Of course, it wasn’t just an atmosphere of deception created by agents of Soviet influence that undermined American strength. After the war, Victor Kravchenko would testify before Congress to the effect that the Soviet Lend-Lease operation he defected from—the Soviet Purchasing Commission, located about three miles due north of the front door of the White House—was in real- ity the Soviet Spying Commission, the Soviet Thieving Commission, and the Soviet Ransacking Commission, with its thousand-plus employees under orders to filch as many industrial and military secrets as possible for the upcoming struggle between the USSR and the USA. This struggle, they were all told, would inevitably follow World War II. We may have been numb to the chill, but what we call the Cold War was under way long before historians tell us it began.

All the signs of struggle were there for anyone to see—anyone, that is, who could believe his own eyes, who could close his ears to the incessant propaganda. “Russian aims were good and noble. Communism had changed its stripes,” Hanson Baldwin writes, recapping the stream of wartime hooey. He continues, “A study of Marxian literature and of the speeches and writings of its high apostles, Lenin and Stalin, coupled with the expert knowledge of numerous American specialists, should have convinced an unbiased mind that international Communism had not altered its ultimate aim; the wolf had merely donned a sheep’s skin.”

“Islamic aims are good and noble. What stripes could possibly need changing? Extremists are trying to hijack one of the world’s great religions, a religion of peace,” a military analyst of the future will write of our own era’s propaganda stream. “A study of Mohammed’s law (sharia) and the speeches and writings of Islam’s au- thorities, Hassan al-Banna and Yusef al-Qaradawi, coupled with the expert knowledge of American specialists, should have convinced an unbiased mind that international Islam posed a dire threat to liberty.”

Don’t think we aren’t penetrated today by new totalitarians who look to Mecca, not Moscow.

To appreciate the level of infiltration/occupation I am talking about, let’s take the Office of War Information, one of those government bureaus set up in the early stages of the war. The OWI’s mission called for pro-American and pro-Allied propaganda at home and abroad, but it tended to push Communistic policy at home and the Soviet line abroad. Or, to quote the more peppery 1954 description by Chesly Manly, longtime Washington correspondent of The Chicago Tribune, a bitterly anti-Roosevelt paper in those days, OWI “was loaded with draft dodgers, red revolutionists, and a scum of European refugees who pretended to sell America to the world but made it their business to sell Communist Russia to America.”

Periodically, OWI drew the equivalent of dirty looks from congressional Republicans and even censure once from FDR himself for an outbreak of Sovietophilia beyond even White House bounds. As M. Stanton Evans writes, having “scrambled to recruit personnel numbering in the thousands with little time, and apparently less desire, for anti-Red security vetting,” units such as OWI were “custom-built for penetration.”They worked like a dream—Soviet dream, American nightmare.

That’s a lot to accept on faith, I know. So here follows a sampling, extracted from several volumes of spy-tracking research by our leading scholars, of OWI personnel under OWI directors Robert Sherwood, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and Harry Hopkins crony and biographer, and Elmer Davis, a popular pre-Cronkite radio commentator whose tenure is aptly summed up by his yeoman efforts to cover up Soviet responsibility for the Katyn Forest Massacre, setting the story for domestic broadcasts, which would bar commentators who spoke the truth about Soviet guilt.

There was Joseph F. Barnes, OWI assistant director of overseas reporting. For starters, Barnes was an alumnus of the 1933 Moscow correspondents’ conspiracy to suppress news of the Terror Famine and the takedown of Gareth Jones described in the last chapter. According to Romerstein and Breindel, Barnes “had a long relationship with Soviet intelligence.” In the fall of 1944, a Venona cable mentions Barnes, noting that while recruiting him for the NKVD “is obviously not only inadvisable but unrealizable . . . It is desirable to use him without signing him up.” One explanation for this, Romerstein and Breindel posit, “may be that he was already working for the GRU” or Soviet military intelligence. In open congressional hearings in 1951, four witnesses would identify Barnes as a Communist, including ex-Communists Whittaker Chambers and Louis Budenz and former Soviet intel officer Alexander Barmine.

There was Owen Lattimore, the ardently pro-Communist director of OWI’s Pacific operations. Lattimore’s status as a spy remains contested, although not for want of expert opinion. Chiang Kai-shek conveyed to the FBI in 1948 he believed Lattimore, while acting as his Roosevelt-supplied wartime adviser, was supplying information to Communist forces, and Alexander Barmine knew of Lattimore as a Soviet agent. Meanwhile, his function as an agent of Communist influence is impossible to contest. Lattimore would be described in 1952 by Senator Pat McCarran’s Internal Security Subcommittee as “a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.” Having studied his recently declassified FBI files, M. Stanton Evans reports that “Lattimore spent an inordinate amount of time swimming in a veritable Red sea of officially Communist spies and Moscow agents.” Not surprisingly, his “files are replete with data about his links to Communists and Soviet agents, allegations that he stacked his Pacific office of OWI with pro-Red staffers, that he belonged to Communist fronts, that his writings were pro-Soviet propaganda.” Barmine would testify publicly that Soviet intelligence regarded both Barnes and Lattimore as “our men.” Barnes would later help Lattimore write Ordeal by Slander, his 1950 counterattack on Joseph McCarthy, which popularized the epochal term (likely published first in The Daily Worker) “McCarthyism.”

Carlo a Prato was on the OWI Italian desk. His résumé included being “expelled from Switzerland for life as a Soviet agent who received and disbursed funds from Moscow.”

Haynes and Klehr further note that after the war, “several members of OWI’s Polish-language section emerged as defenders of the Communist take- over in Poland and as close relatives of officials in the new Polish Communist regime.” For example, Arthur Salman would “graduate” from the OWI’s Polish desk to become editor-in-chief of Robnotnik (Worker), a big paper in Communist Warsaw.

Flora Wovschin was an almost frantically active KGB agent within OWI (her Soviet intelligence activities there and, later, at the State Department take up some twenty Venona cables).

Irving Lerner, an employee of OWI’s motion picture division, was caught red-handed trying to photograph the cyclotron used in the creation of plutonium at Cal Berkeley without authorization. Speaking of the OWI’s motion picture division, along with the White House, it was deeply involved in the making of Mission to Moscow (1943), summed up by producer Robert Buckner as that “expedient lie for political purposes.”

The question is, whose political purposes—ours or the Soviets’?