Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The whole purpose of secrecy in government should not be to keep information from other states (this is almost impossible) but to make it as difficult as possible for other states to get certain information, so that, when they do get such restricted information, it will be so intermingled with other information and misinformation that it cannot be evaluated promptly enough to do them much good. Any espionage system gets more information than it can handle rapidly. Any country should assume that the enemy has all its own secret information. The lessons of past history fully support this assumption. Following every war the discovery is made that the enemy, during the war, had every other state’s most cherished secrets. In fact, the most successful kind of counterespionage work is achieved, not by preventing access to secrets, but by permitting access to information which is not true. This was done most successfully in 1943 in preparing the American invasion of Sicily, which was a surprise to the Germans because they had been provided, through their espionage in Spain, with false information about an invasion of the Balkans. The Germans had a somewhat similar success through their Operation North Pole by which the Germans successfully took over and operated the French Underground and the associated British espionage net in a large part of France for about a year. Finally, it is not generally recognized by outsiders that almost all the information gathered by any espionage net is nonsecret material fully available to anyone as public information. Even in work against a supersecret area like the Soviet Union or in nuclear “secrets” this is true. Allen Dulles said that more than 90 percent of the information which the CIA gathers on the Soviet Union is nonsecret. Soviet espionage reports on the United States must contain at least 97 percent nonsecret material.

Many, if not most, of the “spies” and “atomic spies” apprehended, with high-powered publicity, by the FBI and the Un-American Activities Com-mittee in 1948-1954 (to the great alarm of the American people) were not concerned with secrets, while some of them were not engaged in espionage at all, and almost none of them had anything to do with nuclear secrets (contrary to the publicity releases of the agencies who accused them). There was nuclear espionage, and it was successful, but almost nothing was achieved by any spy chasers in the United States either to reveal the culprits or to punish them. Fuchs and Nunn May were real nuclear spies for the Soviet, but others at least equally important are hardly ever mentioned. For example, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the greatest French nuclear physicist (Nobel Prize, 1935) and an admitted member of the Communist Party, knew as much about our nuclear work as anyone in Europe, Britain, or Canada. His chief associates fled from France (he did not) in 1940 and worked on the nuclear project in England and Canada until they returned to France after that country’s liberation. Some of these associates, notably Hans von Halban and Lew Kowarski, certainly knew as much as Nunn May and may have known as much as Fuchs, and unquestionably told all they knew to Joliot-Curie, a Communist, in 1944. Or again, as an example of numerous unexplored paths by which nuclear information went to Russia, an outstanding Polish nuclear physicist who studied with Joliot-Curie was Ignace Zlotowski. He was in the United States in the critical years during the Soviet race to make the atom bomb as a member of the Polish Embassy staff and Poland’s representative on the UN Atomic Energy Commission. He sent large quantities of nuclear information behind the Iron Curtain and was present as an observer at the Bikini bomb tests in 1946.

Finally, it is evident that a great deal of nuclear information (whether secret or not is unknown), as well as uranium metal, went to the Soviet Union as part of Lend-Lease in 1943. Major George Racey Jordan, USAAF, tried in vain to disrupt these shipments at the time. While most of Jordan’s evidence is unreliable, the shipment of uranium to Russia is corroborated from other sources. The significance of such shipments is still unknown, since the export license permitting them was granted at the request of General Groves. Jordan’s other evidence, most of which was very discreditable to the New Deal (since he testified that he, Groves, and others were under direct pressure from Harry Hopkins and Vice-President Henry Wallace to allow export of nuclear materials, radar, and other secrets to Russia) was subsequently shown to be false, yet all his statements were given nationwide publicity by news commentators like Fulton Lewis, Jr., by Life magazine, and by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and are still widely believed.

Most of the “atomic spy” cases are similar to this. The earliest of these was the arrest of Soviet naval Lieutenant Redin by the FBI on March 26, 1946, on charges that a Seattle naval engineer, Herbert Kennedy, had sold Redin “secrets” about the Bikini test ship Yellowstone for $250. This case was a forerunner of others in respect to two false assertions in news releases: (1) claims by the FBI that information leading to the apprehension of Redin had come from the Gouzenko “atomic spy” case in Canada (February 1946) and (2) claims by the HUAC that it had unearthed this significant case. Redin was eventually acquitted when his defense showed that Kennedy had been paid for research he did for Redin in the Seattle Public Library. Neither Gouzenko nor HUAC had anything to do with it.

The change in the climate of American opinion (and thus in the attitudes of American juries) over four years may be observed in the contrast between the acquittal of Redin in 1946 and the conviction of Abraham Brothman in 1950. The FBI publicity and the universal belief of the American press, both at Brothman’s arrest in July 1950 and at his trial in November 1950, was that he was “part of a Soviet spy apparatus under a Russian trade organization chief working to ferret out atomic secrets” ( The New York Times , July 30, 1950) or that the trial was an “ATOMIC SPY CASE” (all New York newspaper headlines, November 8-23, 1950). In fact, Brothman and his secretary (Miss Moskowitz) were the only defendants in a trial for conspiracy to persuade a third person, not on trial (Harry Gold), to commit perjury in July 1947. Undoubtedly, Brothman and his secretary had discussed together what they could do about the testimony to be given by the semimoronic Gold before a grand jury. Their purpose, in which they clearly failed, was to keep Brothman from being involved in any charges of giving secrets to Communists. Technically they were guilty of conspiracy, were so found, and were sentenced to a total of nine years’ imprisonment. In spite of the fact that the trial clearly showed that Brothman had nothing to do with espionage, secrets, or atomic research, the mistaken impression that he did was never removed by the press, and remained in the public mind as an established truth, so that United States Attorney Irving Saypol, who prosecuted this case in November 1950, referred to Brothman as convicted of “ espionage ” when he prosecuted the Rosenberg case before the same judge in April 1951. The true story, as far as Brothman was concerned, seems to be quite different.

Brothman was an industrial chemist and chemical inventor who owned a number of chemical laboratories and factories held as subsidiaries of his Pennsylvania Sugar Company. His chief concern was in industrial solvents in which he held patents on processes and equipment. In 1940, when Brothman was seeking orders for his products, he was approached by a Russian, Jacob Golos, then proprietor of World Tourists, a Communist-front travel agency but previously employed by the Soviet Trade Commission (AMTORG) and its Purchasing Commission. Brothman offered Golos 10 percent commission on any orders he could place with either agency for Brothman’s products or processes. We now know that Golos was a high official in the Soviet secret police, a major Soviet spy, and one of the three-man Control Commission of the American Communist Party. Brothman knew none of this and was not himself a Communist, although in 1940 he regarded the Soviet Union as the chief obstacle to world Fascism.