CHAPTER 1
Cold War
Counterintelligence
Introduction
The distinguished American historian Richard Hofstadter suggested that
periodically in American history, during times of great worry, many individuals
turn to “conspiracy theories” to explain away their anxieties. The early
post–World War II scene was such a period. To some Americans, President Franklin
Roosevelt sold out the European nations that fell victim to the Communists. The
peace that Americans expected after fighting the Nazi attempt to subvert the
European continent was not there. Unable to rationally explain why they failed to
achieve any security, the American public believed the answer was the result of
widespread treason and subversion within the nation.
President Harry Truman was bogged down in Korea but unwilling to commit the
resources to win because the United States had to build up NATO to defend Europe.
Because of Truman’s actions in promoting loyalty oaths for the US Government,
some right wing Republicans in Congress accused the Democrats of being soft on
Communism. If there were indeed traitors in the country, then the Democratic
Party was responsible for them because they had controlled the government
since 1932.
In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a journalist who admitted he was a Communist
Party member and Soviet spy, accused Alger Hiss, a middle-level aide to President
Roosevelt, as having provided classified documents to the Soviets. The case might
have faded into the dustpan of history except that Hiss lied about knowing Chambers.
Caught in that lie he was convicted of perjury. Elizabeth Bentley, another former
Soviet spy, also came forward at this time with her story of Soviet intelligence
penetration of the government.
The next event fueling American anxiety was the Soviet Union’s detonation of
the atomic bomb. The US intelligence community had convinced American leaders
that the United States was five years ahead of the Soviets in this area yet the country
now faced this new menace. The arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Harry
Gold, and several other Americans revealed that through them Soviet intelligence
had penetrated the Manhattan Project, as the A-Bomb program was called.
A senator from Wisconsin by the name of Joseph McCarthy rode the nation’s
apprehension about Communist subversion to political stardom. McCarthy
constantly told people he had the names of Communists within the government.
Yet, he never released a single name to the press nor did he identify a single Communist in the government. He actually had nothing but was able to convince
people that what he said was true. McCarthy was an alarming symbol of just how
anxious American society had become. In the end he went down in flames.
The identification of the Communist party spy rings caused Soviet intelligence
to end this recruitment practice. The intelligence services looked to running
“illegals”— a Soviet national documented as a citizen of another country who
emigrates to the targeted nation. This practice was revealed when Rudolph Ivanovich
Abel was arrested by the FBI in 1957.
It was the start of the Cold War. Every presidential administration beginning
with Harry Truman had to design its foreign policy around the overwhelming fact
that the United States was locked into a deadly competition with the Soviet Union
that left very little room to maneuver. To the Counterintelligence Community, this
meant its resources and energy had to be focused on that threat.
Military Security
The sudden Korean outbreak found the military
security (counterintelligence) effort of the Office of the
Acting Chief of Staff Intelligence Division, Department
of the Army (OAC of SG-2, D/A), in a noticeably
unsatisfactory state. Although the new conditions of
Cold War had served to increase all phases of this effort
to a marked degree, the Army had not only been
prevented by higher authority from carrying out the
domestic intelligence operations it needed to support
prior planning for the possible use of federal troops in
local emergencies but had also been denied any direct
control over the establishment of policies and procedures
aimed at uncovering subversion or sabotage within its
own ranks. Moreover, due mainly to defense economy
considerations, the total authorized strength of the two
security branches that formed part of the earlier merged
Security and Training Division had been reduced to 36
officers and 41 civilian employees just when the
demands of the security clearance program for
personnel, requiring access to classified information of
the Government, had reached a new peak in intensity.
On 25 June 1950, under the terms of a special regulation
dated 14 September 1949, which was still in force, these
branches were being called upon to perform the
following functions:
Operations Branch—Formulates, promulgates,
and supervises counterintelligence programs
pertaining to the Army; establishes countermeasures against efforts to gain unauthorized
access to classified information pertaining to plans,
operations, and capabilities of the Army; and
initiates, controls, reviews, and recommends final
action on certain types of security investigations
of military and civilian personnel connected with
the Army.
Security of Military Information Branch—
Formulates, promulgates, and exercises
supervision over measures for censorship and for
safeguarding classified military information; and
promulgates and interprets policy on the disclosure
of classified military information to foreign
governments and their nationals, the United States
Government, nongovernmental agencies, and
individuals.1
The most pressing counterintelligence problem right
after the opening of the Korean Conflict had to do with
the establishment of military censorship, especially
armed forces and public information media censorship.
This was the case despite the fact that anticipatory
planning both for national and military censorship in
the event of an emergency had been accomplished
during the previous Cold War period. Furthermore, on
7 February 1950, the Secretary of Defense had formally
directed the Secretary of the Army to assume primary
responsibility for:
Coordinating all aspects of censorship planning,
as it concerns the Department of Defense, with a
view to developing censorship programs which
are soundly conceived and integrated with those
of the Federal Agency having primary
responsibility for censorship.
Providing consultation and coordination with
the National Security Resources Board through a
working group compromising appropriate
representation from each military department and
such representation as the NSRB may desire.
Informing the Secretary of Defense from time
to time of programs and developments in the field
of censorship planning.2
One result of this timely directive from the Secretary
of Defense was the prompt creation of a working group
on censorship planning, which came to be known as
the National Censorship Readiness Measures
Coordination Committee (NCRMCC). Enjoying
appropriate National Security Resources Board
(NSRB), Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD), Army,
Navy, and Air Force representation, the NRCMCC
started without delay to prepare an emergency plan for
armed forces participation in the implementation of
national censorship if it was ever ordered into effect.3
Even though the letter of instructions to the field
regarding that plan could not be actually issued until 29
August 1950,4 it was already in the process of Army–
Air Force staff coordination at the time of the Korean
outbreak, so its chief provisions were generally
understood and accepted by all concerned.
This planning effort had been founded on the thesis that national censorship would be immediately imposed by the Chief Executive following some kind of declaration of war. The Korean conflict, however, was then being officially regarded as a United Nations police action led by the United States, which presented an entirely new concept in the matter. Besides, neither the Air Force nor the Navy seemed to feel in 1950 there any compelling need for the establishment of censorship and the National Censorship Adviser to the NSB had already expressed an opinion that "in view of the diplomatic and political implications, the President would not give his approval to the imposition of national censorship 5
Nevertheless, the problem of affording a suitable military security for troop movements, combat operations, and the introduction of new weapons into the Korean conflict soon became both real and acute. Since there at first almost no curbs at all on reporting about those matters, serious security breaches repeatedly occurred during the early weeks of the fighting. These security breaches thoroughly alarmed the operating personnel within the OACofS G-3, D/A, and prompted the G-2 security officials to undertake a comprehensive study of the entire censorship situation.
Upon completion, this study reached the rather indefinite conclusion that only total national censorship embracing the armed forces, mail, and public information media could possibly hope to solve the problem effectively; but, under the existing conditions such a course of action was plainly out of the question. The three major press services in the United States, though, were persuaded to agree not “to compile or publish state or national round-ups of National Guard or Reserve units being called to active duty.” Additionally, on 9 August 1950, when the Secretary Defense cabled Commander-in-Chief Far East (CINCFE) to express his grave concern over the recurring breaches of security displayed in dispatches emanating from Korea, General MacArthur stated that he preferred a code of voluntary press control to one calling for an imposed censorship and also noted as follows:
In Tokyo previous directives from Washington forbade such direct procedure but something of the same general effect has been accomplished by constantly calling attention to correspondents published dispatches which jeopardized security. The results are progressively encouraging. The practical difficulties involved with nearly 300 correspondents representing 19 foreign countries of varying attitudes and with the constant demands for more rapid transmission of copy to their home offices render the problem of arbitrarily checking dispatches almost insurmountable. Of course, whatever system is applied here will not prevent violations through stateside or other foreign outlets and unless something of the same sort is applied there articles violating security can rapidly be transmitted by airmail delivery or even faster methods of communication. To attempt a complete censorship in Japan would require the employment of thousands of people to check the various communications systems involved. This is completely beyond the resources of this command. In addition it would involve international complications which would be practically insurmountable. If any change in the present system is to be made I suggest that for general coordination and understanding it be formulated and announced by the government from Washington after due consultation with other nations involved.6
Military security problems bearing upon the establishment of armed forces and public information media censorship then continued to plague the Army authorities both in Washington and the Far East. They were soon made even difficult when a heated dispute broke out in the Department of the Army over whether the press censorship function should be performed within a theater of operations by G-2 or Public Information Office personnel. This particular dispute was presumably settled on 30 January 1951, at least for the Department of the Army, with general staff responsibility for supervising press censorship being definitely assigned to the OACofS G-2, D/A, but the Chief of Information (CINFO) was also designated as a “proponent agent” for such matters.7 In the meantime, Gen. A. R. Bolling had submitted a recommendation through channels to the Chief of Staff that military censorship, including press censorship, should be ordered into effect without delay in Korea.8
The Chief of Staff, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, disagreed with the G-2 proposal for establishing an armed forces censorship in Korea but did feel that press censorship ought to be imposed there just as soon as possible, and he promptly forwarded a recommendation along those lines to the JCS. On 8 September 1950, the JCS informed CINCFE they considered his voluntary press censorship system ineffective and intended to notify the Secretary of Defense that a more positive censorship of all public information media in FECOM was now necessary.
General MacArthur then sharply reminded them he had no personnel trained or available to perform detailed censorship work and reiterated an earlier belief that the implementation of censorship should be a United Nations activity.
On the basis of this reply and numerous indicated problems concerned with personnel requirements, shipping space, and day-to-day regulation of some 60 non-English-speaking war correspondents, the JCS finally decided to forego any further moves toward imposing censorship on public information media in the Far East. CINCFE was carefully cautioned, however, to continue “positive pressure in support of the principles of voluntary censorship at all levels in order to provide maximum security of force deployment.”9
Another major counterintelligence problem that confronted the departmental intelligence agency of the Army during the early part of the Korean Conflict period was connected with developing more effective removal procedures for personnel, both civilian and military, who were found to be either serious security risks or disloyal.
In January 1950, the Secretary of the Army had asked the Personnel Policy Board, Office of the Secretary of Defense, to make a study of the procedures currently in use for that purpose by the three Service Departments, so more uniform policies could be established regarding the dismissal of such employees.
The Army, for example, was still utilizing the summary authority contained in the Public Law 808 to process both its security risk and disloyalty cases but the Navy and Air Force were now using that particular authority only for security risk cases and EO 9835 procedures, through the Civil Service Commission, for handling their disloyalty cases.
One result of this study, therefore, was to have the Secretary of the Army, on 12 May 1950, notify the Chairman of the Personnel Policy Board that in the future the Army would conform to the Navy and Air Force system for all removal cases.10
Meanwhile, at an Armed Forces Policy Council meeting held on 10 May 1950, the Secretary of Defense himself had requested the Chairman of the Personnel Policy Board “to undertake a general review of the present policies and procedures for determining the loyalty and security of Department of Defense civilian personnel.”
The Korean outbreak thus found the OACofS G-2, D/A, in the midst of preparing several informative memorandums dealing with this complicated subject for the guidance of Army representatives participating in two major personnel security reviews.11
Less than two weeks later and before either review could be actually concluded, though, Mr. Johnson, the Secretary of Defense, ordered the service secretaries to take immediate steps to accomplish pre employment investigations for all civilian employees being assigned to sensitive positions requiring access to Top Secret, Secret, or Confidential material in their respective departments.12
These early actions were then strongly influenced by other closely related developments within the personnel security field as follows:
1. Passage of Public Law 733, 81st Congress, on 26 August 1950, not only repealing the initial suspension section of PL 808 but also providing for the establishment of Loyalty-Security Hearing Boards to receive testimony from civilian employees who were answering charges for their removal on loyalty-security grounds.
2. Passage by Congress, on 20 September 1950, over President Truman’s veto, of a new Internal Security Act (PL 831, 81st Congress, commonly known as the McCarran Act), which was intended to furnish an effective legal basis for prosecuting members of the Communist Party seeking to subvert the US Government.
3. Issuance of Army-wide directive by the Adjutant General, dated 20 September 1950, covering the establishment of Loyalty-Security Hearing Boards in compliance with PL 733 and also giving official notice that the existing Special Regulation 620-220-1, Civilian Personnel, Loyalty-Security Adjudication, was being rewritten to conform to this new law.
4. Approval by Secretary of Defense George Marshall, on 2 October 1950, of a recommended list from the Personnel Policy Board of “Criteria for Determining Eligibility for Employment for Sensitive and Non-Sensitive Duties in the Department of Defense”. Among other things, this list indicated the need for a special regulation to assist the appropriate commanders in determining security qualifications and requirements for the employment or assignment of personnel to sensitive positions throughout the US Army.13
Since these measures were all aimed primarily at establishing effective procedures for handling civilian loyalty and security risk cases, they did not alter in any significant degree the currently prescribed methods for disposing of disloyal, disaffected, or subversive military personnel. To serve that latter purpose, the Army had already devised a workable program based upon the provisions of a Special Regulation 600-220-1, originally issued on 10 November 1948 and then slightly revised in January 1950, supplemented by additional instructions contained in a Special Regulation 600-220- 2 (SECRET) dated 9 June 1949. This program normally involved one or more of the following administrative actions:
1. Each Army inductee or enlistee was initially called upon to fill out and sign a standard Loyalty Certificate (NME Form 98). If that certificate failed to mention membership in any organization designated by the Attorney General as being inimical to the US Government, no further action was taken. When it did so indicate, however, then more security checks were accomplished and proper authority eventually made a decision on the enlistment of continued induction of the person in light of them.
2. Similar procedures were utilized to eliminate disloyal or subversive Regular Army personnel and Army Reserve personnel either on active duty or in an inactive duty status, under the terms of a 615-370, Enlisted Personnel, Discharge, Disloyal, or Subversive.
3. Army Reserve personnel on whom fragmentary disloyal or subversive information was already known were deliberately not recalled to active duty until such time as a suitable investigation could be conducted to determine whether or not they should be eliminated through AR 615-370 procedures.
4. Under the provisions of SR 600-220-2 (Secret), the duty assignments of suspected military and civilian personnel were fittingly restricted pending the completion of a full-scale investigation to determine whether or not they should be eliminated through AR 615-70 procedures.14 While the departmental military security officials were not entirely satisfied with the powers they possessed under this adopted program for eliminating known or suspected subversives from the Army, they had generally come to accept the situation in that respect by the time the Korean conflict started. As a matter of fact, during its total period of operation from 10 November 1948 to early August 1950, the program did succeed in producing some interesting statistics, as follows: Action Under SR 600-220-1
Cases Received ........................................... 107
Cases pending (discharge recommended) ..... 15
Personnel discharged .................................... 55
Cases returned for further investigative action ..
................................................................... 100 Action Under Reserve Recall Program
Total cases ................................................ 1147 (a) Derogatory cases (will not be recalled until investigations can be conducted or may be discharged under SR 600-220 -1) ............... 480
(b) Derogatory cases (may be recalled but will be placed under surveillance) .......................... 420
(c) Derogatory cases not identified to persons of Army service ................................................ 68
(d) Pending classification to (a) or (b) above .......................................................... 179
Action Under SR 600-220-2 (Regular Army Personnel)
Class “A” Restrictions – 21
Class “B” Restrictions – 45 15
The advent of the Korean conflict made it virtually imperative, of course, to eliminate all disloyal or subversive persons from the US military establishment as soon as possible. At a meeting of the Armed Forces Policy Council held on 8 August 1950, therefore, Secretary of Defense Johnson not only requested the three Services to review their security files and separate any personnel with Communist leanings but also announced he intended to advise the White House when this action had been completed. Because the Army felt that its existing program was well suited for such purpose, no important changes were recommended in it. Nevertheless, all four of the basic special regulations supporting the program were promptly revised in order to render them more applicable, and they were reissued before the end of the year, as follows:
SR 600-220-2 (S), Personnel, Disposition of Subversive and Disaffected Personnel, 6 September 1950.
SR 620-220-1, Civilian Personnel, Loyalty/Security Adjudication, 13 November 1950.
SR 600-220-1, Personnel, Disloyal and Subversive Military Personnel, 6 December 1950.
SR 380-160-2, Military Security, Determining Eligibility for Employment on Sensitive Duties, 28 December 1950.16 [Think of what they are admitting with these new regulations,and what they are designed for. DC]
Other events bearing upon the military security field that occurred during the early Korean conflict period and appear to warrant special mention were, as follows:
1. The IIC, on 8 June 1950, had approved a change in the current Delimitations Agreement on Security activities by governmental agencies, which was designed to transfer responsibility for performing certain counterintelligence investigations aboard Military Sea Transport Services (MSTS) ships from the Army and the Navy. This change then necessitated a corresponding revision of the latest SR 380-320- 2, “Military Security, Counterintelligence Investigative Agencies, Supplementary Agreements” that was duly accomplished, effective 16 August 1950.17
2. Congress, on 16 June 1950, had passed a law (PL 555, 81st Congress) amending the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, in order to permit the entrance into the United States of 500 additional DPs as “national interest cases” provided they were recommended by both the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State. Investigating the DP applicants for such entrance from the security viewpoint, however, presented some almost insuperable problems for all concerned. With the Army CIC representing the only possible means of performing satisfactory overseas investigations for that purpose, the Secretary of Defense chose to delegate his own assigned responsibility in the matter to the Secretary of the Army. Col. William H. Brunke, Chief of the Exploitation Branch, ID, OACofS G-2, D/A, was then selected to organize this new Army effort. Representative committees were also soon formed to develop and coordinate workable procedures for clearing the DP applicants, so that, late in November 1950, detailed instructions could be sent out to the various occupation commanders covering the entire conduct of screening operations in the field.18 Shortly thereafter, arrangements were likewise concluded to speed up the local DP processing by establishing joint Army-State clearance committees in Frankfurt, Germany, and Salzburg, Austria.
3. The Informant and Observer system that had been in force during WWII was abolished, effective 20 August 1945, and not replaced. While the need for a similar system without some of the more objectionable features of this earlier organization had become clearly apparent during the subsequent Cold War period, no attempt was made to introduce another one into the Army until after the Korean outbreak. On 20 October 1950, the deputy Chief of Staff for Administration did approve, but for planning purposes only, the distribution of a G-2 sponsored “Counter subversive Plan” to be instituted in all units of the Army Field Establishment upon specific direction by the Secretary of the Army. Regardless of the fact that this new system had been most carefully designed to operate through the regular chain of command and was plainly “non-punitive, non-investigative and non-mandatory if other coverage existed,” it was never put into actual effect.19
4. Having been beset by many serious personnel problems throughout the entire preceding Cold War period, the CIC was finally able to get a new AR 600-148, “Personnel, Assignment to Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC)” published in August 1950, which served to tighten up several of the mandatory qualification requirements governing the selection of personnel for CIC assignment. Notwithstanding, the sudden Korean emergency had found the CIC with a shortage in officer strength of 15 lieutenant colonels and 55 majors and needing five lieutenant colonels and 50 majors for immediate duty in the Far East. The desired raising of CIC personnel standards, therefore, especially for field grade officers in most cases again had to be postponed.20
5. Under the current SR 10-5-1, “Organization and Functions, Department of the Army,” date 11 April 1950, the OACofS G-2, D/A, had been charged with “planning, coordinating and supervising the collection, evaluation and dissemination of intelligence information concerning the strategic vulnerability of the United States and its possessions.” Because the term “strategic vulnerability” was so broad and elastic, though, the other three general staff divisions continued to remain deeply involved in activities impinging directly upon that function. During December 1950, for example, the ACofS G-3, D/ A, addresses a letter to the six Continental Army Commanders on the subject of “Department of the Army Responsibility for Industrial Security” and instructed them to accomplish a “Facility Security Survey” for the industrial plants located within their respective areas that were being carried as “Key Facilities” by the national Munitions Board. Since these surveys might well produce some valuable information both from the strategic vulnerability and military security (sabotage) standpoint, the ACofS G-2, D/A, not only arranged to receive a copy of each for use in the departmental military intelligence agency but also advised the ACofS G-2s of the Continental Armies to make similar arrangements at their own headquarters.21
6. A law (PL 679, 81st Congress) was passed on 9 August 1950 that authorized the President to prescribe regulations for safeguarding American ports and waterfront facilities. President Truman then issued an Executive Order (EO 10173), dated 18 October 1950, establishing a limited port security program to be implemented by the US Coast Guard of the Treasury Department. In accordance with a written request from the Secretary of the Treasury to the Secretary of the Army, therefore, the ACofS G-2, D/A, in January 1951, was called upon to take necessary steps to ensure that all the Army Commanders and Attaches would urgently report any information which might give:
(a) Warning of the actual or suspected departure for the United States or approach to the United States of any vessel known or suspected of carrying materials for attack.
(b)Warning of the actual or suspected departure for the US vessels owned, controlled, or in the service of the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Communist China, Outer Mongolia, North Korea, Eastern Germany, or Eastern Austria.
(c) Any other information of value to the Coast Guard in carrying out its tasks.22
7. Early in January 1951, the Director of Administration, Office of the Secretary of Defense, proposed to make the formation of a joint Service agency to develop needed equipment for physical or investigative security use. The Army did not favor the formation of such an agency because the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had already taken action in the same matter, which included the CIA. Nevertheless, the Department of Defense ignored this obvious duplication and announced the establishment of Physical Security Equipment Agency (PSEA), effective 6 February 1951. Under management direction of the Secretary of the Air Force, the PSEA was then held responsible to provide for the “development of physical security and related investigative equipment as a common service for all agencies of the Department of Defense.” Army participation in the new agency was subsequently covered by the publication of SR 380-410-1, dated 23 February 1951.23
The establishment of the G-2 Central Records Facilities (CRF) at Fort Holabird, Maryland, on 17 August 1951, was a most progressive step in the direction of improving the Army’s entire counterintelligence effort. Not to be confused with the Central CIC Files, which had recently been microfilmed and consolidated in the CIC Center at Fort Holabird, this new field facility was originally intended to furnish a centralized repository for all closed personnel security cases of the Continental Armies, Military District of Washington (MDW), and OACofS G-2, D/A. Remaining under G-2 control but supervised directly by the Commanding General, Fort Holabird, who was also Chief, CIC, the CRF was officially charged with the “maintenance, processing, and administration” of the files in its custody. It was not in any sense an investigative agency nor was it capable of making any loyalty evaluations. In January 1952, its specific functions could thus be described to the Commanding Generals of the Continental Armies and MDW, as follows:
a. To provide a central repository for all intelligence investigations which have been or are being conducted by the above-named commands.
b. To provide a master index to all intelligence investigations which have been or are being conducted by the above named commands, which will be furnished a copy thereof, including changes when issued.
c. To consolidate all intelligence information that has been developed on an individual by the above-named commands, eliminating duplicate and nonessential material.
d. To prevent duplication of intelligence investigative effort by investigative agencies of the above-named commands.
e. To provide a standardized filing system for all intelligence personality investigative files within the above-named commands.
f. To facilitate the use of personality investigative files by furnishing the files or information therefrom to the above named commands.24
While the new CRF was promptly recognized by all concerned as representing a major contribution in simplifying and facilitating procedures for checking the security background of persons who had previously come under the cognizance of an Army counterintelligence investigative agency, it soon ran into severe personnel difficulties of its own. Initially, the CRF was allocated just eight military and 32 civilian spaces; these totals were raised to 11 military and 86 civilian on 29 October 1952, in view of the increased emphasis that was being placed upon personnel clearance matters throughout the US Government. This favorable action did not provide much real relief for the CRF, however, because it could only employ trained civilians possessing the highest possible security qualifications, and by that time there were very few such persons readily available for such procurement. The facility was thus forced to operate during most of the Korean conflict period by utilizing whatever “pipeline” military personnel happened to be passing through the CIC Center from time to time on temporary duty or other transient status.25
Early in 1951, the Secretary of Defense had queried the Secretary of the Army with reference to the current security status of the Panama Canal. The result was that Secretary Pace ordered Maj. Gen. John K. Rice, Chief, CIC, and Col. Duncan S. Somerville, from the OACofS G-3, D/A, to visit the Canal Zone as his personal representatives for the purpose of examining the “question of counterintelligence measures…now being taken to provide for the protection and security of the Panama Canal.” During their visit, they discovered that CIA activity within the Canal Zone and surrounding areas had been quite limited, and most of the required counterintelligence operations were being performed by CIC personnel assigned to Headquarters, United States Army, Caribbean (USARCARIB). This was an Army command that functioned under the Commander in Chief, Caribbean (CINCARIB), who acted in the capacity of Executive Agent for the JCS.26
After Lt. Gen. Horace L. McBride, U.S.A., became CINCARIB on 1 April 1952, the question of responsibility and means for conducting counterintelligence operations within his command again came to the fore. He felt that because of his JCS mission he ought to assume operational control of the 470th CIC Detachment, Headquarters, USARCARIB, but this view was not shared by either Maj. Gen. Lester G. Whitlock, CG, USCARCARIB or Maj. Gen. Richard C. Partridge, the newly appointed ACofS G-2, D/A.27 Following an exchange of several unyielding letters on the subject between Washington, DC and Quarry Heights, CZ, it appeared that the problem could probably best be settled through personal contact. On 22 October 1952, therefore, Generals McBride, Whitlock, and Partridge, along with Brig. Gen. Martin F. Hass, Chief of Staff, Caribbean Command, conferred together at Quarry Heights in the matter and reached an agreement that:
1. CINCARIB would assume direct control of the 470th CIC Detachment but leave a small group of its personnel with CG USARCARIB for his own investigative use. CINCARIB would then not only be responsible for the “investigation, collection, and reporting of intelligence matters in the Republic of Panama and the Canal Zone” but also “accept requests for information on these areas from the Department of the Army” while acting as Executive Agent for the JCS.
2. Utilizing his retained group of personnel from the 470th CIC Detachment for such purpose, CG USRCARIB would continue to undertake the reporting of “purely Army intelligence matters.”
3. This new CIC organization was to remain on a trial basis until the end of March 1953. At that time, it would revert back to the prior organization if the ACofS G-2, D/A or CG USCARIB felt “things were not working out properly.”28
With military security problems thus continuing to demand a large share of attention within the departmental intelligence agency of the Army, the Security Division, OACofS G-2,29 now formed into four functional branches designed respectively as Personal Security, Special Operations, Security of Military Information, and Censorship, was mainly engaged during the periods from 9 September 1951 to 31 December 1952 in supervising the following activities:
Personal Security Branch—called upon to handle all matters relating to policies and procedures for the investigation and clearance of personnel from the military security standpoint; this branch was faced with these principal problems:
a. Investigation and Clearance of Foreign Personnel for Entrance into the United States under Auspices of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA)—On 8 May 1952, a new SR 380-160-12 (C) was issued to govern the granting of “limited access” security clearances to foreign personnel brought into the United States under JIOA auspices. One noteworthy feature of this regulation was that it authorized the substitution of a polygraph test for such components of the required background investigation as could not be properly accomplished due to inaccessibility of the geographic area from which the subject personnel had originated. Moreover, an announced aim of the regulation was to ensure that the respective skills of these foreign personnel would be exploited by the Military Departments concerned to the fullest extent possible.
b. Security Clearance of Aliens by Private Industry—While the publication of SR 380-160-12 (C) did help to ease the security clearance problem in connection with the employment of foreign personnel by the Military Departments, the polygraph substitution that it authorized still could not be applied to aliens who were under consideration for employment within private industry. Feeling that some of these latter aliens were probably being denied advantageous employment from the US viewpoint on classified contracts by private industry, the ACofS G-2, D/A, asked the Department of Defense Munitions Board to grant the same type of exemption to them as the others. Even though this request had been concurred in by all the Army agencies concerned, the Munitions Board, on 13 June 1952, chose to act unfavorably upon it.
c. Investigation and Clearance of Aliens Serving in the US Army—Strongly indicated at this time was a need to have the polygraph exemption also cover enlisted aliens serving in the US Army, so that their individual skills could be fully utilized within the appropriate military commands. After a G-2 recommendation to permit such an exemption had been approved first by the Department of Defense and then by the Munitions Board, a new SR 380-160-13 (C) was issued, on 15 August 1952, to implement it.
d. Armed Forces Industrial Security Regulation—Because the three Military Department were now dealing with private industry on an ever-increasing scale, the necessity for having a single Armed Forces Security regulation to control it soon became plainly apparent. During May 1952, therefore, the Munitions Board decided to form an Armed Forces Industrial Security Regulations Committee to accomplish that particular task. This committee was composed of two members from the Munitions Board staff plus two representatives from each of the three Military Departments. Initially, the two Army representatives on it were Lt. Col. Donald C. Landon, OACofS G-2, D/A, and Lt. Col. David G. Fitch, OACofS G-4, D/A. Capt. A.H. Ladner, OACofS G-3, D/A, however, was later permitted to attend the committee meetings and to receive copies of its agenda and minutes without holding a formal membership. The eventual result was the publication of a far-reaching SR 380-405-5 in January 1953, designed to establish a single personnel investigative and clearance system at all private industrial plants performing classified contracts for any of the Military Departments. It also returned to the OACofS, D/A, several functions bearing upon safeguarding classified information, which had been given to the Provost Marshal General’s Office during World War II, in order that administration of the Army part of the new Industrial Security Program would come under complete control by the departmental military intelligence agency. This work then soon grew to be so demanding that a separate Industrial Security Branch, Security Division, was formed in March 1953, in accordance with a directive received from the Secretary of Defense.
