By Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (bannerofliberty.com)
January 21, 2001
As I listened to, and read, the reports about career FBI agent and counterintelligence expert Robert Philip Hanssen's arrest for spying for the Soviet and Russian governments, I wondered how the general public was going to react. Here is a man, the father of six, with 27 years of service to his country, who has sold his country to a foreign enemy for a truly paltry sum of money - less than $100,000 a year for fifteen years.
I find it hard to believe that Hanssen would risk his life and his family for that small amount of money. FBI agents are not exactly poor. It reminds me of another spy case, 50 years ago, in which the spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed. They weren't into spying for the money. They were into spying for their belief system - communism.
We are told that Hannsen was known to the Soviets as "Ramon." The code name for the spy who led to the Rosenbergs was "Raymond" back in the 1940s and 1950s.
During World War II, a British physicist named Klaus Fuchs was working at Los Alamos in the Manhattan Project - the group that developed the atomic bomb. Twice in 1945 Fuchs met with a Soviet agent named "Raymond" and provided notes on the working design for the atomic bomb. .
In February 1950, less than two weeks after a jury convicted Alger Hiss of perjury for denying under oath that he had passed secret information to a Communist agent named Whittaker Chambers, Klaus Fuchs was arrested and confessed to disclosing to the Soviets information about the Manhattan Project.
For those of the younger generation who probably never heard of Alger Hiss, he was the first link that eventually led to what appeared to be a rather large network of pro-communist spies in key positions. Hiss was a graduate of Harvard Law School and former clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and had held several key positions in the New Deal administration. He was with President Roosevelt at the historic Yalta conference, helped to organize the 1945 U.N. conference in San Francisco and, when accused, was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
At his trial two Supreme Court justices, Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed, friends from college days, appeared as character witnesses on his behalf and, two months later, when the first trial deadlocked 8-4, not surprisingly Frankfurter and Reed with in the minority. However, another trial took place, and Hiss was convicted. It was later upheld by both the Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court and Hiss was sent to prison, largely because of the tenacity and legal work of a young California congressman named Richard Nixon.
Hiss was actually convicted of perjury, the very same charge leveled against Bill Clinton that half the U.S. Senate treated as a minor crime. What Hiss had done, of course, was to infiltrate the U.S. government to move this nation towards communism. Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor from the very liberal TIME magazine and a self-admitted ex-communist, identified Alger Hiss and provided four rolls of microfilm containing secret State Department documents that he said had also been secretly passed to him by Hiss in the 1930s when both of them were members of the Communist Party.
So, what happened was that a respected nuclear physicist at Los Alamos named Klaus Fuchs gave secret information on the Atom bomb to a communist spy named Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor of TIME magazine who was in the same communist cell as Alger Hiss and Alger Hiss. Fuchs arrest began the chain of investigations that led to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. American cryptanalysts deciphered reports sent from the Soviet Consulate to the KGB. One of those cables was a report by Fuchs on the progress of the Manhattan project. Confronted with the evidence, Fuchs confessed and identified "a spy named Raymond." "Raymond" turned out to be a middle-aged chemist, Harry Gold, who to whom Fuchs had given information about the bomb. Gold had paid $500 in September of 1945 in Albuquerque in exchange for information about the implosion lens for the atomic bomb.
That information led authorities to David Greenglass, a brother of Ethel Rosenberg. Greenglass was a machinist in the Army. And, in spite of his history as a member of the Young Communist League and a vocal proponent of communism in bull sessions with army friends, he had been selected to be part of the secret Manhattan Project. He was stationed in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and then later in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
It was through the Rosenbergs that Greenglass learned the real purpose of the Manhattan Project - the construction of an atomic bomb. At the Rosenberg trial Greenglass was a prosecution witness against his sister and his brother-in-law in exchange for immunity for his wife Ruth, so that she might remain with their two children. Greenglass received a 15 year sentence for his role in the passing of the Atomic information.
The Rosenbergs were tried, convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair. However, a massive and very emotional propaganda campaign was launched at that point to prevent the executions. It was pointed out that, after all, spying for the Soviets wasn't all that bad since the communists were our allies in World War II. Five separate hearings were held before the U.S. Supreme Court, but most were lost on a 5-4 Supreme Court decision. An appeal for clemency to President Dwight David Eisenhower was denied based on the President's belief that the Rosenberg betrayal of atomic secrets might bring death to "many, many thousands of innocent citizens."
The Rosenberg spy trail led to some of America's most respected citizens and, eventually, to the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy whose desire for publicity created such absurd charges that the public was soon lulled back into slumber. I remember McCarthy accusing President Eisenhower of being a "dupe" of the Communists. It was at that point the public began to discount the reality of the communist threat. From that time on I have suspected Senator Joseph McCarthy of being a double agent. It was McCarthy's wild and unsubstantiated accusations against people like President Eisenhower whom he accused of being Communist "dupes" or "sympathizers" that led into the 1960s and an era when young men could evade the draft, run off to England and even to the USSR to protest and picket, and then later be elected to high office, as was Bill Clinton.
Most of the spying done by Hannsen of course occurred during the Clinton Administration when the top executive of this nation was providing Communist China with the necessary super computers needed to accurately aim their missiles at U.S. cities, undermining our power supplies by making coal, natural gas and oil deposits unusable in the name of "saving the environment," and gutting our military forces.
Undoubtedly part of Hannsen's defense, as the Rosenberg defense, will revolve around the "seriousness" of his crimes in view of what the American people were supporting with their votes throughout the 1990s.
All of which brings to mind that at least 50 members of the U.S. House of Representatives are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (see http://www.dsausa.org/dsa.html). Under the direction of Bill Clinton, they have become a powerful force in the Congress, especially in those areas defined by the Socialists 12 point "Progressive Agenda" which calls for, among other things,
a federal jobs bank, a massive public works program, requiring private banks to fund education programs to combat racism, funds for drug treatment on demand, "workplace democracy" which would discourage high executive salaries and raise the minimum wage, support multicultural education and hiring of teachers from communities of color, provide government health care with no deductibles, no co-payments, no out-of-pocket expenses, guarantee the right of all women to have federally funded abortions or federally funded child-care, should she allow her child to live, recognize the "integrity and legality of all families" …including those of lesbians and homosexual men, shift government subsidies from nuclear energy to solar and wind powered energy while making corporations accountable for all clean-up costs, and, finally, demilitarize while establishing social charger rights for international economic integration through loan forgiveness and development aid.
And, I bet you thought communism was dead, didn't you? Be assured, folks, that Robert Philip Hannsen is not the only person in a key position to do this nation great harm. It's quite possible you voted for someone with similar beliefs or lack of integrity, as the case may be.
To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com
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