Why Does the "Mitrokhin Archive" Claim KGB Paid Mark Lane $6000 in Today's Money to Debunk The Warren Report?

[Dawn Meredith]

On ‎2‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 10:52 AM, Don Jeffries said:

And by the way, trying to claim the "commies" were funding Mark Lane is straight out of the CIA handbook. It also eerily corresponds to how the "Russians" are now used by the establishment left as bogeymen that can be conveniently blamed for any and all dissent in America. 

Tommy, was Joe McCarthy right? After all, in his day, the Soviets were a lot more powerful....

 

Great question Don. You know of course from his fb posts that Tommy completely buys into the Russia hysteria.  It makes me crazy- I refuse to argue this with people who parrot the rants of MSM. 

[Thomas Graves]

On 3/16/2018 at 2:44 PM, Dawn Meredith said:

Great question Don. You know of course from his fb posts that Tommy completely buys into the Russia hysteria.  It makes me crazy- I refuse to argue this with people who parrot the rants of MSM. 

 

Dawn,

 

I assume you're using "MSM" here as a pejorative term and from a conspiracy-theorist's point of view?

Do you consider AP, BBC, USA Today,  NYT, WP to be "MSM," and therefore avoided like the plague?

Can you find any news sources that you not only like, but are rated as having "High" factual reporting (regardless of Left or Right bias) on this website?

https://www.mediabiasfactcheck.com

 

Thank you,

 

--  Tommy 

 

Edited March 29, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[Thomas Graves]

On 2/26/2018 at 8:52 AM, Don Jeffries said:

  .....

Tommy, was Joe McCarthy right? After all, in his day, the Soviets were a lot more powerful....

 

Don,

If you're asking whether or not McCarthy was basically right in his assessment that the U.S. Government (including the CIA) had been been penetrated by Soviet counterintelligence agents and compromised by some home-grown, recruited-by-KGB "moles," yes, he was. 

He was rabid, though, and way over-the-top in the number of people he accused of being said spies and "moles".

--  TG

Edited March 21, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[James DiEugenio]

Dawn and Don (like that one?):

It has been a long held ambition of the rightwing in the USA (both the rabid right and the well funded, sophisticated right) to somehow show that the people who triumphed over Joe McCarthy, e.g. Bobby Kennedy, were actually wrong about the matter.  That somehow, some way, that image of McCarthy as the drunken blowhard being led around by the nose by the ambitious and brutal Roy Cohn, was wrong.  He was really a smart,  courageous, and astute man who was really a true blue patriot.  Maybe a bit loud and boisterous at times, but, hey, extremism in the defense of liberty is not an offense, as Goldwater said.

The opportunity for this long held ambition--by Bill Buckley for one--was  realized with the crack up of the USSR in the early nineties.  Yeltsin's disastrous America backed  "shock doctrine" policies drove the whole country into a kind of economic Stone Age.  So many people began to abandon ship.  Some of these were in the KGB.  They were welcome with open arms by people in the west who were in bed with  MI 6 and CIA.  For example, Christopher Andrew.  And therefore, the rehab on McCarthy now began in earnest.  And also, the attacks on people like Mark Lane were also realized. The fact that he kept records that contradicted their accusations did not matter.  The fact that one was sued successfully also did not matter.  Rupert Murdoch was going to publicize this stuff.  I guess that is part of the MSM Tommy G likes.

That there was never any open review of these so called archives does not bother their acolytes. That some of what was in them was inherently implausible does not either.  That their advocates could use them to revive their terminal ambition--Cold War 2--does not phase them.  Why?  Because, at heart, this is political, not historic. Its a use of the former KGB with the CIA and MI 6 that somehow TG completely misses.  

[Chuck Schwartz]

I met Mark Lane in 1975 in Albany, NY.  I can attest to the fact that Mark Lane was a man of great integrity and was one of the first people who stood up against the allen dulles - led Warren commission.  His interview of Lee Bowers was very important, historically.  He also won a very important case against e howard hunt, who admitted he was part of the B team to assassinate JFK. 

[James DiEugenio]

Chuck,

Thanks for that but I don't think Hunt actually admitted to that.

The case proved that Hunt could not demonstrate with credibility where he was on 11/22/63, which gave ballast to the famous Hunt Memorandum of Angleton to Helms about having to find an alibi for Howard on that day.

