The parallels between the British and American cases weren’t coincidental, but sprang from similar intellectual and moral causes. In both countries, there had been a long decline of faith in Western institutions—beginning with religious faith itself, then spreading to other aspects of a culture that appeared in the depression era of the 1930s to be on its deathbed. To many already afflicted with anomie and dark misgivings, the economic/political crisis of the age looked like the coup de grâce for traditional views and customs. The supposedly ironclad theories of Marx and Lenin and alleged wonders of Soviet planning were thought to have the answers no longer provided by the older culture.
Aiding the transition was the vast flowering of party front groups that has been noted. In these Potemkin village outfits, Communist ideas and projects were presented in appealing masquerade, and many who weren’t Communists to begin with, or ever, mingled freely with those who were—Marxism and its subspecies made respectable and fairly trendy by the systemic crisis.
As the 1930s intellectual ferment fed the Communist malaise, it had other adverse effects as well. An alternative answer to the cultural breakdown was the Nazi version of the godless faith, which had just come to power in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. As the Brown and Red despotisms fought for supremacy in Europe, each posed as the remedy for the other.*18 For many in England and the United States, the Communists and the USSR would thus gain added luster as alleged antidotes to Hitler. (A conflict capsuled in the Spanish Civil War of the latter 1930s, as Western leftists flocked to the Loyalist government in Madrid, supported in its fashion by the USSR, in battle against Gen. Francisco Franco, backed by the Italian Fascists and the Nazis.) From this maelstrom came the Philbys and the Hisses, and many others like them, who would be the traitors of our histories.
The British spy cases, however, were linked to events in the United States by more than common causes and similar outcomes. There were innumerable direct connections between the egregious loyalty problems and feckless security measures that prevailed in Whitehall and those that developed in Foggy Bottom and other Washington power centers. Such overlappings reflected, above all else, the global nature of the Soviet project, which was its outstanding organizational feature. The American comrades were part of a worldwide web that included German, French, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, and other agents who took their orders from the Kremlin. The affinities between British and American CP members were aspects of this formidable undertaking. But they were products also of the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom, with their common political history and language, a linkage that became pronounced in World War II and continued in the Cold War.
Thus, Kim Philby was in the latter 1940s the liaison between the British intelligence unit known as MI6 and intelligence agencies in Washington, and received copious information from his U.S. contacts. Donald Maclean, as second secretary of the British Embassy in D.C., then head of the American desk in London, had access to U.S. intelligence reports and entrée to our atomic energy program. Guy Burgess as attaché for Far East affairs at the British Washington Embassy was privy to official data about our policy in Asia. Among them, the Cambridge spies scooped up a lot of American secrets useful to their Kremlin masters. Britain’s unthinkable security problems were our problems also.
Beyond this were intertwinings of British and American personnel, many with specific links to Cambridge (though Oxford also made its contribution). Most visibly, there were Cambridge alums who settled and worked in North America, establishing personal ties that bridged the ocean and would have relevance in the McCarthy era. Among such transplants, one of the more conspicuous—and genteel—was the wealthy American Michael Straight, who spent much of his youth in England and attended Cambridge in the 1930s. Straight would later achieve public notice in the United States as editor of The New Republic (cofounded and supported by his family). This small but influential journal was a harsh critic of McCarthy, featuring many articles that deplored his alleged lies and evil doings.6
By an odd series of connections, suggestive of the global context, Michael Straight had personal as well as political causes for an aversion to McCarthy. Straight was linked by marriage to not one but two McCarthy targets—Gustavo Duran and Louis Dolivet—both of foreign birth and both named in U.S. intelligence reports of the time and other data later as Soviet agents. (Duran was married to the sister of Straight’s wife, Dolivet to Straight’s actress sister.) Duran was one of McCarthy’s earliest cases, identified on the Senate floor and before the Tydings panel as a Soviet operative in the Spanish Civil War who had somehow popped up in the U.S. State Department. Dolivet would be named under oath in 1953 McCarthy hearings as a Red propagandist whose books were in our information centers overseas.
