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American Betrayal

FINALLY -- IN AUDIOBOOK!

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"It is not simply a good book about history. It is one of those books which makes history. ... "

-- Vladimir Bukovsky, co-founder of the Soviet dissident movement and author of Judgment in Moscow, 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

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

"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

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

"I have read it, and agree wholeheartedly."

-- Angelo Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston Unversity, and fellow of the Claremont Institute. 

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.

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

"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 

"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

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

"American Betrayal is absolutely required reading. Essential. You're sleepwalking without it."

-- Chris Farrell, director of investigations research, Judicial Watch

"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 

"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 

It is myth, or a series of myths, concerning WW2 that Diana West is aiming to replace with history in 2013’s American Betrayal.

If West’s startling revisionism is anywhere near the historical truth, the book is what Nietzsche wished his writings to be, dynamite.

-- Mark Gullick, British Intelligence 

“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

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 

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

"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

[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 

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

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

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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Rereading American Betrayal: Why Did Uncle Sam Keep Soviet Secret Agents a Secret?

Feb 16

Written by: Diana West
Monday, February 16, 2015 11:02 AM 

Attempts to explain the unhinged campaign (spearheaded, curiously, by ex-Communists) to save "court history" from the newly dusted-off, newly inter-connected evidence presented in American Betrayal have logically pointed to the arguments in the book that pull FDR from his pedestal and lift McCarthy from history's hell.

As I now record the audiobook, however, I am struck anew by other arguments mustered in the book that augur a change in the way we also regard Truman, Eisenhower and many more. Such arguments make the case for a seismic shift in our conception of the "American Century."

To be sure, that conception to date is based on drastically incomplete information. Chapter 6 of American Betrayal begins by showing that almost every US history book -- military, biography, diplomacy, etc. -- written post-Venona (1995) fails to incorporate the record of espionage relevant to the epic events and actors they purport to explicate. Among other things, this tells me it is incumbent on us to re-assess these events and actors by interweaving the mainly absent intelligence backstory into the familar tapestry of war and peace we all "know." This is the mechanism of American Betrayal.

Along the way, the behavior of the executive branch in particular in regard to the massive, secret Soviet-directed penetration of the halls of power that reached criticial mass under FDR demands new scrutiny. For example, take Truman's reaction to Whittaker Chambers 1948 testimony unmasking Alger HIss as a leading agent of the Soviet-directed, Communist conspiracy against the United States. Rather than crowning him with laurels, he sought to indict Chambers for perjury. Why?

Starting in 1945, Truman began receiving numerous and weighty reports from the FBI on the Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt administration that named Hiss and White and Currie, among many others, so he was cognizant of the crisis in considerable detail. 

Chapter 6 focuses on an important FDR aide, Lauchln Currie, who was publicly i.d.'d as a Soviet agent in Venona in the 1990s. Why do I highlight "publicly"? It is worth noting that 40 years prior to the public release of 2,900 Venona documents by the US government (there may be more that are unreleased; we don't know), Currie was already being investigated by the FBI as a Soviet agent -- and, among others, so reported to Truman. Indeed, Currie comes up on the government radar before that.

Currie was first identified internally in 1939 by Whittaker Chambers as a fellow traveller who helped the Communist Underground inside the US government; i.d.'d for the FDR administration by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1941 as one of the 1,100-plus federal employees (also including Hiss and White) belonging to Soviet front organizations (and investigated by the FBI but the reports have "disappeared"); highlighted in 1944 as part of a Communist "fifth column" "boring from within" the FDR administration by GOP VP presidential candidate John Bricker; i'd.'d as a Soviet agent to the FBI (which alerted the Truman White House) in 1945 by ex-Communist Elizabeth Bentley; i'd.'d in open hearings as a Soviet agent by Bentley in 1948. (Tantalizingly, thirteen years later, future Sen. Ted Kenney met and dined  with Currie on a trip to Currie's post-America home of Colombia.)

Long before the public unveiling of Venona in 1995, however, codebreakers were also able to confirm Currie's activities on behalf on the Kremlin. At some point before 1995 -- as far back as 1950, as a matter of fact -- codebreakers confirmed that Soviet intelligence was working with Hiss and White and many other traitors to the United St. Why did We, the People, have to wait 45 more years to learn of this crucial confirmation? Why did Uncle Sam permit Americans to tear themselve apart for decades in a rancorous debate over people such as Hiss and White -- over whether Communist agents even existed in the first place -- when for so much of the time Uncle Sam knew the truth?

From American Betrayal, pp. 166-169:

...It should be noted that a number of espionage prosecutions were secretly assisted by Venona, beginning with that of Soviet agent Judith Coplon, a young Justice Department analyst who in May 1949 became the first spy to be identified and arrested due to Venona revelations; Robert Soblen and Jack Soble followed. It was Venona clues that led to the linchpin conviction of British atomic spy Klaus Fuchs in 1950, and Venona decrypts “unmistakably identified Julius Rosenberg as the head of a Soviet spy ring and David Greenglass, his brother-in-law, as a Soviet source at the secret atomic bomb facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico,” Haynes and Klehr write.