[Thomas Graves]

2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Dawn and Don (like that one?):

It has been a long held ambition of the rightwing in the USA (both the rabid right and the well funded, sophisticated right) to somehow show that the people who triumphed over Joe McCarthy, e.g. Bobby Kennedy, were actually wrong about the matter.  That somehow, some way, that image of McCarthy as the drunken blowhard being led around by the nose by the ambitious and brutal Roy Cohn, was wrong.  He was really a smart,  courageous, and astute man who was really a true blue patriot.  Maybe a bit loud and boisterous at times, but, hey, extremism in the defense of liberty is not an offense, as Goldwater said.

The opportunity for this long held ambition--by Bill Buckley for one--was  realized with the crack up of the USSR in the early nineties.  Yeltsin's disastrous America backed  "shock doctrine" policies drove the whole country into a kind of economic Stone Age.  So many people began to abandon ship.  Some of these were in the KGB.  They were welcome with open arms by people in the west who were in bed with  MI 6 and CIA.  For example, Christopher Andrew.  And therefore, the rehab on McCarthy now began in earnest.  And also, the attacks on people like Mark Lane were also realized. The fact that he kept records that contradicted their accusations did not matter.  The fact that one was sued successfully also did not matter.  Rupert Murdoch was going to publicize this stuff.  I guess that is part of the MSM Tommy G likes.

That there was never any open review of these so called archives does not bother their acolytes. That some of what was in them was inherently implausible does not either.  That their advocates could use them to revive their terminal ambition--Cold War 2--does not phase them.  Why?  Because, at heart, this is political, not historic. Its a use of the former KGB with the CIA and MI 6 that somehow TG completely misses.  

 

James,

 

I agree with you that parts of the Mitrokhin Archive are implausible.  Like "Mark Lane was paid by the CPUSA to cast aspersions on the Warren Report," and that "Yuri Nosenko was a true defector," for example.

Regardless, regarding Joseph McCarthy (whom Don asked me about), do you, or do you not, sir (a little humor there, James) agree with me that the U.S. Government, including the CIA, had been penetrated by some at-that-time-still-uncovered Soviet spies and American "moles"?

 

Thanks,

--  TG   

[James DiEugenio]

 

I don't consider the Rosenbergs and Sobell to be part of the US government. They were scientists who worked on government projects.

Hiss was not a spy, as the most recent literature on that case shows.

With that out of the way, care to name some of them?

 

[Thomas Graves]

4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

 

I don't consider the Rosenbergs and Sobell to be part of the US government. They were scientists who worked on government projects.

Hiss was not a spy, as the most recent literature on that case shows.

With that out of the way, care to name some of them?

 

 

James,

 

I'll just mention one for now, and let Tennent H. Bagley ("Spy Wars" page 271 - ) do my talking. 

(More to come after I take a much-needed siesta here in laid-back San Diego.  All those enchiladas I had for lunch made me sleepy ....)

 

In September, 1949, Kim Philby was posted to Washington, D.C., as MI6's liason to the CIA.

 

KIM PHILBY --

 ... self-deception joined with a lack of courtroom-quality proof to grant 
to Kim Philby many extra years to do the work that has since caused him to be 
labeled (perhaps prematurely) as “the spy of the century.” 

Philby's career was jolted on 25 May 1953 when British diplomats Guy Bur- 
gess and Donald Maclean fled England to the USSR just after Burgess had re- 
turned to London from Washington, where he had lived for a year with Philby, 
and just three days before Maclean was to have been interviewed by British 
counterintelligence. As MI6 chief in Washington, Philby had been one of the few 
people to know of the impending move against Maclean (exposed by a break of 
KGB ciphers code-named "Venona”). Now the CIA and FBI refused to deal fur- 
ther with Philby, so he was recalled to London and questioned about “indiscre- 
tions" and “misconduct.” 

His interrogators, Milmo and Skardon, considered Philby a traitor and they 
had better reasons than the “third man” warning to Burgess and Maclean. One 
was Philby’s communist first wife, another was “the nasty little sentence in Krivit- 
sky’s evidence” (as Philby later called it). NKVD operative Walter Krivitsky, after 
defecting in 1937, had told the British that the NKVD had sent a young English 
journalist to Spain during the civil war there. This had caused Philby no problem 
at the time because many fit this description. But the lead hung there waiting for 
a cross-bearing. 

