Keep the Current Threat in Perspective

During World War II, when the Soviet Union and United States were allies, Soviet intelligence “thoroughly infiltrated the American government,” even the project to build the atomic bomb, according to Harvey Klehr, a historian at Emory University. Among the hundred-plus Soviet spies in the federal government were Harry Dexter White, a high-ranking official at the Treasury Department, Duncan Lee, a top aide at the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and Laurence Duggan, the head of the Latin America desk at the State Department. The nature of this infiltration didn’t become public until the late 1940s, when former Soviet spies like Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley began testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, at which point it “became the issue in American political life,” paving the way for McCarthy’s witch hunt in the early ’50s, Klehr said.

At the time, noted John Earl Haynes, a retired Library of Congress historian who has collaborated with Klehr, Soviet-style communism posed a genuine ideological threat to the American way of life. There was a robust U.S. Communist Party. Many Americans were sympathetic to the Soviet Union as a model of what they wanted the United States to become. “There’s nothing like that today,” Haynes said. “There is no pro-Putin party [in America]. … There’s no large group of people who really want the United States to become a clone of Putin’s Russia.” The Soviet Union also had a “universalistic ambition to make the whole world communist,” including the U.S., whereas Vladimir Putin seems more intent on “opportunistic meddling.” (Richard Fried, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, did point out that some Trump supporters are enamored with Putin’s reactionary nationalism.)

On the other hand, Haynes added, Russian intelligence agencies today appear more interested in manipulating U.S. policy and public opinion than the Soviet intelligence agencies of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, which focused more on information-gathering.

During the Red Scare period, Haynes said, there was “a basis for fears of communist subversion” since there had been “real spies in the government,” though most had been purged by the late 1940s and McCarthy was “95 percent wrong” about the people he accused.

“Yes, there was a problem with infiltration,” said Fried. But “by 1950, it had been pretty well taken care of. McCarthy comes along very late in the day. If there is a problem today [with Trump’s links to Russia], I don’t think it can be said that it’s been taken care of.”

Release as Much Information as Possible

In the 1940s, the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, the precursor to the National Security Agency, began decrypting Soviet cables that revealed the identities of spies in the U.S. government, in what was known as the Venona project. But for a variety of reasons—including concern that the evidence wouldn’t be admissible in U.S. courts and a desire to keep the Soviets in the dark about the decryptions—U.S. intelligence officials never disclosed the project’s findings to the public. Only in 1995, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were the materials released.