The Katyn Massacre: Conspiracies and cover-ups

Not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.

Part III

A tacit deal with the devil

In September 1944, at the time of the Warsaw Uprising, George Orwell unleashed a withering blast against British Stalinists and their fellow-travelers:

Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not 'Is this policy right or wrong?' but 'This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?' And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power.

First of all, a message to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals generally: Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don't imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist for the Soviet regime, or any other other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

FDR died before the end of the war. Any evaluation of his actions over Katyn must allow that wartime expediency played a large role in his decision-making.

Nonetheless, the choices he made had far-reaching consequences. Key parts of his administration behaved as propagandists for Stalin’s regime. As Orwell warned it would not be easy to put those habits aside or to face up to the moral cost.

We know that people do not change their minds easily. They will fight the evidence in front of their eyes. Most prefer to cling to illusions rather than admit error. When all else fails, people prefer to ignore the matter and pretend that it never happened.

This problem becomes even more acute when an issue becomes grist for political campaigns. Honesty may be the best policy but it can also be a quick way to lose an election.

Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had no interest in losing elections.

Thus, while the US and Stalin came to be adversaries in the post-war years, the leaders of each country shared certain common objectives. For instance, none of them wanted the whole truth about Poland to come out.

Nor would they want the full story of Soviet penetration of the US government to become public.

• The NKVD and GRU obviously wanted to avoid a thorough reckoning. They might be able to salvage some of their intelligence and influence assets if the matter remained a shameful secret for the US government.
• Naïve liberals who could not distinguish between fellow liberals and Stalinist feared a witch-hunt. While they trusted communists, they feared the vast majority of the public. Therefore, they preferred to suppress information that might “inflame” public opinion.
• Clear-eyed functionaries understood that their reputations and claims to power would be damaged if it were revealed that they had permitted Stalin’s agents to roam freely through their departments or that they had helped cover-up Moscow’s crimes.

As Stephen Koch noted the Wise Men, the New Dealers, and the Brain Trusters faced a serious risk if the truth came out:

Any very public housecleaning of the Washington penetrations would have handed the populist right an all-too-powerful blunt instrument for attacking Yalta, containment, and their own position in power.

OK. It is finally time to talk about the narratives of McCarthyism and the importance of Katyn in them

The Katyn Massacre: Conspiracies and cover-ups

Part II

Once FDR and Stalin agreed to keep each other’s secrets, the US government labored to cover-up Soviet atrocities.

OWI: Above and beyond

Most of the government preferred to deal with Katyn by ignoring it and hoping the issue would fade away. On 22 April 1943 (nine days after the graves were revealed to the world) a State Department memo recommended that

on the basis of the various conflicting contentions [concerning Katyn] of all parties concerned, it would appear to be advisable to refrain from taking any definite stand in regard to this question.

Other bureaucrats chose to be more energetic and proactive.

The Office of War Information (OWI) was a key player in deep-sixing the truth. OWI loudly denied that the Soviets were responsible. This government bureau smeared those who raised questions as dupes and worse. In OWI’s eyes to doubt Stalin was to be pro-Nazi. The head of OWI Elmer Davies (remember that name) led the charge. On 3 May 1943, he took to the airwaves to defend Stalin’s honor and followed the Stalinist line that the Germans were responsible.

This is not benign neglect of an inconvenient truth. This is lying to the American public. But Davies and his people went even farther to help FDR and Stalin. The OWI actively worked to silence and censor media outlets that raised questions about Stalin’s role in Katyn.

We now know that Soviet intelligence had placed many assets in OWI. Some of its employees left the US after the war and went to work in Warsaw for the puppet government installed by the Red Army. There they wrote propaganda for Stalin. (Hence, their location changed but not their job duties.)

A sorry tale, more than a little sordid. Sadly, all wars, no matter how noble their aims, have their squalid incidents hidden away in dark corners. Governments lie to the public, especially in wartime. In this case, however, the cover-up forced the government to lie to itself with tragic consequences. Moreover, the lying and cover-ups did not end when the war was finally over.

Willful blindness and self-imposed ignorance

The Katyn cover-up did not simply conceal information from the public (voters). Steps were taken to ensure that the truth was hidden from most of the decision-makers in government. Note, for example, that MG Bissell apparently took no steps to ensure that Van Vliet’s information was shared with those policy-makers who were dealing with Stalin.

