Tuesday, December 30, 2014

American Betrayal

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK!

"This explosive book is a long-needed answer to court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow. Must-reading for serious students of security issues and Cold War deceptions, both foreign and domestic."

-- M. Stanton Evans, author of Stalin's Secret Agents and Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies

"[West] only claims `to connect the dots,' which is a very modest description of the huge and brilliant work she has obviously done. ... It is not simply a good book about history. It is one of those books which makes history."

-- Vladimir Bukovsky, author of To Build a Castle and co-founder of the Soviet dissident movement, and Pavel Stroilov, author of Behind the Desert Storm.

"Every once in a while, something happens that turns a whole structure of preconceived ideas upside down, shattering tales and narratives long taken for granted, destroying prejudice, clearing space for new understanding to grow. Diana West's latest book, American Betrayal, is such an event."
 
-- Henrik Raeder Clausen, Europe News

"No book has ever frightened me as much as American Betrayal. ... It all adds up to a story so disturbing that it has changed my attitude to almost everything I think about how the world actually is."

-- Steven Kates, Quadrant

Her task is ambitious; her sweep of crucial but too-little-known facts of history is impressive; and her arguments are eloquent and witty. ... American Betrayal is one of those books that will change the way many of us see the world.

-- Susan Freis Falknor, Blue Ridge Forum

“What Diana West has done is to dynamite her way through several miles of bedrock. On the other side of the tunnel there is a vista of a new past. Of course folks are baffled. Few people have the capacity to take this in. Her book is among the most well documented I have ever read. It is written in an unusual style viewed from the perspective of the historian—but it probably couldn’t have been done any other way.”

-- Lars Hedegaard, historian, editor, Dispatch International

"Diana West's new book rewrites WWII and Cold War history not by disclosing secrets, but by illuminating facts that have been hidden in plain sight for decades. Furthermore, she integrates intelligence and political history in ways never done before."

-- Jeffrey Norwitz, former professor of counterterrorism, Naval War College

Diana West’s American Betrayal — a remarkable, novel-like work of sorely needed historical re-analysis — is punctuated by the Cassandra-like quality of “multi-temporal” awareness. ... But West, although passionate and direct, is able to convey her profoundly disturbing, multi-temporal narrative with cool brilliance, conjoining meticulous research, innovative assessment, evocative prose, and wit.

-- Andrew G. Bostom, PJ Media

Do not be dissuaded by the controversy that has erupted around this book which, if you insist on complete accuracy, would be characterized as a disinformation campaign.

-- Jed Babbin, The American Spectator

The most important anti-Communist book of our time.

-- J.R. Nyquist, contributor, And Reality Be Damned ... What Media Didn't Tell You about the End of the Cold War and the Fall of Communism in Europe

The polemics against your Betrayal have a familiar smell: The masters of the guild get angry when someone less worthy than they are ventures into the orchard in which only they are privileged to harvest. The harvest the outsider brought in, they ritually burn.

-- Hans Jansen, former professor of Islamic Thought, University of Utrecht 

West's lesson to Americans: Reality can't be redacted, buried, fabrictaed, falsified, or omitted. Her book is eloquent proof of it.

-- Edward Cline, Family Security Matters

In American Betrayal, Ms. West's well-established reputation for lacking "sacred cows" remains intact. The resulting beneficiaries are the readers, especially those who can deal with the truth.

-- Wes Vernon, Renew America

After reading American Betrayal and much of the vituperation generated by neconservative "consensus" historians, I conclude that we cannot ignore what West has demonstrated through evidence and cogent argument.

-- John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons

Enlightening. I give American Betrayal five stars only because it is not possible to give it six.

-- John Dietrich, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy.

If you're looking for something to read, this is the most dazzling, mind-warping book I have read in a long time. It has been criticized by the folks at Front Page, but they don't quite get what Ms. West has set out to do and accomplished. I have a whole library of books on communism, but -- "Witness" excepted -- this may be the best.

-- Jack Cashill, author of Deconstructing Obama: The Lives, Loves and Letters of America's First Postmodern President and First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America

American Betrayal is a monumental achievement. Brilliant and important.

-- Monica Crowley, Fox News analyst, radio host and author of What the Bleep Just Happened: The Happy Warriors Guide to the Great American Comeback

"If you haven't read Diana West's "American Betrayal" yet, you're missing out on a terrific, real-life thriller."

-- Brad Thor, author of the New York Times bestsellers Hidden Order, Black List and The Last Patriot.


If the Soviet penetration of Washington, D.C., was so wide and so deep that it functioned like an occupation …
 
If, as a result of that occupation, American statecraft became an extension of Soviet strategy …
 
If the people who caught on – investigators, politicians, defectors – and tried to warn the American public were demonized, ridiculed and destroyed for the good of that occupation and to further that strategy …
 
And if the truth was suppressed by an increasingly complicit Uncle Sam …

Would you feel betrayed?

Now available from St. Martin's Press, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character

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Jan 25

Written by: Diana West
Friday, January 25, 2013 5:49 AM 

I cannot overestimate the fearless excellence of M. Stanton Evans' work as a historian, and, I am fortunate to say, mentor. His 2007 book Blacklisted by History is not only a shattering revision of half a century of lies about Joseph McCarthy and "McCarthyism" -- and, by extension, obfuscation about the successful penetration and subversion of the US government -- it is also an exercise in courage, in confronting a false and crippling consensus with an unshakeable dedication to fact and logic. On a personal note, the book served me as a rosetta stone by which I was able to begin deciphering the mendacious history we "know" as our shining cultural legacy. The results of this unnerving research-odyssey will be published in my forthcoming book, American Betrayal.

That said, I am delighted to post an article written for this week's edition of Dispatch International. My task was to introduce a European audience, in brief, to Evans' work. The piece below is the main article, which is available for free at the DI website. I also wrote accompanying piece assembling a series of thumbnail sketches of some of the sensational revelations Evans and co-writer and Cold War expert Herbert Romerstein discovered in their brand new book, Stalin's Secret Agents. It is behind the online-subscription wall -- so subscribe!

"Joe McCarthy Was Right All Along"

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Most Europeans are unlikely to be familiar with the facts behind the American term “McCarthyism.” They probably know it describes something very bad in American politics – the “Communist witch hunts” of more than half a century ago. They may also know that simply uttering the term, like casting a spell, stops all debate cold by associating someone with the eponymous Joseph McCarthy. As the story goes, he was himself very bad. After all, he conducted those long ago “Communist witch hunts,“ ruining his name in perpetuity. This probably exhausts general knowledge.

But here’s a secret: Most Americans know little more than this same familiar but completely false narrative. In recent years, stunning revelations from archives in Washington and Moscow have confirmed that McCarthy’s investigations – and those conducted by other officials before and after – netted not innocent and imaginary “witches,” but secret cadres of hardened Communist agents determined to bring down the American republic. Surely, this makes Joe McCarthy a great patriot and deserving “the plaudits of a grateful nation.”

So wrote M. Stanton Evans, the consensus-smashing, revisionist biographer of McCarthy in Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (2007). Evans was attempting to convey the significance of just one particular Soviet intelligence operation, circa 1945, that McCarthy was instrumental in bringing to light, circa 1950.
 
Even a few details about this operation, named initially as the Amerasia affair after a pro-Communist journal of the day, will add a little needed context to modern-day perspective on the so-called McCarthy era.

Amerasia’s editor, Phillip Jaffe, came under FBI surveillance in 1944 after the contents of a confidential OSS memo appeared in his magazine. (The OSS was the precursor to the CIA.) The FBI soon learned Jaffe was in possession of hundreds of stolen, secret US government documents, plus a photographic set-up. The magazine ran no photographs, so the FBI plausibly believed it had come across an active espionage operation. Further surveillance, including wire-taps, determined that Jaffe was in frequent contact with US Communist Party leader Earl Browder, Soviet “diplomats” in New York, a top Chinese Communist envoy of Mao and US diplomat John Stewart Service (home from Chiang Kai-Shek’s China, where, it later emerged, Service roomed with two leading Communist agents, Solomon Adler and Chi Chao-ting).

