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"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
"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.
"Diana West is distinguished from almost all political commentators because she seeks less to defend ideas and proposals than to investigate and understand what happens and what has happened. This gives her modest and unpretentious books and articles the status of true scientific inquiry, shifting the debate from the field of liking and disliking to being and non-being."
-- Olavo de Carvalho
"Diana West wrote a brilliant book called American Betrayal, which I recommend to everybody ... It is a seminal work that will grow in importance."
-- Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker, Fox News contributor
"A brilliantly researched and argued book."
-- Edward Jay Epstein, author of Deception: The Invisible War between the KGB and the CIA, The Annals 0f Unsolved Crime
"American Betrayal is absolutely required reading. Essential. You're sleepwalking without it."
-- Chris Farrell, director of investigations research, Judicial Watch
“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, journalist, founder, Danish Free Press Society
"This is a must read for any serious student of history and anyone working to understand the Marxist counter-state in America."
-- John Guandolo, president, Understanding the Threat, former FBI special agent
"I've been, quite frankly, mesmerized by Diana West and her new book American Betrayal. If you get it (a) you won't put it down, and (b) you'll be flipping back to the notes section because every paragraph your hair's going to be on fire."
-- Stephen K. Bannon, Breitbart News Radio
"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
"I have read it, and agree wholeheartedly."
-- Angelo Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston Unversity, and fellow of the Claremont Institute.
No book has ever frightened me as much as American Betrayal. ... [West] patiently builds a story outlining a network of subversion so bizarrely immense that to write it down will seem too fantastic to anyone without the book’s detailed breadth and depth. 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. ... By the time you put the book down, you have a very different view of America’s war aims and strategies. The core question is, did the USA follow a strategy that served its own best interests, or Stalin’s? And it’s not that it was Stalin’s that is so compelling, since you knew that had to be the answer, but the evidence in detail that West provides that makes this a book you cannot ignore.
-- Steven Kates, RMIT (Australia) Associate Professor of Economics, 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
"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
Although I know [Christopher] Andrew well, and have met [Oleg] Gordievsky twice, I now doubt their characterization of Hopkins -- also embraced by Radosh and the scholarly community. I now support West's conclusions after rereading KGB: The Inside Story account 23 years later [relevant passages cited in American Betrayal]. It does not ring true that Hopkins was an innocent dupe dedicated solely to defeating the Nazis. Hopkins comes over in history as crafty, secretive and no one's fool, hardly the personality traits of a naïve fellow traveler. And his fingerprints are on the large majority of pro-Soviet policies implemented by the Roosevelt administration. West deserves respect for cutting through the dross that obscures the evidence about Hopkins, and for screaming from the rooftops that the U.S. was the victim of a successful Soviet intelligence operation.
-- Bernie Reeves, founder of The Raleigh Spy Conference, American Thinker
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
[American Betrayal is] the most important anti-Communist book of our time ... a book that can open people's eyes to the historical roots of our present malaise ... full of insights, factual corroboration, and psychological nuance.
-- J.R. Nyquist, author, Origins of the Fourth World War
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, fabricated, 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 attacking "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 neoconservative "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
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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Aug
23
Written by:
Diana West
Saturday, August 23, 2014 7:51 AM

An overheard conversation between top Nazis Goering (front left) and von Ribbentrop (front, second from right) set off the chain of events revealing to the public the existence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact's "secret protocol," which included evidence of Soviet war crimes committed in tandem with the Nazis. The Allies suppressed the document at the Nuremberg trials.
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Today is the 75th anniverary of the non-aggression pact between the Hitler and Stalin, the latter becoming (after Hitler attacked Stalin on June 22, 1941) the member of the "Big Three" known as "Uncle Joe." In the commemorative essays discussing the twin dictators' earlier alliance of August 23, 1939, which would be followed by Hitler and Stalin's conquest of Poland the following month, the pact's secret protocol that divided the nations of central and Eastern Europe between them is also mentioned. I have yet to see, however, any discussion of how that secret protocol became known to the public.
That disturbing story of near-suppression takes us past the war to the trials of the Nazi high command in Nuremberg -- widely hailed the model of international justice. But what a morally rotten exercise it was, as war criminals (Soviets) sat in judgment of war criminals (Nazis) while war crimes (British and US) were occurring all around (Operation Keelhaul, the little known British-US-enabled "repatriation" from the West of millions of Soviet-claimed persons to death/the Gulag, was in full swing).
