This Day in CIA History (Frank Wisner, Former Ops Head, Kills Self)

Oct. 29, 1965— Frank Wisner, a workaholic former operations chief of the Central Intelligence Agency who directed multiple controversial covert activities in the early era of the Cold War, committed suicide at age 56 on the family farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The death was the third in two decades of important figures who had shocked Washington by taking their own lives. In 1949, after being asked to resign as Defense Secretary by President Harry Truman, James Forrestal (whom I profiled in this prior post) had leaped from a window while under psychiatric care in Walter Reed Hospital. Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, killed himself with a shotgun in 1963.

All three men suffered from severe depression, with Wisner and Graham now formally diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and Forrestal exhibiting behavior that has led to more recent diagnoses of delusional disorder or schizophrenia. 

The stress of being in a position of significant responsibility—and, sometimes, not measuring up to it—can result in feelings of worthlessness that lead to self-destructive behavior. Though, unlike Forrestal or Graham, he was little known to the general public, Wisner, by virtue of his leadership in the nuclear age, was as important a figure as either.

Mental illness was not the only tie among these three men. When the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence organization to which Wisner had belonged, was disbanded, Forrestal supported his lobbying effort for a replacement agency. Moreover, when Wisner, as head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) authorized Operation Mockingbird in an alleged attempt to influence American and foreign media, he selected Graham to run the project.

These contacts with Forrestal and Graham were only a couple of examples of how Wisner organized a network of mentors, friends, and proteges to further his intelligence activities.

I first became aware of these “global salvationists” intent on countering international Communist influence in Burton Hersh’s 1992 account, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, which examined him in relation to Eisenhower cold warriors John Foster Dulles and younger brother Allen; legendary OSS chief ``Wild Bill'' Donovan; New Deal diplomat William C. Bullitt; and Carmel Offie, the dandyish assistant to Bullitt and Wisner.

Later, in the 1990s, Evan Thomas, in The Very Best Men, changed the focus to how Wisner interacted with colleagues Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald in the CIA's formative period up to the Vietnam War.

These and other government officials, politicians, and journalists formed part of an elite “Georgetown social set” that, according to Thomas, “shared the same social background, the same ideals, and the same confidence in America’s role in the world.” Perhaps none embodied its aggressiveness and risk-taking quite like Wisner.

The key event in his career occurred towards the end of World War II, when, while stationed in Bucharest in the fall of 1944, he warned his OSS superiors that the Soviets were taking over Romania. 

Haunted by his failure to prevent this early maneuver in the campaign to pull Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence, Wisner was determined to combat the regime’s infiltration at every turn, there and elsewhere around the world, a far-flung set of espionage and psychological warfare operations that became known as “Wisner’s Wurlitzer.”

With little to no American experience with spycraft before WWII, Presidents of both parties had no record for assessing what worked and what wouldn’t. Two of the more audacious CIA activities sanctioned by Wisner—coups against elected leaders orchestrated in Iran and Guatemala—were initially deemed successful in that they toppled regimes deemed friendly to the Soviets.

Within a quarter century, however, policymakers were grappling with the consequences of the coups: mistrust about American motives throughout Latin America, and in Iran, a revolution that put in power the Ayatollah Khomeini’s hostile theocratic regime.

In Eastern Europe, Wisner was willing to accept ex-Nazis if they would help strike back against the USSR. CIA backing of dissidents within the Eastern bloc could not dislodge the Soviets, however, and the crushed 1956 Hungarian revolution only fed Wisner’s frustration and guilt over encouraging it with propaganda without US military backing.

In December 1956, Wisner suffered a nervous breakdown that several friends attributed to the failed uprising. Psychoanalysis and electroconvulsive treatment were not enough to alleviate his condition.

With access to Wisner’s medical records provided by his children, Douglas Waller contends in the biography The Determined Spy that the spymaster’s mental illness predated any malaise he may have felt about being transferred from Langley to a less consequential London posting. That’s surely true, but the ambitious Wisner’s sense that he was being placed on the shelf surely didn’t help his frame of mind.

