Secret History

By Martin Roberts

This book is a fascinating account of a number of criminal cases in the
United States and in the United Kingdom, some of which resulted in
wrong convictions. The book is part narrative, part analysis. The analysis,
in particular the demolition of the reputation of Whittaker Chambers,ex-spy
and idol of many Americans (he was awarded the Presidential Medal of
Freedom) will arouse debate and rethinking of the real lessons of the cases.
The British cases will shock the complacency of many British people. Both
parts are relevant to the current debate on how to deal with Islamic terrorists,
whose fanaticism recalls that of the IRA and supporters of Communism. The
book includes an analysis of Communism and the way in which its supporters
manipulate fact for their own ends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781481780506

Martin Roberts

Martin Roberts is a British subject living in Belgium. He began to study contested verdicts in criminal cases when he started to study for a law degree, and this book is the result. He trained as an archivist and worked in that field for 26 years. This has given him a lot of patience and a bit of scepticism about what records tell us. He has sought to make his book user-friendly by quoting online sources and allowing the reader to find his way through the facts and arguments to reach his own conclusions.

Book preview

© 2012 by Martin Roberts. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/13/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4567-8986-2 (sc)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Quotation Credits

From A Generation on Trial: USAv.Alger Hiss by Alastair Cooke, copyright 1950, 1952 by Alistair Cooke. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

From J.Edgar Hoover, Sex and Crime by Athan Theoharis, by permission of Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group

From the New York Times, issues of December 17, 1937, January 16, 1938, January 17, 1938, copyright 2012 The New York Times. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

From the book Notes from theUnderground: the Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters 1949-1960, page 49, by Ralph de Toledano, editor. Copyright 1997. Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by special permission of Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C.

From Whittaker Chambers, by Sam Tanenhaus, page 373. Copyright 1997 Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 The Amerasia Affair

Chapter 2 Talking Like A Duck: Marxism, Communism And Their Consequences

Chapter 3 The First Witness’ Tale’ Tale: Whittaker Chambers

Chapter 4 What The Witness Never Told Us

Chapter 5 The First Spy’s Tale: David Zablodowsky

Chapter 6 The Second Spy’s Tale: Oliver Edmund Clubb

Chapter 7 The Third Spy’s Tale: Alger Hiss

Chapter 8 The Tales Compared: 1. The Spy Documents

Chapter 9 The Tales Compared 2: Analysis Of A Friendship

Chapter 10 The Fourth Spy’S Tale: Harry Dexter White

Chapter 11 The Tales Compared

Chapter 12 The Second Witness’ Tale: Elizabeth Bentley

Chapter 13 An Intellectual Hatred: The Trials Of William Remington

Chapter 14 Watched At An Inch: The Case Of Judith Coplon

Chapter 15 The Fbi’s Tale

Chapter 16 A Masterpiece Revisited An Analysis Of Whittaker Chambers’ Book, Witness

Chapter 17 The Professor’s Tale: An Analysis Of Professor Weinstein’s Book, Perjury

Chapter 18 A Note On Venona And The Russian Files

Chapter 19 The Terrorists’ Tale Part 1: The Guildford Four

Chapter 20 The Terrorists’ Tale Part 2: The Maguire Seven

Chapter 21 The Terrorists’ Tale Part 3: The Birmingham Six

Chapter 22 An Appalling Vista

Appendix 1 Whittaker Chambers’ Finances

Appendix 2 The Inner Meaning Of Huac Proceedings

Endnotes

Bibliography

Here I discovered the roguery and ignorance of those who pretend to write anecdotes, or secret history; who send so many kings to their graves with a cup of poison; will repeat the discourse between a prince and a chief minister, where no witness was by; unlock the thoughts and cabinets of ambassadors and secretaries of state; and have the perpetual misfortune to be mistaken.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part 3

To Anne, who had to endure it all

Acknowledgements

It is very difficult to write a book about events in a foreign country, particularly if one’s own country is remote and uses a different language. Fortunately, I have found American archivists and librarians both well informed and helpful, and I owe a debt to them all. Among them, I wish to thank the staff of the Harvard Law School Library, where the Hiss Defense Files are held: Lesley Schoenfeld, Edwin Moloy, Mary Person and others perhaps whose names I do not know. At the North-East Region Archive of the US National Archives, I wish particularly to thank Gregory H. Plunges: at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, to thank William H. Creech, who provided me with information vital to my research into the life of Whittaker Chambers that I could not otherwise have obtained. As a retired archivist, I can remember the many other things that archivists are required to do. Various members of the New York Public Library have helped with my enquiries, often on small matters of fact. For biographical details on a number of people mentioned in my book I must thank Tricia Boyd of the Special Collections Department at Edinburgh University Library; Carol A. Leadenham, Reference Archivist at the Hoover Institution; the Colgate University Alumni Office: unnamed officials at the US Department of Justice for copies of FBI documents; Alan Walker, Archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland, for searching and verifying an original exhibit from the Hiss prosecution files, and describing its exact labelling; John Carter of Columbia University for providing information on Elizabeth Bentley’s student years; and staff of the US National Personnel Records Center, for checking the records of Anthony Muller’s enlistment in the US Marines. To the late Professor David Levin of the University of Virginia I owe a debt that I have for convenience put in the endnotes.

I had the help of two researchers: Chris Richards of New York who read material to which I would not otherwise have had access; and Matt Seccombe, who checked references in the Hiss Defense Files at Harvard Law School Library.

I was fortunate enough to contact Joan Pinkham, daughter of Harry Dexter White, who provided me with valuable information about the White family.

Because I was remote from the United States, I had to use the Bibliothèque Royale Albert 1er in Brussels, Belgium. The staff and resources of the Center for American Studies within that Library were crucial to my research, and I would like to thank the staff for their patience.

It was necessary to put the text online for the publisher. I was not well equipped for this and would like to thank the following people who have helped me to master my computer: Angela Lewus; Michael and June Smith; Hilary and Peter Edelsten, our neighbour Michael Van Gucht, and Anne Reniers. This was invaluable for someone with no technical skills. Elizabeth and Derek Burnett did a grand job in typing and editing the draft text of the book before it went online, and I wish to thank them both.

Mr. P.W. Standring, a professional editor, checked and edited my text at a later stage. Any errors in the text are, of course, my own.

Two professional writers read my text at different stages and I thank them both for their suggestions and comments. Jeff Kisseloff of New York saw an early version and took the time to make written comments. Mike MacDonald and Teresa gave me support, advice and encouragement that were indispensable. I wish for Mike, in his next book, all that I would wish for myself.

No one can write about the Hiss case without consulting the Hiss Defense website at homepages.nyu.edu, run by Jeff Kisseloff, so I have a double reason for thanking him.

Before everyone else, I would like to thank my wife Anne, to whom this book is dedicated. She read my drafts for the book and gave me moral and practical support that has sustained me over the years when I was writing or researching.

Chapter 1

The Amerasia Affair

Gentlemen do not read other peoples’ correspondence

Remark attributed to Henry L. Stimson, US Secretary of State, turning down a proposal to set up a code breaking service in the State Department

In February 1945 an official of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States’ wartime intelligence agency, was reading an obscure specialist magazine called Amerasia when he suddenly felt that he had read the same words before. He had indeed done so. The article, which commented on Allied policy in Thailand, contained verbatim passages from a secret report that he had written a few months previously.

Alarmed at the thought that there was a security breach at OSS, he contacted its head of security, who took the matter seriously enough to take both the report and the article to New York, where he submitted both to Frank Brooks Bielaski, head of investigations at OSS.

The original report, though confidential, had been seen by enough people to make tracing the person who leaked it a difficult task. Bielaski decided that it would be simpler to burgle the offices of the recipient and trace the culprit backwards from there. This was no great strain on OSS resources; the offices of Amerasia magazine were in New York and not protected by guards.

The magazine’s offices were in fact part of the premises of the Institute of Pacific Relations and leased from them. It had always been closely linked to the Institute, whose nature and origins form part of the context of this affair. A number of countries bordering on, or having interests in, the Pacific Ocean had set up the IPR in 1927. Its main backers had been academic, commercial and other interests in the United States, who tended to set the tone of its activities. In the 1930s, it became the target of various Communists and fellow travellers, who had an interest in changing US policy towards China, then in a state of undeclared war with Japan and riven by conflicts between the Kuomintang (Nationalist) government and a growing Communist Party with its own private army. Although a number of these people, including Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a Red millionaire, reached positions of influence within the Institute, later Congressional investigations concluded that the IPR had been on the whole an objective and useful observer of events. Nevertheless, in 1945 some people thought it subversive.

Such was the background of the magazine whose offices Bielaski and some OSS staffers came to burgle. This proved unnecessary: the building’s caretaker was sufficiently impressed by their credentials to unlock all relevant doors for them. The offices contained a large number—two or three thousand, according to Bielaski’s later estimate—of official documents. Many were marked Secret, and a large number appeared to come from the State Department. They took some samples and left in the same way that they entered.

Bielaski rushed with his samples to General William (Wild Bill) Donovan, the head of OSS. Donovan was a lifelong enemy of J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. Security within the United States was largely the responsibility of the FBI. He had great pleasure in dumping what was clearly a serious and embarrassing matter in the lap of his old enemy.

Hoover was not prepared to allow matters to continue purely on the basis of what OSS had discovered. He therefore sent in an FBI team to burgle the premises again, had the magazine’s staff and other suspicious characters put under surveillance, and had their homes burgled and bugged. The results were interesting, though in the end they backfired and left the FBI in a most undignified position.

One of the suspects, Philip Jaffe, was a long-time Marxist and fellow traveller. Owner of a greetings-card firm, he was known to have helped, financially and otherwise, a number of pro-Communist movements. He was particularly close to the Chinese Communists, who were within a few years of taking power in China. Jaffe’s social life, as observed by the FBI agents, reflected his political views: he visited Earl Browder, head of the US Communist Party, and the Soviet consulate in New York. They also saw him in the company of two other suspects: Andrew Roth, then an officer in the US Naval Reserve, and Emanuel Sigurd Larsen, an official in the State Department.

Jaffe’s first observed encounter with these two men had elements of farce about it that may cause the reader to doubt Americans’ propensity for paranoia and to wonder what security system, if any, was in operation at the State Department. Jaffe, armed with a briefcase, travelled to Washington, where he registered at the fashionable Statler Hotel. He was joined in the hotel lobby by Larsen and his wife, and shortly after by Lieutenant Roth, also accompanied by his wife. The five of them went for a meal in the equally fashionable Colony Room. After this relaxed lunchtime, Lieut. Roth drove Jaffe and Larsen to the State Department, where Jaffe and Roth stayed in the car, examining documents. The surveillance (undetected by its subjects), revealed much exchange of paper packages and envelopes.

It was clearly time to act and the FBI men persuaded a reluctant Justice Department to issue arrest warrants. The reluctance was due to the delicate but for the moment harmonious state of Soviet-US relations; Russia was still our wartime ally. Apart from the subjects of the surveillance, the editor of Amerasia, Kate Mitchell, a journalist called Mike Gayn, and John Stewart Service, a prominent State Department official, were also brought in.

The six arrested appeared before a grand jury. This institution is now obsolete in Great Britain so it will be necessary to explain it for British readers. Grand juries perform duties rather like those of JPs: they hear evidence from witnesses and other relevant sources and decide whether there is a prima facie case to answer. These juries are much larger than trial juries, have lawyers to help them in determining the facts at issue and are able, individually or as a body, to question witnesses who appear before them.

The second grand jury that considered the affair refused to proceed against Gayn, Mitchell or Service, and brought indictments against the other three only for the rather modest charge of misappropriating government documents. Since a large number of documents, some of them highly secret, had been found in Jaffe’s possession, it seemed that prosecution would be an easy matter. It was not.

At the time of Larsen’s arrest, and in his presence, FBI officials searched his apartment. He overheard one of them instructing another as to where to look for incriminating evidence, and realised that they had visited his apartment before, without a warrant. Larsen was able to persuade the caretaker of the building to attest that this was so, and his attorney went to court to file a motion to strike out the charges against his client on the basis that the evidence had been obtained illegally. It happened that Jaffe’s attorney was also present in court that day. He had come to negotiate an agreement with Justice Department officials that, in return for his client pleading guilty to unauthorized possession, they would drop the more serious charges on file in the court

By a series of subterfuges, the officials concealed the fact that Larsen’s motion—which would have struck down the Jaffe charges as well—was being filed at the same time. When Jaffe’s lawyer discovered this in court the next morning, he was furious. His client was left pleading guilty to a lesser charge that he might have avoided altogether.

Another aspect complicated matters further: the FBI had been unable to produce evidence of the documents being handed over to Soviet or Communist Party representatives. This is always a problem in countries such as the United States, where legal rules are so fundamental and where the standard of proof of a criminal charge is set so high. The fact that they had no proof does not mean that such handing over did not take place: given Philip Jaffe’s affiliations, it is highly likely that it did.

The problem was the greater because there was no evidence that the other five defendants had any knowledge of what Jaffe was, or might have been, doing with the documents. The available evidence indicates that they had no such knowledge. The IPR had close links with the State Department at least in the sense that staff of the latter body was co-opted onto the former. If all six were involved in espionage, it beggars belief that they would publish in a magazine articles based on the documents they were stealing. What in fact happened—a Far East expert recognizing his own work in the pages of the magazine—was something easily foreseeable by Amerasia staff and their associates.

The notion that the Amerasia case was about a spy ring is further weakened by an examination of the career of John Service, the most important of the arrested people. Service had been born and largely educated in China, the son of missionaries. His first long residence in the United States was when he attended university in Ohio. Fluent in Chinese and thoroughly familiar with the country, he joined the Foreign Service of the State Department young, and served continuously in China. During the early 1940s, he came to share the view of General Vinegar Joe Stilwell, US military adviser to the Kuomintang government of General Chiang Kai-shek, that the Kuomintang was collapsing as a military and political force because of the interminable war with Japan, internal corruption, military incompetence and other pressures. Chiang became aware of their views and both were recalled to Washington.

Although he was allowed to return to the field later, Service was soon in trouble again for advocating military aid to the Chinese Communists. Although a number of experts held similar views, they were not in accord with the official line, which treated the Kuomintang as the only lawful government.

Service’s interest in Amerasia seems to have been as a means of leaking information—some of it contained in his own reports—about the Chinese theatre of operations, which would provide the public with arguments critical of official policy. As the reader will have gathered, the United States is a less secretive place than Britain, and the role of non-elected officials is viewed differently. But there are limits, and at the end of 1951, after much investigation, Service was fired by the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, on the grounds of reasonable doubt about his loyalty.

Unwilling to let matters rest there, Service pursued all available means to establish his good faith and loyalty. After a long series of Loyalty-Security Board hearings and proceedings before federal courts, the US Supreme Court finally cleared him in 1956. Wishing to make his point indelibly clear on the record, he sought and received reinstatement at the State Department. Now a major embarrassment, he was given various obscure jobs well below his abilities, but he stuck it out until 1962, when he took early retirement.

Service’s career is relevant when determining the exact nature of the Amerasia affair. In 1952, the Republican candidate, Eisenhower, was elected President. Although Eisenhower had no enthusiasm for witch-hunts, a number of people on the far right of his party—not just Senator McCarthy but the Vice-President, Richard Nixon—were extremely interested. During the twenty years in which they had been out of office, some Republicans had become obsessed by Communism and the state of the world. Their appetite for the blood of their adversaries meant that the Administration had from time to time to throw them some red meat. The posthumous reputation of Harry Dexter White was one such offering.

Another piece was the independence of State Department experts. A man named R.W. Scotty MacLeod was appointed head of the Bureau of Security at the State Department. MacLeod was a former FBI agent who surrounded himself with like-minded staff. He was strongly anti-Communist and, like many FBI men, he had not only come to hold narrow, conservative opinions, but was happy to promote them. The new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, a former patron of the now-disgraced Alger Hiss, appointed him as a new broom to sweep out the supposedly pro-Communist element that had flourished there under the Democrats. MacLeod must have exceeded Dulles’s expectations and perhaps his wishes. His activities sent a wave of panic through the Department. Some officials resigned; some assumed support of policy decisions with which they disagreed; a few were sacked on sufficient grounds. Morale slumped as policy advice began to be shaped to suit the likes of MacLeod.

The fact that Service was able to struggle through this difficult period and eventually be reinstated indicates that his enemies were unable either to find or fabricate a strong case against him. He was at least able to show them that he had paid a high price for his indiscretions.

A much more important conclusion to be drawn from the affair, apart from the obvious one that there was not enough control over confidential documents or over the people who had access to them, was that normal legal processes were not a suitable means for dealing with espionage, real or imaginary.

Chapter 2

Talking Like a Duck: Marxism, Communism and Their Consequences

‘If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck, chances are it is a duck’

Comment by Australian politician on the criteria for identifying crypto-Communists

Many of the major figures described in this book had one thing in common: they either confessed to having been Communists or were accused of being Communists. The beliefs of Communists, as a system of thought and action, are gradually receding into the past; so that this may be a convenient point at which to describe some of the major features of their theory, Marxism-Leninism.

The first of these is materialism. Communism is an atheistic, anti-religious creed. Its first (Soviet) constitution guaranteed freedom of religious belief and of anti-religious propaganda. This is a very careful formulation, which leads us to the heart of this ideology. When the Soviets granted freedom of religious belief, they were granting nothing. It is not possible for any government to prohibit beliefs of any kind, so long as they are not openly expressed. The purpose of the clause is to give nothing while appearing to give something, with the aim of deceiving credulous outsiders. By contrast, freedom of anti-religious propaganda was something that the state granted to itself. Since those in authority were able to define what constituted freedom, and what constituted anti-religious propaganda, it could become whatever they chose. And so it did. In practice, it meant freedom to persecute and sometimes to kill believers in any religion. This included the shamanism practiced by the native inhabitants of Siberia. The contrast with the United States is stark indeed. The USA has a government system that ignores religion completely, but its inhabitants are more devout than those of most other western countries are.

Second is social Darwinism. History is viewed as the result of constant struggles between classes, which the working class would finally win under the leadership of the Communist Party. Darwin’s theories, and the discoveries of other biologists, were used to support the notion that, as among wild animals, the human world was a constant struggle for food, sunlight, a mate and so on. This view—that struggles for dominance between species of animals or between commercial rivals in the human world were not merely inevitable but desirable—was widely espoused in the 19th and 20th centuries, and gave rise to popular sayings like the rat race and it’s dog eat dog out there. It had a strong influence on—for instance—Fascism, Nazism, economic theory, eugenics programmes, and the revival of imperialism.

This view was common among entrepreneurs and inventors in the United States in the Victorian era and later. Thomas Edison was a typical example: so was Rockefeller. But while Americans give a vague assent to social Darwinism in the economic sphere, they do not ensure that it is applied elsewhere. In particular, class war in the Marxist-Leninist manner has little attraction in a society as fluid as that of the USA.

The third characteristic is conspiracy. Communism first took power in Tsarist Russia, a country renowned for its repressive censorship and autocracy. Because criticism of the Tsarist system was in itself an offence, dissidents and above all revolutionaries went underground, sending documents secretly between one small group or cell and another, using passwords and forged identities, and conspiring to assassinate prominent persons in the regime. That there were good reasons for their caution appears in the fact that, before the Revolution, Lenin had for many years a private secretary, Roman Malinovsky, who was also an informer for the Tsarist secret police.

That this particular set of attitudes was, and always has been, alien to the American mind, is illustrated by the ferocious exposure to public view of the private lives and activities of candidates for election. One promising presidential candidate of recent times, Senator Joe Biden, saw his hopes of the Presidency destroyed when it was revealed that he had plagiarised a sentence in a public speech by another politician, and then denied the plagiarism. Nor is this a recent phenomenon: the Presidential election of 1884 was, for example, notable for the exposure of details of the candidates’ private lives. The secrecy of Communist activity made its real nature hard for Americans to comprehend.

That it was an essential feature of Communist parties everywhere is indicated by an indiscreet remark of Max Bedacht, a lifelong American Communist. Questioned about his contacts with Whittaker Chambers when the latter was a member of the Communist underground, Bedacht hotly denied it. Pointing to his public, legal job in the Communist apparatus, he said, I was opposed to connecting legal work with illegal work. It is common sense not to connect the two. This reveals two things: firstly, that Bedacht took it for granted that work in the party underground was illegal, and secondly that ordinary standards of truthfulness were irrelevant.

A fourth characteristic is moral relativism as to the means of achieving Communism and moral absolutism as to the end itself. This relativism is indicated by, for instance, the purges, the show trials, the Red Terror under both Lenin and Stalin, the concentration camps and so forth. Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, describes a high official in the Soviet security service deriding the notion that only the guilty should be punished. If that was the case, he said, the innocent would have nothing to fear and would be harder to control. Professor Richard Pipes in his Concise History of the Russian Revolution also relates this.

The other side of this, moral absolutism as to the end, can be seen in Fitzroy MacLean’s book Eastern Approaches. MacLean had the good fortune to be a diplomat in Moscow at the time of the great show trials of former Communist leaders staged by Stalin during the Great Terror of 1936-8. He obtained a pass to hear the proceedings and related them very faithfully. He was particularly interested in the behaviour of Nikolai Bukharin, one of the defendants. Bukharin had devoted his life to the Communist cause and no doubt had plenty of blood on his hands, but he had been ousted from the leading group many years before. Like all the other defendants, he pleaded guilty. This did not stop the prosecution lawyer, Vyshinsky, from getting all defendants to admit their guilt over many years of sabotage, for example putting ground glass in the butter, impeding the planned economy and so forth. The prosecution spelt out at length the exact nature of each offence, and the part that each of them played in it, and each of them pleaded guilty. The charges were of treason by acting as spies for the West, sabotage and wrecking—anything that had gone wrong in the USSR over the last twenty years. This was done partly to put the blame for the regime’s numerous failures, for instance the famines, on traitors, and partly as a sort of morality play to show the Soviet public how they should behave.

Bukharin was a brave man who had sought nothing from Stalin in return for confession except the lives of his wife and daughter (a promise that Stalin did not keep). On several occasions during the trial, when the charges became specific, he demonstrated that he could not have met X at Y in order to do Z because his presence elsewhere was fully documented. Nonetheless, he would continue, he was guilty in a wider sense because his political views at the time were erroneous and harmful to the interests of the working classes. As MacLean perceived, he was pleading guilty but only on his own terms. He pleaded guilty because that would avoid divisions in the international