I got a note from my attorney, inquiring if I was on strong medication. He wrote: “You sounded like Joe McCarthy on Oxycontin in that piece yesterday.”

I was at that moment on the cusp of creativity- or lack of it- as the darkness slowly melting away out the window, and fascinated by the forces that are abroad in the wide world these days. I hate Mondays. I had to grant my pal a significant point. I had a long rumination on the impact of Lysenkoism in mind.

(Trofim Lysenko, noted crazy geneticist. Photo courtesy of the Evil Empire).

You know, the doctrinal theme of the old Soviet empire that if you disagree with the State you must be crazy, and treatment included confinement in an mental institution.

There was some of that right here, too, in the Good Ole USA in the crazy days of the Red Scare. I decided to put Trofim Lysenko aside for another day- though the dotty doctrine is back, and proclaimed in both a posting by a medical professional in the Huffington Post and from the podium at the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London.

Maybe it was the medication, I dunno, but the past does reflect the future dimly, and there is some interesting stuff to sort through, since everything old is new again.

I bristled a little at the reference to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, since in the narrative of our adventures in the Old Cold War he has become synonymous with just about everything nasty in politics you can think of.

(Joe McCarthy. He was a squadron intelligence officer in the Pacific during WWII and is alleged to have fabricated wounds to qualify for the Purple Heart and fabricating combat missions to earn the Distinguished Flying Cross. USMC photo.)

I am not particularly interested in Joe McCarthy- he was a blowhard and a drunk and a self-aggrandizing son-of-a-bitch. He reminds me a little of Lyndon Johnson, only drunker. He is a footnote to the tale, not the pivot-point, though his antics are what are remembered. The Senator’s reckless conduct enabled the narrative about what happened to morph into something besides what actually happened in Our Nation’s Capital.

I talked to my pal Mac about this. He recalls the furor in town that raged between the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1948, and the Alger Hiss trials with interest. He was actually assigned to Arlington Hall not long after the McCarthy-Army hearings in 1954. He thinks there is a story to be told, and I agree.

I am particularly curious about Mr. Hiss and his role as policy director at State for East Asia in the years immediately before the attack on Pearl. His orientation and loyalty to Russia is unquestioned- and whether or not the material he passed to his Russian handlers was “really sensitive” or “over classified trash” is really beyond the point. In my years in the machine, if something was marked “Secret” it was supposed to be handled that way.

My pal noted- correctly- that the later damaging generation of spies like Jonathon Pollard and the Walker Assholes and the long list of opportunists were motivated by cash, not ideology.

I quoted Whittaker Chamber’s eloquent statement of why he got involved with the Soviet spy network yesterday. The Lost Generation after World War One really felt they had been to the brink of apocalypse, and looked over into it. It seems perfectly reasonable that something radical needed to be done to remedy a coming disaster. It is not dissimilar to the generation that became politically aware in the mid-late 1960s- and whose idealism was likewise harnessed in all sorts of mischief. I remember it well, and my first adult trip to Washington was to observe the May Day demonstrations in 1970, the year before the Yippies attempted to levitate the Pentagon.

I don’t recall how high they got the building. It all blends together now.

Anyway, there is a lot of doom in the air now, too, and it seems reasonable to remember how things came to be as they are. Like the Reds Under the Bed, or the HUAC itself, which had its origins in the anti-anarchist sentiments of World War One, and actually targeted the Ku Klux Klan in one of its manifestations.

Alger Hiss was a recognized comer in the State Department, Hiss was taken out of Hal Ware’s Cell at Ag and handled separately, recognizing the sensitivity of his access to power along with Harry Hopkins at the White House and Harry Dexter White at Treasury.

(CPUSA Agricultural expert and spy Harold “Hal” Ware in 1935.)

I may do stories on Hal Ware and Harry White. Both are fascinating characters, and worth remembering. Ware was the agricultural expert for the American Communist party who did extensive field work in the Soviet Union during the era of forced collectivization. Harry White rose to be Number Two at Treasury, trained in economics. He was a real mover and shaker: he was the senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that laid out the post war order, and it is said that he dominated the proceedings and crushed the contrarian views of Lord Maynard Keynes who represented His Majesty’s government.

(Harry Dexter White on the cover of Time Magazine. Not the Man of the Year. Whittaker Chambers was a senior editor there. Photo Time Magazine.)

After the war, White went on to be the architect of the newly-formed IMF and the World Bank. He got caught up in the Chamber’s testimony to the Mundt-Nixon panel at the HUAC in 1948 but died three days later of a heart attack at his summer home in New Hampshire.

The VENONA transcripts, supplemented by FBI files, suggest strongly that he passed classified information to the Soviets during World War Two. I find it extraordinary that the men who created the framework of the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund did not have policy notions informed by the fact that they were traitors. Oh well.

Joe McCarthy had nothing in particular to do with Hiss, or White or Ware except to make speeches about them and accusations at others. The era is all a jumble now, and when we think Red Scare, we think Tail Gunner Joe. The House proceedings had been held in 1948, and McCarthy’s Army hearings in the Senate were held six years later, in April of 1954, long after young Dick Nixon’s fierce anti-Communist reputation had elevated him to the Vice Presidency.

My pal was incensed that I had taken Joe’s famous list- the one he waved around at the Army Hearings- to identify 349 Americans who had affiliation with the OGPU and NKVD. He certainly had one, and was willing to recklessly dime out everyone on it. The source I reference is not from Joe. It is from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on secrecy in the US Government, issued in 1995. It, in turn, is based on previously highly classified NSA analysis of the VENONA material.

There is plenty of controversy on the true identity of many of the names on the list. The Army decrypts of the bulk of Soviet materials ranged from a hefty 50% (1944) to virtually nothing from 1942 and 1945, and zip-squat thereafter. Cryptologists picked at the carcass of the WWII material for years afterwards, breaking some of the codes by sheer brute brainpower.

The NSA accounting of the VENONA project (with many additional links at the National Cryptologic Museum) is contained here:

http://www.theblackvault.com/documents/nsa/venona/monographs/monograph-1.html

As I noted earlier, a Soviet spy named Bill Wesiband who was posted to Arlington Hall disclosed the vulnerability to his Soviet handlers as early as 1946. Kim Philby, the most highly placed Soviet spy in Britain’s MI-6, was briefed on the matter in 1949. By virtue of his position, he received summaries of the VENONA transcripts when he was assigned to Washington as a liaison officer from MI-6 to the newly-formed CIA.

It was knowledge of VENONA material identifying his fellow Cambridge spies that enabled Philby to tip off Burgess and McLean and enable their flight to Moscow ahead of British counter-intelligence. Philby himself wound up as a Hero of the Soviet Union, and of the five members of the Cambridge ring, four of them lived long and apparently regret-free lives.

Progressive voices have continues to fight a rear-guard action about VENONA. Some of it is perfectly justified. Victor Navasky of The Nation has written that of the list of 349 Americans identified “The reader is left with the implication — unfair and unproven — that every name on the list was involved in espionage, and as a result, otherwise careful historians and mainstream journalists now routinely refer to VENONA as proof that many hundreds of Americans were part of the red spy network.”

I take his point, though it ignores the evidence that several highly-placed USG officials are certain to have been working for the other side, and Whittaker Chambers had alerted counter intelligence officials about it as early as August of 1939, immediately after the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact was signed in Moscow.

Nothing was done about his allegations, even after confirmation began to emerge from VENONA materials. Everyone from President Truman down wanted the matter to go away—it was just too toxic, and wasn’t about national security in an immediate way- the atom secrets had been passed to the Soviets, and many of the old Bolshies who had wormed their way into positions of influence were getting to retirement age.

For his part, Harry Truman did not have the decrypted VENONA material, and the FBI’s warnings were taken as political opportunism by J. Edgar Hoover. We know far more about Jedgar these days- and the truth about his legacy has been liberating.

Navasky goes further in his defense of the people on the various lists, black and red. He claims that many of the disclosures to the Soviets were “nothing more than exchanges of information among people of good will” and that “most of these exchanges were innocent and were within the law.”

I will give Navasky a “maybe,” since the Constitution gives us the right to free speech and does not prohibit stupidity.

But think about it. Hiss’s involvement as policy director for East Asia at State in the years immediately before Pearl Harbor are highly suggestive. There was a Communist insurgency in progress against the Kuomintang even as the Japanese were raping Nanking. It is worth additional research to see exactly what sorts of policies were being put in place on Alger Hiss’s watch at State, since those years are the ones in which Hiss was actively passing documents to the Soviets. So, too, is the influence of Soviet agents on the formation of the institutions that dominate the post-war international framework.

As to Tail-Gunner Joe, his reckless and drunken spree with parts of the truth damaged innocent lives, for sure. His abasement of the narrative of Soviet espionage and the complicity of some Americans deranged the loony right to this day, who remain convinced that there are Reds Under the Beds now as they were then.

Joe also enabled the loony left’s contention that it either didn’t happen or didn’t matter even if it did. I think the truth will set you free, if you give it a chance, even if it is a little late to make anyone pay for what they did.
The past only shows a dim reflection of the future, after all.

(One of the 1938 notes in Alger Hiss’s handwriting that compose the 65-page Pumpkin Papers, the existence of which secured his conviction on charges of perjury at his second trial. A neat account is at:

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/pumpkinp.html

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com