Belfrage was portrayed at the time as a victim of McCarthyite excesses, punished because he dared dissent from the smothering orthodoxy of the era. Four decades later, however, came the revelations of Venona. Here we find numerous mentions of Cedric Belfrage, identified by the cryptologists as the KGB contact “UCN/9,” reporting back to Moscow out of William Stephenson’s office. Venona shows UCN/9 providing data from the OSS about the then-looming struggle for the Balkans—a major focus of Soviet, British, and U.S. intelligence efforts. The decrypts also show UCN/9 trying to sound out British policy toward a second front in Europe to ease Nazi pressure on the Russians, sharing documents with Soviet spy chief Jacob Golos, and otherwise acting as a fount of knowledge for the Kremlin. It would thus appear that Joe McCarthy was not mistaken in seeking the deportation of Cedric Belfrage.
NOR was McCarthy wrong about the case of T. A. Bisson. In his early speeches, McCarthy often referred to Bisson and his efforts to advance the Communist cause in China. These comments occurred in connection with McCarthy charges involving the magazine Amerasia, the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), and Professor Owen Lattimore, a kingpin in the IPR who would become McCarthy’s major target. Though Bisson was closely linked to all these cases, it’s doubtful many people today know anything about him, except possibly as one of McCarthy’s hapless victims. So who was T. A. Bisson? Here is what Venona tells us, in a message from Soviet agents in New York back to Moscow Center:
Marquis [Soviet espionage agent Joseph Bernstein] has established friendly relations with T.A. Bisson (hereafter Arthur)…who has recently left BEW [Board of Economic Warfare]; he is now working in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) and in the editorial office of Marquis’ periodical [Amerasia]. Arthur passed to Marquis…copies of four documents: (a) his own report for BEW with his views on working out a plan for shipment of American troops to China; (b) a report by the Chinese embassy in Washington to its government in China…(c) a brief report of April 1943 on a general evaluation of the forces on the sides of the Soviet-German front…(d) a report by the American consul in Vladivostok….4
According to the FBI, the Joseph Bernstein receiving this material was a self-identified Soviet spy who would play an equally sinister role in later cases of subversion. So Bisson not only touted the cause of the Red Chinese, as McCarthy stated, but passed confidential official data to a Soviet intelligence agent. McCarthy thought Bisson was bad news and cited evidence to prove it. But he didn’t know for sure how bad, as reflected in these transcripts. That secret would be locked up for fifty years, known only to the Kremlin and the keepers of Venona.
BREAKING our alphabetical sequence slightly, we have next the cases of V. Frank Coe and Harold Glasser, called back to back in the same McCarthy subcommittee hearings in October 1953.*11 Both were part of the Treasury nexus that included Harry White, Sol Adler, Gregory Silvermaster, and many others. As with Cedric Belfrage, Coe and Glasser were quizzed about Allied policies in the German occupation. This probe sought to develop the espionage angle of a case in which printing plates for occupation currency, issued and redeemable by the United States, were transferred to Soviet control by members of the Treasury network.
In these hearings, ex-Communist Elizabeth Bentley testified that the handover of the currency plates was ordered by her Soviet former bosses and that Red agents in the Treasury followed through and got the job done. Coe and Glasser were questioned about this and other postwar financial issues. Coe was in particular quizzed about a memo he wrote passing along a Soviet request for more dies to print the occupation money. Asked by Sen. Karl Mundt (R-S.D.), “At the time you wrote that memorandum, were you engaged in espionage activities in behalf of the Soviet government?” Coe replied, “I respectfully, under the protection of the Fifth Amendment, decline to answer the question.” When Mundt further asked, “Are you now a member of the Communist Party?” Coe respectfully passed on that one also.
