seizure of power in 1949, and which is therefore at least partly responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings.

Proliferation: How One Person’s Actions Affects Millions

Technology — understood not merely as the latest iPhone or AI app, but rather in a more general way — has led to a situation in which one individual’s actions can affect, for good or for ill, the lives of millions. Such is the case of Alger Hiss.

Alger Hiss is one of the most destructive people of the twentieth century.

Born in the United States, in Maryland in 1904, Hiss came from a comfortable middle-class family. He was popular in high school, and succeeded academically, completing his undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, and his graduate work at Harvard. Alger Hiss developed significant social connections, which turned into professional and political connections, during his time at Harvard.

In 1936, Hiss obtained a job within the State Department. Around the same time, he also became a spy for the Soviet Socialists. Although a paid employee of the USSR, Hiss did his espionage more as a passion than as a way to earn money: his desire was to destroy the United States as a constitutional democratic republic.

Alger Hiss was an agent for the organization which would become the KGB.

Eventually working his way up to the level of presidential advisor, Alger Hiss would have face-to-face meetings with President Roosevelt. As a Soviet agent, his task was twofold: first, to steal secrets from the United States government and send them to Moscow; second, to give misleading advice to President Roosevelt so that he would make decisions which favored the USSR and not the United States.

One of Joseph Stalin’s paid employees was giving advice to the president of the United States.

One of the Soviet agents to whom Alger Hiss reported eventually defected. Whittaker Chambers, a high-level insider in the Soviet Socialist espionage network, confessed to the U.S. authorities what he was doing. Chambers was not comfortable when he discovered the consequences of supplying the USSR with military intelligence.

As a result of Soviet spying in the United States, the Soviet Socialists obtained the technology to build their own atomic bombs. Emboldened by this technology, they increased their resolve to oppress the nations of eastern Europe. Millions of people in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and other nations died or lived in servitude because of the Soviet hegemony.

Further, the Soviet Socialists launched and maintained their military proxies in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The Soviet espionage network inside the United States gave them the technology to start such efforts, and the intelligence to maintain them.

The roots of the Soviet spy network go back a decade earlier: In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Alger Hiss was assuring President Roosevelt that he could trust the promises of Joseph Stalin. Stalin pledged to allow free and fair elections in the nations of eastern Europe. Stalin broke these promises and ordered the Soviet Socialist army to invade these nations at the end of WW2. Alger Hiss was simultaneously sending U.S. military secrets to the Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow.

Historian Christina Shelton writes:

During the late 1940s, a high-level State Department official, Alger Hiss, was accused of spying for the Soviet Union by a senior editor of Time magazine, Whittaker Chambers, who previously had been a Soviet agent and Hiss’s “handler.” For two years, the political drama of congressional hearings and Hiss trials made headline news throughout the country. The case was particularly contentious, given Hiss’s prominence, the political climate of an incipient anti-Communist movement during the Truman administration, and, most importantly, because of the ideological rupture that unfolded. Battle lines were drawn between the right and the left that remain to this day. Hiss eventually was convicted of perjury related to espionage. The evidence that was crucial to the government’s case included stolen State Department classified documents, microfilms with classified material, and handwritten notes — all of which came to be known collectively as the “Pumpkin Papers” — that Hiss had turned over to Chambers for passage to Soviet military intelligence. Chambers had secreted them prior to his defection for his own future protection and then presented them shortly before the perjury trials began.

Some of the evidence which ultimately led to Hiss’s conviction was a set of documents which had been hidden inside a hollowed-out pumpkin: so they were called the “Pumpkin Papers.”

Hiss had given these documents to Whittaker Chambers when they were both working for the Soviet Socialists. When Chambers decided to stop supporting the USSR, he kept these documents and hid them. Later, when Chambers had to defend himself against Hiss’s attacks, Chambers produced the documents and showed them to U.S. intelligence officials.

When the evidence showed beyond doubt that Hiss had stolen U.S. information and attempted to send it to the USSR, it was clear that Hiss was guilty. Hiss had not only betrayed the United States, but he had willingly supported the Soviet Socialist efforts which caused millions of deaths in Korea, in Vietnam, and in eastern Europe.

