Posted on 07/05/2003 11:29:25 PM PDT by ex-Texan
The hidden microphones Stalin used to shape the rebuilding of post-war Europe (Bugged FDR!)
JOSEPH Stalin was not a man to leave anything to chance. Years of eliminating his opponents and protecting himself from potential challengers had instilled a keen sense of self-preservation in the Soviet dictator and bred, as poker players put it, an unwillingness to ever "give a sucker an even break". One of those suckers, it turns out, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the United States president.
A new study has revealed in devastating detail how Stalin bugged FDR’s quarters during the 1945 conference at Yalta that determined the map of post-war Europe.
In an article published in the latest edition of Studies in Intelligence, the journal of the US’s intelligence community, Gary Kern writes that Stalin "had the American president pinned, examined, and analysed like a specimen under a magnifying glass".
The Soviet leader knew every move, every gambit the Americans and British would make at Yalta, and could plan his responses accordingly. The US, argues Mr Kern, walked into a surveillance trap.
What’s more, it did so twice. In 1943, the allies, Stalin, FDR and Winston Churchill, had met in Tehran, where Stalin engineered the conference so that FDR would stay in the Soviet delegation’s compound where his conversations could be monitored easily.
At Yalta, FDR was billeted at the Livadia Palace, a former summer retreat of the tsars, where Stalin’s security service, the NKVD installed a sophisticated network of hidden microphones, ensuring that no American conversations would be missed.
The US delegation ought to have known what to expect, since a security sweep at the American embassy in Moscow the year before had uncovered no fewer than 120 listening devices.
But it was not just the Americans who were under surveillance.
According to Mr Kern: "The British delegation settled down in the Vorontsov Palace, 20 miles distant, where accommodations were equally attentive. In a story with two versions - either Churchill said that lemon juice would go nicely with his gin and tonic or his daughter, Sarah, said that lemon juice would go nicely with the caviare - the British woke up the next day to find a lemon tree growing on the ground."
"It’s bizarre. They say everything, in the fullest detail," Stalin told Sergo Beria, the son of his chief of police who was employed as an intelligence analyst at Tehran and Yalta, summarising the nature and subject manner of the conversations of the US delegation.
Mr Beria recalled in 1998 that even FDR’s outdoor conversations were secretly taped. "As we already had a system for directing the microphones to a distance of 50 to 100 metres to listen, [and] as there was no background noise, everything was quiet," he said. "All these conversations recorded very well, and later on were translated and processed."
Getting up at six each morning, Mr Beria prepared summaries of the overheard conversations; then he met with Stalin at 8am.
"Stalin was interested not only in what was said, but also in how it was said: He wanted to know the intonation, the length of pauses, and the tone of voice of the American speakers," writes Mr Kern, who served in the CIA directorate of operations for more than 35 years.
"According to Beria, Stalin prepared very carefully for each day’s session, assembling all the reports from his intelligence team."
FDR’s benign and rational view of Stalin proved to be one of his last, and arguably greatest, mistakes, even if it was to some extent rooted in the practical realities of power politics. As the historian Hugh Brogan puts it: "He knew that it was mere sentimentalism, given the actual balance of forces, to talk as if the United States could or would impose its policies on the USSR in matters of vital interest to the latter.
"He said repeatedly that America would never fight Russia just for the liberties of Eastern Europeans ... instead he favoured friendly persuasion. He hoped, by constantly exhibiting frank, warm and honest collaboration to the Russians, to induce them to modify the full rigour of their policy and to persuade the Poles, Lithuanians and others to accept the fact of Russian hegemony."
By trusting too much in the charm and persuasive powers of his own personality at Yalta, FDR, argues Mr Kern, misjudged his adversary and was guilty of allowing himself to be cheated by the dictator.
The communique issued at Yalta proclaimed "the establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life ... which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice."
But far from freeing the continent from dictatorship, Yalta cleft Europe in two, paving the way for the Cold War.
FDR was a failure as a president, both in domestic and in foreign affairs. Don't expect the media to report this though.
Really? The Soviet Union had audio tape recorders in 1945?
This was not difficult to decipher at the time. A lot of us were suspicious when ol' FDR reared back one day and said "...some of my best friends are communists."
Our suspicions were confirmed when FDR allowed Stalin to take over the countries of central Europe as though they were conquered nations. He had no right to allow that, but then, he was a very sick man. (another fact neatly kept from us by the adoring, subversive socialist media)
The capper, however, was when Stalin toasted FDR as a fool right to his face there at Yalta and FDR raised his glass and smiled as though he had been complinented. He was one sorry SOB.
A friend of Chambers had arranged a private audience with President Roosevelt's assistant secretary of state, Adolf Berle. After dinner, at Berle's home, Chambers spend several hours detailing the Communist espionage network of which he had been a part. He gave Berle the names of at least two dozen Soviet spies working for the Roosevelt administration. Among them was Alger Hiss, a top State Department official, as well as his brother, Donald Hiss. Berle urgently reported to President Roosevelt what Chambers had said, including the warning about Alger Hiss. The president laughed and told Berle to go f___ himself. No action was even taken against Hiss. To the contrary, Roosevelt promoted Hiss to the position of trusted aide who would go on to advise him at Yalta. . . William C. Bullitt, former ambassador to Russia...(also)...brought the news to Roosevelt's attention. He too, was laughed off.
FDR was dying, at Yalta, to boot, BTW.
(The Soviets) saw a bright future for Michael Straight [codenamed NOMAD and NIGEL], the wealthy young American recruited shortly before his graduation afrom Cambridge University in 1937. (Their) optimism sprang far more from Straight's family connections than from any evidence of his enthusiasm for a career as a secret agent. Straight's job hunt after his return to the United States began at the top--over tea at the White House with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. With some assistance from Mrs. Roosevelt, he obtained a temporary, unpaid assignment in the State Department early in 1938. . .In 1947, Michael Straight became the publisher of The New Republic and packed the magazine with Soviet agents and/or sympathizers including Soviet agent I.F. Stone--MSNBC contributor Eric Alterman's friend and mentor.
Meanwhile his magazine, for over 50 years, has trashed decent Americans such as Ford and Limbergh--who helped fight Nazis and Communists--because they were isolationists until Pearl Harbor.
Btw...Weisband gave the Soviets information on Venona five years before the CIA learned of the Army code breaking operation. That is how pathetic our security was and how one group could not trust another because everyone knew Soviet agents were crawling all over the place.
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