Reports came into the War and State Departments that implicated the Soviets. They were buried rather than disseminated. In some cases they were not even archived and ignored they were destroyed so they could never see the light of day.

This destruction was a willful and premeditated rejection of the lessons learned in the intelligence war against Germany and Japan.

At times it did not matter if a report was true or important: if it was perceived as “anti-soviet” it was rejected. People who sent along too many “anti-soviet” reports faced severe consequences to their career and reputation.

FDR actually exiled former Pennsylvania governor George Earle to Samoa after he voiced strong opinions on Stalin’s guilt. Earle was serving as a naval officer and had investigated the massacre while on a diplomatic mission in the Balkans. FDR rejected his assessment and took extreme steps to make sure his view did not become public.

FDR told Earle that he was absolutely certain that the Nazis were guilty. This is not surprising. His closest aide, Harry Hopkins, was completely in the pro-Stalin camp. When the massacre came to light Hopkins followed Moscow's lead in denouncing the Polish government for raising questions and demanding answers. He was happy to impute invidious motives to the ally fighting along side us in the "crusade in Europe".

Indeed, when the Poles exiled in London publicly denounced the Soviets for the massacre, Hopkins responded that they were troublemakers, interested only in preventing their large estates from falling into Russian hands.
David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch

U.S. policy-makers operated under the illusion that Stalin could be reasoned with -- that he could be a partner to secure the peace and safeguard a free and prosperous Europe. This illusion persisted, in part, because the bureaucracy squelched contrary opinions. Moreover, the arguments of the skeptics were weakened because they and their audiences were denied important information.

Famed diplomat George Kennan is a case in point. He doubted that Stalin could allow any degree of freedom in Poland after the war. As he saw it, the Russians had surely committed atrocities when they occupied Poland in partnership with Hitler. These crimes had to be covered up. The only way for Stalin to ensure that the cover-up would succeed was to install a regime completely servile to Moscow.

Kennan tried to make this case to his colleagues and bosses in State. As he admits his argument was weak because “I had no proof.” Without proof, his astute analysis was no match for officially sanctioned illusions.

He had no proof because key figures in the executive branch worked diligently to bury the evidence of Stalin’s crimes.

So it went for anyone who tried to put US-Soviet relations on a realistic footing. Their voice was muted and their position was weakened because elements inside the government worked overtime to bolster Stalin’s image, hide his perfidy, and punish his critics.

Kennan:

Western opinion was never fully aware, during the war years, of the full monstrosity of what had been done by the soviet police authorities during the Nonaggression Pact period.

The Katyn Massacre: Conspiracies and cover-ups

For a half-century after the mass murder of the Polish officers, the US government sought to cover-up and downplay this Stalinist atrocity.

The cover-up had far-reaching repercussions. It had a direct effect on the 1944 presidential election. It influenced our policies on the post-war settlement in Eastern Europe. To this day, it distorts our understanding of the history of WWII and post-war anti-communism.

Part I

Dangerous knowledge

Even before the Germans revealed the mass graves at Katyn, the US government had good reason to believe that something horrific had happened to the Polish officers. The Polish government in exile knew that thousands of POWs were unaccounted for. When pressed on this issue, Stalin was first evasive and then offered excuses that were unpersuasive and even laughable. (Gee, maybe they deserted and went to Manchuria.)

In 1942, Army intelligence (G-2) received reports from an agent in France that the Soviets had murdered Polish prisoners on an industrial scale.

Soon after the graves were discovered the Germans took several allied prisoners to the site in the hopes that they would confirm that the Soviets were responsible for the murders. The POWs refused to cooperate with their captors and balked at helping Goebbels’s propaganda efforts. However, the American prisonersCapt. Donald Stewart and Lt. Col. John Van Vliet were able to send coded messages to Army G-2 expressing their belief that the Soviets were guilty.

[The government hid the fact that they possessed this early evidence of Stalin’s culpability for over a half-century.]

After he was liberated from his POW camp, Lt. Col. Van Vliet made a report directly to Major General Clayton Bissell, head of Army G-2, in May 1945. In this report, he confirmed his assessment of Soviet guilt and expanded on his reasons for believing this. MG Bissell classified the report TOP SECRET and emphasized to Lt. Col. Van Vliet that he was to discuss the matter with no one.