A New Leader for a New Country: Presidents Make Precedents

The metamorphosis of eastern North America from British colony to independent sovereign nation lasted several decades. From the middle of the 18th century, especially after the French and Indian War ended in 1763, the colonies grew more and more restless under the oppressive British government. The King and Parliament levied a series of ever-higher taxes, confiscating thereby the hard-earned property of those living in the colonies. Further, the British regulated many facets of commerce — both business within the colonies and trade between the colonies and the rest of the world. The British also violated the rights of the colonists in egregious ways: the freedom of speech was threatened and violated.

Over the third quarter of the century, tensions grew, outrage among the colonies grew, and British control and oppression grew, until April 1775, when the war started. The fighting ended in late 1782; a peace treaty was signed in 1783. The colonies were now the United States of America.

Moving away from British persecution was only one half of the process. Moving toward the creation of the new nation’s own government was the other half.

There are many examples of revolutions which succeeded in throwing off cruel governments, only to fail to have prepared a new government to step in and take over. This is why the French Revolution failed. This is why so many postcolonial nations have gained their independence and autonomy, and then become “failed states” or remain locked in a third-world condition.

Throughout the 1700s, the Americans had not only developed vindications for their desire to be independent and sovereign, but rather they had also explored the general principles and possible specific programs for a new government. Some of these concepts had been tested in the settings of the legislatures within the individual colonies. The heritage of the British Parliament also provided a legacy from which both general principles and specific practices could be drawn, possibly modified, and sometimes rejected.

The thinkers who prepared the way for the revolution of 1776, and who shepherded it for several decades afterward, had deep and broad educations. Some of them had traveled widely; others had experience from business, military, political, or agricultural endeavors. Among the many names which belong to this list are Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Patrick Henry. Thomas Jefferson was able to read Greek at an advanced level by his early teenage years. Benjamin Franklin explored nearly every field of human endeavor, making groundbreaking discoveries in physics, and developing a music instrument for which Mozart, Josef Haydn, and Beethoven, among others, composed works. Among the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, a working knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, and other languages was commonplace.

In June 1776, a committee began to write a document which would eventually become the Articles of Confederation. This paper would be a forerunner to the United States Constitution. All thirteen states ratified the finalized text of the Articles of Confederation by February 1781.

By September 1786, it was clear that the Articles of Confederation needed some adjustments. In the course of meetings to determine which changes were needed, starting in May 1787, the revisions were so significant that the document which emerged from these meetings in September 1787 was essentially an entirely new document, the U.S. Constitution.

The final product of the Constitutional Convention was designed to improve on the Articles of Confederation. It included insights from contemporary debates about government: discussions from the writings of John Locke, Montesquieu, and others. The last few centuries of the British experience shaped the document: the Magna Carta of 1215, the English Civil War, the tenure of Cromwell, the Stuart Restoration in 1660, and the British Bills of Rights of 1689. Given that the delegates at the convention had an extensive knowledge of history, the antecedents of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the political thoughts of medieval Scholasticism, are visible in the Constitution.

The Constitution displays a certain universality and timelessness, inasmuch as it draws upon the features of human nature. All people — regardless of the place or era in which they live, regardless of their language, culture, or religion — share certain basic characteristics because they are human beings. They all desire, e.g., peace, freedom, justice, and prosperity. The rare exceptions — the warmonger or the criminal — even have such properties, although hidden behind a mental or moral disease.

The document features various procedural complexities designed to slow the functioning of the government, and thereby avert any scenario in which the government would infringe upon the rights of the individual. The Constitution is a set of rules which the government must obey. The Constitution protects the people from the government.

The majority of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was opposed to slavery and sought its abolition. To create an instability which would eventually demand that attention be paid to the cause of abolition, the famous — or notorious — “three-fifths clause” was inserted into the text. They designed this text to destabilize the institution of slavery. This wording was not, as some suppose, devised to solidify slavery, but rather to undermine it.

Yet having an ethical and principled constitution was only the first step. Not only a structure of offices constitutes a system of government, but rather also the individuals who populate those offices.

The launch of the new federal administration would find its success not only in the equilibrium and justice established by the Constitution, but rather also in the character and quality of the human beings who would fill the various roles in the new structure.