There, in a Nuremberg prison yard, a German defense lawyer by chance overheard top Nazis (von RIbbentrop and Goering) discussing the contents of the still-secret protocol, which offered evidence of Stalin’s guilt in committing “conspiracy to wage aggressive war,” one of the key charges against the German high command. With Stalin trying to blot out his alliance with Hitler from the record -- with full support of his British and American allies -- how did the secret protocol ever come to the world's attention?
Here is what happened at Nuremberg, as discussed in Chapter 2 of American Betrayal, pp. 54-58.

... Even to participate in these trials, the Western Allies had to overlook Stalin’s crimes and pretend they had not taken place within the timeline of the war whose very outbreak was precipitated by the infamous 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact negotiated by German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. After all, the Nazis and Soviets had begun World War II together as allies with the invasion of Poland. The Germans invaded Poland from the west on September 1, 1939—a well-known date—and the Red Army invaded from the east on September 17, 1939.
Not a well-known date.
Why?
Given the USSR’s 1939–41 attacks on Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Bessarabia alone, as John Laughland writes in his 2008 book A History of Political Trials, “the Communists were therefore guilty of exactly the same crimes against peace as the Nazis. They were also guilty of numerous atrocities.”56
At first, this was another concept that brought me up short, another point of clarity that should have been obvious but had somehow been obscured by the fog of that vaporous arsenal clouding our understanding of the past. It wasn’t right to convict Hitler’s successors of charges that Stalin was equally guilty of and call it not only justice but Perfect, Lodestar Justice for the Ages. One of the many proofs of the corruption of Nuremberg lies in the fact that when a German defense counsel named Alfred Seidl brought forward the first public evidence of the secret protocol to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact that divided the nations and peoples of Europe between Hitler and Stalin—evidence of Stalin’s guilt of committing “conspiracy to wage aggressive war,” one of the key charges against the German high command—Seidl’s evidence, a verified copy of the protocol, was ruled inadmissible. In open court—and not just any open court, but the model court of a new international order—the Western Allies signed on to a Soviet conspiracy of silence conceived of and directed by Stalin. Mean- while, Stalin, it turns out, had empowered a secret commission at Nuremberg “to prevent at all costs any public discussion of any aspects of Nazi-Soviet relations in 1939–1941, and, first and foremost, of the actual existence, let alone contents of the so-called secret protocols,” writes Arkady Vaksberg in his 1990 biography of Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin’s Prosecutor. Vyshinsky headed that secret commission. “However, all his [Vyshinsky’s] worries proved unfounded; the foreign members [of the tribunal] were quite kindly disposed toward their [Soviet] Allies and certainly no desire to strain relations.”57
In this cozy court, Seidl set off an unanticipated eruption of the facts, which the U.S. government, already in possession of the Nazi archives, might well have known even before the German lawyer made his case. Quite by chance, Seidl had overheard von Ribbentrop in the prison yard revealing the secret protocol and its contents to Hermann Göering. Seidl then embarked on a very vocal search for the document, up and down channels, eventually and clandestinely receiving a photostat of the document from an unnamed U.S. officer, who we might assume was fed up with Nuremberg “justice,” too. While the evidence wasn’t admitted in court, it entered the equally important court of public opinion. On May 22, 1946, the day after Seidl was overruled at Nuremberg, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published the once-secret protocol in its entirety, thus thwarting the conspiracy of silence.
It’s possible that without Seidl’s “indomitable” efforts, as the Post-Dispatch described them, we might never have learned about the secret protocol— certainly not for some time. The fact is, not a jot about the Soviet criminal case came to judgment at Nuremberg—not the NKVD massacre of some twenty thousand Polish officers known as the Katyn Forest Massacre (charged to the Germans), not the forced “repatriation” of some two million Soviet-claimed refugees, which occurred thanks to essential assistance from British and U.S. troops—our very own war crime—which was still under way in Ger- many and elsewhere even as Nuremberg unfolded. Yes, as we’ve seen, Vyshinsky, Stalin’s all-purpose fixer and prosecutor at the notorious Moscow show trials of the 1930s (the Great Purge that liquidated tens of thousands of Soviet citizens58), kept showing up to ensure, minder-style, “that everything went off as planned, and especially to ensure that no discussion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was allowed in the courtroom.”59 However, as we’ve also seen, the presence of the man Britain’s chief prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross called “Stalin’s foremost proxy” was likely unnecessary, what with “the Tribunal,” as Telford Taylor, chief American counsel at Nuremberg, writes in his Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, “doing its best to protect [the Soviets] from embarrassment.”60
Shades of George Bush at Malta, forty years later.
