Category Archives: Communism

Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage, Part II

Posted on by

Part I of the review of this book by Joseph E. Persico was about how FDR prepared the country for war, and how he reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This posting will focus on Roosevelt’s use of intelligence and intelligence services, and some of the impacts on the events of World War II.  Vincent Astor had become a friend and confidant of FDR after his crippling attack of polio. Astor and a group of wealthy friends had formed an organization to secretly collect gossip and informal intelligence that they called “The Room.”  One member was Kermit Roosevelt, the man who would engineer the CIA overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran in the early 1950’s.  Astor had done some amateur sleuthing in the Pacific for Roosevelt after FDR had become President, but the German attack of Poland brought Astor and The Room closer to FDR.  The group of adventure-seeking dilettantes reconstituted themselves as “The Club,” and began to increase their activities through various international banks.  This group appealed to FDR’s natural attraction to “cloak and dagger” intrigue.  FDR is characterized in the latter pages of the book as wanting to be like a secret agent who was “…a burglar with morals.”  He preferred to work with human sources over signals intelligence, or “humint” over “signit” in the shorthand of the trade.

Much of the book is about the various U.S. intelligence gathering services that seemed to spend almost as much effort trying to discredit the other organizations as they did trying to steal secrets from other countries.  Much of the in-fighting involved Bill “Wild Bill” Donovan. FDR had written a note in June 1941 authorizing a military central intelligence service with Donovan as the “coordinator of information,” or COI.  The organization was renamed Office of Strategic Services, or OSS.  It was the latest of 136 “emergency agencies” that FDR created.  However, this one began almost immediately to create friction with the other military intelligence agencies and J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to Britain also wasn’t a fan of Donovan.  Continue reading →

Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage, Part I

Posted on by

I’ve read several books about FDR, and this book written by Joseph E. Persico is, in my opinion, the best one. My parents were avid supporters of FDR, and I have been skeptical about why they felt that way. This book made me reflect that there were positive aspects of the man and his leadership that I hadn’t considered previously.  There is so much information in the book that I intend to break the review into several parts.  This part will describe how FDR prepared the country for war, and how he reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Isolationists, such as Charles Lindberg, had a majority of popular support to avoid another war with the memories of the dead and maimed from World War I fresh in minds of Americans.  Roosevelt agreed with Churchill’s priority of finding a way to get the U.S. into the war before the Germans overran Britain, but he had to deal with the political reality that the country was not convinced that was necessary and the practical reality of the state of preparedness.  In 1940 the U.S. army ranked eighteenth in the world behind Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Roosevelt strived to find ways to support the British while telling the American people that his intention was to remain neutral.  The depth of Roosevelt’s deception is illustrated by the “Tyler Kent” affair.  Kent was a code clerk attached to the U.S. embassy in London who was frustrated that his intellect wasn’t being used in his mundane job of decoding messages.  He was an anti-Communist Isolationist, and was reading exchanges between FDR and Churchill that clearly proved FDR was lying about how he was working to keep America out of the war.  Unfortunately for Kent and fortunately for FDR, Kent told some people he intended to provide documents he was copying to the press.  The British intelligence agency MI5 raided his apartment in May 1940 and found 1,929 documents. The content of the documents would likely have cost Roosevelt reelection if they had been revealed to the American public.  Roosevelt and Ambassador Kennedy denied Kent the diplomatic immunity to which he was entitled, and he was tried, convicted, and jailed. Continue reading →

Recent Russian Spy Case

Posted on by

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.

Spy Catcher, The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer

Posted on by

This book by Peter Wright, former assistant director of England’s MI5, must not have been a best seller.  I bought a hard cover copy at the Westminster, CO library for a dollar as part of their campaign to clear out books no one had been reading.  The book chronicles the author’s quarter of a century in British intelligence.  It is not an easy or fun book to read, because it contains so many details of people, organizations, and events.  It is undoubtedly an excellent reference book for those reasons.

The book presents an astonishing contrast between the British and Soviet intelligence operations.  Seldom is there mention of any Soviet secrets being collected by the British unless the Soviets wanted the British to know the secret.  Practically every British secret of any importance was known by the Soviets, and Stalin often knew it before it had filtered through the British bureaucracy.  The British were a bit similar to the Soviets in their freedom to use any means to gather intelligence.  The author said it was made clear MI5 operated on the basis of the 11th Commandment, “Thou shalt not get caught.”