Pointing more directly toward Philby were four fingers left behind by the 
ghost of Konstantin Volkov. This British-desk NKVD officer had contacted the 
British Consulate in Istanbul in August 1945 offering information about Soviet 
spies in the British government. His information could have uncovered Philby, 
Maclean, and Burgess (and doubtless others) but fate— and Soviet manipulation 
—had placed Philby across his path. Philby had become head of counterintelli- 
gence work against the USSR and was the logical choice, as he pointed out, to 
handle the case. He quickly alerted the NKVD, which removed Volkov before he 
could make his next contact. But these pointers remained: 

• Volkov had told the British Consul that a “head of a British counteres- 
pionage organization” was an NKVD agent. Philby was now head of a 
recently formed MI6 organization to counter Soviet espionage. 

• Within MI6 Philby had handled the Volkov matter almost single-handedly. 
Any suspicion that a leak might have caused Volkov’s untimely disappear- 
ance would necessarily point toward him. 

• Philby had so dragged his fee and delayed the British response to Volkov’s 
appeal that the British Consul correctly concluded that unless Philby was 
criminally incompetent, he must be a Soviet agent. 

• "Two days after the Volkov information reached London," as Philby learned 
from his British interrogator Milmo, "there had been a spectacular rise in 
the volume of NKVD wireless traffic between London and Moscow, fol- 
lowed by a similar rise in the traffic between Moscow and Istanbul.” 

But this had not been enough. It took the Burgess-Maclean flight, eight years 
later, to halt Philby’s rise toward the top of MI6. And even that was not enough to 
make him confess. MI6 dropped him for errors of judgment, not for treason, and 
a few years later, in what may have been an accident of parliamentary procedure, 
he was publicly cleared by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan. So those ice- 
bergs of suspicion gradually melted in the warm waters of organizational self- 
deception and forgetfulness— and Philby sailed on. Incredibly, MI6 rehired him. 
Its chiefs, like many MI6 officers, had scoffed at the very thought that Philby 
might be a traitor, and at the paranoid idea that the Soviets might have pene- 
trated their ranks. Now they set him up as a journalist in Beirut where they 
thought his contacts would prove useful. 

Useful they were, but mainly for the KGB. Though removed from MI6’s 
central files, Philby kept in touch with former colleagues and other Westerners of 
interest to KGB recruiters. These Westerners still trusted Philby; even those who 
thought he might have warned Burgess and Maclean did not suspect he had done 
it on the KGB’s behalf. A former CIA official in the area wrote, “When I went to 
Beirut in 1957 to set up a consulting firm I was told by both CIA officers and SIS 
officers that Philby was still suspect, although he had been formally cleared of 
any connection with Burgess and Maclean, and that I would be doing a great 
service to my country were I to keep an eye on him. I did, as did other British and 
American laymen who were friends of his. Like all the others, I didn’t have the 
slightest suspicion that he was a Soviet agent and, in fact, wouldn’t believe it until 
he surfaced in Moscow. . . . Believe me, it was a terrible shock.” 10 

Finally, in 1962 new information pointed unmistakably at Philby, and MI6 
had to act. A longtime colleague, Nicholas Elliott, got a partial confession from 
him, but then he fled to the Soviet Union and until his death in 1988 kept on 
helping the KGB damage the West. 

Edited March 22, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[Chuck Schwartz]

Jim, I should have constructed my paragraph better and said that e howard hunt made a deathbed confession to his son , St. John, stating he was part of the B team to assassinate JFK.

[Thomas Graves]

On 3/21/2018 at 12:25 PM, James DiEugenio said:

 

I don't consider the Rosenbergs and Sobell to be part of the US government. They were scientists who worked on government projects.

Hiss was not a spy, as the most recent literature on that case shows.

With that out of the way, care to name some of them?

 

 

James,

 

This is what CIA's Soviet Russia Division Counterinterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley (who, fwiw, was independent of James Angleton at a  CIA) says about Alger Hiss on pages 272-273 of his 2007 book Spy Wars:

 