Taylor’s 1992 “personal memoir” of Nuremberg only skimmed what he called the trials’ “political warts,” the “biggest wart” being “the presence of the Soviet judges on the bench.” Why? By way of explanation, Taylor invoked the “hatred and fear of communism and the Soviet Union . . . voiced throughout the United States,” which is no explanation at all. As for the Moscow show trials, he gently broke it to readers on page 639 that the trials “had a very bad name.” Then there was that “very ticklish matter” of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Taylor writes. Even a practically kindly passing reference to the perfidious agreement by prosecutor Shawcross was infamously omitted in deference to Soviet sensibilities.61 These were the lies and hypocrisy that led to such ghastly scenes as when, with Hermann Göring and Rudolph Hess in the dock, the Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko spoke on February 8, 1946. Taylor writes, “Rudenko described the [German] invasions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and then . . . the Soviet Union. Certain events contemporaneous with the destruction of the Polish state seemed to have been erased from Rudenko’s memory” (emphasis added).
“Certain events,” of course, referred to the massive, simultaneous and, at that moment in the proceedings, ongoing Soviet role in said Polish destruction. Taylor’s account continued, quoting the words of the Soviet prosecutor, “On September 1, 1939 the fascist aggressors invaded Polish territory in treacherous violation of existing treaties,” [Rudenko] declaimed, and read from a document . . . to show “how the gangster assault of Hitler’s Germany on Poland was prepared in advance” (emphasis added).
“Prepared in advance”? Even Taylor doesn’t fail to notice Rudenko’s omission, writing, “Of course, the crucial ‘preparation in advance’ was the Nazi-Soviet treaty.”62 Taylor makes no additional comment on this brazen hypocrisy, an altered state of mind that the West dysfuntionally tolerated to a point where even as late as 1986, Soviet officials could with impunity denounce references to the historical consequences of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact as being “disinformation about the prewar policy of the USSR” and a “hackneyed lie that the Soviet-German Treaty of 1939 opened the path to the second world war.”63 Never mind that it did. Taylor does, however, note a memorable observation made by Nuremberg psychologist Dr. G. M. Gilbert: “Gilbert recorded that Goering and Hess, in disgust, took off their headphones. During the lunch break, Goering was scornful: ‘I did not think that they [the Russians] would be so shameless as to mention Poland.’ ”64
When Göring and Hess have the moral high ground, you know you’re in trouble—or at least you should. Knowing or not, everyone who participated in the charade at Nuremberg was complicit. In a 1962 essay titled “Who Betrays Whom?” the British writer and ex-Socialist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had famously and to the detriment of his journalistic career borne early witness to the horrors of Soviet collectivization and forced famine in the 1930s, had this to say: “Let us hope that mankind will sometime recover sufficient equanimity to get a laugh out of the spectacle of English and American judges sitting alongside Soviet ones, and solemnly pronouncing Germans guilty of the use of forced labour and of the partition of Poland.”65
Germans, but not Soviets.
No such knowing derision has ever compromised the solemn regard in which Nuremberg is still held, still respected as a civilizational milestone. Given the travesty of Soviet immunity alone, this vaunted tribunal gives off the noxious fumes of a Western show trial, albeit one conducted not to establish the phony guilt of defendants but rather to establish the phony legitimacy of the court itself—specifically the Soviet Union’s rotten central role in it. How else to regard a judicial proceeding where Moscow show trial judge Iona Timofeevich Nikitchenko presided?66 In his Nuremberg memoir, Telford Taylor opaquely introduced late-twenty-century readers to Nikitchenko as “an army judge advocate,” but in 1936, Nikitchenko made mass murderers’ row as one of the judges who signed the spurious death sentences of the “old Bolsheviks” in the first of Stalin’s public show trials that initiated the Great Purge decimation of a generation of Russians.67 ”We might agree, at least retrospectively,” Robert Conquest wrote in 2005 regarding Nikitchenko’s blood-soaked spot on the Nuremberg bench, “Nuremberg can be pronounced defective on this basis alone.”68
But we do not so agree, retrospectively or otherwise. Such a thought doesn’t enter our minds. Nuremberg “justice” as jointly apportioned by “Allies” who included hardened criminals-against-humanity from the USSR lives on as “a moral reference point.”69 How can that be? How can we look at darkness and see purity? Once again, Mikhail Gorbachev’s failure to accept the reality of half a million trucks and jeeps wasn’t and isn’t the only amazing game of denial in town.