It was in this respect that George Washington’s role became crucial, as historian Ron Chernow writes:

The battle royal over the Constitution exposed such glaring rifts in the country that America needed a first president of unimpeachable integrity who would embody the rich promise of the new republic. It had to be somebody of godlike stature who would seem to levitate above partisan politics, a symbol of national unity as well as a functioning chief executive. Everybody knew that George Washington alone could manage the paradoxical feat of being a politician above politics. Many people had agreed reluctantly to the new Constitution only because they assumed that Washington would lead the first government.

The procedural mechanisms of the legislature, of the executive, and of the judiciary are the skeleton of the system, but the humans in the offices are its flesh and blood. The styles of communication, the abilities to see which compromises are reasonable, and other interpersonal intangibles also partly determine whether an individual is successful in office.

George Washington possessed an ability to see talent and potential, even when it came in unlikely personalities, or was disguised behind immaturity. He also stuck unswervingly to his principles, ready to compromise on negotiables, but never conceding matters of integrity.

It was in this way that the improbably good working relationship between Washington and Alexander Hamilton arose, as Ron Chernow reports:

Perhaps the main reason that Washington and Hamilton functioned so well together was that both men longed to see the thirteen states welded into a single, respected American nation. At the close of the war, Washington had circulated a letter to the thirteen governors, outlining four things America would need to attain greatness: consolidation of the states under a strong federal government, timely payment of its debts, creation of an army and a navy, and harmony among its people. Hamilton would have written the identical list. The young treasury secretary gained incomparable power under Washington because the president approved of the agenda that he promoted with such tireless brilliance. Jefferson had it wrong when he charged that Hamilton manipulated Washington. On fundamental political matters, Washington was simply more attuned to Hamilton than he was to Jefferson. For that reason, Washington willingly served as the political shield that Alexander Hamilton needed as he became America’s most influential and controversial man.

Hamilton had both training and experience in the law. As part of the Constitutional Convention, he understood the document from the inside; he understood the competing viewpoints which had been mixed and welded into the text. He’d been one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, a series of essays designed to explain the new Constitution to the people, and to persuade them to adopt it.

Had Alexander Hamilton lived two centuries later than he did, he may well have used phrases like “systems theory in political science” — or had such phrases applied to him. With no precedents to follow, he, along with Washington and the other members of the new government, had to implement the mechanisms of the Constitution for the first time. This first generation of elected and appointed officials had to grasp both theory and practice: they needed to be both thinkers and doers.

The dynamics among the first cabinet members were both personal and political. The concept of “cabinet” was not yet clearly defined. Washington met with Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury, Jefferson as Secretary of State, and Henry Knox as Secretary of War. The Attorney General, Edmund Randoph, was only marginally associated with the cabinet, while the Vice President, John Adams, was largely kept out of it.

Hamilton was energetic, offering opinions on nearly every aspect of government. Ron Chernow describes Washington as “above the partisan fray” and “detached.” In this context, “partisan” does not refer to formally organized political parties, but informal alliances among various leaders: political parties had yet to be formally created. Washington “was gifted with superb judgment” and was “never a pliant tool in Hamilton’s hands.” Washington “often overrode his treasury secretary.”

In contrast to Hamilton, Washington “had learned to govern his emotions” and “was conciliatory, with an innate sense of decorum.” Although Washington worked well with Hamilton, he “could weigh all sides of an issue and coolly appraise the political repercussions.”

Washington and Hamilton counterbalanced and complemented each other. Hamilton was impulsive and sometimes deliberately provocative. Hamilton’s “excesses” and “rash decisions” ultimately cost him his life.

The Purposes of the Soviet Espionage Network inside the United States: More than Stealing Secrets

Ordinarily, when people think of spies, they picture spies as stealing secrets. That’s what spies do.

Yet spies do more than gather intelligence. They often plant falsehoods into the systems of the government against which they are working. They hope that the officials in that government will act on the basis of these fabrications.

Spies also work to insinuate themselves into circles of power, whether by gaining posts in a government, or by becoming confidants and eventually influencers in political organizations. In these situations, spies can not only gain access to secrets and plant fabrications, but they can also influence decision-makers in the government and eventually become decision-makers in the government: in the very government which they are attempting to destroy.