Wisner retired in 1962 from the agency to which he had brought his unflagging energy and willingness to push against legal and ethical norms to bring down the Soviets. A lucrative consulting business over the next three years did little to assuage his growing anguish, until he borrowed a shotgun from one of his sons and killed himself.

Quote of the Day (John le Carre, on His Con-Man Dad and Writing)

“Ronnie the con man could spin you a story out of thin air, sketch in a character who did not exist, and paint a golden opportunity where there wasn't one… if all that isn't part and parcel of the writer's art, tell me what is.”—John le Carre, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life (2016)

“Ronnie"’s son is David Cornwell, but readers know him better as spy novelist John le Carre, born 85 years ago yesterday.

Deceit and betrayal lie at the heart of the espionage trade, and nobody might have been better at inculcating the traits of mind needed for it than David’s father, a con man extraordinaire who cheated people right and left—even friends and family—of their money, with occasional breaks for prison and bankruptcy.

When le Carre became rich as a result of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, he had to deal with a string of his father’s unpaid hotel bills. At one point, Ronnie even seduced a woman by claiming to be his famous son!

Le Carre aficionados have already known the basics of this story since the publication of one of his more autobiographical novels, A Perfect Spy, but a chapter in his newly released The Pigeon Tunnel lays out in considerably more detail a legacy of Dickensian shame over a father who always seemed in trouble.

(For more on le Carre’s theme of betrayal, see this prior post of mine on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the first installment of his superb “Quest for Karla” trilogy about the hunt for a mole at the highest reaches of Britain’s intelligence system—and the consequences of it.)

This Day in Literary History (Le Carre Unleashes Mole Hunter Smiley)

June 17, 1974—A decade after making his first career splash with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, former British intelligence officer David Cornwell—better known by the pseudonym John le Carre—reached what is probably the artistic zenith of his career with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  At least partly inspired by the treason of Kim Philby, the novel popularized the term “mole” to denote the particular nature of the latter’s offense: a highly placed enemy at the heart of a national intelligence service.

So successful was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that it spawned a 1979 TV miniseries starring Alec Guinness (pictured here) and a more recent film starring Gary Oldman. Both adaptations gave the lead actors one of their most prized roles as le Carre’s donnish spymaster George Smiley. The spy thriller also was the opening novel in a trilogy, The Quest for Karla, in which Smiley pursues his cunning, ruthless counterpart at Soviet intelligence.

“Karla”’s double agent at the highest levels of British intelligence engages in a devastating series of national and personal betrayals with implications not just for Britain agents and their minders but also for their American “cousins.” The damage was similar to that perpetrated by the spy ring recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s and centered around Philby, the highest-ranking British intelligence officer to serve the Soviet Union as a double agent.

Bill Haydon in Tinker contains characteristics of three other notorious spies who joined the Communist Party while at Cambridge in the 1930s—Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean—but Philby, another spy with upper-class connections, a famous father specializing in Arab studies, and links to U.S. intelligence, was the most obvious model for the character. Le Carre recalled, in an interview with Jon Snow of Britain's Channel 4 a few years ago, that he had special reason to loathe Philby, "a bad lot": the novelist, before his writing days, had used the cover of a British diplomat to run agents and lure defectors in Germany—until Philby blew his cover in the early 1960s. Le Carre would not meet the dying double agent in Russia in 1988 because of his memories of a man whom he "wouldn't have trusted...with my cat for the weekend."

Oddly enough, I had read the last two-thirds of The Quest for Karla, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People, more than 30 years ago, but not Tinker until I began researching this post. I discovered that inadvertently, I had saved the best for last.  Le Carre had introduced Smiley in two mysteries written in the early 1960s, Call for the Dead,” and A Murder of Quality, and part of the compulsive power of Tinker is simply as a whodunit. Cashiered from the highest levels of British intelligence, “Circus” (so nicknamed for the location of MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, at Cambridge Circus in London) after a failed operation, Smiley is now called out of retirement, because he has no connection to the suspected current treachery, to ferret out the mole among four principals in Circus who are code-named Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Poor Man.

