( Friedman was a former VN/Cambodia journalist for Human Events weekly, 1970)
Diana West’s book “American Betrayal” has sparked a lot of controversy among conservative historians and I would like to put in my two sense because I have been studying the issue of Communist/Soviet penetration of our Government, especially in the 1930’s and 1940’s, for a long time. I’ve been lucky because I have met a few of the people who helped to break the Alger Hiss story, as well as to expose Communist Party USA operations and individuals both within the government and without.
For that reason, I would like to do some highlighting of such contacts because it shows how extensive the Communist issue has been on my life.
I met and heard Whittaker Chambers speak shortly before he died. I actually talked to him (I was about 16 at the time). I also met the late Isaac Don Levine, an American journalist who covered the Russian Revolution of 1917, and who later took Chambers to meet presidential advisor A.A. Berle, in the White House, to have Chambers reveal directly to him what he knew about Alger Hiss as both a Communist Party member and as a Soviet spy.
· As a counter-balance speaker to Chambers, our boys club advisor brought in a local ACLU attorney who promoted a book entitled “The Un-Americans” by Frank Donner. It was a leftist attack on Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and other Communist Party defectors, as well as on the FBI, CIA, congressional investigative committees and private groups who did research on communism.
What the speaker did not say, or perhaps did not know, was that Donner was a deep cover Communist Party USA member, who worked in the Party’s security apparatus along with Frank Wilkinson, once a California government employee who went to jail for perjury. Donner eventually emerged as the ACLU’s man heading a “Surveillance Project” at Yale.
· I also have met and questioned both of the theoreticians of the CPUSA (Herbert Aptheker) and the Trotskyite “Socialist Workers Party” (George Novak, once a secretary to Leon Trotsky in Mexico). Both polite but shallow ideologues at best.
I was proud to have been mentored in internal security by the late Herbert “I Led 3 Lives” Philbrick, the FBI undercover agent, and the late Herb Romerstein, a former very young member of the CPUSA, then an Army veteran of the Korean War, a state investigator specializing in Communist penetration of education, and then a government analyst and investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its successor, the House Internal Security Committee. He also worked for the House Select Intelligence Committee and the State Department’s section on Soviet Disinformation and Propaganda operations.
Stan Evans published my first monograph in 1976, as part of the American Conservative Union’s ACU Education and Research Institute (“The Meaning of the Bicentennial: Volume One – The Peoples Bicentennial Commission). He also served as an editor of “The Pink Sheet on the Left/American Sentinel” while I was an Associate Editor, writing on internal security and terrorism matters.
Both Evans and Romerstein wrote several books within the past 2-10 years dealing with Soviet penetration of the U.S. Government. Diana West’s book “American Betrayal” looks like a continuation of the last Evans/Romerstein book “Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government”, Threshold Editions, 2012.
