by Mary Grabar
Zinn cites Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak, the authors of The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, to the effect that Communist victories in Czechoslovakia and China, the blockade of Berlin, and the explosion of the atomic bomb by the Soviets produced a “wave of hysteria” and a massive “Red hunt” by the Truman administration that failed to uncover “a single case of espionage.” While hysterical “Americans became convinced of the need for absolute security and the preservation of the established order,” really all that was happening was an “upsurge all over the world of colonial peoples demanding independence,”—“in Indochina against the French, in Indonesia against the Dutch; in the Philippines armed rebellion against the United States. . . . China, Korea, Indochina, the Philippines, represented local Communist movements, not Russian fomentation.” American leaders knew that keeping down this “general wave of anti-imperialist insurrection” would require “national unity for militarization of the budget, for the suppression of domestic opposition to such a foreign policy.” Thus, the U.S. government conspired to depict such “local” movements as being fomented by the Russians to create an “atmosphere” of fear in which “Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin could go even further than Truman.”24
In fact, the Communist movements in “China, Korea, Indochina, the Philippines” did indeed result from “Russian fomentation.” We have already looked at Soviet involvement in China. John Lewis Gaddis explains that Korea, which had been “part of the Japanese empire since 1910,” was “jointly occupied by Soviet and American forces at the end of World War II,” with the Soviets in the north and the Americans in the south. There had been no agreement about “who would run the country,” but the “American-supported Republic of Korea” controlled the south “by virtue of an election sanctioned by the United Nations.” Syngman Rhee in the south wanted to invade the north and unify the country, but the U.S. withdrew troops, not wanting to get involved in a potential war. In the meantime, in the north, Kim Il-sung finally received a long-desired “encouraging response” from his “superpower sponsor,” the Soviet Union, in 1950. Stalin believed that a “ ‘second front’ was now feasible in East Asia, that it could be created by proxies, thus minimizing the risk to the U.S.S.R., and that the Americans,” who “had done nothing . . . to save the Chinese nationalists,” would again do nothing. Stalin read with care the announcement on January 12, 1950, by Secretary of State Dean Acheson “that the American ‘defensive perimeter’ did not extend to South Korea” and the “top-secret National Security Council study upon which it was based”—thanks to British spies.
Not only did Stalin give Kim Il-sung the “green light” to invade South Korea, but he also “encouraged Ho Chi Minh to intensify the Viet Minh offensive against the French in Indochina.” This strategy had the advantage of not requiring “direct Soviet involvement.” Both the North Koreans and the Viet Minh would operate “under the pretext of unifying their respective countries. And the Chinese, still eager to legitimize their revolution by winning Stalin’s approval, were more than willing to provide backup support, if and when needed.”25 Stalin was emboldened by the fact that, thanks to spies, the Russians had successfully detonated their own atomic bomb the previous year.26
Zinn admits that North Korea, “a socialist dictatorship” in “the Soviet sphere of influence” invaded South Korea, but calls South Korea “a right-wing dictatorship, in the American sphere” and portrays the American response as overkill. According to Zinn, the Americans reduced Korea to “shambles” and “provoked the Chinese into entering the war.”27 So both the Soviet Union and the United States supported dictatorships, and the United States was more at fault. And any concern about the series of betrayals by Communist spies that led to the war is evidence of paranoia ginned up by an American government intent on keeping its citizens in line.
