Sorry for the long delay, but family comes first and my daughter’s birthday was this weekend so everything else took a back seat. This post ties together Parts One and Two

So why is this history important? How does it connect with the MSP surveillance operations of 2005-2006?

First, it is important to understand that the CPUSA was a wholly owned and subsidized subsidiary of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, we now know from CPUSA archives and the Venona decrypts, American communists indeed committed espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. As I will show below, the FBI and the Ober Commission were well justified in monitoring the Party.

Second, intelligence agencies have long institutional memories and stubborn institutional cultures that are not easily changed. Like IBM’s reputation for its buttoned-down culture, intelligence agencies have their own culture and way of interpreting events and information, and it is incredibly hard to change. The case of Col. Sergei Tretyakov’s defection from the KGB is a prime example of this. Even tough Tretyakov supplied his institutional knowledge of KGB culture to the CIA, the KGB still could not change its way of thinking and operating.

I see the MSP surveillance operation as an outgrowth of that institutional culture stemming back to the days of the Ober Commission, HUAC and FBI surveillance. Having said that, the communists during the World War II, Cold War eras were clearly a threat, as opposed to the contemporary anti-war, anti-death penalty groups, who clearly were not. I’m not excusing the surveillance, rather, given that institutional culture, I understand why the MSP targeted the groups they did.

From its very beginning the CPUSA received subsidies from the Soviet Union. When Finnish authorities captured John Reed—the patron saint of American communism—he had in his possession $14,000 worth of diamonds and currency. In 1920 that made for a lot of scratch. Warren Beatty omits that fact from his film Reds, a vapid hagiography about Reed and Bolshevik Revolution. Comintern documents also reveal that the Soviets disbursed a payment to Reed the day he arrived in the Soviet Union as the duly elected representative of the Communist Labor Party, which eventually became the CPUSA. In those days the only way into or out of Soviet Russia was to cross the Finnish frontier. In all from July 1919 to September 20, the Soviets gave the CPUSA the equivalent of several million dollars. Soviet subsidies to the CPUSA continued until 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev ended them in response to CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall’s criticism of perestroika and glasnost. Add to this the fact that the CPUSA took its marching orders from Stalin and Moscow, you have a real cause for concern.

Put yourself in the place of the FBI. You survey a political party, whose goal is the imposition of Soviet communism in place of the American constitutional order, a party controlled and subsidized by an antagonistic foreign power. This is definitely a cause for concern.

Essential Reading:
The Communist Party in Maryland: 1919-1957

Witness

The Secret World of American Communism

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors

The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--the Stalin Era

Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics

The CPUSA did not limit its activities to legitimate activities or even political subversion. Hundreds of American communists actively spied or assisted Soviet espionage on the US Government.

It is a well-known fact that Whittaker Chambers worked for the CPUSA underground as a courier. Chambers passed on the secret documents Alger Hiss stole, to Soviet military intelligence. The man who handled Chambers was J. Peters. Peters was the chief of the CPUSA underground. The Baltimore-Washington region was a major area of Soviet espionage operations. One of the most notable espionage rings involving American communists was the Ware Group named after the covert communist Harold Ware who, worked in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Members of the group included Hiss, his brother Donald, Harry Dexter White, John Abt and Lee Pressman. Chambers microfilmed documents passed to him from Hiss in the Baltimore apartment of William and Anna Spiegel on 112 East Madison St. Peters then passed the documents on to Col. Boris Bykov of the GRU (Soviet military intelligence)

Furthermore, three sets of District 34 meeting minutes (January 13, 1938, January 27, 1938 and July 16, 1938) establish that J. Peters attended meetings chaired by Blumberg, and that Blumberg knew about CPUSA underground assistance to Soviet intelligence. The July 16 minutes notes, “Comrade Peter was elected Chairman.” It is known that Peters used several aliases and on occasion “Peter” was one. In Party records, Peters was known as “Peter”. For example, he signed the autobiography he composed for the Comintern using the name “J. Peter.” Interestingly enough, Bykov went by the name “Peter” as well.

It is unclear what chair Peters was elected to or why or if he was just chairing the meeting. Blumberg as head of the Party would have chaired the meeting unless Peters was there for underground purposes that superseded normal business. No minutes were taken of what Peters said. However, at the meeting Benjamin Fields discussing the situation of the Party in Cumberland said, “The Party has had to deprive itself of many vital comrades who are now engaged in other important fields of work and cannot be used by the Party apparatus as such.” Fields’ statement could have bearing on why Peters was there. Although Rudy Baker replaced Peters as head of the secret apparatus by the July 16 meeting, it is possible that Peters still had some responsibilities within the underground that required his presence in Baltimore. Furthermore, the dates of Peters’ appearance at these meetings coincides with Whittaker Chambers’ defection from the CPUSA underground, which caused a great deal of turmoil in both the underground and Soviet intelligence.

