Communist Party of the United States of America

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is one of several Marxist-Leninist groups in the United States.

Early years

It was formed in 1919 as a splinter group of the left-wing of the Socialist Party over the issue of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The left wing socialists supported Lenin and Trotsky, and broke off the SP to form two rival parties: the Communist Party of America and Communist Labor Party. Under pressure from the Communist International, these two communist parties officially merged in Chicago in 1919. From its inception, the Communist Party, USA came under attack from the FBI and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer for defying the Sedition Act of 1918. Consequently, the Communist Party went underground and went through name changes to evade the authorities.

During the early 1920s, the party apparatus was to a great extent underground. It reemerged in 1923 with a small legal above ground element, the Workers Party of America. As the Red Scare and deportations of the early 1920s ebbed, the party became bolder and more open. An element of the party, however, remained permanently underground. It was through this underground party, often commanded by a Soviet official operating as an illegal in the United States, that Soviet intelligence was able to co-opt CPUSA members. The Comintern supplied the American Communist movement with the equivalent of several million dollars in valuables, an enormous sum in the 1920s. [1] By 1930 it adopted the title Communist Party of the USA.

In the 1930's the CPUSA recruited several hundred persons among thousands of new employees hired by the federal government under the impact of the New Deal's rapid expansion of governmental programs. Federal regulations forbade partisan political activity by federal employees, and open membership in the Communist Party brought discharge. The CPUSA evaded the law by organizing caucuses of government employees that met in secret. Joseph Peters, a senior member of the Central Committee of the CPUSA, headed the party’s underground apparatus from 1932 to 1938 and pioneered its role as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence activities.

Earl Browder assumed party leadership after 1929 and actually dissolved the party in 1944 replacing it with a Communist Political Association. For this he was in turn expelled and James Z. Foster became head of the party. Foster was to lead the party until he retired in 1958 and was succeeded by Gus Hall.

Whittaker Chambers testified that Sandor Goldberger AKA "Joseph Peters" and commonly wrote under the "Josef Peters" and commonly wrote under the name J. Peters, a Comintern apparatchik who worked in the Fourth Department, a Comitern functionary, headed the party’s underground secret apparatus from 1932 to 1937 and pioneered its role as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence activities. Bernard Schuster, Organizational Secretary of the New York District of the CPUSA was the operational recruiter and conduit for members of the CPUSA into the ranks of the secret apparatus, or "Group A line".

Secret apparatus

In the 1930s CPUSA membership became largely native-born, and more educated people joined, including many scientific and technically trained professionals. American Communists considered the 'capitalist' corporations which employed them as morally illegitimate institutions. When Soviet intelligence officers approached and asked that the scientific secrets of these corporations be shared with the Soviet Union, few had moral objections.

Soviet intelligence agencies were able to use over 400 American citizens during the 1930s and up to 1946. The CPUSA was not just a recruiting ground for Soviet intelligence, it functioned within Soviet espionage as an auxiliary organization. Earl Browder, with the active assistance of a dozen high-level CPUSA officials, and numerous rank-and-file members, supervised CPUSA cooperation with the OGPU and GRU. Browder was given personal credit for recruitment of eighteen agents in a 1946 OGPU memo.

In the 1930s, the chief Soviet espionage organization operating in the U.S. became the GRU. J. Peters, headed the secret apparatus that supplied internal government documents from the Ware group to the GRU. Browder assisted Peters in building a network of operatives in the Roosevelt administration. This group included Alger Hiss, John Abt, and Lee Pressman. Courier for the group at the time was Whittaker Chambers. Browder oversaw the efforts of Jacob Golos and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bentley, whose network of agents and sources included two key figures at the Department of Treasury, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and Harry Dexter White.

By the end of 1936 at least four mid-level State Department officials were delivering information to Soviet intelligence: Alger Hiss, assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre; Julian Wadleigh, economist in the Trade Agreements Section; Laurence Duggan, Latin American division; and Noel Field, West European division. Chambers told how a tank design by C.W. Christie was procured, and was put into production in the Soviet Union as the Mark BT.

In the late 1930s and 1940 the OGPU, known as the Political Directorate, used the U.S. as one of several staging areas for multiple OGPU plots to murder exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, then living in Mexico City. It was American Communists who infiltrated Trotsky’s killer into his own household . They were also central to the NKVD's unsuccessful efforts to free the killer from a Mexican prison. In the late 1930s Soviet agents sought to provide Moscow with a wide range of information on high-performance aircraft, battleships, cruisers, armor, navigation equipment, tank engines, and armaments from key U.S. defense contractors, including Northrop, Douglas, and Marietta. The operations were run by Soviet Case Officers working under the cover of Amtorg Trading Corporation, the Soviet Society of the Red Cross, TASS, Sovfil'meksporta and some other establishments.

By 1940 Soviet interest was focused on atomic energy and other scientific developments, with some emphasis also being given to infiltration of Trotskyite and White Russian activities.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and American entry into the war in December, the USSR became a major recipient of American military aid. Thousands of Soviet military officers and technicians entered the U.S. Scores of Soviet intelligence officers were among those arriving in America. These Case Officers, with the assitance of American citizens, waged a successful unrestrained espionage campaign against the United States, from 1942 to late 1945.

