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6

Treason of the Heart

In 1965, I was twenty-six and living in London when The Free World Colossus, a book I had written holding the United States responsible for the Cold War, was published. At about that time I received a phone call from a man with a thick Russian accent who said he was with the Novosti Press Agency and wanted to have lunch. I remember clearly that his first name was Lev because I immediately associated it with Trotsky. Later on, after the experience was over, I learned that Lev was the third man in the Soviet embassy, a post usually reserved for officers of the KGB.

Lev wore the badly-tailored black suits favored by Soviet officials and was a man of medium height with thin white hair and a pasty Slavic complexion. In the course of our relationship, he insisted always on calling me from a pay-phone, a precaution I accepted as natural. This was not because I presumed from the outset that he was a spy, but because it was normal in the left to assume that phones were tapped and that “sensitive” political matters should be discussed in person. The fact that Lev was a Soviet official merely made the discretion seem particularly prudent.

Our meetings took place in London’s more expensive restaurants, like Prunier’s, where I first sampled Coquilles St. Jacques and other elegant cuisines courtesy of the Soviet Union. My reaction to this treatment was a mixture of enjoyment—I could not myself afford such extravagances—and guilt. In my private thoughts I deplored the way the Soviet government was ready to squander wealth that properly belonged to Soviet workers on such luxuries, but it seemed rude to bring up such matters to my host, nor did I want to lose an opportunity to present my views to an influential Soviet official. My host routinely ordered a bottle of wine, which I did not hold well, so that by the middle of the meal I was always a little tipsy.

The topics of our discussions were wide-ranging and I did most of the talking. I took it as my mission to convert Lev to New Left ways of thinking. I advised him that it was important to publish Trotsky’s writings in the Soviet Union and tried to persuade him that it was counter-productive to incarcerate dissidents in psychiatric institutions, the current Soviet practice. Repressive methods may have been necessary, I suggested, during the period of “primitive accumulation” when the Soviet Union was catching up with the industrial powers. But now that Russia was a superpower, the controls could be relaxed.

The focus of our discussions often shifted to the subject of Bertrand Russell, for whom I was working at that time, and his secretary, Ralph Schoenman. Lev wanted to know the answer to the question on everyone’s mind. How influential was Schoenman in shaping the philosopher’s political stands? Russell had made some public statements the Russians didn’t like. Did they reflect his views or Ralph’s? Later, I discussed these conversations with Ralph and he gave me some background to Lev’s curiosity. The Johnson administration had recently begun bombing military targets in North Vietnam. At Ralph’s prompting, Russell issued a public appeal to Moscow to supply MiG’s to the North Vietnamese so they could shoot down the American planes. The Soviet consul general had summoned Ralph to a meeting. After explaining to him that sending Russian planes would mean war with the United States, the consul warned: “Mr. Schoenman, people who advocate World War III are either crazy or working for the CIA, and they get into trouble.”

When Lev was not asking me questions about Russell and Schoenman, I lectured him on how the Soviet future could be reshaped. He didn’t try to discourage me from the belief that I was making an impression. At the end of the second or third session he gave me a Parker fountain pen. It was still in the store box and wasn’t wrapped like a present. I didn’t know how to refuse it without insulting him. The next time we had lunch it was raining and I was wearing my trench coat. As we walked into the street at the end of the meal, he stuffed a thick white envelope into my left pocket.

I knew instinctively what it was, but was so frightened that I didn’t dare remove it until I reached home. Without taking off my coat, I went into the bedroom and closed the door, laying the envelope out on the bed. Inside, there were 150 one-dollar bills. I was not so much surprised as dumbfounded. How could these people be so stupid in their own interest and so reckless with mine? The Free World Colossus was the first left-wing history of the Cold War that could not be tainted as the work of a Soviet apologist. It had taken me years to develop this perspective, which promised to be far more effective in persuading readers that America was responsible for the Cold War and far more valuable to the Soviets, if they wanted to look at it that way, than any information I might be able to obtain as an intelligence asset. Yet they thought nothing of putting my work in jeopardy by attempting to recruit me as an agent. The thought enraged me.

