S tumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really “win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our nation more vulnerable.

To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the other, detractors who blame FDR’s indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death throes.

I was a federal prosecutor in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. We indicted the offending jihadist cell for levying a terrorist war against the United States. Several of the terrorists had been major mujahideen figures. Their lawyers thus thought it exculpatory to claim that they could not have conspired to wage jihad againstAmerica; after all,they had actually been allied withAmerica in the jihad against the Soviets. The provocative claim was implausible as a defense, the Soviets having left Afghanistan (and the USSR having collapsed) years before the Twin Towers bombing. Still, it is standard procedure to investigate even dubious defense claims. Hence, my unwitting stumble into a heated controversy.

The cia and Reagan administration veterans passionately proclaimed that the $3 billion in aid and armaments funneled to the mujahideen—matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia, with Pakistani intelligence as our “cut-out” for deniability purposes—was an unvarnished triumph. The war became the Soviets’ Vietnam, bleeding the Red Army to death even as a humiliated Kremlin buckled under the pressure of Reagan’s arms build-up. In sum, I was told, “Look, we liberated half the world from Communist tyranny. Case closed.”

Yet, it wasn’t that simple. The mujahideen begot al Qaeda. A fifth of the U.S. aid, plus most of the Saudi contribution (real money in those days), was channeled to virulently anti-American terrorists. They proceeded to take their jihad global . . . eventually to Manhattan. The rest is history—the history we’ve been struggling with for two decades.

So, was al Qaeda a Frankenstein’s monster of America’s own making? Government officials bristled at the suggestion—just as West’s detractors erupt at the suggestion of a Soviet tyranny stamped “Made in the USA.” Indignation, however, is not an answer. The answers that I did finally elicit, through clenched teeth, were the stuff of fable: We only helped the “good” Afghan fundamentalist Muslims, you see; the “bad” fundamentalists—mostly Arabs who flocked to the jihad—were really ne’er-do-wells who barely left their tents during the fighting. When this did not wash, the officials got down to brass tacks: “Look, once the decision to fight the Soviets covertly was made, the battlefield reality required arming jihadists.”

Nothing incompetent or nefarious, we were to conclude, just military necessity. Any concern that many of the jihadists we armed hated the United States at least as much as they hated the Communists, and might well turn on us later, was dismissed. Officials rationalized that by helping Islamic supremacists, they were laying the groundwork for better relations with them; plus, surely the responsibilities of governance would moderate the jihadists once the war was over. Pretty naïve—so much so that defenders of the American-fueled jihad seamlessly shifted to “the best defense is a good offense” mode, distorting their critics’ arguments with shrill, exaggerated mockery. I was told many times, with all due eye-rolling exasperation, that Osama bin Laden and the “Blind Sheikh” (my lead defendant, Omar Abdel Rahman) were not on the CIA payroll—as if that assurance were a showstopper that put to rest the pointed questions about whether our government was insouciant about radical Islam and whether it materially contributed to the creation of a new anti-American threat.

D iana West knows the feeling.

She did not set out to examine the history of World War II. Her purpose was to explore the Cold War paradox: Despite our seeming victory over the evil empire, we lost the same Cold War at home, to a lasting, corrosive effect, thanks to a “riddling, corruptive drive against what we now regard as ‘traditional’ morality, Enlightenment logic, and cultural memory.”

The “loss of cultural confidence” is a frequently offered explanation for this. Yet, West counters, “it doesn’t explain the loss of cultural confidence itself.” The “progression from traditional morality to cultural relativism” was not inevitable and passive; it was the result of a hyperactive, corruptive agent: Communist infiltration. Not only infiltration of government, but Communists boring into all institutions of culture and elite opinion, very much including Hollywood, the arts, academe, and journalism. And this was not done idly. This was infiltration with a specific and remorselessly pursued purpose to eviscerate our ideals of right and wrong, the fundament of our capacity to reason and judge.

The matter especially addles West because of today’s paralyzing ambivalence about Muslim supremacism. Putting aside intra-Islamic debates over the tactic of terrorism—which tend to be situational rather than over the propriety of mass-murder attacks in principle—the ideology that fuels violent jihad is not confined to terrorists. It is the mainstream Islam of the Middle East, which teaches the imperative of establishing the reign of Allah’s law, the repressive sharia system. Globally renowned and revered scholars reaffirm this command with numbing regularity and identify the United States as Ummah Enemy Number One. Nevertheless, the United States government is not merely resistant to acknowledging this ideology and its prevalence; it menaces any attempt to edify Americans about it. Instead, top officials instruct their minions to avoid giving offense, to obsess over what we must have done to inspire such contempt. They indulge the fantasies that sharia totalitarianism can coexist with democracy, that the responsibilities of governance will tame radicals, and that “partnering” with movements like the Muslim Brotherhood—which openly profess a desire to conquer the West—is the best way to achieve security.