This report was not circulated within the government. The single copy mysteriously went missing soon after it was written.

In 1951, congress created a committee to investigate Katyn. Stewart and Van Vliet were again sworn to secrecy about the coded messages they sent as POWs. Van Vliet was ordered to write a new report to replace the missing one he wrote in 1945. The Defense department eventually provided this report to the committee after a prolonged period of obfuscation and stonewalling.

The Katyn Committee heard testimony from MG Bissell. While he could not (or would not) explain how the 1945 report was lost, he was happy to explain why he failed to give the report wide circulation within the government:

Poland couldn't participate in the war with Japan. The Russians could participate in it. Those were the factors.

Based on realpolitik it is impossible to fault Bissell’s strategic calculus. With the war still raging in the Pacific, maintaining good relations with Stalin made strategic sense.

Guilty knowledge and a conspiracy of silence

Bissell was not alone in his assessment. Throughout the war, US military planners feared that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler. This, in turn, would allow Hitler to concentrate on the western allies and cost the lives of untold thousands of soldiers from the US, Britain, and the other nations fighting with them.

Of course, Poland was one of those nations fighting with the Allies in the West. The United States may have had no choice but to placate Stalin. They did have the option to be honest with the ally whose soldiers were fighting beside them. Allied leaders made the morally dubious decision to lie to a faithful partner. Eisenhower did not inform the Poles fighting under him in France that his great crusade would not bring freedom to their families in Poland. Churchill never told the Poles that they were fighting for the glory of the British Empire instead of the independence of their homeland. Instead he assured Gen. Anders "we will not abandon you and Poland will be happy."

Realpolitik was not the only factor at work. On the American side an even more repugnant calculus came into play FDR’s political prospects. At the Tehran Conference in late 1943, Roosevelt acceded to many of Stalin’s demands. But, he explained to the despot, the details of the negotiations must remain secret for a time: 1944 was an election year and he did not want to alienate millions of Polish-Americans whose votes he needed.

Stalin played along. During the campaign FDR told the Polish premier that "A strong and independent Poland will emerge" after the fighting ended. Stalin's silence allowed this lie to pass unchallenged.

The same need for secrecy obviously held true for Katyn. If the truth came out, it would do more than complicate US diplomacy: it would hinder Roosevelt's campaign for a fourth term.

So it was that FDR and Stalin became tacit co-conspirators. They shared an interest in hiding the truth about Poland.

Katyn and the historians

Anthony Daniels:

There is a curious phenomenon in Western intellectual life, namely that of being right at the wrong time. To be right at the wrong time is far, far worse than having been wrong for decades on end. In the estimation of many intellectuals, to be right at the wrong time is the worst possible social faux pas; like telling an off-colour joke at the throning of a bishop. In short, it is in unforgivable bad taste.

There was never a good time, for example, to be anti-communist. Those who early warned of the dangers of bolshevism were regarded as lacking in compassion for the suffering of the masses under tsarism, as well as lacking the necessary imagination to “build” a better world. Then came the phase of denial of the crimes of communism, when to base one’s anti-communism on such phenomena as organised famine and the murder of millions was regarded as the malicious acceptance of ideologically-inspired lies and calumnies. When finally the catastrophic failure of communism could no longer be disguised, and all the supposed lies were acknowledged to have been true, to be anti-communist became tasteless in a different way: it was harping on pointlessly about what everyone had always known to be the case. The only good anti-communist was a mute anti-communist.

The handling of the Katyn massacre by Western historians fits Daniel’s description to a “T”:

The treatment of the Katyn massacre illustrates the determined myopia of revisionists in the decades prior to the collapse of the USSR and the opening of its archives.
Haynes and Klehr, In Denial

As Haynes and Klehr go on to record, the left-wing’s campaign to protect Stalin was fought on several levels and went through several phases. Initially, they tried to promote Stalin’s lie that the Nazis were responsible. Part and parcel of this strategy was a willingness to label those who promoted the truth as Nazi-dupes and proto-fascsts.

As evidence mounted that Katyn was a Stalinist crime Uncle Joe’s Western apologists threw up their hands and pronounced the whole thing a complicated mystery. They adopted an even-handed approachmaybe Nazis, maybe Soviets, who knows?

Of course, those scholars and pundits had no desire to unravel the mystery themselves. Ignorance is bliss when the truth maybe politically damaging.

