Evidence: Exploring Cold War History

With the end of the Cold War more than a quarter of a century behind us, historians seek to form the most accurate narratives of that era. To do so, they need data.

Evidence of Soviet espionage networks in the United States comes from different sources, which may be grouped into two categories: the data available during the Cold War, and the data which became available after it was over.

Some of this evidence was used to discover and convict Soviet agents during the Cold War. The Pumpkin Papers - actually, several rolls of film - were given by Whittaker Chambers to the United States government.

The Pumpkin Papers were documents which Chambers had couriered from their sources to Soviet operatives who would send them on to Moscow. Chambers had been a member of the Communist Party (CPUSA) during the early 1930s.

The CPUSA was not merely a group advocating policies and candidates. It was an arm of the Soviet government and functioned as part of a spy network. When Chambers left the party, he kept the Pumpkin Papers. Eventually, he aided the U.S. government and gave them the papers.

The papers received their odd name because Chambers had hidden them in a pumpkin.

Chambers produced the papers in 1948 and gave them to Congress. They were used in ongoing investigations and trials which ultimately revealed that Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department officer who personally advised the president on foreign policy, was a Soviet operative.

An editor of the University of Michigan’s Michigan Law Review writes:

Even before Soviet cables proved the existence of a vast Soviet-run espionage network in Amer­ica, there was lots of evidence. There were, for example, the detailed accounts given in sworn testimony by various ex-Communists like Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and Louis Budenz. There were Chambers's Pumpkin Papers. There were Soviet defectors who brought reams of KGB documents with them, identifying Soviet agents in America. There were confessions of arrested spies, such as David Greenglass, who informed on his sister Ethel Rosenberg and her hus­band, Julius. There was the arrest of Judith Coplon, who was actually apprehended in the act of handing a U.S. counterintelligence file to a KGB officer.

Among the data which became available after the end of the Cold War, the Venona Project files are probably the most famous. These were a series of messages between Soviet operatives which had been intercepted and decrypted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Other evidence became available when the government of the Soviet Union, and the governments of other Warsaw Pact nations, fell after 1989. While the Venona Project had intercepted and decrypted telegraphed messages as early as 1942, the evidence was not released, even to other branches of the U.S. government, for fear that the Soviets would learn of the breach in their system.

Had the Soviet learned of the intercepts, the data would have become worthless, and the communists would have changed their encryption system. The intercepted messages made it clear that there were numerous Soviet operatives in various government agencies, so the data from Venona was not shared, even within the government.

It turned out that, all along, there was also evidence in the form of decrypted Soviet cables to their agents in America. Though not revealed for half a century, the U.S. government had broken the Soviet cable code beginning in the forties in a top-secret undertaking known as the Venona Project. In the most patriotic act of his career, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan would push through the declassification of the Venona Project, which was finally unveiled on July 11, 1995.

Keeping Venona secret for so long was a calculated risk: it meant that some Soviet agents would not be prosecuted. Those agents who were tried in court were convicted based on other evidence; even the prosecuting attorneys did not know about the Venona evidence.

After 1995, it became clear how large the Soviet espionage network in the United States was, and how thoroughly it had infiltrated the U.S. government.

Stalin Deceives FDR

In 1939, when Hitler and Stalin were allies, they jointly invaded Poland: the Nazis from the west, and the USSR from the east. This unprovoked aggression happened quickly, and by the end of that year, Poland was a subjugated nation.

Although the combat operations were over, the bloodshed was not. In 1940, at or near a place called Katyn, the Soviets executed 22,000 Poles, all of them unarmed, many of them civilians, and by that point in time, none of them part of the war effort.

This cold-blooded killing of civilians was conducted by the NKVD, one of the communist secret police agencies.

By 1941, the geopolitical landscape had changed. Hitler had betrayed Stalin, and Stalin had joined the western allies - England, the United States, and others.

The Allies were delighted to have the USSR on their side. They were hesitant to offend the Soviets in any way, lest they return to Hitler’s side.

President Roosevelt, hoping to spark a friendship with Stalin, did not confront him about the massacre at Katyn. Nor did FDR object to Stalin’s demand that, in a postwar scenario, almost half of Poland become Soviet territory: the USSR would annex 77,000 square kilometers of Polish territory.

