• Mary Jane and Philip Keeney. Though not original Bentley cases, the Keeneys were known to the Bureau from other probes and turned out to have innumerable contacts with her suspects. Indeed, there seemed to be few people in Communist, pro-Communist, and fellow traveling circles they didn’t know. Through their multifarious dealings, the Keeneys—especially Mary Jane—came to occupy a special niche in the burgeoning archives of the Bureau. (Both Keeneys show up in Venona but were well known to the FBI before it received the decrypts.)
Mary Jane had been at the Board of Economic Warfare, then moved briefly to the State Department, thence to the United Nations. Philip worked at the Library of Congress and OSS, then shipped overseas to help with the occupation of Japan. The Keeneys’ range of contacts was prodigious. They knew the Silvermasters, were friends of Max and Grace Granich, were in touch with Philip Jaffe and Joseph Bernstein, hobnobbed with the Owen Lattimores, were friendly with Maurice Halperin of OSS, and had many other such connections. Some of these were unheralded figures who nonetheless show up often in security records: Lois Carlisle, Sylvia Schimmel, and Bowen Smith of the State Department, Alix Reuther of OWI and the War Department, Stanley Graze of OSS and State, David Wahl of BEW, and a formidable list of others.
The Keeneys also had frequent dealings, recorded by the Bureau, with the already noted “Colonel Thomas” (Soviet agent Sergei Kournakov), Samuel Krafsur and Laurence Todd of the Soviet news agency TASS, Czech official Vladimir Houdek, Bulgarian diplomat Boyan Athanassov, and several more of like persuasion. In the manner of Philip Jaffe, Mary Jane moved tirelessly back and forth among officials of the U.S. government, shadowy activists of the left, and identified Soviet or other East bloc agents.10
LOOKING at this somewhat bewildering array of people—merely a sample of what’s in the records—the Bureau observed a number of items that proved useful in understanding the way things functioned. First, from the interconnections among the suspects, it became apparent that the targets of the various investigations then in progress were at some level all parts of a vast phenomenon, rather than totally distinct endeavors. Whether it was snooping at the Berkeley Lab, purloined papers at Amerasia, moles at OWI and OSS, or Soviet agents at Treasury or State, the same names kept popping up from one inquiry to another.
Thus, to take a few examples, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, who started out on the West Coast, was a close contact of Louise Bransten and of her fellow Communist Steve Nelson. Silvermaster was also acquainted with the Communist writer Bruce Minton, whose real name was Richard Bransten and who was the ex-husband of Louise Bransten.
When they moved East, the Silvermasters connected up with Robert Miller, who was in continuing contact with Maurice Halperin and others from OSS. Halperin and Willard Park were in turn linked with Richard Bransten/Minton. Asking him for contacts in D.C., said Bentley, they were referred to Golos and thus became a part of her apparatus. Park would also be in contact, according to the FBI reports, with Louise Bransten, a cousin of his wife. As Halperin would later aptly comment, “We are all one family when you get down to it.”11
The Louise Bransten/Kheifetz combine would show up again in one of the most famous of all security probes, that of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Other suspects prominent in this investigation were Haakon Chevalier and George Eltenton, both identified Communist agents tracked by the Bureau. In keeping with the earlier-noted OWI connections of the West Coast group, when Chevalier sought a job at OWI, he got a letter of introduction from Owen Lattimore to Joe Barnes. George Eltenton’s wife meantime was active with the IPR, where both Barnes and Lattimore had worked back in the 1930s.*61
The nuclear connections of the D.C. group were many. One of the more famous Silvermaster contacts was Dr. Edward Condon, sometime science adviser to the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and head of the National Bureau of Standards in the Department of Commerce. Like Oppenheimer, Condon would eventually become the focus of his own FBI investigation and also of a heated conflict between the White House and the Congress.
Yet another case involving Commerce was that of William Remington. Though not part of any of the affinity groups discussed above, Remington was named by Bentley as one of her agents. In a further illustration of how cases commingled, he was a close friend of Bernard Redmont, yet another Bentley suspect, who worked with Robert Miller at State. According to Bentley, it was Remington who brought Redmont into the Communist Party. Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely.