It is delusional, and yet we are currently betting our lives on it. Indeed, the fastest route to ostracism from respectable society is to question the consensus or have the audacity to point out that our enemies actually are, well, enemies. They want to destroy us and make little secret about it, at least when speaking among themselves. How did we arrive at such a lunatic place where mortal enemies are perceived as friends? How did we lose our capacity to reason and judge?

West finds the answer in Soviet espionage and its covert war on Western values, which long predates the Cold War. The doctrines of Karl Marx had an enthusiastic following in the Western hemisphere’s elite academic circles by the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, the American people and their government were firmly fixed against Bolshevism. In a posthumously published history of World War II, FDR’s predecessor Herbert Hoover observed that “Four presidents and their six Secretaries of State for over a decade and a half [after 1917] held to this resolve” not to recognize the Soviet government. Opposition, West recounts, was informed by “the Bolsheviks’ seizure of the government by force, their reign of blood, [and] their pledge to conspire against other governments”—a dedication to world revolution that “made the ‘mutual confidence’ required for diplomatic relations impossible.”

T hat commonsensical assessment was cast aside when Roosevelt made the fateful decision to establish normal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. In exchange, the U.S. received a short set of parchment promises, most prominently including Stalin’s risible commitment not to attempt the subversion or overthrow of the American constitutional system. Contemporaneously came a demonstration that “normalizing” intercourse with a macabre regime would necessitate participation in what Stalin, like Hitler, conceived of as “the Big Lie”—as West puts it, “the concerted assault on truth to form world opinion.” Soviet sympathizers and agents of influence in the press willfully covered up the great famine of 1932–1933—among the most gruesome chapters of the Stalin terror reign that, by the British historian Robert Conquest’s calculation, killed 20 million people. It is also the chapter West identifies as “a seminal moment in the history of the world,” in which

history itself, always subject to lies and colorations, became susceptible to something truly new under the sun: totalitarianism; more specifically, the totalitarian innovation of disinformation, later expanded, bureaucratized and, in effect, weaponized, by KGB armies of dezinformatsiya agents.

Conquest elaborated:

Stalin had a profound understanding of the possibilities of what Hitler approvingly calls the Big Lie. He knew that even though the truth may be readily available, the deceiver need not give up. He saw that flat denial on the one hand, and the injection into the pool of information of a corpus of positive falsehood on the other, were sufficient to confuse the issue for the passively instructed foreign audience, and to induce acceptance of the Stalinist version by those actively seeking to be deceived.

There was no shortage of the latter in the Roosevelt administration, nor of purposeful agents of influence to ply them. Some, in key positions, were Soviet operatives in the formal sense: Harry Dexter White at the Treasury Department, Alger Hiss at the State Department, and Lauchlin Currie at the White House, for example.

Others were, at the very least, willing agents of Stalin’s influence. Harry Hopkins, the one most prominently featured in American Betrayal, was Roosevelt’s closest adviser and social companion during much of the Second World War, portrayed by West as “FDR’s alter ego, co-president, or Rasputin, depending on who’s talking.” There has been controversy since American Betrayal’s publication over whether, as West infers, Hopkins could have been “Agent 19”—a formal Soviet spy—or whether he was “merely” an ardent Soviet sympathizer constantly at the President’s ear. This seems to me as meaningful a distinction as whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a notorious Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, had some formal understanding with the group or was “merely” a champion of Islamic supremacists who happened to be in charge of shaping American foreign policy. In any event, according to the KGB agent Gordievsky, the infamous Soviet spymaster Iskhak Akhmerov described Hopkins as “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States.”

All of this was just the tip of the iceberg. West notes that, based on the latest declassified disclosures assiduously ignored by mainstream historians,

Expert estimates now peg the number of Americans assisting Soviet intelligence agencies during the 1930s and 1940s as exceeding five hundred. Not one Aldrich Ames. Not two Rosenbergs. Not five “magnificent” Cambridgers. More than five hundred willing and variously able American traitors, many operating at the very highest levels of the federal government, with who knows how many more in support roles. This was a national security fiasco of a magnitude that has never, ever entered national comprehension.

West thus concludes, in a passage on which her critics have seized, that the United States government was “for all intents and purposes occupied by a small army—a small army being just what this kind of war requires.”

