The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (31 page)

APPENDIX
3

Warning: Historians at Work

By Diana West

September 9, 2013

Air Force historian Eduard Mark, now deceased, wrote a
paper in 1998 linking the codename "19" in KGB cable 812 from the
Venona archive to Harry Hopkins.

Mark's thesis is discussed on two pages of
American Betrayal
– one detail in
a 403-page book with 944 endnotes. It is a hallmark of the weird war on
American Betrayal that reviewer Ronald Radosh inflated several such details out
of all recognition and then attacked them in their exaggerated state. Thus,
Hopkins/"19" is called the "linchpin" of my book, which is
nonsense as dispatched in Part Two of The Rebuttal.

While it is not the linchpin of my book
 
indeed, I could cut out all reference to
it and make the same case
 
Hopkins/"19" may be seen as the linchpin of the war on
American Betrayal.

Having over-inflated the significance of Hopkins/”19”
in my book (two pages) to a point of absurdity, Radosh sets out to take down
Hopkins/”19” as a standing argument. This included negating the 1998 Mark
research paper that gave rise to Hopkins/"19."

First, Radosh cites historians John Earl Haynes and
Harvey Klehr, whose research identifies "19" as Soviet agent Laurence
Duggan. Haynes and Klehr base their argument on the many identifications
Alexander Vassiliev found in KGB documents known as "the Vassiliev
notebooks" linking the codename "19" to Soviet agent Duggan into
the 1940s. Eduard Mark, on the other hand, constructed his "19"
theory based on meeting lists and appointment books to ascertain what officials
had access to the tiny, high-level presidential meeting under discussion. (Mark
had weighed Duggan/"19" i.d.'s of the 1930s into his 1998
calculations but dismissed Duggan as a possibility for reasons listed in his
footnote below.
[12]
)

Then Radosh went farther still.

He describes a dramatic scene at a gathering of
espionage experts and authors he, Radosh, in part presided over at the Wilson
Center in Washington, DC in 2009. Among the assembly were M. Stanton Evans, John
Earl Haynes, Harvard's Mark Kramer, Eduard Mark (d. 2009) Herbert Romerstein
(d. 2013), and Alexander Vassiliev.

In this company, Radosh writes, Mark “publicly”
recanted his 1998 findings that identified Hopkins as “19.”

Radosh:

At a conference on Soviet espionage held a week before his untimely death,
West’s source, Eduard Mark, publicly stated that he now acknowledged that Harry
Hopkins was not Agent 19, and that the conclusion he had reached in his 1998
article was false.”

In Part Two of The Rebuttal, I flag a discrepancy in
the record. I compare Radosh's August 7, 2013 statement — Mark recanted
his thesis — with what he wrote me in an email two months earlier on June
13, 2013.

Addressing the same topic —
Hopkins/"19" vs. Duggan/"19" — Radosh wrote me:

Were Mark still alive, I’m certain he would have conceded the point.”

What was that again?

Were
Mark still alive, I'm certain he would have conceded the point.

On August 7, 2013, Radosh describes Mark's public
recantation of his thesis in 2009. Mark died the following week.

But in June 13, 2013, Radosh is speculating that
"were Mark still alive," he would have recanted his thesis.

Both statements cannot be true.

Here is the full email of June 13, 2013:

Diana,

Re what Bostom says about Hopkins is wrong, and if it is from your book, it
is also incorrect.

Here's what John Haynes just e-mailed me:

"Ed Mark was wrong about 19. Harvey and I always treated 19 as
unknown. Mark was sure he an eliminated all of the possibilities and Hopkins
was the last man standing. I disagreed with him and told him he was putting too
much faith in his analysis of who was at various Trident conference social
events. I thought he might be right but that the evidence was just too thin to
reach a conclusion, even a tentative one. This was prior to AV's notebooks
[Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks of hand-copied KGB cables]. When AV's
notebooks came out, 19 was repeatedly identified as Laurence Duggan."

The Vassiliev papers show conclusively that Larry Duggan was 19, not
Hopkins. So while Hopkins might have been pro-Soviet, as others were, and naive
and a fellow-traveler, he was not an agent.

One has to be meticulous and careful when making charges, and very careful
about consulting the most authoritative sources. Were Mark still alive, I'm
certain he would have conceded the point. He was a careful scholar for the most
part.

Ron

It's hard not to linger a little over the undercutting
tone of that final encomium to Mark, but the fact remains that as of June 13,
2013, Radosh and John Earl Haynes both are writing as if Mark's 1998 thesis is
still intact. In other words, there is not any indication, not a whisper, about
Marks' 2009 before-death public recantation that Radosh reports in his August
review.

It is also worth pointing out that Haynes similarly
treated the Mark thesis as current in a January 2013 essay he posted
here
. In this essay,
Haynes argues that “19” was Laurence Duggan, not Harry Hopkins as Mark's 1998
paper argued. Discussing Mark, Haynes wrote: “But on the matter of Venona 812
he and I disagreed.”

Note that he didn’t say, “On the matter of Venona 812,
he and I disagreed until Mark publicly recanted his paper’s findings in 2009.”

I asked John Earl Haynes for any further information
he could offer about what transpired at the 2009 conference. Here is an excerpt
from his August 16 email. (Full email exchange below.)

At the symposium Ed did mention briefly in one of the Q&A sessions that
he no longer held to his view that "19" was Hopkins.

Haynes' account corroborates Radosh, although his
rendition lacks the drama of the scene as Radosh set it up.

Haynes:

I remember the [Eduard Mark] remark but don't specifically remember at
which session it was, but
Professor Mark
Kramer of Harvard's Cold War Center remembered Ed's remark very clearly
,
that it was at a session of the symposium he chaired, and that he and Ed had a
further discussion of the matter when they walked together to the Metro after
the symposium ended.