Mentioning the killings at Katyn and the seizing of Polish territory, historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:

Nor was that the total story. When the Red Army rolled back into Poland, the Soviets would control not merely half the nation but all of it. They would then set up a puppet regime in the city of Lublin for the part of the country still called “Poland,” plus a sector of Germany awarded the Poles in compensation for what was given Russia. To this further demarche the Americans and British consented with misgivings, but consent they did, covering their retreat with pro forma protests and never-to-be-honored Soviet pledges to provide for Polish free elections.

FDR, Winston Churchill, and Stalin met - occasionally with other global leaders - to make these deals and shape the postwar world in a series of conferences: in Teheran in 1944 and in Yalta in early 1945.

A conference was held in Potsdam later in 1945, but by that time, Roosevelt had died, and Harry S. Truman was president.

During his last two years in office, FDR was hampered in his ability to think and speak clearly. He was a dying man, diagnosed variously with cancer, hypertension, and heart failure. He often fell asleep at meetings.

In addition to his health, Roosevelt was also thinking about domestic politics inside the United States, as Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein note:

Noteworthy in these events was the performance of FDR. One suggestive episode occurred at Teheran, when the President told Stalin the United States was willing to go along with the Soviets on Poland, but that he had political realities to deal with. “[T]here were six to seven million Americans of Polish extraction,” Roosevelt said, according to the official Teheran record, “and, as a practical man, he did not wish to lose their vote [in the 1944 election]. He hoped … that the Marshal would understand that, for the political reasons outlined above, he could not participate in any decision here in Teheran … and could not take any part in any such arrangement at the present time.” The magnanimous Stalin replied, now that FDR had explained it, that he understood the President’s problem.

Further inhibiting Roosevelt’s ability to negotiate was the fact that his advisor for foreign policy, Alger Hiss, was actually a Soviet agent, paid both to present a pro-Stalin view to FDR, and to leak American military secrets to Moscow.

Roosevelt hoped to form a working friendship with Stalin. Stalin had no intention of building any such relationship, but deliberately continued to foster those hopes in FDR, who was all the more inclined to allow the Soviets to continue their atrocities in Poland. Thus it was that millions of Poles lost their lives, their properties, and their liberty.

Venona: Evidence for the Prosecution

During the Cold War, the ability to intercept and decrypt communications between various operatives in the Soviet intelligence agencies was crucial to keeping U.S. citizens safe. A paradox, however, arises when the aggressor’s internal messages have been deciphered: if Americans acted upon that information, the USSR would know that its codes had been broken, and the information would quickly become worthless.

This same paradox allegedly kept Churchill from warning the city of Coventry that it was about to be attacked during WWII: if he had done so, it would have been a clear signal to the Nazis that their famous ‘Enigma’ encryptor had been understood. However, there is insufficient evidence that Churchill, or anyone else in England, knew of the Coventry raid before it happened.

While the urban legend’s narrative about Churchill facing the painful decision about Coventry might be fiction, it is a documented datum that U.S. officials made similar difficult decisions.

The ‘Venona’ project allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to decrypt Soviet messages in the 1940s. These intercepted cables documented that there were hundreds of communist spies operating inside the federal government.

An editor at the University of Michigan’s Michigan Law Review writes that “the Soviet cables indisputably proved the guilt of” a group of suspects investigated by the FBI: “Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” That was merely the beginning. The Soviet communications yielded many other names. But in court, the FBI did not release the Venona decryptions, even though that would have given them “slam dunk” convictions. Instead, more lengthy and difficult cases, sometimes using bits of circumstantial evidence, kept the Venona project a secret:

Because of Venona, the FBI and certain top Justice Department officials were absolutely sure “they were prosecuting the right people.” But throughout the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, J. Edgar Hoover risked acquittal rather than reveal that the U.S. had cracked the Soviet code.

Some news reporters derided the FBI’s apparently weak cases, not knowing that the defendants were guilty, and that the FBI had a surplus of evidence, not a dearth of it. In addition to the Venona information, the FBI had statements from former Soviet spies who'd defected and agreed to help the Americans. These defectors, Chambers and Bentley, independently confirmed the Venona data. “Without realizing that the U.S. government had confirmed the accounts of such informers as Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley with Soviet cables,” the anti-FBI media

smeared ex-Communist informers as lunatics and per­verts. Now the world knew what J. Edgar Hoover knew at the time: The informers were telling the truth.

Hiss was convicted and sentenced in January 1950. The two Rosenbergs were convicted and sentenced in 1951. Harry Dexter White died before he could be tried. The Venona transcripts were not released until 1995.

Afghanistan: Obama’s Surge

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, an international coalition of nations participated in military action against the Taliban government, beginning with aerial bombardment on October 7, 2001. Until December 31, 2014, United States troops have been in Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom.

Since January 1, 2015, the military designation for U.S. presence in Afghanistan has been Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.

By January 2009, U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan had grown to 32,800. For most of the time between October 2001 and January 2009, levels were under 20,000.

Upon taking office in January 2009, Barack Obama began a surge of troops, raising levels to over 100,000 within two years. The Obama Surge lasted until September 2012, at which time levels were reduced to 68,000, a number still more than double the troop level when Obama took office.

Currently, the Obama administration is projecting a gradual drawdown until a force of 1,000 is left in Afghanistan during 2017. In March 2015, a New York Times headline read “U.S. to Delay Pullout of Troops From Afghanistan to Aid Strikes,” and a Reuters article was titled “Obama slows withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.”

As of June 2015, the U.S. had around 9,800 troops in Afghanistan.

The American soldiers were the majority of the force in the area, joining approximately 7,000 soldiers from a coalition which included Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Mongolia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the UK, and around twenty other nations.

A statistical overview reveals that, compared the U.S. action in Afghanistan during the Bush administration, the Obama administration engaged in a massive escalation and surge.

T.A. Bisson - an Accomplice to Totalitarianism

Of the many Soviet spies to infiltrate the United States government, Thomas Arthur Bisson was one of the most sophisticated. Born in New York in 1900, he had a successful academic career and published books and articles, mainly about eastern Asia.

But Bisson’s espionage activities make him partly responsible for deaths in China and Europe.

As part of his academic cover, Bisson was employed by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), ostensibly a think-tank studying the diplomatic relations between various east Asian nations, but in reality a communist front organization. In the IPR, Bisson was in contact with Owen Lattimore, another known Soviet agent.

Bisson also worked for two publications, Amerasia and China Today. An FBI investigation discovered that the offices of Amerasia held hundreds of stolen classified documents from various government agencies.

Writing for these, and other, periodicals, Bisson could implement Mao’s disinformation campaign in the U.S., attempting to create a public perception of the Chinese communists as “democratic,” e.g., in the IPR’s periodical Far Eastern Review.

During the 1930s and 1940s, China was in the midst of an internal conflict between Mao’s communists and Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists. The Soviet Union was fully backing Mao, while the United States was giving only a half-hearted effort to the nationalists.

The role of Bisson and other Soviet operatives was to keep U.S. support for Chiang Kai-Shek to a minimum, and to undermine whatever support was given.

Evidence about Bisson’s activities comes, in part, from the Venona project, an undertaking by U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept and decrypt messages between various members of Soviet espionage network. Exploring the mountains of data gathered by the Venona project, historian Stan Evans writes:

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:

Bisson handed over reams of information, including reports from not only the American military, but also from the British military. The numbers and locations of troops, internal discussions about negotiating with Maoists about locating U.S. airfields in China, and data about trade between Japan and China were among classified topics about which Bisson informed Moscow.

The Soviets were eager to get classified information from the Board of Economic Warfare, a government panel on which Bisson worked during the war. Evans quotes at length from the Soviet document.

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 …

During the 1940s, during the war, Bisson reported to the GRU, a lesser-known Soviet intelligence agency. The more famous KGB was not founded until 1954. Joseph Bernstein worked for the GRU, and Bisson delivered information to Bernstein, which Bernstein then forwarded to Moscow.

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.

After the war, Bisson left New York and his GRU contacts for a while, working in Japan for the U.S. military, “first with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, then as adviser to the Chief, Government Section, GHQ, SCAP” according to the Fogler Library at the University of Maine. Working with Douglas MacArthur, who had the title Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), Bisson once again had access to classified documents and forwarded them to the Soviets.

