FIRlnGLlne HOST: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

Transcription

1 The copyright laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. If a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy or reproduction (including handwritten copies) for purposes in excess of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. Users are advised to obtain permission from the copyright owner before any re-use of this material. Use of this material is for private, non-commercial, and educational purposes; additional reprints and further distribution is prohibited. Copies are not for resale. All other rights reserved. For further information, contact Director, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. FIRlnGLlne HOST: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. GUEST: SUBJECT: JONATHAN BRENT 0 "ARE THERE ANY SECRETS LEFT?" FIRING LINE is produced and directed by WARREN STEIBEL. This is a transcript of FIRING LINE program #2718/1147, taped at the HBO Studios in New York City on October 29, 1997, and telecast later on public television stations. Copyright I997F/RJNG LINE Transcripts ai\d videocassettes are available through Producers Incorporated for Television, 2700 Cypress Street, Columbia, SC 2920s sojn99-j449

2 MR. BUCKLEY: The publication of The Annals of Communism by the Yale University Press has caused a great deal of comment and a great deal of non-comment. The series, tmder the editorship of our guest, Jonathon Brent, is deeply informed, Yale having made a deal with Moscow that gives it access to an incredible 400 million secret documents. From these 25 books have been projected; possibly as many as 50 will be published. Already published are five volumes, among them The Secret World of American Communism, The Stalin Molotov Letters, and most recently Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War. The series is edited by Professor Brent, who graduated from Columbia and got his doctorate in English literature from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Illinois and at Northwestern before serving as editor-in-chief of the Northwestern University Press and then going to Yale. He has been widely published in the academic jmu"nals and others. Maybe it shouldn't surprise us-on the other hand, some of us are naifsthis epochal series has been greeted rather grumpily by historians and editorialists, to say nothing of the major fmmdations, Ford, Rockefeller,. MacArthtU", the National Endowment for the Humanities, which have refused to help to finance the project. My conversation with Dr. Brent will focus on this reaction, and I begin by asking: what is the major contribution to historical knowledge of your book, The Secret World of American Communism? MR. BRENT: That book proved for the first time-it demonstrated concretely-that the American Com1mmist Party was engaged in espionage, which was a claim that had routinely been dismissed by the heads of the Commtmist Party in the United States. It showed furthermore, not only had it been engaged in espionage that was being directed by Moscow, but it showed that it was engaged in atomic espionage and that it was serving tmder the direction of the NKVD, the KGB of the time. MR. BUCKLEY: Now how does this violate establishment tmderstanding on the question? MR. BRENT: Well, I think establishment understanding has always been split. There was always that group off ormer Commtmists in the United States who were well aware of what the Commtmist Party was doing and they said so. The problem is that no one believed them. Particularly 1

3 those on the left did not believe them, did not want to believe them, derided them as liars and scoundrels. MR. BUCKLEY: And McCarthyites. MR. BRENT: And McCarthyites. And in the case of Elizabeth Bentley, for instance, who was the first person to mention Alger Hiss to the FBI, she eventually drank herself to death in complete obscurity and did so under the cloud of being called a liar and a phantasmagorical alcoholic. And she was telling the truth the whole time. And this is what was discovered in the archives that our scholars investigated in Moscow. MR. BUCKLEY: Now Professor Haynes in the introduction to this book says that there are two dominant orthodoxies in America. One is that the Comnnmist movement was a normal, albeit radical, political participant in American democracy. The second was, American communism was a domestic movement with its roots in American democratic populist and revolutionary past. Now that simply wasn't so, and this book historically establishes this, does it not? MR. BRENT: That's right. And we are going to be publishing the sequel to this book in the spring, called The Soviet World of American Communisrn, which takes this larger picture of how the American Cmmmmist Party was established, what in detail all of the connections with Moscow were, nnd it will blow thrt myth completely to smithereens. The Secret World of American Communism, the first book, was particularly concerned with the question of espionage. This second book will be concerned with the totality of the relationships: how Moscow financed the party, how it oversaw the ftmctioning of day-to-day activities of the party, how it encouraged Americans to denounce fell ow Americans, how it got Americans to go to Karelia, for instance, and there be subjected to the most inhumane and horrendous treatment by the NKVD, where many Americans perished and disappeared, and how it was that members of the American Communist Party, knowing this, never said a word. Never. MR. BUCKLEY: When I was at school at Yale-I don't usually bring things like this up; this is twice now-a professor said on a radio program, referring to the Henry Wallace movement, that people who urge that movement along are, however inadvertently, making themselves the creatures of the Soviet totalitarian system. And two professors of Yale 2

