http://www.dcdave.com
Harry Hopkins was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
closest aide and confidante. Formally, his two top positions were first
as director of the Works Progress Administration and later as head of the
Lend-Lease Program. With his heavy involvement in key areas of both
domestic and foreign policy and his close association with the president and
especially with the very influential first lady, Eleanor, he was actually as
near to being an assistant president as anyone in the United States has ever
been. The evidence is accumulating that he was also an agent of the
Soviet Union.
The leading
evidence that Hopkins was a spy for Joseph Stalin is presented by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel in
their 2000 book, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's
Traitor. I have summarized their argument elsewhere as follows:
Their evidence
is, first, that Soviet KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky,
said that Hopkins was in regular communication with top Soviet covert
operative, Iskhak Akhmerov, in New York City. This was more than
just a "back channel" for communication between Roosevelt and Stalin
because Hopkins had existing back channels at the Soviet embassy that he used,
and Akhmerov's identity as an operative was not supposed
to be known to the U.S. government. Second, the Venona
project decrypts of Soviet communications with its spies, which came to light
only in the 1990s, reveal a report on a Washington discussion between Roosevelt
and Winston Churchill by an "agent 19." Only Harry Hopkins among
suspected Soviet agents would have been privy to that conversation. Third,
former Communist Whittaker Chambers testified to Congress in 1948 about the
formation of Communist "study groups" within the U.S. government from
which espionage agents were recruited. One of those groups, led by Lee Pressman, was
established within the Department of Agriculture in late 1933, and Hopkins was
a member of that group. Fourth, his policies were strongly pro-Soviet,
particularly in his work as head of the Lend-Lease program.
The degree
to which he far exceeded any strategic necessity in aiding the Soviet Union in
that latter capacity is well described in the 1952 book by Major George Racey Jordan entitled From Major Jordan’s
Diaries. A summary, with key excerpts,
are in the previously referenced article, “How We Gave the Russians the Bomb.”
Now,
corroborating and entirely independent evidence of Hopkins’ likely treason has
come to light in the pages of an obscure book by Emanuel M. Josephson.
The title is The Strange Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and while it
does have a very intriguing chapter on FDR’s demise, the main subject of the
book is better captured by the subtitle, A History of the Roosevelt-Delano
Dynasty, America’s Royal Family. The following passage is on pp.
145-146:
In later
years, Murray Garsson, the munitions manufacturer who was
convicted for bribery and irregularities in connection with war contracts,
reported that Harry Hopkins had been very helpful to him in securing and
handling those contracts. In return for his help, Hopkins had demanded
and received liberal payment for his influence. Garsson
regularly paid Hopkins’s numerous losses on bets on the horse races. But
one form of payment demanded by Hopkins stood out as most odd, Garsson said.
Garsson maintained quarters at
the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington in connection
with his war contracts. But he spent his weekends in New York with his
family. Harry Hopkins demanded of Garsson
that he permit him and his friends to use the quarters during the weekends, and
that he defray the cost of refreshments and entertainment. Garsson permitted Hopkins and his guests to charge their
expenses to his account.
In looking
over his bills, Garsson noted the names of the persons
who had signed the tabs charged to him. Among Harry Hopkins’s associates
who had signed tabs were Carl Aldo Marzani
and the whole array of the members of what was later proved to be the Hal Ware (Communist) cell that operated in the
Government. Garsson stated that he did not
become aware of the fact that he was acting as involuntary host to Hopkins’s
Communist cell until after Marzani had been convicted
and sent to jail for perjury in swearing in his State Department application
that he was not, and never had been, a member of the Communist Party.
Josephson,
who was hardly an admirer of Roosevelt and his New Deal, lacks references for
his allegations, but many factors militate in favor of their basic
accuracy. The strongest of these is that they dovetail perfectly with the
other Soviet-agent charges against Hopkins and, coming much earlier, they could
not have been influenced by them. In combination, the charges are much
stronger than any one of them is alone. Hopkins was also known to have a
number of personal weaknesses; he was a heavy drinker and gambler.
His first wife had divorced him, charging him with infidelity, and he was left
with large alimony and child support expenses. Combined with his taste
for luxury and the cost of his vices, those expenses are likely to have
outstripped his meager government income. A common acronym for the main
four reasons that people get involved in espionage is “MICE,” Money, Ideology,
Compromised, and Ego. Often it only takes one of them, but Hopkins would
appear to have been vulnerable on all four points.
Whatever
one’s character or vulnerability, a primary reason not to be a spy against
one’s own country is obvious enough. It is typically very risky.
The penalty can be quite severe, as we know from the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
case. But the official relationship with the Soviet Union and Communism
had changed radically by the time the Rosenbergs were
executed. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the attitude toward espionage by the
Soviet Communists was permissive in the extreme, and Harry Hopkins had to know
it. As we document in detail in “FDR Winked at Soviet Espionage,”
Communist defector Whittaker Chambers had told Roosevelt’s
security adviser, Adolf Berle, all about Harold Ware’s spy nest, which
included the infamous Alger Hiss, in 1939. Berle
had relayed the information to Roosevelt, and Roosevelt had blown him
off. Spying for the Reds under Roosevelt was essentially risk free. The results are well summed up by historian
Thomas Fleming on page 319 of his 2001 book, The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War
within World War II:
There was
scarcely a branch of the American government, including the War, Navy, and
Justice Departments, that did not have Soviet moles in high places, feeding
Moscow information. Wild Bill Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, the
forerunner of the CIA, had so many informers in its ranks,
it was almost an arm of the NKVD. Donovan's personal assistant, Duncan
Chaplin Lee, was a spy.
