Posted on 05/05/2008 8:38:27 AM PDT by Ultra-Secret.info
RE: "The NSA told the FBI about the Venona intercepts but insisted that the FBI could not use NSA intercepts as evidence in court. The FBI had to develop their own leads. As a result most of the spies escaped prosecution. The FBI did not get their man."
An early version of "the Wall?" But recently even without "the Wall" between agencies there appeared to have been walls among FBI personnel -- at least some recent writings about 9/11 are saying it.
.. and Ronald Kessler cites the FBI to impugn Senator McCarthy?!
What is your source for that statement? As Blacklisted by History proves, McCarthy got most of the details of the spy story right. His errors were few enough to count on one hand; in hundreds of cases, he was right on the money. His antagonists, on the other hand, were not just consistently wrong, but in many cases lying.
In the immediate post-war years the bureau was much smaller and far more selective than today. Both my father and one of his brothers were Agents. My very strong anti-communist position stems directly from what I learned from my father and uncle, who were on the front lines.
The number of spies that McCarthy said were in the government was approximately right. But most of them had stepped out of government in the late 40’s after the fbi grabbed their first spies. So they were out of government service by the time McCarthy was naming names. The names the McCarthy named were people on a state dept watch list prepared in the late 40’s. These were not necessarily people pegged by the venona cables. (A few were. Most weren’t.) In the early 90’s the kgb also released a list of their spies in the US during the 1940’s. I have not seen that list compared to the state department watch list. You should be able to get the list of kgb names at the bottom of my first post. With a little digging you should be able to pull down who the state dept put on a watch list in the late 40’s.
McCarthy never claimed that most of his suspects were still in official positions. His point was that these people had been flagged by the FBI under Truman's executive order 9835 of 1947, and should have been removed as stipulated in that order. Instead they were cleared or permitted to transfer or leave voluntarily, meaning they were clear to take other official positions, or even return to their old ones later, as indeed many did.
McCarthy's investigations sought to find out why these suspects had been cleared, while others, apparently far less dangerous, were not. And -- fatal to his political career -- McCarthy sought to find out who was responsible for these clearances.
The notion that McCarthy's suspects were mostly already out of official positions when he made his charges in 1950 comes from the Tydings report, which was copied almost verbatim from a "confidential memorandum" from the State Department, which was full of disinformation -- including denying the presence of people in the department who were there.
McCarthy named suspects throughout the government, not just in the State Department, many of whom were still there: Meigs in the Army, Brunauer in the Navy, Ferry at the CIA, Remington at Commerce, Lloyd in the White House, Adler at Treasury, Keeney at the UN, etc. Some of McCarthy's suspects had transferred to other official posts from the State Department. Still others had been permitted to leave, at least temporarily. Yet 80 of McCarthy's suspects were still in official posts in 1950, including no less than 67 in the State Department.
Quote: "The names the McCarthy named were people on a state dept watch list prepared in the late 40’s."
You may be thinking of the "Lee list." Most of McCarthy's initial State Department cases appeared on this list, but he had other sources. McCarthy suspects who were not on the Lee list include such headline-grabbers as Adler, Bisson, Keeney and Lattimore.
Quote: "These were not necessarily people pegged by the venona cables. (A few were. Most weren’t.)"
As Haynes and Klehr noted, 139 Soviet agents in the U.S. have been identified from non-Venona sources, and it was these sources, not Venona, that McCarthy had. Nevertheless, among the McCarthy suspects who also appear in the Venona decrypts are such notorious cases as Adler, Bisson, and Currie.
Quote: "In the early 90’s the kgb also released a list of their spies in the US during the 1940’s."
You may be thinking of the "Gorsky memo."
The NSA’s historical society in Ft Meade MD holds a symposium every other year in November that in the last years has included discussions of venona. I’ve attended those symposiums. People there are mostly old and grey. Talking up McCarthy is like touching the third rail. Its a very touchy subject. Not as bad as bringing up McCarthy in Hollywood.
Judging by your statements it looks like you were conflating spies and people whose background made it inappropriate for them to be in government. I agree there were spies who certainly stayed on in government after 1950 and as well as men whose sympathies were such as to make them inappropriate for government service.
Curiously, there is a gap of over 15 years where the US didn’t catch any spies. This lasted until the early 1970s. When spies were arrested after that their motives for spying were discovered to be money or ego and not ideology.
It looks like you have done a closer reading of the original transcripts of McCarthy’s hearings than I have. You would argue that the transcripts show that McCarthy was not arguing that the people he named were spies but rather that their backgrounds made them inappropriate for government service. “Are you or have you ever been a communist,” was not tantamount to charging a person with being a spy but rather a clearance question the answer to which would determine whether a person’s background made them appropriate for government work.
This was what was meant by the smear.
And it just so happened that some were or had been spies.
I hope I did not conflate spies with non-spies. I was responding to your comment that McCarthy got the spy story mostly wrong.
McCarthy didn’t accuse many people of being spies. His most oft-repeated charge (starting with his Wheeling speech) was that the suspects he named “would appear to be either card-carrying Communists or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.”
Even if Herbert Romerstein is correct that no Communist ever turned down recruitment as a spy, there is a difference between being loyal to (or even a member of) the CP and being a spy.
Briefly: The Truman loyalty program of 1947 ordered Attorney General Tom Clark to compile a list of subversive organizations; the FBI to investigate all Federal employees; and loyalty review boards to review FBI reports and remove those employees found to be loyalty or security risks.
The AG compiled the list, including the CP and the multitude of Party-line “fronts” it controlled. The FBI submitted many hair-raising reports, documenting affiliation not just with fronts or the CP, but with Soviet intelligence. Yet few of the officials implicated were actually removed — zero in the State Department.
McCarthy got wind of this in 1950 and blew the whistle.
One part of the spy story McCarthy may have gotten wrong — when he called State Department advisor and Soviet disinformation specialist Owen Lattimore a spy, then immediately retracted the charge. The FBI was never able to prove the continuous accusations of espionage against Lattimore (starting in 1927), but there is no doubt that he was active in the Soviet “influence” strategy, particularly in subverting the policy of aid to China during its civil war with the Soviet-proxy Communist rebels.
Regarding Hollywood and McCarthy: Isn’t it ironic that Tinseltown lavishes so much ritual hate on McCarthy (who never investigated Hollywood), but doesn’t even remember J. Parnell Thomas, who actually did investigate Hollywood, jailed the Hollywood Ten, and chaired the hearings that led to the blacklist? (Those publicity-hounds never forgive a snub!)
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