4 threatened a lawsuit. One of them went on to nm for governor on the Wallace ticket. Now to what extent are the difficulties that you've had in the reception of your books traceable to a reluctance to validate the fact absolutely established that, for instance, the Wallace movement was a Stalinist operation? MR. BRENT: I have to qualify a little bit what you said. 1\IJR. BUCKLEY: Sure. MR. BRENT: On the one hand, the reception of the books has been quite favorable on the right in this cotmtry by the conservatives in this cmmtry. The first book, The Secret World of Arnerican Communism, made the front pages of newspapers armmd the cmmtry. It has- That book in particular was denmmced by the left, and to this day, there is a great tmwillingness on the part of many prominent people in the left to accept the fact that these documents are true, that they are not false documents, that they have not been cooked up somehow; and number two, that the documents have been chosen objectively, that they've been chosen by scholars not to prove a political point, but rather to establish the facts of history. This is what they've done. But the left seems so entrenched and so committed and so somehow bmmd up in a myth of itself that largely, it does not wish to examine these things. And that has led, I believe, though it's impossible to establish it, I believe that is one of the things that had led to the fact that our series has universally not been supported by visibly left-wing- 1\IJR. BUCKLEY: The establishment- 1\IJR. BRENT: Yes, the establishment fmmdations, et cetera. 1\IJR. BUCKLEY: Are you at liberty to disclose how it is that you got hold of this tmique access to these documents? 1\IJR. BRENT: Well, it's not such a mystery in fact. I had the idea for this series in embryo in 1991 when I was in Prague at the invitation of George Soros who was then trying to establish his Eastern European University, and he wanted someone to direct the press. So he invited me to come. And I listened to Czech and Htmgarian scholars talking about what they were doing in their archives, and I turned to Soros and I said, You know, there's got to be something in those archives worth publishing. Why 3

5 don't we start a series, call it Documents of Totalitarianism. He said, great idea. And so it got started then, in Prague in April of '91. In the fall of '91 I came to Yale, and I was, of course, talking about this idea with a lot of people. I wrote to academics arotmd the country. Everyone thought it was a great idea, but everyone thought it was tmdoable. There were too many documents. Finally in December of '91 Yeltsin declared the Soviet archives open and I realized that it was the Soviet archives which would be the engine for the whole series, not Czech, not Hungarian, not Polish, that that was the main thing. And so I went to Moscow on January 10, 1992, and I met improbably- MR. BUCKLEY: You just knocked on the door. MR. BRENT: I knocked on the doors. Nobody else did. [laughter J That's how- MR. BUCKLEY: And asked, Can I have your secret archives? [laughter] MR. BRENT: That's right. And at a recent event concerning our series Victor Navasky, the editor of The Nation, got up and inquired of the head of public relations of the KGB, who happened to be there, he said, How is it that Yale University Press has had access to these archives?, implying of course that there's been some sort of secret tmderstanding or secret agreement. Yuri Kobaladzi threw up his hands and said, I don't know. So afterwards I said to Victor, Look, if you want to know, ask me and I will tell you. It's very simple. I went to Moscow. MR. BUCKLEY: But there were requirements. MR. BRENT: Yes, there are requirements, of course. Negotiating the deal was extremely complicated, because the Russians, of course, had no experience negotiating a deal. They had no idea what the list price of a book was. They had no idea what a royalty was. They had no idea of rights. MR. BUCKLEY: Let alone intellectual property. MR. BRENT: Intellectual property. And furthermore, tmderlying the whole thing is the problem that these documents, were they in American archives, would be free and open to the public. They belong to the people. In Russia- 4

6 MR. BUCKLEY: Well, we've got a lot of stuff we haven't revealed. MR. BRENT: Well, that's true, but were we to declare these- MR. BUCKLEY: Sure. MR. BRENT: -de-secretized documents. MR. BUCKLEY: Yes. MR. BRENT: In Russia they don't belong to the people. They belong to the archives. And so they don't 1mderstand- They 1mderstand nothing about intellectual property rights. MR. BUCKLEY: Now you are obliged, as I understand it, to provide for simultaneous public~tion in Russian- MR. BRENT: That's correct. MR. BUCKLEY: -so that Russians can have access to the same things you uncover. MR. BRENT: That's right. MR. BUCKLEY: Now the problems of financing are met how? MR. BRENT: Well, entirely by raising outside money, from fom1dations, from individuals. We have been successful in signing a contract with a moviemaker to do a film of the whole series ultimately. That has brought in some money. But really we rely almost entirely on outside contributions from individuals and corporations. MR. BUCKLEY: And how expensive is the project? MR. BRENT: It's extremely expensive. We have to pay for translations. I have to pay for scholars going back and forth to Moscow, I have to pay for their hotel, I have to pay for Xerox machines. You don't 1mderstand. The Russian archives are completely falling apart. They don't have Xerox machines. In the archive of the Red Army, for the chief archivist to ttu-n on the light in her office, she opens the drawer of her desk, she takes out a lightbulb, she stands on a chair and screws it in. And on more than one 5