The spy ring
also reached into the White House in the person of economic adviser, Lauchlin Currie,
according to Chambers. As with the evidence against Hopkins that came
initially from Garsson and from Major Jordan, the
evidence against Currie was later reinforced by the same Venona intercepts
that Romerstein and Breindel
used to conclude that Hopkins was also a spy.
David
Martin
February
11, 2011
Addendum
1
With
a search of the Internet using the terms “Harry Hopkins” and “David Niles” we
have turned up some additional evidence
connecting Hopkins to Communist subversion:
In
l936 James Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins invited David Niles to Washington from
Boston. In l94l or l942 he became a resident assistant to the President
at the White House. He retired in 1951 after serving Presidents Roosevelt
and Truman. He was bitterly attacked by anti-Israel factions as reported
in New York Times story May 5, l948. Active member of Ford Hall Forum in Boston, Never attended college.
Niles,
then, can be seen as something of a protégé of FDR’s son and of Harry
Hopkins. Niles, apparently, had his own connections to Communist
subversion. This passage is from page 181 of the aforementioned Romerstein-Breindel book, which we quote in “Who Killed James Forrestal?”
Whittaker
Chambers reported to the FBI an odd story about Niles that he had heard from a
fellow Soviet agent named John Hermann in 1934 or 1935. A Soviet agent named
Silverman (not George Silverman) was living in the next building from Alger
Hiss. This Silverman apparently had an obviously homosexual affair with David
Niles. Silverman had told Niles of the work of the underground apparatus in
Washington, and Niles later threatened to expose the activities of the
Communist group unless Silverman left his wife. To solve the problem, J.
Peters, the head of the American Communist underground, ordered Hermann and
Harold Ware to get Silverman to leave Washington, D. C. immediately.
As
for Niles’s other patron, we learn from Wikipedia that, “[James] Roosevelt
was one of the first politicians to denounce the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was also the only
Representative to vote against appropriating funds for the House Un-American Activities
Committee.” One must wonder now if that might have been because
he feared what they might expose.
David
Martin
February
15, 2011
Addendum
2
More
evidence of Hopkins’ work on behalf of the Soviets
turns up in the case of defector, Victor Kravchenko.
In this instance he was in league with FDR’s extremely pro-Soviet ambassador to
the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies.
The following passage is from page 275 of The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia
by Tim Tzouliadis (2008):
Victor
Kravchenko had been a Soviet Lend-Lease official who
defected in 1944, while stationed in New York. At the time, the Soviet
embassy had tried hard to force Kravchenko’s
extradition as a war-time “deserter,” and had engaged
the willing intervention of Ambassador Joseph Davies to its cause. What
followed was the farce of the FBI having to call up Kravchenko
anonymously to tip him off that “the heat was on” from the State Department,
and warn him that he should “carefully hide himself.”
But Kravchenko’s English was not yet up to such
head-spinning machinations, and the FBI agent had to repeat the whole
conversation to a friend, who took the appropriate evasive action on Kravchenko’s behalf. Joseph Davies, meanwhile,
appealed directly to the president and secretary of state to have Kravchenko sent back to Russia. The
moral issue of Kravenchenko’s inevitable execution
was elegantly sidestepped by Harry Hopkins, who argued that if he was returned,
no one would know what happened to him. Only
President Roosevelt had sensed a fast-approaching political calamity; “Will you
tell Joe that I cannot do this?” he instructed his secretary, and the
defector’s life was spared. (emphasis added)
Kravchenko’s very revealing book, I
Chose Freedom, was published in April of 1946, and even the formerly
pro-Soviet New York Times, reviewed
it favorably.
Hopkins
apparently served his Soviet masters almost to the end of his days. The
following passage is from pp. 118-119 of Stalin’s
Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government by
M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein (2012):
Hopkins’s
pro-Soviet leanings would be on further display in the Yalta records, where his
handwritten comments are available for viewing. Though seriously ill at
the time of the meeting, he continued to ply his influence with FDR, who
himself was mortally sick and susceptible to suggestion in ways that we can
only guess at. After FDR had made innumerable concessions to Stalin,
there occurred a deadlock on the issue of “reparations.” At this point,
Hopkins passed a note to Roosevelt that summed up the American attitude at
Yalta. “Mr. President,” this said, “the Russians have given in so much
at this conference I don’t think we should let them down. Let the
British disagree if they want—and continue their disagreement at Moscow
[in subsequent diplomatic meetings]” (Emphasis added by Evans and Romerstein).
One may
search the Yalta records at length and have trouble finding an issue of
substance on which the Soviets had “given in” to FDR—the entire thrust of
the conference, as Roosevelt loyalist [Robert] Sherwood acknowledged,
being in the reverse direction.
David
Martin
March
19, 2013
Addendum 3
New
doubt has arisen over the best evidence that Hopkins was actually a Soviet
agent. See my article “Harry Hopkins and FDR’s
Commissars.”
David
Martin
January
24, 2014
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