Codenamed the Argonaut Conference, was the wartime secret meeting from 4 Feb 1945 to 11 Feb 1945 among the heads of government of the U.S., the U.K., and the Soviet Union with FDR (accompanied by communist Alger Hiss – censored from the Wikipedia page), Churchill, and Stalin discussing Europe’s postwar reorganization. It was at this city on the Crimean peninsula that these men made the major concessions that put the Red imprint on post-war Europe and opened the door for them in East Asia. Many countries and millions of people were betrayed as a result of this secret meeting and as William McCarthy correctly pointed out in 1950 relative to anti-communist to communist: “…the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5 against us.”
One of the reasons we were so conciliatory to Stalin was supposedly that we needed the Soviet quid pro quo of their entry into the war against Japan 90 days after the defeat of Germany. But, according to Evans and Romerstein, Soviet agents of influence within the Roosevelt government played a key role in keeping intelligence estimates away from FDR that the Japanese were already so badly beaten that the Soviet assistance would not be needed. Perhaps no agent was more important than the notorious Alger Hiss. Here we pick up the Evans-Romerstein narrative early in Chapter 3 entitled “See Alger Hiss about this.” Bear in mind that FDR’s new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius Jr., was newly appointed and had very little experience in foreign affairs. He was, in short, in over his head:
At a White House briefing a month before the conference opened, Stettinius wrote, FDR said he wasn’t overly concerned about having any particular staffers with him at Yalta, but qualified this with two exceptions. “The President,” said Stettinius, “did not want to have anyone accompany him in an advisory capacity, but he felt that Messrs. Bowman and Alger Hiss ought to go (Authors’ footnote: Dr. Isaiah Bowman of Johns Hopkins University, who had been involved in the Versailles conference after World War I and was a Stettinius adviser. He did not go to Yalta, though Alger Hiss would do so.) No clue was provided by Stettinius or apparently by FDR himself, as to the reason for these choices.
Alger Hiss, it will be recalled, was a secret Communist serving in the wartime State Department, identified as a Soviet agent by ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers, a former espionage courier for Moscow’s intelligence bosses. This identification led to a bitter quarrel that divided the nation into conflicting factions and would do so for years to follow. The dispute resulted in the 1950 conviction of Hiss for perjury when he denied the Chambers charges under oath, denials that ran contrary to the evidence then and to an ever-increasing mass of data later.
Though Hiss is now well-known to history, in January 1945 he was merely one State Department staffer among many, and of fairly junior status – a mid-level employee who wasn’t even head of a division (third ranking in the branch where he was working). It thus seems odd that Roosevelt would single him out as someone who should go to Yalta – the more curious as it’s reasonably clear that FDR had never dealt with Hiss directly (a point confirmed by Hiss in his own memoirs).
At all events, Hiss did go to Yalta, one of a small group of State Department staffers there, and would play a major role in the proceedings. Such a role would have been in keeping with the President’s expressed desire to have him at the conference. It’s not, however, in keeping with numerous books and essays that deal with Yalta or Cold War studies discussing Hiss and his duel with Chambers.
In standard treatments of the era, the role of Hiss at Yalta tends to get downplayed, if not ignored entirely. Usually, when his presence is mentioned, he’s depicted as a modest clerk/technician working in the background, whose only substantive interest was in the founding of the United Nations (which occurred some three months later). Otherwise, his activity at the summit is glossed over as being of no great importance.
This writer can vouch for the standard treatment of Hiss at Yalta from his reading on the subject. The name “Alger Hiss” does not even appear on the “Yalta Conference” Wikipedia page, a lacuna that some reader of this essay and hopefully of Stalin’s Secret Agents, at least of Chapter 3, will be able to correct. At the very least, Hiss, as a Soviet agent, was in place to pass along to the opposition what the U.S. negotiating position would be. Furthermore, with our foreign policy first team not even present at Yalta, in express accordance with Roosevelt’s wishes, the way was clear for the influence that Hiss wielded, which the authors go on to describe in their chapter.
The Yalta story was played out over and over in the late Roosevelt and early Truman years. Yugoslavia was betrayed by agents who furnished misinformation about the nature of the anti-Communist resistance to the Nazis. Chiang Kai-shek was betrayed in China in a similar manner. Similar misinformation was given about the Katyn Forest massacre of virtually the entire Polish officer corps by Stalin’s forces, all to the post-war benefit of the Communists. Perhaps the most disgraceful episode of the post-war period, Operation Keelhaul, the return of millions of former residents of the Soviet Union to face almost certain death, was another of the fruits of this betrayal. An even greater potential atrocity, the Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of the German economy, was only narrowly averted by the resistance raised by Truman’s anti-Communist cabinet members like Secretary of State James Byrnes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, and others. It was the brain child of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau’s (an FDR crony) top assistant, Harry Dexter White. White, like Hiss, had been identified as a Communist agent to FDR aide Adolf Berle in 1939. Henry Wallace, FDR’s vice-president before Truman, who ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948 and darling of Stone and Kuznick, promised in the campaign that White would be his treasury secretary if he were elected president.