T his notion of occupation is a leitmotif of American Betrayal, and it is fair enough to grouse that West’s style is polemical, even hyperbolic at times. For example, the assertion that the Soviets single-handedly won World War II is so often repeated, and with such intensity, the reader is led to believe that the Anglo-American victories over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan are, at best, a footnote. Obviously, however, West does not mean that the evil empire “occupied” Washington the same way it occupied Eastern Europe—in fact, West addresses that crushing occupation at length. As explained by M. Stanton Evans, the eminent journalist and scholar of Communist infiltration, West argues instead that

Soviet agents, Communists, and fellow travelers held official posts, or served as chokepoints of intelligence data, and from these positions were able to exert pro-Soviet leverage on U.S. and other allied policy. Though ignored in many conventional histories, the evidence to support this view is overwhelming.

It is indeed. And the explanation of how it happened is pellucid as well: FDR was sympathetic to Communism. Not to Stalin’s monstrous version of totalitarianism; Roosevelt appeased, rationalized, and abetted Stalin’s regime, but he no more endorsed its atrocities than today’s apologists for Islamic supremacism endorse al Qaeda’s savagery. He did, however, indulge the fantasy—as do today’s apologists—that the two could be compartmentalized.

Roosevelt was a staunch progressive who sympathized with a vision of what he was convinced Communism would progress into. Its repression and brutality were just a phase. As West recounts, he was adherent to a theory of “convergence”—the notion that the United States was evolving from laissez-faire capitalism to welfare state socialism while the Soviet Union was moving from totalitarianism to social democracy. In pressing the stalwart congressman Martin Dies to desist in his Red-hunting, FDR explained that some of his best friends were Communists. He told Dies and then-Archbishop Francis Spellman that only sixty percent of the American capitalist system would be retained, while the Soviets would eventually adopt forty percent of the capitalist system, “so an understanding will be possible” between the two. FDR further predicted, long before the end of the Second World War, that “the European people will simply have to endure the Russian domination in the hope that in ten or twenty years they will be able to live well with the Russians.” That is, long before Yalta, Roosevelt was envisioning a Europe under the Soviet thumb—albeit with optimism, however delusional, that the regime would morph into something akin to the European Union.

It is within this framework that West considers the Roosevelt administration’s conduct of World War II, peering at her subject through the lens of Soviet espionage. She controversially concludes that the Communist “occupation” of the policymaking chain weighed heavily in the decisions to, for example: (a) Dispense breathtaking amounts of aid to Stalin’s regime under the “Lend-Lease” program (administered by Hopkins); (b) Suppress the fact that the Soviets were responsible for the Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish army officers after they invaded Poland in collusion with the Nazis in 1939; (c) Invade Europe via Normandy in the north of France, rather than Winston Churchill’s “soft underbelly” preference to proceed from Italy up to the Balkans, in deference to Stalin’s demands—which would leave Eastern Europe free of Anglo-American forces that might prevent an eventual Soviet advance; (d) Demand “unconditional surrender” from Germany, rather than consider the potential of cooperating with anti-Nazi Germans who sought U.S. protection from impending Soviet domination—an objective to annihilate Germany’s defense capabilities that arguably lengthened the war, markedly increased American casualties, and facilitated Stalin’s swallowing of territory; (e) Surrender half of Europe to Stalin at Yalta while simultaneously ushering in the United Nations system of global governance, under what Jeane Kirkpatrick described as a “fantasy” about shared democratic values that “required denying and falsifying the nature of the Soviet Union”; and (f) Abide the horrific retention and abuse of American prisoners of war, who were simply transferred from Nazi to Soviet captivity.

I t is here that we arrive, at last, at the crux of the imprecations hurled at West, most comprehensively by the neoconservative Cold War historian Ronald Radosh in a harshly critical Frontpage Magazine review, tellingly entitled “McCarthy on Steroids.” Dr. Radosh, an apostate from Marxism, portrays West as a “conspiracy theorist” practicing the species of “yellow journalism” that gives anti-Communism a bad name. The charge lacks merit. As for yellow journalism, American Betrayal is exhaustively researched, as elucidated within its more than 900 endnotes. It is also duly deferential to the authoritative historical accounts—the work of such giants as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr—notwithstanding Radosh’s inaccurate claims that West attacks them and ignores them when their conclusions diverge from her own.

