Stalin Plants Spies and Uses Dupes

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union quietly set up ‘front’ organizations in the United States. These groups appeared to be benign social groups - academic or cultural organizations, labor unions, educational foundations, etc. - but were in fact a facade behind which the USSR could carry out its spy operations.

One such was the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). Founded in 1925, allegedly as an intellectual forum for the discussion of economics and policy, it had perhaps innocent beginnings. In any case, it was soon infiltrated and subverted by Soviet espionage agents, if it was not founded by them.

Front organizations typically had members who fell into various categories: the ‘dupes’ who were unaware of the group’s true nature and believed that they were simply working for some noble-sounding humanitarian goal; the ‘sympathizers’ who neither members of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) nor Soviet agents, but who were inclined to support communism; those who were party members; and those who were employed by a Soviet intelligence agency like the NKVD, MGB, or KGB.

People in any of those categories could be immigrants or citizens born in the United States. The term ‘fellow traveler’ was sometimes also used.

To be a member of the CPUSA was not merely holding a set of political views or voting for certain candidates. It was not like being a Republican or a Democrat.

The CPUSA stated explicitly that it sought a “violent” revolution in the United States. To be a member was to advocate violence, to advocate the overthrow of the United States government, and to advocate the elimination of the political liberties which citizens enjoy.

Historian Willmoore Kendall writes:

The IPR found room in its organization not merely for a wide range of Communist sympathizers and dupes, but for Communist espionage agents a well - Michael Greenberg, for example, a British-born Communist who in 1941 became managing editor of IPR’s Pacific Affairs. (By 1942, Greenberg was the proud occupant of an office in the White House.) IPR’s reliance on persons with Communist affiliations who also had close ties with the State Department is fully documented in the IPR hearings.

Three main sources of information revealed the extent of the Soviet espionage network inside the IPR. First, investigations by the FBI and other American law enforcement agencies uncovered, bit by bit, links between IPR associates and Soviet spies. Second, some members of the international communist conspiracy defected and revealed information about IPR members and friends. Third, when the Cold War ended between 1989 and 1991, previously classified documents became available: from both sides.

Of the various front organizations operated in the United States by the Soviet Union, the IPR was particularly relevant to the situation in China. Starting in the 1920s, there was an internal struggle between Mao’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists. It was a civil war.

Stalin’s USSR supported Mao, and the United States lukewarmly supported the nationalists. Stalin tasked the IPR with weakening U.S. support for Chiang Kai-shek, by influencing the thinking of policymakers, and with providing the Soviets with classified information about the situation in China, by stealing confidential documents from various government agencies which had been infiltrated by IPR operatives.

The fact that Mao gained control over China - a fact which caused the deaths of millions - is due in part, but not in whole, to the communist infiltration of the IPR.

A Seemingly Innocent Conversation

When a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) named John Service met with some members the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR) in late 1944, it might have seemed like an obvious and mundane event - perhaps even boring. It would have seemed natural for a State Department bureaucrat, one of whose tasks it was to write regular reports from China about China and send them to Washington, to meet with a few members of what seemed to be an academic organization of scholars who studied contemporary eastern Asia.

Why would anyone care about, or be interested in, a bunch of tedious intellectuals gathering to discuss diplomacy between China and the United States?

Because they were all Soviet communist spies.

FSO John Service was actually working for Stalin’s intelligence agencies. He gathered information about the situation in China, and about U.S. policy toward China, and handed it off to operatives who forwarded it to Moscow. He had detailed, confidential, and sensitive information about the struggle in China: that nation was in the throes of a civil war between Mao’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.

The Soviet were working to aid the Communists. The Soviets were also working to persuade the United States not to support Chiang’s Nationalists (‘Chiang Kai-shek’ is also spelled ‘Jiang Jieshi’).

John Service wrote reports from China to Washington, allegedly to inform U.S. policymakers about conditions in China so that they could shape U.S. diplomacy toward China. In reality, Service’s reports were Maoist propaganda pieces, designed to deflate U.S. support for Chiang.

