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August 27, 2013 Re: Former Hillary Press Secretary Refuses to Agree Alger Hiss Was a Communist Ian Tuttle Reference:John Fund-Former Hillary Press Secretary Refuses to Agree Alger Hiss Was a Communist Karen Finney’s refusal to acknowledge that Alger Hiss was a Communist spy — let alone a Soviet agent with a direct hand in crafting American policy during World War II and the crucial early Cold War years — should, alas, come as no surprise. The Cold War years are full of unpleasant memories for the Left, whose intellectuals, ignoring the horrors of the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s massacres, and much...

We can start with the spoiler. At the end of his newly released and massive revised edition of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, Allen Weinstein makes the following observation: "As for the conspiracy theories themselves, we may expect that newer and perhaps more ingenious defenses of [Alger] Hiss may emerge, if only because none of the theories raised during the past six decades has proved persuasive. There has yet to appear, however, from any source, a coherent body of evidence that seriously undermines the credibility of the evidence against Alger Hiss." There will never be produced such a body of evidence,...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

From New York University’s website. Here is their take on the most famous spy/operative case of the 1940s: “He [Hiss] continued to assert his innocence, and over the years evidence surfaced to back his claim, including some 40,000 pages of FBI documents released to him in the 1970s.” An influential State Department official during World War II, Hiss was convicted of perjury and served a sentence for the crime in the 1950s. The web site goes on to claim: “Alger Hiss was frequently accused of secretly having secretly forged a pro-Soviet policy [sic] at Yalta. In fact, Hiss argued for...

Those who treat the Cold War as a relic of the past ignore a salient fact: Communist regimes still exist, sometimes with nukes but always with human rights violations. To get an idea of why they linger, it is helpful to see how they came into being. They were mostly established by the mother of all communist dictatorships, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to placate wartime ally Josef Stalin, dictator of the USSR in every manner possible, particularly at the wartime conferences attended by the Allied leaders in Teheran and...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Christina Shelton, a retired US intelligence analyst; she spent the major part of her thirty-two year career (twenty two years) working as a Soviet analyst and a Counterintelligence Branch Chief at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She is the author of the new book, Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason. FP: Christina Shelton, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Shelton: Thank you, Mr. Glazov. FP: Let’s begin with you telling us what inspired you to write this book. Shelton: I have always had an abiding interest in both the Soviet Union and the intriguing world of espionage. For...

Washington GOP Establishment hits Bachmann for fighting Muslim Brotherhood. Is Huma Abedin the new Alger Hiss? Is Huma Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood what Alger Hiss was to the Soviet Union? Why are Republican Senator John McCain, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rodgers (R-MI) acting in the growing Abedin controversy as Washington Establishment Democrats of the 1940s did in the Hiss episode? Which is to say, writing off the dangers of a foreign enemy whose goal is to infiltrate the U.S. government -- because, well, the people in question are part of...

The simple answer is no, the Citizens United decision was not an activist Supreme Court decision. The Citizens United decision upheld the principle that organized groups, whether they are corporations, unions, or for that matter groups such as the National Organization of Women, a corporation, have the right to engage in political speech and political activism in the form of supporting candidates and causes with money and in-kind support. Citizens United upheld the Constitutional principle of the right to assemble and to seek redress of grievances. By rendering their decision, the Supreme Court upheld the right of any group, which...

Fifty years ago today, the life work of Alger Hiss came to fruition. Hiss, a US State Department official, served the United Nations as its acting Secretary General during its founding conference in the spring of 1945. On October 24, 1945 the United Nations Charter became effective as a majority of the countries that had signed it ratified their signatures. Several years later, Hiss went to a federal penitentiary for committing perjury when testifying that he was not a Soviet agent. His personal career was over, but his most important work, the United Nations, lived on. Globalists everywhere are today...

Here's your daily dose of an indie film in progress; at the end of the week, you'll have the chance to vote for your favorite. In the meantime: Is this a movie you’d want to see? Tell us in the comments."The Whittaker Chambers Story" Tweetable Logline: Feature-length documentary about Whittaker Chambers: journalist, theologian, and writer of the political and spiritual classic "Witness"Elevator Pitch: A feature-length documentary about Whittaker Chambers, whose book Witness is a political and spiritual classic. Chambers had insight into the human condition that transcended his time. He was a member of the communist party in the 1920s...