7 occasion, these archives- Imagine, the Red Army archive, the archive of the Central Committee, the archive of the Economy have been closed because they cannot pay their electricity bills or they cannot pay the guard who stands outside with his submachine gm1. l\iir. BUCKLEY: So how do you cope with that kind of situation? l\iir. BRENT: We have to buy them all this equipment. We have to buy them this equipment. We try- You know, if they tell us, Look, we have to buy paper, I buy them the paper. I need toner for the machine. And literally, I have to take the money with me over there, because most of these places don't even have bank accmmts. So it's extremely expensive. I go over twice a year and see to the needs of the archives. l\iir. BUCKLEY: So you say it's extremely expensive. What does it come to per volume so far? l\iir. BRENT: Well, I would say each volume in the end requires a minimum of $50,000. l\iir. BUCKLEY: That's not much. I mean, as volumes gol\iir. BRENT: It's notl\iir. BUCKLEY: -for historical analysis. l\iir. BRENT: But when you don't have it, it's much. [laughter 1 l\iir. BUCKLEY: Yes. The enterprise you are engaged in is, of course, enormously important, and you published a volume on the letters exchanged between Molotov and Stalin. Now what are historians going to learn from that exchange? l\iir. BRENT: Well, I- l\iir. BUCKLEY: It's hard to itemize. l\iir. BRENT: It's hard to itemize. I think one of the things they will learn is that Stalin wrote these letters. Nobody knew of the existence of such letters. No one knew that Stalin- The method by which he organized his thinking is very clearly indicated in these letters. And of course they 6

8 begin in the early '20s when he took power and they continue up to 1935, at the point at which the purges begin, and so one sees very graphically the way he made decisions. One sees how, step by step, he was concentrating power, how he was making use of power, what a careful and truly demonic mind this man had, cruel mind, and how this thinking led to the purges. I mean, one of the things, it seems to me, they do is show the way that he centralized power, because there is this debate going on within the academy today among revisionists who want to claim, as some people do about Hitler, well, it wasn't he, it was really the people, it was all these other forces swirling armmd him, he was caught up in it, it was the social chaos of the- No, it was Stalin, and we have the documents with his signature on them authorizing certain things. lvir. BUCKLEY: Well now, in these researches, for instance, in those letters, is there any talk about manipulation of opinion in America, how to do it, how it's going, _orlvir. BRENT: Not in the letters to Stalin, but in many other documents, and that will be in the second volume, John Haynes' book you referred to earlier. They would have conversations about how to influence American public opinion and how one can get to certain intellectuals. And of course they weren't naifs. They knew that they couldn't simply invite so-and-so to the headquarters of the KGB and say, How would you like to represent the Soviet Union? They find people who are somewhat sympathetic who find people who are sympathetic. And it's like money lam1dering, but it's not money, it's ideas. It's idea latmdering. MR. BUCKLEY: Right. Yes. Theodore Draper, talking about this controversy and about the grumpy reception of some of your books, says of the reviewers, "Theirs is clearly an attempt to rehabilitate comnnmism by making it part of the larger family of socialism and democracy. No one would think of doing this favor for fascism, but commtmism, with even more millions of victims and a much longer lifespan, is the beneficiary of this sustained effort of historical rehabilitation in, of all places, American colleges and tmiversities." Now your series is sort of a juggernaut that crashes into that establishmentarian delusion, is it not? Do you project that history will come arom1d because these documents are so difficult to dispute? lvir. BRENT: I think it will have to. That's the pleasure of doing it as a publisher. As a publisher, one rarely does something that one thinks is 7

9 really going to last. And I think this is going to last. I think these documents will give historians and students something to think about, something to be challenged by for a generation. MR. BUCKLEY: Well now, in the volume that you brought out a few weeks ago, very prominently reviewed, on Berlin, about which, it was said by the reviewer, this really proves that there are no secrets left. Describe, if you will, how that volume is organized. MR. BRENT: Well, it's organized chronologically beginning in 1945 and going up through 1961, it is the result of a collaboration between David Murphy, who was the head of Berlin Operations Base in he had been there since 1954-and Sergei Kondrashev, who was lieutenant general in the KGB and chief of German Department. And the book is organized- MR. BUCKLEY: And that in and of itself is absolutely remarkable- MR. BRENT: It's- MR. BUCKLEY: -historical theater. MR. BRENT: It is. It's a historical collaboration. MR. BUCKLEY: Yes. MR. BRENT: And something of that sort had never happened before. And so they struggled over every major issue of espionage in Berlin from '45 to '61, and the book does a brilliant and very important job of putting together the two sides so one can see what the KGB was thinking and what the CIA was thii1king, and how one side was reflecting the other. And you can see the development of the relationship, which is exceedingly important for, first of all the history of the Cold War, but secondly for tmderstanding policy decision-makh1g and the importance of intelligence and infornrntion in two different systems, two vastly different systems, the closed Soviet system- MR. BUCKLEY: Is there implicit criticism of American policy during that period or do the authors simply let the record speak for itself and for us to draw our own conclusions? 8

