Target (33 page)

With his own privileged position and so many spies in the OSS and other government agencies, Currie had a variety of ways of learning about the Russian code books—including from Donovan himself. Currie and Donovan had a relationship that grew during the war if for no other reason than their mutual access to the president and having worked together on priority war missions. In one, initiated by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and forwarded to Donovan by Currie, German supply lines through Turkey and Greece were to be attacked.
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An FBI report on Donovan in the early 1950s, prompted by his appointment by President Eisenhower to be Ambassador to Thailand, lists as a detriment Donovans’ law firm representing “a public relations firm, Allied Syndicate, whose clients [include] Lauchlin Currie.” The information was based on confidential but probable former OSS sources who told the agents that Donovan was an “anti-anti-communist” who had “always been ‘soft and mushy’ in his treatment of communists in the government,” as well as elsewhere, especially the OSS.
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Harry Hopkins was probably the highest placed government insider revealed to have been working for the Soviets—that because of his closeness and influence over the president. An architect of the New Deal and prominent New York City socialist who caught Roosevelt’s eye, he was picked early by the new president for his administration when it first came to Washington in 1933. After World War II began in Europe, he was appointed by the president to run the vital Lend-Lease war supply program to Britain and the USSR. Because Hopkins was insistent upon the Soviets receiving uranium through Lend-Lease, General Leslie
Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, began to suspect him, according to Romerstein and Breindel. Others did, too, but could never prove anything because his power and prestige kept them at bay. Now the authors write unequivocally “Hopkins was a Soviet spy.”
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They and others who have studied the new sources say Hopkins, among further pro-USSR moves, removed anti-Soviet officials from crucial U.S. government positions thereby helping the Soviets gain influence. He also tipped Soviet Ambassador Litvinov that the FBI was bugging his Washington phones. He advised Soviet Minister Molotov on how to persuade Roosevelt to open a second European front—something the Russians desperately wanted from the Allies but the War Department wanted stalled. They did not want to invade until America was ready. And he tried to have an important Russian defector, Victor Kravchenko, sent back to the Soviet Union and certain death.
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Kravchenko, a Soviet officer, knew too much about Soviet misdeeds. He published in 1946
I Chose Freedom
, one of the first books to expose Stalin’s use of starvation, slave labor, and execution, especially in subduing the Ukraine, Kravchenko’s homeland. The defector who married here and took up life under an assumed name died from a supposed gun-inflicted suicide. But his son Andrew believes he might have been the victim of a KGB execution, according to the documentary film
The Defector
that the son produced about his father.

Another probable NKVD execution—this one by exit from a skyscraper window—but “officially” listed as suicide,
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was the death of Laurence Duggan in 1948. Duggan was one of the most ideologically-motivated of the war-time American traitors. Head of State’s South American desk, he had worked for the Soviets
since the mid-1930s and provided Moscow mostly with classified diplomatic cables, including those about Argentina, which supported the Axis. But he experienced an ideological crisis over Stalin’s terror purges and signing of the non-aggression pact with Hitler. He could not understand why either occurred. He quit spying for awhile but resumed after being soothed by his Soviet handlers. Code-named “Frank,” “Prince,” and “19,” he and Hiss worked together, although it is not clear either knew about the other being a communist spy. As a close adviser to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Duggan had top-level influence. Overall, according to
The Haunted Wood
, he passed hundreds of classified documents, including secret transmissions sent to Washington from the U.S. embassy in Moscow.
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There were many more: Michael Straight, a personal friend of the Roosevelt’s whose parents founded the liberal
New Republic
magazine. He became a communist at Oxford in England in the 1930s. British universities were an incubator for Soviet spies in that period. Mrs. Roosevelt got him a job at State. He provided the NKVD with armaments reports and potential spy recruits.
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Samuel Dickstein was a New York congressman, code-named “Crook.” The Soviets knew his bottom line. He demanded increasing amounts of money for his treason while the quality of his product correspondingly dropped. Still, it included providing Moscow with information on American fascist groups unearthed by his Congressional un-American activities committee. At the same time he steered Congress away from investigating communists.
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More appreciated by the Soviets was Harold Glasser, another of Morganthau’s Treasury staff. His code-name was “Ruble,” as in money—which he was to the Soviets. The son of Lithuanian immigrants, he joined the communist party in 1933. With the help of Harry Dexter White in Treasury he survived an
FBI background probe that could have ousted him. He provided intelligence from the War Department and the White House which was deemed so important by the NKVD that seventy-four reports generated from the material went directly to Stalin.
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General Fitin, Donovan’s counterpart and close associate in the OSSNKVD cooperation—to whom all the U.S. espionage was funneled—was so pleased with Glasser that he recommended the Treasury officer be awarded the “Order of the Red Star,” a Soviet medal given usually to soldiers for “exceptional service in the cause of the defense of the Soviet Union.”

These spies, plus the hundreds in other U.S. agencies at the time, including the military and OSS,
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permeated the administration in Washington, and, ultimately, the White House, surrounding FDR. He was basically in the Soviet’s pocket. He admired Stalin, sought his favor. Right or wrong, he thought the Soviet Union indispensable in the war, crucial to bringing world peace after it, and he wanted the Soviets handled with kid gloves. FDR was star struck. The Russians hardly could have done better if
he
was a Soviet spy.

According to one of the few comprehensive books about the secretive Counter Intelligence Corps—the same organization Patton-plot investigator Stephen Skubik belonged to—Roosevelt ordered in 1943 that the CIC “cease any investigations of known or suspected communists and destroy all files on such persons immediately.”
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The order, according to the books’ authors, was the result of an investigation of a “leftist” friend of the Roosevelt’s that went wrong and made the president angry.
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And the order was not confined only to the CIC. Patton’s nephew, FBI agent Fred Ayer, Jr., wrote, “intelligence personnel in Europe [where he was
stationed] were officially forbidden to report, much less investigate, anything that our Red Allies were up to,” making their jobs, he added, “frustrating and ulcer-causing.”
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Similarly, General Albert C. Wedemeyer, aid to War Department head Gen. Marshall and among the planners of several major Allied campaigns, including D-Day, wrote that he learned early in the war it was “taboo for any American in an official position to expose, denounce, or openly oppose Stalin’s aggressive action and sinister aims.” It was “positively unpatriotic... to voice dislike and distrust of our ‘gallant ally,’ the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or to denounce the tyranny of ‘good old Uncle Joe’.... Naturally, the press [generally supporting Russia and Stalin] affected Washington’s political judgments.” From higher-ups like Marshall and Hopkins, writes Wedemeyer, he constantly experienced “admonitions not to refer to the Russians in a critical sense or to the dangerous implications of communism.”
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Just how insidiously powerful Moscow had become in war-time Washington is illustrated by the facts concerning Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s vice president and icon of the Left who ran for president as a socialist in 1948.
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As Roosevelt’s early secretary of agriculture, the farm-born Wallace instituted the then-radical idea of farm subsidies as a way of raising prices for American farmers. It was one of the beginnings of public-trough welfare still existing today. Elevated to vice president in 1940, Wallace became a vocal champion of the Soviet Union, an example, he believed, of what society should be in the modern world. In 1944, he visited Russia and returned with glowing accounts—not realizing he had been duped with lies, phony statistics and shows, and a brutal gulag dressed up to look like a summer camp.
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Privately, in late October
1945, as Truman’s secretary of commerce (and only a little more than a month before Patton died), he met with Anatoly Gorsky, the NKVD station chief in Washington, to urge that Stalin help him combat U.S. “fascists,” one of whom, he said, was his own country’s new secretary of state, James F. Byrnes.
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Luckily, Roosevelt, feeling pressure from Democrats who believed Wallace’s far-left pronouncements might cost the party the 1944 election, decided to replace him with the less radical Democrat Sen. Harry Truman. Wallace was then given the commerce position as a consolation prize. But had Wallace been kept on the ticket, the White House, upon FDR’s death only months later, literally, would have been all but run from Moscow. Wallace is said to have stated that had he succeeded FDR, he intended to make Laurence Duggan and Harry Dexter White his Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury respectively.
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This was the administration Patton, a severe Soviet critic, was subject to as he continued his bumpy rise and outspokenness.

The Allied Sicilian campaign of July 1943 was a hard-fought victory, highlighting Patton’s bold, aggressive generaling but also revealing traits which would further alarm his superiors. The British, because of the defeat at Kasserine, regarded U.S. troops as unreliable. They therefore commandeered the planning, with Patton’s British counterpart Montgomery taking the lead. To Patton’s chagrin, it was with Eisenhower’s blessing. Patton, heading U.S. forces, was relegated to a support role. It angered him. “Ike is more British than the British and is putty in their hands,” he wrote in his diary.
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Once the battle started, and without informing Eisenhower, he jumped in a B-25 and flew to General Sir Harold Alexander, theater invasion commander, to argue that Americans,
without whom there would be no invasion, should be given a larger role. It was unfair and tactically unsound for Montgomery to get all the glory. He pointed out that Washington, upon whom the British counted so much for aid and support, would not take kindly to learning that its army was being relegated to such a minor role. Patton knew his stuff. Alexander had no rebuttal and granted Patton permission to do more than had originally been planned. Without informing Eisenhower again, Patton took advantage of the opportunity to break out from solely supporting Montgomery’s flank, performed a tough, quick movement of his troops northwest and then east over rough and heavily defended terrain and, after taking Palermo, beat Montgomery, who was bogged down with German resistance, to the coastal city of Messina where the bulk of the Germans had been pushed. Messina was supposed to have been Montgomery’s prize. Tainting the victory somewhat was the fact that most of the enemy, rather than surrender, escaped across the narrow straits to nearby Italy, meaning they would be able to fight again. Regardless, American morale “soared,” as did Patton’s image. He “had effectively exorcised the Kasserine Pass demons,” wrote Eric Ethier in
American History
magazine. The press, as it had in North Africa, made him a hero.
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But the celebration was short-lived. General Omar Bradley, serving under Patton at the time, had not liked the dash to Messina. He thought it unnecessary and basically ego-driven. The move distanced him from Patton. Similarly, Eisenhower, who had not been happy with Patton’s independence in Morroco, had now seen it in battle. Patton had gone against plan and should have informed him. Basically, in Eisenhower’s eyes, he was deemed untrustworthy.

Then came the slapping incidents.

In a fit of temper, Patton cursed and struck two soldiers at different times while visiting Sicilian hospitals. He viewed the two soldiers, suffering from shell-shock, as cowards, not worthy of being amongst wounded heroes. Because one of the soldiers was rumored to be Jewish, there were also whispers of anti-Semitism. Patton, historians point out, may have been suffering shell-shock himself.
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But when Eisenhower first learned of the incidents he was incensed. “No letter that I have been called upon to write in my military career has caused me the mental anguish of this one,” he wrote in reprimand. “I assure you that conduct such as described in the accompanying report will not be tolerated.”
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He demanded Patton apologize to the two soldiers, show contrition to him personally, and cease such “brutality” forever. But knowing he would need Patton for future fighting, he stopped short of any official action for fear of ending Patton’s career and thus losing his service. Nevertheless, on August 24, he wrote General Marshall in Washington, “George Patton continues to exhibit some of those unfortunate personal traits of which you and I have always known and which during this campaign caused me some most uncomfortable days . . . . I have had to take the most drastic steps; and if he is not cured now, there is no hope for him.”
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