Detail from "I'm More Than Just a Stalin Fan" by William Davies
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More than any other item, what "triggered" the Pravda-style disinformation campaign against American Betrayal was book's annotated examination of Harry Hopkins, FDR all-powerful, unconfirmed, and, today, unknown top aide, who lived in the family quarters of the White House during World War II. KGB colonel and defector Oleg Gordievsky was taught in KGB training school that Hopkins was the Kremlin's most important agent in America during World War II; Kremlin/Communist intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein positively identified Hopkins as an agent of influence; Air Force historian Eduard Mark identified him as Source 19 in a Venona cable (Mark did not believe Hopkins was a Soviet agent, however).
But what did Hopkins actually do? American Betrayal sets forth his record of perfidy/honorable service for consideration, and I invite readers -- and, now, listeners to the brand new audiobook -- to comment.
As I studied Hopkins, whom I had barely heard of before undertaking this research, I came to believe there is no overstating his significance.
From Chapter Seven:
Without this one unlikely human hot spot of Kremlin influence, without this sickly man who alternately haunted death’s door and high-life’s watering holes until finally succumbing in January 1946, without his artful domination of the thirty-second president, without his lockstep-loyal network of intragovernmental assistants he assembled to bypass constitutional checks and balances, World War II, the war that remade the world even as we know it today, would have taken an unrecognizably different course. In military terms -- which are also human terms -- the fighting would have likely ended much, much sooner, and much, much better, from the American point of view, not the Soviet point of view. In political terms -- which are also human terms -- a shorter war would have prevented the Soviet enslavement of half of Europe and beyond, which occurred due to the relative positions of Allied armies in Europe in May 1945.
In human terms, a shorter war would have meant millions fewer casualties, from the Nazi death houses to the battlefields; indeed, a shorter war would also have spared Central Europe’s urban centers, which were flattened by Allied firebombing campaigns mainly in that final year of war, and particularly in those final months of fighting. The ultimate firebombing attack came at Dresden, where roughly one thousand British and U.S. heavy bombers dropped roughly four thousand tons of explosives and incendiary devices on the city center between February 13 and 15, 1945, less than three months before V-E Day on May 8, 1945. It is said, as the late historian John Keegan wrote, that this atrocious act was taken at the behest of Stalin. In the past, I’ve defended the firebombing of Dresden on the basis of the mission’s stated objectives and the Nazis’ refusal to surrender, but it is with a heavy heart that I now believe it was “necessary” only to facilitate Soviet territorial gain. On an extremely low level, defending Dresden makes me just another dupe of the great Communist con. Was obliterating Dresden and some thirty thousand of its residents to expedite the Soviet march on Berlin in America’s best interest? Of course not. It wasn’t in humanity’s best interest, either. Ironically, it was in the best interest of Dresden residents Victor and Eva Klemperer, who, having received Nazi orders to report for labor duty on the day before the firebombing campaign would begin, were able to escape near-certain death by the light of these raging flames of destruction. Then again, if the war had been shorter, it all would have been unnecessary.
The duration and outcome of the war itself, then, become a potential case against Harry Hopkins as the bayonet point of Soviet influence penetrating the White House. With a shorter war, it seems unlikely the Soviet Union would have emerged as a superpower; certainly not a territorial behemoth with a new empire. This hypothesis makes Hopkins the most overlooked catalyst of the twentieth century. History may remember him as a bit player, but it’s time to refocus posterity’s attention. ...