Of course, the mere fact that people’s names appeared in this huge compendium of cases didn’t mean they were Communists or Soviet agents (though in many instances they quite obviously were), nor did the FBI, backtracking on the Bentley data, so construe things. For that matter, Bentley herself distinguished among her people—some of whom she said were committed CP members or Soviet agents, others timid cooperators on the fringes. Still less was there any certainty about people who showed up as second- or third-tier contacts of the people mentioned.
In some instances, there would later be court tests of such matters, and much later still, confirming evidence from Venona. But for the moment the Bureau mainly had Bentley’s word about the suspects, which in a court case would be her say-so against theirs. So further evidence was required, and this would be intensely hunted. However, one thing conspicuous early on was that a large number of the people Bentley named, and their interlocking contacts, formed a kind of floating subculture in and around the federal government of distinctive nature.
The point wasn’t merely that they knew one another but that they worked together, helped each other get jobs, promotions, and key assignments, cooperated in political projects, and vouched for one another when dicey questions were asked about security matters. Prime movers in this regard, said Bentley, were Harry White and Lauchlin Currie. At Treasury, White ran a virtual job-placement service, having brought in such as Ludwig Ullman, Frank Coe, and Gregory Silvermaster. When Silvermaster was under fire, Currie would vouch for him as true and loyal. Silvermaster would pass the benefits along, bringing William Taylor to the department; when inquiries were made about Taylor, Harry White would do the honors by vouching for his bona fides.12
A second main point about the Bentley people was their great mobility in moving from one job to another. Nor was this merely random. Instead, the transitions were typically quite focused, geared to the main issues of the day, which at this era often meant a diplomatic or other foreign posting. The case of the MacArthur occupation forces in Japan has been noted. In this instance, an unusual group of helpers would be dispatched by the U.S. government to assist the general with his duties. These included John Stewart Service, Owen Lattimore, T. A. Bisson, and Philip Keeney, to cite only the more obvious cases. Also on hand to help out in Japan was the Canadian Herbert Norman, alumnus of both the Cambridge circle and the IPR connection.
A similar crew showed up in Germany to help staff the occupation there. This delegation included Mary Jane Keeney, George S. Wheeler (brother of Donald), Russell Nixon, Ludwig Ullmann, Harold Glasser, V. Frank Coe, James Aronson, Cedric Belfrage, Henry Collins, and Irving Kaplan, all targets of security investigations. Assignments of this sort were run through the office of Assistant Secretary of State John Hilldring. A key member of the Hilldring staff involved in such decisions was Bowen Smith, a good friend of the Keeneys and himself a minor Bureau suspect. Many like assignments would occur at the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), in charge of distributing relief supplies and handling displaced persons in the postwar period.*62
A further point emerging from the Bureau records concerns the much-emphasized issue of spying. In the case of the Bentley people, the FBI had been told going in that many had plied her with official data, and much of the surveillance was aimed at catching the suspects stealing secrets. This, however, never happened, nor was there much prospect that it would. The main reason usually cited for this is that, shortly after Bentley and Igor Gouzenko bolted, the Soviets ratcheted down
their networks, pulled back their Russian controllers, and told their contacts to lie doggo.
But such instructions may not have been the only reason nobody was caught red-handed filching papers or discussing secrets on the phone. Whatever else they were, the Bentley suspects weren’t stupid. Despite their casual way in socializing, they were hardly the kind of people to talk about such matters on an open phone line or conduct transactions where they could be watched by Bureau agents. Also, once the heat was on, they knew it, and many a wiretap contains warnings from one suspect to another to be careful about saying anything of substance on the phone. Such concerns became acute in the early months of 1946, when many of the Bentley group were being closely pressed by security agents.
