Posted on 07/21/2002 11:22:36 PM PDT by TheUglyAmerican
WASHINGTON – A long history of fumbling the war against internal subversion in the post–World War II era led to a fatal "mindset" that may have foiled the nation's last clear chance to prevent the terrorist attacks against America Sept. 11, says author and journalist M. Stanton Evans.
Unveiling for the first time charts obtained from FBI files revealing the bureau's fruitless attempts to warn various government agencies of the communists in government during and after the Cold War, Evans told a student audience over the weekend that influential figures in and out of government kept the lid on the true extent of the enemy subversion.
Evans, founder of the National Journalism Center, which trains aspiring reporters, has spent more than a decade writing a book about Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
According to Evans, the early days of the Cold War gave birth to the notion that "just because somebody is a mere member of the Communist Party or a mere member of a Communist front, that doesn't necessarily prove anything. You've really got to have some kind of act – a person has to do something in order to kick him out of government."
"This is not ancient history," Evans, the publisher of Consumers Research magazine, emphasized to the student seminar, which was sponsored by Accuracy in Academia.
"If you look at what has happened with respect to the FBI and 9-11 and issuance of visas to terrorists that led to 9-11, which is being debated on the [Capitol] Hill today, you see it's the same stuff. It's identical, and the only difference is … it's applied to terrorists [instead of communists]," Evans noted.
Drawing the Parallel
Evans cited the visa rationale used recently by the State Department: "[The rationale] very clearly says that just because somebody's a member of a terrorist organization doesn't mean he shouldn't have a visa. Just because somebody merely advocates terrorism – he's just an advocate, he's not doing it; that doesn't mean he shouldn't have a visa. That's what the handbook says."
By example, Evans cited one of the questions on a visa questionnaire: "Are you a terrorist?"
"And if the answer is yes, it does not necessarily disqualify you," Evans told his audience at Georgetown University.
It is a mindset that has been dictated over the years by court rulings, says Evans.
FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley encountered just that attitude, says Evans. The Minneapolis agent tried to warn her superiors, going all the way up to FBI Director Robert Mueller, about the suspicious activity of Zacarias Moussaoui – the alleged "20th hijacker."
She said he was a "very suspicious character, and maybe we should get into his laptop in order to see what is there."
"If they'd gotten into his laptop," concluded Evans, "they would have found a lot of information that might have headed off 9-11. The FBI turned her down because that's what's in the law. The law in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act says very clearly that you cannot use intrusive methods with respect to suspects unless you have reason to believe that a criminal act is about to be committed."
Says Evans, one case that started the ball rolling on this mindset in the U.S. was the so-called Amerasia case.
In June of 1945, six people associated with an obscure pro–Chinese Communist magazine were arrested by the FBI and accused of espionage on behalf of the Reds in China, then in revolt against the pro-Western government of Chiang Kai-shek.
Among those arrested were Philip Jaffe, the magazine editor described by Evans as "pro-Soviet big-time," and John Stewart Service, an "old China hand" at the State Department.
Evans says the Truman administration, fearing political fallout from the arrests, moved to hush them up as quickly as possible.
"They rigged the case through Lauchlin Currie [a Soviet agent in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations] and Thomas Corcoran [Washington wheeler-dealer "Tommy the Cork," as FDR used to call him] and several in the Justice Department. [They] rigged the case so that John Stewart Service got off."
They "obstructed justice and tampered with the grand jury," Stan Evans further explained. "The [facts in] the whole Amerasia case [have] never been made public."
There have been books dealing with the case, and informal probes and uproars, but never has it undergone a thorough official investigation.
"There is a file, a transcript of the wiretaps that tracked this series of crimes and forgery, obstruction of justice, and other felonies committed by all these people," says Evans, whose research has unearthed reams of material on espionage going all the way back to the '30s. "I mean, it's clear as a bell what happened."
Warnings of Communist Penetration
Evans further recounted the efforts of a conscientious security official in the State Department, J. Anthony Panuch, who sought to warn of communist penetration, only to be dismissed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who bluntly told him, "You are fired." This was part of a determined move by Acheson and his immediate predecessor, George Marshall, to dismantle the security staff at State.
(Panuch was one of the first whistle-blowers in the post-war period to pay a price for his efforts to protect this country. Many others were to follow, more recently Gary Aldrich, Notra Trulock and Robert Wright. For the time being, while the spotlight is on her, Coleen Rowley is safe. What happens after public attention is focused elsewhere may be another story.)
Sen. McCarthy got into the Amerasia case a few years later when he obtained a list of suspected communists and security risks in the State Department that had been compiled by a congressional committee clerk named Robert Lee, who had an investigative background and later became a member of the Federal Communications Commission.
Service's name was among those on that list.
"Joe McCarthy … dragged all this back into the spotlight," explained Evans, "and he went after John Stewart Service, and he went after the Amerasia case, and he went after the peculiar way in which the Truman Justice Department handled the case and blew that sky-high as well."
"Imagine the amount of information in the hands of the FBI, and you had people in the administration and the Amerasia case who were trying to cover it up. Joe McCarthy just blew that case to smithereens and took all the information to the American people."
Obviously, said the author/journalist, "it was crystal clear why people didn't like him too much: because he was doing something that nobody before had been able to do to get across to the American people the gravity of this."
Evans, whose forthcoming book apparently has a working title, "The Untold Story of the Cold War," showed his audience at Georgetown some charts he had unearthed that clearly showed how the FBI had tried again and again to warn agencies all throughout the government of Soviet agents embedded in their bureaucracies.
The bureau made these charts after the case of Soviet spy Alger Hiss hit the headlines. At that time, there was a hue and cry of "Where was the FBI? Why didn't the FBI tell us all this?"
One of the FBI diagrams traced bureau efforts to warn about Soviet agent Solomon Adler, a Treasury Department official. It was marked by indications of so many contracts and warnings that it was difficult to fit all of them on one page.
McCarthy has been so thoroughly trashed by the left, which wields tremendous influence in the biggest media, entertainment, academia and other opinion-molding avenues, that subsequent generations have bought into the mythology that he made false accusations and "stirred things up for political purposes."
But Evans has a huge reservoir of years of research that says otherwise. One of the files he showed at the meeting concerned atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, showing he "was a communist" but that "he couldn't surface," said soviet operatives. Much of this stems from the so-called Venona papers, which show that subversives had indeed penetrated high places in government.
"I'll say it to anybody, and I'll say it again," said the researcher."These people [who trash McCarthy] do not know what they are talking about. They are so ignorant. They have not done their homework, and you cannot believe a word they write."
Most of what they write, he said, "is based on misrepresentation, cover-ups that date all the way back to the 1950s in which they were in denial about this and have remained in denial for half a century."
Asked by NewsMax.com when he expects to go to press with his book that has been so long in the making, Evans replied he was not certain, "Every time I think I'm about ready to go with it, I come across some new information."
If the one question was asked, America would change drastically in a short time period.
3 years later I see that nothing much has been changed.
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