Barry Rubin
When Andrew McCarthy drew a
parallel between the treatment of State Department official (and Soviet
spy) Alger Hiss in the 1940s and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s
aide Huma Abedin Weiner today it reminded me of an interesting
discovery from my own research, as documented in my history of the State
Department, Secrets of State. As Andrew McCarthy notes, after Hiss was
accused of being a Soviet spy and convicted of perjury, Secretary of
State Dean Acheson–a friend and colleague in his law firm of Hiss’s
brother–defended the accused spy.
This doesn’t mean that Huma Abedin Weiner–whose father, mother, and
brother were very active in the Muslim Brotherhood and who herself
worked for Brotherhood front groups–is guilty of any misbehavior. After
all, Alger Hiss’s brother, Donald, was a respected lawyer who never did
anything wrong either. A key influence in Alger’s life were the
political views of his wife. And while Huma’s spouse, Anthony Weiner,
has certain personal issues being a Muslim Brotherhood person isn’t one
of them. On the other hand, though, Alger, unlike Huma–to continue the
analogy–was never an official in a Communist front group.
Yet the Hiss case does offer us a lot of lessons for today.
After World War Two ended the State Department had to decide how to
convert back to peacetime work. It did a thorough security review of
3000 employees to check for security risks and identified 285 people as
possible problems. Most of them had either already quit; were forced to
resign or encouraged to go elsewhere as soon as possible. A lot of them
went to work for the United Nations.
On July 26, 1946, Secretary of State James Byrnes released a detailed
report going through these cases. The Truman Administration also fully
cooperated with the House of Representatives, which issued its own
detailed report on these investigations in March 1948. Remember that
there was not enough proof to prosecute anyone and in many cases the
information against them was minor and even clearly false, far less than
we know for a fact about Abedin Weiner. Having a relative with
Communist sympathies was enough to get someone fired though. In the end,
about 50 of those who had been investigated but against whom there was
no reliable evidence–in some cases just statements by personal
enemies–were allowed to remain at junior posts at the State Department.
But in one case, the 1948 House of Representatives’ report said that a
certain man was “the greatest security risk the Department has [ever]
had.” He wasn’t identified by name but it was noted he resigned on a
specific day. It was the date Hiss resigned. Obviously, he was the
person being referred to in the report. Every high official in the State
Department had to know that Hiss was deeply implicated in espionage.
Many people know the story of Whittaker Chambers and his warning
about Hiss to State. What they may not know that by 1945 and certainly
by early 1946 both the State Department and the FBI was convinced of
Hiss’s guilt. Secretary of State Byrnes was informed. In March 1946, the
State Department security staff recommended Hiss should be given a
choice between being fired or resigning but also noted that they did not
believe they could prove Hiss’s guilt in court. So a Republican with
impeccable conservative credentials, the future Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles, stepped in and offered Hiss a job as president of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss accepted and resigned.
Hiss’s guilt was thus no secret within the government. One can
understand how, lacking proof before Chambers produced pilfered
documents, that they might have chosen to remain silent. To defend Hiss
publicly, though, was both morally wrong and politically suicidal. Here
is a graphic precedent for high-ranking officials knowing there was a
real danger and yet loudly denying that any problem existed.
I’m not going to repeat the story of Chambers and Richard Nixon and
the “Pumpkins Papers” because you presumably know about this or can
easily research it. An intriguing question, though is this: Why is it
that the Truman Administration did a good job of rooting out Communists
and spies but did not publicly acknowledge this, even when it came under
attack from Senator Joe McCarthy and others? Remember that the
pro-Communist left hated Truman and ran against him in 1948 under the
Progressive Party banner?
Presumably there were two main reasons. First, it did not want to
lend credence to the attacks against itself and make the New Deal look
bad, a political motive. Second, it could not reveal intelligence
sources–including what we now know as the Verona Intercepts of Soviet
secret telegrams as well as information from friendly intelligence
agencies. In Hiss’s case there was also an element of the aristocracy
sticking together. Yet this was a costly decision. At any rate, the lack
of acknowledgment of the Truman Administration’s and State Department’s
own efforts in this regard has led to some misunderstanding of history
as well as adding to the mythology that the problem of Communist
penetration was a myth.