Special Operations Branch—Until 19 September 1951, the entire counterintelligence responsibility for the Pentagon Building had rested with a small 118th CIC Detachment functioning directly under the Special Operations Branch, OACofS G-2, D/A. On that date, the Secretary of Defense instructed the Secretary of the Army to install a much more comprehensive program, which would not only encompass the Pentagon Building proper, but also its “grounds and appurtenant buildings.” In view of these additional demands, the 118th Detachment was inactivated, effective 8 January 1952,and replaced by a larger Sub-Detachment “A” from the 902nd CIC Detachment that had recently been organized at Fort Holabird, MD, to execute special counterintelligence missions for the ACofS, D/A. On 1 December 1952, the Special Operations Branch was renamed the Special Investigation Section, Security Division, but its duties continued to remain essentially unchanged.
Security of Military Information (SMI) Branch- Held responsible for handling all Army matters concerned with the security of classified military information; this branch was involved in a remarkably wide variety of activities along such lines, as follows:
a. Tripartite (US-UK-France) Security Agreement—The US Government, in August 1951, formally accepted a set of “principles and standards” for safeguarding information that had been agreed upon by a Tripartite Security Working Group made up of top-level security experts from the United States, United Kingdom, and France. This Working Group, with Col. Gordon E. Dawson, Chief of the SMI Branch, OACofS G-2, D/A, acting as Chairman, had completed a detailed survey of the regulations and methods in current use within those three countries for that particular purpose. By May 1952, both the United Kingdom and France had also announced similar notice of acceptance in the same matter. The Tripartite Security Working Group, with its Army representation now consisting of Brig. Gen. J. H. Phillips, Deputy ACofS G-2, D/A, as Principal, and Col. John F. Schmelzer, newly appointed Chief of the SMI Branch as Alternate, then met successively in Washington, London, and Paris during the period from October to December 1952 to examine and judge at firsthand the progress stemming from this key international security of information agreement. The true significance of these meetings becomes well illustrated by the fact that they ultimately led to the military security arrangements that were adopted for NATO.
b. Eligibility of Foreign Representatives to Receive Classified Security Information- In compliance with a National Security Council (NSC) directive issued during November 1950, the security officials of the member agencies of the Interdepartmental Committee on Internal Security (ICIS) were finally able some two years later to agree upon a proposed list of procedures for determining the eligibility of individual representatives of foreign governments to receive US classified information. As recommended to the ICIS, each individual representative would be required to furnish an identification document, including a suitable photograph, for check by the FBI and other appropriate internal security agencies before any classified information could be given to him. While certain exceptions were authorized for high- ranking foreign diplomatic or consular personnel and invited guests of the American Government, the procedures were meant to apply fully to all Foreign Service Attaches. No definite action was taken by the ICIS on this touchy position, however, prior to the end of the Korean conflict period.
c. Security Agreement Between the Departments of Defense of the United States and New Zealand—In September 1952, the United States and New Zealand Department of Defense concluded an agreement with reference to taking coordinated measures for the security of their own military information. This agreement called for each Department to maintain military security classifications based upon mutually approved criteria and to disclose classified information to other nationals only under regularly established rules and procedures.
d. Security Policy Toward the European Defense Community (EDC)—The signing of the EDC Treaty, in May 1952, posed a new and difficult security of information problem to the US authorities because the German Federal Republic, a non-NATO member, was included in it. Moreover, the treaty itself provided for the formation of an advance Interim Committee to get the EDC ready to function effectively just as soon as it had been ratified by the legislative bodies of the nations concerned and also activated a staff organization to commence immediate EDC military planning under the direct guidance of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE). In July 1952, therefore the ACofS G–2, D/A, forwarded a request to the State Defense Military Information Control Committee (S–DMICC) recommending the establishment of a temporary disclosure policy toward the EDC to be maintained strictly on a “need to know” basis. The S–DMICC then officially approved the disclosure of the US information classified as high as SECRET on that limited basis to the Interim Committee of the EDC, if such information was deemed necessary for accomplishing its defense planning objections.
e. Security Policy toward the German Federal Republic—With the advent of German participation in the European Defense Forces of EDC, it became clearly evident that West Germany would soon have to be included within the framework of the national disclosure policies being formulated by S-DMICC. Arrangements were thus made for a combined State-Defense team to visit West Germany during October 1952 and examine the security of information system currently in use therein. Published by the State Department on 3 December 1952, the report of this team expressed general satisfaction regarding the legal basis of West German security, a lesser satisfaction with the actual security of some of its governmental agencies, and no satisfaction at all with West German industrial security. On the other hand, because of the sound legal basis and strong will to achieve suitable information security it had observed in West Germany, the team felt that S-DMICC should “proceed with those measures which may be expected to bring about rapid improvements in the German security picture.”
f. Security Policy Toward Japan—The establishment of an adequate policy covering the disclosure of US military information to Japan had been under active consideration ever since 1949. At that time, the Japanese Diet (legislature) had enacted a National Public Service Law, which provided stiff penalties for divulging government information and rendered members of the subversive organizations ineligible for government employment. This law, though, promptly came under heavy internal attack and was never firmly implemented. Nevertheless, in October 1951, the ACofS G-2, D/A, did recommend the adoption of a limited information disclosure policy toward Japan on an interim basis, and a course of action along those lines was duly approved by S-DMICC. With the Japanese passing of additional laws aimed at tightening their security producers in May and July 1952, the situation appeared to be clearing up but the country shortly experienced another serious political crisis. S–DMICC then decided to postpone any further action in the matter, at least until after this latest governmental crisis had been successfully resolved.
g. Executive Order 10290—Designed to establish basic standards throughout the Executive Branch of the Government for safeguarding information affecting the security of the United States, this EO became effective on 27 October 1951 and caused several changes in the current Army security regulations. It required, for example, that all information of such nature should be positively identified as “Security Information.” Changes in AR 380-5 incorporating the minimum requirements of EO 10290 were published without delay, but a rewritten version thereof, covering the entire provisions of EO 10290, could not be prepared and issued until 6 June 1952.
Censorship Branch—Being primarily a planning group, this branch was seldom called upon to perform any actual operation or supervisory censorship functions. Its activities from 9 September 1951 through 31 December 1952 were, thus principally, as follows:
a. Civil Censorship—Although US policy had for some time been to encourage the unconditional abolishment of civil censorship throughout Austria, there was still a small island of it remaining in Vienna. The main reason for this anomaly was that the Soviet element within the Censorship Technical Committee of the quadripartite Allied Council for Austria kept pressing for numerous “compromises,” which were obviously calculated to assure Soviet control over all Austrian communications. It was felt best, therefore, to allow the original situation to continue unchanged.
b. National Censorship—As Executive Agent for the Secretary of Defense in connection with planning for the imposition of National Censor ship, the Censorship Branch was required to monitor the active duty training of Army and Air Force Reserve Officers holding national censorship mobilization assignments. Arrangements were thus made to have appropriate training courses in censorship work conducted for these personnel at Fort Benning, Georgia, from 1-15 June 1952, and at the Presidio of San Francisco, California, from 16-30 June 1952. A special activities course was also given to selected censorship military reservists at Washington, DC, on methods of detecting messages written in code, cipher, or secret ink. Other important events relating to national censorship planning at this same time were the submission of a detailed staff study to the Secretary of Defense, which recommended the completion of needed censorship agreements with several Western Hemisphere countries and the initiation of coordinated planning between the Censorship Branch and all governmental agencies engaged in psychological warfare.
c. Armed Forces Censorship—Censorship activities within this field were centered mostly upon accomplishing the following three tasks:
1. Arranging for the training of censorship units at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
2. Shipping the 1st Military Censorship Organization to EUSOM so it would be readily available there to open Armed Forces censorship in the event of hostilities.
3. Developing the Armed Forces Censorship Play for Exercise Long Horn, scheduled to be held at Fort Hood, Texas, during March-April 1952. This exercise not only uncovered a number of valuable indoctrination procedures but also furnished an excellent guide for the reassessment of previously accepted censorship personnel qualifications.30
The first mention of mail being received within the United States from American Prisoners of War held in North Korea or Red China was contained in a report forwarded to Washington by the ACofS G-2, Fifth Army, dated 5 April 1951. It stated that according to the Post S-2 at Camp Carson, Colorado, Mr. and Mrs. R. W. Wegner of Denver, Colorado, had recently received a letter from their POW son along with 23 other letters written by America’s POWs in North Korean or Red Chinese prison camps. The Wegener's had proceeded to remail the enclosed letters to the respective addresses shown on them, as requested. Shortly thereafter, the ACofS G-2, Second Army, took note of a similar report that 11 POW letters had been received at Mayfield, Kentucky, accompanied by the same sort of remailing instructions. This sudden POW mail influx plainly represented an integral part of a vigorous Communist psychological warfare offensive, which was also featuring anti-American propaganda disseminated through radio broadcasts, news organs, typical hate pamphlets, and undercover agents on a global basis.31 The offensive undoubtedly aimed at gaining a ceasefire with complete exchange of all POWs for the Communist truce negotiations at Panmunjom, regardless of whether or not the North Korean or Red Chinese POWs in UN prison camps wished to be repatriated. As a matter of fact, a large number of these prisoners had actually signified a desire to refuse such repatriation and to remain on the Free World side of the Iron Curtain.32
In May 1951, the ACofS G-2, D/A, forwarded a summary sheet to the Chief of Staff on the subject of POW mail, the terms of which had already been discussed with the ACofS G-1, D/A, and the interested CIA, FBI, ONI, and Air Force Office of Intelligence (AFOIN) officials. It not only called attention to the favorable worldwide reaction that the publication of POW lists in Communist news organs was receiving but also pointed out that the Chinese were encouraging correspondence between selected POW’s and their relatives within the United States for the obvious purpose of distributing Communist propaganda. The feeling was, therefore, that an appropriate explanatory statement should be devised and forwarded to the next of kin of American POWs, in order to offset any psychological warfare gains the Chinese may have achieved by releasing their POW lists in a seemingly forthright manner. The Communist propaganda drive then showed signs of becoming so increasingly successful that the departmental military security officials, during March 1952, joined with the CIA in preparing a plan for the censorship of all communications, including POW mail, passing between the United States and the Chinese mainland. A series of representative conferences were soon held under Army G-2 sponsorship to inquire into the feasibility of establishing that type of censorship without further delay. On 11 August 1952, though, it was decided that two separate studies ought to be initiated in the matter, one to cover just the censorship of the POW mail problem and the other to explore “larger-scale censorship.”33 Meanwhile, late in December 1951, the Chief of Staff had approved an intelligence project authorizing the ACofS G-2, FECOM, to read and microfilm prior to remailing, all POW mail turned over to the UN negotiators by the Communists during the truce talks, which were taking place at Panmunjom. Although most of the propaganda included in these letters was so specious that it could be considered dangerous, some of them did contain invidious remarks or potentially valuable military information, and they were sent directly to the ACofS G-2 to D/A for final review and disposition. This mail inspection effort promptly proved to be such a major drain on G-2 FECOM’s limited personnel resources, however, that he was forced to request permission to discontinue it. In May 1952, General Bolling did grant permission for G-2 FECOM to cease examining by not microfilming the POW mail, and at the same time, forwarded a so-called “Watch List” to him presenting the names of seven officers and 24 enlisted men who had either given “definite evidence of Communist indoctrination” or were “suspects of successful indoctrination.” Any letters received from them were to be placed at the beginning of the microfilm and after that handled in a special manner.34 The Watch List, which was carefully kept up to date in accordance with the latest available information, then served to provided the initial indication to the departmental military intelligence authorities of the true nature and extent of the indoctrination being given to the UN POWs held by the Communists.35
With ACOofS G–2, D/A, having thus already embarked upon a program of seeking to collect as much information as possible about the Communist indoctrination of American POWs held in North Korea and Red China, that distressful subject suddenly became of serious national concern late in 1952, when the truce talks at Panmunjom gave distinct promise of yielding an agreement for the large-scale exchange of captured personnel from both sides. Since no firm policies had as yet been announced for handling such returnees, the Secretary of the Army, during January 1953, addressed a number of pertinent questions to the Secretary of Defense regarding the Communist employment of “brain washing” techniques on the US military personnel, in order to obtain proper guidance. Secretary Wilson’s 36 reply dated 19 February 1953, first took note that the Department of the Army had a primary interest in the matter and then requested it to “develop immediate screening and de-indoctrination procedures designed to both determine and overcome any adverse mental effects found to exist among personnel of any of the services who have been released or escaped from prisoner of war camps in Korea.” He further asked the Department of the Army to supply the national Psychological Strategy Board with any data it managed to obtain from the screening of returned prisoners of war.”37
Although the OACofS G-1, D/A, was designed to be the staff agency for monitoring the entire program involving the return and reassignment of the US POWs from Korea, now officially known as the “Returned or Exchanged Captured American Prisoners–Korea (RECAP-K) Program,” the OACofS G-2, D/A, continued to remain fully aware of its own fundamental intelligence and security responsibilities in connection therewith. These responsibilities not only called for deriving all possible intelligence of tactical or strategic value from it but also collecting information on Communist indoctrination means and methods, which might serve as a basis for developing effective countermeasures.38
Having recently prepared detailed letters of instruction to CINCFE and the Commanding Generals of all Major Commands relative to the intelligence processing of RECAP-K personnel, which had first been carefully coordinated with G-1, G-3, G-4, Chief Psy-War, TAG, CINFO, and the Surgeon General, and then duly approved by the Chiefs of Staff, these letters were dispatched on 13 March 1953.39 Shortly thereafter, Maj. Gen. (later Lt. Gen.) Robert N. Young, the ACofS G-1, D/A, appointed an ad hoc committee, composed of representatives from the Offices of the ACofS G-2, Surgeon General, Chief of Psychological Warfare and Chief of Information, to “study and prepare methods and procedures for de-indoctrination of U.S. personnel” being returned from POW camps in North Korea or Red China. The proposed plan was to have the members of this committee assigned to Valley Forge General Hospital, Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, where they would be able to observe personnel suffering from Communist “brain washing” techniques and, after studying the problem, submit to the OACofS G-1, D/A, adequate de-indoctrination procedures “for immediate use to overcome any adverse mental efforts found to exist among those present and recommend disposition in each case.”40
It soon became imperative that some sort of a definite plan should be agreed upon by all concerned for handling returnees from Korea, because the initial exchange operation of captured personnel who were sick and wounded, subsequently known as “Little Switch,” had already begun on 19 April 1953 and the American ex-POWs involved were scheduled to start to arrive by air at designated ports of debarkation in the Sixth Army Area within a few days. During a meeting held in the Office of the Chief of Staff on 20 April 1953, therefore, General Collins first asked several pointed questions in the matter and then approved an information seeking program calling for a preliminary interrogation at Valley Forge General Hospital or in the proper Continental Army area, depending principally upon the physical condition of the individual returnee concerned. It was also understood that when these returnees were finally discharged from the Army their respective security files would be turned over to the FBI if an additional investigation seemed indicated.41
Of the 149 American persons processed under this Operation “Little Switch,” a total of 127 (three officers and 124 enlisted men) were from the Army. Only 21 of this total required special Army or FBI investigations but one person did turn out to be a “hard core” Communist and was eventually discharged without honor for “security reasons” in the Sixth Army Area.42 It was however, most productive from the standpoint of collecting information for both future intelligence and counterintelligence use.43
The close of the Korean conflict period thus found the OACofS G-2, D/A, not only faced with an evermounting number of difficult military security problems but also right in the midst of conducting a highly sensitive counterintelligence operation that was fraught with disquieting implications. The most striking development of the entire period, though, had undoubtedly been the rapid growth of a vast personnel loyalty-security program, which demanded numerous and varied investigations by many different agencies before appropriate clearance could be granted for an individual to have access to certain classified information of the US Government. The inordinate growth of these investigative activities after the Korean outbreak becomes clearly apparent from the following table, designed to compare the average weekly load of security cases in six different categories handled within the Security Division, OACofS G-2, D/A, during the months of June 1950 and June 1951:
1950 1951
Civilian Removal Recommendations 3 18
Military Discharge Recommendations 3 10
National Agency Checks 750 2000
FBI Loyalty Investigations 3 17
G-2 File Checks 5000 13250
CIC Investigations 940 228044
One of the chief results of this huge expansion in counterintelligence activities during the first year of the Korean conflict period was to render the already difficult CIC personnel procurement problem almost insolvable. Although from June 1950 to August 1952 the total worldwide strength of the CIC did increase by approximately 1,200 enlisted men, it also decreased over the same period by 100 officers. Furthermore, most of the new enlisted men could only be hastily trained on an emergency basis and the existing qualification standards for CIC duty assignment had to be habitually lowered in order to procure them. This adverse personnel situation unquestionably contributed materially to the fact that the backlog of unfinished clearance cases kept getting larger and larger while the conflict progressed. The tremendous extent of that backlog seems aptly illustrated by a report forwarded from the CIC Center to the OACofS G-2, D/A, on 21 August 1952, giving the average number of personnel clearance cases completed per month within the ZI and Overseas Theaters, along with the companion backlog, during a nine-month period ending 31 March 1952, as follows:
Average number of ZI cases
closed per month .......................18,694
Average number of Overseas cases
closed per month ......................102,363
Average backlog of ZI
cases per month ....................... 28,441
Average backlog of
Overseas cases per month ...........61,42845
Not all of these listed investigative cases, of course, fell under the same category. Of a total caseload of 42,889 ZI cases current on 15 November 1952, for example, 25,301 were Background Investigations, 16,776 National Agency Checks, and 812 Complaint Type Investigations. The latter investigations were the least numerous by far but they represented the more serious cases and always required special handling. The bulk of the normal backlog was ordinarily made up of National Agency Checks, due to the large number of different agencies that had to be consulted before an individual clearance could be granted. Brig. Gen. P. E. Gallagher thus described the system then in use for that particular purpose, Chief CIC, at an Army Command Conference held in December 1952, as follows:
This National Agency Check, in brief, is initiated by the requesting agency or facility and is processed to the G-2 of the Army Area. From this office it is sent to the ACofS, G-2, Department of the Army, who, in addition to checking their own files, obtains a check from the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When leads so indicate, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of Special Investigation, Civil Service Commission, Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, and Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization are also checked. In many cases it has been found that a bottleneck often occurs, as far as time is concerned, in clearing a name through some of the National Agencies which I have outlined.46
By the end of 1952, the number of investigative cases assigned to the CIC had finally commenced to decline, especially within the ZI. The effort was still a major undertaking, however, and, on 31 December 1952, the CIC called for the full services of a total of 7,030 persons, including the 1,428 officers, 384 warrant officers, 4,622 enlisted men and 596 civilians. At that time, the caseload status of all CIC investigations for the past six months was officially estimated to be, as follows:
Personnel Security Investigations
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 21,677
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 50,420
Closed these 6 mos......................... 44,611
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 27,486
Contractor Personnel and
Facility Clearance Investigation
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 5,739
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 13,123
Closed these 6 mos......................... 11,286
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 7,576
Other Personnel Investigations
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 20,273
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 37,848
Closed these 6 mos......................... 40,386
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 17,735
Counterintelligence Investigations
Pending 1 July 52. .......................... 1,898
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 6,529
Closed these 6 mos......................... 7,080
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 1.347
All other types of Investigations
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 8,689
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 43,726
Closed these 6 mos......................... 45,203
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 7,212
Grand Total
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 58,276
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 151,646
Closed these 6 mos......................... 148,566
Pending 31 Decembers 52 ............. 62,356 47
The military security function was intimately connected in a great many different ways during the Korean conflict period with the intelligence training effort. Training considerations were not only an important influence in limiting the prompt execution of all CIC investigations but also represented a controlling factor in proper development of such basic counterintelligence measures as censorship, industrial security, and the security of military information. Since there were not nearly enough intelligence specialists on hand at the opening of the conflict to satisfy the sudden demands of a major Army expansion, in most cases they had to be immediately procured regardless of established qualification standards and then hastily trained on the job. Unfortunately, the matter of agency or staff responsibility for supervising the conduct of intelligence training remained so obscurely drawn that training along those lines was often badly neglected.
In the period following World War I, Marxist revolutions and leftist agitation that spread to virtually all countries shook Europe and the United States. The Soviet Government had established an organization known as the Comintern to coordinate and direct revolutionary movements and communist parties around the world. It is against this historical backdrop that Marten’s activities must be viewed.
It is important to describe the beginnings of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) that was developing at the same time as the Soviet espionage apparatus in the United States. The CPUSA was founded in 1919 in Chicago and was an outgrowth of the Socialist Party, founded in 1900. The early CPUSA was noteworthy for several reasons, among them was the fact that the overwhelming majority of members were foreign born and did not speak English. Most of the early members were Russian or emigrants from other Eastern European nations, and a large number also were Jews.
From its earliest beginning, the party was wracked by severe divisions. Some were ideological, and some were linguistic. Another aspect of the party was its slavish devotion to Moscow. The CPUSA never deviated from the Moscow line at any time in its history.
In 1920 with the CPUSA badly divided, the Comintern, acting as sort of a referee, dispatched functionaries with orders to the party to reunite. At a series of secret meetings, the different wings of the party were fused into one organization. During the early 1920s, the party apparatus was to a great extent underground, with a small legal aboveground element, the Workers Party.
As the Red Scare and deportations of the early 1920s ebbed, the party became bolder and more open. By 1930 it adopted the title Communist Party, USA. However, an element of the party remained underground permanently. It was through this underground party, often commanded by a Soviet official operating as an illegal in the United States, that Soviet intelligence co opted CPUSA members.
By the mid to late 1920s, there were three elements of Soviet power operating in the United States, despite the absence of formal diplomatic relations. They were the Comintern, military intelligence, and the forerunner of the KGB, the GPU. It appears that during the early 1920s, the Comintern was the dominant arm of service in the United States, although it was not unusual at that time for agents or officers to be switched from one service to another.
What was US counterintelligence doing? After the Red Scare collapsed in 1924, the Department of Justice and its investigative arm, the Bureau of Investigation, declined to investigate “radicalism.” The US military intelligence services, ONI and MID, to a certain extent filled the void, but these organizations were poorly funded after the war and not able to counter the scope of activities of the Soviets in the United States. The US State Department was investigating international communism and also had jurisdiction over investigations of passport fraud. However, there was no central direction or focus to countering or investigating Soviet espionage during the 1920s and early 1930s. As a result, the Soviets had almost free run for about 12 years before the FBI was given the task again of monitoring Communist and Fascist activities in the United States.
The fact is that few Americans had any awareness of the existence of Soviet espionage in the United States and would have been shocked if such a thing were to be made known. At that time, no state openly admitted engaging in peacetime spying, which was considered disreputable and underhanded.
During the 1920s, Soviet intelligence in the United States focused on industry, specifically the aircraft and munitions industries, and to penetrating the mainline federal government bureaucracies such as the Departments of State and War. A favorite Soviet tactic in gathering intelligence on US industry was to exploit the desire of US firms to do business in Russia.
A Soviet representative would call on an American business and dangle the possibility of a lucrative contract with the USSR. However, the Soviets would insist on extensive plant inspections prior to actually signing a contract. After numerous visits and inspections by Soviet representatives, actually intelligence officers, some excuse for not doing business would be found. By then the Soviets would have extracted whatever technical information they were seeking. This tactic was repeated scores of times over the 1920s.
Another success of Soviet military intelligence in the United States was obtaining of the complete plans of the British warship, Royal Oak, from the Navy Department. The Soviets recruited an American, Robert Switz, as an agent, along with a US Army corporal, Robert Osman. The two provided US military information to the GRU. Osman was tried in 1933 for illegal possession of secret documents relating to national defense. He was convicted, but the conviction was overturned on appeal.
The role of Amtorg (a Soviet trading company) in Soviet intelligence operations was first revealed in 1929 by the first senior Soviet intelligence officer to defect to the West. Using the name George Agabekov, he had served in Turkey in the GPU residency. After his defection he wrote, “The first GPU resident in the U.S. was Tschatzky. As there was no Soviet diplomatic representation in the US, he was known as an employee of Amtorg….”
The case of William Disch alerted some in the United States to what the Soviets were doing behind the doors of Amtorg in New York. A US Navy defense contractor working on fire-control mechanisms employed Disch as a draftsman. An Amtorg employee who called himself Mr. Herb approached Disch. Herb told Disch that he was willing to pay two thousand dollars a year, a considerable sum in 1931, for classified information on the fire-control apparatus. Disch informed the company what had transpired and Naval Intelligence conducted a surveillance of meetings between Disch and Herb, who was identified as Moshe Stern, alias Mark Zilbert, of Amtorg. Eventually, Stern broke contact with Disch, but no legal proceedings against Herb or Stern were forthcoming.
The decade of the 1930s saw a dramatic increase in activities of both the Soviet intelligence apparatus in the United States and the CPUSA. There were several factors at work that gave impetus to both phenomena. The economic depression, which gripped the industrial world, seemed to bear out Marxist predictions of the impending collapse of capitalism. Many American intellectuals embraced Marxism as the inevitable wave of the future. The international scene also worked to the Communists’ favor. The rise of Fascist and Nazi dictatorships seemed threatening to many, and the antiSemitic nature of both regimes seemed to many Jewish Americans cause to defend the interests of the USSR, and by extension, the CPUSA.
Another boost to Soviet prestige, and also to Soviet intelligence in the United States, was the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1933. At last the Soviet intelligence organs in the United States could function under the protection and cover of diplomatic immunity. At the time, the United States had no real intelligence service operating in Moscow, other than a few military attachés. Aside from the embassy in Washington, the Soviets also established consulates in several large cities, including San Francisco and New York.[Right after their comrade Roosevelt was elected. DC]
The relationship between the CPUSA and the Soviet
espionage apparatus is best illustrated by the examples
of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers.48 Both
cases exemplify the success the CPUSA, and by
extension the Soviet espionage services, had in attracting
bright, well educated native born Americans to do their
bidding.