While sending disinformation to Washington, Service sent accurate information to the Soviets, both about China, and about how Washington was thinking about China.

The Soviet operatives with whom John Service networked were an impressive list of communist spies: Owen Lattimore, who did not have academic credentials, was nonetheless given a post at Johns Hopkins University; the Soviets brokered this deal for him because it gave him a credible base from which to launch propaganda, and it gave him a cover for his espionage activity. Lattimore also worked for Pacific Affairs, the official publication of the IPR, and for Amerasia, the unofficial publication of the IPR.

The IPR had, on paper, no connection to Amerasia, but a list of IPR employees and Amerasia employees was essentially the same list. Those who sat on the board of directors for the IPR were also working at Amerasia.

This information became interesting when the FBI found plentiful evidence that the staff of Amerasia had stolen documents from the government which were marked ‘classified’ or ‘secret’ or ‘confidential’.

Another of Service’s discussion partners was John Carter Vincent, who was, like Service, an FSO who’d worked in China. Like Service, Vincent seemed more determined to undermine Chiang than to relay information about the situation. Historian Stan Evans writes:

At all events, Service did talk to the Washington IPR, and would thus plug into the shadowy network of pro-Red China watchers who would now figure decisively in his story. In attendance were the ubiquitous Lattimore, IPR employee Rose Yardumian, State Department official Julian Friedman (an aide to Vincent), and Friedman’s friend and federal colleague, Andrew Roth. A former IPR researcher, Roth was at this time a lieutenant in the Far East division of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), liaising with Vincent’s State Department office. He would prove to be a crucial liaison as well in the strange adventures of John Service.

Information flowed through a far-flung network of Soviet operatives who’d hidden themselves as “moles” inside various government offices. Rose Yardumian was married to Peter Townsend, a British journalist and link between Mao’s communists and English leftists.

If Yardumian and Townsend were the bridge to the communists hidden in Britain, then Andrew Roth was the bridge to Soviet operatives in postwar Germany. Roth was employed by the Office of Naval Intelligence and therefore privy to highly secret military information. Stan Evans writes:

Though a bit player in the Service drama, Roth was an intriguing figure, if only for what his career revealed about security standards of the era. In addition to his work at IPR, he had publicly defended the activities of something called the “Free German Committee,” a Communist operation based in Moscow. Despite this, he had been commissioned an intelligence officer in the Navy. The former head of ONI explained this, as quoted in a U.S. Senate report, by saying “The fact that an officer was a Communist was not a bar to a commission.” As seen, this was a perfectly accurate statement of the wartime practice.

The IPR also had offices in New York, which Service would later visit. Service would also travel to the West Coast to meet with communists in California.

Were John Service and individuals connected with the IPR responsible for the fall of China and for Mao’s communist tyranny which would execute millions of Chinese? While they may not bear sole responsibility, they were certainly a contributing factor.

FDR at Yalta: Giving Poland to Stalin

In 1939, Stalin’s USSR was closely allied with Hitler’s Nazis, and they jointly invaded Poland. By the end of 1939, Poland was occupied by Soviet and German soldiers. Its political liberty had tragically disappeared.

The nature of the Soviet occupation manifested itself in 1940, when 22,000 Poles were executed by the NKVD, a branch of the Soviet secret police, in or near a place called Katyn. The victims were unarmed prisoners, mostly civilians who had nothing to do with the war effort: professors, lawyers, engineers, physicians, teachers, writers, and journalists.

The massacre at Katyn was not part of any combat operation: the fighting in Poland had ended in late 1939. This was an attempt, by the international communist conspiracy, to eliminate the intellectual and leadership potential among the Poles.

In 1941, Stalin’s political allegiances changed. After Hitler betrayed him, Stalin joined forces with the western allies. The USSR became an ally of the United States and of England.

President Roosevelt did a quick about-face: he presented the Russians, whom he’d previously presented as enemies to the American people, as our friends and allies. Overnight, Americans were told to stop viewing the Soviets as dangerous foes, and instead embrace them as partners in the fight against Hitler.

