Most governments, Communist ones included, are quite concerned if it is discovered that espionage agents from an opposing power have wormed their way into their governmental agencies and are busily passing along confidential information to potential adversaries. However, it seems that quite often the attitude in the United States government has been “whatever will be will be.” So the Communists are stealing top secret information from us—so what.
It is noteworthy that before World War 2, when Roosevelt was in office, this kind of activity was going on wholesale and those who had been warmed of it did nothing. Whittaker Chambers in his informative book Witness noted that when Roosevelt was told of Communist penetration of the State Department he just laughed. No one bothered to look into anything until the informants became numerous enough that the situation could no longer be ignored.
In his book Seeds of Treason Ralph de Toledano noted a man named Harold Ware. Old time anti-Communists should recognize the name. de Toledano described Ware as “…a top-notch agent of the Communist International—the Comintern. Ware’s mother was Ella Reeve Bloor—today ‘Mother’ Bloor to all Communists…His brothers and sisters had been weaned on Marxism and he himself was a charter member of the Communist Party.”
In other words, Ware and his siblings were all “red-diaper” babies. In 1920 Ware had spent much of his time driving around the country, picking up information about American agriculture to pass along to Lenin. In the early 1920s he organized the first Communist front group in this country. It was the American Federated Russian Famine Committee. Ware made several trips to Russia in the 1920s, attending the Lenin School in Moscow, where most Soviet agents got their training in espionage, sabotage and “revolutionary organization.
In this country his wife, whom he had met in Russia, started publication of a slick propaganda organ called Soviet Russia Today. I don’t know if it is still being published or not but I remember seeing copies in the 1970s.
What Ware did in this country was to begin “…the systematic creation of Communist cells wherever possible. Some of these agents were assigned to the colleges, some to the banks, some to industry. Ware, because of a seven-year tenure (1925-32) as a dollar-a-year man for the Agriculture Department was assigned to Washington to direct operations there.”
According to an article in Human Events by Edna Lonigan: “Each cell (was to divide) and breed others. Directors of the NKVD (secret police) sat with maps of the ‘terrain’ of the Federal government, and moved their followers to one key position after another.
Communists in government and the colleges were ordered to recommend their comrades for all desirable openings. They were told to locate the key jobs, to know when they would be vacant, and to pull the strings. Their people always had the ‘best’ recommendations.” You have to wonder how their people always got such glowing recommendations, seeing that they were Communists, but that tells you a little about the nature of the Federal government and the colleges at that time, doesn’t it?
In late July of 1948 Elizabeth Terrell Bentley testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and a few days later, in early August, Whittaker Chambers testified before the same committee. According to James Burnham in The Web of Subversion “At those hearings in the summer of 1948, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers told parallel and intersecting narratives. Miss Bentley had, she testified, acted for some years (1941-44) as the courier and paymaster of two espionage cells or networks that were operating within agencies of the United States government. From members of these cells she had gathered secret documents, plans, microphotographs, of all kinds of secret and confidential data, and had transmitted these, directly or indirectly, to Soviet representatives.” One wonders just how many of these cells were in operation in the 1930s and 40s. Between them Bentley and Chambers exposed the Ware cell, the Silvermaster cell and the Perlo cell. Though these cells working in the Federal government were exposed, I have heard from some sources that there were some Communist cells operating in Washington in the Federal government that were never caught or exposed. One can only assume that, to some degree, exercising a little caution, they continued to operate.
The high positions in government occupied by these people should come as a shock to many, though it probably won’t because these people almost never get mentioned in our “history” books and therefore, no one knows about them and the fact that they had sold out to the Soviet Union and betrayed their country. The history books would only mention them if they had been somewhere on the political right. As Communists being on the left, they were automatically given a pass... More>>
