[This review was published in the Winter 2014 issue of The Journal of Social, Political and Economic

Studies, pp. 522-534.]

Book Review
Stalins Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelts Government
M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein
New York: Threshold Editions, 2012
If now, almost seventy years after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a reader remains
convinced that the concern in the United States over Communists in government during the FDR and
Truman administrations was a product of hysteria, leading to what is commonly called a witch hunt,
this book will serve as a much-needed corrective. It will be welcomed by those for whom the passage of
time has created a disposition to make a fair-minded consideration of the evidence. In Stalins Secret
Agents, two historians of the Cold War, M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, present an
introduction to the disclosures that have accumulated from a number of sources, including those from
intelligence decrypts and Soviet archives. The subject justifies a lot of anger, but Evans and Romerstein
approach the subject with the unemotional and understated objectivity that is expected in scholarly
writing.
The authors explain that their intention is to fill in the blanks of things occurring behind the
scenes. This is important to what is perhaps the main purpose of their book, which is to make a dent in
the vested ideological interest that has so long held sway about the role of Communists during those
years. For decades there has been an established narrative about our domestic Cold War and related
security matters, the main theme of which is that the internal Communist problem was vastly overstated,
if not entirely nonexistent, and that the people accused as infiltrators were innocent victims. They point
out, for example, that J. Robert Oppenheimer remains routinely depicted in our histories as a martyr.
Oppenheimer, they have us recall, was a famed physicist who was during World War II the scientific
leader of the atom project. The revocation of his U.S. security clearance has not prevented him from
being much celebrated. Evans and Romerstein, however, say that its clear beyond all peradventure that
Oppenheimer was considered by Communist leaders to be a secret member of the party when he went
into the atom program.
The evidence of Communist penetration into the FDR and Truman administrations is by now
massive, with the many sources corroborating each other. Evans and Romerstein refer to the archives of
the KGB, as disclosed in the 1990s by onetime Soviet operative Alexander Vassiliev [who] copied
down voluminous reports about the goals and tactics of Soviet intelligence, including disinformation
schemes. They go on to say, further, that the archives of the Soviet Union and other east bloc
nations were made available to researchers for a brief period after the Communists were toppled
from power.
The Venona dccrypts provide additional inside information from the Soviets themselves. During
the 1940s, the U.S. Army Signal Corps conducted an operation given the code name Venona in which
code breakers intercepted thousands of encrypted messages exchanged between the Red intelligence
bosses in Moscow and their agents in this country. The decrypts werent made public until 1995 (a delay
that long blocked the worlds access to a major source). Unfortunately, even though highly significant,
they are only a relatively limited window into a voluminous traffic: We have less than three thousand out
of hundreds of thousands of such missives, and the decryptions barely got into the military side of
intelligence: with a few exceptions, cable traffic for Soviet military intelligence wasnt read at all. The