Although Stalin’s alliances had done a complete turnaround, swapping enemies for friends and vice-versa, the communist designs on Poland did not change. The western allies, hurriedly welcoming the Soviets, overlooked the USSR’s aggression toward Poland. Historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:

The reason for this reversal was that, between the beginning of the war and its conclusion, the Soviets had been converted from foes to allies, and in this new guise continued to press their claims on Poland. When Hitler invaded Russia, the Communists were thrown willy-nilly into alliance with England. Grateful for backing from any quarter, Churchill embraced them as newfound friends and praised them in extravagant fashion. As has been seen, similar notions would prevail at the Roosevelt White House, in terms exceeding the views of Churchill. The pro-Soviet attitudes now suffusing Western councils would spell the doom of Poland.

At a famous series of wartime conferences, key Allied leaders met not only to coordinate the last phases of the war, but also to plan the postwar world. Among these meetings, the most famous were at Teheran in 1944, and at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945.

Stalin made his participation in the Allied war effort conditional on certain postwar demands. (Whether or not Stalin was truly able or willing to broker a separate peace with Hitler aside from the Allies, they yielded to his desires.)

Foremost among such demands was that the Soviets keep the part of Poland they had seized in 1939 in common cause with Hitler. Despite efforts by some in the State Department to oppose this, and occasional statements to the contrary by FDR, the Americans and British would concede the point early on, with virtually no resistance. Tentatively at Teheran, more definitely at Yalta, they agreed to bisect the prewar territory of Poland and consign roughly half of it to Russia.

President Roosevelt, it later became clear, was suffering from a variety of physical ailments which prevented him from thinking clearly at these conferences. Quite aside from the post-polio symptoms which he’d had for over two decades, by 1944 FDR was dealing with hypertension, cancer, and heart failure.

At the Yalta conference, in February 1945, Franklin Roosevelt was not simply ill. He was dying. By April of that year, he would be dead.

Participants at the conference were shocked by his condition. He fell asleep in the middle of conversations, and answered questions with nonsequiturs.

He was in no condition to participate in complex political, economic, and military analyses, even with the most honest of allies, let alone with the wily and deceitful Stalin.

In the end, the USSR received 77,000 square kilometers of Polish territory as a reward for having murdered thousand of innocent Polish civilians.

Wyatt Earp Meets Doc Holliday: History in the Making

Sometimes an individual plays such a pivotal role in history that he quickly passes into myth and legend, and the basic data of his life are almost lost among the fables and tales told about him. Not only is this true of historical figures who lived many centuries ago, but it can happen in the case of a man who lived quite recently.

Wyatt Earp was born in 1848 in Monmouth, Illinois. He had five brothers, Morgan, Newton, Virgil, Warren, and James. He had two sisters named Adelia and Mariah Ann. In 1849/1850, the family moved to Pella, Iowa. Here the parents, Nicholas and Virginia, lived with their children for around a decade.

The Earp family was strongly attached to the Republican Party, and so the older sons fought for the North during the Civil War: Virgil, James, and Newton. Wyatt was too young to join the army, although he tried repeatedly.

By 1869, Wyatt had reached adulthood, become a lawman in Missouri, and married his wife Urilla. But Urilla died in 1870, leaving him broken-hearted.

For the next few years, Wyatt Earp had no steady home. He roamed through Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and the “Indian Territory” (later known as ‘Oklahoma’). He prospected for gold, worked as a ‘bouncer’ or private security man, and eventually returned to working for law enforcement agencies. His career began to stabilize itself somewhat when he became a marshal in Dodge City, Kansas.

Interrupted by a stint of gold prospecting in South Dakota, Wyatt was marshal in Dodge City in 1876/1877 and in 1878/1879.

Contrary to the images of tough guy heroes in western movies, Wyatt habitually avoided alcohol.

