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Roosevelt was like a passionate schoolboy in his courting of Stalin. Sword and Shield authors Andrew and Mitrokhin quote how FDR, in order to win favor with the inscrutable dictator, had no pangs ridiculing his friend Churchill at the upcoming Tehran summit in November 1943. “Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally, Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw.... I saw the light. I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me.... I called him ‘Uncle Joe.’ He would have thought me fresh the day before . . . but he came over and shook my hand. From that time on our relations were personal . . . . We talked like men and brothers.”25
Patton, of course, disapproved. Did he make his feelings about the Soviets known in North Africa? I have not been able to find any public record of his doing so, but it does not mean it did not happen. He had plenty of chances to give his anti-Soviet views, not only with his own staff, who certainly were aware of his opinions, but with the high-ranking officers in the Allied commands in North Africa with whom he had daily contact, and even with Roosevelt, Hopkins (whom Patton called “pilot fish”bb and FDR’s “boyfriend” because of his attachment to the president), and General Marshall, each of whom he spent ample time alone with during the Casablanca talks. At least twice, according to his diaries, he was alone with Roosevelt, talking “for about thirty minutes” in one instance (January 19, 1943 entry) and then for “two hours” (an October 17, 1945 entry in which he recalled the earlier trip) as he drove the president back from a seaside lunch. “We talked history and armor. . . .Then he got on to politics . . . .”26 Did Patton hold his tongue? Not likely. That was not his style. And since he was praised by conferees, his confidence to speak out must have been high. The trip was a chance to influence the highest decision maker. But even if he just listened, Roosevelt, who relished the clandestine and always had a silent agenda and private sources of information—as most in his position would—certainly knew Patton’s opinions. It was his job, and his advisors’ jobs, to know. That was one of the reasons he had established the OSS, which basically was his own private intelligence service, as opposed to using the military intelligence services which were parochially beholden to the admirals and generals. Donovan reported only to FDR, and occasionally, the War Department. So it may not have been coincidence that it was just several weeks after the Casablanca meeting, in early February 1943, that Eisenhower had summoned his generals to Algiers to order them not to talk badly about the British. Also prohibited in the gag order was any criticism of the Soviets.27
It was Patton who was doing the most vocal Soviet bad-mouthing.
President Roosevelt, one sadly has to believe, had no idea how infiltrated Soviet spies were in his administration. (If he did know, that would be even worse.) What he believed to be a noble and time-has-come society—one needed to insure world peace—was actually a place of repression, assassination, and lies as bad as Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, however objectionable his methods might have been, portrayed in his denunciations.28 Even McCarthy, who frequently charged communists were rife in American society, did not know how bad things really were. He was not privy to the deepest secrets that are only now coming to light. The numbers of Communist agents reporting to Moscow and sympathizers aiding them in America at that time is staggering, probably reaching into the thousands. It included the American communist Party, now known to have been supplying the USSR with recruits.29 The result was a clandestine army, and not just in low, inconsequential jobs. There were Soviet spies in virtually every part of the U.S. government during the war, stealing secrets and influencing policy—all to aid Stalin and the USSR.
Americans spying for the Soviets were operating at the highest tiers; at State, Treasury, Justice, in the Congress, in the military, in the intelligence agencies, defense industries, the media, even in the White House with influence over the president. They were working in the country’s most secret science projects, such as Manhattan which was creating the atomic bomb. In fact, had it not been for a lucky change in the Democrat ticket for president in 1944, America would have emerged from the war with two Soviet spies heading major cabinet positions and a president, Henry Wallace, who believed, as they did, that communist Russia was the light of the world.
One of the reasons historians now know much of this is because of the Venona project, the secret wartime U.S. endeavor to read coded Russian diplomatic messages. The project was not declassified and made public until 1995, more than fifty years after it had been initiated. A lot of history has been written without it but the media, generally still locked into portraying the era as one of “McCarthyism” and “The Red Scare,” has done almost nothing to publicize Venona, which gives the lie to their shallow portrayal. As a result, the general public is still largely unaware of what the code-breaking operation shows.