On June 6, 1945, FBI agents arrested six people, including Jaffe and Service, and seized hundreds of top secret documents, many concerning military matters. An open-and-shut espionage case, it would seem.

An open and quickly shut-down case is more like it. What followed was cover-up, perjury and grand-jury rigging by, among others, high-ranking Washington officials. Some were eager to prevent a national security scandal from engulfing the Truman White House. Others were acting to shield a far wider Communist-led conspiracy mounted by confederates inside the State Department, Treasury, White House and elsewhere in the US government, working not merely to filch secret documents but to ensure, through influence and subversion, the Communist takeover of China. These powerful forces of suppression proved overwhelming. The Amerasia case was scuttled, the scandal was buried, and, within a few years, China was Red.

Five years later, McCarthy’s laser-beam focus on the still-festering case would be instrumental in follow-up investigations launched by both the Senate and the FBI. These massive probes yielded, as Evans notes, some 5,000 pages of Senate hearings, plus 1,000 pages of exhibits and, from the FBI, 24,000 pages of now-declassified records.

They reveal the workings of a vast, complex influence operation, Evans writes, that “assiduously worked to guide official and public thinking, and hence the course of U.S. policy,” in this case regarding the Far East. Other such intricate influence operations, of course, targeted the West. And who was doing this dirty work of Communist-directed subversion from within? Many officials and public figures highlighted by Joseph McCarthy (among others), who, we have since learned from US and Soviet archives, were secret agents and fellow-traveling supporters of Stalin.
 
McCarthy, as Evans has pointed out, threatened to blow the lid off the official cover-ups and other acts of treason. Thus, he had to be isolated, demonized and destroyed, and so he was. History would be written by the isolators, the demonizers and the destroyers, and repeated by rote for the next half century.

Then along came the declassification of FBI records and releases of intelligence documents, and scholars such as M. Stanton Evans to sift through them. But the far-reaching implications of such research – that anti-Communist “witch-hunters” were right all along – have done shockingly little to change the way Americans regard their history. Such hidebound attitudes extend also to American conservatives, who, it would seem, are the modern-day heirs of the anti-Communist legacy. What Evans calls “court history” is that deeply entrenched as national lore.
 
Will this ever change? “There’s no concise answer to that,” Evans replied in a recent interview with Dispatch International. “There is a mindset, a narrative, a template that has been out there for a long time.” The reflex reaction, to date, is to preserve that template rather than assess the new evidence.

Thus, it is minimized or denied. Evans mimics the usual reaction to the specter of historical Communist penetration: “ `Well, this thing was overblown, there wasn’t a big problem, these people were persecuted.’ The new evidence, he continues, “challenges this so they dismiss it. We’re dealing with an establishment mindset that is impervious to refutation – to fact. It’s like throwing popcorn at a battleship.”

This hasn’t stopped Evans, 78 – once the youngest metropolitan newspaper editor in the USA (Indianapolis News), and formerly a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and commentator for CBS News and Voice of America – from reloading and firing again. In fact, following his McCarthy book, which corroborates many McCarthy cases and documents the Washington Establishment’s craven efforts to destroy the maverick senator rather than address subversion and cover-up, Evans embarked on a new project. With so much evidence now available attesting to the presence of Soviet agents watching over wartime Washington, Evans set out to write a concise history of what it was these agents of the Kremlin actually accomplished.
 
The new book, published in November 2012, is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, co-written with Herbert Romerstein, a leading Cold War expert and longtime congressional investigator. Assessing the achievements of agents of influence, is very different, Evans emphasizes, from standard histories of spying as defined by stealing secrets.

The series of history-changing events Evans and Romerstein identify as having been subverted by Soviet agents is itself history-changing, demanding a rewrite of much of the history of World War II. Despite the familiarity with which we regard the era, in many ways, Evans and Romerstein are pioneering a new field of study. The best way to approach it with what Evans himself calls his Law of Inadequate Paranoia: “No matter how bad you think something is,” he says, “when you look into it, it's always worse."

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