Enter Harvard Professor Mark Kramer. As Haynes
recounts via Kramer's recollection, Kramer chaired a session of the 2009
conference during which Kramer remembers "very clearly" Mark's
remark, and, further, that Kramer and Mark continued the discussion en route to
the Metro.

Orange line or Blue?

Haynes:

Kramer says Ed said that the material in the notebooks convinced him that
he had been wrong (never an easy thing for a historian to say, at least not for
me, though I have done so). But then Ed died unexpectedly shortly after the
symposium, so he never published anything on his changed view.

Frankly, Ed's
remarks in 2009 do not strike me as very central to the issue of who was
"19."
Vassiliev's notebooks establish without equivocation
that "19" in Venona 812 was Duggan.

That may be. But "Ed's remarks" are
"very central" indeed to the Radosh "take-down" (his word)
of
American Betrayal
. Why? Radosh
made them that way, and they were subsequently amplified and extended.

Coincidentally, Haynes and Klehr published an
article
on
August 16, the day I exchanged emails with John Haynes. The article lays out
their findings regarding Duggan and "19." A footnote included the
following:

“During one of the question-and-answer periods and in informal
conversations at the [2009] symposium Mark remarked that the Vassiliev
notebooks had convinced him that `19’ was Duggan and he no longer held to his
1998 position. He died unexpectedly shortly after the symposium and,
consequently, never published a formal statement on the matter."

Here we see the very specific Mark recantation —
reported for the first time, I believe, by Radosh in his August 7 review of my
book — enter the scholarship via Haynes and Klehr on August 16.

And yet on June 13, Radosh emailed me:

Were Mark still alive, I feel certain he would have
conceded the point.

The plot thickens.

Actually, Radosh thickens it himself by next writing a
comment on the Frontpage website and then emailing it me.

On August 17, Radosh emailed me (unsolicited, as
usual):

I have just posted the following at FrontPage Magazine in response to
Andrew Bostom's query, as well as the one you made in your e-mail to John
Haynes:

Since I wrote directly to Haynes, I can assume Haynes
shared my email with Radosh.

What follows is a copy of Radosh's comment to Andrew
Bostom as posted by Radosh at Frontpage Magazine.

Ron Radosh Andrew Bostom • a few seconds ago −

In answer to Andrew G. Bostom's query, as well as that by Diana West, let
me shed light on this.

The reason you did not find it on any C-Span video is that the network did
not tape the entire proceedings. The long afternoon panel and another one were
not recorded. At the time, a number of us commented how upset we were that they
did not choose to film the very important afternoon panel in particular.

More to the point, I am now quoting the e-mail I and others received from Mark
Kramer, the editor of The Journal of Cold War Studies, and Program Director at
the Project on Cold War Studies, Harvard University, and Fellow at the Kennedy
School of Government, Harvard University.

Kramer wrote me the following on
August
16th:
• a few seconds ago

—

"Ron, I can definitely confirm it.

I was chairing the session, and Ed intervened when Stan Evans referred to
Harry Hopkins as No. 19. Ed said "The Vassiliev notebooks show that this
isn't true. I thought it was, but it isn't. When I found out that I'm wrong,
I'm willing to admit it." I talked about this with Ed after the session,
as he and I were heading for the metro station."

Others, including me, remember this quite well.

Signed:

Ronald Radosh

New information!

According to the definite confirmation of Mark Kramer
— the editor of The Journal of Cold War Studies, and Program Director at
the Project on Cold War Studies, Harvard University, and Fellow at the Kennedy
School of Government, Harvard University — M. Stanton Evans "referred
to Harry Hopkins as No. 19" and Eduard Mark "intervened."

M. Stanton Evans? How did he enter into this? True, he
was at the 2009 conference, but Evans has categorically, emphatically rejected
Kramer and Radosh's characterization of his actions, writing: "I had no
such encounter with Eduard Mark about Harry Hopkins, No. 19, or anything
whatever...The supposed recollections of Kramer and Radosh about my part in all
of this are totally mistaken." (See Evans’ exchange of memos on this
matter with John Haynes
here
.)

If we remove Evans from the equation, we still must
consider Kramer and Radosh's faulty memories. With that sinking feeling, then,
here's the evidence as amassed as of August 16, 2013 by Radosh, Haynes, Klehr
and Kramer.

1)
   
Radosh's
initial statement that Mark publicly recanted as "false" the findings
of his 1998 Hopkns/"19" paper (Radosh, August 7).

2)
   
A
footnote to that effect in a paper by leading historians (Haynes and Klehr,
August 16).

3)
   
A
recollection by Harvard Cold War Studies Program Director Mark Kramer of Marks'
verbatim quotation (published August 17). As Kramer recalls Mark saying (after
Kramer mistakenly recalled Evans's non-discussion of "19"): "The
Vassiliev notebooks show that this isn't true. I thought it was, but it isn't.
When I found out that I'm wrong, I'm willing to admit it."

4)
   
Radosh
adds that he, among others, remembers this "quite well."

Then I can't explain how this slipped Radosh's mind
when he wrote me on June 13:

Were Mark still alive, I'm certain he would have
conceded the point.

I would receive a few more "collegial"
emails from Radosh. "Conrad Black tears you apart," for example, was
one heart-warming entry in my in-box, also on August 16.

The last (unsolicited) email I received from Radosh
came on August 19.

First, the "collegial" comment:

You should admit
the truth and stop insulting us, Diana.

Then, for reasons known only to Radosh, he included in
his email to me the following email of August 18 from Mark Kramer to Radosh and
cc'd to John Haynes, Harvey Klehr and David Horowitz: