Stalin’s Agents

The book was nearly completed when Breindel, who had served more than a decade as the editorial page editor of the New York Post, died in 1998 at the age of forty-two. Romerstein, an expert for the United States Information Agency and congressional committees on Soviet espionage and disinformation, finished the book.

Getting it published, however, proved no easy task. A mainstream publishing firm voided its contract — on the pretext of Breindel’s death, but in reality because it could not deal with the exposure as traitors of such icons of the “greatest generation” as Harry Hopkins and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The conservative publisher Regnery stepped in to prevent The Venona Secrets from being spiked, but what is still in question is whether this work will get the attention it deserves.

The inspiration of this book was the release by the National Security Agency of intercepted and decrypted communications between Soviet spies and their spymasters. Given the code name “Venona,” these messages, Romerstein and Breindel write, “are the mortar that holds together information from Soviet archives and U.S. government investigations. Together, they give a clear picture of Soviet World War II espionage against the United States.” The impact of Moscow’s effort was profound. Soviet influence in the Roosevelt administration is shown killing any chance for an early Nazi surrender to the Western allies. It hastened the Kremlin’s development of the atom bomb, permitting Stalin to give the green light to the Communist invasion of South Korea. The result in each instance was heavy loss of life by American soldiers.

The Venona files have settled many arguments once and for all, silencing liberal claims that had persisted for half a century. The decrypted messages prove that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg genuinely were spies. The first 1995 Venona release “sent shock waves through the ranks of the Rosenberg defenders.” It also vindicates the two early sources about Communist espionage, Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley. These former spies had become government witnesses after years of soul-searching, “only to be called liars by the Left and vilified in numerous books and articles.” The Venona Secrets also demolishes the old liberal saw that the Communist Party USA was just another political party. “Venona shows that most of the agents working for the NKVD during World War II were members of the Communist party; some were Party officials.” That included party leaders Earl Browder and Eugene Dennis.

But Romerstein and Breindel combine the Venona files with other sources to make bold assertions. None is bolder than their treatment of Roosevelt’s confidant Harry Hopkins, who has been canonized by mainstream historians as a hero gallantly battling chronic illness in the cause of winning the war.

In a section headed “Harry Hopkins — Soviet Spy,” the president’s top adviser is shown lobbying relentlessly to give tons of uranium to the Kremlin. When Soviet official Victor Kravchenko defected in Washington in 1945, Hopkins pleaded with Roosevelt to send him back to Russia. Instead of presenting to Stalin the American desire for a free Poland, Hopkins told the Soviet dictator “that the United States would desire a Poland friendly to the Soviet Union.”

Hopkins’s role was truly remarkable. Janet Ross, Moscow correspondent for the Communist Daily Worker, was an NKVD agent who in 1943 reported U.S. ambassador William Standley’s criticism of Soviet policy made to a small group of American journalists. Only two days later, Hopkins “pressed for the removal of Ambassador Standley on the grounds that the ambassador had lost Stalin’s confidence.” Hopkins earlier had insisted, over the objections of Army intelligence, on sending pro-Soviet military officer Philip Faymonville (called by his colleagues the “Red Colonel”) to Moscow as a lend-lease administrator.

Could it have been, the authors ask, that Hopkins was “an unconscious agent” who did not realize that his left-wing ideology was drawing him toward treason? Ishak Akhmerov, a Soviet spymaster during World War II, delivered a lecture to KGB officers during the 1960s in which he mentioned Alger Hiss but called Hopkins “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States.” The “Agent 19” described in Venona decrypts as meeting secretly with Churchill seems nobody but Harry Hopkins.

Romerstein and Breindel are even bolder in their treatment of Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb who has been portrayed in books and films as a heroic figure and defended even by such staunch anti-Communists as the Alsop brothers. The loss of Oppenheimer’s clearance as a security risk during the Eisenhower administration was widely condemned as McCarthyism.

The Venona files suggest but do not definitely prove that Oppenheimer collaborated with the NKVD. But Romerstein and Breindel are convinced by the testimony of Pavel Sudoplatov, the Moscow-based chief of atomic-bomb espionage, who fingered Oppenheimer in 1994. “We can say for certain,” the authors write, “that Oppenheimer did in fact knowingly supply classified information on the atom bomb to the Soviet Union.”