Also, there is a final point that seems even more important in the wider Cold War context. As the postwar diaspora suggested, and as FBI agent Guy Hottel observed to Director Hoover, large numbers of the Bentley people had moved, or were moving, to policy-making jobs that would affect the shape of things to come in the dawning East-West struggle. They were often well placed to guide or implement decisions, not simply kibitz as others did so. And people actually making policy, rather than learning about it secondhand, generally don’t have much time—or need—for spying. As Whittaker Chambers had pointed out, it was the policy making that counted.
CHAPTER 11
What Hoover Told Truman
ONCE universally praised and honored, the FBI in recent years has fallen on hard times. The uproar about alleged intelligence failures before the terrorist onslaught of 9/11 is but the latest chapter in a morose, ongoing story that dates back to the 1970s, if not before then.
At that era, we were bombarded with horrific tales of abuses by the Bureau, saying it was trampling private rights and ignoring tenets of the Constitution, creating an American police state. From this agitation there developed laws and guidelines that restricted the powers of the FBI, subjected it to bureaucratic second-guessing, and in general curbed the can-do methods that were once its leading features.
To this skein of woe there have been added, since the 1990s, still other lacerating charges, mostly of the opposite nature: that the FBI was a dismal flop in what was once its foremost mission—combatting the efforts of Communists and Soviet agents to penetrate the U.S. government. Here the Bureau’s alleged failings concern, not what it did opposing Red incursions, but what it should have done and didn’t. Given the fierce anti-Communism of J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men, this seems the most fantastic charge of all, but is seriously made in certain quarters.
Thus, to take an extreme example, a column by a presumably expert writer in a respected daily makes the remarkable statement that “Soviet intelligence operatives ran through J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI like a sieve.” This critique suggests the Bureau didn’t know “the Communist Party was a support organization for Soviet intelligence,” or that its “agent penetrations were numerous at very high levels of the government during and after World War II.” The writer adds that, even when tipped off by the Army to the secrets of Venona, Hoover and his dim-witted agents failed to get the job done.1
A more widely circulated charge relating to Venona is that the FBI deliberately withheld its horrific revelations from President Truman. This is a rhetorical twofer, as it both blames the FBI for security lapses in the Cold War and exculpates Truman from charges of inaction, twin objectives in some circles. If only Truman had known about Venona, supposedly, he could have taken proper steps against the spies and agents inside the government he headed; but as Hoover withheld the necessary data, Truman was slow to learn the facts and craft the needed measures.*63
With all due respect to the learned folk who advance such notions, all of this is moonshine and will be so perceived by anyone who bothers to check the official records. As has been seen, the FBI was neither fooled by nor indifferent to Soviet penetration efforts in the 1940s. Nor was it in doubt that the Communist Party USA was a creature of the Soviet Union, up to its ears in spying, pro-Moscow influence schemes, and other species of subversion. Nor did the Bureau withhold its knowledge of such matters from the Truman White House.
It’s fair to say, in fact, that the FBI throughout the war years and early postwar era was the only institution of the U.S. government that—as an institution—clearly grasped the Communist problem, devoid of blinkers or delusions. Perhaps the Bureau can be faulted for not picking up on the matter more alertly in the latter New Deal years, but it repeatedly led the way in warning of the Communist danger as of the early 1940s. This was most notably so during the “gallant ally” daze of wartime, when FDR, Harry Hopkins, and their minions were lauding Stalin, letting Earl Browder out of prison, and strewing roses along the path that led the comrades to the federal payroll.
While all this was going on, the FBI was vigilantly on the job against the Soviets and their agents, even as it cracked down on Nazi and Japanese would-be saboteurs in the context of the war. That the Soviets were our military allies didn’t obscure for Hoover the fact that they were profoundly hostile to American interests and values. Nor did the Bureau accept the fiction, advanced in 1943, that the Soviet Comintern had been dissolved as an agency of world subversion, or that the “Communist Political Association” announced at this era by Earl Browder was an indigenous American group with no linkage to the Kremlin. The Bureau always knew that this was phony. Hoover and his men knew all this, not because of any ideological leanings (though such undoubtedly existed), but because they were paying attention to events—closely watching what the Soviets and American Reds were doing, as opposed to propaganda statements by vice president Henry Wallace or Ambassador Joseph Davies about the peaceable kingdom to come in which the United States and USSR would lie down together in friendship. What the Bureau was observing and recording was the exact reverse of these benighted notions.