Finally, spies sometimes commit acts of violence: sabotage and assassination.

From the earliest days of Soviet Socialism, starting with the revolutions of 1917, Soviet operatives inside the United States functioned in all the ways discussed above. Concrete examples include Alger Hiss, who had a stellar government career. He served as a clerk for a Supreme Court justice, and went on to work in the Justice Department. He then was an assistant to a Senate committee. In 1936, Hiss began working at the State Department. He held an impressive and ever higher series of government posts until he retired from government work in late 1946. In the latter years of his career, Alger Hiss met frequently in face-to-face meetings with President Roosevelt, and became a trusted advisor to the president. Not only did Hiss meet frequently with Roosevelt in the White House, but he traveled with him to the Yalta conference in February 1945. In Yalta, a city on the Crimean Peninsula, Roosevelt met with Stalin and Winston Churchill to make decisions about the postwar reorganization of Europe. Hiss exerted significant influence over Roosevelt at the conference; indeed, Roosevelt sometimes merely did whatever Hiss told him to do.

Alger Hiss was also a paid spy working for the NKVD. The NKVD was a predecessor of the KGB. Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent.

Another specific example is Harry Dexter White. He worked in the Treasury Department from 1934 to 1946. He had decisive influence in the shaping of U.S. policies. He was a paid agent, working for the Soviet Socialists.

One tactic used by espionage agents is to find a naive and sympathetic individual who will be easily influenced. This individual will not be aware that he is being manipulated by sinister forces, yet will act in ways which support those forces. Soviet spies like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White did exactly this with Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

Morgenthau was the United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 to 1945 during the Roosevelt administration. Morgenthau formulated economic policy, both for the years of WW2 and projected for the postwar global economy. In this context, he is often cited as the author of the “Morgenthau Plan,” a policy proposal which would have devastated what little remained of the German economy and infrastructure at war’s end.

Not only would this policy have been an attempt to consign the German people, already suffering after a dozen years of Nazi oppression, permanently to a third-world status, but it would have also removed an important line of defense: in order to shield western Europe from a Soviet attack, West Germany needed to have a solid infrastructure and industrial base to support the thousands of Allied troops stationed there.

The plan called for Germany to be stripped of its industrial base and physical infrastructure, leaving the land “agricultural and pastoral.” Morgenthau’s personal motive may have been a sense of justice: Morgenthau felt that Germany needed to be punished for war crimes, and that Germany should not be given the opportunity to rebuild itself. Historians use the phrase “harsh peace” to describe Morgenthau’s approach. Morgenthau may have also thought that Germany should be kept weak, lest it start another war.

Whatever Morgenthau’s emotional motives may have been, the plan itself was shaped decisively by Harry Dexter White. As a Soviet operative, White saw that a weakened Germany would give the Soviet Socialists a better chance in any potential future invasion of western Europe. Harry Dexter White used Henry Morgenthau’s emotions to get Morgenthau to promote the plan.

Henry Morgenthau provided the unfocused emotion and bitter passion needed to sell the plan as justice. Harry Dexter White created the details of the plan, calculated to serve Stalin’s interests, leave western Europe vulnerable, and facilitate the enslavement of millions when the Soviet attack happened.

The Morgenthau Plan should have been titled the Harry Dexter White Plan.

At the same time, Alger Hiss was using his influence to persuade President Roosevelt that America could trust Stalin. Under Hiss’s influence, Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s promise, given with no guarantees, that the Soviet Socialists would allow free and fair elections in the countries of eastern Europe — the countries already, or soon to be, occupied by the Soviet army. Millions of people in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, and elsewhere would be subjugated to the Soviet Socialist dictatorship because Alger Hiss persuaded President Roosevelt to grant Stalin’s wish.

Historians know with confidence that not only Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, but also dozens of other high-ranking officials inside the U.S. government, were Soviet agents. Although much of this was known, and some of it suspected, prior to 1995, it was in that year that the National Security Agency (NSA) declassified some documents from its Venona Project. These documents, dating from 1943 to 1980, were intercepted communications between individuals in the Soviet espionage network inside the United States. The NSA had to decrypt these messages, as they were written in code. These messages identified those officials inside the U.S. government who were working for the Soviet Socialists.

In 1952, Whittaker Chambers wrote about Soviet intelligence activity. He himself had been a Soviet agent. He knew firsthand the workings of the Soviet espionage network. But in 1952, the Venona papers had not yet been published, and so he lacked documentation for some of what he wrote. He would be vindicated 43 years later, when the Venona decryptions were declassified. In one of his books, Whittaker Chambers wrote:

In a situation with few parallels in history, the agents of an enemy power were in a position to do much more purloin documents. They were in a position to influence the nation’s foreign policy in the interest of the nation’s chief enemy, and not only on exceptional occasions, like Yalta (where Hiss’s role, while presumably important, is still ill-defined) or through the Morgenthau plan for the destruction of Germany (which is generally credited to White) but in what must have been the staggering sum of day to day decisions. That power to influence policy has always been the ultimate purpose of the Communist Party’s infiltration. It was much more dangerous, and, as events have proved, much more difficult to detect, than espionage, which beside it is trivial, though the two go hand in hand.

Chambers not only identifies Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, but points to the multiple tasks of the Soviet espionage network, i.e., that the agents did more than steal secrets.

Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein highlight the accuracy of the statements made by Chambers. This precision is even more remarkable, given that Chambers wrote before the declassification of the Venona decryptions.

Chambers was correct about the roles of Hiss and White, though now accessible records that prove the point weren’t open to inspection when he made this comment.

Evans and Romerstein also give credit to Chambers for pointing out that the Soviet espionage network did more than steal secrets: “As to the relative importance of policy influence compared to spying, Chambers” indicated that Soviet agents planted disinformation and influenced policy decisions to a nearly unimaginable extent. The president of the United States was sitting in the Oval Office, having friendly one-on-one policy discussions with a man who reported to the Kremlin.

Because Chambers had himself been a Soviet agent, his account of at least a segment of the spy network was authentic and detailed. Evans and Romerstein show that Chambers gave one of the most significant descriptions of the Soviet intelligence apparatus: “That sums up the matter about as well as it can be stated.”

Ultimately, the truth became manifest. Alger Hiss was sent to prison. Harry Dexter White’s Morgenthau Plan was rejected in favor of rebuilding Germany. The purposes of peace, justice, and freedom were served. That is good news.

Sadly, however, Hiss and White — and dozens of other Soviet spies operating inside the United States at the time — did substantial damage: they emboldened Stalin and his successors. They are at least partly responsible for the deaths in the Hungarian Uprising, the armed suppression of the Prague Spring, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, and other incidents around the globe.

The U.S. Constitution: System and Procedure Build Justice

Politicians refer to the Constitution often, usually claiming that it supports whatever viewpoint they have. But what is the Constitution? And equally importantly, what is the Constitution not?

The Constitution is not a set of rules and laws. The Constitution is a set of instructions about how to make rules and laws. For example, the Constitution doesn’t care whether a community makes recreational marijuana legal or not. It doesn’t care whether the speed limit on the roads is 50 MPH or 80 MPH.

But the Constitution cares about how that decision gets made.

For example, the Constitution delegates the power to each state’s legislature to decide whether or not to legalize recreational marijuna. The point is not whether it’s legal or illegal: the point is who makes that decision. It would be a violation of the Constitutional process if the U.S. Congress made that decision.

There are some decisions which should be made by the state legislatures, and other decisions which should be made by the Congress. The important question isn’t which decisions get made, but rather, who should make them.

In the same way, there are some responsibilities to be carried out by the president and his executive branch, and other responsibilities which belong to the Supreme Court and its judicial branch.

In the long run, it doesn’t matter which decision gets made — whether marijuana is legal or not — but it matters who made that decision, and which process was used to make that decision.

The Constitution is a neutral document in this way. The Constitution can be, and should be, used by both sides — the people who are “for” and the people who are “against” any particular idea.

Without a Constitution, and without people acting according to the Constitutional process, chaos results, and after the chaos, some individual or group can seize power, and then the people’s freedom disappears. True freedom and true justice exist only where a neutral procedure is followed.