Begun on a small scale in 1943 in response to fear that the Russians might be negotiating a secret peace with the Nazis, Venona continued under the National Security Agency until 1980 when it was finally halted but remained classified. From the beginning, the project, born under NSA forerunner, the army’s Signal Intelligence Service, was a hard, exasperating task conducted by a few dedicated individuals. The smallness probably reflected the pro-Soviet attitude in Washington at the time. Suspect the Soviets and you were suspected yourself. But such favoritism did not deter the Soviets. They were so pervasive in their U.S. spying that they were actually alerted by a spy within Venona shortly after the war and changed their codes thereafter. But thousands of messages in the earlier code that had been cracked had already been sent. Code-breakers had material from roughly 1940 through 1948. So they continued their painstaking work secretly for decades. What has emerged so far, supported by the testimony of Soviet defectors and rare Kremlin files that have surfaced in the interim, shows the great power Stalin wielded in Washington at the time Patton died. What has been deduced from Venona so far is rewriting history.
The alternative scenarios to the actual guilt of accused communists in America—propagated by the Left in response to the “Red Scare” in the late 1940s and early 1950s and based on hope and naiveté rather than facts—have been shown largely to be myths. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a seemingly benign New York couple executed as Soviet spies amidst great controversy that claimed they were innocent of McCarthy’s witch-hunt charges were indeed, Venona shows, on the NKVD payroll. They were sending classified secrets back to Moscow such as stolen U.S. atomic data that helped the Soviets build nuclear bombs—which threatened America for decades after. Julius Rosenberg’s code names in the Venona traffic were “Antenna” and “Liberal.” The spy ring he and his wife worked in was one of several receiving nuclear secrets from, among other U.S. scientists, J. Robert Oppenheimer, head physicist of the Manhattan Project and another portrayed by the Left as an innocent victim of communist “witch hunts.”bc But Soviet assassination chief Sudoplatov, in his post-Cold War memoir, Special Tasks, describes Oppenheimer’s espionage. He was a secret member of the Communist Party in the United States, according to several sources including Sudoplatov, and helped get spies like Klaus Fuchs into the Manhattan project.
Penetration of the U.S. atomic bomb project and the abandonment of Eastern Europe to the Soviets are considered among the most important espionage-related coups in U.S. history. Russia was the next nation to build an atomic bomb and thus check America’s monopoly, and its U.S.-aided takeover of post-war Eastern Europe precipitated a half century of expensive and violent conflict in the Cold War. The Korean War and the Vietnam War must be counted in the death toll. Most prominently, State Department officials Alger Hiss and Laurence Duggan, Morganthau advisor Harry Dexter White in Treasury, and trusted White House economic aid Lauchlin Currie, a close Roosevelt confidant, are all shown to have been Soviet agents by Venona or Soviet files and memoirs (like Sudoplatov’s) that have surfaced since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Each was accused under the Roosevelt administration and protested his innocence. Some still have Old Left and family connected defenders. But the evidence is overwhelming. For whatever reason, they betrayed their country.