Vehement in defense of Duran (less so, in retrospect, of Dolivet), Straight thus had plenty of reasons to deplore McCarthy, which he would do in many formats (including an anti-McCarthy book based on the Army-McCarthy hearings). For Straight, McCarthy personified the evils of crude Red-baiting that saw Communists under every bed. Given all this righteous fervor, it would come as a shock to many to learn that Straight himself had been a Communist under the bed—or perhaps more aptly, given his publishing interests, between the covers. He had been recruited by Communist spy king Anthony Blunt at Cambridge in the 1930s, then sent back to the United States to do the Kremlin’s bidding. That the wealthy editor of The New Republic had been a CP member and Soviet agent would be yet another unthinkable revelation from the secret annals of the Cold War.*19
Whether such linkages mattered—and how—is suggested by an anecdote from Straight himself. He recalled spotting Guy Burgess outside the British Embassy in Washington early in 1951 during the Korean War and realizing Burgess was probably furnishing American military secrets to the Kremlin. Such Burgess spying, Straight reflected, could have cost untold numbers of American lives in the fighting against North Korea and Red China. However, any disclosure of the matter to the FBI would have prompted questions leading back to Blunt and how Straight knew so much about Guy Burgess. So, in the event, Straight did nothing. He preferred to focus his public wrath on the distasteful lowbrow Joe McCarthy. On that particular danger, Straight saw no reason to keep silent.7
Michael Straight was not the only member of the Cambridge set to make his way to North America as part of a more general global movement by some well-traveled people. Another was the Canadian E. Herbert Norman, a Cambridge grad who specialized in Far East affairs and would rise to a high-ranking job in Canada’s diplomatic service. In this role, Norman would liaise with U.S. officials and American scholars working on Pacific problems, playing, for instance, a significant part in the postwar occupation of Japan. A Cambridge product even more directly linked to U.S. concerns was Michael Greenberg, a native of Manchester, England, who came to America in 1940 and managed by a feat of bureaucratic magic to wangle a job on the White House staff while still a subject of Great Britain.
Greenberg and Norman would be of interest in the McCarthy saga of the 1950s, as both were then named in congressional hearings as agents of the Communist interest.8 These identifications occurred during an intensive probe of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) conducted by the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, under Sen. Pat McCarran (D-NV), following up on some of McCarthy’s unthinkable early charges. The IPR hookup seemed incidental in the case of Norman but decisive in the case of Greenberg. His first important job in the United States was as Professor Owen Lattimore’s editorial successor at the Institute; thereafter he would make a smooth transition to the staff of Lattimore’s friend and ally Lauchlin Currie at the White House.
As it happened, Michael Straight was also connected in a minor role to the IPR and would meet up with Greenberg and Norman at an IPR conclave in Quebec in 1942. This unusual private group would thus reunite, on the west shore of the Atlantic, three members of the Cambridge circle, far from the storied halls of Trinity and Kings. It was, in a small way, typical
of the IPR in action—as its stock-in-trade was networking with like-minded people from many climes to cogitate, and where possible shape, the fate of Asia. Lattimore, Currie, Greenberg, Straight, and Norman were but a few of the peripatetic folk who kept in touch through IPR and its web of worldwide contacts.9
FURTHER indicative of Moscow’s global reach through a veritable foreign legion of spies and agents was another unthinkable Communist ring that in some ways outdid the Philby combine. This group too had many U.S. connections, dealt with issues of vital importance to our interests, and would figure prominently in the later McCarthy drama. It was a formidable apparatus, based in Asia, headed by the German-born Communist Richard Sorge, perhaps the most effective secret agent in Soviet history.
Sorge made his mark as a big-time spy for Moscow in Shanghai, China, beginning early in 1930. China was at the time and would remain a hotbed of Red intrigue, where such eminent comrades as Michael Borodin, Gerhart Eisler, Earl Browder, Steve Nelson, Vasili Zarubin, and Eugene Dennis all put in a tour of duty. This parade of talent signified the great importance Moscow attached to the Middle Kingdom—an interest not always matched by American leaders, for whom China was a backwater deserving only passing notice.*20 In the late 1930s, as Moscow was increasingly concerned about Japan, near neighbor and historic foe of Russia, Sorge was dispatched to Tokyo to help out with that problem also.
Even more than the Cambridge comrades, the Sorge group overlapped with the IPR, understandable as the ring had a Far East focus. Among the leading members of the polyglot Sorge operation were the Chinese Communist Chen Han-seng, the American writer Agnes Smedley, and the German-born naturalized Briton Guenther Stein. In Tokyo the network included the prominent Japanese journalist Hotsumi Ozaki and one Kinkazu Saionji, son of a distinguished family. All would later be named in congressional hearings as Soviet agents tied to Sorge, and all were linked in one fashion or another to the IPR (Saionji as secretary of its Tokyo unit).10
Arguably the most direct and intriguing nexus between Sorge and the IPR was the globe-trotting Comintern agent Chen Han-seng. A Communist since 1926, Chen was recruited into the Shanghai combine by Smedley and worked with the ring in both China and Japan. In 1935, fearful of a police crackdown, he decamped to Moscow, then moved on to the United States, where he, too, linked up with Owen Lattimore and the IPR. While at the Institute and the Walter Hines Page School at the Johns Hopkins University (another Lattimore connection), Chen was the main Red Chinese contact with the American comrades. After the fall of China in 1949, he would like others noted in these pages abscond to Beijing and become an official of the Red regime there.11
Still other members of the Sorge/IPR extended family had contacts useful to the Moscow cause in Asia. Both Guenther Stein and Agnes Smedley were well familiar with the Chinese Reds based at Yenan in Northwest China and tireless promoters of their interests. Both would likewise become acquainted with U.S. officials posted to China in the 1930s and early ’40s. Smedley would be a particular favorite of Gen. Joseph Stilwell, World War II commander of Allied forces in the region, and of his State Department adviser John Paton Davies (who would call Smedley one of the “pure in heart”).12 Stein was a contact of and information source for U.S. diplomat John Service (who also worked for Stilwell), later arrested in the Amerasia scandal.
In the spring of 1941, the IPR would develop yet another strategic contact in China as Professor Lattimore moved out of the academic-think-tank shadows directly to the policy forefront. At the prompting of his ally Currie in the White House, Lattimore was named by President Roosevelt as an adviser to Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and dispatched to Chungking, wartime capital of Free China. Thus, the IPR contingent now had key personnel at crucial listening posts in both Japan and China, as well as at the center of power back in the United States. Each would have a role to play in the fateful events that led to our involvement in World War II and thereafter in the Cold War.
In Tokyo at this era, the number-one mission of Sorge and his network was to protect the Soviet Union from attack by its historic nemesis, Japan. This task became the more urgent in June of 1941 when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded Russia, sending the Soviet armies reeling backward. The possibility of a matching onslaught from the East by Germany’s Tokyo allies raised in Stalin’s hypersuspicious mind the dread specter of a two-front war. Sorge’s goal, as he would himself describe it, was to ensure that if Japan, already at war with China, got into the larger global conflict, it wouldn’t be through an attack on Russia (or failing this, warn Moscow if such attack was coming).
In this effort, the Soviet master spy was greatly aided by his two IPR-connected Japanese assistants, Ozaki and Saionji. Both had good access to the Tokyo power structure, Ozaki as a respected journalist and adviser to the premier, Prince Konoye, Saionji as a member of the “breakfast group” that counseled the Imperial Cabinet. Each, according to the testimony in the case, used this access to argue that Japan should strike, not north at Russia, but to the south against British, Dutch, or American Pacific outposts to get the resources—especially oil—that the Empire sorely needed.*21
As this question was being thrashed out in the Tokyo cabinet, a mirror-image debate was being conducted 7,000 miles away in the United States. Here the issue to be decided was whether to seek a truce with Tokyo, winding down its four-year-old war with China, thus averting a direct clash between Japan and the United States, championing the cause of Chungking. Ambassador Joseph Grew, our envoy to Japan, was working to head off such a conflict and thought there was a chance to do so. However, when it appeared the State Department might be leaning toward a modus vivendi with the Empire, members of the IPR brigade sprang nimbly into countervailing action.