While in his capacity as one of Dodge City’s marshals, Wyatt followed a criminal to a small town located near the army’s Fort Griffin, Texas. He knew a barkeeper in that town named John Shanssey. John introduced Wyatt to Doc Holliday. Wyatt and Doc would become friends and coworkers. Historian David Fisher writes:

John Shanssey also introduced Doc Holliday to deputy US marshall Wyatt Earp. Shanssey and Earp had met several years earlier, when the future lawman had refereed one of the future saloon man’s bouts. This time, Earp had come to “the Flats,” as the town near Fort Griffin was called, hunting a train robber named “Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh. Perhaps at Shanssey’s request, Doc told Earp what he knew: While playing cards with Rudabaugh a few days earlier, he’d heard the man say something about going back to Dodge City. Earp sent that information by telegraph to Dodge City’s assistant deputy, Bat Masterson, who eventually made the arrest. But that encounter marked the beginning of the more important relationship of Doc Holliday’s life.

Wyatt Earp’s life seemed to go from steady to haywire after the death of his wife. He moved from town to town, and from job to job.

Doc Holliday’s life was similarly unraveled by a diagnosis of tuberculosis. ‘Consumption,’ as TB was then often called, was almost a death sentence. Many patients died soon after diagnosis. Holliday was himself a medical practitioner, and understood well his prognosis. Like Wyatt, he began a nomadic life, and became known as a formidable gunfighter. The knowledge that he was likely to die soon from tuberculosis erased any fears he might have had in shootouts. His behavior in confronting criminals was courageous bordering on reckless.

Both Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday would outlive their gunfighting days and die of other causes.

But when they met and teamed up, they both were engaged in dangerous attempts to enforce justice.

Wyatt Earp was himself an ornery character. He’d been a boxer and a gambler; he’d worked on the railroads, as a constable, and as a horse thief. There were a lot men like him in the Old West, people who just flowed with the opportunities life presented to them. For the previous few years, he’d been working mostly as a strongman, keeping the peace in brothels. He’d moved to Wichita in ‘74 to keep the peace in his brother Virgil’s house of ill repute, while also working as a part-time peace officer for the city. When Earp first crossed paths with Doc Holliday in ‘77, he had recently been named Dodge City’s chief deputy marshall.

After Holliday met Earp at “the Flats,” Holliday and his girlfriend Kate followed Earp back to Dodge City.

Presumably, Earp welcomed the Doc and Kate, who found lodgings at Deacon Cox’s boarding house when they arrived in Dodge. If it wasn’t the roughest town in the West, it definitely was high on the list. As a letter that appeared in the Washington Evening Star complained, “Dodge City is a wicked little town. Its character is so clearly and egregiously bad that one might conclude … that it was marked for special Providential punishment.”

This was the beginning of a collegial relationship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Their most important, and most famous, work lie several years ahead of them, in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881, in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

After Reconstruction: Civil Rights Violated (Civil Rights Setback)

After the end of the war in 1865, an era of flourishing civil rights began for the newly-freed African-Americans. Ex-slaves began voting, owning property, and even running for office; more than a few of them were elected.

Within fifty years, however, most of this progress would be undone.

How did this happen? How did a civil rights triumph turn into a civil rights debacle? Historian Wyatt Wells notes that the threat to Black liberty began with the Compromise of 1877. The electoral college contained some ambiguous ballots after the presidential election of 1876.

In this compromise, which was never written or reliably documented, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes obtained the presidency, but the Democrats demanded that the Republicans withdraw federal officers from the South - officers who’d been stationed there to ensure civil rights for the African-Americans. Historian Wyatt Wells writes:

Although the Compromise of 1877 terminated Reconstruction, it did not settle the questions of what race relations and politics would look like in the postwar South.

After a decade of Republican influence, “many northern Republicans expected” that the Democrats would allow Blacks to continue voting and holding elected office. Because of the alleged Compromise, the Republicans expected the

Democrats to respect the rights of African Americans, and at least a few of the latter promised to do so. African Americans often voted and, in some areas, held public office. In most southern states, the Republican Party still functioned, electing local officials, state legislators, and the occasional U.S. Representative. In the 1880s a coalition of Republicans and dissident Democrats won state elections in Virginia, and in the 1890s alliances between Republicans and Populists did the same in North Carolina and Louisiana.