Also named by Chambers as a Soviet agent along with White and Hiss, was White House aide, Lauchlin Currie, the patron of Owen Lattimore, who would play a key role in the loss of China to the Communists. Not named by Chambers was the most powerful of FDR’s aides promoting Soviet interests in the Roosevelt administration, his “assistant president,” Harry Hopkins. Hopkins’ name, however, would turn up later among the Venona intercepts as a likely Soviet agent, as would the name of his powerful protg on the staffs of both Roosevelt and Truman, David Niles.
Among the key sources for the revelations of Evans and Romerstein are the aforementioned early revelations of Chambers as recounted in his 1952 book, Witness, Chambers’ Congressional testimony in 1948, the testimony of another Communist defector, Elizabeth Bentley, in the same year, and the files of the FBI and KGB files made accessible since the fall of the Soviet Union.
How Could Roosevelt Subvert His Own Government?
For all the extremely valuable information in Stalin’s Secret Agents it falls crucially short in the most fundamental information that it fails to impart. We see the vital missed opportunity early in Chapter 6, “The First Red Decade”:
In 1939, shocked by the Hitler-Stalin pact and otherwise disenchanted, Chambers decided to break openly with Moscow and tell the authorities what he knew about the infiltration. In September 1939, accompanied by anti-Communist writer-editor Isaac Don Levine, he had a lengthy talk with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, then doubling as a specialist on security matters for the White House.
Chambers would later repeat his story to the FBI, at legislative hearings, and to federal courtrooms, as well as in a bestselling memoir, becoming in the process the most famous and in some ways most important witness in American Cold War history. However, it’s evident from the record that much of what he had to say was revealed in this initial talk with Berle. And what he would reveal, both then and later, was an astonishing picture of subversion, reaching into numerous government agencies and rising to significant levels.
Specifically, Chambers would name a sizable group of suspects then holding federal jobs, most notably Alger Hiss, and provide examples of activity by official U.S. staffers working on behalf of Moscow. Judging by Berle’s notes – and a parallel set recorded by Levine – it was a shocking tale that should have set alarm bells ringing and led quickly to corrective action. But so far as anyone was ever able to tell, no bells were rung or action taken. It appears, indeed, that virtually nothing would be done about the Chambers data for years thereafter.
Berle himself would later downplay the Chambers information, saying the people named were merely members of a “study group” and thus not a security danger. But this version was belied by Berle’s own notes about his talk with Chambers. The heading he gave these wasn’t “Marxist study group,” but “Underground Espionage Agents.” As Chambers would comment in his memoir, he was obviously describing “not a Marxist study group, but a Communist conspiracy.” And the people named would fully live up to that description. (pp. 78-79)
Talk about an astonishing picture! Consider, please, the kicker in the foregoing passage and its passive voice: “But so far as anyone was ever able to tell, no bells were rung or action taken.”
Who didn’t ring the bells or take the action? Certainly it was not Berle:
When I called on Berle a couple of weeks later, he indicated to me that the President had given him the cold shoulder after hearing his account of the Chambers disclosures. Although I learned later, from two different sources who had social relations with Berle, that Roosevelt, in effect, had told him to “go jump in a lake” upon the suggestion of a probe into the Chambers charges, I do not recall hearing that exact phrase from Berle. To the best of my recollection, the President dismissed the matter rather brusquely with an expletive remark on this order: “Oh, forget it, Adolf.”
The writer is none other than Isaac Don Levine, the man who set up the Chambers-Berle meeting and took part in it. It’s on pages 197-198 of his extraordinary 1975 book, Eyewitness to History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century.
One would do better reading Wikipedia than reading Evans and Romerstein on this question:
Berle found Chambers’ information tentative, unclear, and uncorroborated. He took the information to the White House, but the President dismissed it, to which Berle made little if any objection. Berle kept his notes, however (later, evidence during Hiss’ perjury trials).
From Levine we gather that that characterization of Berle’s initial reaction is completely wrong no matter what Berle said later in protection of his party and his former boss, but at least it tells us that Berle informed the president. Even Ann Coulter, of all people, is better on this point than these co-authors:
Berle urgently reported to President Roosevelt what Chambers had said, including the warning about Hiss. The president laughed and told Berle to go f— himself. No action was ever taken against Hiss. To the contrary, Roosevelt promoted Hiss to the position of trusted aide who would go on to advise him at Yalta. Chambers’s shocking and detailed reckoning of Soviet agents in high government positions eventually made its way to William C. Bullitt, former ambassador to Russia and confidant of the president. Alarmed, Bullitt brought the news to Roosevelt’s attention. He, too, was laughed off.
