John Koster

HarryDexterWhiteThe NKVD, predecessor of the KGB, knew that a war with the United States would divert Japan from its ambitions in Mongolia and Siberia—threats that tied up 25% of the Red Army—and allow Russia to deploy its full military power against the Germans. Fortunately for Stalin, his intelligence service had an “agent of influence” in Washington perfectly situated to provoke a U.S.-Japanese war—Harry Dexter White (see the photo on the left), a high-ranking Treasury official.
Skillfully manipulating his boss, Henry Morgenthal Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, and Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department’s expert on Asia, who hated the Japanese and believed that Asians were naturally timid and easily bluffed, White was able to turn U.S. policy toward Japan in an increasingly belligerent direction. When FDR almost agreed to relax a U.S. oil embargo in return for Japan’s gradual evacuation of China, White drafted a hysterical letter for Morgenthau’s signature:

To sell China to her enemies for the thirty blood-stained coins of gold, will not only weaken our national policy in Europe as well as the Far East, but will dim the bright luster of America’s world leadership in the great democratic fight against Fascism.

Instead of compromising, the United States demanded that Japan withdraw from China immediately, neutralize Manchuria, and sell three-quarters of its military and naval production to the U.S.
Perceiving the demand as an insult and a threat, the skittish Japanese government concluded that war was inevitable. They moved ahead with a contingency plan for an attack on the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, and Stalin, thanks to Harry Dexter White, were spared a war on his eastern flank.

4 thoughts on “John Koster

  1. shinichi Post author

    Pearl Harbor 2.0

    by John Koster

    http://nation.time.com/2012/12/07/pearl-harbor-2-0/

    The “infamy” of December 7, 1941, is deeper than most Americans have ever imagined. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was almost certainly the result of a Soviet plot—“Operation Snow”—carried out by Harry Dexter White, a figure of enormous influence in the Roosevelt administration and a known Soviet spy.

    Americans remember Pearl Harbor as the work of a Japanese military machine hell-bent on a war of conquest. The truth is more complicated.

    The imperial regime had faced severe political shocks throughout the 1930s. Two attempts on the life of Emperor Hirohito—one by a Japanese communist whose father was a member of parliament, another by a Korean patriot—were followed by the assassinations of prominent bankers and cabinet members.

    (PHOTOS: After Pearl Harbor, Life in the Pacific and on the Home Front)

    After Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai was murdered in 1932 for his failure to cope with the Great Depression and to curb foreign influence, 110,000 Japanese petitioned for clemency for his assassins. Four years later, in a sensational coup attempt, young military officers cornered Prime Minister Kesisuke Okada in his own bathroom, slew his look-alike brother-in-law, and nearly wiped out the cabinet.

    The emperor feared assassination by his own officers if he knuckled under to American or Russian threats to Japan’s economic and military interests, especially access to American oil.

    The Russians, meanwhile, knew that they could not simultaneously repel an expected German invasion from the west and respond to the Japanese threat from the east. A series of skirmishes with the Japanese at Nomonhan in 1939 had revealed serious weaknesses in the Soviet military.

    The NKVD, predecessor of the KGB, knew that a war with the United States would divert Japan from its ambitions in Mongolia and Siberia—threats that tied up 25% of the Red Army—and allow Russia to deploy its full military power against the Germans. Fortunately for Stalin, his intelligence service had an “agent of influence” in Washington perfectly situated to provoke a U.S.-Japanese war—Harry Dexter White, a high-ranking Treasury official.

    Born to a working-class immigrant family in Boston, White had served as a non-combat officer in World War I. He earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard but was unable to land an academic post in the Ivy League, in part because of anti-Semitism, and in part because of his own abrasive attitude toward subordinates.

    By the time he went to work in Franklin Roosevelt’s Treasury Department, he had developed communist sympathies, and by 1936, with the assistance of Whittaker Chambers, he was leaking information about Japanese and Chinese politics and economics to the NKVD.

    Fearing exposure, White temporarily gave up his subversive activities. But in May 1941, as the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin began to unravel, NKVD agent Vitalii Pavlov managed to reactivate White with an urgent mission—to provoke a war between the United States and Japan so that Russia would not have to fight on two fronts.

    From his perch in the Treasury Department, White had become closely acquainted with the key figures in FDR’s administration. He knew, for instance, that Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department’s expert on Asia, hated the Japanese and believed that Asians were naturally timid and easily bluffed. And White wielded enormous influence with his boss, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthal Jr., whose personal friendship with the president made him the most powerful member of the cabinet.

    Skillfully manipulating Morgenthau and Hornbeck, White was able to turn U.S. policy toward Japan in an increasingly belligerent direction. When FDR almost agreed to relax a U.S. oil embargo in return for Japan’s gradual evacuation of China, White drafted a hysterical letter for Morgenthau’s signature:

    To sell China to her enemies for the thirty blood-stained coins of gold, will not only weaken our national policy in Europe as well as the Far East, but will dim the bright luster of America’s world leadership in the great democratic fight against Fascism.

