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Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government

by Dave Martin — (abridged by henrymakow.com) May 19, 2013

Isaac Don Levine, the man who set up and took part in the Whittaker Chambers-Adolf Berle meeting confirms that FDR dismissed evidence of Soviet spy infiltration.
“When I called on Berle a couple of weeks later, he indicated to me that the President had given him the cold shoulder after hearing his account of the Chambers disclosures.  Although I learned later, from two different sources who had social relations with Berle, that Roosevelt, in effect, had told him to “go jump in a lake” upon the suggestion of a probe into the Chambers charges, I do not recall hearing that exact phrase from Berle.  To the best of my recollection, the President dismissed the matter rather brusquely with an expletive remark on this order: “Oh, forget it, Adolf.”   Eyewitness to History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century, pp. 197-8 (1975)
It is very, very hard to come to any other conclusion than that [Evans and Romerstein,] who could well be described as America’s leading surviving Red hunters, are covering up for Franklin D. Roosevelt. That impression is greatly reinforced by Evans in a presentation he made to The Heritage Foundation, which one can listen to here. He is asked specifically about Roosevelt’s complicity in permitting his government to be laced by Communist agents, and Evans attributes it all to FDR’s naiveté.   Perhaps someone should have also asked him about the failure of the FBI in all this, the people who have the national responsibility for counter-espionage.  But the FBI ultimately works for the president.  He had the power to make them stand down, and there is every indication that that is just what he did.
Further indication that the authors are covering up for Roosevelt is their failure to mention at all the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky,left.   Krivitsky, as former chief of Soviet intelligence in Europe, knew a good deal more about Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government than Chambers did.  But instead of being embraced and welcomed by the Roosevelt administration, he was harassed by them.  In February of 1941 he was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in a Washington, DC, hotel room.  The District police ruled the death a suicide after only a cursory investigation.  Who would have had the power to, in effect, make the DC police stand down on this one?
The authors do talk about the very well connected Soviet spy, Michael Straight, who as publisher of The New Republic hired Henry Wallace as editor, but they have no reference to the extremely revealing biography Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, by Australian journalist Roland Perry.   Perhaps that is because Perry, like Levine in his similarly ignored book, has a lot to say about Walter Krivitsky.  Perry even suggests that Straight, a family friend of the Roosevelt’s working for the State Department at the time and feeling threatened, was involved in Krivitsky’s assassination.  (See the review by Wes Vernon.)

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