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Spies who came in from the Cold War brought exceptional documents
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Former COM Professor Lawrence Martin-Bittman, who once headed the Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service’s disinformation campaigns, helps “uncover” phony documents planted by the Czech government at the bottom of a lake in 1964. The documents listed the names of alleged Nazi spies, including some prominent West Germans. Photo courtesy of Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center |
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On a recent Monday evening, students were able to step out of their weekday routines and into a shadowy world of intrigue and secrets, of cloak-and-dagger activity, covert operations, propaganda, and forged documents.
No, they weren’t in the war room of the Bush or the Kerry presidential campaigns. These students were attending the seminar Espionage — Intelligence, Secrets, and Spies at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
The Gotlieb Center, a repository for the personal papers of more than 2,000 influential public figures, writers, and performers, also has its share of “pieces of hidden history — documents that were never meant to be viewed,” said Ryan Hendrickson (UNI’98), the center’s assistant director of manuscripts.
However, there were the telltale artifacts, “declassified” and available for viewing on the fifth floor of Mugar Memorial Library. Displayed on tables were spy manuals from the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the CIA), top-secret reports, and records such as court transcripts from the infamous 1953 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — who were executed for stealing U.S. atom bomb technology and passing it to the Soviet Union.
The papers went all the way back to our country’s most famous traitor, Benedict Arnold. A 1775 letter from Arnold to Silas Deane, a Connecticut representative to the Continental Congress, describes his disillusionment with the American army.
“This is simply amazing,” said Philip Benjamin (ENG’08), who, like the other students, was provided with white cotton gloves to handle the documents. “To be able to read — and actually hold — a letter from Benedict Arnold, and one written by Benjamin Franklin. It’s fascinating.”
In 1778, Deane helped Franklin convince the French to provide commercial and military aid to the colonies. But later that year, the Continental Congress accused Deane of war profiteering. Embittered, he wrote a series of letters to prominent Americans urging them to give up on the war and come to some agreement with Britain short of full independence. Franklin’s 1782 letter to Deane, from the Gotlieb Center’s historical manuscript collection, expresses his disappointment in his old colleague. He even compares Deane to Benedict Arnold.
The “traitors” section of the seminar’s displays also drew Patty Piekarczyk (CAS’07), who perused the “men of conscience” section as well, reading translations of secret code in telegrams sent from Herbert H. Field to the U.S. State Department. Field, who was dedicated to helping refugees during World War I, was dispatched to Germany by the Paris Peace Conference after the war, and sent back reports to Allied intelligence. On display was one 1919 report from Munich describing a certain “Dr. Parvais, alias Halpha,” who is “probably the most sinister figure on the diplomatic stage.”
“I’m thinking about a career in the FBI,” said Piekarczyk, “so the ‘espionage’ title of the seminar intrigued me. I think this is a great program. I didn’t know students had access to these papers.”
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Frances Whistler, associate director of the Editorial Institute at BU, and Philip Benjamin (ENG’08) examine the “secret agents” display at the seminar Espionage — Intelligence, Secrets, and Spies at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Student outreach at the Gotlieb Center is one of the main goals of Vita Paladino, director since February. The center, founded in 1963, is used by biographers, documentary filmmakers, and graduate students working on dissertations, but Paladino said she wants to target undergraduates, enabling them to use the collections for primary resource materials in their research. She pointed out that the center has existed for 41 years at BU, “capturing history and preserving it. We decided that we want to bring that history directly to the students while they’re here, because I’m tired of hearing, during alumni tours, of alums saying, ‘I was here for four years, and I never knew this place existed.’”
Nonetheless, students weren’t the only attendees at the seminar. Eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks, a Core Curriculum professor and William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities, said after reading a letter from Ethel Rosenberg to her lawyer, Emmanuel Block, that he was “amazed at the tone of the letter — still defiant and political — 11 days before her execution.”
Nick Mills, a COM associate professor of journalism, was poring over items in a display on Lawrence Martin-Bittman, who headed the Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service’s disinformation campaigns. His most successful mission was Operation Neptune, a ruse that involved him and a group of divers “discovering” several chests full of documents at the bottom of a lake in 1964. The documents, which listed the names of alleged Nazi spies, included some prominent West Germans and weakened West Germany’s ties with its neighbors. In reality, all the documents were forgeries, planted in the lake by the Communist Czech government. Martin-Bittman became disillusioned with Communism after the Soviet Union crushed Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” uprising in 1968, and he fled to the United States.
“Larry is a friend and former colleague of mine,” said Mills. Indeed, Martin-Bittman directed COM’s Program for the Study of Disinformation and was a journalism professor before retiring in 1996. “After he defected, a military court in Czechoslovakia convicted him of treason and gave him a death sentence,” Mills said. “In 1994 the death sentence was lifted, and he visited Prague for the first time in 26 years.”
Another espionage display with BU connections was a sampling of materials from the former Boston University Research Laboratory. Originally located where the School of Law tower is today, the lab joined forces with the newly formed Itek Corporation in 1958. The result was the camera for America’s first spy satellite, with the code name CORONA. “The first CORONA missions were launched in 1960, and the film’s recovery marked the first return of an object from space orbit, and the first mapping of the Earth from space,” said Hendrickson. “Among its other accomplishments, CORONA exposed the truth about the Soviet Union’s weak arsenal, helping defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis.” The CORONA project ended in 1971 after 145 launches. Among the items on view at the seminar was a 1971 satellite photo of a Soviet rocket plant.
The seminar also included documents from Michael Burke, a CIA agent who ran an unsuccessful operation to overthrow Communist Albanian President Evner Hoxhap, and from Ira Hershman, who during World War II helped smuggle thousands of Jewish refugees from Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary to safety via neutral Turkey.
For those who would like a look at these and other espionage-related documents, the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center is planning an exhibition in January on the first floor of Mugar Library. The next Student Discovery Seminar, on the library’s fifth floor, will be BU Then and Now: The Evolution of Our University, on Monday, October 18, at 5 p.m. For more information, call 617-353-3696.
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October 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations