The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (6 page)

“Then
Harriman suggested something novel and sensible. In the event that a follow-up
cable from Roosevelt failed to move Stalin, the administration should consider
`retaliatory measures.’ What a concept. Harriman suggested restricting the
movement of Soviet contact officers riffling through Displaced Persons camps in
the Western zone for hapless returnees (there were over 150 Soviets at
Eisenhower’s own headquarters where a special section of the staff was
designated to assist them; Americans and British had no equivalent setup with
the Red Army), or perhaps halting further consideration of `non-military’
Lend-Lease material (Stalin was angling for another big `loan’). Harriman also
recommended something even more effective—something for the ages.
Harriman tentatively suggested `that consideration be given to allowing our
prisoners of war en route to Naples to give stories to the newspapers of the
hardships they have been subjected to’ in the Soviet zone.

“This was
what was lacking, and this was what was needed. At any point, exposure, loud
and clear, could have changed the U.S.-USSR dynamic in every way. It was the
reality that We, the People were almost always, always deprived of in order to
drive the Soviet conspiracy of Western silence forward, fueled by acquiescence,
accommodation, participation and incorporation of all the Big Lies going back
to the very first, the Terror Famine.

“Dream
on.”

Continuing his pattern of
overlooking what is actually in the book
,
Radosh sums up by criticizing me again for something that isn’t in the book
– namely, Truman’s “line in the sand opposing further Soviet expansion”
that “led to a Cold War that ended with the collapse of the Communist system.”

I “show no awareness” of the Truman
doctrine, Radosh writes; nor, he continues, do I confront this argument
“because it would be inexplicable if America was a Soviet occupied state run by
Stalin’s agents.”

Having been through the excruciating
exercise of rebutting this “review,” I have come to see more clearly that
Radosh’s undue focus on criticizing me for elements that are
not
covered in my book – in this
case, Truman’s “line in the sand” – is a sustained if desperate act of
misdirection. We are all
supposed to look
at Truman’s “line in the sand,” Stalin’s “correlation of forces,” and the
“separate-peace” fear factor, etc. – and nothing else. We are certainly
not supposed to look behind the curtain at what Soviet agents, fellow travelers
and dupes might have been doing back in de-facto-occupied-Washington to promote
or use or be influenced by these same elements as ways and means to shape US
policy-making.

The latter, of course, is exactly
what
American Betrayal
does, It does
not, once again, characterize wartime Washington as a “Soviet-occupied state”
akin to Poland under Jaruzelski, as Radosh’s phraseology repeatedly and
distortingly implies.

MY TRUE CRIME REVEALED
− AGAIN

I can only surmise that my offense,
once more, is to have written a book outside the confines of the conventional
consensus narrative that Radosh wants to read, over and over again – and,
more important, wants everyone else to keep reading. The sources I list, which
Radosh consistently fails to acknowledge
 
while falsely and repeatedly impugning my credibility, temperament and
even sanity (“unhinged”) – simply do not support this narrative of
conventional consensus academia which Radosh upholds. Thus, no “Truman’s line
in the sand.” No “correlation of forces.” No “Anna Rosenberg Hoffman.”

Is this why David Horowitz wrote:
“She should not have written this book”?

CHAPTER 2

AGGRESSIVELY ATTACKED
DETAIL #1: “19”

For
the remainder, I will be defending a series of details isolated by Radosh, one
in each of the remaining four sections of his attack. The Radosh technique here
is to build each detail into a supposed “pillar” of my “conspiracy thesis,”
distort and misconstrue it, and then try to take it down.

Indeed, one commenter on the Radosh “take-down” seized on
this discernible pattern. He observed that the Radosh method is “t
o
aggressively attack a detail in a text – of course with the intention to
disturb the holistic impression.” He called the technique the “Language of
Violence.”
^[9]

The Radosh review – a series
of aggressive attacks on details – leaves no “holistic impression” of
American Betrayal
. Nor can I, for that
matter, leave a “holistic impression” of my own book in my rebuttal, alas.

The
most aggressive Radosh attack on detail is his “claim” regarding “Agent 19.” It
appears to be part of an all-out, no-holds-barred effort to protect Harry
Hopkins, Roosevelt’s top wartime advisor, from consideration as a Soviet spy or
agent of influence, perhaps in an effort to preserve Roosevelt’s place on
history’s pedestal.

Radosh
begins:

“A key assertion
for West is that FDR’s closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, was actually the Soviet
agent known in the Venona decrypts as “Agent 19.”