I returned the envelope at our next meeting and told him never to give me another. He was disappointed but not discouraged, especially since I agreed to go on with our lunches. But a few sessions later it became apparent that my rejection of the money had prompted a more drastic test. When we left the restaurant, he brought up my job as an instructor in a University of Maryland course at the American army base outside of London, and asked me if I would be willing to obtain information about NATO for him. We were standing in the middle of the street, but I screamed at him: “You’re crazy. I’m not going to spy for you or anyone else. Get the f—k away from me and don’t ever contact me again.” I walked away and never saw him again.

I was not the only radical courted by Lev. I had seen him with a Marxist economics tutor at the London School of Economics. I had discussed him in a veiled manner with the editor of the leftwing magazine Views, who had also been having lunches with him. Members of the New Left Review crowd knew him, as did activists I recognized from the Labour Party left. How many had failed to reject him as I did? How many had become suppliers of information to the KGB?

After my stint in London, I returned to the United States to join Ramparts magazine. Beginning in 1966, a series of sensational Ramparts stories drew a national spotlight to the magazine and expanded its circulation to 100,000 readers, making it the largest publication of the left. The stories featured the CIA and its global intrigues. The first had come to Ramparts courtesy of an obscure assistant professor of economics at Michigan State, named Stanley Sheinbaum, who had participated in a CIA-funded program to train police in South Vietnam. Sheinbaum’s story provided a politically explosive link between the campus and the war. When a student came to Ramparts with information that the CIA was funneling secret funds to the National Student Association, a further connection was established. This scoop led to revelations about the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other liberal institutions that had been created to oppose the Communist offensive. In the hands of Ramparts’ editors, a moral equivalence between Russia’s police state and America’s democracy was established. In the absence of similar stories about KGB operations among the organizations of the left or of links between the antiwar movement and the Communist forces in Vietnam, the Ramparts articles seemed to confirm the New Left view of the world.

One of the writers who worked on these stories was Sol Stern, whom I had met and gotten to know in Berkeley. In 1968 Ramparts sent Sol to Bratislava, along with Tom Hayden and an SDS delegation, to meet Madame Binh and other leaders of the National Liberation Front. For the radicals attending, this was not just a fact-finding mission. The organizers allowed Sol to be present only after Ramparts agreed that he would not report on the “sensitive” political discussions taking place. Long afterwards, Sol told me what these were: “The SDS’ers held a seminar with the Communists on how to conduct their psychological warfare campaign against the United States.” According to Sol, Hayden was particularly vocal in making suggestions on how to sabotage the American war effort. He also tried to get the group to endorse publicly the Communist line on the war, but Sol and the sociologist Christopher Jencks, who was also present, objected and Hayden’s proposal was voted down.

Their dissent had consequences. Following the Bratislava meeting, members of the group were scheduled to go to North Vietnam. Hayden had already been there, publicly proclaiming that he had seen “rice-roots democracy” at work. As a consequence, he enjoyed the confidence of the Communist rulers and had become one of their gatekeepers, screening American radicals for his hosts. To punish Sol and Jencks, Hayden saw to it they were denied permission to go on with the others to Hanoi.

Hundreds, maybe even thousands of similar contacts and arrangements were made with the Communist enemy during the Sixties and after. Yet only a handful of New Leftists have ever written or talked about them. Few had the high-level contacts of Hayden, and only one, Carl Oglesby, was able to tell his story and remain a leftist in good standing. Others, like Phillip Abbott Luce and Larry Grathwohl, made their revelations as “renegades” and were attacked as “government agents,” a stigma that warned others not to follow their example. Even after the collapse of Communism made its evils difficult to ignore, the cover-up by veterans of the New Left continued. Memoirs and historical monographs by New Left historians painted a virginal portrait of radical protesters, rewriting the history of the period on a scale that would have seemed impossible outside the Communist bloc. In his own memoir, Hayden includes pages of excerpts from his FBI file, interspersed with disingenuous presentations of his political career that keep his readers in the dark about many of the far-from-innocent activities in which he actual1y engaged. The effect is to make the FBI’s surveillance gratuitous and malign at the same time.

In the summer of 1972 Hayden paid a visit to the Ramparts offices. He told us he had been to Paris to meet with the National Liberation Front and representatives from Hanoi. He wanted us to publish an article he intended to write on the military situation. It was to be called “The Prospects of the Vietnamese Offensive” and was a detailed account of the battlefront in Vietnam and the political situation in America. In our office, he dictated all 13,000 words of the article into a tape-recorder in one sitting, while only referring to some notes he had brought with him. It was an impressive demonstration. The article concluded: “Vietnam, country of countless My Lais will be liberated. May we speed the time.”

I knew that Hayden’s article was Communist war propaganda. Peace negotiations had begun in Paris and the terms of any treaty would be critical to the war aims of both combatants. If the situation could be stabilized to preserve the regime in the South, the United States would prevail in the war. If conditions facilitated a Communist “liberation,” the other side would win.

The Nixon administration wanted a truce signed before the November election. It had launched a dramatic gambit to pressure the Communists into a stabilizing peace. After more than two decades of quarantine, Nixon had recognized the Communist regime in China and, accompanied by his advisor Henry Kissinger, had made visits to Moscow and Peking. They hoped to persuade the Communist rulers to pressure Hanoi into a settlement on unfavorable terms. Hanoi responded with its own strategy, which was to launch an offensive in South Vietnam to alter the facts on the ground. The role of Hayden and other New Left radicals was to intensify the divisions in America, behind enemy lines.

I listened to Hayden’s request to publish his propaganda piece with an anxious feeling. This was a “gut-check” present whenever Hayden asked for a political favor. One time he had summoned me to his Bateman Street house. When I got there, he asked me if I would hide a Black Panther in the shack behind my house. It occurred to me that the Panther, whose name was “Deacon” and who was later killed in a drug-related incident, might be wanted for an actual crime. But I ignored the thought for the same reason that everyone on the left ignored the crimes that leftists committed—the Panthers were a vanguard of the progressive future and were under attack. Equally important was my desire to impress Hayden with the fact that I was not just an intel1ectual but ready to put myself on the line when the need was there. Like other radicals I wanted to be regarded as an authentic revolutionary when the occasion presented itself.

The same consideration underlay my readiness to serve Hayden’s purposes in placing his revolutionary propaganda before a large audience. Because I had acquired a reputation for being critical of the Communists, I even emphasized the gesture I was making. I told him I admired the way he was willing to offer his pen in the service of the Communists, because it would also serve the Vietnamese people. I did not really believe the Communists had the interests of the Vietnamese people at heart but I believed that the American “imperialists” had to be defeated. At the same time, I stressed to Hayden that my own task was one of remaining independent of any party line. Hayden eyed me with a cynical squint. I felt I had to warn him—since he was working directly with the Communists—that I was going to write an article in the same issue that would be critical of Hanoi’s Communist allies in Moscow and Peking. By welcoming Nixon to their capitals, the Russians and Chinese were playing into his hands. Hayden refused to admit that there might be any conflict of interest between the Communist forces. Whether he actually believed this or was just playing the role he had assigned himself as a spokesman for Hanoi, I didn’t know and never found out.

My piece, much shorter than Hayden’s, was called “Nixon’s Vietnam Strategy: How It Was Launched with the Aid of Brezhnev and Mao and How the Vietnamese Intend to Defeat It.” The Los Angeles Times ran a long article on its editorial page attacking what I wrote under the heading, “Bloodthirsty New Left Wants The War to Continue.” One reader wrote a letter to the editor saying that an NBC reporter, also named David Horowitz, should be fired for expressing such views.

