The Baltimore Sun, Washington Post and Washington Times are reporting on the Maryland State Police surveillance of Maryland based anti-war and anti-death penalty activists in 2005-2006. The Maryland Chapter of the ACLU filed a FOIA suit for release of intelligence reports from MSP’s Homeland Security and Intelligence Division. The records reveal detailed surveillance of the activists. MSP agents found no evidence of criminal activity by these activists, yet the surveillance continued.

Not surprisingly the activists and the ACLU are in a tizzy. I don’t blame them. Once the agents determined there was no threat the intelligence operations should have ceased the operation. Yet one target found his name in terrorist and drug database. Quite clearly, MSP overreached in this case.

However history tells us, that this type of surveillance is nothing new and provides some context for the impetus for MSP’s intelligence operation.

Since there is a great deal of history to tell, I will break the story into three parts. Parts one and two will deal with government surveillance of the Maryland communists and part three will explain why the surveillance was so important and the general history of CPUSA involvement with Soviet espionage.

During World War II and the Cold War, the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and their comrades in Soviet intelligence made great use of peace groups as fronts like the American League against War and Fascism (ALWF) and Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which in Maryland would morph into a branch of fellow traveler and Soviet dupe, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party.

In my grad school days I wrote a research paper on Albert E. Blumberg the former Johns Hopkins professor turned chief of District 34 (Maryland/DC branch) of the CPUSA during the late 1930s early1940s. I talked briefly about Blumberg here. Blumberg was a leading light in both the ALWF and the PCA. Albert Blumberg was the A. Robert Kaufmann of the era, only dangerous. His story and that of the Maryland CPUSA is quite amazing. To put it bluntly, the contemporary activists monitored by MSP in 2005-2006 are pikers compared to their ideological forbears. That is Blumberg and his cohorts took their orders from, and had the backing of an adversarial foreign power.

The story begins on August 23, 1939 with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which Hitler and Stalin publicly agreed to a non aggression treaty and a secret protocol to carve up Poland. See here for the tragic consequences of this deal. The Nazi-Soviet pact was a huge reversal of course, or in contemporary parlance a flip flop. Stalin’s flip flop presented a problem for American communists as they had to toe Moscow’s line. Questioning Stalin was not good for one’s health just ask Juliet Stuart Poyntz or any other American communist caught up in Stalin’s purges. In fact, records of District 34 meetings retrieved from Moscow reveal that Maryland communist whole heartedly supported Stalin’s purges. Commenting on the Moscow Trials, Maryland Party chair Ben Fields said:

“you will see to what extent fascism has been weakened during these years and the Soviet Union has been strengthened at the same time… how correct was the line of the Comintern on the struggle against Trotskyism, and that the extermination of Trotskyites in the Soviet Union, upon which Hitler relied so much to carry out his plan of conquest, was needed and very successful.”

According to Fields the Moscow Trials represented a great victory for Communism over fascism and “a great victory for the working masses the world over. Needless to say that it is of enormous importance to our struggles in America.”

Gone were the Popular Front days where the CPUSA ingratiated itself into the New Deal coalition and took anti-Nazi positions. Now that Stalin was allied with Hitler, American communist now styled themselves as “peace activists” and turned to calling Franklin Delano Roosevelt a war monger and “proto-fascist” for his support of England and France. The Communist International or Comintern, controlled by Stalin, coordinated the activities of all international communist parties. The official Comintern policy was that the European war was a fight between the western imperialists of no concern to the Soviet Union, by singing the pact Stalin had put Russia at the forefront for peace and champion of oppressed workers of the world.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was the first government body to attack the Maryland Party. Initially formed to investigate Nazi sympathizers, in 1939 HUAC was known as the Dies Committee, named after its creator, Texas congressman Martin Dies. In 1940, HUAC questioned Albert Blumberg and his wife Dorothy Rose Blumberg. Both were indicted for contempt of Congress, and Dorothy Rose was convicted of perjury and election fraud after the committee turned over evidence to Maryland prosecutors. District 34 members had fabricated fraudulent petitions in order to get of their members on Maryland election ballots. Governor Herbert O’Conor eventually pardoned her in 1943.

The trouble the Party faced from the Dies Committee was a direct result of its subservience to Moscow and Stalin’s foreign policy. Baltimore Sun columnist CP Ives said:

“The Communists are not merely an indigenous political party, with an eye to the liquidation of capitalists and overturning the republic; they are agents in good standing of a foreign dictatorship, which is only technically friendly with us and is in close cahoots with another dictatorship not even technically friendly.”

The CPUSA and Blumberg's precarious position did not last long as Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union and then Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into the war making allies out of America and the Soviet Union. Once again orders from Moscow reversed 180 degrees and now the CPUSA fully supported the U.S. war effort.

The FBI took notice of the Dies investigation and in 1941 the bureau opened a sustained surveillance operation of the Maryland party. The FBI penetrated the Maryland CPUSA so thoroughly with informants that it would produce damning eyewitness testimony at many of the Smith Act trials of the 1950s, especially Albert Blumberg’s trial.

I will tell that story in Part Two.

Topics: Maryland Communist Party

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Historical Context to the Maryland State Police Surveillance Operation Part 1

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