Worth
noting is that in this first sentence Radosh has not only distorted my work, he
has misstated the work of the late Eduard Mark, who, in a famous 1998 essay,
identified “19” as Hopkins, but did not ever identify Hopkins as a “Soviet
agent.”

Radosh
continues:

“The
identification of Hopkins as Agent 19 is the linchpin of West’s conspiracy
case.”

Radosh
has made another categorically false statement about my book (which he
continues, gratingly, to label a “conspiracy case”). In fact, I once again re-enter
the surreal dimension of this rebuttal to deny yet another feature that is
not
in my book.

I
performed an electronic search of
American
Betrayal
to quantify quickly for readers the extent to which this claim
− that the identification of Hopkins as “19” is the ”linchpin” of
anything in my book − is false.

My
book’s 403 pages include 900-plus endnotes, which I keep mentioning because
Radosh did not. After searching, I find that Hopkins’ name appears on 107
pages. My discussion of the Eduard Mark thesis that Harry Hopkins was “Agent
19” is confined to two pages. There are several passing references.

“Agent
19” is hardly the “linchpin” of my book. (I trust my discussion and debunking
has already dispelled the repetitious, poisonous charge that
American Betrayal
is a “conspiracy
case.”)

In
fact, I use the Mark thesis to kick off my own search for a wider dossier on
Hopkins. In other words, having introduced the Mark thesis on p. 147,
I all but leave it behind on p. 148
to
seek my own Hopkins sources and references in order to assess for myself
whether he might be described as a Soviet agent or at least an agent of
influence (see note for partial list of my Hopkins sources
^[10]
).

Radosh
writes:

It is one thing
to point this out [Hopkins’ “pro-Soviet” beliefs] and analyze its implications,
and quite another to claim that Hopkins was an actual Soviet agent,
a claim that is not original with West,
although it is, in fact, not true.

Notably,
Radosh does not mention the authorities who label Harry Hopkins a Soviet agent,
so I will.

In his
1990 book
KGB,
co-written with
Christopher Andrew, Oleg Gordievsky (former KGB colonel and British double
agent), recalled that as a young KGB officer he attended a lecture given by
Iskhak Akhmerov, the most renowned KGB “illegal” spymaster of the World War II
period. Akhmerov, Gordievsky wrote, told the assembly at KGB headquarters that
t
he
most important of all the Soviet wartime agents in the United States was none
other than Harry Hopkins.

The late Herbert Romerstein, a towering expert on espionage
and Soviet subversion, having studied the matter for himself, agreed.

Radosh breezily states this is “in fact, not true,” but
that’s no argument.

Radosh
now takes the reader into his confidence to spread a little slander:

“When I sent her a collegial
email questioning this assertion, and requesting that we get together to talk
about it, she became quite huffy: `Dialoguing is one thing,’ she emailed back;
`issuing directives is another.’ ”

Rather
than take up too much space to demolish this childish and dishonest aside, I
will simply quote the opening of that “collegial email” Radosh sent me, and
note there was no request to get together.

“Diana,

“You have to acknowledge that you and [M. Stanton Evans] are
dead wrong about Hopkins. …”

Once
again, Radosh is making stuff up.

Having
demonstrated that the Hopkins/”19” matter is in no way the “linchpin” of my
book (or “West’s conspiracy case,” as Radosh keeps repeating), I will now point
out that Hopkins/”19” is a linchpin of the Radosh attack 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 destroy Hopkins/”19” as a valid argument
and, in the process, destroy the book. To do so, he cites John Earl Haynes and
Harvey Klehr, whose latest published work − as of 2013,
after
my manuscript was complete (to
debunk another Radosh charge that I neglected more recent Haynes’ commentary on
Hopkins/”19”) – contends that Mark’s 1998 thesis was wrong due to
numerous references in the Vassiliev notebooks (copies of KGB documents)
identifying Soviet agent Lawrence Duggan as “19.”

Then
Radosh goes further still – and maybe a little too far. He describes a
dramatic scene at a 2009 gathering of espionage experts and authors that he
helped preside over at the Wilson Center in Washington. Among those present
were Michael Dobbs, M. Stanton Evans, John Earl Haynes, Mark Kramer, Herbert
Romerstein, and Alexander Vassiliev.

Eduard
Mark died the following week. Romerstein passed away in May of this year.

In
his “take-down,” Radosh writes that in front of this august company, Mark
“publicly” recanted his 1998 findings that identified Hopkins as “19.”

Radosh
reports this as the final point of this “19” section, climactically concluding:

“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.”

… OR DID HE?

