688
PARTISAN REVIEW
Union ahead of loyalty to the United States was well-founded" and that
it was anything but "a domestic movement with its roots in America's
democratic, populist, and revolutionary past."
What, in particular, are the highlights of this collection of docu–
ments? The authors set out to provide answers to three important ques–
tions: Was there a secret Communist apparatus? Did that body infiltrate
government agencies? Did some Communists spy for the Soviet Union?
The unqualified answer to the three questions is yes. Moreover, espi–
onage was not a side activity of the Party; indeed, it was known to and
carried out by top cadre. One of the major documents uncovered, for
example, reveals that Earl Browder, the top Party chairman under whose
helm the CPUSA had its greatest membership and influence during the
World War II years, had ties to the NKVD (the predecessor of the
KGB), and that his sister, Margaret, was a functioning Soviet intelligence
agent, just as ex-Communist Benjamin Gitlow and Soviet intelligence
defector Walter Krivitsky had charged. Soviet files contain a January
1938 memo from Earl Browder to Comintern chieftain Georgi Dim–
itrov, noting that his sister "has been working for the foreign depart–
ment of the NKVD, in various European countries," and requesting that
she be released lest Earl Browder's own "increasing involvement in na–
tional political affairs and growing connections in Washington political
circles" be compromised and endanger his important political work for
the Party. Browder, true to form, perjured himself when asked about the
charges during his 1939 testimony before a Congressional committee.
The documents also substantiate charges made in the 1950s by the
famed so-called "blonde Spy Queen," Elizabeth Bentley . Bentley had
testified to the FBI, and later before Congress, that she and her lover Ja–
cob Golos had been supplied with material from government agencies by
a ring in Washington - led by economist Victor Perlo - which she had
dubbed the "Perlo group." As the authors note , the liberal magazine
The Nation
had in 1948 editorially remarked that her charges were so
"wanton" that they "hardly seem worth the dignity of denial." Indeed,
as late as the 1970s,
Nation
editor Victor Navasky obliquely identified
Perlo simply as a "New Deal economist." For the most part, historians
were no less kind, finding Bentley's stories extravagant and most likely
the neurotic imaginings of a bitter woman whose lover had suddenly
died. But the authors have found three memos from NKVD head Pavel
Fitin to Georgi Dimitrov, memos that support the essentials of Bentley's
story.
In
particular, the files produced a "top secret" memo in which
Fitin requested information for the NKVD on seven American Com–
munists,
all
but one of them government workers later named by Bentley