Neither my piece nor Hayden’s was the most explosive feature of the August 1972 issue of Ramparts, however. That honor belonged to an unsigned article by a man who called himself Winslow Peck. It was titled “U.S. Electronic Espionage: A Memoir” and, as we soon discovered, publishing it would violate a section of the Espionage Act of 1918.

The article had literally come over the transom of our Berkeley office. It was passed on to me as Ramparts’ expert on national-security subjects. At first I dismissed it as the work of a crank. The author claimed to know about top-secret military intelligence matters and included capitalized words like COMINT, ELINT, RADINT and SWAMP. I had no way of assessing those claims and was inclined to discard the manuscript without further thought. But before doing so I gave it to Bob Fitch, a writer we had hired after another staffer, Jan Austin, had left our staff to become a full-time member of the Red Family.

After reading the article, Fitch came back looking pale and frightened. It turned out that he was an ex-military man and had served as an intelligence operative in the 82nd Airborne Division during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a result of his training, he recognized secret military codes in the text of the article—codes that he was under oath never to repeat. If we printed them, he said, we would all go to jail. Unfortunately for our country this turned out not to be the case. Once Fitch had authenticated the document, we arranged a meeting with Peck at a local Berkeley IHOP. We learned that Peck had been employed by a top-secret branch of intelligence called the National Security Agency, which encompassed 80 percent of U.S. intelligence but was unknown at the time. How unknown was indicated by an anecdote Peck told us. He was present at a briefing session with Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1967 when Humphrey “asked a couple of pretty dumb questions that showed he didn’t have the foggiest notion of what NSA was and what it did.”

Peck’s most sensational claim was that the NSA had cracked the Soviet intelligence code. That meant U.S. intelligence could read Soviet electronic communications at will:

As far as the Soviet Union is concerned, we know the whereabouts at any given time of all its aircraft, exclusive of small private planes, and its naval forces, including its missile-firing submarines. We know where their submarines are, what every one of their VIP’s is doing and, generally their capabilities and the disposition of all their forces.

Peck himself was stationed at a base in Turkey and had listened to the last conversation between Soviet Premier Kosygin and a Soviet cosmonaut who had burned up in space. He also claimed to have intercepted and read the message to the front from Israeli headquarters in Tel Aviv recalling General Moshe Dayan during the 1967 war.

I was struck by what I thought were the momentous ramifications of Peck’s disclosures. If we knew where every Soviet missile and tank was, there could be no surprise attacks or false “missile gaps” based on erroneous estimates, such as had underwritten Kennedy’s arms-buildup in the Sixties. To print Peck’s article would strike a blow against the war machine. It would promote peace on all sides—or so I deluded myself into thinking. In fact, as I realized after we had published Peck’s story and the deed was done, what we had done was to expose the most carefully-guarded intelligence information of all: the knowledge that we had penetrated the Soviet code. Agents were killed to prevent the other side from knowing what their own side knew.

When I realized what we had done, I was beset with uncertainty and self-doubt. There was no one-time breaking of a code. The other side would always respond by creating a new one. By revealing to the Soviets that their security had been breached, we had merely alerted them that they needed to replace their code. Even if I had understood this, I might still have agreed to print his story anyway. My responsibility as a “revolutionary” was to hurt the United States. The overriding justification was one that weighed heavily on al1 the political decisions I made as a member of my radical generation. It was important that America should lose the Vietnam war. I did not believe that an NLF victory would mean “rice-roots” democracy, as Hayden had written. But I was convinced that America’s loss would be Vietnam’s gain. An American defeat would weaken oppression everywhere. Or so I believed.

When we told Fitch that we were going to run Peck’s article, he panicked. We would all be tried for treason and go to jail, he whined. We brushed his fears aside, practically laughing in his face. Where was his revolutionary spine? Where was his commitment to the cause? When we refused to reconsider our decision, Fitch announced he was quitting the magazine. He was not about to go down in flames with us. We enjoyed seeing this rhetorical maximalist exposed as a coward, but his departure caused an internal lurch nonetheless. What if he was right? We had families. Were we ready to jeopardize their futures even for a grand gesture like this? We began to sense that we might be out of our depths.

