Posted on 02/05/2002 11:06:24 PM PST by quietolong
NOVA reveals startling new evidence that Soviet spies penetrated America's deepest secrets, including the Manhattan Project, in the 1940's. By cracking the code of Soviet diplomatic cables, the FBI was able to hunt down "atom spies" such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg. But the true "master spy," a physicist named Ted Hall, got away -- and his gripping story is presented for the first time by NOVA. Read Venona Intercepts By Peter Tyson
In 1995, the U.S. National Security Agency broke a half century of silence by releasing translations of Soviet cables decrypted back in the 1940s by the Venona Project. Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of what is now called the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union, including those chronicled in NOVA's "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies."
The four Venona cables presented here provide striking evidence of the covert activities of several atomic-era spies, including Klaus Fuchs, Julius Rosenberg, and Theodore Alvin Hall. Through the cables and accompanying stories, peer through the keyhole into the secret lives of these and other agents, who gave away details of the atomic bomb and other highly sensitive technologies. Watch for code words such as "Enormous," which stood for the Manhattan Project, America's atomic-bomb program
Link to Nova web sight on this show
And on the same night even.
"I Lied": Testing the Intellectual Honesty of Eric Alterman
Btw...Izzy Stone was Eric's idol and mentor.
Not a bother. I appreciate the heads up. Sounds real interesting.
I'll see if the VCR is still working and if I still know how to rig it for a timed recording.
Thanks! !
Another Republican of famously evil repute, Richard Nixon, bit his tongue when Jack Kennedy, with the highest stakes in politics sitting on the table, baited him about "the missile gap", which both Nixon and Kennedy knew was a monstrous lie, because they'd both been briefed (together, in the same room) about Colonel Penkovsky's information.
Could it be that these evil Republicans were still more morally upright, on their worst day, than the princes of liberaldom have ever wanted to be? Perish the thought!
They even let slip that Ethel Rosenberg importuned her sister-in-law to pressure her own brother, David Greenglass, into supplying information to the Soviets, which sort of shreds the loyal wife defense. (Actually, many believe that Ethel was the instigator, pressuring her henpecked husband into becoming an agent.) She was convicted of typing the information supplied by her brother, a fact that the Nova report inexplicably overlooked. They seem to claim that because the Soviets never actually named Ethel Rosenberg as an "agent" in any of their cable traffic or in the Moscow archives, she is not guilty of espionage. But she is identified as Julius' wife (she did not have a code name, he was code named LIBERAL) and in context it is pretty clear that she was an active participant, and so recognized by Moscow.
I'm baffled about the point of the report. Essentially, the thesis is that Joe McCarthy was correct, but he had no right to be, mostly because he was the wrong sort of person. Apparently the report started out as a report on the Venona decrypts (I'm speculating). The Venona decrypts are interesting, the result of persistence and intellectual rigor on the part of the Americans (the bad guys) and procedural sloppiness and endemic laziness on the part of the Soviets (the good guys in our drama). In PBS-land that dog won't hunt.
Airing Ethel Rosenberg's son's claim that his mother was "murdered in cold blood by this government" is unspeakably callous. He in not a disinterested party and is hardly in a position to be objective. His mother's life might have been spared if she, or her husband, had named other Soviet agents. Some find her behavior heroic. But if she loved her son, won't she have been more concerned about assuring that he had a home to grow up in and less in the progress of international communism? The future will work itself out, without the exertions of any one of us, but our children need us uniquely to ensure their future. As parents, the Rosenbergs were failures. Sacrificing your children to some messianic ego trip is no more noble than sacrificing them to drugs or alcohol. But don't tell her son that.
My father, who was a career active-duty USAF Reservist (1950-62, a "retread" for Korea), told me about some of that stuff back in the 1950's. It was common knowledge in the Air Force that Hopkins and Harry Dexter White had been solid red, and that they'd sent nuclear materials over the pole to the USSR in the 40's, but nobody could do anything about it. Some USAAF officer who'd tried to stop a shipment up in Montana or Idaho or someplace had had a can tied to his ass by Hopkins personally, the story went.
There was never any doubt in my dad's mind that McCarthy had been right, but that The Club had hated his guts and ridden him down because he'd tried to crash the party uninvited. Not that they had anything against drunks, but that didn't stop them from telling everyone else about it.