Although the propulsive thrust of the novel came from adhering to the detective and spy genres, its richness derived from its depictions of the intelligence profession as half-calling, half-bureaucracy. The high priests of the intelligence services in the book struggle with loss of faith in their mission, even as they cling to the mysteries at the heart of their work. At the same time, rather than the dashing derring-do of a James Bond, they engage in pitched turf battles with each other, in memos replete with their own in-house vocabulary, such as “lamplighters” (a section that provided surveillance and couriers), “babysitters” (guardians of safe houses used to accommodate defectors) and “scalphunters” (strong-arm men responsible for assassination, burglary, abduction, and the like).

James Wood, in How Fiction Works, criticizes le Carre’s form of “commercial realism,” terming one passage from Smiley’s People “a clever coffin of dead conventions.” That criticism is itself too clever by half. Seldom in the history of the spy story—a genre that has produced other notables such as Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene—has a writer brought to the form such precise attention to atmosphere and almost Dickensian characterization.

The one problem I have with le Carre’s work, actually, is its Anti-Americanism. In his novels—especially with the passing of the years, when the Soviet Union at least reminded him that another political and economic system could rival and surpass the capitalist West in ruthlessness—the United States looms balefully large. The moral ambiguity between the two Cold War superpowers, as strong an element as the weather in these novels, often shades into moral relativism.

The novelist has been at pains to deny it, saying that it’s not Americans he resents but their government. Some might find his vitriolic criticism of the foreign-policy adventurism of the Bush administration bracing. But even his early spy novels, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and A Small Town in Germany, were written with liberal Democrats in the White House and controlling the American intelligence services.

And consider this: If he finds Americans as individuals all right, why do you seldom if ever find a good one in his work? Why are they often depicted as outright villains? Even in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, why is the traitor’s eventual explanation of his turn to the Soviet Union (“The United States is no longer capable of undertaking its own revolution”) regarded by Smiley in this way: “it was the tone, rather than the music, that alienated him”?

 

Quote of the Day (Stella Rimington, on a Past British Intelligence Briefing)

“Well, prime minister, we know that the IRA is about to bring in a large lorry bomb. We don’t know when it’s coming in; we don’t know which port it’s coming in at; and we don’t know what the target is. But, prime minister, I thought you should know.”—Stella Rimington, former director general of the British intelligence agency MI5, on a briefing with John Major on a terrorist threat, quoted in Nick Glunt, “Rimington: U.K. Espionage Has Evolved as Times Changed,” Chautauquan Daily, July 14, 2011

The anecdote above produced many chuckles in the audience at Stella Rimington’s lecture yesterday morning at the Amphitheater at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, but her point was deadly serious: the large gaps of information available to decision-makers around the world as they attempt to preserve the lives of their citizens.

People with a political axe to grind of whatever ideology might think that Presidents ought to know precisely when or where an attack will take place, but more often than not the precise time and place are going to be unknown.

In addition, there is the matter of how and when to charge a terrorist suspect. Governments in the West, particularly in the United States and Rimington’s U.K., need more than enough information to make an indictment stick. Without that, the suspect can go free. Attempts to lengthen suspects’ detention periods to provide further time for building cases run into civil-liberties challenges.

On the other hand, waiting until every “I” is dotted and every “t” crossed in an indictment can lead to massive loss of life.

John Major’s response to Rimington’s maddeningly imprecise briefing? A sigh, followed by “Stella, do your best.” Pretty admirable stoicism, if you ask me.

I’m not a fan of Britain’s former P.M., but this time I sympathized with his frustration, just as I do with his past and present counterparts, no matter what their party, in his country as well as in the U.S., as they deal with thousands of similar maddeningly imprecise reports of threats. It's enough to make you wonder why on earth they would ever want their jobs.

