McCarthy was getting some of his information from John Grombach, who had run a WWII military intelligence operation for the Pentagon and was suspicious of Soviet wartime infiltration of the OSS. Evans documents the role Soviet agents played in persuading the Truman administration to cover up the extent of Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. One item he notes is something I discovered independently and mentioned
here:
"A 1945 FBI wiretap investigation of leaks from the Soviet ambassador to journalist Drew Pearson revealed that Frankfurter was colluding with Pearson. Follow-up wiretaps on Pearson and Brandeis-Frankfurter apparatus member Thomas Corcoran revealed that Corcoran and Rauh-Prichard-Graham Goon Squad member Lauchlin Currie had conspired to protect State Department official John Stewart Service from being prosecuted in connection with the leaking of classified government documents to the pro-Communist publication Amerasia." The "Goon Squad" mentioned here was a spy operation within the FDR/Truman administration run by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, led by Joseph Rauh, Edward Prichard, and Philip Graham, the Washington Post owner; it included Soviet spy Lauchlin Currie. David K. Niles is another figure linked to Frankfurter and the Goon Squad who helped persuade Truman to protect Communists--after the FBI told Truman that Harry Deter White was a suspected Soviet spy, Niles warned Truman that removing White would cause the Democrats to lose New York in the next election. Richard Nixon mentions in the Watergate tapes that J. Edgar Hoover apologized to him during the Hiss investigation because the Truman administration had ordered the FBI not to cooperate with investigators. Leading Republicans such as John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were also at risk of embarrassment because of their prior association with Alger Hiss, so there was bipartisan motivation to get McCarthy. The CIA's domestic media apparatus, centered around Goon Squad member Philip Graham's Washington Post and CBS, sought to discredit McCarthy in order to avoid disclosing the embarrassing Soviet infiltration of the OSS. The final order to take McCarthy down ultimately came directly from President Dwight Eisenhower, who hated McCarthy for investigating the Army, after he had received a report from the FBI that Joseph Kennedy and Cardinal Francis Spellman were planning to run McCarthy for President in 1956. On orders from CIA Director Allen Dulles, James Angelton assigned an agent named James McCargar (aka Christopher Felix) to feed disinformation to Grombach and McCarthy in order to accelerate McCarthy's fall. After McCargar returned from his mission to mislead McCarthy, Angleton took him to a meeting with Allen Dulles, and Dulles congratulated him, telling him, "You've saved the republic."
Drew Pearson (off the top of my head), had a serious connection to a guy named Barnes, a hardcore leftist is not Communist Party guy. Pearson was the perfect conduit for anti-anti-communist propaganda operations (re internal security investigations) headed by Nixon and McCarthy, among others.
Pearson later recruited Jack Anderson, a WW2 draft dodger who claimed to be a Quaker, but whose activities for the Left were anything but “pacifist”. the Pearson-Anderson “Washington Merry Go Run” syndicated national column was used to beat both Nixon and McCarthy ad infinitum.
Anderson was pro-Sandinista as much as he was anti-Reagan and covered up their Marxist domination of the FSLN in Nicaragua (as did Wash. Post Latin American correspondent/ now chief WP foreign correspondent editor, Karen de Young).
The Wash. Post was significantly infiltrated by assorted leftist liberals, Marxists, socialists, etc. some of whom only “came out” in the 90’s or later (Osnos, unfortunately; Hemenway - good writing on SE Asia for the most part; Greider; etc. These included Tad Szulc and Larry Stern, but there are about a dozen more WP writers/editors whose leftist propaganda writings are detailed in “Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies”, S. Steven Powell, 1987, Green Hill.