The situation in the Philippines was another result of the actual “Russian fomentation” that Zinn is so sarcastic about. The Huk Rebellion was not a simple movement for democracy. It began as an uprising by starving peasants who wanted better treatment from their landlords in the 1930s.28 It then became a resistance movement against the invading Japanese. But in 1948, the PKP, the Philippine Communist Party, with leaders from the cities—some of them trained in Moscow—set out to take over the Huk movement, despite the fact that “many supporters of the ‘armed struggle’ had a ‘deep prejudice against communism and communists.’ ”29 A Labor Day PKP statement in 1950 encouraged workers to join with them by pointing to “economic recoveries in the Soviet Union and the New Europe, the victory of New Democracy in China,” and the Soviet Union’s “atomic and hydrogen bombs.” The objective was to fight “ ‘American imperialism and its puppets. . . .’ ”30
As Philippine Freedom author Robert Aura Smith has noted, “The various manifestoes that were issued were couched in the familiar Marxist jargon, although there was heavy emphasis upon ‘landlordism,’ just as there was in China. And the government was always pictured as the ‘tool of American imperialism.’ ” So, “direct” “day-to-day or even month-to-month” “orders from Moscow” were not needed. But “Communist agents in the United States Army in the Philippines” were in contact with the Huks.31
Zinn claims that this was one of the “upsurges” of “colonial peoples demanding independence,”32 forgetting or overlooking the fact that the United States had granted the Philippines independence in 1946 in the Treaty of Manila after fighting off the Japanese invaders during World War II. Or maybe Zinn is in agreement with the PKP that the Filipino government was a “puppet” government, a “tool of American imperialism.” As in Greece, the population in the countryside was terrorized by Communist guerillas until the second president of the independent Philippines put them down.
What Zinn presents as “a general wave of anti-imperialist insurrection in the world,” is really a wave of terrorized peasants. But he is writing a book about American history, and one of the most terrifying periods for those of Zinn’s political persuasion is the Cold War era. In his view, ginning up needless fear of the Communist threat was a way to defeat indigenous freedom movements abroad and repress free thinkers and dissidents on the domestic front with “executive order on loyalty oaths, Justice Department prosecutions, and anti-Communist legislation.” Senator Joseph McCarthy—always an easy mark for the Left—is presented as representative of all anti-Communists. But it’s a fact that Soviet expansion was enabled by Americans’ lack of due diligence when it came to weeding out Communist spies.
There was genuine cause for concern. Americans were justifiably upset by the Communist takeover of China in 1949. In 1945, it had been discovered that the journal Amerasia had published “several lengthy paragraphs lifted from a secret OSS [Office of Strategic Services, the U.S.’s first central intelligence agency] report.” The FBI found out that “three government employees were supplying the journal with information,” and “arrested Emmanuel Larsen, a mid-level State Department official. . . . Lieutenant Andrew Roth, a navy intelligence officer; John Service, an up-and-coming foreign service officer; Philip Jaffe, editor and publisher of Amerasia . . . Mark Gayn, a well-known journalist . . . and Kate Mitchell, another Amerasia editor.”
Then, in 1947, the “Hollywood Ten”—film directors, screen writers, and producers, including nine hardcore Communist Party members and a tenth “close ally”—refused to answer questions before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and as a result were briefly imprisoned and then blacklisted in the industry.33 In 1948, Whittaker Chambers testified against spy Alger Hiss, and on January 25, 1950, Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison “for perjury in denying espionage charges before a Grand Jury.” The day before, Klaus Fuchs had started confessing his “wartime espionage at Los Alamos” to “British interrogators.”