Lauchlin Currie, for one, deplored the possibility of such a truce in a memo to FDR, saying any arrangement of this sort would do “irreparable damage to the good will we have built up in China.” Another U.S. official disturbed by the prospect of a Washington-Tokyo truce was the Treasury’s Harry Dexter White. “Persons in our government,” White declaimed, “are hoping to betray the cause of the heroic Chinese people.” In keeping with this view, according to IPR spokesman Edward Carter, White in November of 1941 alerted him to the modus vivendi danger and called an emergency meeting to concert resistance.*22 13
What Carter didn’t say and would be discovered later was that White was already working to promote a stiff-necked American policy directly counter to the truce idea, this at the urging of the Soviet KGB. As revealed by Moscow agent Vitaliy Pavlov in his memoirs, he had earlier come to Washington to brief White on the proper stance for the United States to take in discouraging any rapprochement with Japan. White, who obviously didn’t need much prompting, had followed through, drafting and redrafting a tough memo on the subject for Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, forwarded to the State Department for its guidance.14
At this crucial juncture (late November 1941), Professor Lattimore, from his new perch in Chungking, would also get in on the action—firing off a cable to Currie in the White House strongly opposing a diplomatic stand-down with Japan as a betrayal of our friends in China. Chiang Kai-shek, said Lattimore, was dismayed by the possibility of such a truce, so much so that “any modus vivendi now arrived at” would be “destructive of the Chinese belief in America.”15 The voices opposing the modus vivendi thus formed a considerable chorus on both sides of the Pacific basin.
In the upshot, the Sorge-Ozaki-Saionji advices would triumph in Japan, while those of the Lattimore-Currie-White trifecta would prevail in the United States. There would be no Washington-Tokyo stand-down over China, no Japanese attack on Russia, and no peace in the Pacific. There would instead be Pearl Harbor, as the Japanese at last decided to strike south and reach their modus vivendi with Moscow. Whether this would have happened anyway, given the geopolitical tectonics then in motion, there is no way of telling. Enough to note that all these influential people were pushing for a common outcome, and the events that followed
were in keeping with their counsels.
All of which was obviously significant in itself but important also in what it portended for the future. For one thing, many key actors in this run-up to Pearl Harbor would make repeat appearances in the later drama of the Cold War, and would there draw the notice of Joe McCarthy. To cite only the more obvious cases, Owen Lattimore, Lauchlin Currie, the IPR, Edward Carter, the Treasury nexus, Agnes Smedley and other alumni of the Sorge ring would all be McCarthy targets in the 1950s. (Ambassador Grew, who got crossways with this crowd on the modus vivendi issue, would figure in the later battles also.)
A further linkage between these matters and developments of the McCarthy era was the centrality of the China issue—routinely cited by the IPR brigade as a reason for rejecting any modus vivendi with Japan. According to such as Lattimore, Carter, and Currie, it was imperative that we stand fast with our good and faithful ally, Chiang, and do nothing to shake his confidence in our bona fides. A few years later, when Chiang was locked in mortal combat with the Communists at Yenan, the IPR spokesmen who had voiced such great concern about his welfare emerged as his most virulent critics.
Also suggestive of things to come was the synchronous action of so many of these people, acting on a worldwide basis. The positioning, indeed, was nothing short of brilliant. Ozaki and Saionji in Japan, White and Currie in the United States, and Lattimore in Chungking had virtually all the bases covered. The operation was not only global but capable of exerting leverage at crucial vectors and at the highest levels. This, too, would prefigure events that followed in the Cold War, when many of these same players and others like them would frequently act together seeking common objects.
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