General Secretary Josef Stalin of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), directed Soviet intelligence officers to collect information in four main areas. Pavel Fitin, the 34-year-old chief of the KGB First Directorate, was directed to seek American intelligence concerning Hitler's plans for the war in Russia; secret war aims of London and Washington, particularly with regard to planning for Operation Overlord, the second front in Europe; any indications the Western allies might be willing to make a separate peace with Hitler; and American scientific and technological progress, particularly in the development of an atomic weapon.

Soviet recruitment of sources within American intelligence agencies, particularly within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency was impressive. The highest ranking recruit was Duncan Lee, counsel to General William Donovan, OSS head. Lee, however, was extremely cautious and less productive than other OPGU sources, like Maurice Halperin, or Donald Wheeler, in the OSS Research and Analysis division. At least fifteen Soviet agents penetrated the OSS, with the actual number more likely around twenty.

The Soviets also developed about twenty sources within the U.S. State Department and other wartime foreign relations agencies. The two most senior Soviet operatives had been active in the 1930s, Alger Hiss and Laurence Duggan. A number of other Soviet infiltrators connections to American diplomacy have only been identified by code-names in the Venona project materials. Some of these identities have not been determined. Some most likely continued to operate in the post-war period. American counter-intelligence officials spent decades interviewing and examining the backgrounds of hundreds of American diplomatic personnel attempting to attach an identity to the code-name of many of these known operatives.

Popular Front

The CPUSA was adamantly opposed to fascism during the Popular Front period. In fact, the Popular Front was motivated by a fear of fascism, and the possible threat to the Soviet Union that Nazi Germany posed. Although membership in the CPUSA rose to about 75,000 [2] by 1938, nearly a third of its members left the party after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Nonaggression Pact of 1939 pact with Hitler. A committed core remained in the ranks. The CPUSA even went so far as to accuse Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt of provoking aggression against Hitler. The CPUSA went so far as to denounce the Polish government as fascist after the German and Soviet invasion.

Stalin publicly disbanded the Comintern in 1943. A Moscow NKVD message to all stations on 12 September 1943 detailed instructions for handling intelligence sources within the CPUSA after the disestablishment of the Comintern. Earl Browder had been both Chairman of the CPUSA and recruiter for the NKVD (in the Venona project he is known as Agent "HELMSMAN"). He was expelled from the leadership when Soviet policy shifted. His crime had been to follow Moscow’s orders in 1941 and “disband” the party in a show of unity with the US Government. But the NKGB thought his services worth keeping, and they succeeded in covertly financing him, by setting him up as a representative of Soviet publishers. Even then, that didn't work, as Browder was dropped after violating the Party Line again in favor of Titoism. Lovestone said of Browder, "There, but for an accident of geography, walks a dead man".

It was the belief of opponents of the CPUSA such as J. Edgar Hoover, long-time director of the FBI, and Joseph McCarthy, for whom McCarthyism is named, and other anticommunists that the CPUSA constituted an active conspiracy, was secretive, loyal to a foreign power, and dedicated to the clandestine infiltration of American cultural and political institutions. This is the "traditionalist" view of some in the field of Communist studies such as Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes.

In the "Findings and declarations of fact" of the United States Congress in passing the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, in 50 U.S. Code Chapter 23 Subchapter IV Sec. 841, that,

"The Congress finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States...the policies and programs of the Communist Party are secretly prescribed for it by the foreign leaders...members of the Communist Party are recruited for indoctrination with respect to its objectives and methods, and are organized, instructed, and disciplined to carry into action slavishly the assignments given them...the Communist Party acknowledges no constitutional or statutory limitations upon its conduct...gives scant indication of capacity ever to attain its ends by lawful political means. The peril inherent in its operation arises not from its numbers, but from its failure to acknowledge any limitation as to the nature of its activities, and its dedication to the proposition that the present constitutional Government of the United States ultimately must be brought to ruin by any available means, including resort to force and violence. Holding that doctrine, its role as the agency of a hostile foreign power renders its existence a clear present and continuing danger to the security of the United States. It is the means whereby individuals are seduced into the service of the world Communist movement, trained to do its bidding, and directed and controlled in the conspiratorial performance of their revolutionary services. [3]

References

• The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Basic Books, 1999, hardcover edition, p. 287-293, p. 306, ISBN 0465003109. Vasili Mitrokhin was an archivist who worked for the KGB. After 1972 when the KGB established its new modern offices at Yasenovo, Mitrokhin was entrusted with transferring the corpus of KGB files from its old office at the Lubyanka in Moscow to the new offices. During the next ten years while performing these duties he copied many files which he turned over to British intelligence when he defected in March, 1992.

• Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin, John Barron, Regnery Publishing, 1996, ISBN 0895264862; 2001 edition, ISBN 0709160615. This biography of Morris Childs, who together with his brother Jack arranged for and handled the money transfers during the 1960s and 70s, contains much of the same material.

External links

• Cold War Counterintelligence

• Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy Report, Appendix A, 4. The Encounter with Communism (1997)

• Article: Communists Should Not Teach In American Colleges, 1949, by Raymond B. Allen, President of the University of Washington, Seattle.

• Article: Guilty as charged by Arnold Beichman, survey of Soviet documents on Communists in America Hoover Institute - Hoover Digest 1999.

• Marxist Internet Archive

Further reading

• American Communist History a peer-reviewed journal published by the Historians of American Communism. [4]