authors point out that since some of the most important Soviet agents, most notably Alger Hiss, worked
for the GRU [Soviet military intelligence], this is another sizeable gap in the Cold War record. For
readers who would like to delve more deeply into the Venona revelations, there are three excellent books
available about it.1
World Communism experienced several shocks in the 1930s that caused significant defections among
Communists and fellow travelers within the United States. Among them were the Moscow purge trials,
the split between Trotsky and Stalin, and the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Some of the disenchanted simply turned
away from Stalin, while others became active anti-Communists. Eye-opening revelations came through
such defectors as Vassiliev, who followed in the footsteps of others such as Oleg Gordievsky, Stanislav
Levchenko and Victor Kravchenko, along with native American defectors such as Whittaker Chambers
and Elizabeth Bentley. Chambers brought forward the famous pumpkin papers, sixty-five microfilmed
copies of official documents that he testified he had received from Alger Hiss and that he had hidden
briefly in a pumpkin patch on his farm. These papers, our authors say, would be the pivot on which
domestic Cold War history turned from that time forward. Chambers named a number of Communists
who had penetrated the American government. Evans and Romerstein say the Chambers information
would subsequently be confirmed by other witnesses and the disclosures of Venona. Foremost among
the witnesses reinforcing his assertions was ex-Communist Elizabeth Bentley, also a former courier.
Bentley defected in 1945. Other defectors such as Louis Budenz and Hede Massing provided much
additional inside information, again corroborating the other sources.
Evans and Romerstein observe that the confidential archives of the FBI [Federal Bureau of
Investigation] are an underrated resource, and that a sizeable trove of information [was] collected by
committees of the Congress.
Stalins Secret Agents is a rather short book at 294 pages, and so is best considered an
introductory overview rather than an in-depth explication of all that is revealed by the sources. It invites
the reader, in effect, to make further study. It would be rewarding to get into much greater detail about
personalities and policies, about the impact on twentieth-century history and into the stories of treachery
and human tragedy that are inherent in events such as Operation Keelhaul, the betrayal of Poland and
the rest of eastern Europe, the promotion of Mao over Chiang Kai-shek in China; and, among many
others, the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals dishonest shielding of the Soviet Union from blame for the
Katyn Forest massacre. There is much more, and countless personal stories that cry out to be told.
A major error of Cold War studies, Evans and Romerstein say, is the seemingly pervasive notion
that the major if not the only problem posed by Communists in official positions was that of spying.
They acknowledge the importance of espionage, which led to the theft of our atomic secrets, [and of]
confidential data such as the dcvelopment of radar, jet propulsion, and other military systems; but they
say that as important in some respects and often more so was the question of policy influence. We
will see the truth of this as we review what the book tells us about specific personalities and policy
choices.
Although he didnt hold a cabinet post, Harry Hopkins was for the better part of a decade
[Franklin] Roosevelts most powerful adviser, the closeness exemplified by his living in the White
House for three years. In a book by British historian Christopher Andrew, the KGB defector Oleg
Gordievsky was quoted as recalling a lecture by veteran KGB operative Iskhak Akhmerov in which
Akhmerov said Hopkins was the most important Soviet war-time agent in the United States. The
historian later modified his account to say Akhmerov meant Hopkins was merely an unconscious
1 The Venona books are: Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and
the American Response, 1939-1957 (Washington, DC: National Security Agency and Central Intelligence
Agency, 1996); Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets (Washington, DC: Regnery,
2000); and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

agent. For many purposes, as we will see, it hardly matters which sort of agent the Soviet Union
considered Hopkins to be. It may surprise many Americans that President Roosevelt himself for
reasons that almost certainly mixed his personal predilections and the influence of Hopkins, his wife
Eleanor, and others around him allowed himself to serve as the worlds most powerful point-man for
Stalin, whom he greatly admired. Evans and Romerstein write of a wartime policy that was pro-Soviet
in the extreme, and say that the President himself was the most obvious and most powerful influence
of this nature. Hopkins was there at Roosevelts side promoting precisely that attitude.
Roosevelt made Hopkins the overall director of the Lend-Lease program extending aid to
Americas wartime allies, which under Hopkins would increasingly be conducted for the benefit of
Moscow with British (and American) interests tagging after. Major George Racey Jordan of the U.S.
Army Air Corps, who was in charge of wartime shipments to Russia via an air base in Montana,
testified in 1949, according to Evans and Romerstein, about massive shipments to Russia of official U.S.
documents, running to many thousands of pages, concerning technical and scientific matters in excess of
Lend-Lease requirements. Jordan said the documents concerned specifications he had seen involving
an installation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a supersecret wartime site for work on atomic weapons.
The conferences at Teheran in November 1943 and Yalta in February 1945 were in several ways
geopolitical disasters for the non-Communist world, as we will see when we discuss them for their own
sakes. Evans and Romerstein write that Roosevelt at Teheran and Yalta adopted a strategy of distancing
himself from Churchill and making common cause with Stalin. This included making a series of
unfunny jokes at Churchills expense plus side remarks to Stalin about the evils of British colonialism.
FDR told his Labor Secretary that at Teheran Stalin broke into a deep guffaw I kept it up until Stalin
was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him Uncle Joe. Hopkins was present at Teheran (as
he later was at Yalta), and we see the parallelism between Hopkins and Roosevelt when we are told that
Hopkins took to denouncing the British for imperialism, colonialism, and reaction, [and] spoke in
glowing terms of Stalin. It tells us a good deal about the pro-Soviet cocoon in which FDR found himself
when Evans and Romerstein say that at Yalta notably absent were ranking U.S. experts who knew a lot
about the Soviets. In their place, as counselors at the highest policy levels, were Hopkins and the
recently-appointed Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., who was a foreign policy novice and
who had been appointed simply because he was a protg of Hopkins.
Stalins Secret Agents focuses so specifically on Communist espionage and influence that a reader
who is otherwise unversed in such things hardly gets a feel for the larger intellectual atmosphere in the
United States in the 1930s. Many hundreds of intellectuals, such as those who wrote for the New
Republic and The Nation, were exhilarated by their enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, a love that actually
began in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1930s became known as the Red Decade.
Hundreds of Communist front groups dotted the scene, and for purposes of influence it hardly
mattered whether someone formally joined the Communist Party or not. It was this that provided the
broader context for the atmosphere around FDR. It isnt surprising when Evans and Romerstein tell us
that Mrs. [Eleanor] Roosevelt had around her a coterie of youthful leftists and was a point of contact for
outside forces who took a favorable view of Moscow, the American Communist Party, and all manner of
pro-Soviet causes.
Lauchlin Currie, identified as a Soviet agent in the Venona decrypts, served in the White House as
FDRs economic adviser from 1939 to 1945. Alger Hiss, who at the time had fairly junior status in the
State Department, was singled out [by FDR] as someone who should go to Yalta. Although Hisss role
at Yalta is, typically, treated as minimal in the conventional histories, Evans and Romerstein say the
Stettinius papers are most revealing on the role of Hiss The documents indicate that Hiss was an
outspoken participant, addressing a wide array of topics.
It would be a mistake to think that the cocoon around Roosevelt was the sum total of Communist
influence. Harry Dexter White (Venona), for example, was a top economic adviser to U.S. Secretary of
the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. He played a leading role in drafting the Morgenthau Plan to turn

