Re: CP stuff

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

David B. Shemano wrote:

> James Devine writes:
>
> "If I remember correctly, the CP also supported state persecution of the
> Trotskyists during World War II, which set a precedent that hoisted them
> later (on their own petard)."
>
> Wasn't the House Un-American Committee originated by Cong. Samuel
> Dickstein (who was on the Soviet payroll) in the 1930s in order to
> harass fascists and their symphathizers?

The Guardian (London)
January 27, 1999

Inside story: The spy who shaped America;
New evidence reveals that the unwitting architect of the McCarthy
witch-hunts was a Soviet agent. Julian Borger on the strange case of
Samuel Dickstein

BYLINE: JULIAN BORGER

Like pathologists trying to explain a freak viral outbreak, American
historians have been poring over the McCarthyist phenomenon for the past
half -century, striving to explain how a small group of legislators, the
House Un -American Activities Committee, managed to paralyse US
democracy and scar a generation.

But the great, ironic secret at the committee's roots has emerged only
now, in Moscow. According to newly unearthed KGB files, the committee's
founding father - the man who paved the way for Senator Joe McCarthy's
witch-hunts - was a Soviet spy.

His name was Samuel Dickstein, a Democratic congressman from Manhattan
who created the committee's prototype in 1934 as a means for hunting
down home -grown Nazis. His campaign against the spread of American
fascism and his post -war service as a New York judge are honoured by a
commemorative collection of his papers in the American Jewish Archives.

But to the NKVD (the KGB's precursor) Dickstein was an important, if
troublesome, agent whose mercenary instincts earned him the codename
'Crook'. For just over two years, at the onset of the second world war,
his handlers believed he was worth the money. It was the first and - as
far as anyone knows - the last time the Soviet spymasters managed to
'buy' a member of Congress.

Dickstein's espionage has come to light now as a result of an unusual
deal struck by the US publishers Random House and the KGB's old-boy
network, the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers. In return for
a lump-sum payment, two researchers - Allen Weinstein, a US espionage
expert, and Alexander Vassiliev, a retired Russian agent - had roughly
two years, 1994 to 1996, to rummage through an assortment of KGB
dossiers. They were then able to check what they found against US
intercepts of Soviet intelligence communications from the period.

In their book The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev portray an
unfamiliar America, where some of the richest and brightest of the New
Deal era vied with one another to spy for Stalin. It was the high-water
mark of the American left. The Haunted Wood describes a world where:
'Avowed or covert Communists, democratic socialists, farmer-labour
activists, and Roosevelt Democrat loyalists found common ground within
the many new agencies and older departments of FDR's government.' The
spies who sprouted from this ferment came in many varieties. Alongside
Dickstein, who sold his services mainly for money, there were
egalitarian New Deal policy wonks, who spied out of anti -fascist
conviction, and the daughter of the US ambassador in Berlin, who did it
for love and sex.

Another traitor unmasked by Weinstein and Vassiliev is Lawrence Duggan,
the head of the Latin American section in Roosevelt's State Department,
who was apparently desperate to strike a covert blow for socialism.

According to Boris Bazarov, the Washington station chief, Duggan told
his Soviet handlers: 'The only thing which kept him at his hateful job
in the State Department where he did not get out of his tuxedo for two
weeks, every night attending a reception, was the idea of being useful
for our cause.' From the NKVD documents, Duggan comes across as a
typical member of a substantial group of young American intellectuals,
which included Alger Hiss - another rising State Department star in the
late thirties. Their faith in the American way of life had been shaken
by the Wall Street crash and the Depression, and they viewed the Soviet
Union as the most effective remaining bulwark against Hitler.

Dickstein was different. He was 42 years old when he first made contact
with Soviet agents in 1937. By then he had been a congressman for the
Lower East Side for 15 years, and was very much part of the corrupt
world of big city politics. There is evidence that he demanded
under-the-counter payments from immigrants for help in securing US visas.

In The Haunted Wood, the Lithuanian-born New Yorker emerges as a jaded
and cynical player. He put a price on his information, and let it be
known he was available to the highest bidder. He began by offering
details on Russian rightwingers living in the US, but went on to supply
secret details of the 1940 war budget.

He demanded $ 2,500 per month for his work and complained bitterly when
he was tentatively offered a fifth of that amount. It was at this point
his handlers dubbed him the 'Crook'. One of them noted in his report
back to Moscow: 'We are fully aware who we are dealing with. 'Crook' is
completely justifying his code name. This is an unscrupulous type,
greedy for money, consented to work because of money, a very cunning
swindler.' When the Soviets withheld payments - suspecting (with some
justification) they were being palmed commonly -available gossip at
absurdly high prices - Dickstein complained he had been paid by British
intelligence 'without any questions'.

Weinstein, a veteran US spy-watcher, says he and Vassiliev (who now
lives in Britain) were unable to stand up Dickstein's claims to be a
part-time British agent, because our intelligence records from the era
remain sealed. 'It was his claim. It could have been a boast. At this
point there's no way of telling,' Weinstein says.

But Dickstein's Soviet handler, Peter Gutzeit, took him at his word and
was clearly taken aback by such brazen promiscuity: 'We are shocked,'
Gutzeit sniffed to his superiors 'but here it is normal.' Dickstein
clearly saw selling secrets as a lucrative sideline to his legislative
work, maximising the financial returns of office. But leafing through
some of his personal records in the National Archives, it is at least
possible to conceive of another, more sympathetic, side to Dickstein.

The files suggest that he went in search of NKVD roubles only after his
self -styled crusade against the Nazis was mutated by a Congress steeped
in anti -Semitism into the red-baiting witch-hunt it ultimately became.

In a December 1933 radio address, Dickstein set out the case for his
Special Committee on Un-American Activities. While chairman of the
Immigration and Naturalisation Committee, he said he had unearthed
enough evidence of German infiltration 'to define the Nazi government
here as the most dangerous threat to our democracy that has ever existed'.

He pointed to new pro-Nazi organisations springing up across the US,
such as the Friends of New Germany, and the Silver Shirts of America,
which espoused the creation of a racially pure Aryan society and the
segregation of Jews.

When his proposal went to the floor of the House in March 1934, however,
it met determined resistance. One congressman warned against an
'investigation of the German government or the so-called 'persecution'
of the Jews in Germany'.

Another congressman, from Texas, waxed lyrical about his state's
tolerance for Jews. 'Througout my life, I have been friendly with the
Jewish race. We played together as boys. . . Some of my closest friends
in life have been Jews. In every place in Texas where I have lived there
has been no discrimination whatever against Jews.'

As a Jewish immigrant himself, Dickstein would have been as aware of the
realities of the American South as the plight of the Jews in Germany.
But to win his prize, he said what was required of him, promising
Congress: 'This committee has nothing to do with the affairs being
conducted in Germany . . . We are not interested in what happens in
Germany.'

Dickstein got his committee, but the chairmanship went instead to John
McCormack of Massachusetts, who divided its investigations equally
between US Nazi sympathisers and a range of leftwing groups including
trade unions. By 1937, Dickstein began looking for other outlets for his
anti-Nazi zeal and had become a paid Soviet agent.

When the committee was reconstituted in 1938 as the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) under the rightwing leadership of Martin
Dies, it turned almost its entire attention to the pursuit of suspected
communists. Dickstein failed to win a seat on the new panel. He looked
on powerlessly in 1939 as US 'brownshirts' under the leadership of the
'American Fuhrer', Fritz Kuhn, rallied in Madison Square Garden.

Without access to HUAC's inner workings, he was of diminishing interest
to his Soviet spymasters. Having paid him a total of $ 12,000 (now worth
about $ 133,000), the NKVD decided in 1940 that he was more trouble than
he was worth.

After five more years in Congress, Dickstein served as a New York judge
until he died in 1954. Senator Joseph McCarthy fell from grace the same
year, but by then Dickstein's mutant creation had run amok across the US.

The committee itself stumbled on until 1976, when Congress finally
killed it off. The damage it had done to American society is still
visible today - for example in the almost physical horror of socialism
and social democracy. After all these years, it is somehow fitting to
discover that it was the brainchild of a traitor.


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