Comment by Mark on January 20, 2003 4:20 pm

In the interest of historical accuracy, here’s a snippet from Ronald Radosh’s article “The Red ‘Scare’ Was Real”:

The Venona project files – thousands of decrypted 1940s cables between the KGB in Moscow and its agents in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, only released to the public beginning in 1995 – makes the evidence overwhelming. Thanks to Venona, we have definitive proof of the guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, as well as the most important American atomic spy, Theodore Hall.

But Venona also revealed that the KGB had among its agents such people as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White; the chief of the State Department’s Division of American Republics, Laurence Duggan; the head of the State Department’s Latin American Division, Maurice Halperin; and Lauchlin Currie, administrative aide and State Department liaison to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.

Venona in fact confirmed what anti-Communists had argued at the time, and which their detractors, the anti anti-Communists, had always denied: There was a successful and dangerous Soviet penetration of our government, as well as a network of spies working for the KGB.

It also has been established that many of them were recruited directly out of the ranks of the American Communist Party. Contrary to what the left of the time had maintained – that the Communists were small, insignificant and hardly a danger – there was in fact good reason to view them not simply as members of an unpopular but legal political party, but as potential spies in waiting. The CP-USA was, as scholars Harvey Klehr and John Haynes have written, “indeed a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the Cold War.”

I think it’s important to note that Radosh is a former member of the Communist Party USA.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1778