One wonders whether we will be saying the same thing in a few decades
about radical Islamist penetration of the federal government today. In
this case, though, the Obama Administration behaved far worse than did
its predecessor. Truman got rid of those with real security problems;
Obama is doing nothing. And meanwhile the administration’s Republican
enablers are contributing to the danger. Suffice it to say that there is
a lot of evidence of multiple suspect individuals in this regard. Go
back and read what the superb investigative reporter Patrick Poole has
been writing for the last few years to see the extent of this problem.
Let me mention another of the most passionate issues of that earlier
era. Did the United States lose China? I do not propose to reexamine the
issue in depth but only to make some very specific points. The question
in retrospect is whether the United States should have followed an
energetic policy of supporting the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek
against the Communists. No one can say whether such a policy would have
changed the course of the Chinese Civil War. It was said that certain
left-wing experts on China influenced the Truman Administration not to
do more. It could well be argued that these experts didn’t have much
influence, that no U.S. government would have undertaken such a giant
effort at the time, and that such an effort wouldn’t have changed
anything.
Incidentally, this also reminds me of a great memo written by a
long-forgotten American diplomat who possessed common sense. Around 1946
in response to the idea that Ho Chi Minh wasn’t really a Communist but a
nationalist who the United States could win over and moderate by giving
him support, the State Department officials wrote something like this:
“That argument might possibly be true but it would be a hell of a risk
to take!”
As I said, though, I don’t want to enter into those debates.
But if we focus on revolutionary Islamism today we can answer
parallel questions more easily. In the Obama Administration’s favor, we
could say that it succeeded in Libya in installing a non-Islamist
government that prevailed in elections. We can also say that in Tunisia
the nature of that society has limited the scope of an Islamist victory
and may–or may not–eventually get rid of an Islamist-led coalition
there. That’s due to Tunisia, though, not to the White House.
The president’s record on Egypt, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, Syria, and
Turkey, however, is bad. The Obama Administration has promoted the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria; pressed Israel to go soft on
Hamas in the Gaza Strip (and vastly helped Hamas by its own Egypt
policy), and promoted a stealth Islamist regime in Turkey to be its best
friend in the Middle East. And here we know that literally hundreds of
“experts” inside and outside of government–a far more impressive force
than the handful of suspect China experts–have promoted this goal. This
record is far clearer than the China question of sixty years ago.
The usual defense is that Obama didn’t have much leverage to prevent
these problems from developing. That’s nonsense. He could have worked
with the army in Egypt and Turkey as well as doing more to promote the
moderate forces there. In Lebanon, the United States abandoned the
moderates who were then in power, a problem due partly to George W. Bush
and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice but mainly to Obama. The same
can be said of Bush and Rice letting Hamas run in the Palestinian
elections even though that violated the Oslo agreement. While it seems
like a bad joke it is sadly true that Bush and Rice assumed that Hamas
would lose because they depended on the misleading polls by the
incumbent Palestinian Authority’s Fatah leadership’s front group. But
Obama’s panicked reaction to the Turkish-organized Gaza flotilla–we must
do something to ease the pressure on Hamas!–was even more embarrassing.
Think about what’s happening in Syria. How about investigating how
pro-Islamist Defense Department official broke U.S. regulations by
bringing Syrian Muslim Brotherhood leaders in for meetings a few years
ago? There is no bar on U.S. aid–including supplying guns–to the Muslim
Brotherhood elements in the opposition. There is no policy favoring help
for moderates among the rebels. There is no statement that any
opposition group involved in massacring civilians because they are
Alawites or Christians will never again get any American political or
military assistance! How about investigating the terms of U.S. aid to
radical anti-American forces in the opposition and the Obama
Administration’s help in creating a Brotherhood-dominated Syrian
National Council?
As for Turkey, we know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the State
Department reporting warned repeatedly about the Islamist and
anti-American intentions of the Turkish regime. That one is completely
Obama’s fault. He has repeatedly made clear that a repressive Turkish
government that has broken the armed forces, is subverting the courts,
and has trampled on the freedom of expression is his ideal type of
regime, an example for other Muslim-majority countries!
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