Because the Constitution is neutral, it is also timeless. Changes in society, technology, culture, or economics don’t affect the Constitution, and the process can apply equally to today or to a hundred years into the future. Constitutional procedures work for Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, or Hindus. Constitutional processes work for old and young, rich and poor, men and women. They work for any ethnicity, race, or culture.

The ideas in the Constitution last because they are built on human nature. Every human being has certain features in common with every other human being — anywhere, anytime. Concerning the universal principles of human beings, and how they are factored in to the Constitution, Ben Shapiro writes:

The founders constructed the Constitution on the basis of three main realizations about human beings. First, they realized that human beings are imperfect, selfish, driven by self-interest. They will go to war with each other to assure the victory of that self-interest. The founders agreed with the central theory of Thomas Hobbes, that without government, man reverted to constant warfare: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Given that human beings are imperfect, how can they build a peaceful society? How can they live and work together in justice, peace, prosperity, and freedom?

Back in the late 1600s, Thomas Hobbes wrote that only with a powerful absolute government — a dictatorship — could human society function decently. He felt that if people had freedom, they’d use it to attack each other. Today, there are still people like Hobbes: they believe that a powerful government should control the lives of people and make decisions for them.

But the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution didn’t agree with Hobbes. They thought that humans can have both a decent society and freedom at the same time. They got some of those ideas from the books written by John Locke, who lived a few years after Hobbes, but before the foundation of the United States.

Ben Shapiro explains how Locke articulated the idea of “limited government” — the idea that the government’s power shouldn’t be infinite, but rather that by limited the government’s power, the people protect their own freedom:

But they disagreed with Hobbes that the only way to solve this conundrum was a great and powerful ruler. They believed that such rulers were similarly capable of brutality in their own self-interest. They adopted this philosophy from John Locke, who wrote, “The end of government is the good of mankind; and which is best for mankind, that the people should be always exposed to the boundless will of tyranny, or that the rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed, when they grow exorbitant in the use of their power, and employ it for the destruction, and not the preservation of the properties of their people?” In other words, if rulers invaded the rights of others, they ought to be curbed.

If the government has more power, then the people have less freedom; if the government has less power, then the people have more freedom.

How, then, can people structure a government to ensure that it doesn’t become too powerful?

The Constitutional system with its separation of powers is designed to make sure that no one part of the government gets too much control. If power divided between the three branches — legislative, judicial, executive — then each branch will have roughly one-third of the power, which is less than half, and therefore can be curbed by the other two branches.

The power is further divided between federal, state, and local governments. When the power is chopped up into small pieces, and different parts of government each have a piece, it prevents any one part of government from having too much power. Freedom is achieved and preserved when the government is relatively weak and limited: a strong and expansive government is the type of government which can take people’s liberties and properties.

Ben Shapiro explains how the Constitution carefully divides and balances power between different parts of the government:

So, how could society survive without an all-powerful ruler checking men? By a series of mutual checks and balances. As James Madison famously stated in Federalist #51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

It might seem odd to say that people want a weak and limited government. Wouldn’t everyone hope for a strong and expansive government? But it’s better to have a strong nation with a weak government than to have a weak nation with a strong government. Either the government will have control, or people will have control. In order to be free, the people must have a limited government. The greatest danger to liberty is the government. This is ironic, because the purpose of the government is to protect the people’s freedom, but it is also true that when people lose their liberty, it’s because the government took it.

The best thing that can happen is gridlock. The word ‘gridlock’ might seem like something undesirable, but when the government is all bogged down in its own procedures, and when the government is doing little or nothing, that is when the people have the most freedom. When there’s a problem in society, or a problem, rather than having the government “do something,” it’s best if the government does nothing, so that the people can figure out how to fix it. The people will do a better job than the government.

The Constitution is filled with various mechanisms designed to slow down the government’s processes, a Ben Shapiro explains:

Checks and balances were designed to prevent government from overreaching its boundaries; only widespread agreement could overrule such checks and balances. The judiciary was therefore designed not to lord over the executive and legislative branches, but to interpret the law “under the Constitution;” it was checked by its requirement of funding from Congress and execution from the executive branch. The legislative branch was designed to pass laws in concurrence with the Constitution; the president was given the power to veto laws. Congress itself was checked by distribution of power between the House, chosen by population, and the Senate, chosen by state. The executive branch was checked by the legislature; the executive couldn’t create laws or self-fund, and the legislature could always impeach an incipient tyrant. The federal government as a whole was checked by state governments, all of which had their own checks and balances.

