<\/p>\n
I got a note from my attorney, inquiring if I was on strong medication. He wrote: \u201cYou sounded like Joe McCarthy on Oxycontin in that piece yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was at that moment on the cusp of creativity- or lack of it- as the darkness slowly melting away out the window, and fascinated by the forces that are abroad in the wide world these days. I hate Mondays. I had to grant my pal a significant point. I had a long rumination on the impact of Lysenkoism in mind.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Trofim Lysenko, noted crazy geneticist. Photo courtesy of the Evil Empire).<\/p>\n
You know, the doctrinal theme of the old Soviet empire that if you disagree with the State you must be crazy, and treatment included confinement in an mental institution.<\/p>\n
There was some of that right here, too, in the Good Ole USA in the crazy days of the Red Scare. I decided to put Trofim Lysenko aside for another day- though the dotty doctrine is back, and proclaimed in both a posting by a medical professional in the Huffington Post and from the podium at the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London.<\/p>\n
Maybe it was the medication, I dunno, but the past does reflect the future dimly, and there is some interesting stuff to sort through, since everything old is new again.<\/p>\n
I bristled a little at the reference to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, since in the narrative of our adventures in the Old Cold War he has become synonymous with just about everything nasty in politics you can think of.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Joe McCarthy. He was a squadron intelligence officer in the Pacific during WWII and is alleged to have fabricated wounds to qualify for the Purple Heart and fabricating combat missions to earn the Distinguished Flying Cross. USMC photo.)<\/p>\n
I am not particularly interested in Joe McCarthy- he was a blowhard and a drunk and a self-aggrandizing son-of-a-bitch. He reminds me a little of Lyndon Johnson, only drunker. He is a footnote to the tale, not the pivot-point, though his antics are what are remembered. The Senator\u2019s reckless conduct enabled the narrative about what happened to morph into something besides what actually happened in Our Nation’s Capital.<\/p>\n
I talked to my pal Mac about this. He recalls the furor in town that raged between the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1948, and the Alger Hiss trials with interest. He was actually assigned to Arlington Hall not long after the McCarthy-Army hearings in 1954. He thinks there is a story to be told, and I agree.<\/p>\n
I am particularly curious about Mr. Hiss and his role as policy director at State for East Asia in the years immediately before the attack on Pearl. His orientation and loyalty to Russia is unquestioned- and whether or not the material he passed to his Russian handlers was “really sensitive” or “over classified trash” is really beyond the point. In my years in the machine, if something was marked “Secret” it was supposed to be handled that way.<\/p>\n
My pal noted- correctly- that the later damaging generation of spies like Jonathon Pollard and the Walker Assholes and the long list of opportunists were motivated by cash, not ideology.<\/p>\n
I quoted Whittaker Chamber\u2019s eloquent statement of why he got involved with the Soviet spy network yesterday. The Lost Generation after World War One really felt they had been to the brink of apocalypse, and looked over into it. It seems perfectly reasonable that something radical needed to be done to remedy a coming disaster. It is not dissimilar to the generation that became politically aware in the mid-late 1960s- and whose idealism was likewise harnessed in all sorts of mischief. I remember it well, and my first adult trip to Washington was to observe the May Day demonstrations in 1970, the year before the Yippies attempted to levitate the Pentagon.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t recall how high they got the building. It all blends together now.<\/p>\n
Anyway, there is a lot of doom in the air now, too, and it seems reasonable to remember how things came to be as they are. Like the Reds Under the Bed, or the HUAC itself, which had its origins in the anti-anarchist sentiments of World War One, and actually targeted the Ku Klux Klan in one of its manifestations.<\/p>\n
Alger Hiss was a recognized comer in the State Department, Hiss was taken out of Hal Ware\u2019s Cell at Ag and handled separately, recognizing the sensitivity of his access to power along with Harry Hopkins at the White House and Harry Dexter White at Treasury.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(CPUSA Agricultural expert and spy Harold \u201cHal\u201d Ware in 1935.)<\/p>\n
I may do stories on Hal Ware and Harry White. Both are fascinating characters, and worth remembering. Ware was the agricultural expert for the American Communist party who did extensive field work in the Soviet Union during the era of forced collectivization. Harry White rose to be Number Two at Treasury, trained in economics. He was a real mover and shaker: he was the senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that laid out the post war order, and it is said that he dominated the proceedings and crushed the contrarian views of Lord Maynard Keynes who represented His Majesty’s government.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Harry Dexter White on the cover of Time Magazine. Not the Man of the Year. Whittaker Chambers was a senior editor there. Photo Time Magazine.)<\/p>\n
After the war, White went on to be the architect of the newly-formed IMF and the World Bank. He got caught up in the Chamber\u2019s testimony to the Mundt-Nixon panel at the HUAC in 1948 but died three days later of a heart attack at his summer home in New Hampshire.<\/p>\n
The VENONA transcripts, supplemented by FBI files, suggest strongly that he passed classified information to the Soviets during World War Two. I find it extraordinary that the men who created the framework of the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund did not have policy notions informed by the fact that they were traitors. Oh well.<\/p>\n
Joe McCarthy had nothing in particular to do with Hiss, or White or Ware except to make speeches about them and accusations at others. The era is all a jumble now, and when we think Red Scare, we think Tail Gunner Joe. The House proceedings had been held in 1948, and McCarthy’s Army hearings in the Senate were held six years later, in April of 1954, long after young Dick Nixon’s fierce anti-Communist reputation had elevated him to the Vice Presidency.<\/p>\n
My pal was incensed that I had taken Joe\u2019s famous list- the one he waved around at the Army Hearings- to identify 349 Americans who had affiliation with the OGPU and NKVD. He certainly had one, and was willing to recklessly dime out everyone on it. The source I reference is not from Joe. It is from Daniel Patrick Moynihan\u2019s report on secrecy in the US Government, issued in 1995. It, in turn, is based on previously highly classified NSA analysis of the VENONA material.<\/p>\n
There is plenty of controversy on the true identity of many of the names on the list. The Army decrypts of the bulk of Soviet materials ranged from a hefty 50% (1944) to virtually nothing from 1942 and 1945, and zip-squat thereafter. Cryptologists picked at the carcass of the WWII material for years afterwards, breaking some of the codes by sheer brute brainpower.<\/p>\n
The NSA accounting of the VENONA project (with many additional links at the National Cryptologic Museum) is contained here:<\/p>\n