What We Don't Know about David Wahl

Historians and researchers have had a rich field for exploration, particularly since the end of the Cold War allowed a number of documents to be declassified and and available for public inspection, and since Don Rumsfeld sponsored the Freedom of Information Act and obtained Congressional approval for it.

Historians like M. Stanton Evans, known as “Stan” Evans, have sifted through files in the archives of the FBI, learning about various investigations and the individuals who were the objects of those inquiries. New insights into history have been gained by the accessibility of these texts.

Yet not everything is open to the public. Some documents remain classified, either unavailable to the public, or available only in redacted versions - with important words and phrases removed or rendered illegible. These redactions are, naturally, tantalizing hints about what we don’t know. Stan Evans writes:

Considering the stuff that’s available in the Bureau records, one has to wonder about the stuff that isn’t.

Intriguing indeed! Consider the case of one memo,

written in September 1946 by FBI Director Hoover to the Attorney General (at that time Tom Clark) concerning a shadowy Cold War figure named David Wahl. A former federal employee, Wahl had come to notice in one of the most intensive probes ever conducted by Hoover’s agents. In this memo, Hoover says Wahl “as early as 1941 … was reliably reported to be a ‘master spy’ for the Soviet government while employed by the United States government in Washington, D.C.” After this jolting revelation, however, the next paragraph is blacked out entirely. The obvious question arises: If the Hoover comment that Wahl was “reliably reported” to be a Soviet “master spy” is left in the records, what must be in the part that’s missing?

What did the FBI know about David Wahl? In hindsight, the United States may have faced dangers during the Cold War which were greater than we suspected, and which came from unexpected sources.

Perhaps the greatest danger facing the United States was not the Soviet Union’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, but rather its network of agents placed into sensitive positions inside the federal government. Only the release of more information will enable a more accurate assessment of the danger.

These matters are brought up, not to ask the reader’s sympathy for the researcher (well, maybe a little), but to suggest the rather parlous state of the historical record concerning some important topics. Without the documents referred to, and without the items blacked out in the records, attempts to chronicle our domestic Cold War, while not entirely futile, are subject to the most serious limits. Lacking these materials, we are left in many cases with secondhand data of doubtful value that are nonetheless recycled from place to place as supposed truths of history.

Indeed, much of what passes for knowledge about the Cold War is little more than “urban legend” and the stuff of movies and novels. When Alger Hiss, whom we can identify with certainty as a Soviet agent, sat in face-to-face meetings with FDR in the White House, which network of “moles” supported him in his operations?

While Hiss was subtly nudging Roosevelt’s policy decisions in directions which benefitted, not ordinary American citizens, but rather Joseph Stalin, what chain of individuals connected him to his NKGB and NKVD handlers? While he was passing inside information from the administration’s foreign policy deliberations, to whom was he passing them, and how did that data leave the country and arrive in Moscow?

For each bit of evidence we obtain, more questions arise. We know with certainty that the communist espionage network inside the United States was well-developed and reached to the highest levels of the government. It has now been demonstrated to be much larger than was suspected during the Cold War era.

It’s not too much to say, indeed, that the loss of so many primary records has created a kind of black hole of antiknowledge in which strange factoids and curious fables circulate without resistance — spawning a whole other group of research problems.

While searching for reliable data about Soviet espionage activities inside the United States, the researcher must not only work to gain each bit of evidence, but must also work to clear the field of the unreliable fables which have wrongly been presented as fact.

The amount of such misinformation, and the depth and breadth to which it has been spread, is a result of this international communist conspiracy itself, which has worked to cover its tracks. The Soviets made an organized and deliberate effort in this direction going back at least as far as the 1930s, and most probably earlier, and extending to the 1980s, right up until the fall of Soviet communism in 1989 - 1991.

With more than fifty years of opportunity, and with highly-placed agents, not only inside the federal government, but in key positions in the news media, misinformation and “red herrings” about Soviet intelligence-gathering activity inside the United States has been deeply planted inside the public consciousness, and appear as accepted fact in everything from textbooks to encyclopedias, from documentary films to analysis presented in the electronic media.

David Wahl is but one example. Historians attempting to construct an accurate account of the Cold War era face a double challenge. First, the data we don’t have: what has either totally disappeared from archives, or is still in the archives but still labeled ‘classified’; second, the misinformation deliberately spread by Soviet agencies, which has ironically lived on long after the end of the Soviet Union.

Vital Documents Vanish from National Archives

Through careful research, historians have come to the inescapable conclusion that foreign spies have been at work in the repositories which house the most sensitive and confidential documents relating to the national security of the United States. Classified memos and reports, texts which would help to identify threats to the country, have inexplicably disappeared from archives.

One such document is a memo written by Samuel Klaus in the State Department in 1946. It contains data about security risks. Yet this document is not to be found in the archives, despite that fact that at least two different copies of it were housed in two different parts of the archives.

This systematic purging of information vital to national security can only point to the activity of an espionage network.

One historian, M. Stanton Evans, also known as “Stan” Evans, who explored the archives seeking some of these documents, writes:

In discussion of these cases, there is no suggestion that officials of the National Archives have been remiss in the performance of their duties. In my experience, the archivists are meticulous in safeguarding papers entrusted to their keeping and go to elaborate lengths to prevent any tampering with or removal of such records. In the cases cited, it appears the missing papers were removed from the folders before the archivists ever saw them. (Though, as more recent events suggest, there are people who do try to take things from the Archives, and doubtless some such project could have succeeded in the past if sufficient skill and cunning were devoted to the effort.)

Although Sandy Berger is not a member of a foreign-based espionage network, his activity is instructive. In October 2003, he successfully removed classified and confidential information from the national archives. It may never be known whether or not all the documents he stole were recovered. His example shows that it was possible for others to have done similar things over the decades.

Many documents in the archives are unique: only one copy of them has existed - no photocopies, carbon copies, or other versions of them serve as backups. If these documents are removed from the archives, then the information in them may be permanently lost.

This is true especially of documents from an era prior to the electronic age. A single handwritten or typewritten memo is a priceless historic record. No computer backup files exist.

Concerning some of the mysteriously disappearing texts, Stan Evans writes:

(It should be added that some of the items mentioned did survive in other, less predictable places and were recovered.) However, a couple of connected points need making about primary source material on such issues, and its availability — or lack thereof — to would-be researchers.

The attempt to clearly capture the realities of history depends on primary source materials. Evans notes that “these problems concern” especially records about the activities of Soviet agents planted inside the United States government, and “the entire clandestine history of the Cold War.”

The fact that these documents have been the object of a sophisticated espionage network indicates that they contain information which would be deeply damaging to the international communist conspiracy. The effort to eliminate this evidence underscores the importance of this evidence.

What Is Classified?

When historians seek data about Cold War activity, they often find that some of such evidence is “classified” - not available to the public for reasons of national security. Likewise, documents detailing questions of military intelligence and espionage from even older eras of history are still often not yet released to the public.

The reader will understand that some information does need to be kept secret, inasmuch as releasing it could compromise the safety of the nation and jeopardize the lives of citizens. But it seems odd that documents which are forty, fifty, sixty or even more years old are still kept under lock and key.

What could those documents contain? Information about mechanical or electrical technology would be of no value, the communication and military equipment of those eras being long outdated. Any person named in such documents is most likely long dead. What reason compels the current intelligence agencies to continue to label those papers as classified?

Perhaps by looking at what is declassified, one might find hints about the contents of those texts which are still classified. One historian, M. Stanton Evans, writes:

Among the more voluminous collections of such data are the once-secret records of the FBI. These files are a treasure house of information on Communist penetration of American life and institutions, suspects tracked down by the Bureau, countermeasures taken, and related topics. To its credit, the FBI was watching these matters pretty closely while others allegedly standing guard were dozing, or in the throes of deep denial. The material in the Bureau files is both revealing and extensive.

Some of these cases have become icons, taking on symbolic value. The Oppenheimer case is one. Could it be that iconic figures like Oppenheimer are being protected, or manipulated, by selectively declassifying only those documents which serve some agenda?