Whittaker Chambers was a remarkable intellectual. He had translated the German novel Bambi into English. As a result of his literary ability, Chambers was named editor of the Communist party magazine, New Masses. Chambers was approached by Max Bedacht, chief of the party’s underground arm, and instructed to enter underground work himself. He was told to leave the overt party and report directly to Bedacht. Chambers main function in the underground was as a courier, bringing material Soviet agents had procured to Soviet intelligence officers.
https://spartacus-educational.com/Jacob_Golos.htm
In 1938, the year Whittaker Chambers left his underground service to the Soviets, Elizabeth Bentley joined. Bentley had entered the Communist Party(CP) in 1935. She had joined a CP front group, the American League Against War and Fascism in New York, and was soon brought into the party proper. She was introduced to Jacob Golos, a high-level CPUSA official, who became both her lover and her supervisor in espionage activities. Bentley later testified that she served as a courier for two Soviet spy rings operating in the federal government in Washington and that she turned documents gathered by the agents over to Golos, who provided them to Soviet officers. Golos also was head of an organization called World Tourists, which while posing as a travel agency actually facilitated international travel to and from the United States by Soviet agents and CPUSA members. World Tourists was also deeply involved in passport fraud. In 1940, Golos had specifically named for her the three branches of Soviet espionage operating in the United States as military intelligence, the Comintern, and the United State Political Directorate (OGPU).
In her testimony before Congress in 1948, Bentley named scores of Americans working for Soviet intelligence. She described two rings of spies of federal employees in Washington including penetrations of OSS, the State Department, and other agencies. She also indicated that most of the members of the rings were CPUSA members.
As mentioned above, the FBI had virtually ceased investigations of subversive and “Communist” activity after 1924. Although J. Edgar Hoover never wavered in his distrust of American Communists or their Soviet comrades, he was aware that he had no political backing or support for launching a sustained campaign of investigation and scrutiny of the CPUSA or foreign communists and subversives in the United States.
This changed with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. With the international scene degrading, Roosevelt had become concerned with the threat of domestic subversion and fifth columnists in the United States Roosevelt made his first request for assistance on domestic subversion to Hoover in 1933. In 1936 the White House instructed the FBI to provide systematic intelligence about subversive activities in the United States, particularly Nazism and Communism. That request from Roosevelt to Hoover on August 25, 1936 was the basis for more than 40 years of investigative and proactive actions against the CPUSA and their Soviet allies. Hoover created in the mid-1930s a division for overseeing domestic intelligence that overshadowed any other peacetime effort in American history.
The United States now had a permanent, civilian investigative authority with responsibility for looking into treasonable actions by American citizens. This is significant, because prior to this a violation of law was necessary to trigger an FBI investigation. Now, under the new operating procedures, American citizens who had not violated any law could be subject to wiretapping, mail cover, and other investigative techniques by the FBI.
In a memorandum to then Attorney General Homer Cummings, Hoover wrote that the new General Intelligence Division was to “collect through investigative activity and other contact, and to correlate for ready reference information dealing with various forms of activities of either subversive or so-called intelligence type.” The Bureau already had on file identities of some 2,500 persons suspected of communist or Nazi activities, including espionage.
It is interesting to note that the financing of this expansion of the FBI’s span of activities was not reported to Congress, but put under the “cover” of a continuation of a request from the Secretary of State to investigate foreign-based subversion. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria, which heightened international tensions. In the United States, there arose demands from Congress and the public for increased vigilance against spies and saboteurs.
In May of that
year, Congressman Martin Dies called upon the house
to organize a committee to investigate foreign “isms”
which threatened America. The House Committee on
un-American Activities (HUAC) was established. In
October 1938, Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia, and
the FBI established new facilities for “specialized
training in general intelligence work.” In June 1939
President Roosevelt issued a directive allocating
intelligence responsibilities between the military services and the FBI, giving the FBI the Western
Hemisphere.
After Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Roosevelt declared a state of emergency. Hoover appeared before the House appropriations committee and told the public what the FBI had been doing quietly since 1936. He revealed that what was now called the General Intelligence Division had compiled extensive dossiers on “individuals, groups and organizations engaged in subversive activities that are possibly detrimental to the internal security of the US.”
This investigative mandate was somewhat ambiguous and could be interpreted broadly. In practice it meant the FBI could investigate groups who might come under subversive influence. In 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act making the advocacy of overthrowing the US Government a federal crime. It also outlawed groups or organizations that advocated such an overthrow, and membership in such a group was also made a crime. However, officials in the Justice Department did not approve of the law, and little use was made of it until after WWII.
During the war years of 1941–45, the enemies were
clearly Germany, Japan, and Italy. The focus of the
FBI’s domestic security program naturally was on the
activities of those nations. The American Communist
Party followed obediently its directions from Moscow
and were kept in line by the Comintern representative
in the United States Gerhart Eisler, former husband of
Soviet spy Hede Massing.
After the invasion of the USSR by Germany in June 1941, the Soviets urged the CPUSA to agitate for US intervention in the war to save the USSR. This was a reversal of position for the American Communists, who had opposed any potential intervention after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was greeted with joy by the CPUSA, which foresaw salvation for the USSR, by the US declaration of war against Germany and Japan. From this point on, the American Communist Party engaged in what was known as the “united front” effort. This meant, at least publicly, dropping anti-American rhetoric and actions. Strikes in defense-related sectors were discouraged. However, Soviet espionage and the CPUSA’s role in supporting those activities never was suspended, even though the American Communist Party went through the charade of disbanding and renaming itself the Communist Political Association. Now, the motivation for participating in espionage was “fighting fascism.”
Since the resumption of the FBI’s domestic security program in the mid-1930s, the CPUSA was an obvious target, and the Bureau had infiltrated a number of informers and agents into the party. As a result, the FBI obtained a good view of the party’s internal structure and also its divisions and weaknesses, which could be exploited. With the advent of World War II and the FBI’s attention primarily on the Axis targets in the United States and Latin America, the focus of counterintelligence shifted away from the CPUSA. However, even during the war, the FBI maintained a watch on the party and Soviet espionage.
Work begun on decryption of Soviet intelligence cable traffic during World War II and eventually led to the identification of Soviet espionage agents and activities after the war.49 After the end of World War II, the alliance between the United States and USSR quickly faded.
The CPUSA reconstituted itself and resumed its strident pro-Moscow anti-US stance. The era of the united front was over. On Moscow’s orders, the head of the CPUSA, Earl Browder, was dumped. His crime had been to follow Moscow’s orders in 1941 and “disband” the party in a show of unity with the US Government. Now, that policy was in disrepute, and he had to go. The Soviet Union’s actions in Eastern Europe in establishing subservient puppet regimes increased tensions with the United States Communism was becoming a potent domestic political issue.
Public concern over the Communist threat to national
security increased as a result of several high-profile
incidents during the late 1940s. One was the defection
in Ottawa of GRU cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko in 1945.50
Gouzenko provided for the astonished Canadian
Government proof of an extensive espionage operation
directed from the Soviet embassy in the Canadian
capital. He also provided the identities of Canadian
citizens working for Soviet intelligence. His naming
of the distinguished physicist Allan Nunn May as a
Soviet spy had the greatest impact and not just in
Canada.
Gouzenko had revealed that the Soviets had been engaged in a sustained effort, involving scores of agents from different nations, in obtaining information about the atomic bomb. Gouzenko’s information led directly to the arrest and conviction of several Canadian and British citizens who had been working for the Soviets. But more importantly was the impact on public opinion of his revelations of Soviet spying and local communist party participation in that activity. Canadian public opinion was angered, particularly because Canada had been a close supportive ally of the USSR during the war, and a great deal of sympathy for the Soviet Union existed in Canada.
Now Gouzenko revealed that during the war years both the GRU and NKVD had been active in subverting Canadians. As naive as it seems now, Canadians were shocked that such intrigue had been practiced on their soil by a wartime ally. Overnight the popularity and prestige both of the USSR and the Canadian Communist party suffered. The information provided by Gouzenko was a windfall for the Canadian Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) security service as well as MI5 and the FBI, with whom Gouzenko information was shared. Gouzenko information about Soviet atomic espionage dovetailed with other indications from different sources about soviet atomic spying.
Despite the publicity generated by Gouzenko defection, and the HUAC testimony of Bentley/Chambers, by 1948 there had not been a conviction of an American for espionage on behalf of the USSR in any major spy case. This was especially frustrating for FBI agents working Soviet espionage, because they knew the identities of scores of Americans who had spied for the Russians. They simply lacked the evidence needed for prosecution.
All of that was to change dramatically when Soviet NKVD and GRU message traffic from the United States. to Moscow and back began to yield concrete results by 1948. FBI agent Robert Lamphere, working with Army Security Agency cryptologist Meredith Gardner, had made a major break in identifying members of what later became known as the Rosenberg ring.
The first major case to break from the decryption effort
involved Judith Coplon. Coplon, an employee of the
Department of Justice, had also been identified by the
NKVD-GRU traffic. The Coplon case was tricky for
the FBI, because Coplon, by virtue of her position at
Justice, had access to many sensitive FBI investigative
reports, many of which dealt with Soviet espionage.
Intensive surveillance of Coplon revealed she was
meeting with a Soviet attached to the United Nations in
New York named Gubichev.
After observing her pattern of meeting with her Soviet controller during trips ostensibly to visit her mother in New York, a plan to catch her “in the act” was planned by SA Lamphere and approved by Attorney General Tom Clark. A phony document was prepared and allowed to pass across her desk dealing with Soviet espionage. The assumption was that she would attempt to pass the document to Gubichev on her next trip to New York.
When Coplon traveled to New York, shortly after receiving the bogus report, her meeting with the Soviet was observed by massive FBI coverage. She was arrested, along with Gubichev, and charged with espionage. However, only she went to trial in the spring of 1949. Coplon was convicted; the evidence against her based primarily on the FBI produced document. The Soviet cable traffic, which had identified her, was not mentioned in court. Coplon’s attorneys successfully appealed for a second trial, and she was again convicted. However, the second conviction was thrown out on appeal based on the fact that a warrant had not been issued for Coplon’s arrest and the use of wiretaps in the investigation. She was not retried, and went free.
The investigation into Coplon’s background revealed a familiar trail. She had graduated from Barnard College, had been active in left wing causes, and had joined the Young Communist League, a CPUSA front organization. She was a graduate student in international relations, writing a thesis on Soviet economic planning. The VENONA message traffic dealing with Coplon had also mentioned two other female acquaintances of hers that she had recommended for recruitment. One of the women, Flora Wovschin, graduated from Barnard with Coplon and also was a member of the Young Communist League. Wovschin had married a Soviet Amtorg employee and moved with him to Russia. Wovshin’s parents then heard from her in 1949 that she had divorced. In cryptic language, she apparently hinted she was headed for China where the Communists had just triumphed. Later, the Wovshcins were informed that Flora had died. FBI agent Lamphere stated in his book, The FBI–KGB War , that he believed Flora Wovschin had died serving the communists in the Korean war.
On September 23, 1949, President Harry Truman announced that the USSR had exploded an atomic device. This was to have a drastic impact on US national security policy. US intelligence knew the Soviets were working on the bomb but believed the Russians were years behind the Americans. Immediately, the FBI attempted to determine to what extent had the Soviet’s success been attributable to espionage. Following the Coplon case, the Army Security Agency, the forerunner of NSA, made major strides in decrypting Soviet messages. Newly decrypted material indicated the presence of a British spy in the Manhattan project. The FBI, working with MI5, identified a German expatriate physicist named Klaus Fuchs 51 as a suspect.
A look at Fuch’s background indicated that he had been a member of the German Communist party and had fled Germany when the Nazis took over. Under questioning by MI5, Fuchs confessed to passing secrets of the Manhattan Project to Soviet intelligence while in the United States.
MI5, working with the FBI on the atom spy series,
allowed FBI agents to interview Fuchs. Information
Fuchs provided led to the arrest of Fuch’s American
courier, known as “Raymond,” and later identified as
Harry Gold.52 It was the Gold arrest that led to a series
of spy investigations, including the biggest FBI
espionage case to date.
Under questioning, Gold cracked and named another
American spy he had serviced as a courier at the US
atomic center at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The FBI
identified the second spy as David Greenglass,53 who
was also described in the VENONA message traffic.
Greenglass was arrested and quickly confessed. He
agreed to full cooperation with the FBI on the condition
that his wife not be prosecuted. The Department of
Justice agreed.
Greenglass implicated his brother-in-law, Julius
Rosenberg,54 as his accomplice. Greenglass’s sister,
Ethel, also was named as a witting member of the
conspiracy. Other names were dragged in also, such as
Morton Sobell, who fled to Mexico after the Rosenbergs
were arrested. The backgrounds of the accused were
remarkably similar. All were second-generation
Americans of Jewish descent. All became active in left
wing politics at an early age, and all had either joined
the CPUSA or one of its front groups.
Several VENONA messages referred to the Rosenbergs but they were not used at their trial. Under interrogation, the Rosenbergs denied their involvement in espionage and their membership in the CPUSA. Greenglass described Julius Rosenberg as the hub of a wheel of Soviet espionage and his main contact and conduit to the Soviets other than Gold. It was through his brother-in-law, Julius, that Greenglass initiated his espionage.
The Rosenberg trial began in March 1951. Charged
with espionage were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and
Morton Sobell. Testifying against them were David Greenglass and Harry Gold. The Rosenbergs were
unable to refute the detailed testimony of the defense
witnesses and were found guilty. Sobell was sentenced
to 30 years for being a co conspirator although his part
in the conspiracy was never as clear as the Rosenbergs.
Both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to
death.
At the time of the Rosenberg trial, the United States was fighting a Communist army in Korea, Eastern Europe had fallen under Soviet domination, and the United States had lost its nuclear monopoly. The Rosenbergs were seen as willing agents of a sinister worldwide conspiracy to destroy the United States. After nearly two years of unsuccessful appeals, the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. In the meantime, they had become a cause celebre for the Communist movement around the world. The Rosenbergs became martyr figures, victims of anti-Semitic and anti-Communist hysteria in the United States.
During the FBI’s interrogation of Harry Gold, he provided insight into the communist espionage apparatus in the United States going back nearly 15 years. Gold, like the Rosenbergs and Sobell, was the offspring of Russian Jewish immigrants. Although young Gold did not join the Communist Party, he, like his parents, was a strong believer in Socialism. Gold thought that “progressive” Russia was the one place in the world where there was no anti-Semitism.
Gold stated that his supervisor at an industrial solvent plant had recruited him into espionage for the Soviet Union in 1935 where Gold worked as a chemist. The supervisor, named Black, provided industrial secrets to the Soviets. He had recruited Gold on ideological and ethnic grounds, appealing to Gold’s Jewish identification, playing to an appeal that the USSR was the refuge for world Jewry. Black was a member of the CPUSA and pressured Gold to join.
Gold stated that the Soviets paid his tuition to study chemical engineering at Xavier and Cincinnati Universities in Ohio. He revealed the identities of several American spies and their Soviet handlers. One American named by Gold was Alford Dean Slack, also a chemist. Slack confessed to the FBI that he had provided military and industrial secrets to the Soviets. Slack was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 15 years in prison. However, Black was not prosecuted.
Another Soviet agent fingered by Gold was an industrial chemist named Abraham Brothman. Brothman had provided the Soviets with industrial secrets for years. Brothman and Gold had briefly been business associates and had fallen out. Gold had also been a courier for Brothman. Gold named others who were beyond the reach of the law having fled the United States when the arrests began. Names such as Barr 55 and Katz would haunt FBI investigators for years.
The Rosenberg executions brought to a close an era in US domestic security. The interlocking efforts of the Soviet intelligence services and the American Communist Party throughout the 1920s and 1930s had resulted in the establishment of significant penetrations into American Government and industry. The absence of a serious, sustained US counterintelligence presence from 1924–36 gave almost free reign to those forces. The total lack of public awareness of the problem exacerbated the situation.
This changed during the 1950s. The FBI’s counterintelligence program, born in the mid-1930s, began to mature and by 1950 had a real effect on the opposition. The FBI’s penetrations of the CPUSA, along with prosecutions under the Smith Act, inhibited the CPUSA. Finally, public awareness of the Soviet espionage threat increased dramatically with the Rosenberg and Coplon trials, the HUAC testimony of ex-Communists like Bentley and Chambers, and the trials of CPUSA members. The exposure of several Soviet espionage rings caused the Soviets to retrench and rethink their spy strategy in the United States.
In 1952 a directive was issued from KGB and GRU Headquarters in Moscow. Soviet intelligence services were directed to avoid utilization of local communist parties for espionage, unless specific permission was granted from Headquarters for such utilization. An era was over.
As the 1950s progressed, the CPUSA was battered by events. The revelations of Stalin’s crimes by Khrushchev and the invasion of Hungary in 1956 stunned the Communist faithful. The ability of the Soviets to recruit capable, motivated spies in the United States to work on the basis of ideology decreased dramatically. From the mid-1950s on, spying by American citizens became almost exclusively a mercenary vocation.
This development, along with the FBI’s increasing sophistication in countering Soviet intelligence, resulted in increased reliance on illegals in the United States. The capture of Rudolf Abel 56 in 1957 opened a window on these operations.
Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss
According to former KGB Col. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB assigned a comparatively low priority to gathering intelligence within the United States until the late 1930s. At that time, however, several influential underground CPUSA cells maintained varying degrees of contact with Comintern and Soviet intelligence officers. Gordievsky stated that the first main link between the party underground and the Soviet Service was Whittaker Chambers.
Whittaker Chambers exemplified the success the communist movement had in the United States during the 1930s in recruiting some of the best minds in a generation to the task of ultimately serving the Soviet Union. Chambers was a remarkable intellectual, translating Felix Salten’s novel, Bambi, from German. By his mid-twenties, Chambers was a committed Marxist and party member. Disillusionment with the Great Depression and the seeming inability of the democracies to remedy the situation, along with the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe, were among the factors driving Chambers and other like-minded idealists toward the Communist’s corner. Revelations about the savage repression of the Kulaks and real and imaginary opponents of Stalin were in the future.
Because of Chamber’s literary abilities, he was made editor of the party magazine, New Masses. Later, he was named to the editorial staff of the Party newspaper, The Daily Worker. At this time, 1930, Chambers was instructed by the party to cease all contacts with the overt party organization, including the newspaper where he was working. He was to join the party underground apparatus that existed parallel to the overt party.
Chambers then underwent an intensive tutorial in espionage tradecraft. In 1933, he was sent to Moscow for intelligence training and when he returned to the United States, his main controller was Sandor Goldberger, also known as “J. Peters,” a former Comintern apparatchik who then worked for the Fourth Department. Starting in 1934, Chambers was assigned duty as a courier, servicing Communist party cells in Washington and New York, which were providing classified and sensitive information that was passed to Soviet intelligence. Harold Ware, a Communist official in the Department of Agriculture, who died in an automobile accident in 1935, founded the Washington cell.
One important source handled by Chambers was Alger Hiss. Hiss was then a rising young star in the FDR administration, and he not only was a source of information, but in the future would be in a position to influence US policy.
In April 1938, Chambers deserted the party and its underground machine and broke all contact with Soviet intelligence. Close observation of the CPUSA and its leadership had soured him on what had seemed earlier to be the solution to the nation’s and the world’s problems. For a time he feared assassination by Soviet intelligence and hid.
He tried to alert the authorities to Communist penetration of the government, but was brushed aside. His first attempt came on 2 September 1939 when he agreed to tell his story to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, who was also President Roosevelt’s internal security advisor. Berle and others advised the President that his administration was penetrated by Soviet intelligence but Roosevelt appeared to dismiss the idea.
Even the FBI refused to take Chamber’s allegations seriously. It was not until 1945, after revelations by others of Communist subversion of the US Government, that Chambers was given credence. In 1945 he was exhaustively debriefed by the FBI and in 1948 was asked to testify before the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Chambers told HUAC that, when he made his first courier run to Washington in 1934, he discovered an underground spy apparatus already operating. Its leader was Nathan Witt, and the net had seven members, each of whom headed an underground cell of Communist agents. Ware had established this network, which was composed of persons who had first been recruited into Marxist study groups and then into the CPUSA. Each of these agents not only provided classified documents to Soviet intelligence, but was involved in political influence operations as well.
His testimony, along with that of Elizabeth Bentley,
another ex- Soviet spy, created a sensation. Among the
most explosive allegations was his naming of Alger Hiss
as a member of a spy ring. Hiss by this time had been a
high-ranking State Department officer and foreign
policy advisor for President Truman, as he had been
for FDR.
Chambers said that Hiss assisted in recruiting new people into the apparatus. One such successful recruitment, who worked in the State Department, was Noel Field. Hedda Massing recruited Field and his wife Herta. Knowing about the Fields’ fear about the advance of Nazi Germany, Massing played on that fear as the basis for their recruitment. The Comintern apparatus ordered Field to leave his position at the Department of State and join the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. During World War II, Field became affiliated with the Office of Strategic Services and was in direct contact with its Bern Chief, Allen Dulles.
Field remained loyal to the Soviets and maintained contact with Communist underground operatives in Nazi-occupied Europe on behalf of Soviet intelligence. He fled to Communist Hungary when his espionage activities became known to the West and spent years in Hungarian prison cells and torture chambers. He was freed from prison in 1961 but never lost his commitment to his Communist beliefs.57
During Chamber’s extensive testimony before Congress, he had not accused any members of the group of espionage. He was attempting to protect Alger Hiss and other members of the ring, whom he hoped, had also broken with the Soviets. Chambers told the Committee that the purpose of the entire Communist network was initially not for espionage but to infiltrate the government and influence government policy by placing Communists in key positions.
Hiss denied all charges, and after Chambers repeated his allegations against Hiss on a network news interview, Hiss sued for libel. Before that could happen, Hiss was indicted for perjury by a New York federal grand jury, which charged that he had lied under oath while testifying in an inquiry involving Soviet espionage. In that testimony, Hiss had stated that he had never known Whittaker Chambers or had any relationship with him. Hiss was convicted after a second trial. The most damning evidence against him was an old typewriter that he had once owned. FBI forensic experts testified that Hiss’s typewriter had produced classified documents, which had been in the possession of Chambers. These documents had been hidden on Chamber’s farm in a hollowed out pumpkin, thus the name “pumpkin papers.” Also damaging Hiss’s credibility was the testimony of a former maid in his household who stated that Chambers had been a frequent visitor to the Hiss home, and the two appeared to have been friends.
Hiss had many defenders, including President Truman, who referred to the case against Hiss as a “red herring.” Hiss never admitted his guilt and proclaimed his innocence throughout his life. Hiss died at age 92 on 15 November 1996 at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.
Other Soviet agents in the apparatus named by Chambers included:
John J. Abt –Department of Agriculture; Works Progress Administration; Senate Committee on Education and Labor; Justice Department.
Henry H. Collins – National Recovery Administration; Department of Agriculture.
Donald Hiss–State Department; Labor Department.
Charles Kramer–National Labor Relations Board; Office of Price Administration; Senate Subcommittee of War Mobilization.
Victor Perlo–Office of Price Administration; War Production Board; Treasury Department.
Lee Pressman–Department of Agriculture; Works Progress Administration; General Counsel of the Congress of Industrial Organizations; a leading figure in Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign.
Harold Ware–Department of Agriculture.
Nathan Witt–Department of Agriculture; National Labor Relations Board.58
Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Bentley, like Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, spied for the Soviet Union out of ideological conviction. Like Hiss and Chambers, Bentley was well educated (Vassar) and a native-born American. She became a convert to Communism during the heyday of Communist influence (and Soviet intelligence success) during the 1930s. A visit to Europe in the mid-1930s had filled Bentley with a dread of Nazism, and she became convinced, with the help of a Communist friend, that only the Soviet Union was standing up to the Nazis. She joined the party and in 1938 was assigned to the party underground. Also like Chambers, her primary duty was as a courier, servicing Soviet spy rings in Washington and New York.
Bentley’s handler was Jacob Golos, (real name: Jacob Rasin). The Russian born Golos was a high-ranking member of the American Communist Party, a former Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet secret police operative in the USSR. Golos illustrated the intimate relationship between Soviet intelligence and the American Communist party. The word intimate also describes the relationship between Golos and Bentley, for the two had become lovers.
By the mid-1940s, Bentley was becoming disillusioned with her new faith. This was accelerated by the death of Golos, in 1943, from a heart attack. His successors were a parade of boorish goons. She turned herself into the FBI in 1945 and gave up the names of scores of Americans who had spied for the Kremlin, including Alger Hiss. In 1948, Bentley appeared before the HUAC with her story of Communist penetration of the USG. Her testimony was a huge story, commanding wide interest, and contributed to the growing distrust of the USSR and their American adherents.
She provided testimony on two Soviet networks of
government employees who had worked on behalf of
the Soviets in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She
identified over 30 high-level US Government officials
that had worked for the two networks run by Nathan
Silverman[L] and Victor Perlo.[R]
The Nathan Silverman Network consisted of the following members:
Nathan Silverman: Director of the Labor Division, Farm Security Administration; Board of Economic Warfare.
Solomon Adler: Treasury Department.
Norman Bursler: Department of Justice.
Frank Coe: Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, Treasury; Special Assistant to the United States Ambassador in London; Assistant to the Executive Director, Board of Economic Warfare; Assistant Administrator, Foreign Economic Administration.
Lauchlin Currie: Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt; Deputy Administrator of Foreign Economic Administration.
Bela (William) Gold: Assistant Head of Program Surveys, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Agriculture Department; Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Economic Programs in Foreign Economic Administration.
Mrs. Bela Gold: House Select Committee on Interstate Migration; Bureau of Employment Security; Division of Monetary Research, Treasury.
Abraham Silverman: Director, Bureau of Research and Information Services, US Railroad Retirement Board; Economic Adviser and Chief of Analysis and Plans, Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Material and Services.
William Taylor: Treasury Department.
William L. Ullmann: Division of Monetary Research, Treasury; Material and Services Division, Air Corps Headquarters, Pentagon.
The following were members of the Victor Perlo Network:
Victor Perlo: Head of branch in Research Section, Office of Price Administration; War Production Board; Monetary Research, Treasury.
Edward J. Fitzgerald: War Production Board (WPD).
Harold Glasser: Treasury Department; War Production Board; Advisor on North African Affairs Committee in Algiers, North Africa.
Charles Kramer (aka: Charles Krevitsky): National Labor Relations Board; Office of Price Administration; Economist with Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization.
Harry Magdoff: Statistical Division of WPB and Office of Emergency Management; Bureau of Research and Statistics, WTB; Tools Division, War Production Board; Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Commerce Department.
Alan Rosenberg: Foreign Economic Administration.
Donald Niven Wheeler: Office of Strategic Services.59
Bentley also identified seven members of the
headquarters staff of the OSS who were working for
Soviet intelligence. The most important of these may
have been Duncan Chaplin Lee, a Rhodes scholar at
Oxford who joined the law firm of William J. Donovan.
When Donovan became the head of OSS in 1942, he
chose Lee as his personal assistant.
On 3 December 1963, Bentley died. During the last five years of her life she taught English at an all-girls school in Middletown, Connecticut.
Indictment of Communists
January 1949
In the 1920s, the US and state governments attempted to penalize Communists for alleged subversive activities. Many states enacted laws denying the Communists the right to hold public office or to obtain public jobs. In the 1940s, another attempt was made using the same arguments, but several Supreme Court decisions decided that simple membership in or an affiliation with the party was not, in itself, evidence of an intent to overthrow the US Government by force. To clarify the vague state of affairs, Attorney General Clark resolved, in 1949, to indict the Communist Party leaders for conspiracy under the Alien Registration Act of 1940. Following is the text of the indictment.
