The Secret World of American Communism. - book reviews

Eric Breindel

The Secret World of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov (Yale, 348 pp., $25)

OVER the last two decades, most historians of Communism in America -- perhaps not surprisingly -- have tended to sympathize with the American Communist enterprise. Many are "red-diaper babies" -- i.e., the children of Party members and/or sympathizers. Others, to be sure, came to their radical-Left sensibilities without familial encouragement. In either case, however, their purpose has been to depict the CP as an indigenous populist movement -- linked to the Soviet Union by bonds of admiration, but otherwise authentically American.

A need to advance this view preoccupied the Party itself virtually from its inception. The cause took on particular urgency during the Popular Front period. Indeed, Earl Browder, the CP's secretary general from 1930 to to 1944, coined the Party slogan "Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism" precisely to refute charges that American Communists were an alien element -- in effect, creatures of Moscow. Communists preferred to depict themselves as "liberals in a hurry," just as they claimed credit for much of the New Deal.

Indeed, if one's only knowledge of the subject were gleaned from studies by sympathetic historians and memoirs by former activists, one could easily conclude that the CP played a key role in establishing everything from the Social Security system to the National Labor Relations Board. Such books tend to refer to the USSR only in passing -- as if the Soviet Union were a distant, symbolic presence, rather than a daily factor in the life of the American Communist Party.

If establishing an image of distance from Moscow was desirable during the Popular Front years, it became imperative immediately after the Second World War -- for two reasons.

First, news of Stalin's monstrous crimes -- confirmed by Khrushchev in 1956, but scarcely unknown prior to the "Secret Speech" -- required American Communists to insist on their discrete "American" identity.

In addition, Soviet espionage in the U.S. was beginning to dominate the headlines. From the Amerasia affair to the Hiss case to Judith Coplon to the Rosenbergs, the question of Communist disloyalty was emerging as a central issue.

In The Secret World of American Communism, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes -- two pre-eminent students of the American Communist movement -- together with Soviet archivist Fridrikh Firsov, demonstrate that espionage was a central Party function, not some rare aberration in which overzealous comrades occasionally indulged. The authors do so, moreover, on the basis of documentary evidence unearthed in the Comintern archive and in the archive of the CPUSA. Both collections are located in Moscow.

We learn that espionage was approved at the highest level of the American Party; that Browder himself was engaged in "clandestine work"; that Browder's own sister was a long-term NKVD employee; and that his successor as Party leader, Eugene Dennis, was a Comintern agent.

Even more important, Klehr & Co. demonstrate that the key Soviet espionage networks here were either CP subsidiaries or outgrowths of Party cells. The documents give independent confirmation that Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and other refugees from the Communist underground spoke the truth. It's also clear that they and others engaged in espionage with the knowledge and approval of the aboveground CP.

In short, The Secret World of American Communism puts paid to the lie that the CPUSA was a traditional American political party, entirely distinct from any espionage cells that might have been created by the Soviet clandestine services. (Admittedly, this comes as no surprise to NR readers; but the degree to which the Left has been successful in convincing the public at large on this point should not be underestimated.)

For obvious reasons, this subject is crucial to an understanding of the Party's role in American life: the CP, after all, could not claim to be a traditional American political party if it also devoted itself -- even in part -- to spying on the U.S. Government.

Thus the importance to American Communists of insisting on the innocence of, say, the Rosenbergs and Judith Coplon. These were public Party members or sympathizers; their espionage work, therefore, linked the Party itself to Moscow.

By contrast, a captured Russian spy such as Rudolf Abel (arrested by the FBI in 1957, Abel was swapped for downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1961) posed no special threat to the CPUSA. Abel (real name: Willy Fischer) was a Soviet citizen and KGB officer who happened to be stationed in America; his role was akin to that of a CIA agent based in the USSR. And, indeed, Abel -- an "illegal" who had assumed the identity of a dead U.S. citizen -- took pains to limit his contact with American Communists while he lived here.

It's well to recall that Earl Browder himself, shortly before his death in 1973, acknowledged that the CPUSA had been involved in espionage. To be sure, Browder presented the matter in a decidedly benign fashion: "We [the Party] had people who would inform us from the enemy camp because they sympathized with our position," he explained to a UPI correspondent, going on to note that "we didn't consider it espionage."

It's worth mentioning that, to Browder, "enemy camp" meant the U.S. Government; "inform" meant deliver secret information; and "[people who] sympathized with our position" meant fellow Communists. It's also safe to assume that, unlike Browder, U.S. authorities would have considered "it" espionage.

In the end, The Secret World vindicates philosopher Sidney Hook's insistence on the relevance of the distinction between "heresy" and "conspiracy" in discussions of the U.S. Communist Party. In Heresy, Yes -- Conspiracy, No! (published in 1953), he maintained that while Communist "ideas" represented ordinary heresies -- which liberals had no reason to fear -- the same could not be said for actual Party activities. The CPUSA constituted an active conspiracy: it was secretive, loyal to a foreign power, and dedicated to the clandestine infiltration of American cultural and political institutions.