Chautauqua Journal, Day Four: Wednesday

As much as I am bursting to share with you all that I’m learning all this week, perhaps the most important reason for a travel journal or diary is simply giving to others (and recalling for yourself) a sense of what was like at a certain time and place. And so, before moving on to the day’s events, I want to try to picture for you, at least momentarily, what it’s like up here in the southwestern corner of New York, not far from Niagara Falls and Buffalo.

When you hit a warm spell, as I did the first couple of days, the heat and humidity can be bad—particularly, as occurred with me in past years, if you’re staying on an upper floor in an older inn that lacks air conditioning. Even with overhead fans, all you can do at night is sweat it out and pray to get through it. Such places are an asthmatic’s nightmare.

My last several times here, though, I’ve made it a point to book a room with air conditioning. You might even be lucky and not need to put it on at all, which often occurs in the final week of the summer season in late August. On those cool nights, breathing is wonderful.

The heat and humidity took a turn for the better last night. The mid-day highs today were more than 10 degrees lower than yesterday, and the humidity was gone.

Now, in this pedestrian-friendly (visitors’ cars are only allowed on the grounds for 45 minutes, for loading and unloading) village, the abundant trees, an absolute necessity during the fierce heat, become a wonderful amenity. So today, taking the Brick Walk to one of the daily “Brown Bag Lunches” held throughout the week (more on this later) and hearing rustling from the trees and tinkling piano keys from Lutheran House, I felt something like heaven.

Cars tend to be in short evidence during the week, so what you’ll see from Monday to Friday are more likely to be bicycles or (in the case of the elderly) motorized wheelchairs, golf carts or shuttle buses. Bicycles have received more negative attention here than in past years because of some riders’ lack of attention to pedestrians, but make no mistake: for any city dweller or suburbanite, you will feel safer than you would at home.

There are lots of reasons to walk as much as you can around the grounds, but one of the best is simply to enjoy the Victorian-era architecture here. The institutional structures—the Amphitheater, the Hall of Philosophy I discussed yesterday, Hurlbut Memorial Church, to name just a few—are striking in and of themselves. But then you are struck by the picturesque hotels, inns and cottages, featuring a variety of styles (and often creating hybrids of these, too).

I had some real trouble settling on just one photo for this post. But you can see in the one I’ve chosen some features commonly found around these summer accommodations: mostly wooden frames, heavy on shingles and clapboard, often covered with gable roofs—and one of the things I love best, and what I don’t see often in my neck of the woods in Northern New Jersey: front porches , not just on the main level, but frequently also on the second, third and even fourth floors. And on these streets, you’re likely to see not just highly ornamental “gingerbread houses” but also many American flags (and even some foreign ones) flying from homes.

Oh, yes—and flowers blooming everywhere, in simple but glorious profusion.

The Brown-Bag Lunch: Another Learning Event

Besides lectures at the Amphitheater and Hall of Philosophy and Special Studies classes, Chautauqua also lists on its schedule a variety of brown-bag lunches where visitors can learn about topics on a more informal, ad-hoc basis. For this week that I’m attending, for instance, there are 10, on subjects including book reviews, nature writing, the role of nutrition in cardiovascular health, and Shakespeare.

The brown-bag lunch I attended today was a book review, on Louise Knight’s biography, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. It was presented by the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, the oldest continuous book club in the U.S. Between 60 and 70 of us sat in lawn chairs or at picnic tables, listening to two reviewers (one hostile, the other ambivalent) explain how Addams, a child of a Yankee upper-class milieu, founded the multicultural Chicago settlement house Hull House and became the first U.S. woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Other Speakers

The high standard set in the first two days of my “Espionage 101” class continued to be maintained by today’s lecturer, Mark Stout, an intelligence analyst for 13 years and the current International Spy Museum historian. The title of the talk, “Intelligence Analysis: Art, Science or Voodoo?” accurately summed up the ambiguities and stresses involved in this work. (Analysts are often introverts, while policymakers who use their recommendations tend to be extroverts.)