For a decade or two after the Compromise of 1877, the Republicans were able to generate some civil rights for the African-Americans. “Nevertheless, during these years,” the security of those rights was beginning to unravel:

Democrats often used fraud and intimidation to eject Republicans from office, and southern states enacted the first Jim Crow statutes. In 1890 a petition from blacks in Oklahoma to President Benjamin Harrison lamented that “[t]he passage of unfair laws affecting elections, labor and the landlord and tenant system, by the legislatures of southern states, has caused widespread unrest and discontent” and “produced a feeling of profound discouragement and utter dismay among Africo-American [sic] voters in the entire country.”

By the turn of the century, Black civil rights would be in full retreat as the Democrats increased their domination of the South. Kentucky, led by Democrat governor J.C.W. Beckham, passed its infamous “Day Law” in 1904, which prohibited students of different races from attending the same schools. Woodrow Wilson’s administration began to segregate federal agencies which had been desegregated and integrated during the 1870s.

Rewriting the Cold War’s History

For decades, a small but well-organized group of writers sought to downplay the dangers of the Cold War. They worked to deny that the United States faced a serious threat from a coordinated espionage network of operatives placed within various agencies of the U.S. government.

They also sought to direct suspicion away from American Communist Party (CPUSA). This group was not merely interested in articulating a point of view, but was rather dedicated to a “violent” revolution inside the United States, and to obtaining classified military information and forwarding it to Moscow.

The CPUSA’s insistence on violence - its printed internal documents used the word ‘violent’ as defining characteristic of its anticipated revolution - brought it to the attention of law enforcement agencies like the FBI. Its coordination with the KGB, NKVD, and MGB meant that it was stealing U.S. government secrets and giving them a hostile enemy power.

One example of an effort to deny or downplay the dangers which faced the United States during the Cold War is a 1978 book by David Caute titled The Great Fear. The thesis presented by Caute and others is that concerns about threats of a Soviet espionage network inside the United States were baseless and irrational.

In 1995, the ‘Venona’ project was declassified and some of the information which U.S. intelligence agencies had intercepted and decoded became public. These were encrypted cables between various members of the Soviet intelligence establishment.

These post-Cold-War revelations refuted claims made by Caute and others that the CPUSA was not operating a spy network inside the United States. An editor for the University of Michigan’s Michigan Law Review wrote:

Contrary to Caute’s preposterous claim that Communists were innocent idealists, the American Communist Party was linked to Stalin like an al-Qaeda training camp to Osama bin Laden. As John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr wrote in their book Venona, the American Communist Party was “a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the Cold War.” The cables “expose beyond cavil the American Communist party as an auxiliary of the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union.” They said, “While not every American Communist was a spy, hundreds were.” It was a striking admission coming from Haynes and Klehr. In their earlier book on American Communism, they had stated matter-of-factly that “few American Communists were spies.” The disgorging of decrypted Soviet cables forced the professors to revise that assessment.

The Cold War is often defined as lasting from the mid-1940s to the fall of the Soviet Union around 1991. An argument can be made for a starting point a decade or two earlier, inasmuch as the USSR was operating an active spy network inside the United States in 1930s. The Soviets had also been involved with a general strike in Seattle in 1919; an alleged labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was actually communist front and took the residents of the city hostage for several days.

In addition to infiltrating the United States government, the communists also operated a variety of such ‘front’ organizations: cultural clubs, academic foundations, artistic groups, and political and labor committees. These seemingly innocent groups, apparently promoting noble humanistic causes, were facades behind which communist agents carried out their work. Historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:

Communist covert actions against the United States and other target nations were relentless and effective, far more than most historians have imagined. The Kremlin used such tactics in systematic fashion, made them key elements of state policy, and devoted enormous resources to them. The data also show the manner in which the West fought back against this challenge, though in most cases we were on the defensive, playing catch-up, and far less practiced in secret warfare. We thus for many years experienced more defeats than triumphs, though with some victories to our credit.

Since the end of the Cold War, evidence has been released which details the scope, breadth, and depth of the espionage network operated by the Soviet Union inside the United States. It is clear that during the Cold War, few Americans understood the size of communist spy system, and the gravity of danger it posed.

