By Brian Carnell

Sunday, November 28, 1999

The last couple weeks I've been working my way through John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Venona was the code name for the National Security Agency's program of intercepting and decoding Soviet cables. Beginning in 1943 and ending in the 1980s, the NSA intercepted thousands of cables and, thanks to a major mistake on the part of the Soviets, were able to decipher a significant number of them.

Haynes and Klehr previously wrote several excellent volumes revealing the |Communist Party USA|'s espionage efforts on behalf of the Soviet Union based on the CPUSA's own records (which had been sent to the USSR for archiving). In Venona the two report extensively on the Venona cables and try to correlate what is in the Venona documents with the CPUSA and other Cold War records. Haynes and Klehr's research is by no means the definitive last word on Cold War espionage, but it is an important and fascinating start.

Which, of course, those on the Left used to pretending the CPUSA was an innocuous, passive victim will have none of it. In a letter to |The Nation| a few years ago, William Kunstler said point blank that since the Venona cables came from the U.S. government they're of no use whatsoever. As Haynes and Klehr point out, the odds that the Venona cables are forgeries is exceedingly small. Pulling off a historical forgery involving only a handful of documents is extremely difficult; doing it with thousands of document is all but impossible. Besides, so far the Venona cables correspond well with other records, including those in the recently opened Soviet archives.

But there are other options open to the Left to bring the Venona cables into question. The Nation has taken two tacks that reveal the sort of hypocrisy too common the Left.

First, attack the motive. Back in 1996, The Nation publisher |Victor Navasky| accused the NSA of declassifying the Venona cables in order to push "to enlarge post-cold war intelligence gathering capability at the expense of civil liberty." Is this the same The Nation that is always urging the government to declassify more documents? Apparently the government should only declassify those documents that comport with The Nation's views.

It is especially ironic that Navasky continues to ridicule the very idea of a CPUSA conspiracy of espionage, quoting I.F. Stone as writing that "These people are all paranoid, trained to look for plots, but history is not made of conspiracies, history is made by fundamental forces." This from Leftists who spun conspiracy after conspiracy to excuse Communist espionage, from claiming that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of anti-Semitism to the OJ Simpson-esque claim that the FBI framed Alger Hiss by constructing and planting a fake typewriter (not to mention the aformentioned I.F. Stone, a Soviet lap dog for much of his life, who absurdly charged that the United States started the Korean War).

The real problem seems to be that history, often practically deified as a force for the Left by people like Stone, now seems to be moving inexorably toward a full accounting of the Old Left's actions during the Cold War.

Meanwhile in the July 5, 1999 issue of The Nation, Walter and Miriam Schneir reviewed Haynes and Klehr's Venona, trying to link Haynes, Klehr and others with an attempt to rehabilitate Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In fact as Haynes and Klehr point out, it doesn't appear McCarthy ever had access to Venona, reinforcing the view that McCarthy's charges had very little relation to reality. What the Schneir's and other Leftists seem unable to come to grips with is that it is possible that a) McCarthy was a nut and b) nevertheless, there was an active conspiracy among CPUSA members and others to penetrate the U.S. government.

The Schneirs do present some valid criticisms of Venona, and there is certainly still much to be debated about the Cold War -- much of which won't be resolved until researchers have better access to U.S. and Soviet records of the era. But the Schneirs only confirm the worst fears of those not on the Left when they include this dig on Haynes and Klehr:

Haynes and Klehr, who concluded in several previous books that the American Communist Party lacked any redeeming features, here set themselves to a far broader objective.

Their previous books, of course, were based entirely on CPUSA documents so if anybody indicted the CPUSA it was the CPUSA. More importantly, why would it take Haynes and Klehr to make the obvious point that the CPUSA was a political party without redeeming qualities? You could learn that simply by reading the speeches of William Foster and others who ran for president on the CPUSA ticket. For example, here's what Foster said during his 1932 campaign:

Under the dictatorship all the capitalist parties -- Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, etc. -- will be liquidated, the Communist party functioning alone as the Party of the toiling masses. Likewise will be dissolved all other organizations that are political props of the bourgeois rule, including chambers of commerce, employers' associations, rotary clubs, American Legion, Y.M.C.A., and such fraternal orders as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus, etc. ...

The press, the motion picture, the radio, the theater, will be taken over by the government.

If a Right wing group received funding from a foreign country and promised to create a dictatorship, banning competing organizations and instituting a broad regimen of censorship, the Left would be screaming for the FBI to neutralize them. Because the CPUSA was on the Left, however, it still gets the benefit of the doubt from the usual suspects.

Discuss (0 Replies) | Printer Friendly