Alger Hiss was another beneficiary of willful neglect of the obvious. His secret collaboration with Soviet Intelligence was known to Western authorities long before he moved up to play a substantive role in conferences where America’s posture toward the Soviet regime was being worked out, and more than a decade before he was finally brought before a court. Here is how:  In 1937 the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, when he met the former Soviet diplomat Alexander Barmine in Paris, named Hiss as an agent.  In September 1939 French Intelligence passed to American Ambassador Bullitt information (presumably from Krivitsky) that Alger and his brother Donald Hiss were Soviet agents. Bullitt told President Roosevelt soon thereafter.  On 2 September 1939 the journalist Isaac Don Levine, Krivitsky’s friend, escorted Whittaker Chambers to the home of Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle, where Chambers gave details of his Soviet and Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) intelligence activity and clandestine contacts with Alger and Donald Hiss. Berle took notes and reported to President Roosevelt—who laughed it off. Others also told Roosevelt about the suspicions, but neither he nor Berle passed the information to the FBI.  In 1941 the FBI got its first news of Hiss directly from Chambers. Despite their initial interest, they neglected to follow up.  In April 1945 at the San Francisco Conference, which founded the United Nations, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko indiscreetly told American Secretary of State Stettinius that he would be ‘‘very happy to see Alger Hiss appointed temporary secretary general, as he had a very high regard for Hiss, particularly for his fairness and impartiality.’’ In August 1945 the GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko defected and reported that an assistant to Secretary Stettinius was a Soviet spy.  In November 1945 Elizabeth Bentley, a communist underground courier, named to the FBI Soviet spies in government, including some who had been previously named by Chambers. She had been told about Hiss. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover asked President Truman for permission to take action against Hiss, but Truman remained ‘‘stubbornly antagonistic’’ to the allegations. Hiss’s career path to the top was blocked only when Congress took an interest in him after a 1946 grand jury in New York had begun looking into Soviet espionage. This finally forced the State Department to remove him from access to secrets. In mid-1948—more than ten years after he had first been exposed—the spotlight finally shone on him. The House Un-American Activities Committee called Chambers to testify and arranged his dramatic confrontation with Hiss. Chambers then revealed the famous ‘‘pumpkin papers’’ that documented Hiss’s treason. He denied under oath having ever known Chambers, but when confronted with contrary facts began to back off and equivocate. The committee ‘‘kept Hiss on the stand, leading him point by point over his past testimony, leading him to dodge, bend and weave—a spectacle of agile and dogged indignity —through his discrepancies and contradictions, but never bringing him completely to lose his footing or to yield an inch in his denials.’’ To one committee member Hiss’s testimony appeared ‘‘clouded by a strangely deficient memory.’’ Nevertheless the press echoed public sympathy for Hiss (‘‘tall, handsome, well-educated, a brilliant law student’’) and skepticism and contempt for Chambers: ‘‘Not only was he untidy,’’ commented a biographer of President Truman, ‘‘but he had had an erratic career and was clearly far gone into paranoia.’’ In 1977 the writer Allen Weinstein, helped by Hiss and intending to prove his innocence, set out to review all the data. But he was an honest man and the facts he found convinced him (as they do any reader of his book) that Hiss was guilty. Still some journalists kept suggesting that Hiss had been diabolically framed.  (footnote #11)

 

footnote #11:   "These citations come from Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), and Allen Weinstein, Perjury (New York: Vintage, 1979)."

 

--  TG

 

PS  Next up:  Bagley's "take" on some other interesting folks.

 

Edited April 6, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[James DiEugenio]

Anyone who trusts Weinstein and Chambers is too far out for my taste.  Weinstein was caught in so many fabrications of testimony, the guy was sued and had to settle out of court.

Bagley is what I thought he was.

There have been three books written in the last four years which pretty much explode the whole case against Hiss.  I read all three of them.  They were all  good.  And they all vitiate Chambers beyond repair.  But the one that i think is best is the one by Joan Brady called America's Dreyfuss. To say she has some interesting information on Mr Bullitt, does not even begin to tell half the story.  Lewis Hartshorn's fine examination of Chamber's list of lies is really impressive and he shows that the prosecutor was going to indict Chambers until the ridiculous Pumpkin Papers showed up.  For Bagley to say that the film of the PP proved Hiss's treason is beyond the pale of rational argument. Victor Navasky showed that those films were simply a pile of junk.  Which is why Nixon would not let anyone look at them until years later.

And Tom, you do know about the typewriter do you not?  Please tell me you do.  If you do not then there is no point in continuing this. Sign up for the Harvey Klehr newsletter.

Edited March 22, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[Thomas Graves]

47 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Anyone who trusts Weinstein and Chambers is too far out for my taste.  Weinstein was caught in so many fabrications of testimony, the guy was sued and had to settle out of court.

Bagley is what I thought he was.