Moreover, while I suppose I may be something of a conspiracy theorist, too, having in two decades as a prosecutor proved numerous criminal confederations to the satisfaction of juries, it is a frivolous charge to level against West under circumstances where there was, undeniably, a conspiracy: the massive Soviet conspiracy to penetrate and influence American policy-making. With all due respect, Radosh and Conrad Black, another eminent conservative FDR devotee, engage in the same sort of exaggerations about West’s claims as I heard twenty years ago from the CIA regarding critics of its Afghan enterprise. West is not claiming that every decision-maker touched by the Soviet conspiracy—from FDR to Truman, Eisenhower, George Marshall, Averell Harriman, et al.—was, perforce, a Communist. She contends, to the contrary, that there was an ambitious Communist effort to steer American policy in directions that aligned with Soviet interests; that it was willfully and materially furthered by strategically placed Communist agents of influence; and that it thrived in a progressive ethos in which an enduring relationship with the (hopefully evolving) Soviet Union was a high priority, even if it required the willing suspension of disbelief.

More worthy of debate is the critics’ contention that West obsessively proffers sinister explanations for decisions that were actually driven by the realities of the battlefield and the dynamics of the war (particularly the complex relationships between combatant nations). Much of this critique is inflated by the overwrought interpretation of West’s “occupation” metaphor, misleadingly intimating that she claims American policy was fully controlled, rather than significantly influenced, by the Kremlin. To be sure, though, some of the critique is justified by the penchant of West, a gripping writer, to pepper her account with blood-boiling zingers like “What if D-day were a Soviet plot?” in which Normandy beach was “the scene of the crime.”

W hen the underbrush of invective the respective camps have hurled at each other is cleared away, this is a debate made impossible to resolve by the elusive nature of espionage and influence operations. For example, the fact that Stalin had self-interested reasons to push for a “second front” in the north of France, and even that his operatives used their influence to undermine Churchill’s call for a march upward from Italy, does not mean the Soviet influence operation was dispositive. Radosh, Black, and other analysts make a persuasive case that the Italy/Balkans strategy was implausible. Radosh unfairly derides West for an argument she does not make over the timing of the proposed invasion: She does not contend that Churchill’s Italy strategy should have been undertaken prematurely, such that an unfathomable bloodbath would ensue. But knowledgeable commanders at the time, and military historians ever since, have argued that the nigh impassable terrain and superior German battle positions would have made such a campaign slow, exceedingly bloody, and, perhaps, catastrophic.

To her credit, West acknowledges the divergence of opinion. Her critics, to the contrary, peremptorily dismiss the strategy ardently advocated by not only Churchill but also General Mark W. Clark and, at least for a time, General Eisenhower. The point, however, is that it is no more persuasive for West to argue that Kremlin spies were principally responsible for the decision to attack at Normandy than for her detractors to claim that the Soviet influence operation had no bearing on it. This is not an “either/or” situation; it is more likely that both the espionage and the battlefield reality factored heavily in the Normandy invasion.

The point is better illustrated by the Lend-Lease controversy, on which West has the better of the argument. Lend-Lease was a Roosevelt administration program begun before the Pearl Harbor attack, designed to enable aid to Britain and other besieged American allies. After the U.S. entry into the war, the program was expanded, under Hopkins’s direction, to provide astonishingly lavish aid to the Soviet Union—far exceeding anything that could be explained by military necessity, and at the expense of American needs to prosecute the war in the South Pacific.

West’s critics complain, as is their wont, that the author’s framing of Lend-Lease as a Soviet plot is slanderous. That contention is a bit much, though, in light of contemporary American counterterrorism practices, which West’s critics on the Right generally support. Our government routinely prosecutes Islamic charities for material support to terrorism, even if these organizations do legitimate social welfare work, if they divert the slightest portion of donations to violent jihadist groups. Such charitable ventures are summarily branded “terrorist plots,” and rightly so. They are prosecuted as such, with nary a concern that the description and enforcement efforts are overkill.

The issue is not whether Lend-Lease was wholly illegitimate. It is whether Soviet operatives exploited the program, and their influence over it, to arm and fortify the Soviet Union far beyond what was necessary—to fight the war effectively, and to discourage the Kremlin from forging a separate peace with Hitler that might have changed the course of the war. In essence, West’s critics contend that once a decision is made to pursue a legitimate wartime objective—whether it is defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan or appeasing the Soviets to keep them in the war in Europe—anything goes. In national defense, however, we must look to tomorrow’s foreseeable security threats as well as today’s pressing ones. West is plainly right to question whether Lend-Lease, regardless of the good it did, devolved into a Soviet coup that facilitated Moscow’s eventual conquest of Eastern Europe.

