A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  “The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony,” Nitze’s policy paper said, “is animated by a new fanatic faith antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Russia was “inescapably militant because it possesses and is possessed by a world-wide revolutionary movement” and thus this goal of world conquest was inherent in the “fundamental design of the Kremlin.” Its “assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” The United States was being “mortally challenged.” The year of maximum danger, Nitze predicted, would be 1954, when the Soviet Union could possess an arsenal of 200 atomic bombs, sufficient for a surprise attack “of such weight that the United States must have substantially increased … air, ground and sea strength, atomic capabilities, and air and civil defenses” if it was to survive. The buildup he called for would add about $50 billion to the military budgets that Truman, relying on the U.S. monopoly of the bomb, had been holding to a minimum to keep inflation reined in, just $13 billion in fiscal 1949. Acheson admitted in his memoirs that Nitze had been encouraged to employ scary language in order to spook the administration into action, but there is no indication in his memoirs or elsewhere that he and others at the top doubted the basic positions stated in the paper. Truman signed off on it and the NSC adopted it as national policy in April 1950. The president postponed its costly military buildup, however, again out of concern for inflation and fear that a Republican-controlled Congress would not approve the additional funds.

  The two figures in the administration who did not agree with Nitze’s masterwork were its two specialists on the Soviet Union, Kennan and Chip Bohlen. Both now believed that Stalin was generally guided by caution in his foreign policy calculations and was sometimes just reacting to Western moves. Their dissent was of no consequence. The men of power were not interested in what the men of knowledge had to say. Their ears were attuned to the skirl of a different piper.

  The statesmen of the United States were permitting their exaggerated estimate of the military threat from Stalin’s Russia, their preconceived notions of falling dominoes, and a Soviet Union bent on world conquest through an international Communist movement, which it directed, to deprive them of a realistic view of the postwar world they were seeking to manage. The world they created in their minds, and enshrined in dogma through policy pronouncements like NSC-68, was a Manichaean place divided into opposing camps of light and darkness. That world was an illusion. To comprehend the real postwar world, one had to understand that while it was bipolar in terms of the two major powers, within the Communist sphere, as within the non-Communist one, there were national leaders with their own agendas who were prepared to act on those agendas regardless of what Moscow or Washington thought. The clue that the Communist sphere was also a complicated world, a world of varying shades of gray rather than black, was the phenomenon of national Communism, which appeared as early as 1948 when Tito of Yugoslavia openly broke with Stalin and went his own way. He was regarded as an aberration, not as evidence that there might be other Communist leaders like him, authoritarian and socialist in their domestic politics but independent in foreign policy and thus capable of being weaned from Moscow.

  The statesmen of one administration after another, from Truman down through Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, clung to this delusion that they faced an international Communist conspiracy, despite increasingly blatant evidence to the contrary. Acheson departed from the norm in only one sortie in 1949 when he thought he might be able to entice Mao Tse-tung away from Moscow because the Chinese revolutionaries had won their war entirely on their own, without any help from the Red Army. Acheson also tended to regard Mao differently because the United States had wasted so many hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid on the venal regime of the reactionary Chinese dictator, Chiang Kai-shek. The attempt was halfhearted and ended quickly, however, as the right-wing Republicans in Congress brought Acheson under ferocious attack for allegedly “losing China” and Mao turned increasingly anti-American.

  Otherwise, the delusion ruled. Years later, after Mao had quarreled openly and bitterly with Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and the Chinese and the Russians were close to hostilities in the so-called Sino-Soviet split, American statesmen continued to act as if they faced a Communist monolith. In 1961, as John Kennedy took the United States to war in Vietnam by dispatching military advisers, helicopter companies, and pilots and fighter-bombers to stiffen the regime of Washington’s man in Saigon, the South Vietnamese dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, against the Communist-led guerrillas who were threatening to overthrow him, the U.S. Army security clearance form caught the enduring perspective of American statesmen. The form referred to all the Communist nations as the “Sino-Soviet bloc.”

  Given these American delusions, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese national leader in Hanoi, had no chance of being recognized in Washington for what he was, an Asian version of Tito. Ho, in particular, held a sad belief that American statesmen were perspicacious enough to distinguish between different Communist regimes. In the fall of 1963, when American deaths in Vietnam were still well under 200, he predicted to a Polish diplomat in Hanoi that the United States was too wise and pragmatic a nation to lavish lives and treasure on a war in his country. “Neither you nor I,” he said to his Polish visitor, “know the Americans well, but what we do know of them, what we have read and heard about them, suggests that they are more practical and clear-sighted than other capitalist nations. They will not pour their resources into Vietnam endlessly. One day they will take pencil in hand and begin figuring. Once they really begin to analyze our ideas seriously, they will come to the conclusion that it is possible and even worthwhile to live in peace with us.” No American leader with the power to decide ever did take pencil in hand and begin figuring. It would finally take the disillusionment of the tragic and unnecessary war and the lives of the 58,229 whose names would be inscribed on the black granite wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington to bring American statesmen up against reality. In retrospect, one wonders why they clung so long to their delusion.

