A posting on site dated February 25, 2011 described comments submitted after a DOE official read the book “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” (available at Amazon and CreateSpace). One of the comments was about the funding and influence on the international anti-nuclear movement by the Soviet Union. I mentioned that I intended to do additional research on this subject, and had ordered some reference material listed in a Wikipedia article from my local library. I’m beginning to receive those books, and the first one lists ten references to the World Peace Council, which the Wikipedia article described as a Soviet front organization. Another book is by a Soviet agent who turned, and he talks about how the United States should not consider that the war with the Russians has ended.  That is reinforced with the reports of the FBI arresting ten “deep cover” Russian agents in 2010, and the interesting reports that followed that announcement.

The book, “Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union” written by Richard F. Starr in 1991, describes the World Peace Council, the organization founded in 1950 that funded anti-nuclear demonstrations, as supervising all Soviet-supporting front groups. Directives issued by the World Peace Council originated with the Communist Party.  People who participated in the activities organized by the council and other front organizations were called “useful idiots” by Lenin.  The effectiveness of the Council and Soviet propaganda is “perhaps reflected by the report that six U.S. congressmen facilitated establishment of a World Peace Council chapter in Washington, D.C.” (The congressmen are not named.)

But that is all ancient history, right?  Have the Russians become our friends?  Apparently the Russians haven’t backed off from their belief that the U.S. is their enemy, or at least that the U.S. has secrets worth stealing.  The FBI arrested 10 people who had “allegedly” spied for Russia for up to a decade.  They were posing as civilians while penetrating U.S. policymaking circles.  The 11th person accused of being the money person hadn’t been captured the last I heard.  Of course the U.S. media was more interested that one of the agents was a beautiful woman who had posed for Playboy.

I find the most interesting part of the story is that the ten agents were welcomed back in Russia as heroes and heroines after an exchange for four Americans held by the Russians, and there were threats made against the person the Russians believed was responsible for revealing the identities of their agents. The Russian newspaper Kommersant identified the guilty party as “Colonel Shcherbakov,” Shcherbakov had fled Russia for the U.S. in June, days before the arrest of the Russian agents.  His son and daughter aided in the betrayal.  Prime Minister Vladimir Putin denounced the collaborator as someone “who will wind up on booze, or drugs–under the fence.”  “We know where he is, a high-ranking Kremlin source told the…newspaper.  You can have no doubt–a Mercader has already been sent for after him.”  The Mecader reference is to Ramon Mercader, a KGB-hired Spanish communist who was sent to kill Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico in 1940.

As a closing comment, those of us who worked at Rocky Flats building components for nuclear weapons believed what we were doing was necessary for national defense against a dedicated enemy.  I hope that our current leaders don’t think that the intentions of our enemies have changed significantly.