“Unmistakably.” The word peals like a steel bell, cold, penetrating, and troubling. Venona decrypts unmistakably identified Julius Rosenberg . . . “Unmistakably”—and the U.S. government let that secret evidence sit in a vault as our citizens tore each other up over this case for decades? Exactly the same question goes for the Hiss case, the other split-view lodestar by which what became two distinct peoples took their bearings. The U.S. government knew the truth about Hiss and withheld it, too.

Why?

It’s worth noting that Hiss, unlike Coplon and the other atomic spies, was in no way prosecuted with the help of Venona. Indeed, Hiss was already in jail serving four years for perjury related to the lies he told Congress about Chambers before analysts deciphered his name in Venona. It was in the contentious aftermath of his imprisonment, however, during the battle over Hiss and White and Silvermaster and the rest on the one hand, and Bentley and Chambers on the other, that every scrap of information belonged in the center of the public square under bright lights, with Uncle Sam playing town crier:

Hear ye, Hear ye . . .

Instead Uncle Sam mumbled to himself and hid away the precious proof against the traitors, protecting the traitors against the soundings and probes of investigators hot on their trail. Let them grope and stagger blind, Uncle Sam said, let them sift through the good info and the bad, let them rely on their gut hunches to go on, let them fall back on their political courage until it gives out, let them get knocked down, smeared, destroyed. Let the country go to hell. Given what the executive branch knew and when it knew it, this was the greatest betrayal of all.

So, yes, M. Stanton Evans is right about the nation owing plaudits to Joe McCarthy, and more. We owe all of these intrepid public servants our undying gratitude. Sensing the massiveness of the assault on our republic—yes, a conspiracy so immense, to give McCarthy his due—they kept at it, seeking, hunting what their many detractors, many inside the government, never stopped screaming was a mythological beast, a figment, a “witch hunt.” It was just something “under the bed,” a silly “bugaboo,” which became the White House term of choice. ...

“The people are very much wrought up about the Communist bugaboo,” Harry S. Truman wrote in a letter to former Pennsylvania governor George H. Earle in 1947, in response to a very similar warning from Earle. Truman would switch to “red herring” when it came to the Hiss case in the 1948.

Bugaboo? Red herring? Alger Hiss was neither. He was a bona fide enemy of the American republic, but the U.S. government didn’t want anyone to know that, not even after Venona confirmed Hiss’s treason sometime in 1950, as the Schecters report. Why? Oliver Kirby recounted a revealing exchange with Defense Secretary James Forrestal two years earlier, in 1948, about disclosure in general. The way the Schecters tell it, “Kirby raised with Forrestal the idea of publicly releasing the news that American intelligence had broken the Soviet code.” The Soviets, aware American codebreakers were [beginning to] read them since 1945 (thanks to the treason of Drew Pearson’s meek little “Lock” Currie), would only be further inhibited by the announcement, Kirby argued. More important, “Kirby believed that revealing the full extent of Soviet penetration”— complete exposure—“would remove the issue from politics” and limit a “Red Panic” (Truman’s political concern) “because the cases would be acted upon and fully resolved.”

Call it the Sunshine Strategy. Forrestal nixed the notion in no uncertain terms. “Forget that. No. Hell, no”—that kind of thing. His reaction was not unlike what Kirby had already heard from the State Department when he attempted to bring Venona-fingered Communist infiltration to its attention. Or what he would later hear from Gen. Omar Bradley, who, Kirby said, would urge him not to brief other administration officials on Venona’s findings.

It begins to sound like a lot of other things. What George Racey Jordan heard in early 1944 when he went to the State Department wondering about whether he really should be “expediting” military secrets ASAP to Moscow. What U.S. Army Maj. John Van Vliet heard after expeditiously filing a report of his eyewitness assessment of Soviet responsibility for the Katyn Forest Massacre in May 1945. Or what German defense lawyer Alfred Seidl would hear at Nuremberg in 1946 when trying to introduce to the world evidence of the secret division of Europe that Stalin and Hitler had prearranged in the Nazi- Soviet Pact of 1939. Sunshine was the last thing the powers that be—the powers that accommodated, the powers that served—wanted when it came to any aspect of Communist crime and deception. The Establishment wanted its shadows deep, dark and undisturbed. Maybe that was because too many of its members were in them. Maybe that was why they always argued against exposure because, the rationale went, it might upset the Soviets, might worsen relations, might play into the hands of the “hardliners.” These are variations on the same arguments, not at all incidentally, that we hear today to squelch the truth about Islam and its agents’ penetration of the U.S. government.

This Iron Curtain of secrecy left it to the Great Red Hunters to investigate the old-fashioned way, the hard way, the rough way, their suspicions more often than not, it now may be fearlessly declared, confirmed by evidence that just continues to mount to the skies. Evidence that condemns not just the agents of our destruction but our own government, too.

With Venona in a vault, the U.S. government became an agent of concealment, and thus, in effect, a part of the Communist conspiracy, despite itself (or perhaps not). The struggle that characterized what we know as the McCarthy Era, then, pit the forces of full disclosure and transparency—personified by Senator Joseph McCarthy—against the more powerful forces of deception and obfuscation, which included the Truman and Eisenhower White Houses. That’s not at all how we think about it, of course. We’re conditioned, Pavlov’s-dog-style, to invert the paradigm.  ...

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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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