Thus, to pick some prominent cases, the Bureau knew as early as December 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist then becoming a central figure in the atomic energy project, was identified by Communist leaders as a secret party member who had to be inactive because of the wartime work that he was doing. Likewise, in 1945, the FBI obtained credible information that high-ranking government figures Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie, and Harry Dexter White were Soviet agents. Also in 1945, the Bureau knew the espionage case of diplomat John Stewart Service and the pro-Red magazine Amerasia had been fixed, lied about, and covered up by a cabal of top officials.

Other documents are available only in part. FBI files and memo are edited by hand, and historians receive either documents with missing pages, or documents in which black ink has been used to obliterate words, phrases, sentences, and sometimes entire paragraphs.

Again the question arises, what information could be so sensational in, e.g., a 1946 memo from the FBI written to Attorney General Tom Clark? The memo contained information about known Soviet agent David Wahl. Historians who request copies of the memo are still given versions in which one-third of the text is missing. What information is so sensitive that, seventy years later, the government insists on keeping it classified?

After detailed research, M. Stanton Evans, also known as “Stan” Evans, reports:

Such are but a few of the revelations in the colossal trove of records housed in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and while they concern some of the more notorious cases that would later come to view are by no means the most astounding. That said, there is still other information in the Bureau files that isn’t open to researchers. In case after significant case, entries have been held back or heavily “redacted” (blacked out), sometimes for dozens of pages at a stretch. In nearly every instance, such redactions concern materials fifty years of age and counting. It’s hard to imagine any national security interest of the present day that would be threatened by these ancient data.

Some of the withheld evidence might be partially reconstructed, at least speculatively, by bits of text coming from sources outside the United States. Some documents from defunct Soviet-era intelligence agencies - agencies which evaporated with the fall of Soviet communism - have been released, e.g., documents from the KGB and its predecessors, the NKVD and the MGB, as well as from the East German “Stasi.”

It may be possible to extrapolate, interpolate, or triangulate, given evidence from these Soviet agencies, and get a clue as to which data are still being withheld.

Regarding the question of motive, it is very unlikely that there are still any Soviet agents - “moles” as they are sometimes called - employed within the U.S. government at this late date in history. The Soviet Union collapsed twenty-five years ago, and with it, much of the international communist conspiracy.

Mainland China, while continuing some form of the communist vision, did not have the Soviet Union’s central role in Cold War espionage, and so would have little interest in documents from the late 1940s or early 1950s.

The remaining communist states, like North Korea and Cuba, are neither significant enough, capable enough, nor interested enough to sift through half-century old FBI files.

Who’s trying to keep this information hidden, and why? If the Soviet Union, its intelligence agencies and their operatives inside the United States government, and vast majority of the international communist conspiracy all disappeared twenty-five years ago, who still cares about this data, and who has the positions of influence inside the federal government to make this evidence disappear?

Although the Soviet espionage network is long gone, are there remainders of it, the U.S. citizens who, while not Soviet agents, were sympathizers to the international communist cause? Are there leftover “fellow travelers,” even though the ones with whom they were “travelling” don’t exist anymore? Are there still good-natured and idealistic “dupes” who are still unwittingly and naively performing the tasks assigned to them by their KGB handlers, long after those handlers have left the stage of world history?

Did the international communist conspiracy build such an effective network of collaborators - some knowing collaborators, others not even aware that they were being used - that this network continues on its own momentum, long after the conspiracy itself collapsed?

These are the questions which historians must investigate. But such investigation may be contingent upon the declassification of more documents.

The Disappearing Newspaper

Historians have documented that Soviet agents were able to permeate classified archives and remove or eliminate specific documents which would have revealed the details of their espionage network in the United States: the Klaus Memo, a 1946 State Department analysis of internal security weaknesses, and a September 1946 FBI memo to Attorney General Tom Clark are but two examples. Both are missing after thorough searches.

But the communist conspiracy did not stop with government archives. Similar documents have disappeared from private files. One historian, M. Stanton Evans, known as “Stan” Evans, writes:

Nor are such troubles confined to official sources. They extend to private-sector data that should in theory be open to researchers.

“A significant case in point concerns the famous speech” which drew some attention to security risks in the State Department. The speech was “delivered in February 1950 at Wheeling, West Virginia, kicking off the whole” series of investigations. While it was finally proven that Soviet agents were indeed planted inside the State Department, Stan Evans notes that some of the assertions “in this speech became a hotly controverted issue. Much of the dispute revolved around a story in the local morning paper, the Wheeling Intelligencer.”

