Dan Flynn

     One of the more controversial, and powerful, figures of the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt was Harry Hopkins. FDR Biographer Robert Sherwood noted that even partisans of the President "disliked Hopkins intensely and resented the extraordinary position of influence and authority which he held." Journalist Jay Franklin labeled him "one of the guiding intelligences of the New Deal," while John T. Flynn dubbed Hopkins "Roosevelt’s alter ego."

     During his years at the White House, Hopkins did some very strange things. Despite the protests of military officials, Hopkins demanded that the American government give the Soviet Union a large amount of uranium as part of the Lend-Lease program. On a diplomatic trip to the Soviet Union in 1945, he shunned the American position of free elections for Poland and told Stalin that America’s goal was actually to have a post-war Poland that the Soviet Union was comfortable with. Earlier, when a government official defected from Stalin’s prison-state, Hopkins unsuccessfully urged Roosevelt to return the man to the USSR even though he knew that it would mean the man’s certain death.

     What explains this bizarre behavior? According to Herb Romerstein and Eric Breindel, authors of The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors, the reason is that Hopkins, arguably the man with the greatest sway over our 32nd President, was an agent of the Soviet Union. The proof of this can be found in the secret "Venona" spy cables that United States intelligence intercepted during the 1940s. Hopkins is identified as Agent "19."

     Although Hopkins was merely labeled a misguided liberal during the 1930s and ‘40s by his most vehement critics, the years since have not been as kind. American General George Racey Jordan wrote that while Hopkins was in power the presidential advisor had deliberately helped the Russians to the detriment of America. In the 1960s, longtime KGB agent Iskhak Akhmerov professed at a secret meeting of Soviet intelligence officers that Harry Hopkins was "the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States." When historians puzzled over Agent "19" as Venona was released in 1995, the conclusion drawn by many was that Hopkins was the only man with a relationship close enough to Roosevelt to be present at the meetings between the President and Winston Churchill described in the intercepted spy transmission.

     Hopkins is hardly the only prominent American revealed as a traitor since the Venona project was declassified in 1995. More than 300 agents are revealed in Venona, with at least 150 of them working for the United States government. Top officials identified by the deciphered cables include Alger Hiss, the important State Department official who presided as the first secretary general of the United Nations at its founding; Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary of the treasury and the U.S. Representative to the International Monetary Fund; and White House aide Lauchlin Currie.

     Coupled with other material, such as the opening of the Soviet archives and the declassification of FBI bugs and wiretaps, Venona reveals a spying apparatus by Communists undreamed of even by the likes of Joe McCarthy, Martin Dies, and Pat McCarren. The success of several businessmen, such as Armand Hammer, can be traced entirely to their roles as Soviet agents. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, although later wrestled away from the Communists,is alleged in The Venona Secrets to have been founded at the direction of Moscow, which sought a radical alternative to the American Federation of Labor. Several U.S. Congressmen, as well as Members of Parliament in Britain and Canada, secretly served the USSR. Venona proves that the staffs of such prominent journalists as Walter Lippmann and Drew Pearson were infiltrated by Communist agents, and other journalists, such as I.F. Stone, were agents themselves.

     In one of the most controversial proclamations of the book, the authors declare, "we can say for certain that Oppenheimer did in fact knowingly supply classified information on the atom bomb to the Soviet Union." While he directed the Manhattan Project, it was known that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s wife, brother, and sister-in-law were all members of the Communist Party. The fact that he regularly gave a large portion of his salary to the Communist Party was also common knowledge among government officials overseeing the project. This should have made him at the least a security risk for a project with such deep ramifications for national security. It didn’t. In Venona, Oppenheimer is identified with the code-name "Veskel." One message instructs agents to "re-establish contact with ‘Veskel’…as soon as possible." In 1994, a year before the deciphered Venona cables were released, the man in charge of Soviet spying on America’s atom bomb project revealed that Oppenheimer had supplied the Soviets with classified reports on atom bomb development. These earth-shattering revelations about the man in charge of developing the atomic bomb for the United States have been met with a big yawn by academics and journalists.

     For Elizabeth Bentley, vindication came more than 25 years after her death in 1959. A courier for a Soviet spy ring, Bentley broke with the Communists in late 1945 and revealed a massive underground espionage apparatus. Critics mocked the spinsterish Bentley by dubbing her the "blond spy queen" after early reports exaggerated her looks. Her testimony linking more than 40 Americans to traitorous activities has been dismissed by the intelligentsia. Yet Venona, FBI wiretaps, and intelligence archives in Russia confirm her accounts. Helen Tenney, William Remmington, Edward Fitzgerald, Donald Wheeler, Victor Perlo, John Apt, Harold Ware, Gregory Silvermaster, Duncan Lee, Harold Glasser, Allen Rosenberg, and Cedric Belfrage are just a dozen of the more than 20 agents Bentley named that have been revealed as traitors. Confirmation of such a large magnitude of Bentley’s individual charges is all the more remarkable considering the fact that only a tiny percentage of intercepted spy traffic was ever translated (about 3,000 documents are readable). What names appear in the tens of thousands of untranslated cables we may never know.

     Other interesting items that the authors explore include the involvement of American Communists in the murder of Trotsky, the enthusiasm with which domestic subversives carried out their espionage for the Soviet Union while it was allied with Nazi Germany, and anti-Semitism among the Soviets.

     It is significant to note, Romerstein and Breindel point out, that no American Communist agent broke with the Soviet Union after the Nazi-Soviet pact was agreed on; nor is there evidence that any American Communist Party member went to the FBI after being approached to spy against their own country.

     By 1945, Lauchlin Currie, one of Stalin’s White House agents mentioned numerous times in Venona, had heard rumours that the National Security Agency had cracked the Soviet’s code. Currie, along with others, reported this information to his Soviet overlords. Although Venona would continue to attempt to decipher untranslated codes for the next thirty years, it in effect ceased to exist as a functional operation that year. The Russians discovered they had been found out and naturally changed their codes. Venona’s value to scholars hoping to gain an understanding of what really went on in the years leading up to the Cold War, however, lives on.

     For years, scholars decried anti-Communism as a witchhunt. We know now, however, that Communist "witches" did exist. Confronted with this reality, many academics now acknowledge that the accused were in fact spies but lamely maintain that they were serving a good cause. One-hundred million deaths this century at the hands of the Communists suggest that they weren’t.

     The Venona Secrets does a masterful job of bringing together streams of difficult-to-comprehend spy cables. Its telling of the story of domestic subversion as confirmed by those Soviet spy cables that have only recently been made public is worthy of a Tom Clancy page-turner—only what Romerstein and Breindel write about really did happen. The material is inconvenient for the multitude of Court historians of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. However painful, what has been revealed is true. History is being rewritten. Romerstein and Breindel are among its authors.

     "For a long time," the authors explain, "it has been an article of faith among apologists of the Left that Communist Party members were loyal citizens merely engaged in dissent and only bent on reform of the American system. Venona proves the opposite—their loyalty was to the Soviet Union, and many of the Party’s leadership and some of the hard-core membership served as spies in the Soviet cause. Venona and other recently available materials help explain why American Communists betrayed their democratic country to a totalitarian dictatorship."