Germany into a purely agricultural country after World War II; was at the center of the successful effort to
prevent a peaceful settlement between the U.S. and Japan in 1941 (thus deflecting Japan into war with the
United States rather than, as the Soviets feared, attacking Russia); and, in other ways too numerous to
mention here, ranked as an equal to (or better than) Hiss as the Soviet Unions top agent in the United
States. The Evans-Romerstein books discussion of a good many others merits attention, and should
encourage readers to probe further into the specifics behind policies that in so many ways proved
damaging.
We are told much about the positions advanced by the agents. They include:
The elevation of Mao and undercutting of Chiang, leading to the Communization of China.
Until mid-summer 1943 i.e., until Japan was in retreat and in no position to threaten Russia the
Communist line toward Chiang Kai-shek was highly favorable. At that time, however, signals went out to
the Communist Left that Chiang was corrupt, despotic, and a collaborator with the Japanese. The
composite meaning was that Chiang was now the bad guy in China, and that the only reliable U.S.
allies in the country were the Communists serving under Mao. 2 The story of how American policy under
Roosevelt and Truman led to Maos eventual victory is a long and sordid one, with which everyone
wanting to understand twentieth century history should become familiar.3 It is rarely commented upon,
but is nevertheless of major significance that the Communization of China was a sine qua non of the
Vietnam War and, before that, of the second phase of the Korean War (the part of the war after MacArthur
defeated North Korea and Mao sent his forces across the Yalu). The policies leading up to North Koreas
invasion of the south also deserve to be widely known, but arent part of the Evans-Romerstein book. 4
The elevation of Tito and undercutting of Mihailovich in Yugoslavia. Stalins Secret Agents
devotes a chapter to Betrayal in the Balkans in which it tells of the struggle during World War II
between Communist forces under Tito and anti-Communist forces under the pro-Western Serbian
General Draza Mihailovich for postwar control of Yugoslavia. When Hitler attacked Yugoslavia in the
spring of 1941 Mihailovich led a breakaway group of officers into the mountains to carry on
resistance, assuming the mantle of anti-Nazi leadership in the Balkans. As, however, Communist
guerrillas became organized near the end of 1942, Communist and pro-Soviet propaganda outlets
suddenly began portraying him not as a gallant ally but as a collaborator and traitor. The previously
unheralded Tito would be acclaimed instead. [The parallel should be noted between this and what was
done vis a vis Chiang Kai-shek in China.] Evans and Romerstein tell us that Communists such as
Howard Fast in the United States promoted this line. When the United States OSS and the British
intelligence unit in Cairo, part of British agencies riddled with Soviet agents, chimed in, even Winston
Churchill was persuaded by it. The result was that at the Teheran conference in 1943 the Big Three
would issue a statement promising generous aid to Tito. Mihailovich, one of the true heroes of the war,
paid with his life: In 1946, Mihailovich would be hunted down, given a Red show trial, and put to death
by Tito.5

2 The author of this review read all volumes of the New Republic (except one that was missing from the
library shelves) from 1914 to 1983 as part of his preparation for his book Liberalism in Contemporary
America, and one of the surprising about-faces that he noticed was that the magazines glowing reports
about Chiang Kai-shek suddenly turned to bitter condemnation, comporting fully with the shift Evans and
Romerstein report.
3 See Anthony Kubek, How the Far East Was Lost: American Policy and the Creation of Communist
China (1963).
4 For a detailed discussion of how U.S. policies set the stage for the Norths invasion of South Korea,
see Herbert Hoover (George Nash, ed.), Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoovers Secret History of the
Second World War and Its Aftermath (Hoover Institution Press, 2011), pp. 737-752.

The Morgenthau Plan. At the Quebec II conference between FDR and Churchill in September
1944, the two leaders signed off on the Morgenthau Plan for Europe proposing [as weve seen] that
Germany be demolished as an industrial nation and reduced strictly to agrarian status. The plan was
named for Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and supported by Harry Dexter White and Harry Hopkins. It
was drawn up prior to the conference by Morgenthaus staff, no fewer than six [of whom] would be
named in sworn testimony, Venona decrypts, or other official security records as ideological Communists
or Soviet agents. Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his memoirs that when he read the Quebec
memo aloud to Roosevelt, the President was frankly staggered by this and said he had no idea how he
could have initialed this. Evans and Romerstein say that Churchill, however, well knew what he was
signing, but retreated from his initial opposition when Morgenthau promised him a $6.5 billion postwar
loan to a financially stricken Britain.
The threat of such stripping, together with the Allied demand for unconditional surrender,
stiffened the spine of German resistance against the American-British advance in the West. This allowed
the Red Army time to penetrate more deeply into Germany and central Europe. The plan, if carried out
(which it was for two years after the war ended in May 1945), would have ensured that there would be
no nation on the continent that could hinder the growth of Soviet power. As we speak of these effects,
the devastating impact on the German people, for whom a deindustrialized economy could not sustain the
population, should of course not be thought incidental. Evans and Romerstein point to a passage in
Morgenthaus diary: I dont care what happens to the population Why the hell should I worry about
what happens to their people?
When faced with opposition from Stimson and others, Roosevelt seemingly backed off [and]
the plan was nominally repudiated. The rhetoric of reparations was substituted for vengeance; but
de facto the industrial stripping continued, as we have said, until the summer of 1947.
Operation Keelhaul. This was the code name given by the U.S. military to the forcible return to
the Soviet Union of two million anti-Soviet refugees. Endorsed in a secret protocol adopted on the
last day of the [Yalta] conference, it was handled purely as a military matter. The people to be treated
thus were a mixed assortment. A sizeable number were Russians who had been imprisoned by the Nazis
and pressed into service as troops or work battalions. Others were anti-Communists who had joined the
Germans. Many had left the USSR before the war began, and had long since forsworn allegiance to the
Kremlin Still others included the elderly, the infirm, and women and children caught up in the vast
migrations of the war.
Evans and Romerstein quote Anthony Eden, the British foreign minister at the time, as saying that
British policy was to send all the Russians home, whether they want to go or not and by force if
necessary. Eden recognized, as he said, that we shall be sending some of them to their death. The
scenes that followed defy description: The captives fought desperately to avoid going back to
Russia A number would commit suicide, some first killing their children British and American
soldiers bludgeoned helpless prisoners, herding them into boxcars and forcing them onto ships that would
take them to their fate in Russia. As with all these subjects, Stalins Secret Agents gives an overview, but
leaves much more to be said. They direct readers to Julius Epsteins 1973 book 6 as the most
authoritative American book about the subject.
Evans and Romerstein tell of a number of other policies of great importance to the geopolitical
outcome of World War II that were influenced by Soviet agents. These include the effort to bring the
Soviet Union into the war against Japan, agreed to in yet another secret pact at Yalta, which led to the
Soviet occupation of Manchuria, into which Mao moved his forces; the seeking of a coup detat against
5 The authors speak highly of three books by David Martin on the Mihailovich betrayal: Ally Betrayed
(1946), Patriot or Traitor (1978), and The Web of Disinformation (1990).
6 Julius Epstein, Operation Keelhaul (New York: Devin Adair, 1973).