The narratives about Bisson, Bernstein, and Lattimore find their context in the larger setting of the Cold War era. The end of WWII, the Soviet acquisition of America’s secret atomic technology, and the Korean War shaped this time period. Stan Evans describes it:

The latter 1940s and early ’50s were a time of tense, explosive conflict, in the world at large and in the politics of our nation. Soviet expansionism in Europe, the battle for control of China, and the 1950 invasion of South Korea would shatter once-euphoric dreams of post-war cooperation with the Kremlin. American policy dealing with this rapidly changing scene was, to put it mildly, often confused, naive, slow to respond, and contradictory (reflecting a lot of intramural combat). Correlative to all this were such domestic scandals as the Amerasia case, the first exposés of atomic spying, the testimony of ex-Communists Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and other such disclosures.

So Bisson was working both for Mao and for Stalin. Nudging U.S. policy in ways favorable for the Chinese communists and disclosing confidential national security documents to the Soviets, Bisson was double threat. Because not all the evidence was available at the time, U.S. intelligence officials didn’t have access to the Venona transcripts cited above. They knew that Bisson was a security risk, but they didn’t

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.

Bisson would continue to promote totalitarianism for years to come. He was still active during the Vietnam War.

Cedric Belfrage: Soviet Spy

Born in England, Cedric Belfrage was in the United States as early as 1927, working as a reporter covering Hollywood and the entertainment industry. He travelled back and forth between Britain and America for several years, but had settled in the U.S. by the 1930s.

In 1937, he joined the Communist Party in the United States (CPUSA). At that time, this was not merely an act expressing a political view, but rather it was supporting an organization which called for, in its printed materials, a “violent” revolution in America.

He shifted his career from journalism to espionage, as historian Stan Evans writes:

He lived and worked in the United States off and on for something like two decades. In the early days of World War II, he was employed by the British Security Coordinator in New York, the famous Canadian spy chief Sir William Stephenson (the man called “Intrepid” by Winston Churchill), who worked in tandem with the ultrasecret American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In this job, Belfrage had access to U.S. as well as British intelligence data.

Although he lived continuously in the United States for a number of years, he did not become a U.S. citizen. Not only did he have classified data about national security, but he would also have influence on the implementation of national policy in postwar Europe.

At war’s end, Belfrage obtained a post with the military government of occupied Germany as a press control officer, supposedly to help advance the cause of “de-Nazification” in the defeated country. In this role he was involved with the licensing of publications, including some of notorious Communist bent (official Allied policy at the time).

The victorious Allies were anxious to promote freedom of the press, but expressing an ideology is not the same as working for a “violent” revolution. “It was this background that brought him to the notice of” people who were concerned about security risks in the U.S. government.

In Washington, congressional committee members were “looking into U.S. information programs in Europe and possible subversive influence in their operations.” Cedric Belfrage, and others, were using Allied and American organizations to plan for the violent overthrow of western democracies.

When Cedric Belfrage was questioned by

counsel Roy Cohn as to whether he had been a Communist while carrying out his postwar duties, or if he were a CP member at that very moment, Belfrage declined to answer, seeking shelter in the Fifth Amendment. He refused to answer similar questions concerning fellow journalist James Aronson, his sidekick in this and other ventures. Whereupon the committee called on the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport Belfrage.

Because Belfrage had not obtained U.S. citizenship, his case trended naturally toward deportation. A trial, and any subsequently sentenced prison time, would have been fraught with diplomatic difficulties. Stan Evans writes that

After a lot of legal bickering, this in fact occurred, and Belfrage at last left the United States to go back to England.

As in many other cases of Soviet espionage, the famous Venona project shed light on the case of Cedric Belfrage. In this project, American intelligence agencies were able to intercept and decrypt messages sent between various secret Soviet operatives.

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.

Cedric Belfrage, then, had a hand in, among other events, the postwar developments in Yugoslavia. He carries responsibility for the human misery and deaths caused by a 45-year communist domination of that region.

Solomon Adler: Multinational Threat

The life of Solomon Adler demonstrates the complex world of international espionage. Born in England, holding a post in the American government, working for the Soviets, he eventually defected to China and spent the rest of his life there, after U.S. officials discovered that he was smuggling classified information out of the U.S. government and on to Moscow.

Alder’s work was multidimensional. He stole secrets from both the United States and from China for the Soviets; later, he would work for a Chinese intelligence agency, analyzing the Soviets and the Americans.

From the 1930s until at least the 1960s, and possibly later, Adler was active in various forms of espionage. Given that these years encompass WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, it is not unreasonable to wonder how many deaths were caused, directly or indirectly, by of Adler’s work.