Although people often speak idealistically about the Constitution, it is, for the most part, not an idealistic document. The preamble, to be sure, does mention some ideals: justice, tranquility, the “blessings of liberty,” etc.

But the majority of the Constitution is a procedural document. Is the mechanics of running a government. The grand ideals are more found in the Declaration of Independence. The two documents complement each other. The Bill of Rights, a third essential document, is a part of the Constitution, an extension of the Constitution. “The structural Constitution,” as Ben Shapiro writes, “is the essence of American government.”

The design principles behind the Constitution factored in two realities: first, that the concrete details of societies change, and second, that human nature never changes. A system of government built on an understanding of human nature is designed to work in different situations. The Constitution applies, like the laws of algebra, in all contexts:

And it has nothing to do with technological progress. It relies on the same vision of human nature held by the founders, and the same vision of human rights: that because you are a human being, you have inviolable rights that cannot be removed from you by majority vote.

One universal aspect of human nature is that people desire freedom. Another aspect of human nature is that, given large amounts of power, people will sometimes take freedom away from others. The Constitution was formulated around these two factors. It is a system designed to maximize liberty and to protect liberty.

The Tax Withholding System: People Pay More Than They Know

Although there were small experiments with income tax in the United States going as far back as the 1860s, it was not until 1913 that the income tax system as it is known today appeared. For the first twenty-five years or so, the income tax rates were low, and in some years, people of the working class did not need to pay any income tax at all.

But three factors caused the government to need more money: first, the massive debt caused by New Deal spending programs; second, future obligations created by entitlement programs; third, the Second World War. Needing more money, the government raised income tax rates significantly.

The new rates were publicized, yet people didn’t understand that, on March 15 of each year, they would be forced to send thousands of dollars to the government. There was a big problem in the making. What would the government do when the majority of its citizens didn’t pay their taxes — or were unable to pay their taxes.

Historian Amity Shlaes recounts the looming problem facing government bureaucrats:

As March 15, 1943 neared, though, it became clear that many citizens still were not filing returns. Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury secretary, confronted colleagues about the nightmarish prospect of mass tax evasion: “Suppose we have to go out and try to arrest five million people?”

Clearly, a new system was needed. It wouldn’t work simply to present each individual America, once a year, with a bill for thousands of dollars.

Enter Ruml, man of ideas. At Macy’s, he had observed that customers didn’t like big bills. They preferred making payments bit by bit, in the installment plan, even if they had to pay for the pleasure with interest. So Ruml devised a plan, which he unfolded to his colleagues at the Federal Reserve and to anyone in Washington who would listen. The government would get business to do its work, collecting taxes for it. Employers would retain a percentage of taxes from workers every week — say, 20 percent — and forward it directly to Washington’s war chest. This would hide the size of the new taxes from the worker. No longer would the worker ever have to look his tax bill square in the eye. Workers need never even see the money they were forgoing. Withholding as we know it today was born.

The new tax system had several advantages. First, the government would get money in a steady stream all year long instead of one big amount once a year. Second, the government could collect interest on some of that money before it was spent. Third, the government could collect excess money from each individual, and then give an annual refund — meaning that the government had gotten an interest-free loan from each citizen. Fourth, the ordinary taxpayer would never really understand how much money the government was taking.

Workers received their pay, but before they got it, the government had already taken a cut. The government could steal their money without the workers feeling the pain. There was also no consent requested from, or given by, the worker. The money simply disappeared into the government.

This was a revolution in politics and economics, both of which depend more on perception than reality, more on psychology than mathematics. Amity Shlaes explains:

This was more than change, it was transformation. Government would put its hand into the taxpayer’s pocket and grab its share of tax — without asking.

The transfer of the concept from a department store to the government made sense: both institutions could make life more palatable for the individual by offering a “pay as you go” program.