All kinds of information can be processed in intelligence: traffic intelligence (i.e., knowing how often two people speak, how often, and for how long), electronic intelligence, geospatial intelligence, and open-source (e.g., foreign newspapers, TV, Twitter, Facebook) intelligence.

Among the other speakers I saw:

* Stella Rimington, former director general of Britiain’s MI5, on “The Changing Face of U.K. Security”;

* Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights of the American Jewish Committee, on “Human Rights, the Holocaust and Genocide Prevention,” at the Everett Jewish Life Center.

Chautauqua Journal, Day Three—Tuesday

I don’t remember ever having looked at the Hall of Philosophy, one of the places I visit most frequently while on vacation here, from anything like the angle I took when I snapped the accompanying photograph yesterday. Like most visitors, I suspect, I normally approach it at eye level, by walking via the Brick Walk from the Amphitheatre.

But I beheld a whole new way of looking at it—as well as the larger Chautauqua mission—as I walked uphill from Lake Drive 24 hours ago, weighed down by the heat and humidity. From this perspective, through one arch and into another, the Hall of Philosophy evokes, even more than the normal approach taken to this sylvan spot, the Olympian perspective suggested by its marble classical pillars. You, too, can reach this height, the architecture and landscape suggest, but you’re going to have to work at it.

This hall is the traditional site for lecturers on religion, or simply authors who might not pull in the crowds that speakers at the amphitheater usually do. But these afternoon speakers, I’ve found, are, more often than not, provocative and/or simply fascinating, and today’s were no exceptions. Over the years, I've seen speakers discuss here the problematic elements of anti-Semitism in the New Testament, what polls were saying about upcoming elections, and stem-cell research, not to mention compelling theologians such as Karen Armstrong and John Dominic Crossan.

Some speakers are bound to make at least some members of the audience uncomfortable—that is, if they’re doing their jobs correctly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be physically uncomfortable while taking in what they say.

The hall looked pretty full when I arrived for today's 2 pm lecture by Geoffrey Kelly, an authority on the great German preacher and anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere during this hour except under the hall's wooden roof—otherwise, I’d burn beneath the fierce afternoon sun.

So, as I scanned the hard white benches, I prayed (how appropriate!) for a spot that a) had good sightlines, unobstructed by those large pillars, and b) was unoccupied. It took a while, but something eventually turned up.

Kelly, a professor of systematic theology at LaSalle University, is author of 12 books, including five on Bonhoeffer. He was, then, unbelievably knowledgeable on this theologian whose hard, urgent brilliance still echoes across the more than 60 years since his death at the hands of the Nazi regime he’d opposed for more than a decade.

Bonhoeffer, who never wavered in the slightest from his belief in social justice and human rights, still underwent something of an evolution in how he hoped to achieve his ideals. A longtime consistent believer in pacifism, he had come, by the end of his life, to believe there was no way to bring about his ideals except through the death of Adolf Hitler. And so, he became involved in Operation Valkyrie, the failed attempt by German officers to assassinate Hitler. He paid for his participation through death in a concentration camp in the closing weeks of the war.

Kelly traced this Lutheran minister’s interaction with the African-American minister Franklin Fisher (who influenced him deeply by exposing him in Harlem to the black social gospel), Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mahatma Gandhi. Most of all, what lingers from the lecture is Kelly’s invocation of Bonhoeffer’s most impassioned statements on God and human fellowship:

• “God’s truth destroys our untruth.”
• “Peace must be dared; it is the great venture.”
• “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church.”

After Kelly’s lecture came one by Willard Sterne Randall, a former investigative journalist who has made a second career for himself as a historian of Revolutionary War figures. I particularly admired his studies of Benedict Arnold and Benjamin Franklin and his Tory son, so I knew I had to hear what he had to say about Ethan Allen.

The official publication of Randall’s biography of the leading Green Mountain Boy isn’t until late next month, but he had copies on hand, and I was one of the lucky ones on line after the talk who were able to have him autograph it.

Certain aspects of Allen’s life speak with particular urgency today, Randall noted: Our time, like Allen’s, involves warfare far away in mountainous regions, and the suffering of Allen and other prisoners of war at the hands of the British has deeply affected American policy, in some way or other, down to the present day.

As for the week’s theme of spies: International Spy Museum executive director Peter Earnest spoke twice as long as his lecture in the amphitheater yesterday while continuing to be entertainment and informative on the subject of "Recruitment" in the morning class, “Espionage101,” and Bruce Riedel, a senior Brookings Institution fellow (and former CIA officer), gave a measured, cautiously optimistic assessment of “The Intelligence War With al-Qaida.”

He dwelt at particular length on Pakistan and the successful mission to get Osama bin Laden. (He found it hard to credit the notion that its military and intelligence services couldn't know that bin Laden was so close, but thought it possible that the country's president might have been unaware--a very disturbing possibility.)

The Value of Listening

Yesterday, sitting on the porch at Carey Cottage Inn, I overheard another visitor praising the lunches served at Hurlbut Community Church. For $6, she said, you could get a plate (a choice of soup/sandwich or salad; turkey salad; fruit plate; vegetable wrap, or the daily special, in this case a crab sandwich), and the meal would be ready for you.

In prior years, I saw signs around the grounds about these meals, but maybe hearing it endorsed by someone else made a difference this time. So, at the conclusion of Riedel’s lecture, I headed over to Hurlbut, and was glad I did.

This sounded awfully good to me, particularly since I almost had receipt shock at the Refectory the day before . My memory of that eatery—a place of simple but comparatively inexpensive food—must have been playing tricks on me, since my meal of a chicken sandwich, French fries and soda came to more than double what I discovered I could pay at Hurlbut.

In contrast, at Hurlbut, I was happily rewarded with an inexpensive, tasty, and even comparatively nutritious meal without having to wait forever--as well as the knowledge that I was contributing to a fine cause and institution. I’m hooked now for the rest of the week.

I wish that my experience tonight at the Bratton Theater, where I caught a production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, had been as favorable. But I’ll write about it later in the week, when I won’t be so tired or grouchy as I am now and, hopefully, will be more tolerant.

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on the “Iron Curtain”)

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone - Greece with its immortal glories - is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control.”—Sir Winston Churchill, Address At Westminster College, Fulton, Mo., March 5, 1946

Look beyond that first sentence in the above quote, the one that the 20th-century’s greatest phrasemaker turned into a Cold War soundbite. With good friend President Harry Truman in the audience, watching as Winston Churchill accepted an honorary degree from Westminster, the former British Prime Minister—the man who had led his country in its hour of greatest peril—was now, after a dutiful acknowledgement of the massive contribution of Joseph Stalin in the Grand Alliance, somberly outlining the Soviet leader’s recent catalogue of electoral crime.

The 65th anniversary of the Iron Curtain speech comes the same week that the media reported on the death of Judith Coplon Socolov, a Justice Department analyst who lived nearly 60 years after convictions in two espionage trials. (An appellate court judge tossed out the convictions because of FBI agents’ perjury concerning wiretapping Socolov and their failure to obtain search warrants, and, in 1967, the government decided not to pursue the case any longer. However, the judge affirmed that Ms. Socolov was guilty, a judgment confirmed by the 1995 disclosure of the VENONA decrypts of intercepted cables concerning Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and other spies that the government could not disclose at the trials.)

Over 30 years ago, Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism showed how for a group of Old Leftists of the 1930s through Nikita Khruschev‘s 1956 “secret speech“ outlining the terror of Stalin, Soviet-style Marxism became a golden ideology. In Judith Socolov's case, however, “romance” took on a double meaning, as becomes clear in the lede of Sam Roberts’ New York Times obit:

“Judith Socolov, who as a diminutive Barnard graduate named Judith Coplon was convicted of espionage more than 60 years ago after embracing a utopian vision of communism and falling in love with a Soviet agent, died Saturday in Manhattan.”

Oh, what she did for love....