    Instead of compromising, the United States demanded that Japan withdraw from China immediately, neutralize Manchuria, and sell three-quarters of its military and naval production to the U.S.

    Perceiving the demand as an insult and a threat, the skittish Japanese government concluded that war was inevitable. They moved ahead with a contingency plan for an attack on the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, and Stalin, thanks to Harry Dexter White, were spared a war on his eastern flank.

    White continued to shape U.S. policy to Soviet advantage into the postwar era until the revelations of the communist defectors Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley precipitated his spectacular fall.

    He died in 1948, quite possibly a suicide, three days after a disastrous appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was identified as a traitor by the FBI in 1950, but the full story of his role in provoking Pearl Harbor was unknown until Vitalii Pavlov, his Soviet handler and ultimately a lieutenant general in the KGB, published his memoirs in 1996. Pavlov credited White with saving the Soviet Union.

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  2. shinichi Post author

    Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case
    Intelligence in Recent Public Literature
    by R. Bruce Craig. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004. 422 pages.
    reviewed by James C. Van Hook

    Central Intelligence Agency

    https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no1/html_files/harry_dexter_8.html

    In his long-awaited book on Harry Dexter White, Bruce Craig, executive director of the National Coalition for the Promotion of History, hopes to “set the record straight regarding White’s role and complicity in a Communist conspiracy” (5). Harry Dexter White was a longtime Treasury Department official and assistant secretary of the Treasury under Henry Morgenthau in 1945–46, who, along with John Maynard Keynes, was a principal architect of the Bretton Woods multilateral trading system. Confessed spies and FBI informants Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley accused White of having been a Soviet “agent of influence” while in government. The declassified VENONA decrypts of Soviet diplomatic traffic during the 1940s appear to many to confirm such charges. Craig takes a different view. While not necessarily arguing White’s innocence, the author suggests that the charges of White’s detractors were misplaced. He argues that White represented no more than a “trusted individual” to the Soviets and that his actions can be explained by his belief in a Rooseveltian internationalism predicated on continued Soviet-American cooperation.

    In Treasonable Doubt, Craig attempts to defend White by setting into context the three basic charges against him: that White on occasion passed documents to the Soviets; that he used his influence at the Treasury to hire and promote communists; and that he deliberately attempted to steer US policies in a pro-Soviet direction. The author admits that White personally engaged in several inappropriate meetings with Soviet intelligence officials and concedes that papers produced by Chambers in 1948 showed that White had passed sensitive information to the Soviets on occasion. And he admits that White oversaw a monetary policy division at the Treasury Department full of communists and that a real Soviet intelligence ring, the “Silvermaster group,” operated practically under White’s nose at the department. But Craig explains these actions by referring to White’s anti-fascism and his commitment to a more cooperative postwar order.

    When defending White against the charge that he actively sought to steer US policy in pro-Soviet directions, Craig ventures onto firmer ground. Most historians consider the Bretton Woods international trading regime to be White’s greatest achievement. As a largely successful effort to restore free international trade to a central place in nurturing global prosperity, the Bretton Woods system entailed an implicit rejection of the nationalist economics that had dominated the interwar period. Seen in this light, it is difficult to understand how White’s detractors could characterize Bretton Woods, a fundamental institution of liberal capitalism, as inherently pro-Soviet. As Craig argues, it may well be true that White wished to convince Moscow to participate in this system, but such liberal internationalism was anathema to the Stalinist Soviet Union.

    The author holds that Treasury policies toward occupied Germany have been similarly misunderstood. White was accused of having manipulated Morgenthau into passing printing plates for Allied military marks to the Soviets who, thereupon, printed currency with abandon. Craig offers the perfectly plausible explanation that Treasury officials feared that denying Soviet use of the plates in their sector would needlessly endanger postwar cooperation.[1] White was also charged with heavily influencing the notorious “Morgenthau Plan” of September 1944, which proposed a de-industrialized, pastoralized Germany. Many historians have long assumed that the Morgenthau Plan advanced the interests of the Soviets. Craig argues that this plan was really Morgenthau’s own and cannot be laid at White’s feet. Moreover, the plan explicitly rejected reparations, which ran counter to stated Soviet demands on the German economy.

    Finally, Craig absolves White from responsibility for the fall of China. His detractors claimed that White deliberately blocked loans to the anti-communist Nationalist government at a time when the outcome of the Chinese civil war hung in the balance. The specific charge against White concerns his role in blocking a transfer of $20 million in gold bullion to the Nationalist Chinese in late 1944. When placed in the overall context of the considerable foreign aid already given to the Nationalists since 1939, legitimate concerns over inefficiencies and corruption, and the likely inflationary effects of such aid, this charge collapses into insignificance.