If
Radosh is correctly reporting Mark’s public recantation of his Hopkins/”19”
paper circa 2009, why did Radosh send me an email on June 13, 2013 on this
topic, reprising the same arguments (Mark was wrong about Hopkins/”19,” Duggan
was “19”) that concluded:

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

What
was that again? If Mark were still alive … he
would have
conceded the point?

This
construction of Radosh’s sentence clearly indicates that Mark
did not
concede the point – at
least not while he was alive.

In
this same email of June 13, Radosh also quotes John Haynes, another participant
of the 2009 conference, as having “just” emailed Radosh that “Ed Mark was wrong
about 19….”

Haynes’
message to Radosh also suggests that the Mark thesis was still standing −
not that Mark had recanted the whole thing in front of the experts four years
earlier.

It
is worth noting Haynes also treated the Mark thesis as current in a January
2013 essay arguing that “19” was Laurence Duggan. Referring to Mark, Duggan
wrote: “But on the matter of Venona 812 he and I disagreed.”

Note
that he didn’t say,
“He and I disagreed
until Mark publicly recanted his paper’s findings in 2009.”

In
August, however, two months after Radosh e-mailed me stating with certainty
that had Mark lived, he
would have
conceded the “19” point, everything was different.

In
his self-described “take-down” of
American
Betrayal
in August, Radosh states with certainty that Mark in 2009
“publicly stated … that the conclusion he had reached in his 1998 article was
false.”

Later,
in a paper on “19” Haynes co-authored with Harvey Klehr, the authors include a
footnote referencing the public 2009 recantation: “
During
one of the question-and-answer periods and in informal conversations at the
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.”

 
You know what? It’s one or the other.
It’s not both.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 3

THE
AGRESSIVELY ATTACKED DETAIL #2: URANIUM

The next aggressive attack on detail is plucked from the
colossal Lend-Lease program the US created to supply allies during World War
II. Supplying the Soviet Union was a bitter pill for the American people to
swallow. FDR whoppers – such as declaring religious freedom existed in
the USSR – didn’t help. But supply “Uncle Joe” we did – and to a
needlessly dangerous extreme, I conclude from the sources contained in my book.

From
American Betrayal
,
p. 43:

War
supplies didn’t just “flow” to the Soviet Union, they flooded it, with over
half a million trucks and jeeps, nearly $1 billion worth (1940s dollars) of
ordnance and ammunition, thousands of fighter aircraft, bombers, and tanks, 13
million pairs of winter boots, 1.7 million tons of petroleum products, a
merchant fleet, 1,000 steam locomotives, 581 naval vessels including
minesweepers, landing craft, submarine chasers, frigates, torpedo boats,
floating dry docks, pontoon barges, river tugs, and a light cruiser. There were
also icebreakers, which were essential to keep the northernmost ports of the
Gulag Archipelago supplied with fresh slaves, another “lost” fact. American
Lend-Lease didn’t just keep the Soviet police state humming along internally,
either. As Nikita Khrushchev would say to
Life
magazine in 1970 of those
half a million trucks and jeeps, “Just imagine how we would have advanced from
Stalingrad to Berlin without them!”

Radosh, of course, doesn’t mention any of
that. He writes:

“West also insists that Lend-Lease aid was a crucial `rogue
operation’ orchestrated by Hopkins and the NKVD for the purpose of getting not
only war supplies to the Russians, but “the materials that go into making an
atomic bomb…
up to and including uranium.
” (Her emphasis.)”

This, of course, is supposed to
sound appropriately “unhinged” if not “crackpot” – just so many more
“yellow journalism conspiracy theories.”

My italics underscore the historical
fact that a US government program run by a suspected Soviet agent of influence
procured three-quarters of a ton of uranium (including
Manhattan-Project-embargoed uranium) and other atomic materials for Stalin.
Additionally, as George Racey Jordan writes in
From Major Jordan’s Diaries,
his memoir of Lend-Lease, “It seems
fair to take into account not merely what the Russians got, but what they tried
to get.”

This was a huge news story in 1950
and then it virtually vanished from our “narrative,” a matter I explore in
depth in
American Betrayal.

I do not, however, “insist,” as Radosh
claims, that “Hopkins and the NKVD” “orchestrated” Lend-Lease. Once again, he
is exaggerating a fact to deride his own exaggeration..

In this case, however, the reality
is too not much different.

What
is
in my book is that it was Harry Hopkins, Armand Hammer, and
Harry Dexter White who got Lend-Lease going in the first place – a trio
of veritable Soviet assets. Rather than convey these alarming facts as laid out
in American Betrayal, Radosh invokes the “NKVD,” as if to inspire snickers. You
can almost hear jackboots stomping through the White House.

