More lying about history

So much history is being made right now -- and so many lies about current events need to be exploded -- that I feel guilty discussing the scandals of yesteryear. But the past is never really past, is it?

When Roger Ebert gave a positive review to George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck -- the film about Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy -- one of his readers (apparently well-schooled in the Gospel According to Ann Coulter) wrote in to argue that McCarthy was right:

The Venona Project was a top-secret U.S. government effort to decode Soviet messages which ran from 1943 until 1980. Untold thousands of diplomatic messages were decrypted, providing invaluable intelligence. Some of that intelligence proved that there were, indeed, spies imbedded in the U.S. government in far greater numbers than the public suspected. Many of the people that McCarthy singled out as being spies actually were working for Russia, traitors that were selling out their country to the most murderous regime the world has ever seen.

A little Googling will tell you that this has become the standard right-wing argument -- the party line, as it were: "We were correct then; we are correct now." Most liberals -- fearful (as always) of being red-baited, and annoyed at the prospect of doing homework -- offer only a vague and inadequate response to this claim.

Discussion of the Venona project could fill several books. Bottom line: As the recent controversy over the Niger forgeries (hardly the only relevant example) teaches us, right-wingers are willing to "cook" intelligence to fulfill their ideological needs and to discredit enemies. Similarly, eavesdroppers and spy-runners who wish to rise within the heirarchy have always known that they must deliver what the boss wants to hear, even if the boss is the notorious J. Edgar Hoover.

Even if we take everything in the Venona files at face value, nothing in those pages -- and yes, I've spent some time looking at that stuff (as most righties have not) -- justified McCarthy's wild accusations against the State Department and the Army.

Donald A. Ritchie is the associate historian of the U.S. Senate Historical Office. Here's his bottom line on McCarthy and Venona:

McCarthy's defenders cite the VENONA intercepts as evidence that the senator "was on to something." The problem with this defense is that very few of those in VENONA came under McCarthy's scrutiny.

Venona produced most of its results in the years before McCarthy became a force. Even a (generally) pro-McCarthy site can say only this of Venona:

VENONA specifically references at least 349 people in the United States--including citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents--who cooperated in various ways with Soviet intelligence agencies.

Were these people in the State Department? The Army? Did McCarthy target the right people?

Let's put the matter into some persepctive: Right now, I'm sure that there are thousands of people in the United States who work for SISMI, MI6, MSS, FSB, BND, DGSE, Mossad and any number of other foreign intelligence bureaus. The presence of foreign agents in our land doesn't mean I have a right to accuse you of working for any of those spook shops unless I have evidence.

I am astonished that Venona identified only 349 NKVD and KGB hirelings. The propaganda of the time had many Americans believing that a nearly limitless number of Soviet agents infested the nation. The John Birch Society (to which Coulter has at least indirect ties, through her championing of Phyllis Schlafly) even proclaimed that Eisenhower was a knowing agent!

Everyone agrees that the Soviets had agents in the United States. But how many of them penetrated to high positions? I've yet to hear (for example) of one undisputed case of a Soviet mole reaching into the CIA, although I feel sure that such a thing must have happened.

McCarthy made his accusations based not on evidence but on politics. He believed that all Democrats were traitors. Anyone who favored maintaining the New Deal paradigm was, in his eyes, a communist. A "Soviet agent" was not someone actually employed by the Soviet Union, but someone McCarthy and the red-baiters simply did not like. (If you think about it, a genuine penetration agent would espouse right-wing beliefs.)

McCarthyism became a tool of revenge employed by the large network that favored Hitler before and during the war. These fascist sympathizers far outnumbered the communists, and they held far more powerful positions. A number of books prove the point. (If you're looking for a place to start, try Christopher Simpson's Blowback, then head toward Charles Higham's American Swastika and Trading With the Enemy.)

The anti-Communist witch-hunters employed "professional witnesses," such as Harvey Matusow, who provided false testimony designed to place labor leaders and other "undesirables" behind bars. The mania unleashed by McCarthyism targeted such entertainers as Frank Sinatra, Lucile Ball and Humphrey Bogart. McCarthyism became, in short, a racket.

In recent times, Venona has become a cheap, all-purpose device used by rightist propagandists desperate to legitimize their failed worldview. Anyone who doubts the point need merely take a look at this site:

My father was a subscriber to I.F. Stone’s famed newsletter in the 1950s and 60s. Stone was a highly regarded “independent” journalist and his newsletter was always exposing things about Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others who warned against Communist spies and agents of influence. The problem was that I.F. Stone was a Soviet agent of influence, financed by the Kremlin. My Father didn’t know that and probably wouldn’t have believed it.

The Venona decrypts referencing Stone come from the wartime years, when the USSR was an ally. Soviet intelligence did approach him; I presume they wanted him to write something about the Soviet war effort. He may have considered an offer. But no deal was consummated and no money exchanged hands. Stone simply did not work for the Soviets. Nor is there any indication in Venona that the Soviets considered Stone terribly important. (It's not as though he held a government position.)

Former KGB operative Oleg Kalunin once gave a speech widely interpreted as "outing" Stone as a Russian agent. (The speech was given well after Stone's death.) Of course, anyone who follows espionage history knows better than to trust the word of defectors, who are notorious for saying whatever their sponsors want to hear. Interestingly, the speech in which Kalugin made this revelation was mis-reported by the ideologists. From the Columbia Journalism Review:

Andrew Brown, the Independent writer who covered Kalugin's speech in March, checked in with his own clarification. In an article in the October 8 issue of The New York Review of Books, he said his original story had focused on Russian domestic troubles, but his editors had wanted more on spying. Dictating straight from his notes, he added the critical anecdote at the last minute. Material that was deleted, as indicated by the ellipsis in the original published story, would have made clear what he understood Kalugin to mean at the time: that the then-unidentified "American journalist" had not been an intelligence agent but merely someone who was useful to talk to; that he had not been paid any money, but only taken to lunch.

In other words, the right defines the term "agent of influence" so broadly as to include anyone who showed up at the occasional lunch. I've sat across the table from lots of people I neither worked for nor agreed with, and I've also shared chow with people whose backgrounds I did not really know. You can probably say the same.

The right seems to think that the very mention of the phrase "Venona" should stupefy us. To the contrary. On this front, as on every other, we must fight back, lest propaganda replace history.