Library Throws Book at Nixon by Brian Calle Some controversy over the recently revised Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda has provoked some questions over presidential libraries, their value, purpose for public consumption and their role in the remembrance of past presidents. One docent at the Nixon library, my Register colleague Will Alexander, opted to resign in protest of the new exhibit after 10 years of volunteer service. And friends and former colleagues of Richard Nixon have been critical of the museum's new director, Timothy Naftali. Some critics have even suggested that the...

On this day in 1948, Rep. Richard Nixon (R-CA) and his House Un-American Activities Committee questioned Alger Hiss, a State Department officer suspected of being a Soviet spy. Nixon zeroed in on contradictions in Hiss's testimony, revealing that Hiss had lied about not knowing Whittaker Chambers, another Soviet spy. Though never convicted of being a spy, Hiss did go to prison for perjury. For decades, many Democrats asserted that Hiss was innocent and that Nixon had persecuted an innocent man. After the fall of the Soviet Union, de-classified records revealed that Alger Hiss had indeed been a Soviet spy.

PREFACE HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN By Zygmund Dobbs In 1957 a Harvard alumni group asked this writer to initiate a study of leftist infiltration at Harvard University. Previous efforts to find a qualified Harvard alumnus for the task had proved unfruitful. This was a period when America was still in shock over scandals involving traitorous government officials in the service of the Stalinist terror apparatus. Disloyal Ivy leaguers had used the wealth and resources of the United States to undermine their own country. Incredibly, at the same time, they were able to betray over 600 million people...

The Bard tells us, rightly, that the past is prologue. But until America's greatest military intelligence success -- and failure -- becomes common knowledge Americans will remain intellectual sitting ducks, herded hither and yon, hoping to build a sheltering future on shaky misinformation. I'm talking about the Venona Code intercepts: The 3000 encrypted communications between Soviet spies operating in this country and their masters in Moscow, which American and British code breakers began deciphering in 1946. These KGB messages revealed that the Soviets had agents at the highest levels of the executive and legislative branches of our government -- and...

Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign during the post-war era in the US remain one of the great totemic events in liberal-Left mythology. Every time there is a revival of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, solemn words are trotted out about how this metaphor for the appalling witch-hunts which ruined careers is a devastating indictment of irrational fear, blah blah blah. Well, not exactly. The point of The Crucible is that there were no witches. But back in the real world, there certainly were spies. A new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes,...

To think that Boris and Natasha lived right here in South Dakota, and we didn't even know it! Recently, Walter Kendall Myers and Gwendolyn Steingraber-Trebilcock-Myers - a couple who once lived in Aberdeen - were arrested for spying. The news rocked the nation. Well, actually, the nation immediately forgot the story. Still, South Dakota hasn't forgotten. It's not every day suspected spies are found traipsing through your own neighborhood. The espionage likely started after they left Aberdeen, but you still wonder if that abandoned shopping cart you saw in aisle 8 of Kessler's might have contained a coded message. The...

Clearing the air vs. splitting hairs and distorting Cold War history (Part 1) Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter whitewashed Since the downfall of the Soviet Union, volumes have been written about that late superpower's penetration of American Society and its institutions before and during the Cold War years. It can be said without credible contradiction that what we now know about Soviet spying and infiltration of the U.S. for seven decades vindicates the much-maligned anti-Communists (in and out of Congress) of that era. If anything, they didn't know the half of it. It was they who warned — often to...

We are about to look at the trials of a man who was judged in one decade for what he was said to have done in another. —Alistair Cooke, A Generation on Trial, 1950 It was not entirely true, even in 1950, that Alger Hiss was being judged primarily on the basis of what he had done in the 1930s. Unless a former Communist Party member had thoroughly repudiated his past and turned against his one-time friends and political associates, he was suspected in the late forties and early fifties of still being a secret Communist — or, at the...

I am on a long needed vacation, and have already put 3000 miles on my car. Part of me says I wanted to see the country before it disappears...:) One of the things I have been doing while putting all these miles on my car is to listen to the unabridged audiobook version of "Witness" by Whittaker Chambers. I think it is a total of 36 hours or something along those lines. I read the book for the first time in 2002 (inspired by Ann Coulter to do so) and it changed my political life. To me, it was the...

IF BARACK OBAMA has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each — especially by the media and the intelligentsia — go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day. That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication...