Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • July 21, 2010 FDR the same thing. J. Edgar Hoover forwarded the warnings he had received from an Abwehr double agent and a Korean patriot: Pearl Harbor, sometime soon. FDR didn’t listen. His similar response to warnings from Hoover and from Adolph Berle, a non-communist liberal and the security officer of the U.S. State Department, about communist influence and possible espionage, were also dismissed, reportedly with a scatological expletive. When Eleanor Roosevelt learned the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence unit had cracked the Soviet code and was reading the messages to the Soviet consulates from Moscow, including orders to foreign-born and American-born agents, she demanded the operation be shut down. The Army quietly ignored her orders, but Eleanor had her way in the end. She allowed a friendly intelligence expert who turned out to be a Soviet-reliable double agent to join in the fun, and the double agent told the Soviets all about it, so they changed their code. Diplomatic messages recorded between the 1930s and 1945, augmented by Russian files, documented an appalling fact: Between FDR’s second term and his death, Soviet agents of influence were essentially making policy in the U.S. State Department (Alger and Donald Hiss, among others) and in the U.S. Treasury Department. Their malign influence made it impossible to head off a war with Japan. The U.S. Navy said they weren’t ready for this war. P38s like the one Ridgewood’s Tommy McGuire crashed in due to a stall had to be rushed into service because the U.S. didn’t have any fighter planes to equal the German or Japanese equivalents. The P-38’s tendency to stall when the pilot dove or turned kept killing some top Allied pilots, including Bataan hero and survivor Ed Dyess and Free French pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery until near the end of the war. FDR did not want a war with Japan and had wanted to negotiate a stand-down that could have led the Japanese to voluntarily evacuate China and Indo-China, but U.S. State Department hard-liners wouldn’t let FDR conciliate the Japanese at all, and made FDR’s conditions tougher than he had wanted. Secrets about Anglo-American war aims, military production, and even the Manhattan Project were routinely leaked to Russia. Soviet intelligence under Stalin was not a collection of tourists like the people now being deported from Montclair and Long Island; it was a going concern. More than one historian has observed that if FDR had not dropped the somewhat eccentric Henry Wallace as his vice presidential running mate and replaced him with Harry Truman, the United States would have faced the loss of Roosevelt with a president who regularly consulted a guru and talked about One World Government, with a communist agent named Alger Hiss as the probable secretary of state and a communist agent named Harry Dexter White as the probable secretary of the treasury. The boss of Soviet espionage in America in those days was the chief “legal,” or known Soviet employee, Iskhak Adulovich Akhmerov, a Russified Tartar who dropped Mohammed for Marx. His top recruiter was Joseph Katz, an “illegal” who had dropped Moses for Marx. Katz worked as the manager of a glove factory or a parking garage under secret Russian subsidy. The spies Katz recruited and Akhmerov sent on missions were separated into “legals” – NKVD agents with diplomatic credentials, and “illegals” – native-born or naturalized U.S. citizens who gathered and handed on the information. They also murdered several Americans who tried to defect, sometimes right in New York City. None of these murders was ever solved. About half of the illegals, according to counter-intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein, who helped keep track of them, were childhood immigrants from the old Russian Empire who hated Christianity and the idea of a hereditary upper class – such as FDR and his Groton and Harvard network, whom the communists intended to replace with “a Stalin of our own.” The other half were shabby-genteel Anglo-Saxon snobs whose loss of family fortune and bad habits made them outcasts among their own sort, and left them dreaming, perhaps, of revenge. The Russians who actually had to deal with both groups saw themselves politically as Russian patriots and socially as Prussian officers out-of-uniform with one letter missing, always ready for homicide or suicide at the drop of a hat. The Russian “legals” despised the “illegals,” but admitted their usefulness. The spies who arrived from Russia as adults generally tripped over their own feet and didn’t do enough harm to be worth arresting. Akhmerov, who said he had turned even Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s most trusted emissary, into an unconscious but reliable servant of Stalin’s interests, retired in glory, married to a cousin of Communist Party USA Director Earl Browder. Katz fell from glory when he declined to throttle Elizabeth Bentley, a defector, and fake her death with an overdose of sleeping pills because he was afraid he couldn’t take her in a fight. The deaths first of FDR and then of Stalin sent the whole operation back to the unoriginal amateur hour, and most Soviet spies after the early 1950s were greedy Americans who were in it strictly for the money. It’s good that many of them were caught, but they never came anywhere near controlling our foreign policy. Their exploits are trivial compared to the Bad Old Days, when Russian spies ran America. When President Harry Truman went to Potsdam to help sort out the pieces of post World War II Europe, he got some surprises. Truman found out that Stalin knew more about the atomic bomb produced by the top-secret Manhattan Project than he did. Americans discovered that the Russians were running off German occupation currency from their own printing presses with plates they had received from the United States Treasury. Poland, the country Britain and France had gone to war to save, was now a Russian satellite. The Russians occupied a third of ethnic Poland outright and gave the Poles a chunk of ethnic Germany in return, which led to the post-war deaths of about two million Germans after the Russians had murdered tens of thousands of patriotic Poles. Truman was a political product of the corrupt Tom Pendergast machine that ran Kansas City as a wide-open town for prostitution and gambling, with occasional murders. But what Truman saw going on in occupied Europe – including the rampant murder of prisoners of war and civilians, and the deliberate undermining of American, British and French influence in Europe to the benefit of the Soviet Union – was too much even for his tough political stomach. Truman called a halt to communist influence in the United States government. Truman imposed a loyalty oath on federal employees. They had to swear they were not members of the Communist Party or any other group that advocated the overthrow of constitutional government. It was easy enough to lie, of course, but if they lied and got caught they were guilty of perjury, which was illegal, unlike membership in the Communist Party USA, which falsely claimed to be independent of Soviet power or influence. Studies based on decoded Soviet diplomatic messages and Russian records made public after 1989 indicate that about 360 Soviet spies or “agents of influence” were working for the federal government during the later stages of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. Some of them had been denounced at the risk of being killed by defectors who had a bellyful of Stalin’s wholesale murders, but FDR didn’t do anything about the denunciations – not even investigate. FDR had twice tried to abolish the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and ignored warnings from the FBI that there was a major communist presence in the federal bureaucracy. FDR was no communist and not an active communist sympathizer. His domestic programs were designed to relieve the suffering of Americans during the Great Depression or to head off an outright revolution by communists or fascists. His most unfortunate tendency was an inability to accept criticism or to resist flattery. When Admiral James Otto Richardson told FDR the United States was not ready for a war with Japan in late 1940 and that the Pacific Fleet belonged in San Diego and not at Pearl Harbor, where it could provoke political trouble, FDR fired Richardson without warning, and replaced him with Husband Kimmel, a scrappier admiral – who told When Russian spies actually ran America Summer fun Mahwah Troop 50 Boy Scouts recently went on a canoe trip and camp out paddling 15 miles on the Delaware River from Narrowsburg, NY to Minisink, NY through Class I and II rapids.