There is no question to the involvement of J. Peters in the events, which took place in Baltimore. He had many reasons to be in the Baltimore-Washington region. Peters was instrumental in forming the secret apparatus in Baltimore in 1933. Peters work setting up the secret apparatus was so important, and he was so influential that he orchestrated the ousting of then party-chief Paul Cline, who was obstructing his work in recruiting Party members for underground work. Peters, in a scathing memo to a superior with oversight of Baltimore, wrote of the “impermissible situation [meaning Cline’s opposition] which exists in Baltimore” and that “this is one of the few places in the country where we succeeded to build up an organization and this place is one of the most important places for us because of its location.”

The stories I just related are merely a tiny fraction of the history of CPUSA complicity in Soviet espionage. Quite clearly, the federal government and the state government in the form of the Ober Commission were justified in pursuing American communists. Were there excesses? Absolutely. I concede that the anti-communist movement, in certain instances, did indeed take things too far. However, those excesses pale in comparison to the threat that existed. After all, it was in the context of the Cold War and Soviet-backed North Koreans killing American soldiers on the battlefield, that it came to light that American communists turned over secrets of the atomic bomb to Stalin, along with American technical secrets like proximity fuses, its nascent jet engine technology.

What does it all mean?

So What? What does this have to do with the MSP surveillance program? I will admit that at first blush there appears to be no real connections (other than similar ideological views) between the communists of the past to the ageing hippies MSP monitored. However, the history I related speaks to the institutional culture of police intelligence agencies like the MSP and the FBI. Changing that culture is like trying to turn an oil tanker on a dime, it is nearly impossible. One of the reasons I went through so much of this history is that it informs the institutional memory and culture of intelligence agencies. From this point of view, it is only natural that the MSP would look into these groups. By no means do I use this as an excuse for what the MSP did, however, it is one reason why they targeted the anti-war and anti-death penalty groups.

If you read the surveillance reports, you will see that MSP agents frequently cite the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). AFSC bills itself as a pacifist organization. While it is indeed a pacifist organization, that isn’t the whole truth. The AFSC was a willing apologist for Stalin and the Soviet Union. AFSC’s Jennifer Smith was married to the aforementioned Harold Ware. After Ware died, she married John Abt. The AFSC also called reports of the Khmer Rouge genocide as an “American misinformation campaign,” and acted as pre-war shills for Saddam Hussein. Again, given this history I can see why, MSP initiated the surveillance.

Intelligence agencies in a free and open society operate at the nexus between their duty to protect the citizenry, while at the same time avoiding infringing upon their rights. The very nature of our free society is also a weakness our enemies exploit. Like the communists of the past, Islamofascists take shelter in the very rights that compose the constitutional order they seek to destroy. How agencies, charged with protecting that order, combat enemies who hide behind the rights it bestows, is a question that has dogged us from the founding. We are in a constant balancing act. This balance has swung in both directions throughout our history. The scales have swung in directions that led to governmental excesses (COINTELPRO) and in the other direction that limited our intelligence capabilities (9/11). We simply cannot escape this balancing act.

We must also remember that the mission of intelligence agencies is not to prosecute criminal activities or terrorist threats, but to disrupt them. The FBI, even with the Venona information, did not charge most of the spies they uncovered. To prosecute them would have forced the bureau to reveal its source, and Venona was such a guarded secret, even Harry Truman did not know about it.

Decisions about investigations and surveillance operations essentially come down to judgment calls. Intelligence officers, whether state police troopers or FBI agents, are always weighing the balance between security and rights. In the case of the MSP, while I understand the impetus for the investigation, it was quite clearly, a bad judgment call.

There is lots of talk about the legislative investigations and new laws and procedures to prevent anything like this from happening again. Most of this talk is empty chest thumping from unscrupulous politicos, who think they have a silver bullet cure. There is no one solution to this problem, the balance will always be shifting back and forth.

Topics: Soviet Union , Stalin , Whittaker Chambers , Espionage , Albert Blumberg , local history , Cold War , Baltimore History , Maryland Communist Party , Maryland State Police

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