Allegedly, this newspaper story mentioned “a ‘list’ of 205 Communists working at the State Department. This quote appears in every book we have about” the attempts made to stop Soviet espionage during the Cold War. The FBI, Secret Service, and several Congressional committees worked to uncover as much as they could about this underground spy network. This list, if it existed, and if it was indeed mentioned in the newspaper article in question, would be a valuable bit of data. Although it is mentioned in various narratives “and many histories of the Cold War,” there is no evidence that any such list was mentioned in Wheeling in February 1950.

It should be a simple enough task to discover whether or not an article appeared in the Wheeling Intelligencer in February 1950 mentioning a list of security weaknesses in the State Department. Back copies of newspapers are kept by their publishers, by public libraries, university libraries, and various archives.

Yet historians seeking a copy of this article meet lacunae at every turn. Every library and archive has systematically been robbed of this one item. Stan Evans writes:

The task of researching the Wheeling speech, and sifting collateral data on it, prompted the thought that, while all discussions of the subject fixate on this one story, there may have been other items in the local paper about such a major event in the life of Wheeling.

While a newspaper article may count only as a secondary source, and not a primary text, in a historical investigation of Cold War espionage activity, it apparently still contained enough incendiary data that someone went to considerable effort to eliminate every known copy of it.

This hunch, as it turned out, was correct. However, a trip to Wheeling would reveal that these documents, too, were missing.

Mysteriously, the Wheeling Intelligencer, an otherwise peripheral document, had been the object of one of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies. Historians may never know what was published in that article.

Although the article has been mentioned numerous times, it is cited in vague and ambiguous ways, leaving its exact content unclear. The dangers exposed in that speech were apparently dangers which did not want to be exposed, and which were capable of working to restore some of their anonymity.

In the city of Wheeling itself, apparently, no copy of the paper can be found. Stan Evans recounts search efforts made there:

For one thing, the Intelligencer no longer had a morgue of stories from the 1950s. Instead, back issues of the paper were now on microfilm at the Wheeling public library. This seemed fair enough, and as the library was only a couple of blocks away, not an overwhelming problem. However, a visit there produced another disappointment. All issues of the paper, dating to the nineteenth century, were microfilmed and apparently in their appointed places — except the issues that were in question. Conspicuously absent were editions for January and February 1950 — the sequence jumping, without explanation, from December 1949 to March 1950. Written inquiry to the librarian produced no reply as to what had happened to these records.

The same mysterious disappearances took place in the nation’s capital.

The further thought then occurred that the Library of Congress, which maintains back issues of numerous journals from across the country, might have Intelligencers in its holdings. And indeed, the Library does have such a collection — except, again, not these particular issues. According to the notice provided by the clerk who checked the records, the Library had no copies of the Intelligencer prior to August 1952. That made three trips to the well, and three times the bucket had come up empty.

This one incident by itself, certainly, does not reshape world history. But this incident, together with many others like it, show power and reach of an international conspiracy, a conspiracy working to prevent itself from being uncovered, a conspiracy able to reach into any town, any library, and business - and a conspiracy able in those places to erase, eliminate, or rewrite records and documents as it finds advantageous.

Mysteriously Missing Documents

Documents containing details of Soviet spy networks inside the United States mysteriously disappeared from the national archives: real-life events as gripping as any suspense movie from Hollywood.

In 1946, a State Department employee named Samuel Klaus wrote a memo detailing communist infiltration in the federal government. At that point in time, the Communist Party was not about ideas; it was about, in its own words, the “violent revolution” to overthrow the U.S. government.

At least two copies of the Klaus report existed: one in Klaus’s own files, the other sent to Congress’s Tydings committee. Yet, by the late 1990s, neither copy could be found, despite the otherwise meticulous record-keeping of the national archives. The Klaus report named specific individuals. Was someone’s identity kept secret by this theft?

The Klaus memo was only one of a number of such documents to disappear. One historian, M. Stanton Evans, made a careful study of the archives, including the Tydings committee, and noted that “other historical data that ought to be in the subcommittee records are documents provided to the panel by” senators, by the State Department, and by the FBI, among other sources.

