Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods | Hacker News Reader

Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods

newyorker.com

31 pointsDowwie23 comments

"McCarthy had, in fact, no such list. He did not have even a single name."

The FBI Venona project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project) detected a significant number of Soviet spies operating in the US during the "McCarthy period." After the fall of the Berlin Wall a number of documents were recovered from the East Germany that substantiated the FBI work. Senator (D) Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about this in detail in "Secrecy" https://www.amazon.com/Secrecy-Experience-Daniel-Patrick-Moy... (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Commission_on_Governm... for context)

Venona data collection stopped in 1945 (although analysis did not), and McCarthy was not in Washington until 1947, so no, Venona was not detecting Soviet spies during the McCarthy era.

Also, these cables sent from Soviet diplomats contained many names one would expect on diplomatic cables, including FDR, who no one serious has ever accused of espionage. This includes people embassy and consular officials met with. Subsequently, everyone mentioned in the cables some have said are spies, with not much evidence of this. FDR was mentioned, is he a spy too?

I am not sure your timeline is correct. For example, https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/ven... implies US counter-intelligence efforts against Soviets under the Venona project continued until 1980. There were and are doubtless other counterinteligence efforts that ran in parallel and continue to this day. Moynihan's "Secrecy" book explores in detail how intelligence information gets politicized and suggests some policies to minimize that. Using secrets for political ends no doubt occurred and continues to occur and is not limited to any particular party or government department. My point was that there is strong evidence for significant Soviet espionage activity, which the article implies was not the case.

As I said - Venona data collection stopped in 1945 (although analysis did not). The analysis efforts were what was wrapped up in 1980.

Insofar as other efforts, there was wiretapping in Berlin ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gold ), undersea cable tapping ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells ), the Gamma Gupy monitoring of Soviet leaders car phones etc.

Here are the 10 soviet assets named in the soviet cables McCarthy correctly accused of being communists:

Solomon Adler: Official in the US Treasury Department, Cedric Belfrage: American Office of Strategic Services ,(predecessor to the CIA) T. A. Bisson: US Army Board of Economic Warfare, V. Frank Coe: Official at the US Treasury Department, Lauchlin Currie: Executive assistant to President Roosevelt, Harold Glasser: Official at the US Treasury Department, David Karr: Journalist, Mary Jane Keeney: US Army Board of Economic Warfare, Leonard mins: American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Franz Neumann: Frankfurt school, OSS agent, and State Department official

These individuals knowingly provided intelligence to the USSR or as US government officials directed US policy in ways favorable to the Soviet Union at the direction of the KGB.

They all continued their activity long past 1945, most into and after the McCarthy era.

> Marquis has established friendly relations with T. A Bisson (hereafter Arthur) who has recently left Board of Economic Warfare; [...] Arthur passed to marquis [...] copies of four documents: (a) his own report for BEW with his views on working out a plan for shipment of American troops to China; (b) a report by the Chinese embassy in Washington to its government in China [...] (c) a brief report of April 1934 on a general evaluation of the forces on the sides of the Soviet-German from [...] (d) a report by the American consul in Vladivostok [...]

Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957, page 229.

These people are not just "named", they were passing sensitive government documents to Soviet agents and a lot more.

I don't quite get why people are still trying to rehabilitate McCarthy by the fact there were actual soviet spies. That he couldn't find the real ones with his witchhunt makes matters worse not better.

The only reason I can think of is a bit negative of "they not-so-secretly want another witchhunt akin to Holocaust deniers".

My goal was not to rehabilitate McCarthy or give aid and comfort to Holocaust deniers but to point out that there was a lot of Soviet espionage activity, which the article implies was not the case. I strongly encourage you to read Patrick Moynihan's "Secrecy" book for a nuanced view of the policy challenges of managing secrets, diplomacy, and counter-intelligence in a way that preserves democracy.

What seems to be suggested as bigger point for then and now, is not the fact there are these types of characters ready to lie at every turn to further advance their own selfish agenda - they always will exist - but that us as individuals, citizens and journalists often fail to call them early for their deceptions.

A great book I found helpful for understanding the McCarthy era was "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies". I think history is finding that McCarthy was correct, but went about it in the worst way.

What was he correct about?

Perversion of our public institutions by Marxist and anti-national thinking.

So wrongthink destroyed our public institutions, rather than corruption that went completely unpunished? I doubt that very much.

What was the "perversion of public institutions"? What is 'anti-national' thinking? I think you are just fearmongering.

It's true that the us was oppressing black people during this time and after (just look at it going on today), and sometimes accused black civil rights protesters of being commies. The us got involved in a sequence of unnecessary wars like the vietnam war, where the pentagon papers (written by the govt) laid out the long sequence of lies told to the people by the govt.