    Craig’s effort to place White’s career in context is certainly valid. As historians of the Cold War have long realized, one can explain developments in the early Cold War seemingly inimical to American interests—such as the division of Germany and the fall of China—without recourse to the simplistic charge of espionage. History is complex, and when history goes badly, it is not ipso facto the result of sabotage or betrayal. The problem with this approach, however, is that sometimes it runs up against contravening evidence. This is the problem Craig faces when discussing the VENONA decrypts and other data mined from recently opened Russian archives.

    The VENONA intercepts contain damning evidence against White. At least two cables document inappropriate discussions of American foreign policy between White and his alleged Soviet case officer, Kol’tsov. Other cables refer ambiguously to White as an agent, ally, or dupe in the Treasury Department. Craig accepts the validity of the VENONA cables, but does not provide the reader with a convincing explanation of how the decrypts do not prove White’s guilt or, alternatively, how they can be explained, as he does other matters, by setting them in context. One may argue over whether these cables offer unmistakable evidence of espionage, but they certainly amount to more than what Craig terms “hard, circumstantial evidence” of inappropriate contact (262). Although Craig’s arguments about the importance of seeing the American policies with which White was involved in the context of the times are well taken, the VENONA decrypts require more of an explanation. Craig also does not adequately confront the most bizarre intercept available relating to White: the Soviet offer, made to White’s wife through Nathan Silvermaster, to arrange help with their daughter’s college tuition, described in a cable dated 20 November 1944.[2]

    The nature of the book’s organization makes it difficult to evaluate Craig’s arguments fully. He has actually written two narrative accounts. The first two-thirds of the book contain an account of White’s life and career in almost complete isolation from the charges of espionage. The final third presents an equally isolated discussion of the allegations against him, as laid out principally in Whitaker Chambers’ and Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony to the FBI and in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This side-by-side telling of White’s story makes it difficult to follow Craig’s objective of placing White’s activities into their proper contexts. By not integrating White’s two lives, the author’s overall argument remains obscure. Rather than deconstructing the allegations against White, it might have been better simply to set the allegations aside for a moment and attempt to reconstruct, independently, White’s relationship with communism and the Soviet Union.

    Overall, Craig misses an opportunity to present in a more compelling fashion the popularity and legitimacy of the Soviet Union in the eyes of much of the European and American Left during the 1930s and 1940s. Tony Judt, for example, offered a path-breaking explanation of the French fellow-traveling Left of the 1940s by exploring the anxiety with which French intellectuals wished to side with the working class. David Engerman has provided an important portrait of, among others, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, by placing his patently dishonest and pro-Soviet reportage in the context of the Left’s commitment to strict economic and developmentalist planning during the 1930s.[3] Craig might have explained whether White’s encounters with Soviet and American communists were indicative of an admiration for the supposed dynamism of Soviet-style planning, the loss of faith in capitalism so persuasive among intellectuals during the Great Depression, a belief in the historical inevitability of communism’s fundamental goodness, or, finally, a fundamental and even willful obliviousness to Soviet atrocities.

    Treasonable Doubt offers an important contribution to the often-polemical literature on the problem of Soviet espionage in the United States culminating in the McCarthy period. Despite the less than robust treatment of the VENONA material, a missed opportunity to paint a broader social picture, and the rather melodramatic representation that the FBI and HUAC unfairly persecuted White in the final years of his life, the author’s otherwise even-handed treatment—which concedes some of the most damning charges; establishes exactly what White did; and explores his motives within the context of America’s leftish New Deal milieu and the imperatives of alliance politics during World War II—is well founded and welcome.

    [1]Indeed, this reviewer would add that the episode of Soviet abuse of the plates is barely noticed in the literature on postwar Germany written by economic historians, suggesting its insignificance.

    [2]For the text of this cable, see Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939–1957, (Washington, DC: National Security Agency/Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), 375–77. For a discussion of relevant KGB archival materials, see Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

    [3]See Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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  3. shinichi Post author

    (sk)

    アメリカ政府の中枢に Harry Dexter White というソ連のスパイがいて、そのスパイが日本が戦争をせざるを得ない状況に追い込むのに大きな役割を負ったという。

    日本の陸軍の中枢にもソ連のスパイがいて、戦中はもちろん、戦後にまで大きな影響力を保持したともいう。

    ソ連はどうやってそのようなスパイを持つことができたのか。そして日本はなぜ、そういう優秀なスパイを持ち得なかったのか。

    いずれにしても、はじめから終わりまで情報戦で負け続け、せっかくの軍事的な勝利まで台無しにしてしまった。

    いまの産業界の状況も似たりよったりだ。日本人はいつまでたっても情報の重要さに気づかない。

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