What Evans-Romerstein and Coulter have in common is the short shrift they give to Levine. Coulter air brushes Levine out of the picture completely, never naming the “friend” who set up the meeting with Berle, that it was he who told Bullitt, and not even mentioning that there was a third party present at the Chambers-Berle meeting. Of course, she has no reference to Levine’s book, but neither do Evans and Romerstein.
Now consider what the latter have told us about FDR handpicking the man to go with him to Yalta when, as they relate it, there is no indication of how he would even know who Alger Hiss was…except that he had been informed very authoritatively that the man was a spy for the Soviet Union. Holy treason, Batman!
It is very, very hard to come to any other conclusion than that these two men, who could well be described as America’s leading surviving Red hunters, are covering up for Franklin D. Roosevelt. That impression is greatly reinforced by Evans in a presentation on the book that he made to The Heritage Foundation, which one can listen to here. He is asked specifically about Roosevelt’s complicity in permitting his government to be laced by Communist agents, and Evans attributes it all to FDR’s naivet. Perhaps someone should have also asked him about the failure of the FBI in all this, the people who have the national responsibility for counter-espionage. But the FBI ultimately works for the president. He had the power to make them stand down, and there is every indication that that is just what he did.
Further indication that the authors are covering up for Roosevelt is their failure to mention at all the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky. Krivitsky, as former chief of Soviet intelligence in Europe, very likely knew a good deal more about Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government than Chambers did. But instead of being embraced and welcomed by the Roosevelt administration, he was harassed by them. In February of 1941 he was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in a Washington, DC, hotel room. The District police ruled the death a suicide after only a cursory investigation. Who would have had the power to, in effect, make the DC police stand down on this one?
The authors do talk about the very well connected Soviet spy, Michael Straight, who as publisher of The New Republic hired Henry Wallace as editor, but they have no reference to the extremely revealing biography Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, by Australian journalist Roland Perry. Perhaps that is because Perry, like Levine in his similarly ignored book, has a lot to say about Walter Krivitsky. Perry even suggests that Straight, a family friend of the Roosevelt’s working for the State Department at the time and feeling threatened, was involved in Krivitsky’s assassination. (See the review by Wes Vernon.)
Another Look at Harry Hopkins
Had the authors not neglected to tell us that Berle had fully briefed FDR in 1939 on the Soviet infiltration of his government, we would read the entire book in a different light, but particularly their Chapter 9, “Friends in High Places.” That chapter talks about Harry Hopkins, Lauchlin Currie, and David Niles, all members of the White House staff. Roosevelt had been informed by Berle that Currie was a Soviet agent. Neither Hopkins nor Niles had been named by Chambers (Niles was not yet in the White House), but Hopkins was so aggressively pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin that one has to wonder how FDR could not have known what would later be indicated by the Venona intercepts and by Soviet defectors. To their credit, in Chapter 9 the authors reveal virtually all the evidence that I have in “Harry Hopkins Hosted Soviet Spy Cell” that Hopkins was a Soviet agent. Unfortunately, they don’t include what is fresh and new in that article, that is, the fact that he hosted that spy cell while he was working at Roosevelt’s right hand. It’s a shame, because it would have strengthened their argument considerably.
Hopkins, like Alger Hiss, was also a very important figure in the sell-out to Stalin and world Communism at Yalta. The following passage is particularly revealing:
Hopkins’s pro-Soviet leanings would be on further display in the Yalta records, where his handwritten comments are available for viewing. Though seriously ill at the time of the meeting, he continued to ply his influence with FDR, who himself was mortally sick and susceptible to suggestion in ways that we can only guess at. After FDR had made innumerable concessions to Stalin, there occurred a deadlock on the issue of “reparations.” At this point, Hopkins passed a note to Roosevelt that summed up the American attitude at Yalta. “Mr. President,” this said, “the Russians have given in so much at this conference I don’t think we should let them down. Let the British disagree if they want – and continue their disagreement at Moscow [in subsequent diplomatic meetings]” (Emphasis added by Evans and Romerstein).
One may search the Yalta records at length and have trouble finding an issue of substance on which the Soviets had “given in” to FDR – the entire thrust of the conference, as Roosevelt loyalist [Robert] Sherwood acknowledged, being in the reverse direction.
It was certainly very late in the day by that point, but FDR for a long time had every reason to know what he was getting from his principal aide Hopkins.
