Consistency can be a good thing. The democrats have been amazingly consistent since the 60’s. Unfortunately, for most Americans, democrats have been consistently wrong. The left has been consistently wrong about war, appeasing tyrants and dictators instead of confronting them. The left has been consistently wrong about taxes. In favor of taxing anything that is not nailed down. However, more than anything, liberals have consistently misread and misjudged the American People.

During the 60’s, the left was opposing America’s involvement with Vietnam. Ignoring facts that were as obvious then as they are today, Communism was choking the life out of a country that was in desperate need of our help and on a humanitarian level, we needed to be there. Vietnam was slowly becoming another Stalinist country with none of the freedoms or privileges we demand in our own country. Why was attacking Bosnia in the 90’s acceptable but fighting communism in the 60’s was not? Bosnia was a lesser threat to the U.S. than a Communist Vietnam. The end goal of Bosnia was not to take over the United States unlike the communist movement in Vietnam that was a small part of a larger scheme.

In the 70’s liberals decided the next thing to oppose would be any progress that involved cutting down a tree. It did not matter that logging companies had been replenishing the forests by implementing strict replanting policies. Chaining oneself to a tree became the vogue. At the time of this writing, there are more trees in the United States than at its founding in 1776. If there are more trees now than there were then, why are so many democrats so uptight? After all, thousands of cities have grown from nothing and yet we have more trees. We would not be in nearly as good a shape as we are if nobody cared and nobody was trying.

Throughout the 80’s, the common Democratic theme was that Reagan was wrong. Reagan was wrong in believing in lower taxes even though lower taxes help spur a technology boom that carried on through the 21st Century. Microsoft, Apple, and IBM all started in garages and grew into bigger and better companies thanks in part to a realistic and fair tax code that certainly didn’t start in the Carter Administration. In addition, we were assured that Reagan was an idiot. These Reagan is an idiot updates came via The Media, late night talk shows, and many elected democrats. Regarding the Soviet Union, Reagan was opposed on nearly every issue by pacifist liberals. The left not learning from the experiences of Neville Chamberlain, who failed to see the ever-increasing threat of Nazism, continued to seek appeasement instead of strength.

While controlling the White House for much of the 90’s, liberals avoided discussing the onslaught of terrorist activity against the U.S. by talking about Dotcoms, 30 year olds retiring early, and the sitcom Friends. It is ironic that democrats love to take credit for a booming economy that was built on inflated, hyped-up companies that had no real business plan except that they were Dotcoms. Ignoring over half a dozen attacks against the U.S. including the first attack on the World Trade Center and numerous attacks against U.S. Interests abroad there was no increase in the military budget, no questions about the competence of the CIA or the FBI, and no need to check with the United Nations on any military operations involving foreign countries.

From 2000 to 2006, anti-war protesters, communist dupes, U.N. loving Senators, and Hollywood idiots, also known as, “The Democrat Party” wailed loudly against almost every attempt that the U.S. made to protect itself from Islamic terrorism. Democrats have shown more contempt towards our military than toward Jew-hating, civilian-killing, women-suppressing Islamic terrorists. Democrats didn’t like the Patriot Act, they didn’t like monitoring phone calls originating from outside the U.S. from suspected terrorists, they are against any interrogation techniques that might upset the Muslim community, and yet Democrat Senators have the audacity to ask why we were not better prepared against terrorism. If liberals would treat Islamic nuts as they treat tobacco companies then we might actually be safer against future attacks.

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Consistency
Filed on 06/14/06 by Chris Arnell
www.carnellknowledge.com
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By the time Lamphere began using the translated messages, the public controversy over “loyalty” and “red-baiting” had risen dramatically amid growing concern over US-Soviet tensions. New allegations that prominent American citizens had spied for the Soviets burst upon the public in July 1948, when Bentley spoke before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Her testimony recounted, among other things, Lauchlin Currie’s alleged distress over US efforts to read wartime Soviet telegrams (this seems to have been the first public clue to the existence of ASA’s effort). A few days later Whittaker Chambers charged that Roosevelt administration figures Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were secret Communists. Heated denials by the accused and their supporters added to the drama and controversy as elections loomed that autumn. Republican Congressmen and activists hailed the testimony as the long-suppressed proof of Democratic inattention toward Communist subversion. Truman bitterly resented such charges and insisted that the Hiss affair in particular was a GOP “red herring.”