Taking a step back, we decided to defer a final decision to publish the article until we could consult a lawyer. I thought of contacting the defense team for Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon official who was then on trial in Los Angeles for leaking a classified report on American policy in Vietnam. We had just completed a Ramparts cover-feature on his case. I put in a call to Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, a member of the Ellsberg team. After I had outlined the situation, Nesson explained the law. Technically, he said, we would be violating the Espionage Act. But the act had been written in a peculiar way to apply to classified papers removed from government offices or material copied from government files. The government was able to indict Ellsberg because he had xeroxed actual papers. Therefore, Nesson explained, it was important for us not to acknowledge that any papers existed. If we took his advice, Nesson said, we might get away with publishing the article because to make its case in a court of law, the government would have to establish that we had indeed damaged national security. To do so it would be necessary to reveal more than the government might want the other side to know. In fact, the legal process would certainly force more information to light than the government would want anybody to have. On balance, there was a good chance that we would not be prosecuted.

I had just been given advice by a famous constitutional law professor on how to commit treason and get away with it.

We published the article and it became a journalistic coup, getting front-page coverage by The New York Times. But the Times story was disappointing because it did not even mention my notion that the NSA’s technology made surprise attacks impossible. Instead, it focused on the more pertinent question of whether Peck’s claim—that American agents had broken the Soviet code—was accurate. The Times story quoted experts to the effect that it was not. The Times account also revealed that the name of the man we knew as Winslow Peck was actually Perry Fellwock, a fact that could only have been learned from intelligence sources. After the Times story appeared, we held a press conference in the Ramparts offices which was attended by an impressive media cohort. We decided that one particular reporter was the CIA “plant” because he kept asking us whether we had any written documents. We held to the strategy that Nesson had devised and said there were none.

Thinking about these events, I have asked myself in retrospect whether there was any practical difference between my actions and those of radicals like Tom Hayden, who self-consciously served the Communist rulers in Vietnam. When Hayden and Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam and urged American troops to defect, it made me as uncomfortable as had Ralph Schoenman’s broadcasts over Radio Hanoi during my days with Bertrand Russell. Remembering my parents’ experience as members of the American Communist Party, when they were forced to become apologists for murder, I had long ago resolved that I would never commit myself to any regime or party that did not reflect my own political values. Yet war does not leave room for fine discriminations or intermediate stands. Looking back at what I actually did, my “critical independence” seems to me now a distinction without much of a practical difference. The same can be said for all those antiwar demonstrators who might have been critical of Communism but were willing to march behind slogans that called for the withdrawal of American troops, a policy that could only result in a Communist victory. They did not see Communism as a superior way of life the way Hayden did. But in regarding it as the lesser of two evils, they helped the enemy to win all the same.

As soon as the Communists did win, in April 1975, there were reports of a bloodbath in Indochina. The Khmer Rouge had swept across Cambodia leaving killing-fields in their wake. In Vietnam there were reports of a hundred thousand summary executions, a million and a half refugees and more than a million people imprisoned in “reeducation camps” and gulags in the South. These events produced a shock of recognition in some quarters of the left. Joan Baez took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to make an “Appeal to the Conscience of North Vietnam.” She enlisted a number of former antiwar activists to sign the appeal. As soon as the statement appeared Baez was attacked by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda as a tool of the CIA.¹¹ A counter-ad was organized by Cora Weiss, who had traveled with Fonda to Hanoi and collaborated with the regime in its torture of American POW’s. The Weiss ad praised the Communists for their moderation in administering the peace.

In politics, Baez never did anything else as worthy and remained a leftist. Years later, on one of the anniversaries of the fall of Saigon, I appeared with her on a television show discussing the events. She dismissed my views with hostility, saying, “I don’t trust people with second thoughts.” My response—which I did not get a chance to express on camera—was: “I don’t trust people without them.”