The grand jury charges:
1. That from on or about April 1, 1945, and continuously thereafter up to and including the date of the filing of this indictment, in the Southern District of New York, and elsewhere, William Z. Foster, Eugene Dennis, also known as Francis X. Waldron Jr., John B. Williamson, Jacob Stachel, Robert G. Thompson, Benjamin J. Davis Jr., Henry Winston, John Gates, also known as Israel Regenstreif, Irving Potash, Gilbert Green, Carl Winter, and Gus Hall, also known as Arno Gust Halberg, the defendants herein, unlawfully, willingly, and knowingly did conspire with each other, and with divers other persons to the grand jurors unknown, to organize as the Communist Party of the United States of America a society, group, and assembly of persons who teach and advocate the overthrow and destruction of the Government of the United States by force and violence, and knowingly and willfully to advocate and teach the duty and necessity of overthrowing and destroying the Government by force and violence, which said acts are prohibited by Section 2 of the Act of June 28, 1940 (Section 10, Title 18, United States Code, commonly known as the Smith Act.
2. It was part of said conspiracy that said defendants would convene, in the Southern District of New York, a meeting of the National Board of the Communist Political Association on or about June 2, 1945, to adopt a draft resolution for the purpose of bringing about the dissolution of the Communist Political Association, and for the purpose of organizing as the Communist party of the United States of America a society, group, and assembly of persons dedicated to the Marxist/Leninist principles of the overthrow and destruction of the United States by force and violence.
3. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would thereafter convene in the Southern district of New York, a meeting of the National Committee of the Communist Political Association on or about June 18, 1945, to amend and adopt said draft resolution.
4. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would thereafter cause to be convened, in the Southern district of New York, a special national convention of the Communist Political Association on or about July 26, 1945, for the purpose of considering and acting upon said resolution as amended.
5. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would induce the delegates to said national convention to dissolve the Communist Political Association.
6. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would bring about the organization of the Communist Party of the United States as a society, group, and assembly of persons to teach and advocate the overthrow and destruction of the Government of the United States by force and violence, and would cause said convention to adopt a constitution basing said party upon the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
7. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would bring about the election of officers and the election of a National Committee of said party, and be elected as officers and as members of said National Committee and the National Board of said committee, and in such capacities said defendants would assume leadership of said party and responsibility for its polices and activities, and would meet from time to time to formulate, supervise, and carry out the policies and activities of said party.
8. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would cause to be organized clubs, and district and state units of said party, and would recruit and encourage the recruitment of members of said party.
9. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would publish and circulate, and cause to be published and circulated, books, articles, magazines, and newspapers advocating the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
10.It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would conduct, and cause to be conducted, schools and classes for the study of the principles of Marxism-Leninism, in which would be taught and advocated the duty and necessity of overthrowing and destroying the Government of the United States by force and violence.
In violation of Sections 3 and 5 of the Act of June 28, 1940 (Sections 11 and 13, Title 18, United States Code), commonly known as the Smith Act.
On September 6, 1939 and January 8, 1943 a Presidential Directive was issued providing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice should take charge of investigative work in matters relating to espionage, sabotage, subversive activities and related matters. It was pointed out that the investigations must be conducted in a comprehensive manner on a National basis and all information carefully sifted out and correlated in order to avoid confusion. I should like to again call the attention of all Enforcement Officers, both Federal and State, to the request that they report all information in the above enumerated fields promptly to the nearest Field Representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is charged with the responsibility of correlating this material and referring matters which are under the jurisdiction of any other Federal Agency with responsibilities in this field to the appropriate agency.
I suggest that all patriotic organizations and individuals likewise report all such information relating to espionage, sabotage and subversive activities to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in this same manner.
Dr. Klaus Fuchs, a German-born nuclear physicist
was a major contributor to the atom-bomb research
programs of both Britain and the United States during
and after World War II. Simultaneously he was an
invaluable asset to the Soviet Union’s atomic research
program because he secretly communicated to the
Soviet Union all the sensitive data on the work of US
and British atomic establishments to which he had
access. Interned by the British as an enemy alien at the
beginning of the war, his abilities became known to the
administrators of Britain’s secret atomic research
program, and he was recruited to work on the atomic
bomb. By the end of 1943, his work was so outstanding
that he was made one of a small team of British atomic
scientists assigned to work in the United States with
American physicists in developing the gaseous diffusion
U-235 separation process, in making the earliest atom
bombs, in planning atomic weapons, and in developing
the theory underlying the development of the hydrogen
bomb.
Although the security surrounding Western work in atomic energy had supposedly made the development and production of the atomic bomb one of world’s best kept secrets prior to the first explosions in the summer of 1945, it was discovered in 1949 that through the combined efforts of Dr. Klaus Fuchs, “a mild, unobtrusive, pleasant little man who never like politics,” and his fellow agents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, and Harry Gold, the Russians had obtained the final drawings of the atomic bomb before the first test bomb was exploded at Los Alamos in July 1945.
According to Klaus Fuchs’ own statement, when he was first brought into the British program during the early 1940s and learned the purpose of the work, he decided to inform the USSR. He contacted the office of the Soviet Military Attaché in London and enbarked upon his career of professional espionage agent for the Soviet Union. With all the classic trappings of clandestine activity, Fuchs collected the information at his disposal, passed it on to secret couriers, and met his Soviet principals in Britain and in various parts of the United States. He gave the Soviet Union extensive data regarding the Oak Ridge diffusion process, weapons work at Los Alamos, British activities at Harwell, and other projects located in the United States, Britain, and Canada.
After serving 10 years in prison in the United Kingdom for espionage, Dr. Fuchs flew to East Germany, where he was appointed deputy director of the East German nuclear research station near Dresden. When asked by the press there if he would repeat his acts of espionage if given a second chance he replied, “Whatever helps the Soviet Union is right.”
Klaus Fuchs died in 1988.
From 1940 to March 1945, Julius Rosenberg worked on classified projects for the Army Signal Corps in New York City, Philadelphia, and Newark, New Jersey. The Army learned of his membership in the Communist Party, and he was dismissed from the Signal Corps. He worked briefly for Emerson Radio and then had his own business in New York City.
Rosenberg first came to the attention of the FBI regarding Soviet espionage when David Greenglass named him as a co-conspirator in passing atom bomb information to the Soviets. Greenglass himself was identified by longtime Soviet spy and courier Harry Gold, who had also been part of the atom bomb spy ring. According to Greenglass, Rosenberg, who was his brother-in-law, persuaded him to provide information in the form of drawings and descriptions of his work at the Los Alamos lab where the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb, was under way. Greenglass, an Army NCO, was stationed at the Los Alamos lab and worked as a machinist on bomb components. According to Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg was not only aware of her husband’s activities, but helped type material procured by Greenglass.
The Rosenbergs were both charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, based on 1917 espionage statute. Their trial began March 6, 1951 and lasted until March 29, when they were found guilty after one day of jury deliberation. The prosecution’s case relied heavily on Greenglass’s testimony. The testimony of Greenglass revealed the following information.
Greenglass entered the US Army in April 1943, and, in July, 1944, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He did not know at the time what the project was but received security lectures about his duties and was told it was a secret project. Two weeks later, after being told his work was secret, he was assigned to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and reported there in August 1944.
In a VENONA transcript of a KGB New York to Moscow message, No. 1340 on 21 September 1944 states:
LIBERAL 60 recommended the wife of his wife’s brother, Ruth Greenglass, with a safe flat in view. She is 21 years old, an American citizen, a GYMNAST 61 since 1942. She lives on Stanton Street. LIBERAL and his wife recommend her as an intelligent and clever girl.
(15 groups unrecoverable)
(Ruth) learned that her husband was called up by the army but he was not sent to the front. He is a mechanical engineer and is now working at the ENORMOZ 62 David Greenglass plant at Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Greenglass went on to say that in November, 1944, Ruth Greenglass, who came to Albuquerque to visit him, told him that Julius Rosenberg advised her that her husband was working on the atom bomb. Greenglass stated he did not know that he was working on such a project. He stated that he worked in a group at Los Alamos under a professor of a New England university and described to the court the duties of his shop at Los Alamos. He stated that while at Los Alamos, he learned the identify of various noted physicists and their cover names.
Greenglass testified that his sister, Ethel, and Julius Rosenberg used to speak to him about the merits of the Russian Government. Greenglass stated that when his wife, Ruth, came to visit him at Los Alamos on November 29, 1944, she told David that Julius Rosenberg had invited her to dinner at the Rosenberg home in New York City. At this dinner, Ethel told Ruth that she must have noticed that Ethel had not been engaging in Communist activities and that they were not buying the Daily Worker any more or attending club meetings because Julius finally was doing what he always wanted to do, namely, giving information to the Soviet Union.
After Ethel informed Ruth that David was working on the atom bomb project at Los Alamos and said that she and Julius wanted him to give information concerning the bomb, Ruth told the Rosenbergs that she didn’t think it was a good idea and declined to convey their requests to David but Ethel and Julius remarked that she should at least tell David about it and see if he would help. In this conversation Julius pointed out to Ruth that Russia was an ally and deserved the information and that Russia was not getting all the information that was due her.
From a VENONA transcript of a KGB New York to Moscow message, number 1600 on 14 November 1944:
OSA 63 has agreed to cooperate with us in drawing in ShMEL 64 (henceforth KALIBR–see your no 5258) with a view to ENORMOZ. On summons from KALIBR she is leaving on 22 November for the Camp 2 area. KALIBR will have a week’s leave. Before OSA’s departure LIBERAL will carry out two briefings.
David said at first he refused to have anything to do with the request of the Rosenbergs but on the next day agreed to furnish any available data. Ruth then asked David specific questions about the Manhattan Project, and David supplied her that information.
From a VENONA transcript of a KGB New York to Moscow message, number 1773, on 16 December 1944:
OSA has returned from a trip to see KALIBR. KALIBR expressed his readiness to help in throwing light on the work being carried out at Camp-2 and stated that he had already given thought to this question earlier. KALIBR said that the authorities of the Camp were openly taking all precautionary measures to prevent information about ENORMOZ falling into Russian hands. This is causing serious discontent among the progressive (workers)
17 groups unrecoverable
The middle of January KALIBR will be in TYRE.65 LIBERAL referring to his ignorance of the problem, expresses the wish that our man should meet KALIBR and interrogate him personally. He asserts that KALIBR would be very glad of such a meeting. Do you consider such a meeting advisable? If not, I shall be obliged to draw up a questionnaire and pass it to LIBERAL. Report whether you have any questions of priority to us. KALIBR also reports: OPPENHEIMER 66 from California and KISTIAKOWSKI 67 (MLAD’s 68 report mentioned the latter) are at present working at the Camp. The latter is doing research on the thermodynamic process. Advise whether you have any information on these two professors.
In January, 1945, David arrived in New York City on furlough, and about two days later Julius Rosenberg came to David’s apartment to ask him for information on the A-bomb. He requested David to write up the information and stated that he would pick it up the following morning.
That evening Greenglass wrote up the information he had. The next morning he gave this material to Rosenberg, together with a list of the scientists at Los Alamos and the names of possible recruits working there who might be sympathetic to Communism and possibly furnish information to Russia.
Greenglass further stated that at the time he turned this material over to Rosenberg, Ruth Greenglass remarked that David’s handwriting was bad and would need interpretation. Rosenberg answered that it was nothing to worry about because Ethel, his wife, would retype the information.
A day or two later, David and his wife went to the Rosenberg apartment for dinner where they were introduced to a woman friend of the Rosenbergs. After she left, Julius told the Greenglasses that he thought this person would come to see David to receive information on the atom bomb. They discussed a tentative plan to the effect that Ruth Greenglass would move to Albuquerque, where this woman would come to see her and meet Ruth in a movie theater in Denver, Colorado, where they would exchange purses. Ruth’s purse would contain the information from David concerning Los Alamos.
During this discussion the point was raised as to how an identification might be effected. It was agreed that Ruth would use a sidepiece of a Jell-O box to identify the person who would come to see her. Julius held the matching piece of the Jell-O box. David made the suggestion that the meeting be held in front of a certain grocery store in Albuquerque. The date of the meeting was left in abeyance depending upon the time that Ruth would depart for Albuquerque.
Also during this visit, Julius said he would like to have David meet a Russian with whom he could discuss the project on which David was working. A few nights later, an appointment was made by Julius for David to meet a Russian on First Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets, New York City. David drove up to the appointed meeting place and parked the car near a saloon in a dark street. Julius came up to the car, looked in, and went away, and came back with a man who got into David’s car. Julius stayed on the street, and David drove away with the unknown man. The man asked David about some scientific information and, after driving around for a while, David returned to the original meeting place and let the man out. Rosenberg who was standing on the street then joined this man, and David observed them leaving together.
In the spring of 1945, Ruth Greenglass came to Albuquerque to live, and David would visit her apartment on weekends. On the first Sunday of June 1945, a man, subsequently identified by David as Harry Gold, came to visit him and asked if David’s name was Greenglass. David said, “Yes.” Gold then said, “Julius sent me.” David went to his wife’s wallet and took out the piece of Jell-O box and compared it with a piece offered by Gold. They matched.
When Gold asked David if he had any information, Greenglass said he did but would have to write it up. Gold then left, stating he would be back. David immediately started to work on a report, made sketches of experiments, wrote up descriptive material regarding them, and prepared a list of possible recruits for espionage. Later that day, Gold returned and David gave him the reports. In return, Gold gave David an envelope containing $500 that he turned over to Ruth.
In September 1945, David Greenglass returned to New York City with his wife, Ruth, on furlough. The next morning Julius Rosenberg came to the Greenglass apartment and asked what David had for him. David informed Julius that he had obtained a pretty good description of the atom bomb.
At Julius’ request, he drew up a sketch of the atom bomb, prepared descriptive material on it, drew up a list of scientists and possible recruits for Soviet espionage, and thereafter delivered this material to the Rosenberg apartment. He stated that at the time he turned this material over to Rosenberg, Ethel and Ruth were present. Rosenberg remarked that the information was very good, and it should be typed immediately. The information was then prepared on a portable typewriter in the Rosenberg apartment by Ethel.
While Ethel was typing the report, Julius mentioned to David that he (Julius) had stolen a proximity fuse while working at a radio corporation and turned it over to the Russians.
After the report was typed, the handwritten notes were burned in a frying pan by Julius, flushed down a drain, and Julius gave David $200. Julius discussed with David the idea of David staying at Los Alamos after he was discharged from the Army so that he could continue to get information, but David declined.
From 1946 to 1949, David was in business with Julius, and during this period, Julius told David that he had people going to school and that he had people in upstate New York and Ohio giving him information for the Russians.
Late in 1947, Julius told David about a sky platform project and mentioned he had received this information from “one of the boys.” Rosenberg described the sky platform as a large vessel, which could be suspended at a point in space where the gravity was low and that the vessel would travel around the earth like a satellite. Rosenberg also advised David that he had a way of communicating with the Russians by putting material or messages in the alcove of a theater and that he had received from one of his contacts the mathematics relating to atomic energy for airplanes.
Greenglass testified that Rosenberg claimed to have received a citation and a watch from the Russians. Greenglass also testified that Rosenberg claimed to have received a console table from the Russians, which he used for photographic purposes.
In late February 1950, a few days after the news of the arrest of Dr. Fuchs in England was published, Julius came to David’s home and asked David to go for a walk. During this walk Rosenberg spoke of Fuchs and mentioned that the man who had come to see David in Albuquerque was also a contact of Fuchs.
From the VENONA transcripts, a KGB New York to Moscow message, number 195, on 9 February 1944 describes the first meeting between Harry Gold and Klaus Fuchs.
On 5th February a meeting took place between GUS 69 and REST.70 Beforehand GUS was given a detailed briefing by us. REST greeted him pleasantly but was rather cautious at first (1 group unrecovered) the discussion GUS satisfied himself that REST was aware of whom he was working with. R. arrived in the COUNTRY 71 in September as a member of the ISLAND 72 mission on ENORMOZ. According to him the work on ENORMOZ in the COUNTRY is being carried out under the direct control of the COUNTRY’s army represented by General Somerville and Stimson; at the head of the group of ISLANDERS is a Labor member of Parliament, Ben Smith.73
The whole operation amounts to the working out of the process for the separation of isotopes of ENORMOZ. The work is proceeding in two directions: the electron method developed by Lawrence (71 groups unrecoverable) separation of isotopes by the combined method, using the diffusion method for preliminary and the electron for final separation. The work (46 groups unrecoverable) 18th February, we shall report the results.
Julius stated that David would have to leave the country. When David answered that he needed money, Rosenberg said he would get the money from the Russians.
In April 1950, Rosenberg again told David he would have to leave the country, and, about May 23, 1950, Rosenberg came to the Greenglass apartment with a newspaper containing a picture of Harry Gold and the story of Gold’s arrest. Rosenberg said, “This is the man who saw you in Albuquerque.” Julius gave David $1,000 and stated he would come back later with $6,000 more for him to use in leaving the country; also that Greenglass would have to get a Mexican tourist card. Rosenberg said he went to see a doctor who told him that a doctor’s letter stating David was inoculated for smallpox would also be needed, as well as passport photos. He then gave Greenglass a form letter and instructions to memorize for use in Mexico City.
Upon David’s arrival in Mexico City, he was to send this letter to the Soviet embassy and sign it “I. Jackson.” Three days after he sent this letter, David was to go to the Plaza de la Colon at 5 p.m. and look at the Statue of Columbus there, carrying in his hand a guide to the city with his middle finger between the pages of the guide, and wait until some man came to him. David would then state, “That is a magnificent statue” and advise the man that he (David) was from Oklahoma. The man would then answer, “Oh there are more beautiful statues in Paris,” and would give Greenglass a passport and additional money. David was to go to Vera Cruz and then go to Sweden or Switzerland. If he went to Sweden, he was to send the same type of letter to the Soviet ambassador or his secretary and sign the letter “I. Jackson.” Three days later, David was to go to the statue of Linnaeus in Stockholm at 5 p.m., where a man would approach him. Greenglass would mention that the statue was beautiful and the man would answer, “There are much more beautiful ones in Paris.” The man would then give David the means of transportation to Czechoslovakia, where upon arrival he was to write to the Soviet ambassador advising him of his presence.
Julius further advised Greenglass that he himself would have to leave the country because he had known Jacob Golos 74 and that Elizabeth Bentley probably knew him also.
Elizabeth Bentley was a member of the Communist underground, who served as a courier to collect information from Russian agents in the United States. Bentley stated that during her association with Golos, she became aware of the fact that Golos knew an engineer named “Julius.” In the fall of 1942, she accompanied Golos to Knickerbocker Village but remained in his automobile. She saw Golos conferring with “Julius” on the street but at some distance. From conversations with Golos, she learned that Julius lived in Knickerbocker Village. She also stated that she had telephone conversations with “Julius” from the fall of 1942 to November 1943.
Bentley, in interviews with FBI agents, had described Julius as being 5’10” or 11” tall, slim, and wearing glasses. She had also advised that he was the leader of a Communist cell of engineers, which was turned over to Golos for Soviet espionage purposes and that Julius was to be the contact between Golos and the group. Golos believed this cell of engineers was capable of development.
Investigation by the FBI disclosed that Julius Rosenberg resided in a development known as Knickerbocker Village, was 5’10” tall, slim, and wore glasses. Bentley was unable to make a positive identification of Julius.
Sometime later David and his family went to a photography shop and had six sets of passport photos taken. On Memorial Day, Greenglass gave Rosenberg five sets of these photos. Later Rosenberg again visited David, whom he gave $4,000 in $10 and $20 bills wrapped in brown paper, requesting Greenglass to go for a walk with him and repeat the memorized instructions. David gave the $4,000 to his brother-in law for safekeeping.
Also testifying was Harry Gold, who stated that Soviet intelligence was the ultimate recipient of the material. The Rosenbergs denied all charges, but were hurt by having to plead the fifth amendment when questioned about their membership in the Communist Party. The two were sentenced to death and executed June 19, 1953.
Based on the information supplied by Gold, Greenglass was arrested on June 16, 1950, and arraigned on the same date in New York. He was remanded to the custody of a US Marshal in default of $100,000 bail. On October 10, 1950, a superseding indictment was returned by a Federal Grand jury in the Southern District of New York charging Morton Sobell, Ethel Rosenberg, Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass and Anatoli Yakovlev 75 with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Statutes. On October 18, 1950, he pleaded guilty to the superseding indictment. The presiding judge accepted the plea of Greenglass and bail of $100,000 was continued.
On January 31, 1951, a Federal Grand jury in the Southern District of New York, handed down a second superseding indictment charging Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Anatoli Yakovlev, Morton Sobell, and David Greenglass with conspiracy to commit espionage between June 6, 1944, and June 16, 1950. The indictment was similar in all respects to the previous superseding indictment with the exception that it changed the beginning of the conspiracy from November 1944 to June 1944.
David Greenglass received a 15-year prison sentence after his guilty plea. He was released from Federal prison on November 16, 1960 and had to report periodically to a parole officer until November, 1965.
Gen. Mikhail Dokuchayev, who was a KGB officer from 1951 to 1989, confirms in his new book that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg worked for the KGB. The general gives the Rosenbergs credit for averting a nuclear disaster. “The Rosenbergs were a New York couple convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed in 1953. They were integral parts of a Soviet spying effort directed towards obtaining the secrets of the atomic bomb from the United States.”
The Rosenberg Spy Apparatus
Morton Sobell
Morton Sobell was born April 11, 1917, in New York City, the son of Russian-born immigrants. He married Helen Levitov Gurewitz at Arlington, Virginia, on March 10, 1945.
Sobell was a classmate of Julius Rosenberg and Max Elitcher in college and graduated from this college in June, 1933, with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. Subsequently, he attended a graduate school at a university in Michigan in 1941 and 1942 and received a master’s degree in electrical engineering.
Sobell was employed during the summers of 1934 through 1938 as a maintenance man at Camp Unity, Wingdale, New York, reportedly a Communist controlled camp. On January 27, 1939, he secured the position of junior electrical engineer with the Bureau of Naval Ordnance, Washington, DC, and was promoted to the position of assistant electrical engineer. He resigned from this position in October 1940 to further his studies. While employed at an electric company in New York State, he had access to classified material, including that on fire control radar. After resigning from this company, he secured employment as an electrical engineer with an instrument company in New York City where he had access to secret data. He remained in this position until June 16, 1950, when he failed to appear for work. It is noted that on this date the FBI arrested David Greenglass. On June 22, 1950, Sobell and his family fled to Mexico. He was thereafter located in Mexico City and on August 18, 1950, was taken into custody by FBI agents in Laredo, Texas, after his deportation from Mexico by the Mexican authorities.
Max Elitcher, an admitted Communist, advised that during the period he roomed with Morton Sobell in Washington, DC, he was induced by Sobell to join the Communist party. He stated that this occurred in 1939 and that Sobell had informed him that he, Sobell, was a member of the Communist Party.
During the same period, Sobell was reported to have been active in the American Peace Mobilization and the American Youth Congress, both of which organizations have been cited by the Attorney General as coming within the purview of Executive Order 10450. It was ascertained that Sobell appeared on the active indices of the American Peace Mobilization and was listed in the indices of the American Youth Congress as a delegate to that body from the Washington Committee for Democratic Action.
A resident at an apartment building located in Washington, DC, reported that Sobell and Max Elitcher were among the tenants of the building who attended meetings in the apartment of one of the tenants during 1940 and 1941. This individual was of the opinion that these were Communist meetings.
The New York Office of the FBI located a Communist Party nominating petition, which was filed in the name of one Morton Sobell, and the signature on this petition was identified by the FBI Laboratory as being in the handwriting of Morton Sobell.
A check at the instrument company where Sobell was employed reflected that Sobell failed to report for work after June 16, 1950. The company received a letter from Sobell on or about July 3, 1950, wherein he advised that he needed a rest and was going to take a few weeks off to recuperate. A neighborhood investigation by the FBI developed that Sobell, his wife, and their two children were last seen at their home on June 22, 1950, and that they had left hurriedly without advising anyone of their intended departure.
Through an airlines company at LaGuardia Field, it was determined that Sobell and his family had departed for Mexico City on June 22, 1950. It was further determined that round trip excursion tickets for transportation from New York City to Mexico and return were purchased on June 21, 1950, in the name of Morton Sobell.
Further investigation of Sobell’s flight to Mexico reflected that he had communicated through the mail with relatives through the utilization of a certain man as a mail drop. This man was interviewed and reluctantly admitted receiving letters from Sobell with instructions to forward these letters to Sobell’s relatives. This admission was made after the individual was advised that the FBI Laboratory had identified handwriting on the envelopes used in forwarding letters to Sobell’s relatives as being in his handwriting.
In August, 1950, the Mexican authorities took Sobell into custody and deported him as an undesirable alien. On the early morning of August 18, 1950, FBI agents apprehended Sobell at the International Bridge, Laredo, Texas.
On 10 October 1950, a superseding indictment was returned by a Federal Grand jury in the Southern District of New York charging Morton Sobell, Ethel Rosenberg, Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass, and Anatoli Yakovlev 76 with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Statutes. On 18 October 1950, he pleaded guilty to the superseding indictment. The presiding judge accepted the plea of Greenglass and bail of $100,000 was continued.
On 31 January 1951, a Federal Grand jury in the Southern District of New York handed down a second superseding indictment charging Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Anatoli Yakovlev, Morton Sobell, and David Greenglass with conspiracy to commit espionage between 6 June 1944 and 16 June 1950. The indictment was similar in all respects to the previous superseding indictment with the exception that it changed the beginning of the conspiracy from November 1944, to June 1944.
On 5 February 1951, Morton Sobell made an application to a US District Judge, Southern District of New York, for a writ of habeas corpus based on the allegation that the indictment of 31 January 1951, was vague and that the incrimination of Sobell was a violation of his constitutional rights. The application was denied.
On 28 March 1951, counsel for both sides summed up their case to the jury, and, on 29 March 1951, the jury rendered a verdict of guilty against Morton Sobell. On 5 April 1951, Morton Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Theodore Alvin Hall
The Washington Post identified Theodore Alvin Hall as an atomic bomb spy codenamed, “Mlad,” in an article in its 25 February 1996 edition. The article used information from deciphered KGB messages released by the National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA program, actually started by the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service on 1 February 1943, was a small, highly secret program, codenamed VENONA. The object of the VENONA program was to examine, and possibly exploit, encrypted Soviet diplomatic communications.
In one of the encrypted messages, dated 12 November 1944, Hall is identified by name and says that a KGB officer visited Hall, who provided information on Los Alamos and its key personnel to the officer. The message read:
BEK 77 visited Theodore Hall, 19 years old, the son of a furrier. He is a graduate of Harvard University. As a talented physicists he was taken for government work. He was a (member of the Young Communist League) and conducted work in the Steel Founders Union. According to BEK’s account HALL has an exceptionally keen mind and a broad outlook, and is politically developed. At the present time, H. is in charge of a group at “CAMP-2”.78 H. handed over to BEK a report about the CAMP and named key personnel employed on ENORMOZ.79 He decided to do this on the advice of his colleague Saville SAX, a GYMNAST 80 living in TYRE.81 SAX’s mother is a FELLOW COUNTRYMAN 82 and works for RUSSIAN WAR RELIEF. With the aim of hastening a meeting with a competent person, H. on them following day sent a copy of the report to S. to the PLANT.83 ALEKSEJ 84 received it. H had to leave for CAMP-2 in two days time. ALEKSEJ was compelled to make a decision quickly. Jointly with MAJ 85 he gave BEK consent to feel out H., to assure him that everything was in order and to arrange liaison with him. BEK met S (1 group garbled) our automobile. We consider it expedient to maintain liaison with H. (1 group unidentified) through S. and not bring in anybody else. MAJ has no objections to this. We shall send the details by post.
In another VENONA message, from KGB New York to Moscow, number 94, on 23 January 1945, it appears the KGB is running an investigative check on Hall and Sax:
The checking of STAR 86 and MLAD we entrusted to ECHO 87 a month ago, the result of the check we have not yet had. We’re checking STAR’s mother also....
BEK is extremely displeased over the handing over of STAR to ALEKSEJ. He gives a favorable report of him. Aleksej has met STAR twice but cannot yet give a final judgement. MLAD has been seen by no one except BEK. (On the 8th of January) MLAD sent a letter but never (made arrangements) for calling to a meeting. He has been called into the army and left to work in the camp.88
STAR intends to renew his studies at Harvard University at the end of February.
to be continued...
This planning effort had been founded on the thesis that national censorship would be immediately imposed by the Chief Executive following some kind of declaration of war. The Korean conflict, however, was then being officially regarded as a United Nations police action led by the United States, which presented an entirely new concept in the matter. Besides, neither the Air Force nor the Navy seemed to feel in 1950 there any compelling need for the establishment of censorship and the National Censorship Adviser to the NSB had already expressed an opinion that "in view of the diplomatic and political implications, the President would not give his approval to the imposition of national censorship 5
Nevertheless, the problem of affording a suitable military security for troop movements, combat operations, and the introduction of new weapons into the Korean conflict soon became both real and acute. Since there at first almost no curbs at all on reporting about those matters, serious security breaches repeatedly occurred during the early weeks of the fighting. These security breaches thoroughly alarmed the operating personnel within the OACofS G-3, D/A, and prompted the G-2 security officials to undertake a comprehensive study of the entire censorship situation.
Upon completion, this study reached the rather indefinite conclusion that only total national censorship embracing the armed forces, mail, and public information media could possibly hope to solve the problem effectively; but, under the existing conditions such a course of action was plainly out of the question. The three major press services in the United States, though, were persuaded to agree not “to compile or publish state or national round-ups of National Guard or Reserve units being called to active duty.” Additionally, on 9 August 1950, when the Secretary Defense cabled Commander-in-Chief Far East (CINCFE) to express his grave concern over the recurring breaches of security displayed in dispatches emanating from Korea, General MacArthur stated that he preferred a code of voluntary press control to one calling for an imposed censorship and also noted as follows:
In Tokyo previous directives from Washington forbade such direct procedure but something of the same general effect has been accomplished by constantly calling attention to correspondents published dispatches which jeopardized security. The results are progressively encouraging. The practical difficulties involved with nearly 300 correspondents representing 19 foreign countries of varying attitudes and with the constant demands for more rapid transmission of copy to their home offices render the problem of arbitrarily checking dispatches almost insurmountable. Of course, whatever system is applied here will not prevent violations through stateside or other foreign outlets and unless something of the same sort is applied there articles violating security can rapidly be transmitted by airmail delivery or even faster methods of communication. To attempt a complete censorship in Japan would require the employment of thousands of people to check the various communications systems involved. This is completely beyond the resources of this command. In addition it would involve international complications which would be practically insurmountable. If any change in the present system is to be made I suggest that for general coordination and understanding it be formulated and announced by the government from Washington after due consultation with other nations involved.6
Military security problems bearing upon the establishment of armed forces and public information media censorship then continued to plague the Army authorities both in Washington and the Far East. They were soon made even difficult when a heated dispute broke out in the Department of the Army over whether the press censorship function should be performed within a theater of operations by G-2 or Public Information Office personnel. This particular dispute was presumably settled on 30 January 1951, at least for the Department of the Army, with general staff responsibility for supervising press censorship being definitely assigned to the OACofS G-2, D/A, but the Chief of Information (CINFO) was also designated as a “proponent agent” for such matters.7 In the meantime, Gen. A. R. Bolling had submitted a recommendation through channels to the Chief of Staff that military censorship, including press censorship, should be ordered into effect without delay in Korea.8
The Chief of Staff, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, disagreed with the G-2 proposal for establishing an armed forces censorship in Korea but did feel that press censorship ought to be imposed there just as soon as possible, and he promptly forwarded a recommendation along those lines to the JCS. On 8 September 1950, the JCS informed CINCFE they considered his voluntary press censorship system ineffective and intended to notify the Secretary of Defense that a more positive censorship of all public information media in FECOM was now necessary.
General MacArthur then sharply reminded them he had no personnel trained or available to perform detailed censorship work and reiterated an earlier belief that the implementation of censorship should be a United Nations activity.
On the basis of this reply and numerous indicated problems concerned with personnel requirements, shipping space, and day-to-day regulation of some 60 non-English-speaking war correspondents, the JCS finally decided to forego any further moves toward imposing censorship on public information media in the Far East. CINCFE was carefully cautioned, however, to continue “positive pressure in support of the principles of voluntary censorship at all levels in order to provide maximum security of force deployment.”9
Another major counterintelligence problem that confronted the departmental intelligence agency of the Army during the early part of the Korean Conflict period was connected with developing more effective removal procedures for personnel, both civilian and military, who were found to be either serious security risks or disloyal.
In January 1950, the Secretary of the Army had asked the Personnel Policy Board, Office of the Secretary of Defense, to make a study of the procedures currently in use for that purpose by the three Service Departments, so more uniform policies could be established regarding the dismissal of such employees.
The Army, for example, was still utilizing the summary authority contained in the Public Law 808 to process both its security risk and disloyalty cases but the Navy and Air Force were now using that particular authority only for security risk cases and EO 9835 procedures, through the Civil Service Commission, for handling their disloyalty cases.
One result of this study, therefore, was to have the Secretary of the Army, on 12 May 1950, notify the Chairman of the Personnel Policy Board that in the future the Army would conform to the Navy and Air Force system for all removal cases.10
Meanwhile, at an Armed Forces Policy Council meeting held on 10 May 1950, the Secretary of Defense himself had requested the Chairman of the Personnel Policy Board “to undertake a general review of the present policies and procedures for determining the loyalty and security of Department of Defense civilian personnel.”
The Korean outbreak thus found the OACofS G-2, D/A, in the midst of preparing several informative memorandums dealing with this complicated subject for the guidance of Army representatives participating in two major personnel security reviews.11
Less than two weeks later and before either review could be actually concluded, though, Mr. Johnson, the Secretary of Defense, ordered the service secretaries to take immediate steps to accomplish pre employment investigations for all civilian employees being assigned to sensitive positions requiring access to Top Secret, Secret, or Confidential material in their respective departments.12
These early actions were then strongly influenced by other closely related developments within the personnel security field as follows:
1. Passage of Public Law 733, 81st Congress, on 26 August 1950, not only repealing the initial suspension section of PL 808 but also providing for the establishment of Loyalty-Security Hearing Boards to receive testimony from civilian employees who were answering charges for their removal on loyalty-security grounds.
2. Passage by Congress, on 20 September 1950, over President Truman’s veto, of a new Internal Security Act (PL 831, 81st Congress, commonly known as the McCarran Act), which was intended to furnish an effective legal basis for prosecuting members of the Communist Party seeking to subvert the US Government.
3. Issuance of Army-wide directive by the Adjutant General, dated 20 September 1950, covering the establishment of Loyalty-Security Hearing Boards in compliance with PL 733 and also giving official notice that the existing Special Regulation 620-220-1, Civilian Personnel, Loyalty-Security Adjudication, was being rewritten to conform to this new law.
4. Approval by Secretary of Defense George Marshall, on 2 October 1950, of a recommended list from the Personnel Policy Board of “Criteria for Determining Eligibility for Employment for Sensitive and Non-Sensitive Duties in the Department of Defense”. Among other things, this list indicated the need for a special regulation to assist the appropriate commanders in determining security qualifications and requirements for the employment or assignment of personnel to sensitive positions throughout the US Army.13
Since these measures were all aimed primarily at establishing effective procedures for handling civilian loyalty and security risk cases, they did not alter in any significant degree the currently prescribed methods for disposing of disloyal, disaffected, or subversive military personnel. To serve that latter purpose, the Army had already devised a workable program based upon the provisions of a Special Regulation 600-220-1, originally issued on 10 November 1948 and then slightly revised in January 1950, supplemented by additional instructions contained in a Special Regulation 600-220- 2 (SECRET) dated 9 June 1949. This program normally involved one or more of the following administrative actions:
1. Each Army inductee or enlistee was initially called upon to fill out and sign a standard Loyalty Certificate (NME Form 98). If that certificate failed to mention membership in any organization designated by the Attorney General as being inimical to the US Government, no further action was taken. When it did so indicate, however, then more security checks were accomplished and proper authority eventually made a decision on the enlistment of continued induction of the person in light of them.
2. Similar procedures were utilized to eliminate disloyal or subversive Regular Army personnel and Army Reserve personnel either on active duty or in an inactive duty status, under the terms of a 615-370, Enlisted Personnel, Discharge, Disloyal, or Subversive.
3. Army Reserve personnel on whom fragmentary disloyal or subversive information was already known were deliberately not recalled to active duty until such time as a suitable investigation could be conducted to determine whether or not they should be eliminated through AR 615-370 procedures.
4. Under the provisions of SR 600-220-2 (Secret), the duty assignments of suspected military and civilian personnel were fittingly restricted pending the completion of a full-scale investigation to determine whether or not they should be eliminated through AR 615-70 procedures.14 While the departmental military security officials were not entirely satisfied with the powers they possessed under this adopted program for eliminating known or suspected subversives from the Army, they had generally come to accept the situation in that respect by the time the Korean conflict started. As a matter of fact, during its total period of operation from 10 November 1948 to early August 1950, the program did succeed in producing some interesting statistics, as follows: Action Under SR 600-220-1
Cases Received ........................................... 107
Cases pending (discharge recommended) ..... 15
Personnel discharged .................................... 55
Cases returned for further investigative action ..
................................................................... 100 Action Under Reserve Recall Program
Total cases ................................................ 1147 (a) Derogatory cases (will not be recalled until investigations can be conducted or may be discharged under SR 600-220 -1) ............... 480
(b) Derogatory cases (may be recalled but will be placed under surveillance) .......................... 420
(c) Derogatory cases not identified to persons of Army service ................................................ 68
(d) Pending classification to (a) or (b) above .......................................................... 179
Action Under SR 600-220-2 (Regular Army Personnel)
Class “A” Restrictions – 21
Class “B” Restrictions – 45 15
The advent of the Korean conflict made it virtually imperative, of course, to eliminate all disloyal or subversive persons from the US military establishment as soon as possible. At a meeting of the Armed Forces Policy Council held on 8 August 1950, therefore, Secretary of Defense Johnson not only requested the three Services to review their security files and separate any personnel with Communist leanings but also announced he intended to advise the White House when this action had been completed. Because the Army felt that its existing program was well suited for such purpose, no important changes were recommended in it. Nevertheless, all four of the basic special regulations supporting the program were promptly revised in order to render them more applicable, and they were reissued before the end of the year, as follows:
SR 600-220-2 (S), Personnel, Disposition of Subversive and Disaffected Personnel, 6 September 1950.
SR 620-220-1, Civilian Personnel, Loyalty/Security Adjudication, 13 November 1950.
SR 600-220-1, Personnel, Disloyal and Subversive Military Personnel, 6 December 1950.
SR 380-160-2, Military Security, Determining Eligibility for Employment on Sensitive Duties, 28 December 1950.16 [Think of what they are admitting with these new regulations,and what they are designed for. DC]
Other events bearing upon the military security field that occurred during the early Korean conflict period and appear to warrant special mention were, as follows:
1. The IIC, on 8 June 1950, had approved a change in the current Delimitations Agreement on Security activities by governmental agencies, which was designed to transfer responsibility for performing certain counterintelligence investigations aboard Military Sea Transport Services (MSTS) ships from the Army and the Navy. This change then necessitated a corresponding revision of the latest SR 380-320- 2, “Military Security, Counterintelligence Investigative Agencies, Supplementary Agreements” that was duly accomplished, effective 16 August 1950.17
2. Congress, on 16 June 1950, had passed a law (PL 555, 81st Congress) amending the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, in order to permit the entrance into the United States of 500 additional DPs as “national interest cases” provided they were recommended by both the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State. Investigating the DP applicants for such entrance from the security viewpoint, however, presented some almost insuperable problems for all concerned. With the Army CIC representing the only possible means of performing satisfactory overseas investigations for that purpose, the Secretary of Defense chose to delegate his own assigned responsibility in the matter to the Secretary of the Army. Col. William H. Brunke, Chief of the Exploitation Branch, ID, OACofS G-2, D/A, was then selected to organize this new Army effort. Representative committees were also soon formed to develop and coordinate workable procedures for clearing the DP applicants, so that, late in November 1950, detailed instructions could be sent out to the various occupation commanders covering the entire conduct of screening operations in the field.18 Shortly thereafter, arrangements were likewise concluded to speed up the local DP processing by establishing joint Army-State clearance committees in Frankfurt, Germany, and Salzburg, Austria.
3. The Informant and Observer system that had been in force during WWII was abolished, effective 20 August 1945, and not replaced. While the need for a similar system without some of the more objectionable features of this earlier organization had become clearly apparent during the subsequent Cold War period, no attempt was made to introduce another one into the Army until after the Korean outbreak. On 20 October 1950, the deputy Chief of Staff for Administration did approve, but for planning purposes only, the distribution of a G-2 sponsored “Counter subversive Plan” to be instituted in all units of the Army Field Establishment upon specific direction by the Secretary of the Army. Regardless of the fact that this new system had been most carefully designed to operate through the regular chain of command and was plainly “non-punitive, non-investigative and non-mandatory if other coverage existed,” it was never put into actual effect.19
4. Having been beset by many serious personnel problems throughout the entire preceding Cold War period, the CIC was finally able to get a new AR 600-148, “Personnel, Assignment to Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC)” published in August 1950, which served to tighten up several of the mandatory qualification requirements governing the selection of personnel for CIC assignment. Notwithstanding, the sudden Korean emergency had found the CIC with a shortage in officer strength of 15 lieutenant colonels and 55 majors and needing five lieutenant colonels and 50 majors for immediate duty in the Far East. The desired raising of CIC personnel standards, therefore, especially for field grade officers in most cases again had to be postponed.20
5. Under the current SR 10-5-1, “Organization and Functions, Department of the Army,” date 11 April 1950, the OACofS G-2, D/A, had been charged with “planning, coordinating and supervising the collection, evaluation and dissemination of intelligence information concerning the strategic vulnerability of the United States and its possessions.” Because the term “strategic vulnerability” was so broad and elastic, though, the other three general staff divisions continued to remain deeply involved in activities impinging directly upon that function. During December 1950, for example, the ACofS G-3, D/ A, addresses a letter to the six Continental Army Commanders on the subject of “Department of the Army Responsibility for Industrial Security” and instructed them to accomplish a “Facility Security Survey” for the industrial plants located within their respective areas that were being carried as “Key Facilities” by the national Munitions Board. Since these surveys might well produce some valuable information both from the strategic vulnerability and military security (sabotage) standpoint, the ACofS G-2, D/A, not only arranged to receive a copy of each for use in the departmental military intelligence agency but also advised the ACofS G-2s of the Continental Armies to make similar arrangements at their own headquarters.21
6. A law (PL 679, 81st Congress) was passed on 9 August 1950 that authorized the President to prescribe regulations for safeguarding American ports and waterfront facilities. President Truman then issued an Executive Order (EO 10173), dated 18 October 1950, establishing a limited port security program to be implemented by the US Coast Guard of the Treasury Department. In accordance with a written request from the Secretary of the Treasury to the Secretary of the Army, therefore, the ACofS G-2, D/A, in January 1951, was called upon to take necessary steps to ensure that all the Army Commanders and Attaches would urgently report any information which might give:
(a) Warning of the actual or suspected departure for the United States or approach to the United States of any vessel known or suspected of carrying materials for attack.
(b)Warning of the actual or suspected departure for the US vessels owned, controlled, or in the service of the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Communist China, Outer Mongolia, North Korea, Eastern Germany, or Eastern Austria.
(c) Any other information of value to the Coast Guard in carrying out its tasks.22
7. Early in January 1951, the Director of Administration, Office of the Secretary of Defense, proposed to make the formation of a joint Service agency to develop needed equipment for physical or investigative security use. The Army did not favor the formation of such an agency because the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had already taken action in the same matter, which included the CIA. Nevertheless, the Department of Defense ignored this obvious duplication and announced the establishment of Physical Security Equipment Agency (PSEA), effective 6 February 1951. Under management direction of the Secretary of the Air Force, the PSEA was then held responsible to provide for the “development of physical security and related investigative equipment as a common service for all agencies of the Department of Defense.” Army participation in the new agency was subsequently covered by the publication of SR 380-410-1, dated 23 February 1951.23
The establishment of the G-2 Central Records Facilities (CRF) at Fort Holabird, Maryland, on 17 August 1951, was a most progressive step in the direction of improving the Army’s entire counterintelligence effort. Not to be confused with the Central CIC Files, which had recently been microfilmed and consolidated in the CIC Center at Fort Holabird, this new field facility was originally intended to furnish a centralized repository for all closed personnel security cases of the Continental Armies, Military District of Washington (MDW), and OACofS G-2, D/A. Remaining under G-2 control but supervised directly by the Commanding General, Fort Holabird, who was also Chief, CIC, the CRF was officially charged with the “maintenance, processing, and administration” of the files in its custody. It was not in any sense an investigative agency nor was it capable of making any loyalty evaluations. In January 1952, its specific functions could thus be described to the Commanding Generals of the Continental Armies and MDW, as follows:
a. To provide a central repository for all intelligence investigations which have been or are being conducted by the above-named commands.
b. To provide a master index to all intelligence investigations which have been or are being conducted by the above named commands, which will be furnished a copy thereof, including changes when issued.
c. To consolidate all intelligence information that has been developed on an individual by the above-named commands, eliminating duplicate and nonessential material.
d. To prevent duplication of intelligence investigative effort by investigative agencies of the above-named commands.
e. To provide a standardized filing system for all intelligence personality investigative files within the above-named commands.
f. To facilitate the use of personality investigative files by furnishing the files or information therefrom to the above named commands.24
While the new CRF was promptly recognized by all concerned as representing a major contribution in simplifying and facilitating procedures for checking the security background of persons who had previously come under the cognizance of an Army counterintelligence investigative agency, it soon ran into severe personnel difficulties of its own. Initially, the CRF was allocated just eight military and 32 civilian spaces; these totals were raised to 11 military and 86 civilian on 29 October 1952, in view of the increased emphasis that was being placed upon personnel clearance matters throughout the US Government. This favorable action did not provide much real relief for the CRF, however, because it could only employ trained civilians possessing the highest possible security qualifications, and by that time there were very few such persons readily available for such procurement. The facility was thus forced to operate during most of the Korean conflict period by utilizing whatever “pipeline” military personnel happened to be passing through the CIC Center from time to time on temporary duty or other transient status.25
Early in 1951, the Secretary of Defense had queried the Secretary of the Army with reference to the current security status of the Panama Canal. The result was that Secretary Pace ordered Maj. Gen. John K. Rice, Chief, CIC, and Col. Duncan S. Somerville, from the OACofS G-3, D/A, to visit the Canal Zone as his personal representatives for the purpose of examining the “question of counterintelligence measures…now being taken to provide for the protection and security of the Panama Canal.” During their visit, they discovered that CIA activity within the Canal Zone and surrounding areas had been quite limited, and most of the required counterintelligence operations were being performed by CIC personnel assigned to Headquarters, United States Army, Caribbean (USARCARIB). This was an Army command that functioned under the Commander in Chief, Caribbean (CINCARIB), who acted in the capacity of Executive Agent for the JCS.26
After Lt. Gen. Horace L. McBride, U.S.A., became CINCARIB on 1 April 1952, the question of responsibility and means for conducting counterintelligence operations within his command again came to the fore. He felt that because of his JCS mission he ought to assume operational control of the 470th CIC Detachment, Headquarters, USARCARIB, but this view was not shared by either Maj. Gen. Lester G. Whitlock, CG, USCARCARIB or Maj. Gen. Richard C. Partridge, the newly appointed ACofS G-2, D/A.27 Following an exchange of several unyielding letters on the subject between Washington, DC and Quarry Heights, CZ, it appeared that the problem could probably best be settled through personal contact. On 22 October 1952, therefore, Generals McBride, Whitlock, and Partridge, along with Brig. Gen. Martin F. Hass, Chief of Staff, Caribbean Command, conferred together at Quarry Heights in the matter and reached an agreement that:
1. CINCARIB would assume direct control of the 470th CIC Detachment but leave a small group of its personnel with CG USARCARIB for his own investigative use. CINCARIB would then not only be responsible for the “investigation, collection, and reporting of intelligence matters in the Republic of Panama and the Canal Zone” but also “accept requests for information on these areas from the Department of the Army” while acting as Executive Agent for the JCS.
2. Utilizing his retained group of personnel from the 470th CIC Detachment for such purpose, CG USRCARIB would continue to undertake the reporting of “purely Army intelligence matters.”
3. This new CIC organization was to remain on a trial basis until the end of March 1953. At that time, it would revert back to the prior organization if the ACofS G-2, D/A or CG USCARIB felt “things were not working out properly.”28
With military security problems thus continuing to demand a large share of attention within the departmental intelligence agency of the Army, the Security Division, OACofS G-2,29 now formed into four functional branches designed respectively as Personal Security, Special Operations, Security of Military Information, and Censorship, was mainly engaged during the periods from 9 September 1951 to 31 December 1952 in supervising the following activities:
Personal Security Branch—called upon to handle all matters relating to policies and procedures for the investigation and clearance of personnel from the military security standpoint; this branch was faced with these principal problems:
a. Investigation and Clearance of Foreign Personnel for Entrance into the United States under Auspices of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA)—On 8 May 1952, a new SR 380-160-12 (C) was issued to govern the granting of “limited access” security clearances to foreign personnel brought into the United States under JIOA auspices. One noteworthy feature of this regulation was that it authorized the substitution of a polygraph test for such components of the required background investigation as could not be properly accomplished due to inaccessibility of the geographic area from which the subject personnel had originated. Moreover, an announced aim of the regulation was to ensure that the respective skills of these foreign personnel would be exploited by the Military Departments concerned to the fullest extent possible.
b. Security Clearance of Aliens by Private Industry—While the publication of SR 380-160-12 (C) did help to ease the security clearance problem in connection with the employment of foreign personnel by the Military Departments, the polygraph substitution that it authorized still could not be applied to aliens who were under consideration for employment within private industry. Feeling that some of these latter aliens were probably being denied advantageous employment from the US viewpoint on classified contracts by private industry, the ACofS G-2, D/A, asked the Department of Defense Munitions Board to grant the same type of exemption to them as the others. Even though this request had been concurred in by all the Army agencies concerned, the Munitions Board, on 13 June 1952, chose to act unfavorably upon it.
c. Investigation and Clearance of Aliens Serving in the US Army—Strongly indicated at this time was a need to have the polygraph exemption also cover enlisted aliens serving in the US Army, so that their individual skills could be fully utilized within the appropriate military commands. After a G-2 recommendation to permit such an exemption had been approved first by the Department of Defense and then by the Munitions Board, a new SR 380-160-13 (C) was issued, on 15 August 1952, to implement it.
d. Armed Forces Industrial Security Regulation—Because the three Military Department were now dealing with private industry on an ever-increasing scale, the necessity for having a single Armed Forces Security regulation to control it soon became plainly apparent. During May 1952, therefore, the Munitions Board decided to form an Armed Forces Industrial Security Regulations Committee to accomplish that particular task. This committee was composed of two members from the Munitions Board staff plus two representatives from each of the three Military Departments. Initially, the two Army representatives on it were Lt. Col. Donald C. Landon, OACofS G-2, D/A, and Lt. Col. David G. Fitch, OACofS G-4, D/A. Capt. A.H. Ladner, OACofS G-3, D/A, however, was later permitted to attend the committee meetings and to receive copies of its agenda and minutes without holding a formal membership. The eventual result was the publication of a far-reaching SR 380-405-5 in January 1953, designed to establish a single personnel investigative and clearance system at all private industrial plants performing classified contracts for any of the Military Departments. It also returned to the OACofS, D/A, several functions bearing upon safeguarding classified information, which had been given to the Provost Marshal General’s Office during World War II, in order that administration of the Army part of the new Industrial Security Program would come under complete control by the departmental military intelligence agency. This work then soon grew to be so demanding that a separate Industrial Security Branch, Security Division, was formed in March 1953, in accordance with a directive received from the Secretary of Defense.
Special Operations Branch—Until 19 September 1951, the entire counterintelligence responsibility for the Pentagon Building had rested with a small 118th CIC Detachment functioning directly under the Special Operations Branch, OACofS G-2, D/A. On that date, the Secretary of Defense instructed the Secretary of the Army to install a much more comprehensive program, which would not only encompass the Pentagon Building proper, but also its “grounds and appurtenant buildings.” In view of these additional demands, the 118th Detachment was inactivated, effective 8 January 1952,and replaced by a larger Sub-Detachment “A” from the 902nd CIC Detachment that had recently been organized at Fort Holabird, MD, to execute special counterintelligence missions for the ACofS, D/A. On 1 December 1952, the Special Operations Branch was renamed the Special Investigation Section, Security Division, but its duties continued to remain essentially unchanged.
Security of Military Information (SMI) Branch- Held responsible for handling all Army matters concerned with the security of classified military information; this branch was involved in a remarkably wide variety of activities along such lines, as follows:
a. Tripartite (US-UK-France) Security Agreement—The US Government, in August 1951, formally accepted a set of “principles and standards” for safeguarding information that had been agreed upon by a Tripartite Security Working Group made up of top-level security experts from the United States, United Kingdom, and France. This Working Group, with Col. Gordon E. Dawson, Chief of the SMI Branch, OACofS G-2, D/A, acting as Chairman, had completed a detailed survey of the regulations and methods in current use within those three countries for that particular purpose. By May 1952, both the United Kingdom and France had also announced similar notice of acceptance in the same matter. The Tripartite Security Working Group, with its Army representation now consisting of Brig. Gen. J. H. Phillips, Deputy ACofS G-2, D/A, as Principal, and Col. John F. Schmelzer, newly appointed Chief of the SMI Branch as Alternate, then met successively in Washington, London, and Paris during the period from October to December 1952 to examine and judge at firsthand the progress stemming from this key international security of information agreement. The true significance of these meetings becomes well illustrated by the fact that they ultimately led to the military security arrangements that were adopted for NATO.
b. Eligibility of Foreign Representatives to Receive Classified Security Information- In compliance with a National Security Council (NSC) directive issued during November 1950, the security officials of the member agencies of the Interdepartmental Committee on Internal Security (ICIS) were finally able some two years later to agree upon a proposed list of procedures for determining the eligibility of individual representatives of foreign governments to receive US classified information. As recommended to the ICIS, each individual representative would be required to furnish an identification document, including a suitable photograph, for check by the FBI and other appropriate internal security agencies before any classified information could be given to him. While certain exceptions were authorized for high- ranking foreign diplomatic or consular personnel and invited guests of the American Government, the procedures were meant to apply fully to all Foreign Service Attaches. No definite action was taken by the ICIS on this touchy position, however, prior to the end of the Korean conflict period.
c. Security Agreement Between the Departments of Defense of the United States and New Zealand—In September 1952, the United States and New Zealand Department of Defense concluded an agreement with reference to taking coordinated measures for the security of their own military information. This agreement called for each Department to maintain military security classifications based upon mutually approved criteria and to disclose classified information to other nationals only under regularly established rules and procedures.
d. Security Policy Toward the European Defense Community (EDC)—The signing of the EDC Treaty, in May 1952, posed a new and difficult security of information problem to the US authorities because the German Federal Republic, a non-NATO member, was included in it. Moreover, the treaty itself provided for the formation of an advance Interim Committee to get the EDC ready to function effectively just as soon as it had been ratified by the legislative bodies of the nations concerned and also activated a staff organization to commence immediate EDC military planning under the direct guidance of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE). In July 1952, therefore the ACofS G–2, D/A, forwarded a request to the State Defense Military Information Control Committee (S–DMICC) recommending the establishment of a temporary disclosure policy toward the EDC to be maintained strictly on a “need to know” basis. The S–DMICC then officially approved the disclosure of the US information classified as high as SECRET on that limited basis to the Interim Committee of the EDC, if such information was deemed necessary for accomplishing its defense planning objections.
e. Security Policy toward the German Federal Republic—With the advent of German participation in the European Defense Forces of EDC, it became clearly evident that West Germany would soon have to be included within the framework of the national disclosure policies being formulated by S-DMICC. Arrangements were thus made for a combined State-Defense team to visit West Germany during October 1952 and examine the security of information system currently in use therein. Published by the State Department on 3 December 1952, the report of this team expressed general satisfaction regarding the legal basis of West German security, a lesser satisfaction with the actual security of some of its governmental agencies, and no satisfaction at all with West German industrial security. On the other hand, because of the sound legal basis and strong will to achieve suitable information security it had observed in West Germany, the team felt that S-DMICC should “proceed with those measures which may be expected to bring about rapid improvements in the German security picture.”
f. Security Policy Toward Japan—The establishment of an adequate policy covering the disclosure of US military information to Japan had been under active consideration ever since 1949. At that time, the Japanese Diet (legislature) had enacted a National Public Service Law, which provided stiff penalties for divulging government information and rendered members of the subversive organizations ineligible for government employment. This law, though, promptly came under heavy internal attack and was never firmly implemented. Nevertheless, in October 1951, the ACofS G-2, D/A, did recommend the adoption of a limited information disclosure policy toward Japan on an interim basis, and a course of action along those lines was duly approved by S-DMICC. With the Japanese passing of additional laws aimed at tightening their security producers in May and July 1952, the situation appeared to be clearing up but the country shortly experienced another serious political crisis. S–DMICC then decided to postpone any further action in the matter, at least until after this latest governmental crisis had been successfully resolved.
g. Executive Order 10290—Designed to establish basic standards throughout the Executive Branch of the Government for safeguarding information affecting the security of the United States, this EO became effective on 27 October 1951 and caused several changes in the current Army security regulations. It required, for example, that all information of such nature should be positively identified as “Security Information.” Changes in AR 380-5 incorporating the minimum requirements of EO 10290 were published without delay, but a rewritten version thereof, covering the entire provisions of EO 10290, could not be prepared and issued until 6 June 1952.
