Anticommunists such as your father had trouble keeping their positions in government or the Army. From Volume 3 of the McCarthy executive sessions made public this year:
TESTIMONY OF IGOR BOGOLEPOVMr. Bogolepov . . .I went to the Red Army; then came back to the foreign office in the League of Nations desk; then I participated in the Civil War in Spain as interpreter between the Soviet generals and the Republican general staff. I was arrested in Spain by the secret police and shipped back to the Soviet Union for trial. Then I was released in 1938 and restored in the Foreign Service Office in the Soviet Union.
I have participated in many international talks which took place between the Soviet Union and Western nations, including the Soviet-Nazi Pact and President Roosevelt's emissary, Harry Hopkins, in the summer of 1941.
During the war I was in the Baltic countries and on the Leningrad Front and come over to the German lines. I deserted from the Soviet army being in rank of colonel of general staff.
I tried for sometime to convince the Germans to take less stupid political line towards the Russian people and Russian soldiers. Because of my stubbornness and perhaps too hot a defense of the Russian national interests as opposed to Communists and Nazis they put me in Gestapo jail for a while to cool me down.
After release I went to a German farm in Bavaria and was there until the American army came in 1945.
Under American occupation I was obliged first to hide myself, for a couple of years, due to the western policies of extradition to the Soviet police of all Russian people, especially like me who were on the Soviet wanted persons list.
In 1947 I came out and explained to the U.S. Army intelligence officers in Germany who I was actually and my political standpoint and I started my work in the United States Army.
First I worked as instructor in the European Command Intelligence School in Oberammergau and next year I was transferred to the General Staff School in Regensburg, Germany, as an instructor on the matters of the Soviet policies, party organization and similar matters. In 1952 I was brought by the army to this country to testify before the Senate Internal Security Committee against Owen Lattimore. (Note:Lattimore was a Soviet agent)
After my testimony I was dismissed from the army, unfortunately, and I am living now in this country waiting for my bill to be decided.
The Chairman. A bill introduced by Senator Karl Mundt granting Mr. Bogolepov full citizenship.
Mr. Bogolepov. I had forgotten to mention that at the end of the thirties I was able to join the Communist party of the Soviet Union. I did it, as many other Russian anti-Communists do, in order to get in a higher position and to influence in that way the overthrow of the Communist regime in my country. That is all.
Mr. Cohn. Were you dismissed from service with the army after you testified before the McCarran committee?
Mr. Bogolepov. I think in connection with this. If you need more information about it, when I came here the assistant chief of G-2, General Bolling was much eager to get me for his service. He introduced me in the Pentagon to another general and they discussed my further employment as a lecturer in various U.S. military colleges. Two days after the talks were stopped and I got my discharge papers from the army.
The Chairman. What are you working at now?
Mr. Bogolepov. I am not very much happy with work, for evidently my reputation of a radical Russian anti-Communist is speaking against me. Neither State Department or Pentagon wanted to have anything with me. I am working merely on an informal basis. I have here some former students of mine. I examine for them various aspects of psychological warfare; also I am writing for newspapers from time to time, etc., etc.
The Chairman. In the statement I made in the record originally, I understood you objected to testifying because you are now working for the army. I gather you don't; that you lost your job.
Mr. Bogolepov. That is right. The Chairman. Mr. Secretary, may I ask if you could check that.
Secretary Stevens. You bet your life.
The Chairman. We would not like Mr. Bogolepov's name used publicly.
Mr. Bogolepov, the secretary of the army will check into your discharge after you testified before the McCarran committee. It seems on the face to be completely unreasonable that you worked for the army until you were subpoenaed before a United States Senate committee and then were promptly fired. The secretary will check into that.
“There exist in the United States and elsewhere in the world terrorist groups. Many are part of international terrorist networks. These networks and groups engage in kidnappings, extortion, and other acts of violence” (Littman 1975:33-34). Surprisingly, that declaration was not made in the aftermath of the devastating terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was made half a century earlier by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Such rhetorical declarations inspired fear among the populous, extracted attention from the media, and furthered the ambitions of politicians sitting on the committee. Representatives Karl Mundt of South Dakota and Richard Nixon of California engineered a House bill that extorted national paranoia for personal gain. Nixon was hailed by some of his colleagues, such as Representative Ben F. Jensen, as “one of the greatest patriots in all American history” (Congressional Record 1951:A4295-A8014). James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 41 that, “Security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society” (Littman 1975:19). In light of Madison’s remark, Nixon and Mundt were merely indulging in their civic duty. But perhaps they should have listened to different echoes from the past, such as the apparently faint voice of Benjamin Franklin who wrote in 1759, “They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” (Ignatief 2001:21). As we enter a new era of national insecurity, it becomes imperative that we listen to the past; that we do not ignore the wise voice of Franklin.
Of course it was not al Qaeda who sponsored and funded these alleged terrorist organizations in the 1950s, but Marxist-Leninists governments. On May 21, 1948, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Mundt-Nixon bill. It was the product of mass hysteria, an imaginative media, and unscrupulous politicians hoping to capitalize off public sentiment at the expense of others’ civil liberties. The Mundt-Nixon Bill, or the Subversive Activities Control Bill, embodies the essence of how the Cold War affected domestic public policy in the United States. But perhaps more importantly, it has come to symbolize policy making in the United States when under the duress of an internal threat and the resolve of a shaken public. In such circumstances, the line between civil liberties and security bends, fractures, and occasionally even disappears. A poll taken after the September 11 attacks reinforces this idea – seventy percent of Americans are willing to give up some of their civil liberties in exchange for greater security (Morin 2002: A7).
Nixon learned from the Russian Revolution that a minority of dedicated revolutionaries could effectively usurp the government’s authority. Nixon helped investigate a union that had been on strike for ten months against the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company in Milwaukee. He examined how a small group of communists came to dominate an 8,700-member union “by clever parliamentary tactics, violence, intimidation, and dishonest ballot counting.” In actuality, communists in leadership positions in various unions had more to do with their initial interest in creating them with the intention of improving working conditions and wages. Yet, “Nixon became convinced that small numbers of Communists were capable of controlling large unions,” and perhaps capable of controlling larger organizations altogether (Gellman 1999:115). His solution was legislation to force Communists into the “sunlight” and destroy the subversive philosophy by selling democracy and the American way of life (Gellman 1999:115).
The bill symbolically declared, “That anyone who wanted to establish a totalitarian government in the United States under a foreign power was guilty of a crime” (Gellman 1999:115). Members of the Communist Party were required to register with the Attorney General. Federal employees could not participate in the Communist Party and could not “knowingly hire” any of its members. Furthermore, the U.S. government denied passports to its members in an effort to restrict their travel. There were no benefits for Communists to register with the government; their liberties would be revoked as a result of their political associations. Under the Mundt-Nixon Bill, Communists became less inclined to emerge into the sunlight and more inclined to clandestinely conduct their operations and meetings. Nixon wrote years later in his memoirs that he did not want to outlaw the Communist Party. “I believed that this approach would be inefficient and counterproductive. The practical effect of outlawing the party would only be to drive the hard core of true believers underground. I thought it made more sense to drive the Communist Party into the open so that we could know who its members were” (Nixon 1978:46). But Nixon was not driving anyone into the open – he failed to see that requiring Communists to register with the Attorney General would also drive them underground.