Indeed, Bukovsky’s notion of Western “ideological collaboration” to serve Soviet ends has a long and storied tradition that, as the example of the 1946 Nuremberg Trials indicates, certainly goes back further than 1991. In both cases, in Moscow in 1991 and at Nuremberg in 1946, Communist doctrine and its leading agent, the Soviet Union, were allowed to slip away unrecognized, unjudged, unpunished. Perhaps it’s possible to say that the difference is that in 1946, the main motivation to protect Communism, while enabled and acquiesced todue to Allied expediency, still came from within the USSR, a co-victor, after all, in World War II. In 1991, with the USSR in tatters, the decisive block on passing judgment against the USSR, the Cold War loser, came from the West itself.
Now, what was it I said at the beginning of this chapter about finding equilibrium in the conventional wisdom about the 1989 breakup of the Soviet bloc?
I was just leading you on. ...
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A sterling example of penetrating counterintelligence analysis, the kind one seldom sees issuing from intelligence circles, let alone from a private researcher. Diana’s previous books mark her as one who goes far beyond the usual academic policy analysis, to penetrate to the heart of hidden history that seldom makes it to the light of day. Reading The Red Thread prompted me to recall Honoré de Balzac’s observation that there are two histories: the official one, mendacious; and the secret history, shameless, but the real cause of events. Diana West plumbs the depths of Balzac’s secret history in a way that surfaces the realities of an ideological underworld that too many deny and would rather not see exposed. Diana West is a one-person intelligence agency.
— John J. Dziak, Ph.D., former senior intelligence executive, author of Chekisty: A History of the KGB, Adjunct Professor at the Institute of World Politics, Washington, D.C.
Once again, Diana West provides us with invaluable analysis, meticulously documented. She exposes the radical Leftist ideological roots of the Trump "lawfare” coup plotters masquerading as “respectable” Establishment law enforcement and intelligence professionals. Ms. West delivers facts, history, documentation and context like no other. Her work in essential reading.
— Chris Farrell, Director of Investigations & Research for Judicial Watch. He is a former Military Intelligence officer and Special Agent of U.S. Army Counterintelligence.
An extraordinary contribution to understanding the struggle of our times. Diana West has once again done exhaustive research and unearthed a series of facts and connections which will change how you see the American left decisively. This is courageous groundbreaking work with enormous implications for understanding the depth and intensity of hostility to freedom embedded in the American left and its connections to international threats to our survival.
-- Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, Fox News contributor, and author of numerous bestselling books.
This fascinating new book by Diana West, a leading expert on the history of American communism, offers intriguing insights into the anti-Trump conspiracy. Ms. West teases out highly interesting, and disturbing, facts about many of the anti-Trump conspiracy players. But more importantly, she lays out a larger framework in which to view the philosophical drivers of many of the conspirators, who fall into the Marxist/globalist/collectivist political camp. This is in direct opposition to the capitalist/nationalist/individualistic political camp led by Donald Trump. Trump was anathema to these individuals because he represented an existential threat to the globalist enterprise, which has been so long in the making.
-- William Marshall, Senior Investigator, Judicial Watch, and an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 30 years.
Once again, Diana West, as she did in American Betrayal, has scored a home run for truth. Diana's research and analysis are superb. The Red Thread provides an excellent opportunity for Americans to learn the identity of those whose agenda is not in keeping with America's patriotic ideals, and who would undermine its very existence. The Red Thread should be required reading for true patriots who serve in America's government, not to mention those who attend the nation's military academies and war college. Diana West is to be saluted for her patriotism, dedication and her passion for truth.
-- John Molloy, OSJ, Chairman, National Vietnam & Gulf War Veterans Coalition
Diana West exposes a red thread running through the campaign to unseat President Trump. It is the story of a socialist cabal painting itself in false patriotic colors, camouflaged behind a facade of national concern. West shows that the conspirators’ true ideals are opposed to nation and Constitution. Yet it is more than a conspiracy she reveals. It is the latest iteration of the same old phenomenon of subversion, driven forward by what Whttaker Chambers called “man’s second oldest faith.”
— Jeff Nyquist, author of Origins of the Fourth World War
Diana West's analysis of the ideological backgrounds of the DOJ and IC coup plotters against President Trump is powerful, even incontrovertible, evidence of their guilt. Anyone who reads the Mueller Report or listens to MSNBC, etc. should also read The Red Thread as an antidote!
-- Dr. Peter Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. He served on the Congressional EMP Commission as chief of staff, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA. He is author of Blackout Wars.
Diana West does remarkable work and must not be ignored. Her work is research driven not opinion driven---a rarity in today's world. It is essential reading.
-- Peter Schweizer, author of Secret Empires and Clinton Cash

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