The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners by Diana West Page A

`fifty years after the
event.’ The highly praised work by Haynes
and Klehr on Venona was based primarily on documents supplied and edited by the
government.” (Emphasis added.)
    Come
to think it, this government-handout aspect to the Venona cables is an
excellent point to keep in mind.
    Novak:
“As serious historians, they would have benefited had they conducted interviews
with living participants in the Venona affair rather than engage in unfair and
unwarranted attacks on the Schecters and me.”
    Not to mention Kirby.
    The record the Schecters preserved
by interviewing Kirby is at least as debatable today as it was ten years ago,
and it should be possible to do so without being smeared for, as Radosh writes
yet again, promoting a “vast conspiracy theory.”
    The only good to come of this
exercise is that I am now aware of the evidence marshaled by M. Stanton Evans
that makes it patently clear the extent and depth to which Truman was
well-informed by the FBI of Soviet penetration of the federal government
– and long before Venona came on line.
    There is one more point to make.
Radosh also sees Truman’s exoneration in what he describes as “a 1949 FBI memo
indicating that Omar Bradley had decided not to inform Truman about the
Venona program, which was at the time top-secret.”
    That’s not at all what the 1949 FBI
memo says. The memo simply states that Gen. Omar Bradley would assume the
responsibility for briefing the president or anyone else in authority “if the
contents of
any of this [Venona] material so demanded.”
    The memo doesn’t inform us whether Bradley decided one way or
the other; just that he had assumed the responsibility to do so.
    Radosh sums up:
    “In
short, a third key element in West’s vast conspiracy theory is so much hot
air.”
    Radosh can repeat the phrase “conspiracy theory” all he
wants, but the evidence doesn’t back him up.

 
    CHAPTER 5:

 
    THE
AGGRESSIVELY ATTACKED DETAIL #4: GEORGE H. EARLE
    Chapter 10 of American Betrayal contains the most serious indictment of the US
Communist movement for having spawned the traitors, fellow travellers and dupes
who worked inside the federal government to advance Stalin’s interests. In so
doing, they appear to have successfully thwarted multiple attempts by
anti-Nazi, anti-Communist Germans to gain US assistance that might have helped
them overthrow Hitler, surrender German armies to US and British forces in
exchange for unspecified assistance in keeping the Red Army out of eastern and
central Europe – a mission we spent the next four decades fighting to
achieve from beleaguered bases in Western Europe. This might have brought World
War II to a close much earlier than 1945.
    Two high level Roosevelt
administration officials – George H. Earle, former governor of
Pennsylvania and FDR’s special emissary in Europe, and Gen. Albert C.
Wedemeyer, a senior war strategist – would write after the war that they
believed, if successful, these German Underground efforts might have helped
bring World War II to a close as early as 1943.
    In other words, there was a chance not taken due to Communist
penetration of the policy-making chain in Washington and London that might
have saved millions, even tens of millions of lives.
    It is the story of these German Underground
efforts that I discuss in Chapter 10, and the obstacles they faced in both
Washington and London, where pro-Soviet influence – and Soviet influence
operators and agents – were able to keep these anti-Nazi, anti-Communists
at bay.
    Why would that be the case? It was
Stalin’s goal to take Europe. In 1943, his Red Army was still inside Russia. At
a certain point in my research it began to dawn on me that as far as Stalin and
his secret agents were concerned, World War II could conceivably end too soon
– before Stalin had extended his evil empire into Europe. I describe
this phenomenon at length in American
Betrayal.
    That’s the story I