One document was a letter to Senator Millard Tydings “of March 18, 1950, listing the names of eighty loyalty/security suspects at State and elsewhere.” Enclosed with that letter “was a letter from the head of the Central Intelligence Agency concerning one of the eighty suspects.” The Tydings committee gathered quite a bit of intelligence. It had, also in March 1950, obtained “a list of two dozen other names as potential subjects of inquiry. All told, a pretty sizable package of information on the most burning issue of that day, and many days thereafter.”

There is a significant lacuna in the historical data about how much, and how thoroughly, foreign espionage permeated the United States government. It seems reasonable to conjecture that foreign agents, or their accomplices, orchestrated the theft and probable destruction of documentation from the archives. As historian M. Stanton Evans notes,

As these papers were part of an official proceeding of the Senate — and as we know from other sources they were in fact provided — they should all be in the Tydings archive. Again, however, so far as diligent search reveals, all of them are missing, with no explanation of what happened to them, no hint that they were ever there, and no withdrawal notice. They are simply gone.

In trying to understand the Cold War, the international communist conspiracy, and the Soviet spy network inside the United States, these texts are crucial to historians. In trying to protect ordinary citizens, these texts are crucial to understanding the methods and identities of such agents. “Since they were documents central to any assessment of” Soviet espionage, “their absence is a critical gap in the archival record. That absence, it bears noting, affects” our ability to measure the damage inflicted by communist infiltration, and affects “our comprehension of the Cold War era.”

Historians seek data to answer specific, measurable questions: Which classified documents were compromised by Soviet agents? How was misinformation fed to policy makers, and how did that misinformation cause policy to play into the hands of the Soviets? How did the Soviets nudge media outlets and news coverage to slant reports according to their strategies? Which types of sabotage were planned?

A long list of various agencies and departments within the government had responsibilities regarding counterespionage activities, and produced documentation about the Soviet spy network. “Such problems,” Evans notes, “didn’t cease with Millard Tydings but would occur also with the records of” other House committees, Senate committees, FBI memoranda, etc. “It’s evident that a lot of records here are likewise missing. A notable instance involves the case of Annie Lee Moss, a security suspect in the Army who appeared before” to testify

at an historic committee session. In the hearing record, reference is made to an “Exhibit 18,” an FBI report about Mrs. Moss that was obviously important in gauging the merits of the case.

After a careful search, “there is no ‘Exhibit 18’ to be found in the archive” pertaining to the Moss case. Once again, a central bit of evidence has disappeared.

In addition to missing documents, other documents have been mysteriously redacted. This was done simply by using ink to obliterate words, sentences, and entire paragraphs in such a way that no technology can recover the missing text. This happened, for example, to a 1946 memo from the director of the FBI to the Attorney General Tom Clark. The memo concerned a Soviet agent named David Wahl. Did someone inside the government obliterate text in order to hide Wahl’s activities?

Historians face a double mystery. First, which data did these missing documents contain? Second, who stole them, and when? Why were they stolen, and where are they now?

Soviet Agents - Missing Evidence

During the summer of 1946, Samuel Klaus, a State Department employee, wrote a document about security risks facing his department. Historians refer to this text variously as the ‘Klaus Memo’ or the ‘Klaus Report’ and it discussed the existence of known Soviet agents and Communist Party members employed by the State Department.

During the Cold War years, during the dictatorship of Stalin, being a member of the Communist Party (CPUSA) in the United States was not merely a matter of holding a set of political views. Rather, the CPUSA had stated in writing that its goal was a “violent” revolution and overthrow of the United States government.

In addition to Soviet spies and CPUSA member, there were individuals who were “dupes” - sympathetic to noble rhetoric of the CPUSA, naive about its true intentions, these individuals could sometimes be persuaded to help the allegedly idealistic causes, not of the CPUSA directly, but rather of various “front” organizations - cultural and social groups which had hidden connections to the Soviet espionage network. Donating time and effort to, or speaking on behalf of, these fronts, otherwise innocent individuals could, unwittingly, encourage and maintain efforts to compromise U.S. military secrets, efforts to steer U.S. policy away from the interests of ordinary citizens, and efforts to prepare saboteurs to injure key points of infrastructure.