In 1935, Adler came to the United States, and was hired by the federal government in 1936. Historian Stan Evans documents that

Solomon Adler was an official of the U.S. Treasury Department who served for several years in China during World War II and the early postwar era.

A committee led by Senator Millard Tydings was formed in early 1950 to investigate security risks, specifically those in the State Department. Although the committee’s report failed to identify individuals as Soviet agents, the work of the committee provided data for others who eventually did find unambiguous evidence confirming that the persons examined by the committee were working for Soviet intelligence agencies.

As part of a larger spy network, Adler appeared briefly in the national media and on the country's

radar screen on at least two public occasions we know of, suggesting he had been an object of study and discussion in more private sessions. The first such episode was in the Tydings hearings of 1950.

It became clear that Adler was working with other identified Soviet agents, specifically, with Frank Coe, with John Stewart Service, with Harry Dexter White, and with a large ring of communist spies known as the ‘Silvermaster Group.’ The Tydings Committee investigated John Stewart Service as a result of “original charges of subversion. Assistant committee counsel Robert Morris” interviewed witnesses for the committee.

Robert Morris, as Stan Evans writes, who frequently worked "in these hearings, was questioning diplomat John Stewart Service," one of the State Department's China specialists who'd worked to subvert U.S. policy to favor the communists,

about his contacts in Chungking, China, in the 1940s. It was in this context that Solomon Adler was mentioned, as Morris quizzed Service on his linkage to the Treasury staffer.

Morris had done his homework. “This line of interrogation, and other questions posed to Service, indicated that” careful investigation of the data meant that Morris

at this point had good insight into the bigger picture of events in China, in which Service and Sol Adler both played crucial roles.

Rather than relying merely on secondhand or thirdhand accounts, Morris had direct evidence: “There were also indications that the” members of the Tydings Committee had access to direct intercepts of conversations among the spies. The committee’s

forces were privy to wiretap information from the FBI concerning Service, including ties to Adler.

Although the committee failed to explicitly identify him as a security threat, it was clear already in 1950 that Solomon Adler was working to undermine the United States government. “Adler’s name would surface again in 1953, when,” as Stan Evans notes, the

chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations questioned former Treasury employee William Taylor about his relationship to Adler — specifically, if Taylor and Adler had by any chance lived together at a house in Chungking.

A broad network was uncovered: in addition to William Taylor and Solomon Adler, names like Harold Glasser, Irving Kaplan, Victor Perlo, William Ludwig Ullman, Edward Fitzgerald, and Bella Gold formed a constellation of Soviet agents inside the U.S. federal government. These network was in part uncovered due to the work of Elizabeth Bentley, a former Soviet operative who gave information to American investigators. John Snyder was either an unwitting dupe or a willing accomplice, enabling the careers of the members of this network.

Questions posed by subcommittee

in this session also brought up the name of the Chinese national Chi Chao-ting, yet another Adler contact.

The situation in China was one of internal struggle. The defeat of Japan at the end of WWII ended a temporary truce in a civil war between the communists and the nationalists. The Soviets were backing the communists, but the United States was only half-heartedly supporting the nationalists.

Soviet agents inside the United States worked to ensure that American support for the nationalists would be muted, and that whatever support was given, could be subverted or otherwise rendered less effectual.

Solomon Adler was enmeshed in a multinational espionage network. Evidence increased and reached the point at which no reasonable doubt about Adler’s guilt was possible. Data came from many sources, including intercepted Soviet communications.

Messages among Soviet spies were recorded by U.S. intelligence agencies in a program called ‘Venona.’ Stan Evans writes:

This focus on Sol Adler would be of additional interest when the Venona decrypts were published. There we find him duly making his appearance, under the cover name “Sachs,” passing information to the comrades about the state of things in China. This fits with other official data that show him to have been part of a Treasury Red combine that included Harry Dexter White, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Harold Glasser, V. Frank Coe, and a sizable crew of others.

The codename assigned to Adler by the NKGB and MGB was also rendered as ‘Sax’ or ‘Saks’ in various documents. As more data was uncovered, “both Coe and Glasser would become” subjects of investigation, and eventually considered as “committee cases also” by the Tydings group.

When the matter was finished, it became clear that the Tydings committee “did not err in targeting Adler, his ties to Service, or his living arrangements while in China,” although the committee failed to act quickly enough or decisively enough to prevent Adler from continuing his activity for several more years.