That there were spies working for the Soviets cannot be doubted. That Joseph McCarthy contributed anything to improving the situation cannot be believed. Whittaker Chambers described McCarthy as "a raven of disaster".

> That there were spies working for the Soviets cannot be doubted

That the executive branch in the late '40s and 1950s was "full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals", in Arthur Miller's phrase, was very much doubted. He, of course, was the author of "The Crucible" which is a depiction of the Salem witch trials and was an explicit allegory of McCarthyism as a witch hunt. At least that's what I was taught growing up.

The distinguishing attribute of a witch hunt is that the thing being hunted does not exist. It's like a snipe hunt. The message of The Crucible, at least the way I was taught it, wasn't that the wrong people were accused of the witchery going down. It was that the entire hunt was fraudulent and paranoid, because witches aren't real. Or in the common vernacular, "there's a red under my bed and there's a little yellow man in my head". The "Red Scare". Again, suggestive of paranoia.

So, I was raised doubting exactly the things you suggest cannot be doubted, and I don't think those doubts were uncommon at all. Venona makes those doubts look ridiculous. Although people are still calling it a witch hunt, and people are still making excuses for the Rosenbergs.

McCarthy was famously ineffective and incompetent in doing anything about the very much non-witch Communists in government who committed treason to further the cause of a communist dictatorship in the US. Who did a better job than he did in hunting them down while they could still be punished for their crimes?

By "cannot be doubted" I mean now. I think that even Victor Navasky has given up on believing that Julius Rosenberg was framed. Yes, it was doubted then.

Who did a better job than McCarthy? Quite a few people who did not get any headlines, persons serving in the FBI or in executive departments' security arms.

And I think that one should distinguish between persons who once joined the CPUSA, then later thought better of it, and persons actually engaged in espionage. The US engaged in a certain amount of ritual humiliation of these people, and so won them a degree of sympathy entirely out of proportion to their judgment or character.

> Who did a better job than McCarthy? Quite a few people who did not get any headlines, persons serving in the FBI or in executive departments' security arms

We know from Venona the names of dozens of spies for Stalin in government during this time period. What percentage went to jail due to the efforts of, "persons serving in the FBI or in executive departments' security arms"?

> I think that one should distinguish between persons who once joined the CPUSA, then later thought better of it, and persons actually engaged in espionage

This is true, there is a difference between treason on the one hand, and joining an organization that advocates treason on the other. One carries a death sentence, the other is protected under the US Constitution.

From the Memory Hole:

Original BBC 4 program "McCarthy: There Were Reds Under The Bed". "currently not available".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t7hhf

[Correction:] available at the Imperial War College: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80032447

archive.org also doesn't have this program.

The apparent original producer of this show, has a write up at least, but alas no actual audio either. Must be hot stuff:

Quote:

David Aaronovitch thinks the unthinkable about the McCarthy period.

The hunt for the so called 'Reds under the beds' during the Cold War is generally regarded as a deeply regrettable blot on U.S history. But the release of classified documents reveals that Joseph McCarthy was right after all about the extent of Soviet infiltration into the highest reaches of the U.S government.

Thanks to the public release of top secret FBI decryptions of Soviet communications, as well as the release under the fifty year rule of FBI records and Soviet archives, we now know that the Communist spying McCarthy fought against was extensive, reaching to the highest level of the State department and the White House.

We reveal that many of McCarthy's anticommunist investigations were in fact on target.

His fears about the effect Soviet infiltration might be having on US foreign policy, particularly in the Far East were also well founded.

The decrypts also reveal that people such as Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and even Robert Oppenheimer were indeed working with the Soviets. We explore why much of this information, available for years to the FBI, was not made public. We also examine how its suppression prevented the prosecution of suspects.

Finally, we explore the extent to which Joseph McCarthy, with his unsavoury methods and smear tactics, could have done himself a disservice, resulting in his name being forever synonymous with paranoia and the ruthless suppression of free speech.

Hearing from former FBI, CIA and KGB operatives as well as formerly blacklisted writers, David Aaronovitch, himself from a family of communists tells the untold story of Soviet influence and espionage in the United States.

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

http://www.junipertv.co.uk/radio/mccarthy-there-were-reds-un...

I'm currently listening to the program at the second link you posted [1], so you might want to check what media blocking extensions you are running.

[1] https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80032447

Thanks, you are right.

I wondered if Carrol Quigley addressed this. Content starting in page 954 [pdf 969] addresses the matter very directly:

http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf

> The decrypts also reveal that people such as Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and even Robert Oppenheimer were indeed working with the Soviets.

Actually they don't reveal this at all. The cables mention someone in New York, then someone else comes in and says that must be Julius Rosenberg, and thus the decrypts reveal he was working with the Soviets.

Even Rosenberg was working for the Soviets, there is no solid line between the decrypts and him.

You have read the cables? Wow. You have a link and reference for pages of interest? Thanks.

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