McCarthy warned us, but we didn’t listen.  On February 5, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy published a name of 57 known communists working for the State Department.  He said that allowing known communists or communist sympathizers in positions where they had access to sensitive information, and where they had input on policy making, constituted a serious threat to our national security. McCarthy was discredited and today McCarthyism is associated with an irresponsible witch hunt used to smear innocent people.  But the problem is that most of the people investigated by McCarthy were not innocent at all.  To our everlasting shame, Democrats were more interested in destroying McCarthy than they were in finding out if he was right.  Republicans were more concerned about distancing themselves politically from McCarthy than they were in standing up to a threat to our national security.  Even today, Republicans routinely run from a challenge, if threatened by being branded with McCarthyism.

The Venona project started in 1942.  It was a 38-year special project by the NSA to decode intercepted soviet dispatches.  As a result of brilliant work by our cryptographers, it was established that there were soviet spies in our government, and many of them were arrested and convicted.  Some of these people were very highly placed.

Following is the official NSA summary of the Venoma project:

http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf

Although the main stream media downplayed the problem, General Omar Bradley, Army Chief of Staff knew better.  He deliberately withheld direct information about Venona to President Truman and to his administration.  (Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR was removed from the list of people given direct access to the code breaking of the Japanese diplomatic code.)  The reason, in both cases, was that the security leaks from the White House were so serious that intelligence officials felt, correctly, that our national security was at risk.  While neither FDR, or Truman, were considered threats to our national security, many of their associates clearly were threats. 

The Venona Project was not declassified until 1995.  At first the liberal left tried to discredit the information because it did not fit with their widely held belief that people did not represent a threat just because they were communists.  However, subsequent research into Soviet archives provided confirmation with regard to most of the people identified as threats to our security by the Venona project.  The NSA kept working on translating these documents up until 1980.  Ironically, if this information had been released in 1950, today we would be celebrating Joseph McCarthy as an American hero.

Now we once again have an administration where people have been appointed to critical positions with little or no regard to their potentially dangerous associations.  One thing that is very clear from the Venona project and other documents is that the American Communist Party was an active participant in espionage against the United States of America.  McCarthy felt that anyone who was a communist, or who had a close relationship with a communist, should be removed from sensitive positions.  He did not try to blacklist them, or imprison them, he just considered them security threats who should not be allowed access to sensitive information.

It is important to note that there was more than just espionage.  The Soviet Union also infiltrated people into positions where they could influence policy.  Alger Hiss was a well known radical.  He also happened to be a member of the Harvard Law review.   His background was full of relationships with very radical people.  But, he was a family friend of FDR, and even when FDR was directly confronted with evidence that Hiss might be a soviet spy, FDR ignored it.   Alger Hiss was a strong advocate for the socialist New Deal programs.  He was also closely connected with Harry Wallace, who went on to become Vice President of the United States under FDR, from 1941 to 1945.  Wallace was replaced by Truman in 1945.  After FDR died, Wallace personally criticized Truman for his uncompromising stance against the Soviet Union.  In 1948, Wallace ran for President of the United States for the Progressive Party.  His campaign was literally managed by the communist party.  By replacing Truman with Wallace, FDR just may have spared this country from having a communist or at least a fellow traveler, as President of the United States.  

Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closest advisor, has been alleged to have been a soviet spy.  A soviet defector, Oleg Gordievsky, was a KGB officer smuggled out of the Soviet Union by British intelligence.  He claimed that Iskhak Ahkmerov, the KGB officer who controlled illegal soviet agents in the United States said that Hopkins “was the most important of all soviet wartime agents in the United States.”  We may never know whether this is true or not, but we do know that it was Hopkins who insisted that aid be extended to Stalin with no strings attached and it is even alleged that he may have arranged for the shipment of uranium to the Soviet Union that allowed them to develop the atomic bomb.

http://www.aim.org/media-monitor/the-treachery-of-harry-hopkins/

Now fast forward to today.  We have a President of the United States who was allegedly mentored, as a teenager, by a card-carrying communist, Frank Marshal Davis.  The same President had a close personal relationship with William Ayers, who has admitted to conducting terrorist attacks designed to overthrow the government of the United States.   He has appointed numerous people with extreme left,  radical, if not communist backgrounds, to high-level positions. 

Glenn Beck has been warning people that we ignore President Obama’s radical connections to our peril.  The main stream media is out to destroy Glenn Back as an out-of-control maniac.  This is the same strategy that was successfully used to destroy Joseph McCarthy.  (Of course McCarthy contributed to his own downfall.)   But, while they were successful in destroying Joseph McCarthy, that did not make them right.  In restrospect, destroying McCarthy did grave risk to our national security.  Even if Obama himself is not a threat, history has proven that just appointing radicals people to positions of high influence is definitely a threat to our national security.

Now, the FBI has apparently arrested 10 Russians spies, who are allegedly long term agents “SENT TO INFILTRATE POLICY MAKING CIRCLES.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/29/fbi-breaks-up-alleged-russian-spy-ring-deep-cover

They describe this as a long-term deep cover network of agents.  I do not know the full significance of this event.  But it at least appears that the Soviet Union never changed its strategy.  We just stopped paying attention.  Now, ask yourself:  “Does this matter …or not?   I do not know if anyone appointed by Obama is a threat to national security.  I do not know if anyone appointed by Bush, or Clinton or any other President was a security threat.  However, at a minimum, shouldn’t SOMEONE be asking the question?

TDM