Such penetration by Soviet espionage was pervasive. Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, a middle-level bureaucrat who worked in several government agencies, ran a spy ring that included Chambers and Bentley — and that won him the Order of the Red Star and a place in the KGB Hall of Fame. The FBI and U.S. Army counterintelligence were suspicious, but were brushed off by Roosevelt administration officials. Robert Patterson, one of the celebrated wartime “wise men,” pressed for Silvermaster’s continued access to secret information. Lauchlin Currie — administrative assistant to Roosevelt and deputy administrator of the Foreign Economic Administration — told suspicious FBI agents that he “did not believe” Silvermaster was a Communist. But Currie was also a Soviet agent who reported to his Kremlin masters that the Americans were on the verge of breaking the Soviet code.

When foreign service officer John Stewart Service was arrested in 1945 for passing secrets to the pro-Communist magazine Amerasia, Currie went into action. He went to legendary Washington fixer Thomas Corcoran, who in turn went as high as Attorney General Tom Clark. The result: Service was not indicted, and Amerasia owner Philip Jaffe (a friend of Earl Browder) got off with a small fine. “The value to the Soviets of the Amerasia espionage operations, protected by corruption and special favors,” Romerstein and Breindel write, “was grasped only after the decryption of the Venona messages.”

Perhaps the most startling revelation is the thorough Soviet penetration of Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA. Maurice Halperin, chief of the Latin American division, was an NKVD agent. So was Duncan Lee, Donovan’s assistant who kept his spymasters informed of secret missions. The transmission of those secrets bore bitter fruit. “Non-Communist wartime operatives who had been recruited by the Allies in target countries now behind the Iron Curtain were ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated,” Romerstein and Breindel write, adding that it gave the KGB a “crucial advantage” early during the Cold War.

The Venona Secrets reveal successful efforts to infiltrate American journalism. Joseph Barnes, foreign editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, had a “long relationship with Soviet intelligence.” Mary Price in 1944 was “assigned as an undercover Soviet agent” in Walter Lippmann’s office, and the esteemed columnist’s secretary supplied the KGB with his private files during the Cold War. David Karr, a well-known reporter for columnist Drew Pearson, was an agent who regularly handed information to Soviet intelligence (and, in return, apparently received military secrets for Pearson’s column from Alger Hiss’s office). Romerstein and Breindel leave no doubt about I. F. Stone, the leftist journalist still venerated by many liberals: “It is clear from the evidence,” they conclude, “that Stone was indeed a Soviet agent.” What’s more, the Venona messages reveal he did it for money.

The journalist Eric Breindel, had he lived, would have smoothed out the final manuscript. The rough quality of The Venona Secrets makes it read a little like FBI raw files — though that, however unintentional, heightens the dramatic impact. My only real complaint with the book is the conclusion that Harry Truman was “a more effective foe of Soviet subversion” than Joe McCarthy.

In truth, McCarthy had nothing to do with the events revealed in this book. Truman was present for the final stage of massive Soviet espionage in Washington, and — contrary to their own conclusion — Romerstein and Breindel make clear that he did not distinguish himself. Truman ignored J. Edgar Hoover’s advice and retained Harry Dexter White, an influential Treasury official he inherited from Roosevelt and a secret agent who pressed the Kremlin’s policy at the highest level. The authors write that “despite FBI attempts to educate him, Truman paid little attention to Soviet spying in the United States.”

Perhaps Truman would have done better had he been let in on the Venona secrets. In his 1998 book Secrecy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan revealed that the president was not informed because General Omar Bradley decided he had no need to know. “It is surely logical to suppose,” Moynihan wrote, “that such a man would sense the political peril of a Communist espionage ring operating within his own government.”

The Venona Secrets is a breathtaking expose. The government of a great power was infiltrated by the ideological supporters of another great power, for the purpose of stealing secrets and influencing policy.

“Their loyalty was to a foreign power,” the authors write, “and their goal was nothing less than the subversion and destruction of American democracy.”

Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.