This knowledge weighed on my dad's and other people's minds a lot in the 50's and contributed greatly to the atmosphere of pessimism and worry that dominated the era. But media types never talk about that.
See a trend here?
Oooooh, this is too good! Shame on me for enjoying myself so much! Anticommunist BUMP for our Massachusetts friend!!
"LG"
And remember, boys and girls -- the German Nazis were a Left party, too, and don't ever let anyone tell you differently!
And FWIW, I used PBS's public-feedback link to send them a stiffly worded note about, okay, if McCarthy was right -- what about it, guys? You going to climb down any on the subject of Joseph McCarthy?
McCarthyism was created by hollyweird. It would have been created regardless of how polite and nice McCarthy conducted himself. Right wingers are all nazi's and McCarthy was a really nasty threatening one. To bad shallow America worships leftist celebrities and their industry.
What a great line -- great post, thanks! Where do guys like MSNBC find guys like Alterman? Do they deliberately look under rocks?
"Micturation" -- wonderful! It's like finding a dollar bill lying on the sidewalk -- Thanks, Larry! Great, great post!
"LG"
As one of FDR's favourites, during the CCC days, if you were not/nor would not "register to vote" as a Democrat - you were blackballed from CCC, WPA, ... work.
As Hopkins was head of the Lend-Lease program, and was Soviet Agent 19 as identified via the Venona work, it is little wonder that Stalin got more and more ...
As is the case in most of American education - this "history" (as Tehran, Yalta) is never addressed - FDR's legacy is too dear!!!
As an FYI, See "Dark Sun - The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" by Richard Rhodes (Simon $ Schuster, New York, 1995, ISBN 0-684-80400-X), Chapter Five "Super Lend-Lease." Pages 99-100 lists the nuclear materials; there also is a commentary by General Groves.
Yes, FDR-worship is a real pain. At least the plagiarism accusations have shut Doris Kearns Goodwin up. Haven't seen her on The News Hour lately -- blessed relief! Don't know whether you've listened to her, but she absolutely worshipped the ground FDR walked on when she was a kid, and despite her training as a historian, she's never apparently revisited her prejudices and illusions. Maybe being married to Camelot insider Dick Goodwin has had something to do with that. I'd trust her to tell me about Millard Fillmore, but the 20th century? Forget it! She sees the world through a rose-colored pair of Rooseveltian pince-nez.
Revising American history to account for the illegitimate Communist and leftist influences on American society and government, and measure their damage to our history, is going to be the major historiographical restoration job of the 21st century. The Vietnamese War alone is going to be huge.
Then, there will be the inevitable discussion: after we've reviewed all the damage, all the lies, deception, bad faith, and outright treason, we'll have to tackle the question of "what have we learned from all this, and what do we have to do to prevent its recurrence?"
The really hard part is going to be the recovery and maintenance of individual freedom and the rights and influence of our ancestors that we enjoyed in the Jacksonian Era. We will need to eliminate or domesticate the self-interested, destructive influence of economic combinations like the Millocracy and of hostile, alien ideologies like Communism, Fabian socialism, and their underground agents.
For example, only after a British underseas film crew exploring the SS Lusitania in the 1970's published the photographs of "war materiels" did the original shipping manifests "magically" appear from the US Archives.
For almost eight (8) decades, Americans were told that the Wilson Administration "would never put innocents in Harm's Way" - over a thousand people died. And it still took the Zimmermann Telegraph for Wilson to get the US Congress to vote for a declaration of war for entry in WWI - BUT AT LEAST WILSON DID GO BEFORE CONGRESS!!!
An odd thing about the SS Lusitania, and the Zimmerman Telegraph - in both cases Winston S. Churchill had "his fingers" in each of the pies ...
So, we have a proven case where the US government has knowingly placed its own people in Harm's Way, and good old WSC "working" to save the British ...
Hello FDR and Pearl Harbor ... See Stinnett "Day of Deceit" (paperback), and Wilford "Pearl Harbor Redefined - USN Radio Intelligence in 1941."
Source? One the one hand I could easily believe that, but a claim like that needs a bit more documentation.
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