A week later, Senator Joe McCarthy made his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, about the list of Communists in the State Department. Christopher
Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, among other anti-Communists, claim that “McCarthy ultimately did more for the Soviet cause than any agent of influence the KGB ever had.”34 Admittedly, McCarthy had political reasons for going after Communists and attacking Democrats who had been soft on them, or at least not vigilant enough. He also was not careful in making his charges, and he became more reckless as his drinking, some say, got worse. But the nearly universal condemnation of McCarthy betrays a double standard. As John Earl Haynes has pointed out, the standard to which McCarthy is regularly held is not applied to the Dies Committee hearings of the 1930s, when Representative Samuel Dickstein “led the congressional attack on domestic fascism” and “often published in the Congressional Record lists of people he regarded as fascists and Nazis.” Dickstein went beyond anything McCarthy would do when he responded to a congressman’s complaint “that six people Dickstein had named as Nazis swore they were not” with the reply, “If out of these hundreds of names that I have buttonholed as fascists and Nazis . . . only six filed a protest, I think I have done a pretty good job.”35
Contemporary opinion was kinder to McCarthy than history has been. In January 1954, he still had a 50 percent “favorable” rating in “opinion polls,” with only 29 percent opposed.36
Zinn discounts McCarthy’s list, claiming it was based on a list of one hundred dossiers “from State Department loyalty files,” which “were three years old,” with “most of the people . . . no longer with the State Department.” Zinn huffs indignantly, “but McCarthy read from them anyway, inventing, adding, and changing as he read,”—for example, changing one description from “liberal” to “communistically inclined.” He “kept on like this for the next few years,” going so far as to criticize books in the Voice of America libraries.37 In fact, the VOA library did include an estimated thirty thousand books promoting Communism, some by Communist leaders Earl Browder and William Z. Foster, and others favorable to the Chinese Communists by Owen Lattimore and others, and by Philip Foner, official labor historian of the Communist Party, the author of “more than a dozen books extolling the CPUSA.”38 The CPUSA, in which Browder, Foster, and Foner were all officials, was controlled by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Many of the individuals who left the State Department went on to spread their poison elsewhere. Even those just “communistically inclined” were able to do great damage to our nation’s security.
William Henry Chamberlin, a journalist who had been based in Moscow, knew this first-hand. He described how the Office of War Information was influenced by Communist sympathizers, like when the New York office had suggested that he “broadcast to the Netherlands East Indies about the successes of Soviet industrialization and collective farming.” When he informed them that he would have to “emphasize the heavy cost of these experiments in suffering and human lives, the offer was dropped.” Chamberlin described pro-Communist media messages that swayed public opinion in favor of the Soviet Union.39
As William Buckley and L. Brent Bozell wrote in 1954, in the case of Harold Glasser and in nine similar cases, McCarthy “merely quoted from derogatory reports developed by other investigators, with a view to persuading the Senate that at least a prima facie case existed for questioning the operating standards of a loyalty program that had cleared them.” Scholars John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, former KGB officer, in their book Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (based upon Soviet intelligence records copied by Vassiliev in 1993), call Glasser “one of the KGB’s most productive spies in Washington.” Twice in 1953, Glasser appeared “before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations (Joseph McCarthy’s committee). In both cases, he invoked the Fifth Amendment. By 1954, he was working for Liberty Brush Company” and then “faded from public sight.” Glasser had joined the Treasury Department as an economist in 1936, and his role in Soviet intelligence had been known since 1948 when former Communists Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley had identified him. Klehr, Haynes, and Vassiliev describe over a dozen documents that Glasser passed on to the KGB, including one from the Treasury Department about “Allied policies with regard to neutral countries,” “a conversation” between officials about “Poland’s attitude to postwar Germany and about Sov.-Polish relations,” and about “civilian deliveries for liberated regions.”40
Another one of McCarthy’s cases was Stanley Graze, whose name was on the list he gave to the Tydings Committee. Graze was an agent who began his work for the Communist Party as a college student and continued it after being drafted into the army in 1943. In 1945, he “obtained a post in the Russian Division of the OSS” and became “an active espionage source via Victor Perlo.” He moved on to the State Department, then resigned in 1948 after learning that “he had come under investigation for suspected Communist ties,” according to Stan Evans. He wound up at the United Nations, a not unusual landing place for those leaving the State Department under similar circumstances.41
When he appeared before Congress in 1952, Graze invoked the Fifth Amendment. Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev learned that the KGB tried to re-recruit him up until 1962, but “Stanley Graze took a different direction in life. . . . he turned into a criminal capitalist,” becoming fund manager for Investors Overseas Services. In 1969, Graze and his associates helped Robert Vesco “loo[t] . . . more than $200 million,” and in 1972, he found himself an object of a civil fraud complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission. After again invoking the Fifth and refusing to testify at an SEC hearing in 1973, Graze left the country and settled in Costa Rica, where he died in 1987. But according to a KGB officer who had a conversation with Graze at a wedding reception in Costa Rica in 1976, Graze was still a dedicated Marxist.42
Another name “included among State Department security risks by Senator McCarthy in 1950” was that of Franz Neumann, “a Soviet source in the OSS,” an agency especially open to Communists. The Soviets suspected him of passing on disinformation, but reconsidered reestablishing contact in 1944, though there is “nothing indicating that contact was reestablished.” Before he died in an automobile accident in 1954, Neumann had served “on Justice Robert Jackson’s prosecutorial staff at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials” and “plunged into German politics and supported a merger of the German Social Democratic Party with the Communists.” But he was disillusioned by Soviet repression in East Germany and “helped found the Free University of Berlin and in 1948 accepted a professorship at Columbia University.” According to Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, Neumann “never publicly disclosed his clandestine wartime cooperation with the KGB, and no congressional investigating committee called him to testify.”43
In the preface to Spies, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr ask, “Was the hunt for Communist spies in fact a witch hunt, a search for fictional demons, that tells us more about the paranoia and madness of the inquisitors, or was it a rational, if sometimes excessively heated, response to a genuine threat….?” While McCarthy’s charges came “late in the game” and “were wildly off the mark,”44 Haynes and Klehr present evidence that the damage was worse than suspected. In Venona, they condemn McCarthy for making accusations against such individuals as Dean Acheson and George C. Marshall.45 As early as 1954, anti-Communist authors Buckley and Bozell, too, had convicted McCarthy of overreach in imputing “treasonable motives” against Marshall in his sixty thousand-word speech on the Senate floor in June 1951, which listed seventeen charges against the general, including Marshall’s pro-Stalin positions at Tehran and Yalta, giving the Soviets access to Eastern Europe and to Berlin and Prague “ahead of the allies,” helping to formulate an “anti-Chiang” policy, and refusing “to prosecute vigorously the war against the North Koreans.” As much as these accusations seem to indicate softness on Communism, there was no evidence that Marshall was a Communist agent, just probably “America’s most disastrous general,” said Buckley and Bozell.46
Nevertheless, the CPUSA was in fact quite successful in placing individuals “in selected government agencies in order to gain information or influence policy.”47 Screening was lax. William Henry Chamberlin, writing in 1950, wondered how the major spy ring leader Nathan Gregory Silvermaster was able to retain his employment after “Naval Intelligence protested against his employment early in the war,” and the Civil Service Commission had reported “in 1942” about “considerable testimony in the file indicating that about 1920 Mr. Silvermaster was an underground agent of the Communist Party.” Witnesses said that Silvermaster had “been everything from a ‘fellow traveler’ to an agent of the OGPU [Soviet political police].”48
It was not only spies, but also Communist sympathizers who manipulated American foreign policy—including at the Treasury Department, where a “policy of financial strangulation” could determine outcomes, according to Stan Evans in 2007. He described the “cast of characters” involved, including Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, V. Frank Coe, Harold Glasser, and Alger Hiss. Evans understood that Marshall was not a Communist agent, but he pointed out how his bad policies could have been influenced by his mentor, John Vincent, “a close ally of [John Stewart] Service and Soviet agent Laughlin [sic] Currie,” who came to oppose the anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Curiously, when Marshall “arrived in China,” in December 1945, “the Nationalists were winning. . . . the Communists hadn’t had sufficient time to be equipped and trained adequately by their Soviet sponsors. . . .” But Marshall got Chiang “to call off his armies.” That move on the American general’s part was determined by China experts Anthony Kubek and Freda Utley to be “foremost among a number of crucial measures that turned the tide in favor of Mao.” Under the Truman Doctrine, military aid was provided to Greece and Turkey, but was denied to Chiang. On January 5, 1950, President Truman announced that “no military aid would be provided” even “to help Chiang protect Formosa.” The later—and even more perfidious—developments occurred after Marshall had left the department under Dean Acheson, who became secretary of state in 1949.49