Free Republic

Journalists and historians have often referred to Senator Joseph McCarthy's "list" as if it were a precisely defined entity. It was not, however. Certainly one would put his "numbered" list of eighty-one cases, given in a Senate speech of February 20, 1950, as the prime candidate for being McCarthy's "list." But McCarthy himself quickly added several dozen more names to this list in communications to a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (commonly referred to in the press as the "Tydings Committee" from its chairman, Senator Millard Tydings). The Tydings subcommittee in its "State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation" inquired...

Less than fifteen years after the last Soviet troops pulled out of the Baltic States, a new survey has shown that young Swedes are still in the dark about the fate of its neighbours behind the Iron Curtain. A poll carried out by Demoskop on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism (Föreningen för upplysning om kommunismen - UOK) found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag. This can be contrasted with the 95 percent who knew of Auschwitz. "Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the...

It is hard to imagine a sadder group of people than the children of Americans who spied for the Soviet Union. I am thinking of the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the son of Alger Hiss, and now Harry Dexter White’s two daughters, who in a recent letter to the New York Times Book Review rebuke a reviewer for referring to their father, a high-ranking Treasury official under Roosevelt and Truman, as a Soviet agent. What a tragedy the end of the Cold War has been for the kids and grandkids of the spies. How do they talk...

Julius Rosenberg, who recruited his brother-in-law David Greenglass to steal atomic secrets, also enlisted a second spy to penetrate the Manhattan Project, snip... The authors conclude that the spy nicknamed in decoded Soviet cables as Fogel or Persian was not the scientists Robert Oppenheimer or Philip Morrison, as some investigators have speculated, but Rosenberg’s recruit, Russell W. McNutt, a relatively obscure engineer who helped build the uranium processing plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that was part of the Manhattan Project. Mr. McNutt, a graduate of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a former assistant Manhattan borough engineer, died a year ago at...

Earlier this week an article by Jonathan Landay was published by the failing McClatchy Newspapers. The article asserted that innumerable people had been tortured with the intent and purpose of proving a tie between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Al Queda network of terrorist groups. The article asserted that there never were any ties between the two, and that the torturing of captured Al Queda terrorists was done largely to create a fictional narrative that would support the case for invading Iraq (let’s ignore that the alleged “torture” happened AFTER the invasion of Iraq-just as was done in the article)....

When new information about Americans who had cooperated with the Soviet KGB began to emerge in the 1990s, no individual case generated as much controversy as that of the journalist I.F. Stone, who had long been installed in the pantheon of left-wing heroes as a symbol of rectitude and a teller of truth to power before his death in 1989.

  Now We Know Anne Applebaum,  The New Republic  Published: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in AmericaBy John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev(Yale University Press, 637 pp., $35)If one were trying to define the lowest point in the long and venerable tradition of American anti-communism, surely it came in 2003, with the publication of Ann Coulter's Treason. Coulter's "thesis" in this work of cut-and-paste-from-the-Internet history was that a straight line could be drawn between Americans such as Alger Hiss, who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1940s, and Americans such...

LONDON: Secret files have at last revealed the identity of the top spy who transferred Britain's atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union and paved the way for the nuclear standoff with the west, triggering the Cold War for nearly five decades. Though the MI5 suspected him, trailed him and monitored his every move, they were never able to get the man, codenamed "Eric" by the KGB, whose espionage campaign to steal the Allies nuclear bomb plans was codenamed Enormous. Declassified MI5 files have confirmed that the master spy, described as the "main source", was a Soviet mole at the...

Clearing the air vs. splitting hairs and distorting Cold War history (Part 1) Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter whitewashed Since the downfall of the Soviet Union, volumes have been written about that late superpower's penetration of American Society and its institutions before and during the Cold War years. It can be said without credible contradiction that what we now know about Soviet spying and infiltration of the U.S. for seven decades vindicates the much-maligned anti-Communists (in and out of Congress) of that era. If anything, they didn't know the half of it. It was they who warned — often to...