While acknowledging he did not know whether Hiss, one of the first to be arrested for espionage-related crime, was a paid agent or not—a distinction that in terms of the outcome of the espionage makes little difference—Sudoplatov wrote that Hiss “disclosed . . . official U.S. attitudes and plans” to Russian intelligence. Hiss’s codename in Venona is believed to be “ALES” and Sudoplatov and others give buttressing details of his spying. At Yalta in February 1945, Hiss was the “source,” according to Sudoplatov, “who told us the Americans were prepared to make a deal [on] Europe”—that is, basically concede Eastern Europe to Russian domination in the post-war.30 Hiss met daily with a top Soviet intelligence officer at Yalta, briefing him on American positions, wrote Jerrold and Leona Schecter, authors of Sacred Secrets, another of the myth-busting books based chiefly on Russian sources. One outcome of Hiss’s help, according to KGB archives cited in Sword and Shield, was to give Stalin “detailed knowledge of the cards” in his opponents’ hands in negotiation over whether Poland would remain free in the post-war, which it did not.31 “By giving away the American and British positions in advance of the negotiations,” conclude the Schecters, “Hiss abetted the lowering of the Iron Curtain”—and, by extension, the Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe.32
Patton saw this coming and wanted to head it off by going on to Berlin, as he had been briefed was the Allied plan, and capturing it before the Russians did. But he was stopped by Eisenhower for reasons that are still controversial today.bd Earlier, Eisenhower had told his generals Berlin was the objective. As National Review ’s Jonah Goldberg recently wrote, “the concessions at Yalta were possible because America [Roosevelt] chose to let Stalin occupy Eastern Europe. If, for example, General Patton had had his way much of the occupation wouldn’t have been a fait accompli.” 33 In other words, the Cold War might have been averted if we had taken Berlin, which was the key to controlling Eastern Europe after the war. It was shortly after he had been reined in from advancing on Berlin and liberating Prague, another capitol given over to the Soviets, that Patton, in anger and disgust, told Undersecretary of War Robert P. Patterson that “we have had a victory over the Germans” but “failed in the liberation of Europe.” If he wanted Moscow, Patton ventured, “I could give it to you.” But the undersecretary, part of the pro-Soviet administration in Washington, was only shocked at Patton’s anti-Soviet sentiments—sentiments he certainly told his bosses.
It is pertinent to note—because the purpose here is to show Soviet influence in Washington that could have been mustered against Patton—that Patterson, who would be promoted to Secretary of War under FDR-successor Harry Truman, was as blind (or uncaring) for whatever reasons to the infiltration as other New Dealers. When Nathan Silvermaster, an agriculture official and Near East specialist who worked in several mid-level administration jobs, was accused of being a Soviet spy, which, in fact, it was later proven he was, Patterson, on the advice of Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White, both Soviet spies themselves, backed Silvermaster. “I am fully satisfied that the facts do not show anything derogatory to Mr. Silvermaster’s character or loyalty to the United States, and that the charges [brought secretly by the FBI and the War Department] are unfounded,” Patterson wrote to the government Board of Economic Warfare, where, among other sensitive jobs, Silvermaster had access to classified information.34 Yet he saw Patton as a threat.
Silvermaster, a naturalized citizen born in Russia whose Soviet code-names, according to Venona, were “Pal” and “Robert,” was the spymaster liaisoning Hiss, as well as Currie, to Moscow. A third member of his ring was Treasury’s White who historian Harvey Klehr, co-author with John Earl Haynes, of Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, argues was more hurtful to the American government than Hiss. “As assistant secretary of the treasury, he was Henry Morgenthau’s closest aide . . . .One message shows White briefing Soviet intelligence about American negotiating strategy at the first United Nations conference.”be35 According to Sacred Secrets, White directly influenced U.S. policy in several areas. One involved Japan prior to America’s entry into World War II. The Russians did not want Japan attacking them from the Pacific. They feared having to fight on two fronts. Accordingly they asked White to help raise tensions between the U.S. and Japan, hopefully to get Japan to go to war with America—not Russia. To this end, wrote the Schecters, White proposed that the U.S. demand Japan get out of Manchuria, a demand he knew the Japanese, who had been there since the early 1930s, would not accept. Such demands eventually led to Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II.