The differences, however, were significant: the department store still required a deliberate volitional act of payment from the consumer monthly. The government required neither consent nor willingness, nor even awareness, on the part of the worker.

Ruml hadn’t invented withholding. His genius was to make its introduction palatable by adding a powerful sweetener: the federal government would offer a tax amnesty for the previous year, allowing confused and indebted citizens to start on new footing. It was the most ambitious bait-and-switch plan in America’s history.

The advantage of the withholding tax was that it made the process more comfortable for the taxpayer. But comfort is not freedom. By analogy, one might add sugar to poison to make it easier to consume, but it remains poisonous. The withholding tax was easier to endure, but in the end, the government still confiscated a worker’s money.

Taxpayers were faced with painful choices. In the absence of a withholding plan, some taxpayers took on debt in order to pay the massive annual tax bill. Withholding would avoid this debt. It also helped the war effort, and in 1943, as Amity Shlaes writes, that was loyal thing to do:

Ruml advertised his project as a humane effort to smooth life in the disruption of the war. He noted it was a way to help taxpayers out of the habit of carrying income tax debt, debt that he characterized as “a pernicious fungus permeating the structure of things.” The move was also patriotic.

The mechanism for orchestrating a withholding tax at all would have been technically daunting. To orchestrate it in a short period of time would have been impossible. But something made it possible: the government had already put in place a similar system to collect taxpayer’s money for the Social Security system.

Implementing the withholding program was very possible, even in a short period of time, because of the organizational infrastructure of the Social Security program. The IRS could simply piggyback on Social Security collections.

Ruml had several reasons for wagering that his project would work. One was that Americans, smarting from the Japanese assault, were now willing to sacrifice more than any other point in memory. The second was that the federal government would be able to administer withholding - six successful years of Social Security showed that the government, for the first time ever, was able to handle such a mass program of revenue collection. The third was packaging. He called his program not “collection at the source” or “withholding,” two technical terms for what he was doing. Instead he chose a zippier name: “pay as you go.”

In addition to a more palatable name, the new withholding system had advocates and fans among the economic experts of the day. John Maynard Keynes saw taxes, not only as a method for collecting needed revenue for the government, but as a method for regulating the macroeconomy. Keynes advised that, in some circumstances, governments should collect taxes even if they don’t need the money.

The withholding system allowed the government to easily and quickly change or increase the amount of taxes it was collecting, and so respond in Keynesian fashion to changes in the economic environment.

Ruml’s plan went from paying the government’s bills to managing the entire economy by increasing, suddenly and at will, the amount of money being taken from each worker’s paycheck.

The policy thinkers of the day embraced the Ruml arrangement. This was an era in which John Maynard Keynes dominated the world of economics. The Keynesians placed enormous faith in government. The one thing they liked about the war was that it demonstrated to the world all the miracles that Big Government could work. The Ruml plan would give them the wherewithal to have their projects even, they sensed, after the war ended. Keynesianism also said high taxes were crucial to controlling inflation. The Keynesians saw withholding as the right tool for getting those necessary high taxes.

After a few years, some of the experts began to question the wisdom of the withholding plan. One of them, Milton Friedman, later regretted promoting the withholding program, and contended that it should be dismantled, as Amity Shlaes reports:

Among withholding’s backers was the man who was later to become the world’s leading free-market economist, Milton Friedman. Decades after the war, Friedman called for the abolition of the withholding system. In his memoirs he wrote that “we concentrated single-mindedly on promoting the war effort. We gave next to no consideration to any longer-run consequences. It never occurred to me at the time that I was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom. Yet, that was precisely what I was doing.” With an almost audible sigh, Friedman added: “There is an important lesson here. It is far easier to introduce a government program than to get rid of it.”

Milton Friedman said, in an interview:

I played a significant role, no question about it, in introducing withholding. I think it's a great mistake for peacetime, but in 1941–43, all of us were concentrating on the war. I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn't found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now.

One may note the general principle that wartime allows governments to take drastic actions which would not be countenanced in peacetime. People are willing to tolerate decisions made as necessary emergency actions during war. The sad lesson is that, with the advent of peace, the wartime controls often remain in the hands of the government.