To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (701154 ) 2/26/2013 3:58:23 PM From: longnshort 1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) | Respond to "A second new source of information on the American Communist Party was the archives in Moscow of the defunct Soviet Union, which began to be partially accessible to American investigators in the early 1990s, during the Yeltsin years. The Venona papers, together with these archives, made it absolutely clear that the American Communist Party was from its beginning the willing agent of Soviet intelligence, obedient to its orders, financed by its contributions, and serving not only as a propaganda organ for Soviet policies but as a generous source for the recruitment of agents who would thereupon influence American policy and gladly commit espionage as well. It is now plain that by 1945 every important branch of the American government, from the White House itself to the State Department, the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA), and the Office of War Information, to name only a few, was infested with Communists busily doing the work of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it is obvious that a penetration so complete would have been impossible if the Communists had not been able to depend on the blindness or indifference of many of the far larger number of ordinary liberals who dominated the Roosevelt Administration. As early as the late 1930s, even known Communists in government were often regarded by their colleagues as merely "liberals in a hurry." And during the war, of course, they could be excused as simply enthusiasts for America's doughty ally, "good old Joe." * * * Small wonder, then, that liberals, after the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in 1946, dreaded so profoundly the disclosure of the appalling degree of governmental penetration that they now began to suspect the Communists had achieved on their watch in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. For the Republicans, of course, the situation was reversed: revelation of the facts was in their highest political interest, and (not incidentally) in the security interest of the nation itself. The fragments of information on the subject that began to surface in the late 1940s—notably through the confessions of two Communist espionage couriers, Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley—shocked public opinion to its core, and set the stage for a genuinely titanic battle over the truth."