Cold War Overview

As a topic, the Cold War has many different dimensions. Although most famous for the years between the 1950s and the 1970s, it began as early as 1919, when the IWW held the city of Seattle hostage for five days in a general strike.

Allegedly a labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was actually a Soviet front organization. Over the next few decades, the USSR would establish a number of such ‘front’ organizations: groups with ostensibly benign or salutary purposes, but which in fact functioned as intelligence-gathering, propaganda-spreading, or policy-influencing organs of the Soviet Union.

Such front organizations might be cultural or historical societies, labor unions, professional associations, academic groups, political committees, or any other seemingly harmless assembly. Some members of a front would be key leaders, aware of the group’s true purpose. Others might have no idea that their efforts or donations were going to support an enemy government.

In the early years of the Cold War, the Communist Party (CPUSA) was a center for networking many Soviet agents. The CPUSA was not merely expounding a political view, but rather stated in writing that it sought a “violent” revolution in the United States.

Then as now, most Americans wanted to preserve freedom of speech and freedom of the press for all citizens. But the CPUSA was not interested in ideas: is deliberately used the word ‘violent’ in its publications. It wanted to cause the deaths of U.S. citizens.

Later in the Cold War era, the CPUSA had been largely discredited, and Soviet agents used other, more secretive, ways of networking. Historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:

Considering only its larger aspects, the Cold War story is of course well-known and doesn’t need much elaboration. With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, conflict between the new Soviet rulers of Russia and the non-Communist nations was foreordained and, despite numerous tactical zigzags, would persist for generations. The hostility stemmed in part from conditions on the ground in Europe during World War I, but mainly from the belief of Soviet commissars Lenin and Trotsky that their victory would be the precursor to Red revolution elsewhere, and that the new Communist state would lead the way in making this happen. Soviet methods of secret warfare were developed to advance this revolutionary vision.

The United States faced a greater threat than many citizens realized at the time. Only after the end of the Cold War could previously classified reports be released, both by U.S. intelligence agencies, and from the files of what had been the Soviet government.

As the details became more widely known, the American public learned that the danger had been much greater than previously imagined. In 1995, details about the “Venona Project” became declassified. This project was carried out by the intelligence community in the United States, and managed to intercept and decrypt a small percentage of messages sent and received by Soviet agents in the U.S.

Although the KGB may be the most famous Soviet intelligence agency, it was organized in 1954. Several other agencies operated prior to it, including the NKVD and the MGB, going back to 1934.

The Soviet espionage network inside the United States was well developed. An editor of the University of Michigan's Michigan Law Review wrote:

The scale of the conspiracy was unprecedented. Hundreds of Soviet spies honeycombed the U.S. government throughout the forties and fifties. America had been invaded by a civilian army loyal to a hostile power. There was no room for denying it. Soviet operatives were stealing technical information from atomic, military, radar, aerospace, and rocket programs. The cables revealed the code names of the spies, their technical espionage, and the secret transmission of highly sensitive diplomatic and strategic policies.

While the direct members of the international communist conspiracy were willing and knowing agents, other “dupes” unwittingly aided the Soviet effort by supporting what seemed to be innocent and benevolent humanitarian organizations - organizations which were actually fronts.

American counterintelligence efforts proceeded with great caution. Much of what it learn about the Soviet espionage network was not revealed, even to other branches of the government, because the information would become useless if the Soviet learned what the Americans knew.

Different offices within the State Department, and in the Department of Treasury, were staffed by agents from the USSR. Paid Soviet spies held positions in the U.S. government and ranked high enough that some of them, like Alger Hiss, had face-to-face meetings with President Roosevelt.

Other agents gained access to the most detailed information about atomic weapons. Through the work of spies like Klaus Fuchs, Julius Rosenberg, and Ethel Rosenberg, the USSR gained the technology to build its own atomic bomb.

In hindsight, the international communist conspiracy held an incredible position inside the United States government, and almost succeeded in its desire to kill Americans and bring an end to political liberty.