Much the same occurred with Glasser. In cross-examination by McCarthy staffer Thomas LaVenia, the dialogue went as follows: LaVenia: “At the time you attended those meetings, were you a member of the Communist Party?” Glasser: “I refuse to answer that question on the ground that it may tend to incriminate me.” LaVenia: “At the time you attended those meetings, were you engaged in espionage?” Glasser: “I refuse to answer that question on the ground that it may tend to incriminate me.”5
Thus Coe and Glasser, both veterans of such encounters in the late 1940s and early ’50s, would be added to the pantheon of McCarthy subcommittee martyrs. Eventually, both would also show up in Venona—Coe with the cover name “Peak,” Glasser with the more appropriate “Ruble.” On the Venona evidence, Glasser seems to have been an especially valued agent: a pal of Alger Hiss, providing intelligence data to Soviet handlers, talent spotting for the Kremlin. Coe, for his part, would figure in another financial wrangle in the final phases of the war, pertaining to the then anti-Red regime of China and its quest for U.S. funding. In this affair, Coe’s efforts would be devoted to blocking aid for an American ally rather than pushing matters forward as he did for Moscow.
EASILY the most important figure on this McCarthy list of ten was Lauchlin Currie, an executive assistant to President Roosevelt in the early 1940s whose portfolio included policy toward China. Currie left the government in 1945, and though he was still around when McCarthy came along would flee the country soon thereafter. In trying to retrace the steps by which the U.S. government had been penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents, McCarthy got on the trail of Currie and his multitude of contacts.
Currie was, for instance, closely linked with Owen Lattimore, and with diplomat John Stewart Service, arrested in the Amerasia case after sending back a stream of dispatches from China denouncing the anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Currie was also extremely thick with John Carter Vincent, the State Department official who played a critical role in shaping U.S. Asia policy in the years before the Red conquest of China.
In addressing the debacle of U.S. China policy, McCarthy charged that “Lauchlin Currie in the White House and John Carter Vincent and subsequently Alger Hiss in the State Department were exercising their influence at the Washington end of the transmission belt conveying poisonous misinformation from Chungking [to the detriment of Chiang]. The full outlines of Currie’s part in the great betrayal have yet to be traced. That it was an important and essential part, I have no doubt.”6
By “great betrayal” McCarthy meant the strategy of elements in the State and Treasury Departments and White House to torpedo Chiang and advance the fortunes of his Red opponents. This was certainly harsh invective against Currie but totally justified by the record. Like others mentioned, Currie would appear in Venona as an agent of influence and spy for Moscow, bearing the cover name “Page.” And while he more than did his bit on China, his efforts were by no means confined to Asia.
Venona reveals, for instance, that Currie in 1944 told the KGB President Roosevelt was willing to concede Soviet demands about the Polish-Russian border, which claimed for Stalin the territory he seized in 1939 when he and Hitler jointly invaded Poland and divided it between them. This intel was of utmost value to Moscow, as it showed FDR breaking faith with the Polish government in exile, which opposed the Kremlin land grab. The Soviets thus knew they need not fear a tough U.S. response as they dished the Poles, which they proceeded to do in brutal fashion until they totally conquered Poland.*12
LESS important in the larger scheme of things, but significant in his way, was David Karr, among the more flamboyant figures in Cold War records. Karr was the subject of one of the bitterest speeches ever delivered by McCarthy—a denunciation of columnist Drew Pearson as a propagandist for pro-Soviet causes. McCarthy’s main proof of this was the assertion that Karr, a legman and reporter for Pearson, was a Red agent and that his influence in behalf of Moscow was evident in Pearson’s columns savaging anti-Communist spokesmen (McCarthy himself, not so coincidentally, foremost among them).
; On December 19, 1950, McCarthy sought to document these charges by reading into the Congressional Record a security memo from the Civil Service Commission, including findings that Karr had been a reporter for the Daily Worker, a member of the Communist Party, a writer for the Communist-front publication Fight, and related data. McCarthy also read into the Record testimony by ex-Communist Howard Rushmore, a former editor at the Worker, saying he had there given assignments to Karr and that Karr was a party member.