A little later, the article quotes Ms. Socolov’s daughter Emily on whether her mother was guilty: “Was she a spy? I think it’s another question that I ask: Was she part of a community that felt that they were going to bring, by their actions, an age of peace and justice and an equal share for all and the abolishing of color lines and class lines?”

The obit does not describe the younger Ms. Socolov’s current profession, but it sounds as if she is either currently a politician or should seriously consider becoming one. After all, she appears to have absorbed one of the key rules that any budding politico learns in an encounter with the media: When faced with a question you don’t like, make believe it’s another question and answer that one.

There were unquestionably victims of anti-Communism hysteria in the United States, but Ms. Socolov was certainly not one of them. Her defense at her two trials—that she was meeting a Soviet intelligence officer because she was working on a book for which she was culling the most intimate of secrets during pillow talk—was simply not credible, since she could not produce any manuscript or even outline.

And so, Judith Socolov’s remaining defense—the one her daughter raises now like a fallen flag—is that American Communism was the best force for a brave new world of labor and civil rights.
All too many academic historians have allowed that argument to go unchallenged. It should be demolished on several points:

1) American Communists were engaged in willful ignorance about what was occurring behind the Iron Curtain. The Moscow “show trials” of the late 1930s were demonstrated to be miscarriages of justice by a panel that included American philosopher and educator John Dewey, hardly a conservative. As if that weren‘t enough to make them wonder what was going on, American Communists who traveled to the U.S.S.R. repeatedly faced the dilemma of how to account for the sudden, unexplained disappearance of friends in Stalin’s labor paradise.

2) American Communists called for enhanced electoral rights at home and their destruction abroad. What a contradiction: while the great cause of African-American voting rights would be upheld by the party faithful in the U.S., anyone who attempted to exercise the franchise in a way that deviated from the party line would be crushed in Eastern Europe.

3) American Communists faced more than a simple choice between country-club Republican capitalism and Democratic Party racism. The New Deal demonstrated that there was a small-d democratic alternative that safeguarded the rights of labor. Moreover, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had, by 1948, moved decisively toward embracing civil rights. (It should also be stated that the GOP had not yet embraced the “southern strategy” to which it would turn in Richard Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign.)

4) The rights championed by Communists did not extend to religious liberty. When I attended parochial school as a child, many classmates had parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe and Cuba in the wake of Communist takeovers. Yet Catholics were hardly the only religious victims of Communism: Stalin’s effort to install atheism suppressed people of many religious faiths, including Jews, who had to endure the closure of synagogues as he consolidated his hold on power in the 1930s.

5) The legal rights possessed by American Communists simply did not exist in the Soviet Eden they supported. Ms. Socolov was able to live out the remainder of her life in freedom because a judge, despite certainty of her guilt, believed that her right to a fair trial had been fatally undermined by prosecutorial misconduct. No such safeguards existed in the Soviet Union, where people were summarily executed.

Defenders of American Communists are not content to say that the old Leftists lived out the remainder of their lives doing good (in Ms. Socolov’s case, raising a family, earning a master’s degree in education, and tutoring women in prison in creative writing). They also insist that these were idealists who did not know the truth about the dictator they defended.

But how could these Old Leftists not know at least some of what was occurring? For anyone who picked up a newspaper and read even Churchill's recital of electoral abuses in Eastern Europe--especially for many college-educated devotees of this new political gospel such as Ms. Socolov (a Barnard College graduate) who tried to make contact with people in the Soviet Union--how could they not know that something was awry? To claim otherwise would be adopting what has been termed “the Sergeant Schultz defense” (named, of course, for the hapless Hogan’s Heroes German soldier): “I know nothing.”

In a number of lands freed from the yoke of dictatorships, truth commissions have been established that have determined the extent of past political crimes. The lack of critical thinking in academe and journalism about the cost of the crimes of Ms. Socolov and other Soviet spies makes one long for such a body (or, at least, something like the Dewey-headed commission on the show trials) here in the U.S. There is a cost for accepting uncritically the claims of these Old Leftists, best expressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago:

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."