Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (61 page)

Democrats lost their congressional majority in both houses in the
1946 elections, resulting in Pepper's loss of his subcommittee chairmanship and with it Kramer's Senate job, although he remained a close
friend and adviser of Pepper. In late 1946 Mikhail Vavilov, first secretary of the US S R's embassy, attended a dinner at the home of Lee Pressman, then chief counsel of the CIO; met Kramer; and cultivated a
friendship. Vavilov was a diplomat rather than a professional intelligence
officer, but he was also a KGB co-optee who carried out tasks for the
then seriously undermanned KGB station. In July 1947 he sent Moscow
Center a detailed report on his conversations with Kramer. From their
contents, Vavilov does not appear to have known that Kramer was a former KGB source, and Kramer did not enlighten him. However, he did
give Vavilov a detailed briefing on Senator Pepper's stance at the time.
Vavilov reported:

K. [Kramer] works as an adviser to Senator Pepper, who is known for his liberal views. The senator's polit. views are close to ours.... "According to K.,
Pepper now behaves very cautiously. He fears that reactionary Dems. who
manage the Dem. Party apparatus will influence his voters in Florida, which
could lead to his defeat in 1950 when his term as senator runs out." (Truman
hates Pepper.) "As an example of the serious blows that have been dealt to P's
career by the combined efforts of reactionary Dems. K. considers the machinations of Dem. Party leaders in Congress that resulted in P.'s being unable to
become a member of a Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs at the start of
this year, despite the fact that he was technically more eligible than the other
candidate."

Kramer went on to note that Pepper was "`troubled"' by the increase in
hostile letters from citizens accusing him of "`pro-Soviet views."' He also
related that Pepper's nervousness had led him to a "`hasty"' rejection of
the idea of a left-liberal third party and it had been difficult to get Pepper to agree to introduce Henry Wallace at a speech in June 1947.
Kramer then related to Vavilov

one more example of excessive caution on P's [Pepper's] part. In the middle
of last year, P. decided to write a book about the USAs foreign policy. It was
his intention that the book present a development of the ideas which he expounded in his very good speech of zo March 1946 before the Senate, where
P. spoke out against the outcry about a new war, in favor of cooperation between the Great Powers, in favor of the need to strengthen Sov-Amer. relations, and against the anti-Sov. campaign. After dictating part of the book, P.
instructed K. [Kramer] to look over the shorthand and pick out materials for
subsequent parts. K. said that he had begun working more intensively on it,
given how important it was to publish a book like that. However, P. worried
that developing the ideas of the aforementioned speech would come off
sounding so at odds with the U.S. govt's increasingly reactionary politics and
the unrelenting anti-Sov. press campaign that it might damage his career. K.
said that P. is practically too busy now to write the book. K. said that he is tactfully trying to convince P. that this book needs to be published before the 1948
presidential election campaign.

Kramer went on to discuss Pepper's ambitions to become the Democratic
vice-presidential candidate in 1948, as well as noting that the CPUSA was
attempting to nudge Henry Wallace in the direction of a third party.1e0

While Vavilov didn't know that Charles Kramer was a compromised
former agent, Moscow Center did. After receiving his report, it promptly
sent a cable to Washington: "Because M. ["Mole"/Kramer] was betrayed
by Myrna [Bentley], Oleg's [Vavilov's] connection with him must be terminated at once." There are no additional reports of Soviet intelligence
contact with Kramer. In 1948 Bentley's allegations against Kramer became public. Senator Pepper publicly stood by him, stating Kramer had
provided "able and faithful service" to his Subcommittee on Wartime
Health and Education. Pepper's book on foreign policy, ghostwritten by
Kramer, never appeared. Kramer worked as a researcher and speech
writer for Henry Wallace in 1948 and then for the Progressive Party until
it collapsed in the early 1950s. Thereafter he moved to Oregon and faded
from public sight."'

