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john.haynes@johnearlhaynes.com Ten years ago there would have been, not most, but many scholars who would not merely have insisted on Harry White's innocence, but that of Gregory Silvermaster, Helen Silvermaster, William Ullmann, George Silverman, Frank Coe, William Gold, Sonia Gold, Norman Bursler, Solomon Adler, and others of the Silvermaster group of government officials as well, and would have depicted Bentley as a fraud. It is progress that today those scholars concede Silvermaster and company's role in espionage, agree that Bentley really was a spy, and fight only a rear guard operation to save White and Lauchlin Currie. This has occurred not because more persuasive arguments have been presented or more eloquent historians have made the case for the espionage activities of these persons. It has come about because of evidence. It has come about in part through the opening of FBI and other government archival sources in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the accumulative opening of key private papers but most particularly through the opening of certain Soviet-era records in Russia and opening here of Venona and the like. This process will continue. Every year more material is available. While there has been some backward steps in Russia at some archives, there has been continued expansion of access at others. Several key collections remained closed, but someday, and I think not very many years from now, they, too, will be open. From my point of view, I expect a great deal more progress. Dealing with what we have now, however, Mr. Boughton states that I repeat the "charge that Whittaker Chambers named White as a Communist" This statement is inaccurate. In VENONA: DECODING SOVIET ESPIONAGE IN AMERICA I and Harvey Klehr wrote "Chambers also noted that White was not a CPUSA member" and later we describe White as a "fellow traveler rather than a party member." Readers of this list may remember that only a few days ago, May 30, Klehr further quoted our statement in VENONA that White "cooperated with the Communist underground on his own terms and could not be ordered to do anything in particular." How much clearer can one get? Mr Boughton, however, is partially right on one matter. In VENONA, on pages 90 and 91, we noted that "Isaac Don Levine also kept notes on the meeting, and his notes contain White's name. Berle*s notes do not. Chambers, in his memoir, identifies White as an espionage contact but thought he had not mentioned him to Berle." But while our book was right, my posting inaccurately referred to Berle's 1939 notes rather than Isaac Don Levine's 1939 notes. Mr. Boughton has correctly pointed to my carelessness in my posting, but in view of Chambers's detailed description of White's cooperation with Soviet espionage in WITNESS has done nothing for the case for White's innocence. Chambers, for example, stated that when he decided to break with Soviet espionage in 1938, he met with White to urge him, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to do the same. Mr. Boughton's reading that White believed the KGB officer Kolstov was simply a Soviet diplomat and the "apparently incriminating tone of Kolstov's report to Moscow may well reveal nothing more than White's reluctance to be known as having extramural conversations with him" is implausible. The Cold War had not yet begun and there was no risk, danger or suspicion for a senior government official like White to meet in the course of work or even in normal social life with a Soviet diplomat in 1944. Meeting with a KGB officer, however, was another matter, and most readers of the Kolstov message will find it more likely that the proposals for rotating future meetings through a series of apartments and conversations in moving cars more likely reflect the latter than the former. Mr. Boughton's contention that White informed Vladimir Pravdin, a KGB officer, of the U.S. negotiating strategy at the conference founding the United Nations in order to frustrate "Republican members of the U.S. delegation" may be "perfectly understandable" to him. To me is not understandable at all. This notion that responsible and loyal senior American officials make a practice of achieving their ends through unauthorized contacts with foreign intelligence officers bares no resemblance to reality. Mr. Boughton claims there is no "hard evidence." As pointed out in earlier postings, there is not just one deciphered KGB message regarding White, but fifteen. Further, White's participation in espionage is confirmed in the KGB documents to which Weinstein and Vassiliev had access and described in THE HAUNTED WOOD. (I cannot help but note that these exchanges began when I inquired if anyone had actually seen a WWII document that would confirm the assertion made by some historians that in WWII the U.S. Army or the FBI labeled veterans of the Lincoln Brigade as "premature antifascists." Despite examining many records of these veterans, I had never come across the use of the term in WWII by a government agency. No one has as yet come forward with a citation of such a document. This is, I think, a real case of no hard evidence.) But back to White. In addition to the hard evidence of Venona and THE HAUNTED WOOD documents, one adds Chambers statements regarding his direct knowledge of White's espionage in the mid-1930s, Bentley's statements of her knowledge of his espionage during WWII through persons in the Silvermaster network (Bentley did not work with White directly, but she was very clear on the information about White cooperation provided by those members of the network with whom she dealt), and White's pattern of conduct, particularly his intervention to deflect security probes of persons that Mr. Boughton allows were spies: Silvermaster and Glasser, and his sponsorship of government employment for not merely those two but others who consciously assisted Soviet intelligence. I am confident that the evidence available now is sufficient to state that White consciously assisted and participated in Soviet espionage. I am also confident that as time passes more evidence will become available and ten years from now an exchange of this sort will not occur. John Earl Haynes
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