Insofar as Party members used the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship, argued Hook, in order to advance the purposes of a foreign government -- a regime that was hostile to the very civil liberties that facilitated its agents' efforts here -- the CPUSA could not be depicted as a legitimate political undertaking.

In vindicating Hook's conclusion, Klehr, a professor of history at Emory University, and Haynes, a Library of Congress archivist, employ a highly judicious tone. Indeed, the care and the caution that inform The Secret World bespeak an allergy to sensation of any kind.

But for all their circumspection, the authors demonstrate conclusively that John Reed was on Moscow's payroll; that Armand Hammer -- notwithstanding lifelong denials -- was a money-laundering agent of the USSR; and that Moscow-based Pulitzer Prize winner Edmund Stevens -- a Christian Science Monitor correspondent -- was long a secret Party member.

Of special interest is the Klehr - Haynes finding that U.S. Communists -- working under Moscow's direction -- played an important part in the murder of Trotsky. Here, too, their research serves largely to confirm much that had already been alleged. But it's increasingly clear that the "Trotsky project" was, for all practical purposes, a joint undertaking between the Soviet secret police and the U.S. Party's underground networks.

Also noteworthy are the revelations about the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Americans who volunteered -- under Communist Party auspices -- to fight Franco in Spain between 1936 and 1939. The authors have discovered that a considerable number who had been deemed military casualties were killed after "disciplinary" proceedings. Some had been accused of ideological deviation; others had been labeled spies; still others had wanted merely to exercise their "contractual" right to return home after serving their hitch and, as a consequence, were shot as "deserters."

"Lincolns" who were identified by KGB talent-spotters as potential agents, and were trained for underground careers at spy schools in Spain, represent another subject on which Klehr and Haynes shed new light. One such veteran, a New Yorker named Morris Cohen, became an important Soviet espionage operative. He and his wife participated in the theft of atomic secrets at Los Alamos, fled this country when the Rosenbergs were arrested, and turned up in Britain some years later as Peter and Helen Kroger; at the time, they were posing as dealers in rare books.

The "Krogers" were arrested in Eng-land in the context of a notorious 1961 naval spy scandal: their house, it turned out, was a veritable radio station, equipped for high-speed "burst" transmissions to Moscow. Eventually -- in 1967 -- the Cohens were exchanged for Britons who had been jailed as spies in the Soviet Union. Lona Cohen apparently died last year; Morris Cohen still lives in Moscow on a government pension.

Klehr and Haynes have managed to locate Cohen's official Lincoln Battalion background questionnaire, which they reproduce. A handwritten document, it is informed by an absolute faith in Communism's ability "to build a better world for the masses." While Cohen allows that he would like to "return to activity in the American labor movement," he suggests that "if circumstances require my presence elsewhere, similar to the Spanish struggle against Fascism, I would go there."

Morris Cohen -- Party member and Lincoln Battalion volunteer -- struck his Russian superiors as an ideal espionage recruit. Their comments on his questionnaire reflect unmitigated enthusiasm; it's no surprise that he was selected for "clandestine work."

Some other issues documented by Klehr and Haynes should be noted. The degree to which the Party underground devoted itself -- beyond espionage -- to waging war on non-Stalinist leftists (some Trotskyists, some ordinary Socialists) is mind-boggling.

Also fascinating is the attitude of the American CP and of Moscow toward cooperation by U.S. Party members with the Allied war effort. It has long been accepted that Communists -- with the acquiescence of General William Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) -- became especially active in that agency, which proved to be the forerunner of the CIA. But there is much more to the story, and Klehr and Haynes demonstrate -- as did Herbert Romerstein in his recent study of the Lincoln Battalion, Heroic Victims: Stalin's Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War -- that the CP's role in World War II is shrouded in myth and falsehood.

First, revisionist historians who claim that U.S. Communists -- disillusioned by the Hitler - Stalin pact, but still devoted to the Party -- volunteered their services prior to the Nazi attack on the USSR are simply lying. Just as the CP itself opposed American entry into the "imperialist war" until the Soviet Union was attacked, so did its underground cadres.

And many who then signed up for OSS work were instructed by Moscow -- via the official leadership of the American Party -- not to engage too deeply with Donovan's agency.

Klehr and Haynes show that an incipient CPUSA - OSS joint project, which had been supervised by Eugene Dennis, was terminated in 1942 by Comintern head Georgi Dimitrov, acting in consultation with intelligence officials in Moscow. The Soviets were worried that the joint project would compromise their intelligence networks in the United States and elsewhere. Individual Party members, however, were still encouraged to infiltrate the OSS.

Obviously, there is more -- much more -- in these pages. But the best summary of this book's significance is provided by Klehr and Haynes themselves. They describe the CPUSA as "a conspiracy financed by a hostile power that recruited members for clandestine work, developed an elaborate underground apparatus, and used that apparatus to collaborate with espionage services of that [hostile] power." This just about says it all.

It need only be added that an enterprise of this kind isn't everybody's definition of "Twentieth-Century Americanism."

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