White was also instrumental in a Treasury decision to give the Soviets monetary plates which they used to flood post-war Germany with marks and thereby cost the U.S. “hundreds of millions of dollars.”36 White was the architect of the “Morganthau Plan,” the blueprint championed by the secretary to de-industrialize Germany and turn it into a toothless agrarian society. Patton actively opposed the plan on several grounds, including the fact that, like the punitive World War I surrender measures giving rise to Hitler, such drastic measures would cause unrest, probably revolution, and open the country to communism. Following FDR’s death, Truman, despite warnings from the FBI, kept White in his successor administration (although White voluntarily left in June of 1945). On a recent C-Span broadcast, R. Bruce Craig, who champions White as a misunderstood and overzealous New Dealer in his Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case, said that following White’s seeming natural death of heart failure in 1948, rumors persisted that he had been murdered by the NKVD as a way of silencing him.bf37
Similarly, Currie and Harry Hopkins—perhaps Roosevelt’s closest advisor—are now known to have been Soviet spies, although there is still debate about Hopkins’ exact role—whether he was an actual paid spy or simply a deeply committed sympathizer. Both, as presidential advisors, were at the heart of American government during World War II. They had enormous influence, especially Hopkins. In addition to successfully going to bat for Silvermaster, Currie—White House economic advisor to Roosevelt—was the Democrat administration’s man in China before its fall to communism. After the war, Currie was blamed for America’s role in that fall. While Currie’s code name in the Venona traffic was “PAGE”; no code name for Hopkins has emerged but he was considered by the Soviets to be one of their most important spies.
According to Andrew and Mitrohkin, when Donovan acquired the fire-damaged Soviet code materials from Finland, an “out of breath” Currie reported to Moscow, “the Americans were on the verge of breaking the Soviet code.”38 But Currie’s alarm to his Soviet handlers turned out to be unnecessary because Roosevelt, unlike his treacherous Russian ally who showed no similar concern for their partner, incredibly ordered Donovan to return the material to the Soviets post haste.
With his own privileged position and so many spies in the OSS and other government agencies, Currie had a variety of ways of learning about the Russian code books—including from Donovan himself. Currie and Donovan had a relationship that grew during the war if for no other reason than their mutual access to the president and having worked together on priority war missions. In one, initiated by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and forwarded to Donovan by Currie, German supply lines through Turkey and Greece were to be attacked.39 An FBI report on Donovan in the early 1950s, prompted by his appointment by President Eisenhower to be Ambassador to Thailand, lists as a detriment Donovans’ law firm representing “a public relations firm, Allied Syndicate, whose clients [include] Lauchlin Currie.” The information was based on confidential but probable former OSS sources who told the agents that Donovan was an “anti-anti-communist” who had “always been ‘soft and mushy’ in his treatment of communists in the government,” as well as elsewhere, especially the OSS.40
Harry Hopkins was probably the highest placed government insider revealed to have been working for the Soviets—that because of his closeness and influence over the president. An architect of the New Deal and prominent New York City socialist who caught Roosevelt’s eye, he was picked early by the new president for his administration when it first came to Washington in 1933. After World War II began in Europe, he was appointed by the president to run the vital Lend-Lease war supply program to Britain and the USSR. Because Hopkins was insistent upon the Soviets receiving uranium through Lend-Lease, General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, began to suspect him, according to Romerstein and Breindel. Others did, too, but could never prove anything because his power and prestige kept them at bay. Now the authors write unequivocally “Hopkins was a Soviet spy.”41 They and others who have studied the new sources say Hopkins, among further pro-USSR moves, removed anti-Soviet officials from crucial U.S. government positions thereby helping the Soviets gain influence. He also tipped Soviet Ambassador Litvinov that the FBI was bugging his Washington phones. He advised Soviet Minister Molotov on how to persuade Roosevelt to open a second European front—something the Russians desperately wanted from the Allies but the War Department wanted stalled. They did not want to invade until America was ready. And he tried to have an important Russian defector, Victor Kravchenko, sent back to the Soviet Union and certain death.42 Kravchenko, a Soviet officer, knew too much about Soviet misdeeds. He published in 1946 I Chose Freedom, one of the first books to expose Stalin’s use of starvation, slave labor, and execution, especially in subduing the Ukraine, Kravchenko’s homeland. The defector who married here and took up life under an assumed name died from a supposed gun-inflicted suicide. But his son Andrew believes he might have been the victim of a KGB execution, according to the documentary film The Defector that the son produced about his father.
