Silvermaster then went to Currie for help. By now the two men had become close socially, having dinner in each other’s homes with some frequency. Currie called the undersecretary of war, Robert P. Patterson, and asked that Silvermaster’s case be reviewed. He was later to claim that his intercession was neutral, and that he made no recommendation for or against Silvermaster. Nevertheless, on July 3, 1942, Patterson wrote to the BEW saying, “I have personally made an examination of the case and … I am fully satisfied that the facts do not show anything derogatory to Mr. Silvermaster’s character or loyalty.” While Silvermaster’s fate was being decided, Moscow took the precaution of ordering a two-month break between him and his ring. The final resolution of the case was described by Bentley: “Greg [Silvermaster] was permitted to resign from the Board of Economic Warfare and return to the Department of Agriculture—and with a clean slate! After a sigh of relief that must have echoed throughout the entire Russian secret police apparatus, we went back to our normal routine.” Vasili Zarubin, code-named Maksim, the NKVD rezident, or espionage chief, in New York and later in Washington, happily informed Moscow in October 1943: “Recently [Silvermaster] told us that [Currie] made every effort to liquidate his case.”
During this period, Currie was also becoming more interested in the Chinese Communists. That spring he had sent FDR “a letter from a friend in China. We get so little about conditions in Communist China that I thought this might interest you.” Currie’s correspondent spoke admiringly of the Red Chinese enclaves, reporting that he “could find no evidence of graft or scandal, either financial or sexual… . The people in the Communist area are much more alive intellectually and are filled with an ideal… . They teach the Army how to read and have newspapers circulating pretty widely.” Currie, in forwarding this report to FDR, could be seen as proselytizing for the Chinese Communists. Still, he had promoted, even administered lend-lease for the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek, however graft-ridden and ineffectual it was in fighting the Japanese. And his correspondent’s views on the Chinese Communists were no doubt accurate and worth reporting to the President. Currie was always careful that his contacts with Communists not be misconstrued. On one occasion, after lunch with the Russian ambassador, Konstantin Oumansky, he immediately sent the President a memorandum. “I accepted, thinking that I might be able to pick up something interesting or significant which I could pass along to you,” he assured FDR.
Currie, though possessing the President’s implicit trust, nevertheless had his critics within the administration. In 1943, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., discussed with the President possible candidates for a key international economic post in London. “Who do you want?” FDR asked. Morgenthau replied that either Currie or James Landis would suit him fine. Roosevelt said, “I think Lauch Currie would be good. He is doing lots of odds and ends and this will give him a lot to do.” But when Morgenthau floated the name to Henry Stimson, the secretary of war answered that he “did not want Currie and would not take him unless the President so ordered.” The Army, Stimson explained, had no confidence in Currie’s loyalty. John Franklin Carter noted in his diary for April 14, 1943, that the Nationalist envoy, “T.V. Soong, had opposed Laughlin [sic] Currie’s nomination as ambassador to China. Must tell Pappy.”
Currie informed Harry Hopkins in August 1943 that he had recently talked to “Mr. Zubilin” of the Soviet embassy about an immigration case. Zubilin was a cover name for Vasili Zarubin, now operating out of the embassy at 1125 Sixteenth Street. The building, an eighteenth-century-style Italianate marble mansion built by Mrs. George Pullman, wife of the sleeping car tycoon, seemed an odd outpost for the anti-capitalist champions of the proletariat. The beneficiary of Currie’s intercession was Paul Hagen, known as Karl Frank before he came to America, an Austrian refugee and an admitted former Communist whom the FBI suspected of being “a secret agent of the Soviet government.” What Currie had done for Hagen was to appear as a character witness when he applied for a reentry visa allowing him to visit Canada and then return to the United States. On August 7, J. Edgar Hoover received an anonymous but astonishingly accurate letter, sent apparently by a disgruntled NKVD official, disclosing the names of the Soviet Union’s top eleven agents in America and two of their American associates. Zarubin was one of those exposed, and the last line of the letter noted that he had some “high-level agent in the office of the White House.”
