`Red' Alert at Pearl Harbor

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 18, 2001 | by John Berlau

Evidence suggests the Soviet Union, fearing its fate at the hands of a growing Pacific power, used agents in Washington and Tokyo to manipulate the U.S. and Japan into open warfare.

This year, remembrance of the 60th anniversary of the great military tragedy that forced America's entry into World War II began early as Disney's $140 million Pearl Harbor opened Memorial Day weekend. The movie celebrates the bravery of the World War II generation, coming back to win a two-front war with Germany and Japan after virtually the entire U.S. Pacific fleet was destroyed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

But the movie also has stimulated interest in the events leading up to Dec. 7, 1941, and thrown the spotlight on longtime controversies and questions. Did then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt have warning of the attack and ignore it? Was FDR trying to goad Japan into war to justify U.S. entry against Tokyo's ally, Germany? Why was the U.S. military so unprepared if top brass knew that war with Japan was imminent? Why was the last-minute warning sent by slow-moving commercial cablegram?

On top of all this comes fresh evidence of a Soviet role in the Pearl Harbor disaster. It was well-established long ago that Soviet leader Josef Stalin was petrified Japan would attack the Soviet Union in the East. He placed a network of spies in Japan to report to him on the Imperial government's every move. New revelations from the former Soviet Union show that Soviet intelligence tried to reduce the threat to the U.S.S.R. from Japan by manipulating the United States and Japan into war. "What the Soviets wanted was to make sure that they would not be attacked by Japan, that the Japanese would be turned on us and not on them," veteran Soviet intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein tells Insight.

In The Venona Secrets, the explosive new book Romerstein coauthored with the late journalist Eric Breindel, the former congressional investigator and head of the U.S. Information Agency's Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation reveals evidence that a Soviet agent with a high-ranking position in the Roosevelt administration helped set the stage for the surprise Japanese attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

It long has been known that New Deal economist Harry Dexter White was a Soviet spy. It even is old news that as assistant secretary of the Treasury he was one of the first to urge Roosevelt to take a hard line against Japan. But it now has been revealed that the policy advice White gave on Japan probably was instigated on direct instruction from his bosses in the Soviet Union.

The evidence is that White was a Soviet "agent of influence" using his position in the U.S. government both to give the Soviets information and to shape U.S. policy in ways that served the U.S.S.R. In 1946, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to then-president Harry Truman that White was "a valuable asset to an underground Soviet espionage organization." Two years later, ex-communists Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley identified White under oath in hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a member of a communist cell operating in the U.S. government.

All doubt that White was a Soviet agent effectively was removed in the mid-1990s when secret Soviet cables intercepted by the U.S. government and decrypted under the Venona project were declassified. Historians, including Romerstein, have found White's name prominently and frequently mentioned in the Venona documents.

White still has some defenders trying to explain away the constant communications about his activities within Soviet intelligence agencies and the information they received from him. "That was his job to talk to Russians. He was the main liaison for the U.S. Treasury with the Soviet Union," claims James Boughton, former historian of the International Monetary Fund, which White put together after World War II. "I think it's probably the case that White was more open in discussing [U.S.] policies than he later wished he had been, but that's not espionage," Boughton says.

But most scholars of the Venona documents say it's abundantly clear from the intercepts that White was a conscious Soviet agent. "I think the evidence is quite satisfying and convincing and adequate to reach a conclusion that he consciously cooperated with Soviet intelligence," said John Earl Haynes, 20th Century Political Historian at the Library of Congress and coauthor of the 1999 blockbuster book Venona. "I don't think anyone who spies against the United States is a good spy." And Romerstein points out that the Venona transcripts confirm the Soviets agreed to pay the private-school tuition of White's daughter and gave the family other "gifts," shattering the myth that White's cooperation was based on idealism and naivete.

At the same time as the Venona documents were released, a former intelligence officer launched another bombshell: White's well-known push for the United States to take a hard line with Japan came at the behest of a Soviet plan called "Operation Snow." Tokyo was on the march in the Pacific, and Stalin was afraid Japan would attack Russia through its eastern peninsula in Siberia. Increasingly, it looked to many like Japan's next target either would be the Soviet Union or outlying territories of the United States. "There was plenty of indication in 1940 and 1941 that Japan considered itself very much contained and facing shortages in various areas, and it needed to do something," Haynes said. "It had a choice. It could go south and run into the British and the Americans, or it could go north [into the Soviet Union]."