This triggered angry answers from Karr, Pearson, Sen. Clinton Anderson (D-N.M.), and others saying McCarthy had smeared an upstanding newsman. But, as in other cases cited, the evidence of Venona—and other Soviet data—indicates McCarthy knew whereof he spoke. Like his fellow suspects, Karr shows up in Venona, albeit in a different manner. He appears only once, in his own persona and without cover name, providing information to the Soviet agent/TASS correspondent Samuel Krafsur. He also appears in a document gleaned from Russian sources by intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein, as follows:
In 1978, American Senator Edward Kennedy appealed to the KGB to assist in establishing cooperation between Soviet organizations and the California firm Agritech, headed by former Senator J. Tunney. This firm in turn was connected to the French-American company, Finatech, S.A., which was run by a competent KGB source, the prominent Western financier D. Karr, through whom opinions had been confidentially exchanged for several years between the General Secretary of the Communist Party and Sen. Kennedy. D. Karr provided the KGB with technical information on conditions in the U.S. and other capitalist countries which were regularly reported to the Central Committee.7
The description of Karr as a “competent KGB source” underscores the indication in Venona that he was an agent of the Soviet interest. So, for that matter, does the reference to Karr as a “prominent Western financier,” a status in large part achieved through his linkage to the bizarre Moscow front man Armand Hammer, an even more fantastic Cold War figure whose considerable fortune was based on dealings with the Kremlin.
MARY JANE Keeney was among the very first of all McCarthy cases, having been mentioned by him in speeches on the Communist issue in Wheeling, West Virginia, and Reno, Nevada, in February 1950, and on the floor of the Senate a short time later. Though not formally dealt with in testimony to the Tydings subcommittee, she was considered by that panel, the FBI, and the Civil Service Commission to be one of McCarthy’s “public cases.”
McCarthy didn’t talk too often about Mary Jane Keeney (whom he called “Mary Jane Kenney,” as did several FBI reports), but what he said was very much on point. In exchanges with Democratic Senate leader Scott Lucas of Illinois, McCarthy put the matter this way: “I gave the name of Mrs. Kenney, who had been listed by the FBI as a courier for the Communist Party, while working for the government. I pointed out that when she was forced out by public pressure and the FBI statement that she ends up where she is today, in one of the educational organizations or in some part of the U.N. organization.”8
All of which, again, would be backed up by Venona, which shows Keeney and her husband Philip to have been Communists and agents of Soviet intelligence. He had worked for a time at OSS, and she at the BEW, and both had occasion to deal with confidential data. She later went to work, like Cedric Belfrage, for the Allied German occupation forces, while Philip would play a similar role in the occupation of Japan.
FBI records show Mary Jane Keeney meeting with Joseph Bernstein, the Soviet agent who received confidential data from T. A. Bisson, and delivering to Bernstein a package he would in turn deliver to a top CP official. The document hand-off was surveilled by Hoover’s men and was the obvious basis for the “courier” reference by McCarthy. Bureau files reflect many other meetings between Bernstein and the Keeneys, plus frequent Keeney dealings with a “Colonel Thomas,” identified by the FBI as Soviet intelligence agent Sergei Kournakov.
In 1946, on her return from Germany, Mary Jane Keeney did a brief tour of duty at the State Department, but at this time pressures were being mounted by the FBI, security types, and some in Congress to rid the department of such cases. (She was, along with Alger Hiss, one of the “agents” listed in the disappearing Sam Klaus memo of August 1946.) Leaving the department, she moved on to a job at the United Nations, where she was working when McCarthy made his charges. So, despite calling her “Mrs. Kenney” (which he may well have gotten from the FBI), McCarthy described the case with fair precision.
IF LAUCHLIN Currie was the most important of our ten McCarthy cases, the most egregious in many ways was Leonard Mins. Called in December of 1953 during a McCarthy probe into pro-Red penetration of defense supply firms, Mins was so flagrant a Communist he had been fired for this reason a decade before from the OSS. Given the reputation of that agency for harboring Reds and Soviet agents, getting removed from it as a subversive was no small distinction.
Mins in the 1930s had written for both the Daily Worker and the Communist New Masses and had other Red connections. Despite this he had been taken aboard at OSS, where he stayed about a year before being sacked. Indicative of security standards in the war and for some time thereafter, he was then hired by a defense subcontractor dealing with radar-directed weapons for the Navy and stayed at this job for the next three years. In his work on a manual relating to such weapons, he had access to military data.
Among the questions posed to Mins by McCarthy and counsel Roy Cohn were these: “At the time you had access to this material were you a member of the Communist Party?” “Were you at that time on the payroll of the Soviet military intelligence?” “Did you transmit the information which came into your possession while you were working on this manual to Soviet military intelligence?” “At the time [when working for OSS] were you on the payroll of Soviet military intelligence?”9
Mins refused to answer all such questions, pleading the protection of the Fifth Amendment—this interlarded with quotes from the historians Suetonius and Tacitus about the decadent days of Rome and evils of informers. Illustrative of McCarthy’s patience with such baiting, he permitted all these statements to be offered for the record, plus a diatribe by Mins challenging the jurisdiction of the panel and its effrontery in daring ask him if he were a Soviet agent. Rather than gaveling down this filibuster, McCarthy calmly heard it out, said “motion denied,” and proceeded with the hearing.
Subsequently, Mins would appear in Venona as an agent of the Soviet military intelligence service GRU, exactly as suggested by the Cohn-McCarthy questions. While with OSS he had reported to the GRU on U.S. efforts to break Soviet codes, Anglo-American war plans, and his own talent-scouting for the Kremlin. Still other Soviet documentation on Mins reveals that he had been a Comintern agent extending back for several decades.
WE CONCLUDE this brief survey with a case that is a bit of an anticlimax, as neither McCarthy nor Venona had very much to say about him. This final suspect was Franz Neumann, better known as an author and scholar of the so-called Frankfurt school than as a Soviet agent. Nonetheless, he shows up in Venona as a source for the KGB (one of many at OSS), and was case No. 59 on the list of suspects McCarthy gave the Tydings panel. Neumann was a refugee from Germany who came to the United States in the middle 1930s. He was taken into the OSS at the outbreak of the war, then transferred into the State Department in October of 1945 along with hundreds of others from that service.
Though Neumann came to the notice of State Department security officials, he apparently kept his head down enough to avoid excessive trouble before McCarthy chanced across him. He was still on the department payroll in 1950, when McCarthy called attention to his case, but seems to have left the department not long thereafter. At all events, Neumann turned out to be a denizen of Venona (code name “Ruff”) as well as a McCarthy suspect, and so qualifies as yet another answer to the question, Can you name one Communist ever identified in the public record by McCarthy?10
THOUGH drastically compressed, this is a lot of information all at once about a mixed array of cases.
But, considering the glib generalizations tossed around about McCarthy and his victims, the Communists he didn’t name, his lack of evidence, and his lying, it’s obvious that detailed, specific information is precisely the thing that’s needed in such discussion. And, as shall be seen, there are plenty of other security data on McCarthy suspects, derived from sources other than Venona, that are as compelling. When these are examined, potential answers to our rhetorical challenge expand in geometric ratio.
Pending that, a few observations are in order about this group of cases. One is the pattern of verification. In the usual instance, we have someone identified by McCarthy as a Communist, subversive, or security risk, or brought before him to answer charges of this sort made by another witness. Typically, in media/academic handling of such cases, the individual in question would be treated as an innocent victim of McCarthy and/or his “paid informers.” Then, when the truth came out at last, it developed that the alleged victim had been a Communist or Soviet agent all along. Seldom if ever does the process work the other way—in which someone initially considered a subversive turns out to be a blameless martyr.
A second significant point about these cases is that, in every instance, the suspects weren’t merely ideological Communists—though most of them were surely that; they were also, in pretty obvious fashion, Moscow agents, pledging allegiance to the Soviet Union. This was to some degree inherent in the nature of Venona, but would be true in other cases also. The problem with having such people in the U.S. government, in other words, wasn’t their political beliefs as such, but the fact that they were fifth columnists working for a hostile foreign power. All were part of a global apparatus, headquartered in the Kremlin, that was far greater in extent than anyone back in the 1950s—up to and including Joe McCarthy—could readily envision.
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