10 MR. BRENT: I think they're letting the record speak for itself. In general, what the book shows is that American decision-making, when it was right, was right because it was based on good intelligence, good information. Soviet decision-making, when it was wrong, as it was so often wrong, was based on the absence of real intelligence. Even though the intelligence was gathered- MR. BUCKLEY: Or the ideologization of intelligence. MR. BRENT: That's right. And Stalin simply didn't want to hear bad news. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, how does it meet the matter of the Berlin Wall? As I understand it, the Berlin Wall was erected even though Khrushchev anticipated resistance by the Allies, which had it happened, might have caused him to withdraw the design for the wall? How does your book come up on that issue? lvir. BRENT: Well, in dealing with the Berlin Wall, what it shows is the way that the Soviets-and that is one example of a real success of Soviet intelligence-managed to keep the construction of the wall totally secret, in fact kept it secret from the Germans themselves, so that it was a surprise to everybody. David Murphy relates the story-it was a total surprise to the CIA- relates the story that at the point at which it went up, he was in San Francisco. He had just gotten home on home leave, and at four o'clock in the morning gets a call from President Kennedy saying he's got to be in Washington. What are they going to do? MR. BUCKLEY: There was no contingent planning. MR. BRENT: There was no contingent planning apparently, at least not At least our book does not deal with that. It deals with the intelligence aspects of it. MR. BUCKLEY: Does that book convey to the reader, the American reader a positive or a negative sense of the usefulness of the CIA during the Cold War? MR. BRENT: I think it depends on the reader, because a lot of readers have preconceptions about this. But I think to an open-minded readercertainly to me, and I was inclined, I think, before I began reading the book, before I began editing the book, to take the view that the 9

11 intelligence that we gathered was less important than other things. It made me realize how absolutely crucial it was, absolutely crucial that intelligence was. One simple example: In the Berlin blockade of 1948, Stalin thought that the West was going to crumble when they blockaded Berlin. And our government was very frightened that Stalin was prepared to go to war if we showed resistance to their blockade. But our intelligence service consistently fed Washington the information that the Soviets were not prepared to go to war, they were in no way ready for war with the West at that point, and that in fact Stalin- It was a bluff on Stalin's part. MR. BUCKLEY: And that emboldened Truman. MR. BRENT: And that emboldened Truman. He believed it. I mean, the important thing is that he believed the intelligence he got, and that made it possible for the tremendous airlift. MR. BUCKLEY: Now the famous Venona papers, they are not an achievement of the CIA, are they? MR. BRENT: No. No, that's Army intelligence and FBI. MR. BUCKLEY: That was Army intelligence. And to what extent do those papers figure already in your annals or will in futtu-e volumes? MR. BRENT: Well, we have a volume on the history of the Venona papers coming up. MR. BUCKLEY: Do you want to just describe what the Venona papers are for a second? MR. BRENT: Sure. The Venona papers, the Venona project-it's a made-up name. It doesn't ref er to anything. It was made up by the army, I guess. And in the early '40s our intelligence services began to pick up Soviet transmissions, Moscow to New York, Moscow to Washington. And at first it was assumed that these had something to do with lend-lease. But eventually because of the nature of the codes that were used, suspicion was aroused that these messages had some other motive. So they got together a group of the most brilliant linguists and mathematicians they could find, and put them together and said, Tell us what is going on here. They worked and worked and worked, and when they got through one 10

12 layer of the code they f mmd a second code tmderneath it, and they couldn't break it because these were one-time pads, one-time codes, that is to say. On Monday we agree that x equals y, but on Tuesday it's different. So it was very difficult, extremely difficult. Eventually they made some progress, and they came up with the name of Julius Rosenberg. They came up with the name Alger Hiss. And all of a sudden they began to realize they were onto something that didn't have to do with lend-lease, and that's what the Venona documents are. MR. BUCKLEY: Thank you, Jonathon Brent, editor on behalf of the Yale University Press of The Annals of Communism; thank you, ladies and gentlemen. 11