Another New York to Moscow cable dealt with Currie’s old MIT associate and Washington friend, Abraham George Silverman, a member of the Silvermaster ring described by a fellow agent as a whiner always complaining about the heavy party dues he had to pay. Silverman evidently was attracted to at least one facet of capitalism. He worried constantly about his financial straits and had turned to Currie for advice on playing the stock market. Currie was apparently a better government economist than a market seer, since Silverman lost money on his investments. Elizabeth Bentley later stated that upon taking a civilian job with the Air Corps in the Pentagon, Silverman “began to bring documents to the Silvermaster home.” According to an August 1944 NKVD cable, when it appeared that Silverman was to be transferred, he tried to use Currie’s influence to find a job that would keep him in Washington, even though “Pazh [Currie] … is in strained relations with Aileron [Silverman].”
Among his miscellany of White House assignments, Currie was also tracking the development of RDX, a secret plastic explosive. He prepared a “Memorandum for the President” in which he reported, “I have been reliably informed that this explosive gives an effect 40% greater than TNT.” At this time, Bentley somehow managed to acquire information on RDX which she delivered to her controller. Currie further reported progress on the B-29 bomber to the President. Bentley delivered plans for the B-29 to the NKVD while the development of the plane was still under wraps. Others may have supplied Bentley with the RDX and B-29 secrets; but Currie was privy to this information, and was in touch with Silvermaster, whose job was to pass intelligence on to “Good Girl.”
Possibly the most incriminating charge against Currie also came from Bentley, though at second hand. She claimed that in 1944 “Mr. Silverman told me that Mr. Currie came dashing into Mr. Silverman’s house sort of out of breath and told him that the Americans were on the verge of breaking the Soviet code.” Bentley’s charge against Currie was hearsay. It achieves some credibility, however, in that Currie did have access to decrypts coming out of the Map Room where he could have learned that Arlington Hall was trying to break the Soviet ciphers.
A case against Currie as a Soviet spy working next to the President cannot be rejected out of hand. The evidence, however circumstantial, is considerable—his vouching for Gregory Silvermaster’s placement in a sensitive wartime job; his testimony in favor of Paul Hagen, a suspected Soviet agent; that he reportedly gave classified documents to Abraham George Silverman, an agent of the Soviet Union; that he was approached to keep Silverman in a Washington job; that he had insider knowledge of RDX and the B-29 which the Russians learned about; that he had alerted the Soviets about American progress in cracking Soviet codes; and that at least eight NKVD cables between New York and Moscow refer to Pazh, most plausibly Currie. In The Haunted Wood, Currie is referred to unequivocally by authors Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev as one of several “Soviet agents,” a “fellow-agent,” and “the only presidential aide then also working for Soviet intelligence.”
Several NKVD cables between the United States and Moscow, however, indicate that the Soviets did not regard Currie as an agent in their back pocket, but rather as a longtime target for recruitment. One cable sent in 1942 bemoaned the lack of agents “surrounding Roosevelt or such persons as Hopkins.” An NKVD message dated April 6 of that year stated bluntly, “[P]enetrating the surroundings of Roosevelt himself is the goal that we seek in our everyday work.” A later message urged Silvermaster to continue to try to recruit “Pazh.” Three years later, Moscow still appeared to be trying to enlist Currie. “Find out from Albert [an
NKVD officer] and Robert [Silvermaster] whether it would be possible for us to approach Pazh direct.” A message filed a month later suggested Pazh’s close cooperation, but not outright control by the NKVD. “P. [for Pazh] trusts R [Silvermaster], informs him not only orally but also by handing over documents… . Up to now, Pazh relations with Robert were expressed, from our point of view, only in common feelings and personal sympathies.” Obviously, Moscow considered Pazh highly worth recruiting but yet to be recruited.
Elizabeth Bentley later admitted that she had never met Currie, that he never turned over any information or documents directly to her. She even stated, “The man was not a Communist.” She was not sure that Currie knew that intelligence from him eventually found its way into Soviet hands. An NKVD correspondent cabled his superiors that “Pazh” still did not yet understand that Silvermaster was a spy for the Soviet Union.