Syngman Rhee in South Korea; the bisecting of Poland agreed to at Teheran and Yalta, and indeed the
condonation of Stalins grip in Eastern Europe in general; and several others.
Its unfortunate that there is no discussion of what was perhaps the most vital strategic decision in
the European theatre of the war.7 This was the decision for the invasion of Normandy rather than to do
what Churchill wanted done, which was to have an American/British invasion of the continent up
through the Balkans, getting to central Europe before the Red Army.8 The de facto, on-the-ground
military control of Eastern Europe was, in fact, much more important than anything agreed to verbally at
the later conferences. Once the Red Army was there, the fate of those countries was sealed until the
collapse, decades later, of the Communist system. Stalin had long pressed for a second front in France,
not in the Balkans. It was Stalin and Roosevelt who prevailed in the final decision. We can reasonably
infer, from all that Evans and Romerstein have told us about the cocoon around FDR, that men like
Hopkins and Currie were by no means diffident on the subject.
The conferences at Teheran, Yalta. Our authors say the actions taken at Teheran and Yalta were
the culmination of a process that had been underway, in some respects, since the 1930s. Speaking most
specifically of Yalta, they consider it the conference that more than any other determined the contours of
the postwar landscape. We have mentioned the secret protocol approving Operation Keelhaul, and the
secret pact to bring the Soviet Union into the final weeks of the war with Japan. An action we havent
mentioned was the agreement approving the use of forced (i.e., slave) labor as reparations. Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin promulgated a Declaration on Liberated Europe that reiterated the high-sounding
phrases of the Atlantic Charter, but that was window-dressing to put a better face on the bisecting of
Poland, which gave the Soviet Union eastern Poland and moved Polands western boundary deep into
Germany; and on the ratification of Soviet hegemony over what soon became the captive nations of
eastern Europe. Fatefully, the agreements concerning Outer Mongolia and Manchuria were at the
expense of China (setting the stage, as weve seen, for Maos take-over), and we are told that this was
done though Chinas leaders werent at Yalta, werent consulted, and would learn to their dismay about
the concessions only later. Roosevelt signed off on the Morgenthau Plan, as we have seen, at the earlier
Quebec II conference.
FDR had collapsed at a dinner meeting at the Teheran conference in late 1943, making his
physical decline especially apparent. Evans and Romerstein say that presidential historian Robert Ferrell
has written in some detail [about] the evidence that Roosevelt had long suffered from chronic heart
disease. The hypocrisies that often flaw American democracy come to the fore when we are told that
FDRs declining health was kept secret from the American electorate prior to the 1944 presidential
election (just as knowledge of the policy toward Poland was withheld to avoid losing the votes of several
million Americans of Polish descent). By the time of the Yalta conference, FDR was a dying man, as
shown by his shockingly haggard appearance in a photograph taken at Yalta and included in Evans and
Romersteins book. The authors quote Harry Hopkins as saying he doubted that Roosevelt had heard half
of what had been said at the Yalta sessions. It seems unbelievable, especially in light of FDRs
7 U. S. General Mark Clark, commander of the Allied Armies in Italy, felt strongly about its importance.
In his book Calculated Risk, as quoted by Herbert Hoover, Clark wrote Not alone in my opinion, but in
the opinion of a number of experts [not] pushing on into the Balkans was one of the outstanding
political mistakes of the war. Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, p. 389.
8 See Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, pp. 358-9, where Secretary of State Cordell Hull is quoted as saying
that Mr. Churchill had argued and continued to argue up to the Tehran Conference that the invasion
of Europe by the Western Allies should be through the Balkans, the soft underbelly of Europe He also
felt than (sic) an Anglo-American entry into the Balkans and southern Europe would prevent a Soviet
rush into the area which would permanently establish the authority of the Soviet Union there. Hoover
quotes General Albert Wedemeyer as reporting that Roosevelt did not believe that the Soviets wanted to
take over the Balkan states but wished only to establish kinship with other Slavic peoples.

condition, that the vice president, Harry Truman, wasnt made privy to the decisions made at Yalta or
Teheran until after his succession to the presidency when FDR died on April 12, 1945.
Stalins Secret Agents is an important book. It is almost certainly bound to take its place, were sorry to
say, as part of an immense literature on a great many subjects that is hardly acknowledged as existing by
the pundits who, decade after decade, put forward the conventional histories that are absorbed by an
unquestioning (educated) public. Those who seek any understanding of the contemporary world will
find it necessary to immerse themselves in that alternative literature. American universities today are
emphasizing studies in critical thinking. If they are serious about it, they will direct their students to
peruse the alternate realities that are to be discovered on so many things.
Dwight D. Murphey