To be specific, the FBI as early as 1943 was tracking the efforts of Soviet spies to penetrate the hush-hush American scientific project then getting under way that would produce the A-bomb. This was the seminal Bransten-Kheifetz investigation referred to in Chapter 7. From informants and surveillance, the FBI knew the Soviets and their U.S. helpers were trying to penetrate the atom setup and steal its secrets. Bureau reconnaissance of this conspiracy led to known and suspected agents in other places, producing a series of three closely linked inquiries.
The first of these investigations, called “the Comintern Apparatus” (in FBI shorthand, COMRAP), branched out beyond the atom project to other venues, including Soviet commercial fronts, Red activities among ethnic groups, infiltration of labor unions, propaganda efforts, and a good deal else. COMRAP reports identified hundreds of known or suspected Soviet agents, Communists, and fellow travelers in many walks of life across the nation. All of this, to repeat, was tracked and recorded in the early 1940s.
As COMRAP grew to embrace this range of topics, the Bureau established another file devoted solely to the atom project. This was given the case name “Communist Infiltration of the Radiation Laboratory” (CINRAD) and focused on the interactions of Soviet agents with scientific and technical personnel at the Berkeley Radiation Lab and related outfits. CINRAD unearthed a good deal of specific intel on what the Soviets and their American pawns were doing in their efforts to steal the secrets of the atom. This, too, was in the early 1940s.
Finally, COMRAP/CINRAD led to a group of atom scientists who, based on the accumulating record, appeared to be either Communists themselves or sympathetic to the party. Foremost among these was J. Robert Oppenheimer, a consultant at the Radiation Lab and thereafter the key figure at the super-secret Los Alamos, New Mexico, installation that would produce the A-bomb. As early as December 1942, the FBI had surveillance data indicating Oppenheimer was a Communist who had to be inactive because of the sensitive job he held but was still considered a comrade by CP leaders. Thus, a third file was created, devoted to Oppenheimer and his doings, this too stemming from the early 1940s.
The point of stressing the dates of
these investigations, as well as the significant subject matter, is twofold. First, they show the FBI was never thrown off the Communist trail by the propaganda of World War II, which made it as a federal agency unique. Second, the dates show that the FBI was acutely aware of the Communist infiltration problem well before the advent of Venona. Needless to remark, Venona was of crucial value and contributed in decisive fashion to Bureau knowledge of the Soviet networks. But its decrypts didn’t come online to the FBI until April of 1948.*64
This trio of interlocking investigations revealed a lot about Soviet/Communist penetration schemes, but more intel was soon to follow. In March of 1945, the Amerasia scandal, fix, and cover-up began unfolding before the astonished gaze of Hoover and his agents, and in November of that year the massive Gregory investigation would be unleashed by Bentley. These two further inquiries between them produced about 65,000 pages of now-declassified material that would be blended with thousands of others from COMRAP and CINRAD. The net result was a colossal database the Bureau distilled into a series of revealing memos, long secret from the public.
Though these enormous files and summary memos have been expertly culled from time to time in FOIA actions on specific topics, their vast range, and the information they contain, haven’t been a matter of general knowledge. If they had, there could never have been any doubt about the Bureau’s awareness of Communist infiltration in the 1940s or suggestions that the FBI withheld security data from top officials. Irrefutable proof about these matters has been there for sixty years, reposing in the Bureau archives.
Because the raw files are so extensive, it’s impossible to give any clear notion of their contents, except in merest piecemeal fashion. The reports and summary memos are easier to manage, though even here the scope is daunting, running to several thousand pages of densely packed disclosures. These wrap-ups capsule the findings of the Bureau from one inquiry to the next, show how Hoover and his agents increased their store of knowledge, and indicate how the pieces went together. What follows is a rough précis of some of these reports and memos, in the order of their appearance:
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