The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (12 page)

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On Reading the Book

By
Ned May

Gates of Vienna

August
15, 2013

Yesterday
I
pointed
out some of the people
who have read
Diana West’s book
American Betrayal
and recommended it to others — in
contrast to the many folks who have condemned the book while admitting they
haven’t read it.

Interestingly
enough, except for the original scathing review by Ronald Radosh at Front Page
Magazine, all the negative reviews I have seen are by people who have not read
the book, whereas all the positive reviews I have seen are by people who have
read it.

Funny
about that.

Dr.
Andrew Bostom
reports
that
“Historian and journalist
Lars
Hedegaard
,
who has — wait for it — actually read
Diana West’s American Betrayal, made these very insightful comments on the
book”:

What
Diana West has done is to dynamite her way through several miles of bedrock. On
the other side of the tunnel there is a vista of a new past. Of course folks
are baffled. Few people have the capacity to take this in. Her book is among
the most well documented I have ever read. It is written in an unusual style
viewed from the perspective of the historian—but it probably couldn’t
have been done any other way.

A
commenter at Gates of Vienna named QiPo has also
read
the book
:

I
devoured each and every word of “American Betrayal” during which I was
compelled to put the book down so that I could catch my breath again and again!
It is magnificent! For those who have read Chambers’ “Witness”, Posner’s “Why
America Slept”, Pacepa’s “Disinformation”, Grimes and Vertefeuille’s “Circle of
Treason”, or Evans and Romerstein’s “Stalin’s Secret Agents”, Ms. West’s book
allows you to play connect the dots with world events in a way that clearly rips
away the lies of the statist-progressives both in our past and for today. My
years of intense historical studies since 9/11 were confirmed by her immaculate
scholarship and well reasoned conclusions.

Paul
Fein, another commenter at Gates of Vienna, is not only reading the book, but
supplements his appreciation of it with
his
own observations based on decades of experience in military intelligence
.
He says, “My only serious complaint about Diana West’s book so far is that she
is far too optimistic”:

I
have only just started reading Diana West’s book so what I write now may not be
exactly what I will think once I am finished. However, I am already finding the
criticisms of book surprisingly (well, actually not surprising at all) off
topic. The basics thesis of the book, as is made abundantly clear in the
introduction, is about the corrupting influence of Soviet penetration of the major
institutions of the West, in particular the government and other institutions
of the United States. Her point is that at some point the penetration becomes
so great that the policy makers must indulge in self-deception in order to
avoid admitting their own failures to stop the corruption. Eventually,
self-deception becomes so ingrained that the policy makers’ abilities to
rationally or even moderately objectively look at the world are, in effect,
short-circuited. She even uses the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes to make
her point. It is not simply that no one dares to admit that the Emperor has no
clothes. Rational thinking has degenerated to the point, that the policy makers
in their minds really do not see the clothes. Diana West even says something I
had been saying to nearly everyone I trained at work since at least the late
1980’s that in the real world the child who cries out “The Emperor is naked” is
punished or at least given re-education. These arguments about whether this or
that fact is 100% correct or slightly off or whatever misses the point of her
argument. She only needs to prove that there was enough Soviet penetration to
corrupt the system and especially the thinking of the players in the system. It
is quite proper to correct any and all errors, great and small; but we should
also not lose sight of the intent of the book.

I
worked in military intelligence within the Department of Defense for nearly 33
years as a collector and as an analyst going all the way back to service in
Vietnam (another war we lost for no good reason). I find reading this book
difficult, not because I think it is a bad book; but because after reading even
a few sentences, my mind strays to so many things that I experienced or learned
that confirm her thesis and I become so angry that I put the book down and rage
“at the gods,” sometimes for an hour or two. It was during one of these rages
that I decided to write this comment and share with your readers a couple of
incidents that might have some bearing on Diana West’s thesis. While some of
this is may not be common knowledge, I can assure you that none of this will in
anyway disclose classified information. These are just things that I have
experienced or picked up in a career in which I took my oath of office to defend
the Constitution against “all enemies foreign or domestic” very seriously.

I
have not reached the point where West discusses the career of Harry Dexter
White. White was not a member of the Communist Party, but he was a Soviet spy
while he was either Assistant Secretary of the Treasury or Deputy Secretary of
the Treasury. (I am writing this comment “off the top of my head”; and so where
I am not certain of the details, I will try to avoid error by using wording
that indicates that uncertainty.) Perhaps West mentions these two interesting
events. First is the Morgenthau plan. Morgenthau was Treasury Secretary and is
credited with the plan which proposed that Germany should be completely
de-industrialized, i.e. reduced to an agricultural country, and divided into, I
believe, 5 independent countries. While the plan carries Morgenthau’s name, it
is not at all clear how and who originated the plan and how the plan was
developed. What is clear, however, is that the one country that would gain most
from a strategic viewpoint from this plan was the Soviet Union. For centuries,
Russia had been held back from expanding her influence in East Central Europe
by first the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then a united Germany. The defeat of
Austria in WWI eliminated the traditional obstacle to Russian expansion. The
Morgenthau Plan would have permanently eliminated Germany. As it was, the
Morgenthau Plan would have undermined any anti-Hitler, anti-Nazi resistance
movement since the very existence of the German state, as opposed to its mere
defeat and occupation, was now at stake. I cannot state for certain that the
Morgenthau plan was the brain-child of White, but he was positioned to
influence its content. I also find it very interesting that such a strategic
plan would originate from the Treasury Department, rather than State or Army.

The
second incident can definitely be traced back to White. At the end of WWII the
U.S. allocated a large sum of gold to be shipped to China to stabilize the
currency there. The man in charge of overseeing the shipment — Harry
Dexter White. Somehow, the gold was never shipped. Chinese currency had been
inflated during the war, and prices skyrocketed. Chinese inflation rivaled that
of the Weimar Republic. While one may argue (very weakly in my opinion) that
the inflation did not benefit the Mao’s forces, there can be no doubt that it
undermined Chiang Kai-Shek’s government. The inflation issue even came up in a
Chinese history or government class I took in about 1990, when inflation was
becoming a problem in China. The professor, hardly a right-winger, flat out
stated that the Communist Chinese government was in 1990 terrified of a new
inflation since they had come to power on the failure of the Republic’s money.

I
read someplace that at one point in his career Alger Hiss turned down the offer
to be the number 2 man at the State Department. Instead he took the job of
Assistant Secretary for Administration (or whatever the exact title of the job
was at the time). Why take the unglamorous job? How did Stalin come to power?
His rivals had the glamorous jobs, the “powerful” jobs. Stalin was essentially
only the top bureaucrat within the Communist Party. It took him about 10 years;
but when he decided to move on his rivals, his people were in all the right
places. Am I saying that Alger Hiss was putting Communists into all the right
places in the State Department? He surely protected several Communists. That
was bad of course, but let’s return to Diana West’s thesis. He was in position
to promote people with the “right understanding” of the Soviet Union. People
who understood that “Yes, they are Communist, but [fill in the blank].” People
who are sophisticated. People who know how the world really works. You know the
type. Lenin called them “useful idiots.” Spies can be purged. Bureaucrats are
forever (or as close to forever as is possible on Earth). The useful idiocracy
then develops an incestuous relationship with academia. This means that the
effects of Alger Hiss are with us even now.

In
the late 1970s or very early 1980s I took a class at the Defense Intelligence
School (or it might have become the Defense Intelligence College at the time).
The title of the class was Soviet Intelligence and Security Services. Even
though the instructor has long since passed on, I will not mention his name
because that might still be something sensitive even now. Let me just call him
“Mr. Smith.” Mr. Smith had been very high in the counter-intelligence of
America. In fact he had been very close to James Angleton, a legend in
counter-intelligence. His was one of the most remarkable classes I have ever
had. To say it was eye-opening would be the crudest of understatements. It was
one of the few classes I have ever had (and I have spent years and years in the
classroom on both sides of the desk) in which every session was like a semester
in any other class.

On
the first day of class he pointed something out about academia. It is that
Diana West thesis again. He asked us how many schools offering a Ph.D. in
Soviet Studies requires a course on the KGB. Answer at that time — zero,
nada, null, zilch. How many schools offered a regularly scheduled course on the
KGB as an elective? Not a course each semester or even each year. Just
something regular enough so that a Ph.D. student could at least study the KGB
in the classroom once before completing the degree. Answer at that time —
zero, nada, null, zilch. Now in the late 70s most professors would have agreed
that the Soviet Union was at least something like a police state. Yet even with
a Ph.D. in Soviet Studies, these so-called experts in the Soviet Union had
never even studied the police organization of the police state. I look back on
my degrees in Political Science and International Relations, and I just shake
my head at how utterly naive and uninformed the vast majority of my professors
had been. They really did not understand what the Soviet Union was all about.
One of the reasons I retired was that I was tired of working with all the “best
and brightest” that were coming into my profession. There is no one quite so
stupid as a high IQ, over-credentialed fool.

Another
story from that class, if I may. Mr. Smith knew many people in world outside
the intelligence profession, in particular many authors. Herbert Romerstein is
(or perhaps now was) the author of many books on the Soviet threat, and he was
with us for a couple of class sessions. One incident he discussed has always
stayed with me. There may be some of your readers who remember the “Days of
Rage” at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. One of the more notable
accomplishments of those days was the trial of the Chicago Seven, radicals who
were put on trial for their activities in Chicago. The trial was particularly
notable (back to that old thesis thing again) because it was one of the turning
points in American jurisprudence. The trial became a joke, lawlessness and
subversion were trivialized. For those who remember the Days of Rage, have you
ever wondered how that many “students” managed to get to Chicago? Who organized
their lodging? Who organized their transportation? What about their meals? Who
paid for all this? The answer—the Communist Party of the USA. Mr.
Romerstein told us that he had a conversation with one of the Chicago Seven
some years after the Convention. I don’t remember which one, let’s call him
Chicago 3. In the conversation, Chicago 3 said (as best I can remember), “Boy,
did we use the Communists!! They did all the work and paid for everything, and
we got all the glory.” Romerstein replied, “No, Chicago 3, the Communists used
you.” Useful idiots come in all shapes and sizes.

Final
story from that class. One of the students during a session on the McCarthy era
asked how many agents had actually infiltrated the American government. “Was it
100s, a thousand?” Mr. Smith’s reply, “Goodness no.” (Again, not actual
quotations. Just trying to reproduce the meaning of the conversation.) “Well
then, how many? 50?” “Not more than a couple dozen. Fifty would be a disaster.”
Remember, this is a class in which every student has the clearances to discuss
this topic at all but the most compartmented of levels. Certainly, we could
have been given a general idea of the true level of penetration. Also, remember
that Mr. Smith had been a counter-intelligence agent for many years and had
reached the highest levels of the profession. I had the opportunity after the
class to speak with Mr. Smith several times. I never got even a hint of an
impression that he was less than totally honest in what he said. We now know
that there were at least 500+ Soviet agents operating in the U.S. government,
10 times what Mr. Smith called a disaster. This is just what we know. The most
successful agents are the ones we don’t even know exist.