  20.

  GOOD INTENTIONS GONE AWRY

  The U.S. military code breakers and the FBI did catch up with Theodore Hall and Saville “Savy” Sax after the Soviet codes were finally broken. The Russians had been careless enough to give the real names of both men in the initial cable from the New York rezidentura on November 12, 1944, reporting to Moscow Center that they had volunteered to conduct atomic espionage. Subsequent cables had employed code names—Mlad, taken from an old Slavonic adjective meaning “young,” for Hall, and Star, an abbreviation of an adjective meaning “old,” for Sax—but there were enough identifying details, even in the cables where code names were henceforth used, to pinpoint them. The FBI was alerted after the initial cable was broken in 1950. By mid-March 1951 the agents thought they had developed the case to the point where they might succeed in getting one or both men to snap during separate but simultaneous interrogations. Hall and Sax had been shrewd enough, however, to foresee that such a day might eventually arise and had rehearsed what they would say. Over three hours of questioning on March 16, 1951, the agents could break neither.

  Nonetheless, while they controlled themselves and displayed no trepidation, the interrogations were terrifying for both men and for the young women they had since married and with whom they had begun families. The nation had been at war in Korea, first with Kim Il Sung’s North Korean army and then with the forces of Communist China’s Mao Tse-tung, since June 1950. The country was in a frenzy of spy fear. Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official, turned out to be a Soviet agent. He had been convicted in January 1950 of perjury for denying that he passed diplomatic reports to Moscow. (He could not be tried for the espionage itself because the statute of limitations had run out.) In February 1951, the Wisconsin demagogue, Republican s
enator Joseph McCarthy, who was about to launch his madcap witch hunt in which innumerable careers and lives would be ruined, waved a sheet of paper during a speech to the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. He announced that it listed the names of 205 active Communist Party members in the State Department. (It would be years before anyone discovered that the sheet of paper had been blank.) That same month Klaus Fuchs confessed in England to giving the Russians the plans for the Nagasaki bomb. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were on trial for their lives in New York for transmitting a great deal less to the Soviets than Hall had through Sax and Lona Cohen. In April the Rosenbergs would be sentenced to death in the electric chair at New York State’s Sing Sing Prison. The American public was appalled by these revelations. In these years before the disillusionment of the Vietnam War, it was an article of faith for patriotic Americans that the United States was innately good in motive and deed. We had been justified in using the bomb against Japan to shorten the Second World War and save lives and we would never employ it unjustly. We had been safe and humanity had been safe as long as the secret remained with us. Communists were not to be trusted with anything, least of all with the atomic bomb. Giving it to Stalin’s Russia was a monstrous act.

  Hall and Sax eluded the hounds. The decoded cables could not be submitted as evidence in court, nor could the FBI agents show them or mention them to Hall or Sax in order to help break them down, because the military cryptologists did not want the Soviets to learn that their code had been compromised. (Moscow already knew. Kim Philby, the mole in the British Secret Intelligence Service, had informed them. He was so highly regarded by his superiors in MI6 that he was considered a candidate to one day become head of the service and in 1949 had been given the extremely sensitive post of liaison to the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington.) Although they had enough information for an interrogation, the FBI investigators could not reach the higher threshold of sufficient independently corroborating evidence for a grand jury indictment. And so the case was placed in bureaucratic limbo and then, as the years went by, dropped.

  Ted Hall became bored with nuclear physics by the time he was awarded his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1950. He decided that biology was more interesting and worthwhile and turned to the new field of biophysics. After nine years at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the cancer center in New York, he gained sufficient recognition in the highly specialized field of X-ray microanalysis, a technique to detect and measure concentrations of chemicals in human tissue, that he was able to seek and receive an invitation to spend the academic year of 1962–63 at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in England, which had continued to be a home of genius. (Most recently, James Watson and Francis Crick had won a Nobel for creating their “double helix” model, the first accurate rendition of a DNA molecule, at the Cavendish in 1953.)

  The one year turned into twenty-two as Hall and his wife, Joan (she was as intensely left-wing as he was and he had told her everything), and their three daughters settled in at Cambridge and he won international distinction for his work, retiring in 1984 after his research had played itself out. At the request of the FBI, a British counterintelligence officer interrogated him in 1963 in another attempt to crack him, and renewal of his labor permit was held up for a few months. Otherwise, he was left in peace. Nor did anyone ever approach his brother, Ed Hall, the U.S. Air Force rocket engine guru, who held highly secret clearances for his work with Bennie Schriever, including a super-sensitive “Q” clearance that gave Ed access to nuclear weapons designs.

  The Halls remained in England after Ted’s retirement, occasionally traveling to the United States for scientific conferences, once even to Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico campus where he had passed the atomic secrets to Lona Cohen that went back to New York in her Kleenex box. He assumed that the perilous adventure of his youth would never catch up with him publicly. Then the decoded cables in the Venona documents were published in 1995 and 1996 and brought him precisely the notoriety he had most wanted to avoid. (Savy Sax, who went on to be a teacher and psychological counselor in the Midwest, openly boasted of his role in the spying prior to his premature death from a heart attack in 1980. By that time, however, he had become something of an adult hippie, disheveled in his personal habits and given to LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. Apparently, no one who heard his stories ever took them seriously enough to tip off the FBI.)

  In the few years until his death from cancer in November 1999, Ted Hall would never formally admit in writing to his espionage, apparently fearful that such an admission might still bring prosecution, but neither would he deny it. In 1997, he gave Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, the two American journalists who wrote a book about his spying, a written statement that, while again making no explicit admission, sought to justify what he had done and expressed no substantial regret. One reflective paragraph said that, given what he knew at the time, he would commit treason again:

  In 1944 I was nineteen years old—immature, inexperienced and far too sure of myself. I recognize that I could easily have been wrong in my judgement of what was necessary, and that I was indeed mistaken about some things, in particular my view of the nature of the Soviet state. The world has moved on a lot since then, and certainly so have I. But in essence, from the perspective of my 71 years, I still think that brash youth had the right end of the stick. I am no longer that person; but I am by no means ashamed of him.

  The accomplishment of Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall in gaining the Soviets a year to two years in their race for an atomic bomb may not, however, have been without a grim postscript. It may have helped to bring on the Korean War in June 1950. There were several causes for the war in Korea and the principal one was undoubtedly the foolish decision by the Truman administration and the American military leaders of the time to place South Korea outside the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia on the grounds that it was of “little strategic interest” to the United States. (Truman and Stalin had divided Korea at the 38th Parallel at the end of the Second World War, with the Red Army occupying the North and U.S. forces the South.) The decision was twice affirmed by the National Security Council and separately by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and publicized in a speech by Douglas MacArthur, then commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Far East as head of the occupation in Japan. In January 1950, Acheson conveyed the same position in a speech before the National Press Club in Washington. Furthermore, the declarations were given credence by American actions. The last of the U.S. combat troops were withdrawn in mid-1949 and Syngman Rhee, the rightist dictator in Seoul, was left with a fledgling army equipped with secondhand infantry weapons, outmoded artillery, and a 482-man U.S. military advisory group to guide it.

  Rhee and Kim Il Sung, his Communist rival in Pyongyang in the North, were poles apart in their politics, but identical in the intensity of their nationalism. Each dreamt of reunifying his homeland. Kim was now in a position to persuade Stalin to provide his troops with tanks and other heavy armament and to give him permission to invade the South and unite Korea. Mao Tse-tung also went along. Everything on the Communist side was posited on the assumption that the victory would be quick and that the United States would not intervene. Stalin’s act in arming a rival claimant to Korea was aggression, of course, but the aim was the attainment of a friendly regime throughout the neighboring Korean Peninsula without the danger of arousing an American reaction.

  When what the Truman administration and its military chiefs had invited then occurred, as Kim’s freshly armored columns attacked south across the 38th Parallel dividing line in the predawn hours of Sunday, June 25, 1950, the administration reversed itself. Forgetting what they had said and done and misreading their opponent yet again, Truman and Acheson interpreted the invasion as the first bold move by Stalin in the Russian master plan Paul Nitze had warned about just that April in NSC-68, the intent of the Soviet Union “to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” This was a challenge they had to meet
to preserve the credibility of American power and prestige. If they did not do so Stalin might next attempt to overrun all of Western Europe with the Red Army. Truman ordered MacArthur’s troops occupying Japan into South Korea. Acheson described the stakes with high tension to a group of congressional leaders in a briefing six months after the war began: “Since the end of June, it had been clear that the Soviet Union has begun an all-out attack against the power position of the United States. It was clear that the Soviet leaders recognized that their policy might bring on a general war, and it was equally clear that they were prepared to run this risk.” (In fact, once the invasion occurred, there was ample strategic justification for reversing what had been a bad decision and frustrating Kim’s ambition. Korea had been a Japanese colony until the end of the Second World War and the Japanese were sensitive to what occurred on the peninsula, just eighty miles away across the Korea Strait. A reunified Korea ruled by a pro-Soviet dictator would have shaken their confidence in the United States as a protecting power. The United States had to hold on to South Korea in order to retain that confidence.) The ensuing war dragged on for three years. It took the lives of 54,246 Americans and millions of Koreans, civilian and military, as the entire peninsula was devastated. Untold tens of thousands of Chinese fighting men died as well after Mao joined in when MacArthur rashly pushed U.S. troops into the mountains below the border with China and then all the way up to the Yalu River boundary itself.