Edward Murrow – The Pull Of The Land

In Seeds Planted, I noted the profound, injurious, generational influence Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Frederick Nietzsche have had on Western civilization over the last one hundred and fifty years or so. In other posts, such as Universities: 1960s, I’ve cited the very real, practical impact of such philosophies on professors, students, corporate, and government elites in the 20th and 21st centuries.

To further illustrate this very real, deleterious impact, a brief review of two major events of the Cold War would help.

This post will look at the European event, the next will consider the Asian.

As a kid, I was assured by the Weekly Reader that Marshal Tito was a heroic maverick within Eastern European Communism. That he was a thorn in Stalin’s and, later, Khrushchev’s sides. If you check the ever-so-reliable Wikipedia, you’ll read, “During World War II, he was the leader of the Yugoslav Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in German-occupied Europe.”

With what is now known, and has been known since the mid 1990s when the Venona decrypts (secret messages between Moscow and its American agents) plus Soviet archives were made available, it is inconceivable, but all-too-familiar, that Wikipedia would print such drivel. It is also revealing that the reality behind Tito and his rise to power is still unknown to the vast majority of Americans.

It is most important to keep in mind that the Venona messages were known to United States intelligence back in the 50s. Yes, the “Red Scare” decade, so called. But these were kept undisclosed to Congressional investigators who were in turn castigated — by those hiding the evidence — for “looking for Communists under every bed”.

Not only that, but what the messages revealed was also known to major Communist agents, such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, who, at great risk to their lives, informed the FBI and others in the executive branch (the White House) in both Democrat (Roosevelt, Truman) and Republican (Eisenhower) administrations, each of which stonewalled and did so successfully. The Uniparty is not a new thing.

This knowledge was known and certainly was obtainable by “hard-nosed reporters” like Edward Murrow and Drew Pearson, who instead obfuscated, diverted, and reported calumniously against men and women who attempted to sound the alarm.

George Clooney, who came along decades later, is certainly without excuse. He knew that Annie Moss was indeed a Communist agent. However, his movie focused on Murrow-hagiography and McCarthy-condemnation. In a press interview, Clooney admitted that he knew she had been a Communist but that the issue Murrow supposedly harped on was her right to face her accuser. This is poppycock. She had been afforded that right, something the movie clearly obfuscated. But, of course, if the movie had made it clear that she was a Communist, there would have been no movie.

Most of us will recall that Hitler and Stalin, supposed “enemies to the death”, had agreed to a pact in 1939. This had all the usual suspects clamoring for “peace” and non-intervention except for Japan. There, we were to pull all the stops to help our gallant ally, Chiang Kai-shek. We will look at that part of the sphere, and the dizzying volte-face from Chiang to Mao, in the next post.

While the Pact was still in force, Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in early 1941. Resistance to Hitler was a group named the Chetniks, headed by General Draja Mihailovich.

Mihailovich and the Chetniks fought valiantly and successfully until the Hitler-Stalin Pact was abrogated in the late summer of 1941. Then, mirabile-dictu, another “resistance” group arose, called the Partisans. Unlike the Chetniks, who were both anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, the Partisans were Communist. Their leader was Josep Broz, a Stalin protégé whom we know as Tito.

By the end of 1941, after Pearl Harbor, the United States had entered the war as a Soviet ally and in 1942 the pro-Tito blitz in the power corridors of Washington had begun. From whence this push for Tito?

Venona fingers two agents, Duncan C. Lee in Washington and Cedric Belfrage in New York City. Lee was the top assistant of the head of American intelligence, “Wild Bill” Donovan, and Belfrage was the top assistant of Donovan’s counterpart, William Stephenson, who ran British intelligence in North America.

The two men actively recruited Communists and trained them in guerrilla warfare and techniques.

As a side note, Donovan was one of the more colorful figures in modern American history. However, his cold pragmatism whereby he had no concern with Communist agents just so long as they “fought Hitler”, misled him and, more importantly, harmed his country beyond calculation.

The trained guerrilla units were assembled in Cairo where yet another Soviet British agent, James Klugmann, recruiter of the Cambridge Five — Blunt, Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Cairncross — operated most successfully.

Klugmann was Tito’s biggest promoter, submitting countless reports praising Tito and denigrating Mihailovich. He attributed military action by Mihailovich to Tito, he showed briefing maps that falsely reflected vast Partisan control over much of Yugoslavia, and he suppressed news of Nazi statements where Mihailovich (not Tito) was named as the enemy of the Reich.

He even lied about Mihailovich’s actions against the Italians by calling them “meetings” and “evidence of collaboration” between the Chetniks and Mussolini.

Incredible — because it was incredible indeed — were his reports describing the Partisans as paragons of virtue and as progressives and lovers of democracy and respecters of rights, ad nauseum.

A less well-known American, Linn Farish of the OSS, the predecessor agency to the CIA, also added his poisonous two cents. He flew into Yugoslavia to work with the Partisans and the British and after a mere 6 weeks there, he submitted a report that mirrored those by Klugmann, praising Tito and condemning Mihailovich and the Chetniks as traitors and Nazi collaborators; a complete inversion of the reality.

Farish had not spent a single minute with Mihailovich; clearly his “report” was hearsay from Klugmann and the Communist Partisans. He even went so far as to say the Partisans reflect the founding of the United States, whose patriots are forerunners of men such as Tito.

His “report”, by some bureaucratic miracle, was placed in the hands of FDR shortly before the Tehran conference with Churchill and Stalin. It became the first item on the agenda and Roosevelt handed it to Stalin, who must have striven mightily to suppress a chortle.

Within weeks, Mihailovich, the anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, was abandoned by England and the United States, and all resources — American, British, and Soviet — were channelled to the Communist Tito who hunted Mihailovich down and had him executed after a show trial.

Venona confirms:

Farish was a KGB contact with the code name “Attila”

Duncan C. Lee supplied the Soviets with top classified information, including the D-Day invasion and operations in China and Japan. He also divulged British and American diplomatic negotiating strategy, something Stalin no doubt very much appreciated

Cedric Belfrage reported to Soviet intelligence on private discussions between Winston Churchill and William Stephenson, head of North American British intelligence. He turned over British intelligence for the entire western hemisphere during World War II and shortly thereafter.

James Klugmann was a devout Communist whose fanaticism did not raise Churchill’s, or any American’s, eyebrows, and whose “reports” were taken at face value.

The above, and many more confirmed by Venona and the Soviet Archives, in addition to United States government files, were responsible for the loss of American, British, and allies’ lives whose activities were divulged to the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, the North Korean Communists, and others.

For the most part, these men and their coteries came from privileged backgrounds and enjoyed the very best education offered by the West, including American Ivy League colleges, Cambridge, and others. We will be looking at that “Western education” in future posts.

None were ever brought to justice.

The next post will look at the same playbook followed on the other side of the globe.