Censorship Branch—Being primarily a planning group, this branch was seldom called upon to perform any actual operation or supervisory censorship functions. Its activities from 9 September 1951 through 31 December 1952 were, thus principally, as follows:
a. Civil Censorship—Although US policy had for some time been to encourage the unconditional abolishment of civil censorship throughout Austria, there was still a small island of it remaining in Vienna. The main reason for this anomaly was that the Soviet element within the Censorship Technical Committee of the quadripartite Allied Council for Austria kept pressing for numerous “compromises,” which were obviously calculated to assure Soviet control over all Austrian communications. It was felt best, therefore, to allow the original situation to continue unchanged.
b. National Censorship—As Executive Agent for the Secretary of Defense in connection with planning for the imposition of National Censor ship, the Censorship Branch was required to monitor the active duty training of Army and Air Force Reserve Officers holding national censorship mobilization assignments. Arrangements were thus made to have appropriate training courses in censorship work conducted for these personnel at Fort Benning, Georgia, from 1-15 June 1952, and at the Presidio of San Francisco, California, from 16-30 June 1952. A special activities course was also given to selected censorship military reservists at Washington, DC, on methods of detecting messages written in code, cipher, or secret ink. Other important events relating to national censorship planning at this same time were the submission of a detailed staff study to the Secretary of Defense, which recommended the completion of needed censorship agreements with several Western Hemisphere countries and the initiation of coordinated planning between the Censorship Branch and all governmental agencies engaged in psychological warfare.
c. Armed Forces Censorship—Censorship activities within this field were centered mostly upon accomplishing the following three tasks:
1. Arranging for the training of censorship units at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
2. Shipping the 1st Military Censorship Organization to EUSOM so it would be readily available there to open Armed Forces censorship in the event of hostilities.
3. Developing the Armed Forces Censorship Play for Exercise Long Horn, scheduled to be held at Fort Hood, Texas, during March-April 1952. This exercise not only uncovered a number of valuable indoctrination procedures but also furnished an excellent guide for the reassessment of previously accepted censorship personnel qualifications.30
The first mention of mail being received within the United States from American Prisoners of War held in North Korea or Red China was contained in a report forwarded to Washington by the ACofS G-2, Fifth Army, dated 5 April 1951. It stated that according to the Post S-2 at Camp Carson, Colorado, Mr. and Mrs. R. W. Wegner of Denver, Colorado, had recently received a letter from their POW son along with 23 other letters written by America’s POWs in North Korean or Red Chinese prison camps. The Wegener's had proceeded to remail the enclosed letters to the respective addresses shown on them, as requested. Shortly thereafter, the ACofS G-2, Second Army, took note of a similar report that 11 POW letters had been received at Mayfield, Kentucky, accompanied by the same sort of remailing instructions. This sudden POW mail influx plainly represented an integral part of a vigorous Communist psychological warfare offensive, which was also featuring anti-American propaganda disseminated through radio broadcasts, news organs, typical hate pamphlets, and undercover agents on a global basis.31 The offensive undoubtedly aimed at gaining a ceasefire with complete exchange of all POWs for the Communist truce negotiations at Panmunjom, regardless of whether or not the North Korean or Red Chinese POWs in UN prison camps wished to be repatriated. As a matter of fact, a large number of these prisoners had actually signified a desire to refuse such repatriation and to remain on the Free World side of the Iron Curtain.32
In May 1951, the ACofS G-2, D/A, forwarded a summary sheet to the Chief of Staff on the subject of POW mail, the terms of which had already been discussed with the ACofS G-1, D/A, and the interested CIA, FBI, ONI, and Air Force Office of Intelligence (AFOIN) officials. It not only called attention to the favorable worldwide reaction that the publication of POW lists in Communist news organs was receiving but also pointed out that the Chinese were encouraging correspondence between selected POW’s and their relatives within the United States for the obvious purpose of distributing Communist propaganda. The feeling was, therefore, that an appropriate explanatory statement should be devised and forwarded to the next of kin of American POWs, in order to offset any psychological warfare gains the Chinese may have achieved by releasing their POW lists in a seemingly forthright manner. The Communist propaganda drive then showed signs of becoming so increasingly successful that the departmental military security officials, during March 1952, joined with the CIA in preparing a plan for the censorship of all communications, including POW mail, passing between the United States and the Chinese mainland. A series of representative conferences were soon held under Army G-2 sponsorship to inquire into the feasibility of establishing that type of censorship without further delay. On 11 August 1952, though, it was decided that two separate studies ought to be initiated in the matter, one to cover just the censorship of the POW mail problem and the other to explore “larger-scale censorship.”33 Meanwhile, late in December 1951, the Chief of Staff had approved an intelligence project authorizing the ACofS G-2, FECOM, to read and microfilm prior to remailing, all POW mail turned over to the UN negotiators by the Communists during the truce talks, which were taking place at Panmunjom. Although most of the propaganda included in these letters was so specious that it could be considered dangerous, some of them did contain invidious remarks or potentially valuable military information, and they were sent directly to the ACofS G-2 to D/A for final review and disposition. This mail inspection effort promptly proved to be such a major drain on G-2 FECOM’s limited personnel resources, however, that he was forced to request permission to discontinue it. In May 1952, General Bolling did grant permission for G-2 FECOM to cease examining by not microfilming the POW mail, and at the same time, forwarded a so-called “Watch List” to him presenting the names of seven officers and 24 enlisted men who had either given “definite evidence of Communist indoctrination” or were “suspects of successful indoctrination.” Any letters received from them were to be placed at the beginning of the microfilm and after that handled in a special manner.34 The Watch List, which was carefully kept up to date in accordance with the latest available information, then served to provided the initial indication to the departmental military intelligence authorities of the true nature and extent of the indoctrination being given to the UN POWs held by the Communists.35
With ACOofS G–2, D/A, having thus already embarked upon a program of seeking to collect as much information as possible about the Communist indoctrination of American POWs held in North Korea and Red China, that distressful subject suddenly became of serious national concern late in 1952, when the truce talks at Panmunjom gave distinct promise of yielding an agreement for the large-scale exchange of captured personnel from both sides. Since no firm policies had as yet been announced for handling such returnees, the Secretary of the Army, during January 1953, addressed a number of pertinent questions to the Secretary of Defense regarding the Communist employment of “brain washing” techniques on the US military personnel, in order to obtain proper guidance. Secretary Wilson’s 36 reply dated 19 February 1953, first took note that the Department of the Army had a primary interest in the matter and then requested it to “develop immediate screening and de-indoctrination procedures designed to both determine and overcome any adverse mental effects found to exist among personnel of any of the services who have been released or escaped from prisoner of war camps in Korea.” He further asked the Department of the Army to supply the national Psychological Strategy Board with any data it managed to obtain from the screening of returned prisoners of war.”37
Although the OACofS G-1, D/A, was designed to be the staff agency for monitoring the entire program involving the return and reassignment of the US POWs from Korea, now officially known as the “Returned or Exchanged Captured American Prisoners–Korea (RECAP-K) Program,” the OACofS G-2, D/A, continued to remain fully aware of its own fundamental intelligence and security responsibilities in connection therewith. These responsibilities not only called for deriving all possible intelligence of tactical or strategic value from it but also collecting information on Communist indoctrination means and methods, which might serve as a basis for developing effective countermeasures.38
Having recently prepared detailed letters of instruction to CINCFE and the Commanding Generals of all Major Commands relative to the intelligence processing of RECAP-K personnel, which had first been carefully coordinated with G-1, G-3, G-4, Chief Psy-War, TAG, CINFO, and the Surgeon General, and then duly approved by the Chiefs of Staff, these letters were dispatched on 13 March 1953.39 Shortly thereafter, Maj. Gen. (later Lt. Gen.) Robert N. Young, the ACofS G-1, D/A, appointed an ad hoc committee, composed of representatives from the Offices of the ACofS G-2, Surgeon General, Chief of Psychological Warfare and Chief of Information, to “study and prepare methods and procedures for de-indoctrination of U.S. personnel” being returned from POW camps in North Korea or Red China. The proposed plan was to have the members of this committee assigned to Valley Forge General Hospital, Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, where they would be able to observe personnel suffering from Communist “brain washing” techniques and, after studying the problem, submit to the OACofS G-1, D/A, adequate de-indoctrination procedures “for immediate use to overcome any adverse mental efforts found to exist among those present and recommend disposition in each case.”40
It soon became imperative that some sort of a definite plan should be agreed upon by all concerned for handling returnees from Korea, because the initial exchange operation of captured personnel who were sick and wounded, subsequently known as “Little Switch,” had already begun on 19 April 1953 and the American ex-POWs involved were scheduled to start to arrive by air at designated ports of debarkation in the Sixth Army Area within a few days. During a meeting held in the Office of the Chief of Staff on 20 April 1953, therefore, General Collins first asked several pointed questions in the matter and then approved an information seeking program calling for a preliminary interrogation at Valley Forge General Hospital or in the proper Continental Army area, depending principally upon the physical condition of the individual returnee concerned. It was also understood that when these returnees were finally discharged from the Army their respective security files would be turned over to the FBI if an additional investigation seemed indicated.41
Of the 149 American persons processed under this Operation “Little Switch,” a total of 127 (three officers and 124 enlisted men) were from the Army. Only 21 of this total required special Army or FBI investigations but one person did turn out to be a “hard core” Communist and was eventually discharged without honor for “security reasons” in the Sixth Army Area.42 It was however, most productive from the standpoint of collecting information for both future intelligence and counterintelligence use.43
The close of the Korean conflict period thus found the OACofS G-2, D/A, not only faced with an evermounting number of difficult military security problems but also right in the midst of conducting a highly sensitive counterintelligence operation that was fraught with disquieting implications. The most striking development of the entire period, though, had undoubtedly been the rapid growth of a vast personnel loyalty-security program, which demanded numerous and varied investigations by many different agencies before appropriate clearance could be granted for an individual to have access to certain classified information of the US Government. The inordinate growth of these investigative activities after the Korean outbreak becomes clearly apparent from the following table, designed to compare the average weekly load of security cases in six different categories handled within the Security Division, OACofS G-2, D/A, during the months of June 1950 and June 1951:
1950 1951
Civilian Removal Recommendations 3 18
Military Discharge Recommendations 3 10
National Agency Checks 750 2000
FBI Loyalty Investigations 3 17
G-2 File Checks 5000 13250
CIC Investigations 940 228044
One of the chief results of this huge expansion in counterintelligence activities during the first year of the Korean conflict period was to render the already difficult CIC personnel procurement problem almost insolvable. Although from June 1950 to August 1952 the total worldwide strength of the CIC did increase by approximately 1,200 enlisted men, it also decreased over the same period by 100 officers. Furthermore, most of the new enlisted men could only be hastily trained on an emergency basis and the existing qualification standards for CIC duty assignment had to be habitually lowered in order to procure them. This adverse personnel situation unquestionably contributed materially to the fact that the backlog of unfinished clearance cases kept getting larger and larger while the conflict progressed. The tremendous extent of that backlog seems aptly illustrated by a report forwarded from the CIC Center to the OACofS G-2, D/A, on 21 August 1952, giving the average number of personnel clearance cases completed per month within the ZI and Overseas Theaters, along with the companion backlog, during a nine-month period ending 31 March 1952, as follows:
Average number of ZI cases
closed per month .......................18,694
Average number of Overseas cases
closed per month ......................102,363
Average backlog of ZI
cases per month ....................... 28,441
Average backlog of
Overseas cases per month ...........61,42845
Not all of these listed investigative cases, of course, fell under the same category. Of a total caseload of 42,889 ZI cases current on 15 November 1952, for example, 25,301 were Background Investigations, 16,776 National Agency Checks, and 812 Complaint Type Investigations. The latter investigations were the least numerous by far but they represented the more serious cases and always required special handling. The bulk of the normal backlog was ordinarily made up of National Agency Checks, due to the large number of different agencies that had to be consulted before an individual clearance could be granted. Brig. Gen. P. E. Gallagher thus described the system then in use for that particular purpose, Chief CIC, at an Army Command Conference held in December 1952, as follows:
This National Agency Check, in brief, is initiated by the requesting agency or facility and is processed to the G-2 of the Army Area. From this office it is sent to the ACofS, G-2, Department of the Army, who, in addition to checking their own files, obtains a check from the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When leads so indicate, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of Special Investigation, Civil Service Commission, Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, and Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization are also checked. In many cases it has been found that a bottleneck often occurs, as far as time is concerned, in clearing a name through some of the National Agencies which I have outlined.46
By the end of 1952, the number of investigative cases assigned to the CIC had finally commenced to decline, especially within the ZI. The effort was still a major undertaking, however, and, on 31 December 1952, the CIC called for the full services of a total of 7,030 persons, including the 1,428 officers, 384 warrant officers, 4,622 enlisted men and 596 civilians. At that time, the caseload status of all CIC investigations for the past six months was officially estimated to be, as follows:
Personnel Security Investigations
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 21,677
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 50,420
Closed these 6 mos......................... 44,611
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 27,486
Contractor Personnel and
Facility Clearance Investigation
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 5,739
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 13,123
Closed these 6 mos......................... 11,286
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 7,576
Other Personnel Investigations
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 20,273
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 37,848
Closed these 6 mos......................... 40,386
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 17,735
Counterintelligence Investigations
Pending 1 July 52. .......................... 1,898
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 6,529
Closed these 6 mos......................... 7,080
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 1.347
All other types of Investigations
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 8,689
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 43,726
Closed these 6 mos......................... 45,203
Pending 31 December 52 ............... 7,212
Grand Total
Pending 1 July 52 ........................... 58,276
Opened these 6 mos. ...................... 151,646
Closed these 6 mos......................... 148,566
Pending 31 Decembers 52 ............. 62,356 47
The military security function was intimately connected in a great many different ways during the Korean conflict period with the intelligence training effort. Training considerations were not only an important influence in limiting the prompt execution of all CIC investigations but also represented a controlling factor in proper development of such basic counterintelligence measures as censorship, industrial security, and the security of military information. Since there were not nearly enough intelligence specialists on hand at the opening of the conflict to satisfy the sudden demands of a major Army expansion, in most cases they had to be immediately procured regardless of established qualification standards and then hastily trained on the job. Unfortunately, the matter of agency or staff responsibility for supervising the conduct of intelligence training remained so obscurely drawn that training along those lines was often badly neglected.
The Communist Party
and
Soviet Intelligence
Soviet intelligence activities in the United States
apparently began in 1919 when Ludwig Martens, a
Russian-born communist residing in the United States,
assumed the mantle of representative of the new
revolutionary Soviet government. The United States,
like most other nations at the time, did not extend
diplomatic recognition to the regime that had in effect,
declared war on other nation states and called for violent
revolution to overthrow the existing order. The attitude
of the United States, like most other states at the time,
was generally hostile. It must be remembered that it
seemed that the worldwide convulsion that the Soviet
Government called for was in fact a real possibility. In the period following World War I, Marxist revolutions and leftist agitation that spread to virtually all countries shook Europe and the United States. The Soviet Government had established an organization known as the Comintern to coordinate and direct revolutionary movements and communist parties around the world. It is against this historical backdrop that Marten’s activities must be viewed.
Marten
In the absence of diplomatic relations, which extended
to 1933, the Soviets operated unofficially through
envoys like Martens and Amtorg, a corporation that
ostensibly was to facilitate US–Soviet trade. At this
time, around 1920, espionage against the United States
was not the highest priority of the Soviet intelligence
apparatus. The activities of Russian anti-Communist
expatriates, operating primarily from European nations,
especially France, commanded their interest. However,
the United States did not escape the attention of the
Soviet leadership as a valuable target for their
intelligence services. Lenin had specifically directed
that the intelligence arms of the Soviet state function in
the United States.
Arthur Adams
Probably the first identified Soviet intelligence officer
operating in the United States was Arthur Adams, who
was described officially as director of the unofficial
embassy’s “technical department.” Adams was deeply
involved with the theft of American technology and
would appear periodically in the United States over the
next 30 years. Both Adams and Martens were deported
in 1920 as aliens affiliated with an organization that
advocated the overthrow by force or violence of the
Government of the United States. It is important to describe the beginnings of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) that was developing at the same time as the Soviet espionage apparatus in the United States. The CPUSA was founded in 1919 in Chicago and was an outgrowth of the Socialist Party, founded in 1900. The early CPUSA was noteworthy for several reasons, among them was the fact that the overwhelming majority of members were foreign born and did not speak English. Most of the early members were Russian or emigrants from other Eastern European nations, and a large number also were Jews.
From its earliest beginning, the party was wracked by severe divisions. Some were ideological, and some were linguistic. Another aspect of the party was its slavish devotion to Moscow. The CPUSA never deviated from the Moscow line at any time in its history.
In 1920 with the CPUSA badly divided, the Comintern, acting as sort of a referee, dispatched functionaries with orders to the party to reunite. At a series of secret meetings, the different wings of the party were fused into one organization. During the early 1920s, the party apparatus was to a great extent underground, with a small legal aboveground element, the Workers Party.
As the Red Scare and deportations of the early 1920s ebbed, the party became bolder and more open. By 1930 it adopted the title Communist Party, USA. However, an element of the party remained underground permanently. It was through this underground party, often commanded by a Soviet official operating as an illegal in the United States, that Soviet intelligence co opted CPUSA members.
Nick Dozenberg
The Soviet intelligence apparatus, which was
introduced into the United States around the same time
as the CPUSA was founded, maintained intimate
relations with the party from the start. The CPUSA
provided a ready pool of eager volunteers, anxious to
be of service to the revolutionary state. Party members
such as Nick Dozenberg found themselves assigned to
Soviet intelligence by party leaders. Usually, when this
occurred, the party member was instructed not to engage
in open party work or associations. By the mid to late 1920s, there were three elements of Soviet power operating in the United States, despite the absence of formal diplomatic relations. They were the Comintern, military intelligence, and the forerunner of the KGB, the GPU. It appears that during the early 1920s, the Comintern was the dominant arm of service in the United States, although it was not unusual at that time for agents or officers to be switched from one service to another.
What was US counterintelligence doing? After the Red Scare collapsed in 1924, the Department of Justice and its investigative arm, the Bureau of Investigation, declined to investigate “radicalism.” The US military intelligence services, ONI and MID, to a certain extent filled the void, but these organizations were poorly funded after the war and not able to counter the scope of activities of the Soviets in the United States. The US State Department was investigating international communism and also had jurisdiction over investigations of passport fraud. However, there was no central direction or focus to countering or investigating Soviet espionage during the 1920s and early 1930s. As a result, the Soviets had almost free run for about 12 years before the FBI was given the task again of monitoring Communist and Fascist activities in the United States.
The fact is that few Americans had any awareness of the existence of Soviet espionage in the United States and would have been shocked if such a thing were to be made known. At that time, no state openly admitted engaging in peacetime spying, which was considered disreputable and underhanded.
During the 1920s, Soviet intelligence in the United States focused on industry, specifically the aircraft and munitions industries, and to penetrating the mainline federal government bureaucracies such as the Departments of State and War. A favorite Soviet tactic in gathering intelligence on US industry was to exploit the desire of US firms to do business in Russia.
A Soviet representative would call on an American business and dangle the possibility of a lucrative contract with the USSR. However, the Soviets would insist on extensive plant inspections prior to actually signing a contract. After numerous visits and inspections by Soviet representatives, actually intelligence officers, some excuse for not doing business would be found. By then the Soviets would have extracted whatever technical information they were seeking. This tactic was repeated scores of times over the 1920s.
Another success of Soviet military intelligence in the United States was obtaining of the complete plans of the British warship, Royal Oak, from the Navy Department. The Soviets recruited an American, Robert Switz, as an agent, along with a US Army corporal, Robert Osman. The two provided US military information to the GRU. Osman was tried in 1933 for illegal possession of secret documents relating to national defense. He was convicted, but the conviction was overturned on appeal.
The role of Amtorg (a Soviet trading company) in Soviet intelligence operations was first revealed in 1929 by the first senior Soviet intelligence officer to defect to the West. Using the name George Agabekov, he had served in Turkey in the GPU residency. After his defection he wrote, “The first GPU resident in the U.S. was Tschatzky. As there was no Soviet diplomatic representation in the US, he was known as an employee of Amtorg….”
The case of William Disch alerted some in the United States to what the Soviets were doing behind the doors of Amtorg in New York. A US Navy defense contractor working on fire-control mechanisms employed Disch as a draftsman. An Amtorg employee who called himself Mr. Herb approached Disch. Herb told Disch that he was willing to pay two thousand dollars a year, a considerable sum in 1931, for classified information on the fire-control apparatus. Disch informed the company what had transpired and Naval Intelligence conducted a surveillance of meetings between Disch and Herb, who was identified as Moshe Stern, alias Mark Zilbert, of Amtorg. Eventually, Stern broke contact with Disch, but no legal proceedings against Herb or Stern were forthcoming.
The decade of the 1930s saw a dramatic increase in activities of both the Soviet intelligence apparatus in the United States and the CPUSA. There were several factors at work that gave impetus to both phenomena. The economic depression, which gripped the industrial world, seemed to bear out Marxist predictions of the impending collapse of capitalism. Many American intellectuals embraced Marxism as the inevitable wave of the future. The international scene also worked to the Communists’ favor. The rise of Fascist and Nazi dictatorships seemed threatening to many, and the antiSemitic nature of both regimes seemed to many Jewish Americans cause to defend the interests of the USSR, and by extension, the CPUSA.
Another boost to Soviet prestige, and also to Soviet intelligence in the United States, was the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1933. At last the Soviet intelligence organs in the United States could function under the protection and cover of diplomatic immunity. At the time, the United States had no real intelligence service operating in Moscow, other than a few military attachés. Aside from the embassy in Washington, the Soviets also established consulates in several large cities, including San Francisco and New York.[Right after their comrade Roosevelt was elected. DC]
Whittaker Chambers was a remarkable intellectual. He had translated the German novel Bambi into English. As a result of his literary ability, Chambers was named editor of the Communist party magazine, New Masses. Chambers was approached by Max Bedacht, chief of the party’s underground arm, and instructed to enter underground work himself. He was told to leave the overt party and report directly to Bedacht. Chambers main function in the underground was as a courier, bringing material Soviet agents had procured to Soviet intelligence officers.
Max Bedacht
Chambers joined the party in 1924, left in 1929 after
a factional dispute, and returned a year later. He left
the party and its underground apparatus for good in
1938. For years he tried to alert the American public
about the activities of Soviet intelligence and the
CPUSA without success. Finally, in 1948 he was given
a serious hearing when he testified before Congress
about Soviet espionage and its use of CPUSA members
as assets. In 1938, the year Whittaker Chambers left his underground service to the Soviets, Elizabeth Bentley joined. Bentley had entered the Communist Party(CP) in 1935. She had joined a CP front group, the American League Against War and Fascism in New York, and was soon brought into the party proper. She was introduced to Jacob Golos, a high-level CPUSA official, who became both her lover and her supervisor in espionage activities. Bentley later testified that she served as a courier for two Soviet spy rings operating in the federal government in Washington and that she turned documents gathered by the agents over to Golos, who provided them to Soviet officers. Golos also was head of an organization called World Tourists, which while posing as a travel agency actually facilitated international travel to and from the United States by Soviet agents and CPUSA members. World Tourists was also deeply involved in passport fraud. In 1940, Golos had specifically named for her the three branches of Soviet espionage operating in the United States as military intelligence, the Comintern, and the United State Political Directorate (OGPU).
In her testimony before Congress in 1948, Bentley named scores of Americans working for Soviet intelligence. She described two rings of spies of federal employees in Washington including penetrations of OSS, the State Department, and other agencies. She also indicated that most of the members of the rings were CPUSA members.
Hede Massing
Hede Massing, an Austrian-born Soviet intelligence
operative who served in the U.S. in the 1930s, provided
another window into Soviet espionage in the United
States at that time. Massing was a member of an OGPU
apparatus and functioned under the direction of a Soviet
illegal officer based in New York. Massing was assigned
several duties, including that of a courier between the
United States and Europe. However, her most important
assignment was that of an agent recruiter, a task she
apparently carried out with great skill. Massing was
assigned targets for recruitment by her Soviet supervisor.
She used appeals to ideology, especially preying on the
strong anti-Nazi sentiments of New Deal liberals who
dominated the Washington scene of the Roosevelt
administration in the early 1930s. Massing left the
Soviet intelligence apparatus in 1938 after a period of
disillusionment with her Russian handlers. She provided
a detailed resume of her activities to the FBI in the late
1940's. As mentioned above, the FBI had virtually ceased investigations of subversive and “Communist” activity after 1924. Although J. Edgar Hoover never wavered in his distrust of American Communists or their Soviet comrades, he was aware that he had no political backing or support for launching a sustained campaign of investigation and scrutiny of the CPUSA or foreign communists and subversives in the United States.
This changed with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. With the international scene degrading, Roosevelt had become concerned with the threat of domestic subversion and fifth columnists in the United States Roosevelt made his first request for assistance on domestic subversion to Hoover in 1933. In 1936 the White House instructed the FBI to provide systematic intelligence about subversive activities in the United States, particularly Nazism and Communism. That request from Roosevelt to Hoover on August 25, 1936 was the basis for more than 40 years of investigative and proactive actions against the CPUSA and their Soviet allies. Hoover created in the mid-1930s a division for overseeing domestic intelligence that overshadowed any other peacetime effort in American history.
The United States now had a permanent, civilian investigative authority with responsibility for looking into treasonable actions by American citizens. This is significant, because prior to this a violation of law was necessary to trigger an FBI investigation. Now, under the new operating procedures, American citizens who had not violated any law could be subject to wiretapping, mail cover, and other investigative techniques by the FBI.
In a memorandum to then Attorney General Homer Cummings, Hoover wrote that the new General Intelligence Division was to “collect through investigative activity and other contact, and to correlate for ready reference information dealing with various forms of activities of either subversive or so-called intelligence type.” The Bureau already had on file identities of some 2,500 persons suspected of communist or Nazi activities, including espionage.
It is interesting to note that the financing of this expansion of the FBI’s span of activities was not reported to Congress, but put under the “cover” of a continuation of a request from the Secretary of State to investigate foreign-based subversion. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria, which heightened international tensions. In the United States, there arose demands from Congress and the public for increased vigilance against spies and saboteurs.
After Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Roosevelt declared a state of emergency. Hoover appeared before the House appropriations committee and told the public what the FBI had been doing quietly since 1936. He revealed that what was now called the General Intelligence Division had compiled extensive dossiers on “individuals, groups and organizations engaged in subversive activities that are possibly detrimental to the internal security of the US.”
This investigative mandate was somewhat ambiguous and could be interpreted broadly. In practice it meant the FBI could investigate groups who might come under subversive influence. In 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act making the advocacy of overthrowing the US Government a federal crime. It also outlawed groups or organizations that advocated such an overthrow, and membership in such a group was also made a crime. However, officials in the Justice Department did not approve of the law, and little use was made of it until after WWII.
After the invasion of the USSR by Germany in June 1941, the Soviets urged the CPUSA to agitate for US intervention in the war to save the USSR. This was a reversal of position for the American Communists, who had opposed any potential intervention after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was greeted with joy by the CPUSA, which foresaw salvation for the USSR, by the US declaration of war against Germany and Japan. From this point on, the American Communist Party engaged in what was known as the “united front” effort. This meant, at least publicly, dropping anti-American rhetoric and actions. Strikes in defense-related sectors were discouraged. However, Soviet espionage and the CPUSA’s role in supporting those activities never was suspended, even though the American Communist Party went through the charade of disbanding and renaming itself the Communist Political Association. Now, the motivation for participating in espionage was “fighting fascism.”
Since the resumption of the FBI’s domestic security program in the mid-1930s, the CPUSA was an obvious target, and the Bureau had infiltrated a number of informers and agents into the party. As a result, the FBI obtained a good view of the party’s internal structure and also its divisions and weaknesses, which could be exploited. With the advent of World War II and the FBI’s attention primarily on the Axis targets in the United States and Latin America, the focus of counterintelligence shifted away from the CPUSA. However, even during the war, the FBI maintained a watch on the party and Soviet espionage.
Work begun on decryption of Soviet intelligence cable traffic during World War II and eventually led to the identification of Soviet espionage agents and activities after the war.49 After the end of World War II, the alliance between the United States and USSR quickly faded.
The CPUSA reconstituted itself and resumed its strident pro-Moscow anti-US stance. The era of the united front was over. On Moscow’s orders, the head of the CPUSA, Earl Browder, was dumped. His crime had been to follow Moscow’s orders in 1941 and “disband” the party in a show of unity with the US Government. Now, that policy was in disrepute, and he had to go. The Soviet Union’s actions in Eastern Europe in establishing subservient puppet regimes increased tensions with the United States Communism was becoming a potent domestic political issue.
Gouzenko had revealed that the Soviets had been engaged in a sustained effort, involving scores of agents from different nations, in obtaining information about the atomic bomb. Gouzenko’s information led directly to the arrest and conviction of several Canadian and British citizens who had been working for the Soviets. But more importantly was the impact on public opinion of his revelations of Soviet spying and local communist party participation in that activity. Canadian public opinion was angered, particularly because Canada had been a close supportive ally of the USSR during the war, and a great deal of sympathy for the Soviet Union existed in Canada.
Now Gouzenko revealed that during the war years both the GRU and NKVD had been active in subverting Canadians. As naive as it seems now, Canadians were shocked that such intrigue had been practiced on their soil by a wartime ally. Overnight the popularity and prestige both of the USSR and the Canadian Communist party suffered. The information provided by Gouzenko was a windfall for the Canadian Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) security service as well as MI5 and the FBI, with whom Gouzenko information was shared. Gouzenko information about Soviet atomic espionage dovetailed with other indications from different sources about soviet atomic spying.
Despite the publicity generated by Gouzenko defection, and the HUAC testimony of Bentley/Chambers, by 1948 there had not been a conviction of an American for espionage on behalf of the USSR in any major spy case. This was especially frustrating for FBI agents working Soviet espionage, because they knew the identities of scores of Americans who had spied for the Russians. They simply lacked the evidence needed for prosecution.
All of that was to change dramatically when Soviet NKVD and GRU message traffic from the United States. to Moscow and back began to yield concrete results by 1948. FBI agent Robert Lamphere, working with Army Security Agency cryptologist Meredith Gardner, had made a major break in identifying members of what later became known as the Rosenberg ring.
After observing her pattern of meeting with her Soviet controller during trips ostensibly to visit her mother in New York, a plan to catch her “in the act” was planned by SA Lamphere and approved by Attorney General Tom Clark. A phony document was prepared and allowed to pass across her desk dealing with Soviet espionage. The assumption was that she would attempt to pass the document to Gubichev on her next trip to New York.
When Coplon traveled to New York, shortly after receiving the bogus report, her meeting with the Soviet was observed by massive FBI coverage. She was arrested, along with Gubichev, and charged with espionage. However, only she went to trial in the spring of 1949. Coplon was convicted; the evidence against her based primarily on the FBI produced document. The Soviet cable traffic, which had identified her, was not mentioned in court. Coplon’s attorneys successfully appealed for a second trial, and she was again convicted. However, the second conviction was thrown out on appeal based on the fact that a warrant had not been issued for Coplon’s arrest and the use of wiretaps in the investigation. She was not retried, and went free.
The investigation into Coplon’s background revealed a familiar trail. She had graduated from Barnard College, had been active in left wing causes, and had joined the Young Communist League, a CPUSA front organization. She was a graduate student in international relations, writing a thesis on Soviet economic planning. The VENONA message traffic dealing with Coplon had also mentioned two other female acquaintances of hers that she had recommended for recruitment. One of the women, Flora Wovschin, graduated from Barnard with Coplon and also was a member of the Young Communist League. Wovschin had married a Soviet Amtorg employee and moved with him to Russia. Wovshin’s parents then heard from her in 1949 that she had divorced. In cryptic language, she apparently hinted she was headed for China where the Communists had just triumphed. Later, the Wovshcins were informed that Flora had died. FBI agent Lamphere stated in his book, The FBI–KGB War , that he believed Flora Wovschin had died serving the communists in the Korean war.
On September 23, 1949, President Harry Truman announced that the USSR had exploded an atomic device. This was to have a drastic impact on US national security policy. US intelligence knew the Soviets were working on the bomb but believed the Russians were years behind the Americans. Immediately, the FBI attempted to determine to what extent had the Soviet’s success been attributable to espionage. Following the Coplon case, the Army Security Agency, the forerunner of NSA, made major strides in decrypting Soviet messages. Newly decrypted material indicated the presence of a British spy in the Manhattan project. The FBI, working with MI5, identified a German expatriate physicist named Klaus Fuchs 51 as a suspect.
A look at Fuch’s background indicated that he had been a member of the German Communist party and had fled Germany when the Nazis took over. Under questioning by MI5, Fuchs confessed to passing secrets of the Manhattan Project to Soviet intelligence while in the United States.
Several VENONA messages referred to the Rosenbergs but they were not used at their trial. Under interrogation, the Rosenbergs denied their involvement in espionage and their membership in the CPUSA. Greenglass described Julius Rosenberg as the hub of a wheel of Soviet espionage and his main contact and conduit to the Soviets other than Gold. It was through his brother-in-law, Julius, that Greenglass initiated his espionage.
At the time of the Rosenberg trial, the United States was fighting a Communist army in Korea, Eastern Europe had fallen under Soviet domination, and the United States had lost its nuclear monopoly. The Rosenbergs were seen as willing agents of a sinister worldwide conspiracy to destroy the United States. After nearly two years of unsuccessful appeals, the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. In the meantime, they had become a cause celebre for the Communist movement around the world. The Rosenbergs became martyr figures, victims of anti-Semitic and anti-Communist hysteria in the United States.
During the FBI’s interrogation of Harry Gold, he provided insight into the communist espionage apparatus in the United States going back nearly 15 years. Gold, like the Rosenbergs and Sobell, was the offspring of Russian Jewish immigrants. Although young Gold did not join the Communist Party, he, like his parents, was a strong believer in Socialism. Gold thought that “progressive” Russia was the one place in the world where there was no anti-Semitism.
Gold stated that his supervisor at an industrial solvent plant had recruited him into espionage for the Soviet Union in 1935 where Gold worked as a chemist. The supervisor, named Black, provided industrial secrets to the Soviets. He had recruited Gold on ideological and ethnic grounds, appealing to Gold’s Jewish identification, playing to an appeal that the USSR was the refuge for world Jewry. Black was a member of the CPUSA and pressured Gold to join.
Gold stated that the Soviets paid his tuition to study chemical engineering at Xavier and Cincinnati Universities in Ohio. He revealed the identities of several American spies and their Soviet handlers. One American named by Gold was Alford Dean Slack, also a chemist. Slack confessed to the FBI that he had provided military and industrial secrets to the Soviets. Slack was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 15 years in prison. However, Black was not prosecuted.
Another Soviet agent fingered by Gold was an industrial chemist named Abraham Brothman. Brothman had provided the Soviets with industrial secrets for years. Brothman and Gold had briefly been business associates and had fallen out. Gold had also been a courier for Brothman. Gold named others who were beyond the reach of the law having fled the United States when the arrests began. Names such as Barr 55 and Katz would haunt FBI investigators for years.
The Rosenberg executions brought to a close an era in US domestic security. The interlocking efforts of the Soviet intelligence services and the American Communist Party throughout the 1920s and 1930s had resulted in the establishment of significant penetrations into American Government and industry. The absence of a serious, sustained US counterintelligence presence from 1924–36 gave almost free reign to those forces. The total lack of public awareness of the problem exacerbated the situation.
This changed during the 1950s. The FBI’s counterintelligence program, born in the mid-1930s, began to mature and by 1950 had a real effect on the opposition. The FBI’s penetrations of the CPUSA, along with prosecutions under the Smith Act, inhibited the CPUSA. Finally, public awareness of the Soviet espionage threat increased dramatically with the Rosenberg and Coplon trials, the HUAC testimony of ex-Communists like Bentley and Chambers, and the trials of CPUSA members. The exposure of several Soviet espionage rings caused the Soviets to retrench and rethink their spy strategy in the United States.
In 1952 a directive was issued from KGB and GRU Headquarters in Moscow. Soviet intelligence services were directed to avoid utilization of local communist parties for espionage, unless specific permission was granted from Headquarters for such utilization. An era was over.
As the 1950s progressed, the CPUSA was battered by events. The revelations of Stalin’s crimes by Khrushchev and the invasion of Hungary in 1956 stunned the Communist faithful. The ability of the Soviets to recruit capable, motivated spies in the United States to work on the basis of ideology decreased dramatically. From the mid-1950s on, spying by American citizens became almost exclusively a mercenary vocation.
This development, along with the FBI’s increasing sophistication in countering Soviet intelligence, resulted in increased reliance on illegals in the United States. The capture of Rudolf Abel 56 in 1957 opened a window on these operations.
Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss
According to former KGB Col. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB assigned a comparatively low priority to gathering intelligence within the United States until the late 1930s. At that time, however, several influential underground CPUSA cells maintained varying degrees of contact with Comintern and Soviet intelligence officers. Gordievsky stated that the first main link between the party underground and the Soviet Service was Whittaker Chambers.
Whittaker Chambers exemplified the success the communist movement had in the United States during the 1930s in recruiting some of the best minds in a generation to the task of ultimately serving the Soviet Union. Chambers was a remarkable intellectual, translating Felix Salten’s novel, Bambi, from German. By his mid-twenties, Chambers was a committed Marxist and party member. Disillusionment with the Great Depression and the seeming inability of the democracies to remedy the situation, along with the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe, were among the factors driving Chambers and other like-minded idealists toward the Communist’s corner. Revelations about the savage repression of the Kulaks and real and imaginary opponents of Stalin were in the future.
Because of Chamber’s literary abilities, he was made editor of the party magazine, New Masses. Later, he was named to the editorial staff of the Party newspaper, The Daily Worker. At this time, 1930, Chambers was instructed by the party to cease all contacts with the overt party organization, including the newspaper where he was working. He was to join the party underground apparatus that existed parallel to the overt party.
Chambers then underwent an intensive tutorial in espionage tradecraft. In 1933, he was sent to Moscow for intelligence training and when he returned to the United States, his main controller was Sandor Goldberger, also known as “J. Peters,” a former Comintern apparatchik who then worked for the Fourth Department. Starting in 1934, Chambers was assigned duty as a courier, servicing Communist party cells in Washington and New York, which were providing classified and sensitive information that was passed to Soviet intelligence. Harold Ware, a Communist official in the Department of Agriculture, who died in an automobile accident in 1935, founded the Washington cell.
One important source handled by Chambers was Alger Hiss. Hiss was then a rising young star in the FDR administration, and he not only was a source of information, but in the future would be in a position to influence US policy.
In April 1938, Chambers deserted the party and its underground machine and broke all contact with Soviet intelligence. Close observation of the CPUSA and its leadership had soured him on what had seemed earlier to be the solution to the nation’s and the world’s problems. For a time he feared assassination by Soviet intelligence and hid.
He tried to alert the authorities to Communist penetration of the government, but was brushed aside. His first attempt came on 2 September 1939 when he agreed to tell his story to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, who was also President Roosevelt’s internal security advisor. Berle and others advised the President that his administration was penetrated by Soviet intelligence but Roosevelt appeared to dismiss the idea.
Even the FBI refused to take Chamber’s allegations seriously. It was not until 1945, after revelations by others of Communist subversion of the US Government, that Chambers was given credence. In 1945 he was exhaustively debriefed by the FBI and in 1948 was asked to testify before the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Chambers told HUAC that, when he made his first courier run to Washington in 1934, he discovered an underground spy apparatus already operating. Its leader was Nathan Witt, and the net had seven members, each of whom headed an underground cell of Communist agents. Ware had established this network, which was composed of persons who had first been recruited into Marxist study groups and then into the CPUSA. Each of these agents not only provided classified documents to Soviet intelligence, but was involved in political influence operations as well.
Chambers said that Hiss assisted in recruiting new people into the apparatus. One such successful recruitment, who worked in the State Department, was Noel Field. Hedda Massing recruited Field and his wife Herta. Knowing about the Fields’ fear about the advance of Nazi Germany, Massing played on that fear as the basis for their recruitment. The Comintern apparatus ordered Field to leave his position at the Department of State and join the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. During World War II, Field became affiliated with the Office of Strategic Services and was in direct contact with its Bern Chief, Allen Dulles.
Field remained loyal to the Soviets and maintained contact with Communist underground operatives in Nazi-occupied Europe on behalf of Soviet intelligence. He fled to Communist Hungary when his espionage activities became known to the West and spent years in Hungarian prison cells and torture chambers. He was freed from prison in 1961 but never lost his commitment to his Communist beliefs.57
During Chamber’s extensive testimony before Congress, he had not accused any members of the group of espionage. He was attempting to protect Alger Hiss and other members of the ring, whom he hoped, had also broken with the Soviets. Chambers told the Committee that the purpose of the entire Communist network was initially not for espionage but to infiltrate the government and influence government policy by placing Communists in key positions.
Hiss denied all charges, and after Chambers repeated his allegations against Hiss on a network news interview, Hiss sued for libel. Before that could happen, Hiss was indicted for perjury by a New York federal grand jury, which charged that he had lied under oath while testifying in an inquiry involving Soviet espionage. In that testimony, Hiss had stated that he had never known Whittaker Chambers or had any relationship with him. Hiss was convicted after a second trial. The most damning evidence against him was an old typewriter that he had once owned. FBI forensic experts testified that Hiss’s typewriter had produced classified documents, which had been in the possession of Chambers. These documents had been hidden on Chamber’s farm in a hollowed out pumpkin, thus the name “pumpkin papers.” Also damaging Hiss’s credibility was the testimony of a former maid in his household who stated that Chambers had been a frequent visitor to the Hiss home, and the two appeared to have been friends.
Hiss had many defenders, including President Truman, who referred to the case against Hiss as a “red herring.” Hiss never admitted his guilt and proclaimed his innocence throughout his life. Hiss died at age 92 on 15 November 1996 at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.
Other Soviet agents in the apparatus named by Chambers included:
John J. Abt –Department of Agriculture; Works Progress Administration; Senate Committee on Education and Labor; Justice Department.
Henry H. Collins – National Recovery Administration; Department of Agriculture.
Donald Hiss–State Department; Labor Department.
Charles Kramer–National Labor Relations Board; Office of Price Administration; Senate Subcommittee of War Mobilization.
Victor Perlo–Office of Price Administration; War Production Board; Treasury Department.
Lee Pressman–Department of Agriculture; Works Progress Administration; General Counsel of the Congress of Industrial Organizations; a leading figure in Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign.
Harold Ware–Department of Agriculture.
Nathan Witt–Department of Agriculture; National Labor Relations Board.58
Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Bentley, like Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, spied for the Soviet Union out of ideological conviction. Like Hiss and Chambers, Bentley was well educated (Vassar) and a native-born American. She became a convert to Communism during the heyday of Communist influence (and Soviet intelligence success) during the 1930s. A visit to Europe in the mid-1930s had filled Bentley with a dread of Nazism, and she became convinced, with the help of a Communist friend, that only the Soviet Union was standing up to the Nazis. She joined the party and in 1938 was assigned to the party underground. Also like Chambers, her primary duty was as a courier, servicing Soviet spy rings in Washington and New York.
Bentley’s handler was Jacob Golos, (real name: Jacob Rasin). The Russian born Golos was a high-ranking member of the American Communist Party, a former Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet secret police operative in the USSR. Golos illustrated the intimate relationship between Soviet intelligence and the American Communist party. The word intimate also describes the relationship between Golos and Bentley, for the two had become lovers.
By the mid-1940s, Bentley was becoming disillusioned with her new faith. This was accelerated by the death of Golos, in 1943, from a heart attack. His successors were a parade of boorish goons. She turned herself into the FBI in 1945 and gave up the names of scores of Americans who had spied for the Kremlin, including Alger Hiss. In 1948, Bentley appeared before the HUAC with her story of Communist penetration of the USG. Her testimony was a huge story, commanding wide interest, and contributed to the growing distrust of the USSR and their American adherents.
The Nathan Silverman Network consisted of the following members:
Nathan Silverman: Director of the Labor Division, Farm Security Administration; Board of Economic Warfare.
Solomon Adler: Treasury Department.
Norman Bursler: Department of Justice.
Frank Coe: Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, Treasury; Special Assistant to the United States Ambassador in London; Assistant to the Executive Director, Board of Economic Warfare; Assistant Administrator, Foreign Economic Administration.
Lauchlin Currie: Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt; Deputy Administrator of Foreign Economic Administration.
Bela (William) Gold: Assistant Head of Program Surveys, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Agriculture Department; Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Economic Programs in Foreign Economic Administration.
Mrs. Bela Gold: House Select Committee on Interstate Migration; Bureau of Employment Security; Division of Monetary Research, Treasury.
Abraham Silverman: Director, Bureau of Research and Information Services, US Railroad Retirement Board; Economic Adviser and Chief of Analysis and Plans, Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Material and Services.
William Taylor: Treasury Department.
William L. Ullmann: Division of Monetary Research, Treasury; Material and Services Division, Air Corps Headquarters, Pentagon.
The following were members of the Victor Perlo Network:
Victor Perlo: Head of branch in Research Section, Office of Price Administration; War Production Board; Monetary Research, Treasury.
Edward J. Fitzgerald: War Production Board (WPD).
Harold Glasser: Treasury Department; War Production Board; Advisor on North African Affairs Committee in Algiers, North Africa.
Charles Kramer (aka: Charles Krevitsky): National Labor Relations Board; Office of Price Administration; Economist with Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization.
Harry Magdoff: Statistical Division of WPB and Office of Emergency Management; Bureau of Research and Statistics, WTB; Tools Division, War Production Board; Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Commerce Department.
Alan Rosenberg: Foreign Economic Administration.
Donald Niven Wheeler: Office of Strategic Services.59
On 3 December 1963, Bentley died. During the last five years of her life she taught English at an all-girls school in Middletown, Connecticut.
Indictment of Communists
January 1949
In the 1920s, the US and state governments attempted to penalize Communists for alleged subversive activities. Many states enacted laws denying the Communists the right to hold public office or to obtain public jobs. In the 1940s, another attempt was made using the same arguments, but several Supreme Court decisions decided that simple membership in or an affiliation with the party was not, in itself, evidence of an intent to overthrow the US Government by force. To clarify the vague state of affairs, Attorney General Clark resolved, in 1949, to indict the Communist Party leaders for conspiracy under the Alien Registration Act of 1940. Following is the text of the indictment.
The grand jury charges:
1. That from on or about April 1, 1945, and continuously thereafter up to and including the date of the filing of this indictment, in the Southern District of New York, and elsewhere, William Z. Foster, Eugene Dennis, also known as Francis X. Waldron Jr., John B. Williamson, Jacob Stachel, Robert G. Thompson, Benjamin J. Davis Jr., Henry Winston, John Gates, also known as Israel Regenstreif, Irving Potash, Gilbert Green, Carl Winter, and Gus Hall, also known as Arno Gust Halberg, the defendants herein, unlawfully, willingly, and knowingly did conspire with each other, and with divers other persons to the grand jurors unknown, to organize as the Communist Party of the United States of America a society, group, and assembly of persons who teach and advocate the overthrow and destruction of the Government of the United States by force and violence, and knowingly and willfully to advocate and teach the duty and necessity of overthrowing and destroying the Government by force and violence, which said acts are prohibited by Section 2 of the Act of June 28, 1940 (Section 10, Title 18, United States Code, commonly known as the Smith Act.
2. It was part of said conspiracy that said defendants would convene, in the Southern District of New York, a meeting of the National Board of the Communist Political Association on or about June 2, 1945, to adopt a draft resolution for the purpose of bringing about the dissolution of the Communist Political Association, and for the purpose of organizing as the Communist party of the United States of America a society, group, and assembly of persons dedicated to the Marxist/Leninist principles of the overthrow and destruction of the United States by force and violence.
3. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would thereafter convene in the Southern district of New York, a meeting of the National Committee of the Communist Political Association on or about June 18, 1945, to amend and adopt said draft resolution.
4. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would thereafter cause to be convened, in the Southern district of New York, a special national convention of the Communist Political Association on or about July 26, 1945, for the purpose of considering and acting upon said resolution as amended.
5. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would induce the delegates to said national convention to dissolve the Communist Political Association.
6. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would bring about the organization of the Communist Party of the United States as a society, group, and assembly of persons to teach and advocate the overthrow and destruction of the Government of the United States by force and violence, and would cause said convention to adopt a constitution basing said party upon the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
7. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would bring about the election of officers and the election of a National Committee of said party, and be elected as officers and as members of said National Committee and the National Board of said committee, and in such capacities said defendants would assume leadership of said party and responsibility for its polices and activities, and would meet from time to time to formulate, supervise, and carry out the policies and activities of said party.
8. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would cause to be organized clubs, and district and state units of said party, and would recruit and encourage the recruitment of members of said party.
9. It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would publish and circulate, and cause to be published and circulated, books, articles, magazines, and newspapers advocating the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
10.It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would conduct, and cause to be conducted, schools and classes for the study of the principles of Marxism-Leninism, in which would be taught and advocated the duty and necessity of overthrowing and destroying the Government of the United States by force and violence.
In violation of Sections 3 and 5 of the Act of June 28, 1940 (Sections 11 and 13, Title 18, United States Code), commonly known as the Smith Act.
The White House
Washington,
D.C., July 24, 1950
INFORMATION RELATING TO DOMESTIC
ESPIONAGE, SABOTAGE, SUBVERSIVE
ACTIVITIES AND RELATED MATTERS On September 6, 1939 and January 8, 1943 a Presidential Directive was issued providing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice should take charge of investigative work in matters relating to espionage, sabotage, subversive activities and related matters. It was pointed out that the investigations must be conducted in a comprehensive manner on a National basis and all information carefully sifted out and correlated in order to avoid confusion. I should like to again call the attention of all Enforcement Officers, both Federal and State, to the request that they report all information in the above enumerated fields promptly to the nearest Field Representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is charged with the responsibility of correlating this material and referring matters which are under the jurisdiction of any other Federal Agency with responsibilities in this field to the appropriate agency.
I suggest that all patriotic organizations and individuals likewise report all such information relating to espionage, sabotage and subversive activities to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in this same manner.
Harry Truman
Klaus Fuchs
Although the security surrounding Western work in atomic energy had supposedly made the development and production of the atomic bomb one of world’s best kept secrets prior to the first explosions in the summer of 1945, it was discovered in 1949 that through the combined efforts of Dr. Klaus Fuchs, “a mild, unobtrusive, pleasant little man who never like politics,” and his fellow agents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, and Harry Gold, the Russians had obtained the final drawings of the atomic bomb before the first test bomb was exploded at Los Alamos in July 1945.
According to Klaus Fuchs’ own statement, when he was first brought into the British program during the early 1940s and learned the purpose of the work, he decided to inform the USSR. He contacted the office of the Soviet Military Attaché in London and enbarked upon his career of professional espionage agent for the Soviet Union. With all the classic trappings of clandestine activity, Fuchs collected the information at his disposal, passed it on to secret couriers, and met his Soviet principals in Britain and in various parts of the United States. He gave the Soviet Union extensive data regarding the Oak Ridge diffusion process, weapons work at Los Alamos, British activities at Harwell, and other projects located in the United States, Britain, and Canada.
After serving 10 years in prison in the United Kingdom for espionage, Dr. Fuchs flew to East Germany, where he was appointed deputy director of the East German nuclear research station near Dresden. When asked by the press there if he would repeat his acts of espionage if given a second chance he replied, “Whatever helps the Soviet Union is right.”
Klaus Fuchs died in 1988.
The Rosenbergs
The only Americans ever to be executed for espionage
were the husband and wife couple, Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg. Julius was the son of first-generation
Russian-Jewish immigrants and grew up in the lower
east side of New York. As many of his generation and
background, Rosenberg gravitated to the left at an early
age and was a member of Communist youth organizations before joining the American Communist Party.
He also had a technical and scientific bent, graduating
from the City College of New York with a BS degree in
engineering. From 1940 to March 1945, Julius Rosenberg worked on classified projects for the Army Signal Corps in New York City, Philadelphia, and Newark, New Jersey. The Army learned of his membership in the Communist Party, and he was dismissed from the Signal Corps. He worked briefly for Emerson Radio and then had his own business in New York City.
Rosenberg first came to the attention of the FBI regarding Soviet espionage when David Greenglass named him as a co-conspirator in passing atom bomb information to the Soviets. Greenglass himself was identified by longtime Soviet spy and courier Harry Gold, who had also been part of the atom bomb spy ring. According to Greenglass, Rosenberg, who was his brother-in-law, persuaded him to provide information in the form of drawings and descriptions of his work at the Los Alamos lab where the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb, was under way. Greenglass, an Army NCO, was stationed at the Los Alamos lab and worked as a machinist on bomb components. According to Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg was not only aware of her husband’s activities, but helped type material procured by Greenglass.
