Quote:
Originally Posted by MontereyVol  You seriously need to quit reading the propaganda, comrade. |
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
Picture of Harry Truman arriving at the first meeting of the United Nations at San Francisco, 1945.
Truman being introduced at the UN by it's first secretary general, Alger Hiss.
Alger Hiss is led away to serve his five-year sentence
handcuffed to a fellow prisoner keen to hide his face.
By the time of his death in 1996, Hiss had regained much of his footing, including his government pension and even his license to practice law in Massachusetts.
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The dubious doings of Harry Dexter White, erstwhile Lawrence professor
By Peter Blitstein
Assistant professor of history
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2005
On July 31, 1948, a woman named Elizabeth Bentley appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) with an astonishing story. The 40-year-old graduate of Vassar College claimed to have acted as a courier between Soviet intelligence agents and employees of the federal government between the summer of 1941 and the end of 1944.
In November 1945, she walked into an FBI office, confessed, and provided a list of over 80 names. The FBI quickly followed up on Bentley’s information, putting 250 agents on the case, tapping telephones, opening mail, and subjecting the suspects to intensive surveillance. Among the people Bentley named was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White.
Several days after Bentley testified, Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers appeared before HUAC.
Chambers too admitted that he had been a courier between government employees and Soviet agents; he had defected in 1938, but his claims had been largely ignored by American counter-intelligence. After Bentley’s defection, Chambers’ story seemed more credible. Chambers and Bentley did not know one another personally, but provided similar information. Although best-known for his accusations against State Department official Alger Hiss, Chambers also named Harry Dexter White as a Soviet agent.
Who was Harry Dexter White?
In 1946, President Truman appointed Harry Dexter White to be the American director of the International Monetary Fund. As Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s principal advisor on international questions, White was the chief force behind the post-World War II Bretton Woods arrangements, which created the World Bank and the IMF.
He was, therefore, a principal architect of the Cold War-era global capitalist economy. Most important, White was the highest-ranking American government official ever to have been reliably accused of being a Soviet spy.
At the beginning of FDR's New Deal, White worked at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1934 to 1946. He became director for monetary research in 1938, assistant to the secretary in 1941, and assistant secretary, the number-two position in the department, in 1945.
(In the photo, above, White, at left, is shown with John Maynard Keynes at the inaugural meeting of the International Monetary Fund Board of Governors in March 1946; photo courtesy of the IMF.)
Conflicting testimony:
In their appearances before HUAC, Chambers and Bentley asserted that White belonged to a Soviet underground network in the 1930s and in the 1940s.
Both accused him of providing them with government documents. Bentley also accused White of secretly influencing American policies on Soviet orders.
Because of the sensationalism of the developing Hiss case and the revelations about Soviet espionage on the atomic bomb project, Harry Dexter White was soon forgotten.
His case reemerged briefly in November 1953, when President Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, gave a speech at the Chicago Executives Club accusing President Truman of covering up the fact that White was a “Russian spy.”
It was true that Truman appointed White the American director of the IMF in 1946 despite the warnings of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
In his own testimony at HUAC that year, Hoover insisted that his reports should have convinced Truman to reject White’s appointment, but there remained no firm evidence that White was, in fact, a spy.
Hoover himself could not corroborate Brownell’s accusations because the available evidence remained classified. Bentley’s and Chambers’ testimony was suggestive but not sufficient. And White was, after all, dead. Again, White disappeared from public scrutiny.
Then, in 1996, as Craig writes in his recent book Treasonable Doubt, the public release of previously classified materials known as
Venona — Soviet cables intercepted and eventually decrypted by U.S. counter-intelligence — “blew open the case, leaving little doubt of Harry Dexter White’s complicity in the Soviet underground.”
Evidence from Venona is supported by limited information from KGB archives presented by the historian Allen Weinstein in collaboration with former KGB official Alexander Vasilliev in their book The Haunted Wood.
Taken together, these new sources appear to confirm that White was involved with the Soviet underground in Washington from the mid-1930s until Chambers’ defection in 1938 and again during the Second World War. They thus corroborate Chambers’ and Bentley’s claims.
The evidence suggests that White provided written summaries of documents to Soviet agents.
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