Then again, the NKVD did have a line
of sorts into Lend Lease for real. Over security objections of both the State
and War Departments and Army chief of staff Gen. George C. Marshall, Hopkins
insisted on elevating Army officer Philip Faymonville, a.k.a. the “Red
Colonel,” to run Lend-Lease in Moscow. There, Soviet records show, Faymonville
was recruited by the NKVD in 1942.

NKVD recruit Faymonville would help
run − “orchestrate?” − Lend-Lease for the duration.

As for my discussion of Lend-Lease
as “rogue operation,” I frame it with a question and end it with a question.

We’ll start on p. 128:

“…
Just because Lend-Lease, in effect, said everything was all right—even as
Lend-Lease cogs Jordan and Kravchenko knew that what was going on wasn’t all
right— was the Lend-Lease atomic flow, indeed, all right, kosher, and
aboveboard from the point of view and national interest of Uncle Sam? Or was
Lend-Lease covering up a rogue operation? Was Lend-Lease, as run out of the
White House by the president’s top adviser Harry Hopkins, itself a rogue
operation?

Eleven pages and 44 endnotes later,
I pose another question:

“From
Hammer to Hopkins to White and back again to Hopkins: The question now becomes,
How could Lend-Lease
not
have been a rogue operation?”

Take my arguments or leave them. But
don’t distort them.

ON
THE AGGRESSIVELY ATTACKED DETAIL OF URANIUM

As “19” was attacked (above) to
obscure
American Betrayal’s
widely
sourced and -detailed discourse on Harry Hopkins, the new detail under attack
is “a” (as in “one”) shipment of uranium.

That would seem bad enough, of
course. Why was Harry Hopkins’s Lend-Lease scouring all over creation for
uranium for Stalin?

For a reality check, I’ll note that
when Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, testified on this
subject of uranium shipments to the USSR before Congress in 1949, he could not
answer how many shipments of uranium Lend-Lease had in fact transferred to
Stalin, because, he said, “we don’t know how many leaked through.”

Radosh, however, discusses only one
shipment that Groves did indeed permit to go through, against his will, rather
than alert the Soviets to the value we were placing on uranium during this
period of frantic, top secret atomic research. Radosh repeatedly insists this
was the only shipment to go through – and cites another book to
supposedly prove this,
completely
ignoring the additional evidence contained in
American Betrayal
that trumps Radosh’s source.

What evidence? A Congressional
investigation, quoted on p. 124 of
American
Betrayal:

I quote the March 3, 1950, testimony
of
Donald
T. Appell, former FBI agent and investigator for the House Committee on
Un-American Activities, regarding uranium shipments to the USSR in 1943: “As to
the shipment of uranium and heavy water, two specific shipments of uranium
oxide and nitrate and shipments of heavy water have been completely documented
to include even the number of the plane that flew the uranium and heavy water
out of Great Falls.”

The note is: “Hearings into the
Transfer of Atomic Material to the Soviet Union During World War II,” 1149.

A third documented uranium shipment
to Stalin went overland in July 1944.

Just as with my “second front”
debate, the FDR-Stalin cables, my discussion of ex-POWs in Stalin’s clutches,
my non-“19” Hopkins dossier, Radosh has completely and missed or purposefully
ignored my documented evidence − and then aggressively attacked me for
it.

OUT OF CONTEXT DISTORTIONS AND/OR SLOPPINESS

Radosh writes:

“She refers to
Lend-Lease as “the plunder of atomic secrets … spirited out of the country on a
U.S.-government sponsored flight. The reference is to
a
shipment of uranium
to Russia in 1943, allegedly
orchestrated by
Harry Hopkins
as
Agent 19.”
(Emphasis added,)

In
fact, the quotation of mine Radosh cites happens not to relate uranium at all.
It’s not about Harry Hopkins. It’s not about “Agent 19.”

I
endeavor to be brief, but I must reproduce the whole citation to prove Radosh’s
sloppiness.

In fact,
my reference to “plunder” relates to an extensive listing of items recorded by
Maj. George Racey Jordan, US Army “expediter” of Lend-Lease. Jordan claimed he
discovered the following items in a US government-sponsored flight to Russia as
it was about to take off from the Lend-Lease hub in Great Falls, Montana.