Without a doubt the primary tactic of Stalin’s left-wing apologists was to simply bury the massacre and ignore it in their writing, e.g. Eric Hobsbawm:

In his book The Age Of Extreme, published in 1994, he quite deliberately underplayed the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939-40, saying it was merely an attempt to push the Russian border a little further away from Leningrad. He also omits any mention of the massacre of 20,000 Polish soldiers by Russian Secret Police at Katyn.

In the same book, he dismisses the appallingly violent suppression by the Nazis of the Polish resistance in the 1944 Warsaw uprising - when a complacent Soviet army ignored desperate pleas to come to the Poles’ aid - as 'the penalty of a premature uprising'.

Finally, when the evidence is undeniable and they are forced to confront it, they still have ways of minimizing it. Long-hidden information that clears up the mystery can be dismissed as “old news” and minimized as of only “antiquarian interest”. Those scholars who research these questions are painted as “obsessives” and apologists for unsavory causes.

Thus the experts can avoid reckoning with their mistakes, inconvenient questions can be buried, and the essential and all-important narratives can be saved.

All of this happened with the Katyn massacre. It continues to this day. The Left is willing to accept the truth about the crime as long as the damage falls only on Russia and “Stalin’s heir” Putin. But in no way is it acceptable examine Stalin’s apologists in America and the West.

What must be ignored at all costs is what the massacre and its aftermath tells us about the Narratives of “McCarthyism” and the “Red Scare”.

A meaty subject, maybe one deserving its own post.

Katyn

On 5 May 1940 Stalin's Politburo ordered the NKVD to liquidate the Polish officers held as POWs after the conquest of Poland. What we now know call the Katyn Massacre claimed the lives of 22,000 men.

There is a Katyn memorial in St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery in Niles, IL. It was conceived and created by Wojciech Seweryn. His was an amazing life.

You can hear about it in this informative interview with his daughter.

Remembering Katyn

Seweryn was born one day before the Nazis invaded Poland. He never knew his father who was one of the POWs murdered by the NKVD.

After making his way to the US, he conceived and designed the memorial and then worked for decades to raise the money and create the monument. One year after the memorial was finished, Seweryn was invited to join Poland's president Lech Kaczy?ski at the ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre. He died with all on board when the president's plane crashed.

The historiography of the massacre tells us a great deal about the state of the historical profession and also sheds an important new light on the "McCarthy Era" and the so-called Red Scare.

But that is for another post.

Solzhenitsyn at 100

The American Spectator with a nice appreciation of the man and his importance:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Centenary

And just as it took many, over decades, to resist and finally exhaust and defeat the Soviet tyranny and confound its imperial ambitions, it took years and decades to defeat the ideas the ideology if you prefer on which it was based. And if there was one champion who defeated communism, who demonstrated the rot at its core, it was a man born a hundred years today, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
****
The importance of his writing cannot be overstated. What remained of a fellow-traveling intellectual class in the West was shaken. Especially when The Gulag Archipelago began to appear in translation (it was first published in a Russian edition in France), it had the effect of an intellectual neutron bomb: fellow-travelers stayed alive, but the mental universe they had lived by was shattered.

I doubt that any other modern writer lived so eventful a life. Before his books made him famous he had served as a Red Army officer in the final offensives that smashed the Third Reich and as a zek in the Gulag for the crime of criticizing Stalin.

All this before he was 30.

As Christopher Hitchens wrote:

Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken. Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them.

One caveat is in order. TAS notes that Solzhenitsyn was first celebrated in the West, then denounced, and finally ignored. They then add:

If it is any consolation, and it should not be, he was welcomed back to Russia when he returned after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and lived there until the end of his long life, in 2008, without scarcely more honor than he had found during most of his years in Vermont.

Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin tried to give Solzhenitsyn the highest awards their government could offer. He refused them. He accepted a state prize from Putin. When he died in 2007 thousands turned out to pay their respects (including the President of Russia). To mark his centenary, Putin himself unveiled a statue of Solzhenitsyn in Moscow.

In February 2019 an opera based on One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich will premier at the famous Bolshoi theater.

His son Ignat is the musical director and guest conductor.

The past is prologue

Politicized intelligence and the drums of war

Musings II … The “Intelligence Community,” “Russian Interference,” and Due Diligence

If even half of this post by Amb. Jack Matlock is true, it is a severe indictment of Clapper, Brennan and Comey.

In fact, the report was prepared by a group of analysts from the three agencies pre-selected by their directors, with the selection process generally overseen by James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Clapper told the Senate in testimony May 8, 2017, that it was prepared by “two dozen or so analysts—hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies.” If you can hand-pick the analysts, you can hand-pick the conclusions. The analysts selected would have understood what Director Clapper wanted since he made no secret of his views. Why would they endanger their careers by not delivering?

What should have struck any congressperson or reporter was that the procedure Clapper followed was the same as that used in 2003 to produce the report falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had retained stocks of weapons of mass destruction. That should be worrisome enough to inspire questions, but that is not the only anomaly.

He pulls no punches in his conclusion:

Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically motivated, report as proof of “Russian interference” in the U.S. election without even the pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with common dangers is vital to both countries.

RTWT

Important

A little background from the author:

News Values

A vitally important piece of the history of US/Russian relations is just being memory-holed. I hope many people read this book.

The MSM succumbs to mass psychosis

Or, perhaps, shameless propaganda. It’s hard to be sure.

The Trump/Russian collusion narrative is an odd thing. It is sustained by screaming headlines and breathless tweets. Most of the time the substance of the stories fail to live up to the hype.

And then there are those stories which seem irreconcilable. While each may be plausible, they seem to contradict one another. That is, while either may be true, it is absurd to believe that both can be true. Yet outlets like CNN expect us to do just that.

On one hand we are supposed to accept that Putin is a bloodthirsty totalitarian who has brought High Stalinism back to the Kremlin. He is a rogue autocrat so bent on political murder that he is willing to kill defectors in the West despite the inevitable repercussions to East-West relations.

At the same time we are expected to believe that people high up in the Russian intelligence apparatus are eager to blab about secret active measures. Despite Putin’s brutal record, these “deeply knowledgeable sources” display so little fear that they are happy to help foreign spies and ex-spies compile dossiers that reveal these active measures.

Those spies, ex-spies, operatives, and ex-operatives also manifest a cavalier disregard for source protection and operational security.

From PowerLine:

Steele reported that the friends of Vladimir Putin apprised him of Russia’s efforts to intervene on behalf of Donald Trump in the presidential campaign. Why, you might ask, would the friends of Vladimir Putin entrust Christopher Steele with the goods on Russia’s alleged efforts to intervene on behalf of Donald Trump in the presidential campaign?

I have not seen a good answer to that question and Mayer doesn’t really offer one other than that everybody loves Christopher Steele like she does. And of course there are obvious reasons why knowledgable Russians would not deliver true intelligence to Steele. As Eric Felten puts it in the excellent Weekly Standard article “A doozy of a dossier”: “Given the relative trivialities that can get one beaten to death in a Russian prison, these senior officials would seem to have exhibited an extraordinarily cavalier attitude toward their own health and well-being.”

Does anyone at the WaPo or CNN think about issues like this before they start hyping their latest scoop? Do they care about the truth?

Or have they succumbed to the Cult of Truthiness in their Trump Derangement?

Related:

The problem of the press in five tweets

Old spy cases never die

"There's no statute of limitations on counterespionage, none at all."
William Hood, Cry Spy

The British government as released a trove of files that bear on some old spy cases.

The Unbelievable Story of How the CIA Helped Foil a Russian Spy Ring in London
Newly released documents reveal a real-life plot that seems ripped from a Cold War novel.

It’s an interesting story that provides a look inside intelligence operations during the Cold War.

The Portland spy case was another black eye for the British Security services.

Embarrassingly for MI5, the agency discovered that Houghton had previously been on its radar and it had made serious errors about him. In 1956, MI5 had been asked for security concerns about Houghton working at the UDE and was even sent a report from Houghton’s wife warning that he was revealing classified information. At the time, MI5’s vetting section had erroneously concluded, without serious investigation, that Mrs. Houghton was claiming this out of spite because their marriage was breaking up a striking failure for MI5.

In truth, the Soviets displayed something resembling contempt for British counter-intelligence at this time.

After their arrest, the Krogers’ fingerprints were sent to the FBI, who established their real identity as Morris and Lona Cohen, known to be two of the Kremlin’s most important underground assets in the Cold War. The Cohens were American-born KGB illegals in the United States, who had operated with an array of key underground Soviet agents, including the celebrated illegal William Fisher, who lived under an alias, “Rudolf Abel.” They had also acted as KGB couriers, passing top-secret intelligence on U.S. atomic research from agents including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. After the Rosenbergs’ arrest, followed by their trial and execution for espionage in the U.S. in 1952, the KGB spirited the Cohens out of the United States, slipping through the FBI’s hands. Now-available Soviet intelligence material shows the KGB gave them New Zealand passports. In 1954 the Cohens arrived in Britain to begin their new life, and espionage career, as the Krogers.

The KGB obtained the fake passports from Paddy Costelloa New Zealand diplomat who was a graduate of Cambridge University where he ran in the same communist circles as Phlby, Burgess, et. al.

FBI agent Robert Lamphere noted the Zelig-like propinquity of the Cohen/Krogers:

A Philby-network man issued passports for the Cohens, who were involved with Colonel Abel, Gordon Lonsdale, and possibly with the Rosenbergs.

Sending the Cohens to Britain seems highly risky on two counts.

1. They were directly associated with at least three* spy networks known to the US/UK security services: The Cambridge Ring, the Rosenbergs, and Rudolph Abel. If the FBI or MI5 followed the right thread from any of these cases they might track down the Cohens. That in turn, could jeopardized high-value operations currently underway in Britain.

Gordon Lonsdale/Konon Molody was a decidedly high-value asset. According to the Soviet archives, he was the first Soviet “illegal” to operate in Great Britain since the 1930s.

* Lona Cohen worked with a fourth network that stole atomic secrets in New Mexico. However, the FBI did not learn of this network for decades.

2. If captured, the Cohens had many secrets to bargain with should they put self-preservation ahead of ideological loyalty.

Yet the KGB sent them to London to work near the center of a major, on-going, and productive operation. This suggests that the Soviets were confident that MI5 was too inept to be a danger to the Cohens and other traitors ( the polite Narrative) or that the KGB/GRU had sources within MI5 who could protect the spies. (The Chapman Pincher theory).

The Soviets usually took great pains to protect their agents and to ensure operational security. For instance, when Ursula Kuczynski Hamburger Beurton (SONJA) was sent to Moscow for training, she was ordered to leave her son behind. Her superiors feared that the boy would learn Russian words which might someday betray SONIA’s cover story that she was merely a Jewish refugee from Germany.

When Walter Krivitsky defected and was interrogated by MI5, the Soviets ceased all contacted with their Cambridge spies until they were sure that those agents were not compromised by the revelations. The same thing happened when Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945.

The Soviet intelligence agencies were usually patient and careful. So it seems significant that they were willing to put the Cohens to work in London so quickly.

And they were not wrong. MI5 did not break the case (despite their subsequent claims to Parliament and the press). The Portland spies were discovered thanks to the defection of a Polish intelligence officer, Michael Goleniewski to CIA.

To add insult to injury, MI5 even accepted “Gordon Lonsdale” as a true identity until an FBI investigation revealed that the Canadian Gordon Lonsdale was actually the Russian Konon Molody.

Related:

First rule of counterintelligence: never say never

Russia without illusions

A sober and informative piece by David Warsh:

The “Snow Revolution” and the Attribution Problem

Previously:

The Ukraine crisis without blinders

Since the whole Russian debate seems to be driven by Ben Rhodes and his echo chamber, it is worth revisiting this post:

The country is in the very best of hands....

It is also useful to listen to the beginning of this lecture where Dr. Gaddis reviews the steps and missteps of US policy toward post-Soviet Russia.

Robert Conquest, RIP

Nice appreciation from Roger Kimball:

In memoriam: Robert Conquest, 1917-2015

His magisterial book about Stalin’s infamous tyranny, The Great Terror, was published in 1968 to snivels of opprobrium from the bien pensant left-wing establishment, who complained that he had wildly exaggerated the death toll of Stalin’s effort to bring about utopia. When the Soviet archives were finally opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, it turned out he had actually underestimated the butcher’s bill.

Remember The New York Times received a Pulitzer Prize for helping cover-up and explain away the brutality that Conquest wrote about.