These points seem straightforward enough. Communist operatives were pressing their thumbs on the policymaking scales. Sometimes it made a significant difference; sometimes battlefield realities dictated the decision regardless of Soviet machinations; and, importantly, sometimes the presence of Soviet operatives in key policy roles may well have shaped the Roosevelt administration’s understanding of battlefield realities. In light of the undeniable, extensive network of Soviet agents of influence, though, it is fatuous to contend that espionage was essentially a non-factor in the war. Yes, it is surely an overstatement for West to intimate that the Soviets alone won the war—a war in which, as Conrad Black notes, they took an astonishing 95 percent of the casualties, sparing what would otherwise have been massive American and British losses—a war that left half of Europe free and vanquished imperial Japan. Still, it should be beyond cavil that the Soviets were big winners and that their scheming, markedly advanced by their penetration of the White House and State Department, forged the post-war order dominated to this day by transnational progressives, at considerable cost to American sovereignty and liberty.

S o why? Why has the debate over this fascinating and provocative book, a book that seeks a long overdue reckoning of Soviet perfidy, been so vitriolic? Because Diana West has had the temerity to tread a rail—one might say, a third rail—once marched by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Interestingly, in invoking McCarthy, West’s detractors predictably use him as an epithet and summarily opine, to quote Ron Radosh, that the author thinks McCarthy “was right about everything” (a significant overstatement). They are careful, however, not to confront West’s specific contentions about McCarthy. The modus operandi is to tar West as “McCarthy’s heiress” and then move on, forthwith, to Lend-Lease or Harry Hopkins or some other detail that is not central to her thesis. Clearly, they prefer not to take on her argument that McCarthy has largely been vindicated.

McCarthy did not blaze the anti-Communist trail. It was forged before him by Congressman Dies and such towering defectors as Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley. More to the point, original source archives that have come to light in recent years suggest that, if anything, McCarthy understated the breadth of Soviet infiltration. These include the revelations by the former KGB Chief Oleg Gordievsky, who in conjunction with the Cambridge intelligence expert Christopher Andrew, began exposing the scope of Soviet penetration in 1990, even before the USSR collapsed; the U.S. intelligence community’s Venona decryptions that began becoming public in the mid-1990s and were summarized in breathtaking detail by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel; the investigative work of Jerrold and Leona Schecter, who traced the flow of Venona revelations into the Truman White House, beginning as early as 1945; the former KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, who smuggled his files out of Moscow in 1992 (and who, in conjunction with Christopher Andrew, found astonishing the apathy of American historians regarding the KGB’s influence operations); the groundbreaking scholarship of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr on the history of Communist espionage and the mulish determination of the academy not to notice it; the voluminous evidence of American treason on Moscow’s behalf amassed by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev; the files of FBI investigations and congressional hearings on Communist infiltration that have recently been declassified; and so on.

No American in history has undergone as thoroughgoing a character assassination as McCarthy. So successful has the campaign been that one senses from some quadrants on the Right both acceptance of the shopworn narrative that, in his zeal, McCarthy profoundly harmed the cause of anti-Communism and apprehension that any whiff of sympathy for McCarthy will doom conservative credibility. On the latter point, no allowance is made for the strong case that McCarthy was overwhelmingly correct about the Communist threat—especially, the outrage that known and reasonably suspected Communists continued to work in high-ranking government positions for years after being identified as such. That fact is not altered by the serious mistakes McCarthy made—to name just two, his accusation against George Marshall (the Army Chief of Staff during World War II and post-war Secretary of State and then Defense under Truman); and his overstatement of the evidence against Owen Lattimore, which transformed a damaging Communist apologist into a martyr. To reaffirm the Left’s McCarthy mau-mauing is not just wrong; it makes that much harder the urgent task of rooting out today’s analogous threat: the influence exercised by Islamic supremacists over U.S. foreign and counterterrorism policy.

The pro-McCarthy case is made most compellingly in Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans, the preeminent authority on McCarthy’s cases and tribulations. Diana West heavily relies on Evans’s meticulous research, and, for his part, Evans has provided a ringing endorsement of West’s thesis. Deservedly so. Though the tangents of a heated debate have obscured that thesis, it bears recalling. Communist espionage not only distorted American war decisions but, far more significantly, eroded the pillars of Western civilization: the capacity to reason based on firm convictions about right and wrong, and to grasp that good cannot align with evil without losing its way. American Betrayal is not a history of World War II. It is a neon-flashing admonition that we either reinforce those pillars or resign ourselves a very different, dissipated America.