The list
included (p. 123 of
American Betrayal)
:

Road
maps … pinpointing American industrial sites (“Westinghouse,” “Blaw-Knox”).
Maps of the Panama Canal Zone. Documents related to the Aberdeen Proving
Ground, “one of the most ‘sensitive’ areas in the war effort.” Folders stuffed
with naval and shipping intelligence. Stacks of papers on oil refineries,
machine tools, steel foundries, and the like. Groups of documents on stationery
from the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and State, “trimmed close to the
text,” Jordan noted, perhaps to save weight—or remove “Secret” or
“Restricted” stamps (or both). Folders from the State Department Jordan claimed
were marked “From Sayre”—that would be Francis Sayre, who hired Alger
Hiss—and “From Hiss,” Soviet spy Alger Hiss himself. Engineering and
scientific treatises that “bristled with formulae, calculations and
professional jargon.” Something very, very interesting I will describe a little
farther down attached to a thick map bearing the legend that Jordan recorded as
“Oak Ridge, Manhattan Engineering District” (remember, this was taking place
sometime in the winter of 1943–44, before the invention, or public
knowledge, of the atomic bomb). He also found a carbon copy of a report from “Oak
Ridge” containing a series of “outlandish” words Jordan made a note to look up
later: “cyclotron,” “proton,” “deuteron.” There were also “curious” phrases, he
wrote, “energy produced by fission” and “walls five feet thick, of lead and
water, to control flying neutrons.”

Then,
Jordan writes, “For the first time in my life, I met the word ‘uranium.’ ”

[I
comment:] Why, in all of our inherited historical legacy, has there been no
room for this wartime witness to the plunder of atomic secrets just as they were
being spirited out of the country on a U.S. government-sponsored flight?

Plenty of “plunder” here, to be sure. But no uranium
shipment. No Hopkins. No “19.”

Radosh continues: “To her, this proves that the Lend-Lease
Act ‘was a slam-dunk victorious Soviet influence operation.’ ”

Remember: “This” (the particular list of “plunder”), in
fact, had nothing to do with uranium or Hopkins. True to sloppy form, Radosh’s
reference to the “slam-dunk influence operation” applies not to uranium or
Hopkins, but instead to the fact that three Soviet assets – Hammer,
Hopkins and White – got Lend-Lease off the ground in the first place.

He continues:

“Or,
as she refers to Lend-Lease at the end of her book: `All that American booty
pirated by Harry Hopkins for Mother Russia.’ ”

Taking this
particular quotation out of context greatly bothers me.

The context is the
recollection of a witness, a national of the former Soviet Union, who discusses
his memories of American prisoners, ex-soldiers or ex-POWs, who moved through
the Gulag Archipelago. One of his anecdotes recounts four American prisoners of
a Gulag mining camp working as mechanics on “mobile electric power stations
that reached Chaunskaya Guba under the Lend-Lease program.”

This was a wholly
unexpected allusion to Lend-Lease to come across while reading about our
ex-POWs in the USSR. My comment is as follows:
(
American Betrayal
,
p. 338):

“The
Lend-Lease program—again. All that American booty pirated by Harry
Hopkins for Mother Russia. And what a terrible taunt to our men to have had to
tune up good ol’ American equipment in the desolate Arctic reaches of the
Gulag.”

Radosh ignores this context of, yes,
American betrayal
and seizes on the quotation − “All that
American booty pirated by Harry Hopkins” − as more evidence of what he
characterizes as my “conspiratorial” if not also “unhinged” “claims” about
Lend-Lease.

 
He
continues:

“These
claims, which lie at the heart of her conspiracy theory, are demonstrably
wrong, and show that she even fails to understand the nature of unrefined
uranium the Soviets actually received under Lend-Lease, which was not strategic
in terms of making an atomic weapon.”

Here, again we see Radosh inflating
my discussion of uranium and attack his own inflation.

I do not claim that the uranium Lend-Lease
shipped was “strategic in terms of making an atomic weapon.” I discuss uranium,
not weapons grade, “strategic” or “crucial.”

Radosh now goes on,
book-report-style, into an irrelevant discourse on the state of Soviet
technology based on
Stalin and the Bomb,
a 1996 book by Stanford’s David Holloway.

To underscore: this discussion is
wholly and completely irrelevant to
American
Betrayal
. That is, the state of Soviet labs in no way negates the unceasing
Soviet efforts to procure uranium stocks from the US during the war, and,
simultaneously, the unceasing pressure brought to bear on the Manhattan Project
by the Lend-Lease bureaucracy to release uranium stocks to the Soviets. This is
part of what I chronicle in
American
Betrayal
.

But Radosh criticizes me for not
following Holloway’s conventional research track. He writes:

All
of this information can be found in David Holloway’s definitive study.
Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and
Atomic Energy, 1939-1956,
which West seems not to be aware of.”