Lo and behold, the authors declare the accused spies guilty as charged. Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh recently received “generous support” from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation, among others, to write a book on the controversial case of Amerasia magazine, whose publisher and contributors were arrested as spies in 1945 a grand jury refused to indict four of the six, and two paid fines on minor charges. Recently, a new twist has been added, by the willingness of far-right foundations to finance research that they can be assured will hew to their ideological line. The story then goes away until the next batch of documents appears or the next spy gets religion. Depending on the usually predictable political orientation of the academic in question, a person’s reputation is either destroyed or merely damaged. Journalists trumpet the charge, calling on “respected” academics to either endorse or debunk the charges. The drill has become a familiar one: Hitherto secret documents or ex-spy confessions, often backed up by a major publishing campaign, reveal that so-and-so was a spy all along. Today’s lesson deals instead with a disturbing nexus of scholarship, journalism and Cold War fanaticism that, based on either a careless or a deliberately malicious reading of declassified national security documents, threatens our ability ever to make sense of the past half-century of our history. I take no position on guilt or innocence (in truth, I still can’t make up my mind). Since I am writing in what Breindel preemptively calls “America’s leading forum for Alger Hiss apologia,” one could be forgiven for expecting yet another plea for justice for Hiss.
New York Post editor Eric Breindel, writing in The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal, insists that the recent release by the National Security Agency of an encrypted document sent by a Soviet spy in Washington to his superiors in Moscow on March 30, 1945, constitutes “the smoking gun in the Hiss case,” proving “beyond doubt” that Hiss “was still a Soviet agent in 1945.” In “I Spy With One Little Eye ” (The Nation, April 29, 1996), journalist Eric Alterman examined the level of scholarship of some of those saying that released Soviet files and Venona decrypts automatically corroborate the espionage charges leveled in the 1940s against Alger Hiss and others.
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