Such a document was important to defending the peace and freedom in which millions of United States citizens lived at the time. The threats were real. One such spy, documented to be on the payroll of Soviet intelligence agencies like the KGB and the NKVD, was Alger Hiss, who had direct access in face-to-face meetings with the president. The Klaus Memo got attention. As one historian, M. Stanton Evans, writes:

A Senate subcommittee chaired by Sen. Millard Tydings (D-Md.) requested a copy from the department and in due course received one. Thus, one of the most revealing documents ever put together about Red infiltration of the U.S. government was supplied to Congress. But thereafter, so far as the public record shows, the Klaus memo would mysteriously vanish.

Information released decades later - both the Venona files of Soviet messages intercepted by American intelligence agencies, and the files released by the Russians after the fall of the Soviet Union - would confirm the extent of the Soviet spy network inside the United States, and confirm the degree of its infiltration into the federal government. This network was, in fact, capable of making documents like the Klaus Report disappear.

In the National Archives of the United States there are at least two places where this report should be on offer. One is the legislative archive of the Tydings panel.

As noted above, the Tydings committee obtained a copy of this document. Like every other congressional committee, the Tydings committee kept records, and those records are, or should be, preserved in the archives.

When this historian, M. Stanton Evans, inquired at the archives about the memo, the archivists there found it to be missing. The State Department had sent the memo to the Tydings committee, which received it. Yet, in the committee’s papers, the memo is nowhere to be found.

This is reflected in the department’s letter of transmittal, which survives and is included in the subcommittee records. So the memo should also be in the files, but isn’t.

At least one other copy of the memo existed: in the files of Samuel Klaus himself. Yet among those papers, too, the memo was not to be found:

The other place where this memo ought to be is in the papers of Sam Klaus, held in another section of the Archives. In the index to the Klaus papers, the document is listed, under its proper official heading. However, when the file was examined by this writer it turned out the report again was missing. In this case, at least, we know what happened to it. The file contained a notice where the memo had been, saying it was withdrawn from the Archives in March 1993 — not quite half a century after it was written. So this important document is twice over absent from the nation’s official records.

The network of Soviet spies, their willing accomplices, and naive but willing dupes was large enough and pervasive enough to reach into the supposedly secure storage of sensitive government documents. Further, the curious question must be posed: why would anyone devote effort to destroying evidence about Cold War espionage at a time when the Cold War was clearly over and done? The Cold War ended, for practical purposes, in either 1989 or 1990. Who went to great effort to steal and destroy these documents in 1993, and why would they do so?

The Klaus Report is not the only piece of evidence to disappear in this way. Clearly, an organized effort had been made to remove evidence - evidence of the international communist conspiracy - from federal records. Whoever made this effort clearly had access inside the federal government.

Unfortunately for researchers of such matters, this elusive memo is but one of many Cold War papers that have gone AWOL. Some two dozen other documents from the State Department relating to security issues were likewise supplied to Tydings and should be in the Archives also. In these cases handsomely embossed cover sheets, signed by Dean Acheson, Secretary of State in 1950, are still there in the folders. In every case as well, however, the material once enclosed has been stripped from the cover sheet, leaving small wads of paper beneath the staples that held the documents together.

The questions facing historians are these: Can, or will, any of the stolen evidence about the Soviet spy network ever be recovered? Who was stealing such documents in 1993? Why were they stolen? Can some or all of the contents of those documents be reconstructed from other bits of evidence?

We can speculate about the evidence we don’t have. The evidence in hand, however, points to an amazing degree of infiltration by Soviet agents inside the United States federal government.

Counterespionage

During the Cold War years, the United States faced the threat of Soviet aggression. Communist agents had infiltrated the federal government, and by the 1930s, spies like Alger Hiss had reached to the top levels of American government: he occupied a post as presidential advisor in the State Department, and had face-to-face meetings with FDR. In 1946, the Klaus Report, issued by the State Department, documented shocking numbers of Soviet agents in the State Department, and the declassified Venona files, made public five decades later, shows that there were even more of them than the Klaus Report suspected.

Agents of the international communist conspiracy extracted classified information from the government, shaped policy decisions, steered the media to form public opinion, and even planned sabotage activities within the United States.

Facing the Soviet threat, Congress passed the McCormack Act, the Smith Act, and the Hatch Act between 1938 and 1940. Yet, because some officials did not believe that the communist menace was real, and because other bureaucrats were actually sympathetic to the communists, they failed to fully implement these bits of legislation, designed to ensure that government employees were properly vetted. In 1954, William F. Buckley wrote:

Moreover, the laws were not enforced; or, insofar as they were enforced, they were enforced tardily and halfheartedly. The Hatch Act bothered nobody. Even after it was passed, no less than 537 members of the American League for Peace and Democracy alone (as palpable a Communist front as ever existed) remained in federal service.

The Communist Party (CPUSA) had, in its official written materials, explicitly stated that one of its goals was a “violent revolution” to overthrow the government of the United States. The CPUSA did not merely contemplate taking life, it planned to do so.

Among those whose actions enabled the spy network inside the United States, some were unaware of precisely what they were doing. As unwitting “dupes,” they were perhaps not alert to the connections between the CPUSA and the seemingly noble goals of “front” organizations. Some of these fronts presented themselves as supporting culture and the arts; others spoke of justice, peace, equality, and rights. Support, in the forms of money or volunteered effort, given to such groups was actually used, however, to smuggle military secrets to Moscow, to influence federal policymakers to act against the interests of ordinary American citizens, or to prepare saboteurs for the anticipated violent revolution.

For the safety of American citizens, it was logical that members of the CPUSA, or those who supported them, should not be hired into governmental posts involving sensitive intelligence or policy formation. This would be true even for those whose support was given unwittingly. Buckley writes:

However, the Civil Service Commission’s “reasonable doubt” criterion for applicants moved toward the heart of the matter. The Commission made a start toward committing us to the principle that the federal government has the right to draw up its own requirements for government service - that employment by the Government is a privilege, not a right.

While such hiring and personnel efforts were correct in their intentions, their implementation was weak. Buckley continues:

The Commission’s effort did not, however, prevent further Communist penetration of the government, much less undo that which had already occurred. For the Commission did not rule on personnel already hired. Moreover, the Commission, under existing statutes and budget limitations, could not use the FBI in its investigations. Consequently, most of the Commission's information was obtained from the files of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The rest came from a handful of its own investigators.

Upon closer examination, it became clear that there was disarray among various agencies and departments concerning how, and to which extent, they vetted potential hires and current employees.

Between 1934 and 1937, two Democratic Congressmen, John W. McCormack and Samuel Dickstein, operated a committee to investigate the influence of foreign agents infiltrating the federal government. It later emerged, however, that Dickstein himself was an operative of the NKVD (a forerunner to the KGB), and was being paid by the Soviets, presumably to ensure that communist agents were not detected as they applied for, or worked in, federal posts. Dickstein also nudged policy discussions in various directions as Moscow requested, and sent documents to the NKVD.

Meanwhile, the Attorney General had entered the field. In 1941, he directed the FBI to probe complaints of alleged disloyalty among Federal personnel. The FBI reported its findings to the appropriate agencies, and these agencies made their own decisions. It soon became clear that standards varied widely from agency to agency. In 1942, therefore, the Attorney General created an Interdepartmental Committee on Investigation to assist in standardizing procedures and evaluative criteria. This Committee, like the Civil Service Commission, confined itself to regulating applications for employment; and even then it recommended a manifestly inadequate standard: rejection on loyalty grounds was to be based on proof that the applicant personally advocates the overthrow of the government; or else that he is a conscious and willing member of an organization advocating such overthrow.

Thus time elapsed until the 1946 Klaus Report disclosed the greater extent of the problem. Democratic Congressman Martin Dies operated a committee from 1938 to 1944, for the purposes of examining subversive operations in the United States. In 1946, this committee was renamed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Concerned with all manner of subversive activities, not only with communist and socialist ones, the HUAC would investigate the KKK as well as Soviet agents.

During the Cold War, the full extent of the Soviet spy network in the United States was never discovered. Enough of it was exposed to alert the nation to stop it. After the 1990 fall of the Soviet Union, the Venona files would indicate that communists infiltrated the United States to an extent not previously imagined.