Despite the wishful caviling of a few die-hard Marxist professors, the controversy over the American Communist Party's involvement in Soviet espionage was long ago settled beyond even an unreasonable doubt. For example, a June 7, 1999 Time Magazine review of several new books on the subject found that,
"The opening of Soviet archives after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., together with the Venona decryptions..., has made it clear that the fear of Soviet espionage was neither neurotic nor hallucinatory...The Venona traffic demonstrates beyond argument that the Soviet penetration into American government, science, and industry during the '30s and '40s was deep, thorough and hostile. Venona shows that the American Communist Party was elaborately involved in spying."
After Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan released the Venona intercepts in 1995, he wrote a book on the implications of the secrets they revealed. In Secrecy, the American Experience, Moynihan tells us,
"The facts now in hand surely attest that the U.S. government's pursuit of alleged sympathizers and spies in the post-World War II period did not amount to persecution, still less delusion. Not a few were spies, and of these most were left untroubled. Never prosecuted, never named. Instead, the bureaucracies kept their secrets."
Which is to say that there was no witch-hunt.
Not every Communist Party member was a spy, of course, but Lona Cohen was
In point of fact, the American Communist Party (CPUSA) - as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Central Committee - stole every political, industrial and military secret America had; before, during and after World War II. We now know for certain that over 200 espionage agents found employment in the Roosevelt Administration, many of them rising to the pinnacles of power.
Not every Communist Party member was a spy, of course, but Lona Cohen was. In her prime, she managed to smuggle dozens of A-bomb documents out of the Los Alamos nuclear facility. Moreover, she was a spy married to a spy. She and her husband Morris topped off a long and productive criminal collaboration when they were freed from prison in exchange for a couple of our spies who were being held by the Russians.
Disillusioned and despondent in exile, the aging pair grew homesick for America. "Am I a traitor? Svetlana," Lona asked her Russian friend in KCET's Red Files. "But I didn't kill anybody, and I didn't destroy any American lives. No American soldier died because of what I have done."
Wrong !
Lona's actions killed 33,636 American soldiers, not to mention millions of Koreans and Chinese. Stalin could not order Kim Il Sung to attack South Korea until he had an atomic bomb to stymie America's exclusivity. Using American plans, stolen for him by the CPUSA, Stalin detonated an exact copy of America's "Fat Man" bomb in 1949. Then, in 1950, Uncle Joe finally gave Kim Il Sung the order to attack South Korea. (We actually have a copy of that order straight from the KGB's files.)
CPUSA apologists are quick to assure us that Stalin's spies only sped up Soviet bomb acquisition by four or five years. Let's assume for the sake of argument that these Marxist minions are uncharacteristically correct. Let us further suppose that, without the help of the CPUSA, Russia could not have produced an A-bomb until 1953 or later.
Stalin died in 1953. Without those pilfered plans, the Korean War would never have happened. Dead men don't start wars. However, people who conspire to deliver weapons of mass destruction to living homicidal maniacs are guilty of mass murder. This is the true legacy of the American Communist Party. They earned the title of "Reds" because of the copious quantities of blood on their hands.