Truman’s repeated denunciations of the charges against Hiss, White, and others–all of whom appear under covernames in decrypted messages translated before he left office in January 1953–suggest that Truman either was never briefed on the Venona program or did not grasp its significance. Although it seems odd that Truman might not have been told, no definitive evidence has emerged to show he was. In any event, Truman always insisted that Republicans had trumped up the loyalty issue and that wartime espionage had been insignificant and well contained by American authorities.

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In December 1948 the FBI identified a Soviet agent covernamed SIMA as Judith Coplon, a young Justice Department analyst recruited by the Soviets in 1944. Coplon would become the first person arrested on the basis of a Venona lead. FBI agents detained her in March 1949 along with a KGB official under UN cover; her purse contained ostensibly sensitive documents (which the Bureau had routed through her office as bait). Director Hoover or (less likely) someone higher in the Truman administration forbade FBI officials testifying at her trial from introducing the translated messages as evidence. This protection of the cryptanalytic breakthrough forced prosecutors and government witnesses into elaborate cirumlocutions; Special Agent Lamphere, for example, testified that suspicion had fallen on Coplon because of information from a reliable “confidential informant” that was not a wiretap. Although both of Coplon’s convictions would be overturned on appeal, subsequent prosecutions developed in the same manner, with the too-sensitive codebreaking secrets obscured behind mounds of corroborating evidence.

The Coplon case set the pattern for an intense series of investigations and prosecutions that followed over the next two years. Meredith Gardner and his colleagues (working from May 1949 under the auspices of AFSA, the new Armed Forces Security Agency) supplied covernames and translations to the FBI; Lamphere and other Special Agents tracked down the leads:

* February 1949. ASA observed that messages containing “Material G” were quoting British Foreign Office telegrams sent to the British Embassy in Washington during the war. Not until March 1951, however, did American and British cryptanalysts conclude that “G,” “GOMMER,” and “GOMER” (the Russian transliteration of HOMER) had to be the same agent who had provided the cables to the KGB. By the beginning of May 1951, the list of possible suspects had narrowed to one name: Donald Maclean of the Foreign Office. Maclean, with compatriot Guy Burgess, soon fled to the Soviet Union.

* September 1949. The FBI determined that covernames REST and CHARLES, both denoting a scientist in the wartime Manhattan Project, referred to physicist Klaus Fuchs, author of a paper quoted in one message. British authorities interrogated Fuchs in late 1949. His information in turn led the FBI to courier Harry Gold, arrested in Philadelphia on 22 May.(54)

* February 1950. Lamphere suspected that a Soviet agent covernamed CALIBRE had to be an enlisted man posted at the Manhattan Project facility at Los Alamos during the war. Subsequent AFSA analysis, and additional information from Harry Gold, led to David Greenglass, who confessed to the FBI on 15 June 1950 and also implicated his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg.

* Spring 1950. Covername NICK had emerged in 1949 as one Amadeo Sabatini, who had fought in Spain together with KGB asset Morris Cohen. Sabatini apparently kept quiet about Cohen but did point the FBI toward a Jones Orin York (almost simultaneously identified as Venona covername NEEDLE). When questioned in April 1950, York alleged that a former case officer of his was an AFSA employee named William Weisband. AFSA suspended Weisband in May.

* Late June 1950. The FBI discovered that information in the messages about an agent who collected technological and scientific secrets, codenamed LIBERAL and ANTENNA, matched the known facts about New York engineer Julius Rosenberg. Two messages also implicated his wife, Ethel. Rosenberg had been questioned on the basis of David Greenglass’ information on 16 June and tailed ever since, but he was not arrested until a month later.

* Sometime in 1949-50. Gardner translated a 1944 message that described the recruitment of Harvard physics student Theodore Alvin Hall. Soon afterward, the Bureau determined that the covername YOUNGSTER [MLAD], found in other messages, matched Hall. Special Agents questioned Hall in 1951, but he was never prosecuted (probably because a case could not have been made without revealing AFSA’s program).