The Rosenbergs were both charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, based on 1917 espionage statute. Their trial began March 6, 1951 and lasted until March 29, when they were found guilty after one day of jury deliberation. The prosecution’s case relied heavily on Greenglass’s testimony. The testimony of Greenglass revealed the following information.
Greenglass entered the US Army in April 1943, and, in July, 1944, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He did not know at the time what the project was but received security lectures about his duties and was told it was a secret project. Two weeks later, after being told his work was secret, he was assigned to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and reported there in August 1944.
In a VENONA transcript of a KGB New York to Moscow message, No. 1340 on 21 September 1944 states:
LIBERAL 60 recommended the wife of his wife’s brother, Ruth Greenglass, with a safe flat in view. She is 21 years old, an American citizen, a GYMNAST 61 since 1942. She lives on Stanton Street. LIBERAL and his wife recommend her as an intelligent and clever girl.
(15 groups unrecoverable)
(Ruth) learned that her husband was called up by the army but he was not sent to the front. He is a mechanical engineer and is now working at the ENORMOZ 62 David Greenglass plant at Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Greenglass went on to say that in November, 1944, Ruth Greenglass, who came to Albuquerque to visit him, told him that Julius Rosenberg advised her that her husband was working on the atom bomb. Greenglass stated he did not know that he was working on such a project. He stated that he worked in a group at Los Alamos under a professor of a New England university and described to the court the duties of his shop at Los Alamos. He stated that while at Los Alamos, he learned the identify of various noted physicists and their cover names.
Greenglass testified that his sister, Ethel, and Julius Rosenberg used to speak to him about the merits of the Russian Government. Greenglass stated that when his wife, Ruth, came to visit him at Los Alamos on November 29, 1944, she told David that Julius Rosenberg had invited her to dinner at the Rosenberg home in New York City. At this dinner, Ethel told Ruth that she must have noticed that Ethel had not been engaging in Communist activities and that they were not buying the Daily Worker any more or attending club meetings because Julius finally was doing what he always wanted to do, namely, giving information to the Soviet Union.
After Ethel informed Ruth that David was working on the atom bomb project at Los Alamos and said that she and Julius wanted him to give information concerning the bomb, Ruth told the Rosenbergs that she didn’t think it was a good idea and declined to convey their requests to David but Ethel and Julius remarked that she should at least tell David about it and see if he would help. In this conversation Julius pointed out to Ruth that Russia was an ally and deserved the information and that Russia was not getting all the information that was due her.
From a VENONA transcript of a KGB New York to Moscow message, number 1600 on 14 November 1944:
OSA 63 has agreed to cooperate with us in drawing in ShMEL 64 (henceforth KALIBR–see your no 5258) with a view to ENORMOZ. On summons from KALIBR she is leaving on 22 November for the Camp 2 area. KALIBR will have a week’s leave. Before OSA’s departure LIBERAL will carry out two briefings.
David said at first he refused to have anything to do with the request of the Rosenbergs but on the next day agreed to furnish any available data. Ruth then asked David specific questions about the Manhattan Project, and David supplied her that information.
From a VENONA transcript of a KGB New York to Moscow message, number 1773, on 16 December 1944:
OSA has returned from a trip to see KALIBR. KALIBR expressed his readiness to help in throwing light on the work being carried out at Camp-2 and stated that he had already given thought to this question earlier. KALIBR said that the authorities of the Camp were openly taking all precautionary measures to prevent information about ENORMOZ falling into Russian hands. This is causing serious discontent among the progressive (workers)
17 groups unrecoverable
The middle of January KALIBR will be in TYRE.65 LIBERAL referring to his ignorance of the problem, expresses the wish that our man should meet KALIBR and interrogate him personally. He asserts that KALIBR would be very glad of such a meeting. Do you consider such a meeting advisable? If not, I shall be obliged to draw up a questionnaire and pass it to LIBERAL. Report whether you have any questions of priority to us. KALIBR also reports: OPPENHEIMER 66 from California and KISTIAKOWSKI 67 (MLAD’s 68 report mentioned the latter) are at present working at the Camp. The latter is doing research on the thermodynamic process. Advise whether you have any information on these two professors.
In January, 1945, David arrived in New York City on furlough, and about two days later Julius Rosenberg came to David’s apartment to ask him for information on the A-bomb. He requested David to write up the information and stated that he would pick it up the following morning.
That evening Greenglass wrote up the information he had. The next morning he gave this material to Rosenberg, together with a list of the scientists at Los Alamos and the names of possible recruits working there who might be sympathetic to Communism and possibly furnish information to Russia.
Greenglass further stated that at the time he turned this material over to Rosenberg, Ruth Greenglass remarked that David’s handwriting was bad and would need interpretation. Rosenberg answered that it was nothing to worry about because Ethel, his wife, would retype the information.
A day or two later, David and his wife went to the Rosenberg apartment for dinner where they were introduced to a woman friend of the Rosenbergs. After she left, Julius told the Greenglasses that he thought this person would come to see David to receive information on the atom bomb. They discussed a tentative plan to the effect that Ruth Greenglass would move to Albuquerque, where this woman would come to see her and meet Ruth in a movie theater in Denver, Colorado, where they would exchange purses. Ruth’s purse would contain the information from David concerning Los Alamos.
During this discussion the point was raised as to how an identification might be effected. It was agreed that Ruth would use a sidepiece of a Jell-O box to identify the person who would come to see her. Julius held the matching piece of the Jell-O box. David made the suggestion that the meeting be held in front of a certain grocery store in Albuquerque. The date of the meeting was left in abeyance depending upon the time that Ruth would depart for Albuquerque.
Also during this visit, Julius said he would like to have David meet a Russian with whom he could discuss the project on which David was working. A few nights later, an appointment was made by Julius for David to meet a Russian on First Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets, New York City. David drove up to the appointed meeting place and parked the car near a saloon in a dark street. Julius came up to the car, looked in, and went away, and came back with a man who got into David’s car. Julius stayed on the street, and David drove away with the unknown man. The man asked David about some scientific information and, after driving around for a while, David returned to the original meeting place and let the man out. Rosenberg who was standing on the street then joined this man, and David observed them leaving together.
In the spring of 1945, Ruth Greenglass came to Albuquerque to live, and David would visit her apartment on weekends. On the first Sunday of June 1945, a man, subsequently identified by David as Harry Gold, came to visit him and asked if David’s name was Greenglass. David said, “Yes.” Gold then said, “Julius sent me.” David went to his wife’s wallet and took out the piece of Jell-O box and compared it with a piece offered by Gold. They matched.
When Gold asked David if he had any information, Greenglass said he did but would have to write it up. Gold then left, stating he would be back. David immediately started to work on a report, made sketches of experiments, wrote up descriptive material regarding them, and prepared a list of possible recruits for espionage. Later that day, Gold returned and David gave him the reports. In return, Gold gave David an envelope containing $500 that he turned over to Ruth.
In September 1945, David Greenglass returned to New York City with his wife, Ruth, on furlough. The next morning Julius Rosenberg came to the Greenglass apartment and asked what David had for him. David informed Julius that he had obtained a pretty good description of the atom bomb.
At Julius’ request, he drew up a sketch of the atom bomb, prepared descriptive material on it, drew up a list of scientists and possible recruits for Soviet espionage, and thereafter delivered this material to the Rosenberg apartment. He stated that at the time he turned this material over to Rosenberg, Ethel and Ruth were present. Rosenberg remarked that the information was very good, and it should be typed immediately. The information was then prepared on a portable typewriter in the Rosenberg apartment by Ethel.
While Ethel was typing the report, Julius mentioned to David that he (Julius) had stolen a proximity fuse while working at a radio corporation and turned it over to the Russians.
After the report was typed, the handwritten notes were burned in a frying pan by Julius, flushed down a drain, and Julius gave David $200. Julius discussed with David the idea of David staying at Los Alamos after he was discharged from the Army so that he could continue to get information, but David declined.
From 1946 to 1949, David was in business with Julius, and during this period, Julius told David that he had people going to school and that he had people in upstate New York and Ohio giving him information for the Russians.
Late in 1947, Julius told David about a sky platform project and mentioned he had received this information from “one of the boys.” Rosenberg described the sky platform as a large vessel, which could be suspended at a point in space where the gravity was low and that the vessel would travel around the earth like a satellite. Rosenberg also advised David that he had a way of communicating with the Russians by putting material or messages in the alcove of a theater and that he had received from one of his contacts the mathematics relating to atomic energy for airplanes.
Greenglass testified that Rosenberg claimed to have received a citation and a watch from the Russians. Greenglass also testified that Rosenberg claimed to have received a console table from the Russians, which he used for photographic purposes.
In late February 1950, a few days after the news of the arrest of Dr. Fuchs in England was published, Julius came to David’s home and asked David to go for a walk. During this walk Rosenberg spoke of Fuchs and mentioned that the man who had come to see David in Albuquerque was also a contact of Fuchs.
From the VENONA transcripts, a KGB New York to Moscow message, number 195, on 9 February 1944 describes the first meeting between Harry Gold and Klaus Fuchs.
On 5th February a meeting took place between GUS 69 and REST.70 Beforehand GUS was given a detailed briefing by us. REST greeted him pleasantly but was rather cautious at first (1 group unrecovered) the discussion GUS satisfied himself that REST was aware of whom he was working with. R. arrived in the COUNTRY 71 in September as a member of the ISLAND 72 mission on ENORMOZ. According to him the work on ENORMOZ in the COUNTRY is being carried out under the direct control of the COUNTRY’s army represented by General Somerville and Stimson; at the head of the group of ISLANDERS is a Labor member of Parliament, Ben Smith.73
The whole operation amounts to the working out of the process for the separation of isotopes of ENORMOZ. The work is proceeding in two directions: the electron method developed by Lawrence (71 groups unrecoverable) separation of isotopes by the combined method, using the diffusion method for preliminary and the electron for final separation. The work (46 groups unrecoverable) 18th February, we shall report the results.
Julius stated that David would have to leave the country. When David answered that he needed money, Rosenberg said he would get the money from the Russians.
In April 1950, Rosenberg again told David he would have to leave the country, and, about May 23, 1950, Rosenberg came to the Greenglass apartment with a newspaper containing a picture of Harry Gold and the story of Gold’s arrest. Rosenberg said, “This is the man who saw you in Albuquerque.” Julius gave David $1,000 and stated he would come back later with $6,000 more for him to use in leaving the country; also that Greenglass would have to get a Mexican tourist card. Rosenberg said he went to see a doctor who told him that a doctor’s letter stating David was inoculated for smallpox would also be needed, as well as passport photos. He then gave Greenglass a form letter and instructions to memorize for use in Mexico City.
Upon David’s arrival in Mexico City, he was to send this letter to the Soviet embassy and sign it “I. Jackson.” Three days after he sent this letter, David was to go to the Plaza de la Colon at 5 p.m. and look at the Statue of Columbus there, carrying in his hand a guide to the city with his middle finger between the pages of the guide, and wait until some man came to him. David would then state, “That is a magnificent statue” and advise the man that he (David) was from Oklahoma. The man would then answer, “Oh there are more beautiful statues in Paris,” and would give Greenglass a passport and additional money. David was to go to Vera Cruz and then go to Sweden or Switzerland. If he went to Sweden, he was to send the same type of letter to the Soviet ambassador or his secretary and sign the letter “I. Jackson.” Three days later, David was to go to the statue of Linnaeus in Stockholm at 5 p.m., where a man would approach him. Greenglass would mention that the statue was beautiful and the man would answer, “There are much more beautiful ones in Paris.” The man would then give David the means of transportation to Czechoslovakia, where upon arrival he was to write to the Soviet ambassador advising him of his presence.
Julius further advised Greenglass that he himself would have to leave the country because he had known Jacob Golos 74 and that Elizabeth Bentley probably knew him also.
Elizabeth Bentley was a member of the Communist underground, who served as a courier to collect information from Russian agents in the United States. Bentley stated that during her association with Golos, she became aware of the fact that Golos knew an engineer named “Julius.” In the fall of 1942, she accompanied Golos to Knickerbocker Village but remained in his automobile. She saw Golos conferring with “Julius” on the street but at some distance. From conversations with Golos, she learned that Julius lived in Knickerbocker Village. She also stated that she had telephone conversations with “Julius” from the fall of 1942 to November 1943.
Bentley, in interviews with FBI agents, had described Julius as being 5’10” or 11” tall, slim, and wearing glasses. She had also advised that he was the leader of a Communist cell of engineers, which was turned over to Golos for Soviet espionage purposes and that Julius was to be the contact between Golos and the group. Golos believed this cell of engineers was capable of development.
Investigation by the FBI disclosed that Julius Rosenberg resided in a development known as Knickerbocker Village, was 5’10” tall, slim, and wore glasses. Bentley was unable to make a positive identification of Julius.
Sometime later David and his family went to a photography shop and had six sets of passport photos taken. On Memorial Day, Greenglass gave Rosenberg five sets of these photos. Later Rosenberg again visited David, whom he gave $4,000 in $10 and $20 bills wrapped in brown paper, requesting Greenglass to go for a walk with him and repeat the memorized instructions. David gave the $4,000 to his brother-in law for safekeeping.
Also testifying was Harry Gold, who stated that Soviet intelligence was the ultimate recipient of the material. The Rosenbergs denied all charges, but were hurt by having to plead the fifth amendment when questioned about their membership in the Communist Party. The two were sentenced to death and executed June 19, 1953.
Based on the information supplied by Gold, Greenglass was arrested on June 16, 1950, and arraigned on the same date in New York. He was remanded to the custody of a US Marshal in default of $100,000 bail. On October 10, 1950, a superseding indictment was returned by a Federal Grand jury in the Southern District of New York charging Morton Sobell, Ethel Rosenberg, Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass and Anatoli Yakovlev 75 with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Statutes. On October 18, 1950, he pleaded guilty to the superseding indictment. The presiding judge accepted the plea of Greenglass and bail of $100,000 was continued.
On January 31, 1951, a Federal Grand jury in the Southern District of New York, handed down a second superseding indictment charging Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Anatoli Yakovlev, Morton Sobell, and David Greenglass with conspiracy to commit espionage between June 6, 1944, and June 16, 1950. The indictment was similar in all respects to the previous superseding indictment with the exception that it changed the beginning of the conspiracy from November 1944 to June 1944.
David Greenglass received a 15-year prison sentence after his guilty plea. He was released from Federal prison on November 16, 1960 and had to report periodically to a parole officer until November, 1965.
Gen. Mikhail Dokuchayev, who was a KGB officer from 1951 to 1989, confirms in his new book that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg worked for the KGB. The general gives the Rosenbergs credit for averting a nuclear disaster. “The Rosenbergs were a New York couple convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed in 1953. They were integral parts of a Soviet spying effort directed towards obtaining the secrets of the atomic bomb from the United States.”
The Rosenberg Spy Apparatus
Morton Sobell
Morton Sobell was born April 11, 1917, in New York City, the son of Russian-born immigrants. He married Helen Levitov Gurewitz at Arlington, Virginia, on March 10, 1945.
Sobell was a classmate of Julius Rosenberg and Max Elitcher in college and graduated from this college in June, 1933, with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. Subsequently, he attended a graduate school at a university in Michigan in 1941 and 1942 and received a master’s degree in electrical engineering.
Sobell was employed during the summers of 1934 through 1938 as a maintenance man at Camp Unity, Wingdale, New York, reportedly a Communist controlled camp. On January 27, 1939, he secured the position of junior electrical engineer with the Bureau of Naval Ordnance, Washington, DC, and was promoted to the position of assistant electrical engineer. He resigned from this position in October 1940 to further his studies. While employed at an electric company in New York State, he had access to classified material, including that on fire control radar. After resigning from this company, he secured employment as an electrical engineer with an instrument company in New York City where he had access to secret data. He remained in this position until June 16, 1950, when he failed to appear for work. It is noted that on this date the FBI arrested David Greenglass. On June 22, 1950, Sobell and his family fled to Mexico. He was thereafter located in Mexico City and on August 18, 1950, was taken into custody by FBI agents in Laredo, Texas, after his deportation from Mexico by the Mexican authorities.
Max Elitcher, an admitted Communist, advised that during the period he roomed with Morton Sobell in Washington, DC, he was induced by Sobell to join the Communist party. He stated that this occurred in 1939 and that Sobell had informed him that he, Sobell, was a member of the Communist Party.
During the same period, Sobell was reported to have been active in the American Peace Mobilization and the American Youth Congress, both of which organizations have been cited by the Attorney General as coming within the purview of Executive Order 10450. It was ascertained that Sobell appeared on the active indices of the American Peace Mobilization and was listed in the indices of the American Youth Congress as a delegate to that body from the Washington Committee for Democratic Action.
A resident at an apartment building located in Washington, DC, reported that Sobell and Max Elitcher were among the tenants of the building who attended meetings in the apartment of one of the tenants during 1940 and 1941. This individual was of the opinion that these were Communist meetings.
The New York Office of the FBI located a Communist Party nominating petition, which was filed in the name of one Morton Sobell, and the signature on this petition was identified by the FBI Laboratory as being in the handwriting of Morton Sobell.
A check at the instrument company where Sobell was employed reflected that Sobell failed to report for work after June 16, 1950. The company received a letter from Sobell on or about July 3, 1950, wherein he advised that he needed a rest and was going to take a few weeks off to recuperate. A neighborhood investigation by the FBI developed that Sobell, his wife, and their two children were last seen at their home on June 22, 1950, and that they had left hurriedly without advising anyone of their intended departure.
Through an airlines company at LaGuardia Field, it was determined that Sobell and his family had departed for Mexico City on June 22, 1950. It was further determined that round trip excursion tickets for transportation from New York City to Mexico and return were purchased on June 21, 1950, in the name of Morton Sobell.
Further investigation of Sobell’s flight to Mexico reflected that he had communicated through the mail with relatives through the utilization of a certain man as a mail drop. This man was interviewed and reluctantly admitted receiving letters from Sobell with instructions to forward these letters to Sobell’s relatives. This admission was made after the individual was advised that the FBI Laboratory had identified handwriting on the envelopes used in forwarding letters to Sobell’s relatives as being in his handwriting.
In August, 1950, the Mexican authorities took Sobell into custody and deported him as an undesirable alien. On the early morning of August 18, 1950, FBI agents apprehended Sobell at the International Bridge, Laredo, Texas.
On 10 October 1950, a superseding indictment was returned by a Federal Grand jury in the Southern District of New York charging Morton Sobell, Ethel Rosenberg, Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass, and Anatoli Yakovlev 76 with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Statutes. On 18 October 1950, he pleaded guilty to the superseding indictment. The presiding judge accepted the plea of Greenglass and bail of $100,000 was continued.
On 31 January 1951, a Federal Grand jury in the Southern District of New York handed down a second superseding indictment charging Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Anatoli Yakovlev, Morton Sobell, and David Greenglass with conspiracy to commit espionage between 6 June 1944 and 16 June 1950. The indictment was similar in all respects to the previous superseding indictment with the exception that it changed the beginning of the conspiracy from November 1944, to June 1944.
On 5 February 1951, Morton Sobell made an application to a US District Judge, Southern District of New York, for a writ of habeas corpus based on the allegation that the indictment of 31 January 1951, was vague and that the incrimination of Sobell was a violation of his constitutional rights. The application was denied.
On 28 March 1951, counsel for both sides summed up their case to the jury, and, on 29 March 1951, the jury rendered a verdict of guilty against Morton Sobell. On 5 April 1951, Morton Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Theodore Alvin Hall
The Washington Post identified Theodore Alvin Hall as an atomic bomb spy codenamed, “Mlad,” in an article in its 25 February 1996 edition. The article used information from deciphered KGB messages released by the National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA program, actually started by the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service on 1 February 1943, was a small, highly secret program, codenamed VENONA. The object of the VENONA program was to examine, and possibly exploit, encrypted Soviet diplomatic communications.
In one of the encrypted messages, dated 12 November 1944, Hall is identified by name and says that a KGB officer visited Hall, who provided information on Los Alamos and its key personnel to the officer. The message read:
BEK 77 visited Theodore Hall, 19 years old, the son of a furrier. He is a graduate of Harvard University. As a talented physicists he was taken for government work. He was a (member of the Young Communist League) and conducted work in the Steel Founders Union. According to BEK’s account HALL has an exceptionally keen mind and a broad outlook, and is politically developed. At the present time, H. is in charge of a group at “CAMP-2”.78 H. handed over to BEK a report about the CAMP and named key personnel employed on ENORMOZ.79 He decided to do this on the advice of his colleague Saville SAX, a GYMNAST 80 living in TYRE.81 SAX’s mother is a FELLOW COUNTRYMAN 82 and works for RUSSIAN WAR RELIEF. With the aim of hastening a meeting with a competent person, H. on them following day sent a copy of the report to S. to the PLANT.83 ALEKSEJ 84 received it. H had to leave for CAMP-2 in two days time. ALEKSEJ was compelled to make a decision quickly. Jointly with MAJ 85 he gave BEK consent to feel out H., to assure him that everything was in order and to arrange liaison with him. BEK met S (1 group garbled) our automobile. We consider it expedient to maintain liaison with H. (1 group unidentified) through S. and not bring in anybody else. MAJ has no objections to this. We shall send the details by post.
In another VENONA message, from KGB New York to Moscow, number 94, on 23 January 1945, it appears the KGB is running an investigative check on Hall and Sax:
The checking of STAR 86 and MLAD we entrusted to ECHO 87 a month ago, the result of the check we have not yet had. We’re checking STAR’s mother also....
BEK is extremely displeased over the handing over of STAR to ALEKSEJ. He gives a favorable report of him. Aleksej has met STAR twice but cannot yet give a final judgement. MLAD has been seen by no one except BEK. (On the 8th of January) MLAD sent a letter but never (made arrangements) for calling to a meeting. He has been called into the army and left to work in the camp.88
STAR intends to renew his studies at Harvard University at the end of February.
to be continued...
2 comments:
MY PERONAL BELIEVE IS THAT, CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, COMMUNISM, FASCISM IDIOLOGIES WERE DISIGNED AND CREATED BY JEWS, FOR THEIR OWN PERSONAL BENEFIT AS A TRIBE FROM HELL, WHO BY THEIR WEAKNESS OF CHARACTER HAVE TO USE DECPTION, TO NOT ONLY CONQUER THE TRUST OF INDIVIDUALS, BUT OF COMPLETE NATIONS,
CAPITALISM AS USED BY THE JEWS FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT, IS BASED ON SELF SERVING CORPORATE CAPITALISM IN WHICH THE SYSTEM IS USED TO EXPRESS THE IDEA OF THE CREATION OF WEALTH, BY HARD WORKING TO THE NON JEW MASSESS, IN ORDER TO GIVE THEM THE ILLUSION, THAT THEY TOO CAN HIT THE JOCK POT IF THEY TRY HARD ENOUGH.BUT NEVER ARE THEY PERMIED TO GET PASS THE GLASS CILING OF MID CLASS, UNLESS BY CHANCE, LUCK, OR GOD'S HELP THEY DO THE JEWS HAVE ALREADY INSTALED LAWS THAT WILL BRING DOWN ECONOMICALY THE NON JEW BY THE TIME OF THEIR RETIRMENT, AND IN MANY CASES WHERE THE NONJEW HAS NO FAMILY, TO HELP AND SUPPORT THE ELDERLY NON JEW TO KEEP WHAT WITH HIS/HER HARD WORK AND SWEAT, HAVE ACUMULATED THROUGH THEIR LIFE TIME, ENDING AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ECONOMIC BASMENT. IN MANY CASES EVEB LOOSING THEIR ALREADY PAID OFF HOMES BECAUSE OF THEIR INAVILITY TO PAY BASED ON A MISSER SOCIAL SECURITY CHECK CAN NOT AFFORD TO PAY PROPERTY TAXES, AS THE TAXES ARE BASED ON VALUE OF HOME THAT THE COUNTY THE INDIVIDUAL NON JEW MAY LIVE AT THE TIME, AND STATEOF THE UNION WHERE A JEW BURUCRAT CAN INFLATE THE VALUE OF THE PROPERTY ACORDING TO THE NEED OF THE COUNTY TO INCREASE TAXES THE HIGHER VALUE OF THE NOME APRAISESAL THE HIGHER THE TAXES,AND WHAT EVER ELSE OF VALUE THE NON JEW HAS.
SOCIALISM IS THE SYSTEM THAT CAN NEVER EXIST WITHOUT CAPITALISM, BECAUSE OTHERWISE THERE WOULD BE NO PLACE TO GET THE MONEY, THAT ONLY A CAPITALIST SYSTEM CAN CREATE BASED ON CREITIVITY, THE INVENTION IS BORN, ON ANY FREE SOCIETY, AND FREE SOCIETIES, WILL ALWAYS USE CAPITALISM TO DRIVE THEIR CITIZENS TO WHAT EVER LEVEL THEIR JEW SYSTEM MAY NEED AT THE IME FOR ANY PARTICULAR NATION, SO ILLUSION IS THE TOOL USED TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT NO BODY WILL FALL THROUGH THE CRACKS TYPE OF ASSURANCESS, THAT BEGINS TO UNDEMINE THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE UNTIL ONCE THE NUMBERS OF SOCIAL DEPENDANCEY HAS GOTTEN TO S CERTAIN POINT, COMMUNISM TAKES OVER.
ONCE COMMUNISM GETS ESTABLISHED THEN THE WEAK BEGINS TO BE ERASED AND TOTAL CONTROL OF THE PEOPLES WILL IS TAKEN OVER BY A SMALL GROUP WHO DECIDES FOR THE MASSESS HOW TO LIVE THEIR LIVES, FROM BIRTH TILL DEATH, IN MANY CASES ERASING MANY AT ONE GIVEN TIME FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE POWER STRUCTURE OF COMMUNISM, UNTIL THERE IS A LEADER WITHIN THE SMALL NUMBER IN POWER THAT OVERCOMES THE GROUP AND THEN FASCISM EXPRESSESS ITSELF UNDER THE POWER GIVEN TO ONE INDIVIDUAL WHO CAN WIPE OUT INDIVIDUALS AS WELL AS LARGE NUMBERS OF ITS OWN CITIZENS FOR THE PORPUSE OF MAINTAINNING TERROR IN THE MIND OF THE INDIVIDUALS.
NATIONS THAT GO THROUGH THOSE STAGES OR PERHAPS SKIP ONE OR TWO CAN NEVER PROSPER, BECAUSE THEY KILL THE INSENTIVE OF THE INDIVIDUAL FOR CREATIVITY, THAT ONLY GOD HIMSELF PROVIDES TO HUMANITY THAT LIVES IN A STATE OF FREEDOM, SLAVES CAN NOT CREATE THEIR MINDS ARE FOCUS ON HOW TO SURVIVE THE NEXT DAY INSTEAD OF FOCUSING ON WHAT THEIR NEEDS ARE AND HOW TO CREATE THE WAY TO ON HOW TO OVERCOME THE NEED.
THE ONLY WAY A MAN CAN STAND ON THE TOP OF A STRUCTURE IT HAS TO LEARN THAT WHATEVER HE IS GOING TO USE TO GET THERE HAS A GOOD STRONG FUNDATION, NO BODY BUILDS A STRONG HOME UNLESS IS PUT ON SOLID GROUND, IDOTS, THAT USE SAND TO BUILD ON WITH TIME IT WILL COLLAPSE A LESSON THAT STUPID ARROGANT JEWS NEVER LEARNED, AND THOSE MENTION ON THIS ARTICLE ARE ALL JEWS, WHO LIKE RATS USE SPEED TO GET TO THE CHEESE BUT ONCE THEY EAT IT MAY FIND THEMSELVES BEEN CAUGHT BY THE CAT FOR NOT BEEN ABLE TO RUN FAST ENOUGH.
As you judge someone else, there you are yourself. How is that for foundation?
Post a Comment