Every other person identified by Bentley as a member of the Perlo group
appears in documents in Vassiliev's notebooks, including Solomon Li-
schinsky, Allan Rosenberg, Charles Flato, and Joel Gordon. Harry Magdoff boasted in an autobiography written for the KGB that he had joined
the CPUSAs youth group, the Young Pioneers, at eleven and remained
active in party-aligned groups thereafter. Beginning government service
in 1936 as a researcher with the WPAs National Research Project, he
later worked for the Council of National Defense, the Office of Production Management, the War Production Board, and the Department of
Commerce. When the KGB took over direct supervision of the Perlo
group, Joseph Katz reported: "`Raid [Perlo] told him some time ago that
he no longer gives materials to "Helmsman" [Browder], but gives them
to us [KGB] instead.... Tan [Magdoff] felt very proud of himself thanks
to this circumstance."' The KGB cut contact with Magdoff after Bentley's
defection, and he resigned from his government job a year later. In the
late 1940s the KGB contacted Magdoff to check on the status of some of
its deactivated agents. He later became the editor of the Marxist theoretical journal Monthly Review. Up until his death in 2006 he refused requests by friends, unable to credit deciphered KGB cables implicating
him in espionage, to give his version of events .162

Another economist and secret Communist, Edward Fitzgerald,
worked at the War Production Board from 1941 until 1945 before transferring to the Foreign Economic Administration and the Commerce Department. Documents from 1944 and 1945 list Fitzgerald as a source, initially through Victor Perlo, but later in direct contact with the KGB. In a
brief autobiography he gave to the KGB in 1945 he wrote that his wife,
sister, and all of his first cousins were members of the CPUSA and that
he had been a member in "`closed groups"' (underground party units)
supervised by Josef Peters for ten years. The only specific details have
him delivering information on American food aid to Europe in 1945,
American occupation policy toward German economic matters, and Swiss
resistance to providing information on hidden German assets.163

The FBI interviewed Fitzgerald several times about Bentley's allegations, but he denied any participation in Soviet espionage or links to the
CPUSA. However, in 1950 the KGB noted that he was having difficulty
with psychological pressure: "There were fears that he would prove weak.
He was under special supervision by "Tan" [Magdoff]. In March of 1949,
he was placed in a psychiatric hospital. At center [KGB Moscow], they were considering whether to provide him with monetary aid." Fitzgerald, however, regained his composure sufficiently to invoke the Fifth
Amendment during congressional testimony in 1953. Perhaps sensing
that his morale was brittle, the justice Department had one last go at
him. A federal grand jury questioned him in 1955, and once again he refused to testify. The government then gave him immunity from prosecution, thereby removing his grounds for invoking the Fifth Amendment,
but he continued to refuse to answer questions. He received a six-month
contempt of court sentence and went to prison in X956.164

While Charles Kramer was a Soviet spy who was a senior congressional
aide, Samuel Dickstein was an actual congressman (D-NY). First revealed
in The Haunted Wood, his work for the KGB was one of the unexpected
revelations of Alexander Vassiliev's access to the KGB's archives.

The House of Representatives created the "Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities," known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, in
1934. Dickstein spearheaded its probe of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund and other domestic fascist groups. The McCormack-Dickstein
Committee focused public attention on the growth of quasi-fascist groups
and helped to develop a popular anti-fascist movement. There was, however, a price. Dickstein exaggerated the extremist threat far beyond its
small size (claiming that the Bund had two hundred thousand armed men
ready to don their brown uniforms and overthrow the government);
greatly exaggerated the links between domestic fascists and Berlin; and
vastly overstated the threat of espionage, sabotage, and violence. Dickstein coerced witnesses to explain their political beliefs and then condemned those answers that did not conform to his idea of American
patriotism. He verbally abused uncooperative witnesses and lectured them
about their moral shortcomings. When Chairman John McCormack
(D-MA) insisted that names and accusatory testimony not be published
because they were unverified, Dickstein, the committee's second-ranking
member, simply picked out the most sensational parts and inserted them
in the Congressional Record on his own authority, labeling various individuals as Nazi spies or fascists.165

Dickstein was also corrupt. He ran a lucrative immigration-fixing service out of his law office in New York. As chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, he sold his influence to individuals who wanted assistance in getting visas to enter the United States or gaining permanent residence status once here. The KGB first noticed
Representative Dickstein in 1937, when Leo Helfgott, an Austrian KGB
operative, paid him a $1,ooo bribe (more than $14,000 in 2008 dollars) to
obtain a permanent residence visa."'

Dickstein had first approached Soviet ambassador Aleksandr Troyanovsky in December 1936 and suggested that for $5,ooo-$6,ooo he
could provide the USSR with the investigatory files the Special Committee on Un-American Activities had gathered on Anastase Vonsiatsky, an
anti-Bolshevik Russian exile who headed the elaborately named Russian
National Revolutionary Labor and Workers Peasant Party of Fascists. The
New York station was dubious, regarding Dickstein as chiefly interested
in a large bribe, but Ambassador Troyanovsky and Moscow Center were
impressed with the notion of renting an American congressman. Abram
Slutsky, chief of KGB foreign intelligence, wrote, "`The people's commissar [Nikolay Yezhov] has accepted Dickstein's offer."' After a series
of meetings, on 18 May 1937 the Soviets agreed to pay Dickstein a secret
monthly stipend of $1,250, and he agreed to sign receipts and pursue investigations of White Russian immigrant organizations, Trotskyists, and
other anti-Bolshevik groups.167

No sooner had this agreement been reached, however, than the KGB
began to realize that Dickstein was promising much more than he could
deliver. While his use of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to attack domestic fascists had garnered him enormous publicity and
was extremely popular on the left, he was not personally popular with his
congressional colleagues. Dickstein wanted the temporary McCormackDickstein Committee continued, but the House Democratic leadership
was uninterested in backing such a resolution with him as the chief author, since under congressional custom he would become chairman.
Dickstein enlisted Representative Martin Dies, a conservative Texas
Democrat, to sponsor the resolution. Dickstein assumed that even with
Dies as chairman, he could dominate the committee as he had when McCormack had chaired it. But after Dies's resolution passed, the House
leadership excluded Dickstein from membership on the committee.

While he assured the KGB that he would continue to operate as before from behind the scenes, the New York station was skeptical. It had
given Dickstein the cover name "Crook" and told Moscow: "`We are perfectly aware of whom we are dealing with. C. ["Crook"/Dickstein] fully
justifies his cover name; he is an unscrupulous character, greedy for
money, who has agreed to work because of the money, a very clever
snake, etc. So it is hard for us to guarantee fulfillment of the program that has been planned, even the part of it that he presented to us himself.
We will make every effort, however, to see to it that the program is fulfilled."' Moscow Center continued to hope that something useful would
come from having an American congressman on its payroll. Dickstein did
partially carry out one helpful task. The KGB wanted Walter Krivitsky, a
KGB defector who had embarrassed the USSR by his denunciations of
Stalin, to be deported. Dickstein used his influence with the immigration authorities to deny him any visa extensions and did his best to discredit Krivitsky. Although Dickstein's efforts caused Krivitsky great anxiety, he was not deported, in part because Congressman Dies wanted him
to testify to his committee and pressured the INS to allow Krivitsky to
stay. The quality of material Dickstein produced-old files from the McCormack-Dickstein Committee and a few items he picked up from
friendly staffers at the new Dies Committee-disappointed the KGB.
Several times it cut off his monthly bribe, Dickstein promised to do more,
and partial payments resumed, but in the end Moscow decided it was not
getting much for its generous stipend (in excess of $200,000 a year in
2008 dollars) and cut contact in early 1940. A notation in the KGB archive
attempted to blame the lack of return on this investment on Slutsky, the
foreign intelligence chief who had supported Dickstein's recruitment and
who had subsequently been murdered during the purges and denounced
as an enemy of the people. There are references to occasional later contacts with Dickstein in Vassiliev's notebooks, but nothing appeared to
have resulted. Samuel Dickstein continued to serve in Congress until
1946. He then became a judge of the New York Supreme Court and
served until his death in 1954, his corrupt relationship with Soviet intelligence never suspected.168

Abraham Glasser had used his position at the justice Department to provide the KGB with information on American counterintelligence opera
tions, and his exposure in 1941 had been a painful loss. Within a few
years, it recruited an even more productive replacement.