In the literal sense of the word, did the Soviet Union have a “spy” in the Roosevelt White House? It clearly had a manipulable sympathizer so useful that it may be a quibble as to whether or not the man was consciously involved in espionage for a foreign power. However, a line exists that one crosses in moving from being used to knowingly spying for another country. While Lauchlin Currie provided aid and comfort to a rival if not an enemy power, it does not appear that he consciously crossed that moral divide. Currie was a New Deal liberal and, in associating with a Silvermaster and a Silverman, imagined himself in the company of like-minded souls. He appears to have given the information he provided as an act of solidarity, looking upon these associates as legitimate comrades in the struggle against fascism. His behavior was hardly singular. Harry Hopkins, before the Tehran conference, tipped off the Soviet embassy in Washington that the FBI had bugged a secret meeting in which Vasili Zarubin passed money to Steve Nelson, a Yugoslav immigrant, an alumnus of Moscow’s Lenin Institute, and the San Francisco organizer for the American Communist Party. Hopkins, reflecting FDR’s determination to do nothing to upset the Soviets, had acted while unaware that Zarubin was the Soviet rezident.
Even after the war the FBI continued to poke into lingering suspicions against Currie, but nothing ever came of it. As Harvey Klehr, a scholar of the period, writes, “No one who talked to the Bureau believed that Currie was a Party member, secret or otherwise… . Over all the FBI file suggests that Currie was hardly a controlled agent but an eccentric, rather self aggrandizing individual who enjoyed the sensation of manipulating events from behind the scenes.” He may have described his level of complicity best himself. In a letter to a friend, Richard H. Wels, written six years after the war, Currie said, “I was probably too accessible and not sufficiently circumspect. However, I certainly had no idea what the world would be like today. As you remember, in the early days the New Deal was in the nature of a crusade and New Dealers felt a strong sense of camaraderie… . We were all united in pushing along with the War. The atmosphere of suspicion and caution only arose after I left the government [in 1945].”
Lauchlin Currie’s behavior runs like a thread through the lives of numerous well-placed Americans who proved useful to the Soviet Union. Their rationale can be roughly synthesized as follows: We and Russia are Allies in the war against fascism. Therefore, our ally is entitled to know what we know. In its extreme form, this mentality motivated the men who were stealing the secrets of Los Alamos for the Soviet Union. Currie’s involvement was of a lesser order. In him, the Soviet Union did not have a spy in the White House; it had a friend.
Chapter XXVI
A Leaky Vessel
LAUCHLIN CURRIE’S reportedly breathless alert to the Silvermaster ring that U.S. cryptanalysts were on to Russian codes was, it turned out, a false alarm, at least in part. The United States was indeed in possession of certain Soviet codebooks, but not those used by the NKVD for traffic passing between Washington, New York, and Moscow which Arlington Hall was attempting to break, thus far with scant success. What Currie had learned, probably through Map Room scuttlebutt, was about an unrelated spy escapade born halfway around the world.
In November 1944, Wilho Tikander, the OSS chief in another espionage haven, neutral Sweden, dangled a beguiling proposition before his boss, Bill Donovan. Finland had dropped out of the war as Germany’s ally the month before, and Finnish officers approached Tikander in Stockholm offering to sell codebooks seized from the Soviet consulate in Petsamo. Ordinarily, Donovan would have leaped at the opportunity, but he was in a rare prudent mood, trying to win allies, not adversaries, in his campaign to propel the OSS into the postwar world. He was supposed to inform the State Department of any OSS contacts with foreign governments, and for once he chose the path of discretion, relaying the Finns’ offer to the new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius. Stettinius well understood FDR’s supersensitivity to any act that might arouse Soviet suspicions. Consequently, he recommended to Donovan that buying Russian codes from the Finns “would be inadvisable and improper.” Donovan chafed at the secretary’s caution. His impetuous side surged to the fore. He instructed Tikander to proceed with the purchase, for an undisclosed sum, through which over fifteen hundred pages of Russian cryptographic material, including a charred codebook, passed into OSS hands. On December 11, Donovan proudly sent the President a letter trumpeting his acquisition. “I wanted you to know,” he told FDR, “that our chief representative in Stockholm was able to obtain three diplomatic codes and one military through special sources … We have made the necessary payments… . You are the only one to whom I have disclosed these facts.”