In 1973 Nixon and Kissinger had negotiated a peace treaty that was designed to keep the South Vietnamese regime in place and remove America’s military presence. I knew that the outcome was not going to be the “liberation” we had promised. But with American forces out of the picture, I saw no compelling reason to remain politically in the fray. Hayden and others like him did. After the anti-draft movement had disintegrated in 1970, Hayden and Fonda organized an “Indochina Peace Campaign” to cut off remaining American support for the regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. For the next few years, the campaign worked tirelessly to ensure the victory of the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge. Accompanied by a camera team, Hayden and Fonda traveled to Hanoi and then to the NLF-controlled zones in South Vietnam to make a propaganda film. It was called Introduction to the Enemy and attempted to persuade viewers that the Communists were going to create a new “liberated” society in the South, where equality and social justice awaited its inhabitants if only America would cut off support for the Saigon regime.

Assisted by radical congressmen like Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug, Hayden set up a caucus in the Capitol building where he lectured congressional staffers on the need to end American aid. He directed his attention to Cambodia as well, lobbying for an accommodation with the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. When Nixon resigned over Watergate, it provided all the leverage Hayden and his activists needed. The Democrats won the midterm elections, bringing to Washington a new group of legislators who were determined to undermine the settlement that Nixon and Kissinger had achieved. The aid was cut, the Saigon regime fell, and the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital. In the two years that followed, the victorious Communists killed more Indochinese than had been killed on both sides in all 13 years of the anti-Communist war.

It was the bloodbath that our opponents, the anti-Communist defenders of America’s role in Southeast Asia, had predicted. But for the left there would be no looking back. Baez’s appeal proved to be the farthest it was possible for them to go, which was not very far. The appeal did not begin to suggest that antiwar activists needed to reassess the role they had played in making these tragedies inevitable. Ironically, it was Hayden who eventually came closest to such self-recognition: “What continues to batter my sense of morality and judgment,” he wrote in Reunion, “is that I could not even imagine that the worst stereotype of revolutionary madness was becoming a reality. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge became the Stalins and Hitlers of my lifetime, killing hundreds of thousands of people for being ‘educated’ or ‘urban,’ for attracting the paranoid attention of a secret police who saw conspiracies behind every failure of the grand plan to be achieved. Most Western estimates settle on 1.5 million killed.” But having acknowledged those facts and his confusion over them, he could go no farther, and had no genuine second thoughts. The terrible result, which he had worked so hard to make possible, failed to prompt a reassessment of the people who had predicted the bloodbath if the Communists were to win and whose anti-Communist policies he had opposed: “None of this persuades me that Nixon and Kissinger were right.”

Nixon and Kissinger were right, but the Democratic Party had been persuaded by its left wing to abandon the Vietnamese to their fate. This prompted other second thoughts about the way the left regarded America itself. As a student at Columbia, I had read Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women, which was inspired by his countrymen’s conquest of the small island of Melos. Euripides had intended for his play to arouse the moral sense of his fellow-Athenians about the war they had conducted and the suffering they had inflicted. When the Athenians saw Euripides’s play, they wept for the people of Melos. In the eyes of my professor, Moses Hadas, this show of conscience was a tribute to Athenian civilization. How much greater, I thought, was the civilized response of America’s democracy to the tragedy in Vietnam. I could not think of another historical instance where a nation had retreated from a field of battle it had dominated, because the conscience of its people had been touched. And yet, America had withdrawn for precisely that reason. The left believed that American policy was controlled by giant corporations, and that the war was being prosecuted for their imperial interests, which they would not relinquish. But the left had been proven wrong about this too. American democracy was not the “sham” we had said it was. When the American people turned against the war, there was no greater power to make it continue.

This is from an article based on my autobiography Radical Son, published in Heterodoxy, January 1997.