The subject under discussion is the Cold War. And usually people don't even think about what that means. It was a word or phrase that came into use after World War II to define the situation which was neither war nor peace. It was not a hot war with shooting, although occasionally it came to that. But it was a cold war of political operations, of espionage, of various operations against the United States by the Soviet Union. And where we were capable, of the United States against the Soviet Union. But the term "Cold War" defined a phenomena that existed long before the World War II period.

In fact, the Cold War started in 1919. But most people in the West had no idea that it had started. It started with the establishment of the Communist International, an organization based in Moscow, organizing the Communist parties of the world and an international apparatus to take over the world. I mean that might sound a little peculiar at this late stage of the game. Like Adolf Hitler, the Soviet leaders, Lenin, Stalin, and those who came after them, thought that they were going to be able to conquer the world. And if necessary they would use force, and where possible they would use other methods.

.... Now, not every American Communist was qualified to be a spy. Only a handful were. They were all totally loyal to the Soviet Union. But those who were qualified to be spies-say an Alger Hiss in the State Department, or Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department or Lauchlin Currie or Harry Hopkins (and I'll get back to these people a little later) in the White House-they were Soviet spies because they were Communists. And the American Communist Party provided them to do American intelligence service.

....When we start putting together the information that we found in the Moscow archives with the information turned over by the U.S. government-and a very important thing happened during World War II, the American government was intercepting decoded messages of the Soviet intelligence service, the NKVD in the United States and their headquarters in Moscow- about 10% of those messages were actually broken into by our codebreakers and they are now available by codename Venona. And the interesting thing, well there were many interesting things, and one of them is how important the membership in the Communist Party was.

One of the Soviet Intelligence officers reports back to Moscow that there are two people in this file being run by Gregory Silvermaster, and Silvermaster chews them out for not doing their work. And being in the Communist Party, Silvermaster has the power to give them orders because that's how the Soviet espionage apparatus was set up in those days. They were little Soviet Party units. The head of the unit gave orders to the rest of them and reported the information that was collected to the Soviet intelligence personnel and the KGB personnel.

One of the people that Silvermaster ran was Harry Dexter White. A fascinating character, an economist, a world class economist who was working as the Undersecretary of Treasury in the United States and had been a communist for many, many years. In 1941, before we go into the war with Japan, the Soviets were very concerned about a Japanese attack on America. They were afraid, in fact, that the Japanese would change their minds and attack the Soviet Union. And so a Soviet intelligence officer, Vitaliy Pavlov, came to the United States to meet with Harry Dexter White and gave him a set of themes that could be used as the American position on Japan that would antagonize the Japanese and increase the possibility of war.

White wrote this in a memo to Secretary of Treasury Morgenthau, who was totally oblivious to what was going on around him. Morgenthau gave the memo to Roosevelt, and he gave it to Secretary of State, Hull, and it became the basis of very important very famous document called the Hull Ultimatum, which was used by the Japanese war party to argue against those who thought they should not attack the United States. And the war party was using this document which was richly prepared by the Soviet Intelligence Service to manipulate us into war with Japan, and to avoid the Soviet Union being attacked by Japan. And those of you who remember some history, remember the Soviet Union did not get into war against Japan until after the first atom bomb was dropped. Now in exchange for going to war after Japan was ready to surrender, the Soviet Union got Manchuria, which they used as a base for the Chinese Communists to conquer China. They got half of Korea, which gave them a base for the Korean War, the invasion of South Korea by the North Korean Communists. We gave them all kinds of good things that they didn't deserve, but the fact that we fought Japan and we defeated Japan.When we would go over to Moscow and they would say, "hey you Americans fought the Japanese for all those years, and one week and we defeated them!" But Japan, of course, had already been defeated.

Harry Dexter White was very important for another reason. In 1944 he went over to Normandy with Secretary of Treasury Morgenthau to meet with Eisenhower. And during the discussion Eisenhower sort of said off handedly, you know, we should not have a soft peace with Germany. The Germans should be punished for what they did. Remember this is an interesting concept because in America we have the concept of individual guilt. Not of national guilt. Not of mass guilt. If somebody committed a crime, he committed the crime, not his cousin, and not someone as the same nationality as him. Eisenhower didn't think in those terms. He wanted to punish all the Germans and Morgenthau said, yes. And Harry Dexter White said, let me prepare the plan. And he wrote it up. This was to take all the industry out of Germany and make it an agricultural community, and literally destroy the economy of Germany. When Roosevelt saw it he liked it. It was all very secret in the upper levels of government at first, as it was the Soviet intelligence service because White was important to them. But Roosevelt after thinking about it said, no we can't do that. Germany is going to be devastated after the war, we're going to have to feed those people. We should not take away their industry and allow them to build themselves back up. When Roosevelt rejected the plan, the plan was leaked from Harry Dexter White's department to the press telling them that there was an American plan to destroy the German economy after the war. The Nazis of course picked up on this and they used it as propaganda to encourage their troops to fight harder against the American and British. So American, British, and German lives were lost because of this Harry Dexter White program.

In breaking the Venona codes, White had a codename. And the way the FBI was able to determine that that code name fitted Harry Dexter White was a Soviet agent told them that a Soviet agent handler was going over to Normandy to meet with Eisenhower together with the Secretary of Treasury so it became quite obvious that this was Harry Dexter White. The other thing that Venona told us was that it proved things that we already knew and made them very clear. We knew, for example, that the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies because they were Communist Party members. And they spied because the communist party instructed them to spy. But Venona showed not only that they were spies, but that they were out recruiting other spies. And one of the things that Julius Rosenberg did was when the American communists were recruiting for espionage he was given the names and he took them back to the party to check for political correctness that's not an anachronistic term. Every idiot uses the term political correctness today. Back in those days only the Communists used the term political correctness. They invented it, and the job was to check these people out for their political correctness and that meant that Julius Rosenberg knew all the names of the spies and when he went to his death refusing to reveal anything was because he was protecting his comrades. Now the Rosenbergs, both of whom were executed in 1953 had two young sons and the fact that the sons would lose their parents was less important to those two Communists than having to protect their comrades in the Soviet espionage circles.

....The other rather interesting character, who again we knew he was a spy, we knew he was a communist, was Alger Hiss. High level official at the State Department, identified by Whittaker Chambers as one of the spies in the State Department. Chambers would carry the information back to the Soviets from Alger Hiss, while there is a document in the Venona Papers which documents Hiss as a Soviet spy, who after the Yalta conference, was Roosevelt's right hand and received a medal from the Soviet Union for his activities against the United States. The medals were either the Order of the Red Star or the Order of the Red Banner. And those medals are not like the Order of Lenin. The Order of Lenin was given to all kinds of political persons all over Moscow. But the Order of the Red Star and the Order of the Red Banner, were only given for combat heroism, or operations behind enemy lines. Well, we were the enemy lines that Alger Hiss operated behind.

The other case is still one which is pretty controversial and I think the evidence on it we're pretty clear on. But it remains a controversy. There is a very very brave man now living in England named Oleg Gordievsky. He was a high ranking KGB officer and for ten years worked within the KGB for British intelligence. When his name was turned over to the Russians by Aldrich Ames they brought him back to Moscow to question him. They weren't sure if he was a British spy and they let him out on the street one night.

The British smuggled him out of Moscow and he got to England where he is now living. Gordievsky was, I think, a very courageous man, in the course of him reporting to the British and then reporting it to the Americans. When Gordievsky was a young KGB officer, he attended a class with an older man Iskhak Akhmerov. Akhmerov was a KGB agent in charge of illegal intelligence.

Legal intelligence, and let me define this clearly, meant people who were operating out of the embassy. But a few Soviet agents who were illegal intelligence attended some of these and they did not identify themselves as Russians.

In the case of Akhmerov, he was just a foreign guy with an American wife in Baltimore. He ran the most sensitive agents in the United States. Akhmerov's wife was Earl Browder's niece who was head of the American Communist Party. Akhmerov told the class of young KGB officers that, you all know about Alger Hiss. Well I dealt with Alger Hiss but we had a spy more important. We had the person who was the closest personal associate to Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Harry Hopkins. Hopkins was Roosevelt's alter ego. He lived in the White House for some time. Whenever there was any kind of trouble in politics or foreign affairs, Harry Hopkins got the job. And Akhmerov was saying that this very very important man was their spy. Hopkins was top level. In one of the Venona messages, Akhmerov reports back to Moscow that one of his agents, whom he calls Agent 19, had attended a meeting where only three people were in attendance: Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Agent 19. And they discussed the plans for D-Day, which was very very sensitive at the time. Well, by checking US government records we can find the name of that third man. It was Harry Hopkins. So it becomes apparent that Hopkins was, as Akhmerov says, that at one time he had his agent in the White House.