Translated messages also corroborated various charges made by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers. By June 1950 the Bureau determined that the covername ALES, mentioned in one KGB message, referred to former State Department aide Alger Hiss, then serving a sentence for perjury. Around the same time, Lamphere told Gardner that the covername JURIST meant Harry Dexter White, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who had died suddenly a few days after denying Whittaker Chambers’ August 1948 charge before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The translations also clarified another sensational spy case a few years later when the FBI identified the covername MARQUIS as Joseph Milton Bernstein, a GRU agent linked to the Institute of Pacific Relations and Amerasia magazine.

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Who Was William Weisband?

In 1950 one Jones Orin York (covername NEEDLE) told the FBI that he had passed secrets to the KGB since the mid-1930s. A worker in the aircraft industry on the west coast, York said that his KGB handler during 1941-42 had been one Bill Weisband, who had helped him buy a camera for photographing documents.(a)

York’s allegation was disturbing news, implying that the KGB had a mole in the sensitive Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA). Born in Egypt in 1908 of Russian parents, Weisband emigrated to America in the 1920s and became a US citizen in 1938. He joined the US Army Signals Security Agency in 1942 and performed signals intelligence and communications security duties in North Africa and Italy, where he made some important friends before returning to Arlington Hall and joining its “Russian Section.” Although not a cryptanalyst, as a “linguist adviser” (he spoke fluent Russian) the gregarious and popular Weisband had access to all areas of Arlington Hall’s Soviet work. Meredith Gardner recalled that Weisband had watched him extract the list of Western atomic scientists from the December 1944 KGB message mentioned earlier.

Weisband always denied involvement in espionage, and the US Government never prosecuted him for it. While suspended from AFSA on suspicion of disloyalty, he skipped a federal grand jury hearing on Communist Party activity. As a result, in November 1950 Weisband was convicted of contempt and sentenced to a year in prison. He died suddenly of natural causes in 1967.

The Venona messages do not hold a definite reference to William Weisband. Nevertheless, three messages mention a “ZVENO” (the Russian word for “link”). The earliest and clearest reference suggests procedures for the KGB’s London residency to use in contacting ZVENO, who was awaiting a transfer to England. ZVENO, according to one message, had spent the last four weeks in an Italian- language course in Virginia and would leave for Britain by mid-July.(b) NSA records show that Weisband spent that June honing his skills in a language (probably Italian) at Arlington Hall, shipped out on 17 July, and arrived in London by 29 July.

(a) Information that York provided in a later FBI interview can be seen in the Washington Field Office’s memorandum “William Wolf Weisband,” 27 November 1953, Document 34.

(b) New York 981 to Moscow, 26 June 1943; this was not fully translated until 1979.

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The extreme secrecy of the Venona information tended to ensure that any precautions would be viewed skeptically by some of the very intelligence personnel they were designed to protect. Only a handful of American intelligence officers had access to the Venona secret, and those who did not have such access had no way, in many cases, to judge the reliability of the evidence gathered against alleged Soviet agents in the 1940s. As a result, even seasoned intelligence professionals viewed the spy cases and internal security debates of the 1940s and early 1950s as McCarthyite hysteria. This attitude probably influenced some in the Intelligence Community as a whole to underestimate the Soviet espionage threat.

Elizabeth Bentley died in Connecticut in December 1963, long before the end of the Cold War she had helped to start. She never knew about the Venona secret, or about the way in which her testimony (among that of others) assisted the program. Before she died, she had been denounced as a traitor, a liar, and a criminal by everyone from her old comrades to a former President of the United States. The controversy over her testimony was only a skirmish in the national debate over the true extent of Soviet espionage, and over the federal government’s attempts to balance competing requirements of civil liberties and internal security. The declassification of Venona augments and clarifies the evidence in the public domain, and consequently should move the debate from the politics and personalities of those who testified in public to the capabilities and actions of political leaders and intelligence officers–both American and Soviet–who worked in many cases behind the scenes.

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