Edward Stettinius had a reputation as a suave, handsome courtier, possibly in over his head. But Donovan’s rejection of his recommendation gave him an opportunity to show some spine and at the same time play to FDR’s prejudices. Though Donovan had tried to limit knowledge of what he had done, Stettinius learned of it, doubtless from Roosevelt. Two days before Christmas, the secretary of state went to the White House and made an easy convert. He persuaded the President that the codes should be returned to the Soviets. He and FDR then concocted an explanation as to how this material had come into America’s hands. Donovan was to inform his counterpart in Moscow, General Fitin, that an unspecified U.S. agency, in the course of its work, had happened to run across certain documents that apparently related to Russian-encoded communications. Specifically, he was to tell the Russians, “… [W]e had taken advantage of the opportunity to prevent this material from falling into the hands of the enemy and that we would immediately make it available to the Soviet government if they so desired.”
Of course, Fitin replied, the Russians would like to have their ciphers back. All that remained was to arrange a method of delivery. On February 15, 1945, a wary Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador, greeted Donovan at the Sixteenth Street embassy. Donovan’s aide Ned Putzell followed behind carrying the thick sheaf of codes and keys, some burned around the edges. Gromyko in Washington and Fitin in Moscow felt more bafflement than gratitude at the return of the documents. Such behavior by the NKVD would have been unthinkable. What were the Americans up to? In the minds of the Soviets, only one explanation made sense. By making it appear that the codes were still secure, the Russians would continue using them while the Americans could continue breaking them.
For their part, American cryptanalysts heard in disbelief that the White House had ordered the ciphers returned. Colonel Carter W. Clarke, head of G-2’s Special Branch, remembered going to Arlington Hall to report this decision to the staff. Clarke told them that the First Lady had learned of their attacks on Soviet codes and said that it had to stop. The colonel was indulging in hyperbole. Eleanor Roosevelt had no authority to issue orders in this realm. But she did share her husband’s impatience with schemes that could menace the fragile East-West alliance and was not reticent about expressing her feelings. The Russian codes sold by the Finns had had to be returned, but Clarke, with a wink and a nod, told the codebreakers to keep working on the ciphers that were still being intercepted between NKVD agents in the United States
and the USSR.
Did Donovan copy the Soviet codes obtained from the Finns before returning them? It would seem instinctive behavior for a spy chief. However, Putzell, who carried the documents to the Soviet embassy for his chief, insists that Donovan played it straight and that no copy was made. Neither the archives of the OSS, currently maintained by the CIA, nor the codebreaking National Security Agency, nor President Roosevelt’s papers yield any trace of the codes or any reference to their being duplicated.
Contemporary observers, with opinions colored by forty years of Cold War distrust, may be forgiven for finding Franklin Roosevelt the naïf in this drama, with his oversolicitous concern not to upset Stalin. But the President’s actions must be judged against the political backdrop of 1945. Finland had just left the war as a Nazi ally. How would it appear to the Soviets if FDR acquiesced in buying the codes of a presumed partner from a recent enemy? The President was then trying to engineer another three-power summit meeting among Churchill, Stalin, and himself, at which his chief objective was to draw the Soviet Union into the war against Japan. For Stalin to suspect, on the eve of such a meeting, that his capitalist partner was dealing behind his back could well have poisoned the atmosphere. All the performers in this ring behaved according to their natures: Donovan as a spymaster, Stalin as a distrustful ally, and Roosevelt as a leader trying to see beyond short-term advantage.
*
The President had sent the rambunctious George Earle, former Pennsylvania governor, former ambassador, and permanent playboy, to Istanbul in 1943 as his eyes and ears. Earle’s reports from that den of intrigue had proved a mixed but respectable bag. He had provided FDR with solid, if unwelcome intelligence on what the Russians had done to the Poles in the Katyn forest. He had correctly predicted German rockets falling on England. But he had overestimated the destruction and underestimated the time for the Germans to rebuild the bombed Ploe¸sti oil fields.
Joseph E. Persico Page 51