In his Reflection on a Ravaaged Century, Conquest explained why the Communists held sway over so many "smart people" for so long:

The Austrailian poet James McAuley wrote pentetratingly of the pro-Communist phenomenon: 'During the thirties and forties Austrailian intellectual life became subjected to an alarming extent to the magnetic field of Communism. All sorts of people who would regard themselves as being non-Communist, and even opposed to Communism, in practice were dominated by the themes and modes of discussion proposed by the Communists, danced to the Communist tune, and had serious emotional resistances to being identified with any postition or institution which was denounced by the Communists as "reactionary".' He adds that 'one reason for all this was that schools of thought genuinely independent of and opposed to Communist suggestion were in this country not well organized and publicly present. They lacked prestige, that magical aura which captures the minds of the young in advance of argument and establishes compelling fashions

If you think about it, that also helps to explain why the Left and the MSM (sorry, is that redundant?) love Jon Stewart so much.

Also worth noting, as Klehr and Haynes document in In Denial, that hstorians have been waging decades-long battle againt the truth about Stalinism and other communists. That fight continues to this day.

If you are not reading XX Committee...

You are missing out on some of the best geopolitical analysis available.

Putin’s Balkan Offensive

The Truth About Gallipoli

Woodrow Wilson’s Great Folly

I wish this viewpoint would receive a hearing

David Warsh:

In fact, many sophisticated Europeans and Americans share the basic Russian view of the situation. They see the campaign to expand NATO to Russia’s southern borders as the fundamental cause of Ukrainian civil war.

Worth a read

The Generation of ’91

It providers further evidence that Victoria Nuland, like Jamie Gorelick, is a true Mistress of Disaster.

Whatever the case, there is ample evidence that the US was in the midst of things, in the form of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s famous phone call to the American ambassador to Ukraine, conveniently taped and made public by the Russians. ....

Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Rhodes scholarship classmate at Oxford, was at the center of US policy towards Russia throughout the ’90s. A one-time Time magazine journalist, Talbott served as Ambassador-at-Large to the New Independent States before becoming Deputy Secretary of State in 1994.Today he is president of the Brooking Institution....

Talbott’s State Department chief of staff, Nuland, is at the helm of the State Department’s Eurasian affairs today. During the Bush administration she advised Vice President Dick Cheney on the eve of the Iraq invasion and served as US ambassador to NATO.

And remember, Nuland helped push the Benghazi lies and cover-up.

The Ukraine crisis without blinders

An astute and succinct analysis by David Warsh:

Two Views of Russia

It was Nuland who in February was secretly taped, probably by the Russians, saying “F— the EU” for dragging its feet in supporting Ukrainian demonstrators seeking to displace its democratically-elected pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, two months after he rejected a trade agreement with the European Union in favor of one with Russia. She made a well-publicized trip to pass out food in the rebels’ encampment on Kiev’s Maidan Square in the days before Yanukovych fled to Moscow.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin said the other day, “Our Western partners, with the support of fairly radically inclined and nationalist-leaning groups, carried out a coup d’état [in Ukraine]. No matter what anyone says, we all understand what happened. There are no fools among us. We all saw the symbolic pies handed out on the Maidan,” Nuland is the pie-giver he had in mind

Victoria Nuland is a character right out of House of Cards or The Honourable Schoolboy.

Before she was nominated to her current job, Nuland was State Department spokesperson under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Congressional firestorm over the attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.

So how did the Obama administration manage to get her confirmed – on a voice vote with no debate? The short answer is that she was stoutly defended by New York Times columnist David Brooks and warmly endorsed by two prominent Republican senators, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona.

She is also the wife of Robert Kagan, an advisor to GOP presidents and GOP presidential candidates.

I really wonder what went though the mind of Mitt Romney and his closest advisors when they realized that the flack lying about Benghazi and leading the charge against Romney on that issue was married to one of their foreign policy advisors.

Like I said, Politico could not do that scene .justice; it requires the talents of a LeCarre or Evelyn Waugh.

On Ukraine: Why have we not heard from the “41ers”?

Most Republican criticism of President Obama’s Ukraine policy has come from alumnae and ideological allies of Bush 43. The critics accept the premise of Victoria Nuland’s policies: that Ukraine should be integrated into the EU, that NATO should move its frontiers closer to the Russian homeland, that the struggle with Putin is a zero sum game, and that fomenting a coup against a Putin ally is wise policy.

The critics harp on the need for greater strength, greater resolve, greater confrontation.

The debate is only between imperialist hawks and superhawkish imperialists. The policy differences are small; it is mostly a matter of how loud one rattles the sabers.

I’ve noted before that Bush ’41 had a completely different approach to Moscow and its former satellites. (See here and here).

Here is President George H. W. Bush himself in a speech to the Ukrainian Parliament in Kiev in August 1991:

Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based on ethic hatred.

This is a viewpoint that deserves a hearing today.

The country is in the very best of hands.....

There’s an Intelligence Crisis at the White House

As Russian tanks rolled into Crimea, the administration sheepishly admitted it had no strategic warning of what Putin was up to.

How. Is. That. Possible?

You don't need NSA transcripts of Kremlin telephone calls to know that Crimea was part of Russia for much longer than it was part of Ukraine.

You don't need an agent in place in the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation to know that Crimea was the home for Russia's major Black Sea naval base.

That, in and of itself, constituted strategic warning.

The White House and other agencies were surprised that Russia behaved as a Great Power?

Of course, this helps explain why the White House and State department decided to foment a little coup in Kiev despite the risks. People like Victoria Nuland did not recognize the risks.

Straws in the wind: The Boston bombers, US intelligence, and the new Cold War

Steve Sailer connects the dots that Fox News ignores:

FBI: Boston Bomb Brothers were Putin's fault

Read the whole thing. No, really, read to the end--you’ll thank me.

The MSM is uninterested (or afraid) to dig into the connection between the Tsarnaev clan and US intelligence.

Okay. Still, you know, the Russkies did have reasons not to totally trust U.S. intelligence services when it came to the Tsarnaev family.

After all, the Bomb Brothers' Uncle Ruslan used to run a Chechen rebel front organization funneling donations from Al-Qaeda to the fight against Russia out of the house of his (now) ex-father-in-law, retired CIA insider Graham E. Fuller.

This line from the Times story is open to many interpretations; none of them are particularly reassuring to Russia or Putin:

At the time, American law enforcement officials believed that Mr. Tsarnaev posed a far greater threat to Russia.

At a minimum, this suggests that the US government was indifferent to the terrorist threat posed by American citizens when the target was Russia.

A reasonable man might wonder of this indifference is evidence of hypocrisy in the Bush-Obama rhetoric surrounding the war on terror.

Throw in the Tsarnaev’s connection to US intelligence and the stench of hypocrisy grows thick and heavy.

Next straw: more questions than answers.

The Chechens' American friends

The Washington neocons' commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own….

The anti-Russian animus of the MSM is so strong that this contradiction never gets an airing. The victims of Beslan are sent down the memory hole.

There is also a Ukrainian nexus.

Edward Jay Epstein wrote a fascinating book on unsolved crimes. When investigating the death of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko and the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya Epstein found himself deep in the conspiratorial currents of Russian politics and its western annex.

According to Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow-based newspaper for which Politkovskaya reported, Pavlyuchenkov claimed in his pretrial testimony that Politkovskaya’s murder was ordered by two London-based enemies of Putin, billionaire Boris Berezovsky and Akhmed Zakayev, an organizer of the Chechen revolt (which coincides with Putin’s theory that the murder was staged as a provocation).
……
[Alexander Goldfarb] told me that Berezovsky had provided $ 50 million to dissident elements in Ukraine who participated in what became known as the Orange Revolution.

He wasn't wrong

Joseph Epstein reviews the recently published diaries of George Kennan.

George Kennan: diplomat, misanthrope, diarist.

This particularly relevant today:

Proper distance, mutual respect, non-interference, above all the avoidance of war—these were the pillars on which Kennan thought foreign policy ought to stand.

Kennan, in many ways, was more conservative than most of our current right-wing pundits. He was also more intellectually honest and more rigorous.

Government generally, he wrote in Around the Cragged Hill, A Personal and Political Philosophy, “is simply not the channel through which men’s noblest impulses are to be realized. Its task, on the contrary, is largely to see that its ignoble ones are kept under restraint and not permitted to go too far.”

The modern right is rendered absurd on just this point. They catalogue in detail the failings of one government program after another. Yet they persist in thinking that foreign policy and military affairs are different and will not be plagued by unintended consequences or governmental over-reach.

The architect of the Marshall Plan and Containment, two of the most successful government programs of the 20th century, did not let hubris cloud his vision of what the world was really like.

It's possible that Kennan is more relevant now than at any time in the last fifty years.