There have been three books written in the last four years which pretty much explode the whole case against Hiss.  I read all three of them.  They were all  good.  And they all vitiate Chambers beyond repair.  But the one that i think is best is the one by Joan Brady called America's Dreyfuss. To say she has some interesting information on Mr Bullitt, does not even begin to tell half the story.  Lewis Hartshorn's fine examination of Chamber's list of lies is really impressive and he shows that the prosecutor was going to indict Chambers until the ridiculous Pumpkin Papers showed up.  For Bagley to say that the film of the PP proved Hiss's treason is beyond the pale of rational argument. Victor Navasky showed that those films were simply a pile of junk.  Which is why Nixon would not let anyone look at them until years later.

And Tom, you do know about the typewriter do you not?  Please tell me you do.  If you do not then there is no point in continuing this. Sign up for the Harvey Klehr newsletter.

 

James,

 

Yes, I know about the typewriter.

Going from memory here, but isn't it alleged that it was manufactured after a typewriter salesman had retired?

Regardless, what do you make of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's belief that Hiss was a mole? Did he recant on that?

Question:  If Hiss wasn't ALES, who was?  Just a figment of someone's imagination?

Most importantly, what do you mean by, "Bagley is what I thought he was"?

 

--  TG

 

PS  James, is the main reason you disparage Bagley so much because he was convinced that the "former" KGB officer who was anxious to tell CIA that his organization didn't interview LHO or monitor him very closely in the USSR was a false defector, or is there something more about your obvious animosity towards Bagley than that?

 

 

Edited March 22, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[James DiEugenio]

The typewriter was not in existence when the FBI said it was first used by Priscilla Hiss's father.  

Therefore, it could not have been the one given to her and then used to type the documents in question.  And the FBI knew that and concealed it from the defense. 

Further, Elizabeth McCarthy, one of the finest document examiners in America, stated that in her opinion it was possible to create a typewriter to duplicate certain typing on pages.  Which coincides with what Nixon told John Dean, that they had created a typewriter in the Hiss case.  (This is the woman who said that Shaw was Bertrand, based on two pairs of handwriting.  She was right about that also.)

Therefore, I don't have much respect for Bagley's take on the Hiss case.  My graduate field of concentration was postwar American History. I was interested in how the Cold War started, and how it was used politically for domestic purposes.  That is why I was interested in both the Rosenberg and Hiss cases. And the careers of Joe McCarthy and Dick Nixon.

As per Bagley on Nosenko, he may be right, he may be wrong.  I will agree that there is  a case for both sides.  Something I would not have written awhile back.

But the other thing Bagley is credible on is the routing of Oswald's files when they first came in.  Which you still have not commented on.

Edited March 22, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[Thomas Graves]

13 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Anyone who trusts Weinstein and Chambers is too far out for my taste.  Weinstein was caught in so many fabrications of testimony, the guy was sued and had to settle out of court.

Bagley is what I thought he was.

There have been three books written in the last four years which pretty much explode the whole case against Hiss.  I read all three of them.  They were all  good.  And they all vitiate Chambers beyond repair.  But the one that i think is best is the one by Joan Brady called America's Dreyfuss. To say she has some interesting information on Mr Bullitt, does not even begin to tell half the story.  Lewis Hartshorn's fine examination of Chamber's list of lies is really impressive and he shows that the prosecutor was going to indict Chambers until the ridiculous Pumpkin Papers showed up.  For Bagley to say that the film of the PP proved Hiss's treason is beyond the pale of rational argument. Victor Navasky showed that those films were simply a pile of junk.  Which is why Nixon would not let anyone look at them until years later.

And Tom, you do know about the typewriter do you not?  Please tell me you do.  If you do not then there is no point in continuing this. Sign up for the Harvey Klehr newsletter.

James,

Did that old apologist for Stalin ever reconcile himself with the now generally held verdict that Julius Rosenberg was guilty as charged?

Does he still erroneously claim that a great deal of the VENONA-uncovered espionage by American citizens during the Cold War was nothing more than "exchanges of information among people of good will," and that most of these exchanges were" innocent and were within the law"?

(I'm speaking of Victor Navasky, of course.)

Regardless, how, specifically, did Navasky debunk "the Pumpkin Patch films"?

 

--  TG

 

PS    If Oswald's defection had not been planned by the CIA (i.e., if it had been "unwitting"), how, then, would his files have been routed?

PPS  Even if CIA did send Oswald to Moscow, would that necessarily mean that CIA "patsied" Oswald in its assassination of JFK?

 

Edited March 22, 2018 by Thomas Graves