There are also astonishing indications that some events that were viewed as defeats for the Soviets based on the West learning their secret plans were in reality the outcome desired by the Soviets.  The Cuban missile crisis is one example.  Wright believed the Soviets intentionally allowed the United States to learn they had installed intermediate range missiles in Cuba to create the crises.  Their purpose was to get an agreement from the United States to cease in the attempts to assassinate or overthrow Castro.  The Soviets believed having a staunch ally just off the Keys from Florida was worth the perception the Americans had found their missiles and forced their removal.   Continue reading →

Perjury, The Hiss Chambers Case

Posted on by

By Allen Weinstein, 1978

This review pertains directly to the “Witness” review, but it also provides insight into the allignment of forces against Elizabeth Bentley. The American Civil Liberties Union helped Weinstein obtain FBI files about the Hiss case for use in a lawsuit, and the author began his investigations believing Hiss had been unfairly convicted. Those on the political left were absolutely convinced that Chambers was wrong about Hiss and, that Hiss was unfairly convicted of perjury. The book presents a very detailed description of the five years of research that led to the author’s conclusion, much to the dismay of Hiss supporters, that Hiss had indeed been guiltiy of perjury. The book also confirms the magnitude of Soviet espionage in the United State. ….Nadya Ulanovskaya has confirmed the substance of Chamber’s account of his underground activities from his recruitment up to the time when Ulrich…returned to Russia in 1934. Nadya Ulanovskaya, who confirmed the substance of Chamber’s accounts of his Communist activities in the 1930s “scoffed at the dangers involved in conducting an espionage in the United States.” Nadya said: “If you wore a sign saying ‘I am a spy,’ you might still not get arrested in America when we were there.”

Early parts of the book describe the depths reached by Hiss and his supporters to discredit Chambers. There were unproven allegations of homosexuality (which would have been called “homophobic” today), insanity (the term “psychopathic personality” was used by one of their psychiatrist in testimony), imposture, and criminal behavior. There is no question that Chambers had a checkered personal life. He did come from dysfunctional family life as a child, and his father abandoned the family to move in with a male lover. There also is no dispute that Chambers served as a dedicated Communist courier for Soviet espionage rings. There is also the practical matter that he was dowdy and rumpled in appearance while his was handsome and always presented himself in well-tailored fashions. Continue reading →

Out of Bondage: The Story of Elizabeth Bentley

Posted on by

Published by The Devin-Adair Company, New York, 1951
(Buy this book on Amazon.com.)

Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American who served as a courier for Soviet espionage cells who became disillusioned, and like Whitaker Chambers (see the “Witness” review), went to the FBI.  Bentley was a well educated liberal who became concerned about Fascism during a year in Italy and became a Communist when she had trouble finding work after she returned to the United States.  Her intelligence and dedication attracted the attention of members of the Russian Secret Police.    One was a woman named Juliet Glazer (actual name Juliet Poyntz) who scared her.  Glazer was liquidated by her Soviet handlers not long after meeting Bentley.  Over the next few years Bentley would work with others who would suffer the same fate as Glazer (Poyntz).

Elizabeth called herself a “steeled Bolshevik” by the time she went to work for a man called “Timmy,” and she was told to cut off contact with all her Communist friends to go deep under cover.  “Timmy,” who she later called “Yasha,” was Jacob Golos, chief of Soviet espionage operations in the United States.    Elizabeth, whose Venona code name was “Clever Girl,” served as courier for Golos, and the two became lovers against orders from the Soviets and despite the fact he had a wife in Lithuania and a mistress in Manhattan.

Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and orders came to Golos to get as many comrades as possible into the U.S. government.  Bentley assumed the name of “Miss Wise,” and she found a job in the United States Services and Shipping Corporation.  Bentley was surprised at how easy it was for hard core Communists to be hired into sensitive U.S. government jobs.  There were so many agents that she and Golos worried that American intelligence would “trip over one of them.”  So much information was stolen that it was difficult to keep up with the microfilming.  The information included plane production data, planned destinations, and performance data.  “Besides this purely military information, we had a steady flow of political reports from the Treasury…the Office of Strategic services, the Navy, the Army, and…the Department of Justice.  We knew what was going on in the inner chambers of the United States Government.” Continue reading →