I am not sure if you reside anyplace near Solver Springs Maryland, but IF you do, and IF you would be interested in seeing a screening of my latest film, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, I very much would like to invite you to our screening on Monday night where we will be the closing film at the AFI.

I have been reading WITNESS–including today on my plane ride from San Fran to Chicago.

If you cannot attend our screening–may we be in touch in any event?

best wishes to you,

Douglas Urbanski

My husband and I are both nearly finished reading Witness.

I feel like the teenage Jewish kid who tried rather pitifully to express his gratitude and respect for your grandfather. It’s impossible to describe how deeply moving and informative I find the book. I am right now avoiding finishing the last 50 or so pages because I don’t want it to end and because my affection for Whittaker Chambers is so great. Silly, but true.

Along the way I’ve been transcribing sections here and there, and emailing to friends. This is the most recent excerpt I chose, and perhaps my favorite of all:

[excerpt from page 617]

There was another heavy pause. I knew that there must be something that Luce wanted to tell me or ask me, but I was too weary to help him. Suddenly he said, “I’ve been reading about the young man born blind.”

[...] “No, no,” Luce said impatiently, “I mean the young man born blind. It’s in the eighth or ninth chapter of St. John. They brought Our Lord a young man who had been blind from birth and asked Him one of those catch questions: ‘Whose is the sin, this man’s or his parents’, that he was born blind?’ Our Lord took some clay and wet it with saliva and placed it on the blind man’s eyes so that they opened and he could see. Then Our Lord gave an answer, not one of His clever answers, but a direct, simple answer. He said: ‛Neither this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’ ”

Slowly, there sank into my mind the tremendous thing that Luce was saying to me, and the realization that he had brought me there so that he could say those words of understanding kindness. He was saying: “You are the young man born blind. All you had to offer God was your blindness that through the action of your recovered sight, His works might be made manifest.”

In the depths of the Hiss Case, in grief, weakness and despair, the words that Luce had repeated to me came back to strengthen me.

I have read only early works by Ralph de Toledano: Frontiers of Jazz (1947), Seeds of Treason (1950), and Spies, Dupes, and Diplomats (1952).

I am looking for a copy of Lament for a Generation (1960).

His later work I holds no particular interest for me personally, including his final book, Cry Havoc.

I have a question about Ralph de Toledano and his authorship of what would presumably be his last book, Cry Havoc!. Your tribute to him portrays him as an erudite intellectual with wide-ranging cultural tastes. You cite the recording of the Garcia-Lorca poem and connect it to your interest in Neruda, Brecht and Kurt Weill.

I have been investigating the proliferation of what can at best be described as a “conspiracy theory” focusing on the Institute for Social Research or Frankfurt School. It might be more accurate to describe it as a preposterous fabrication and calumny along the lines of the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The origin of this fabricated conspiracy theory would appear to be in Lyndon Larouche’s paranoid cult in the early 1990s.

The confessed Oslo mass murderer, Anders Breivik plagiarized extensively from one version of the tale, published in 2004 by the Free Congress Foundation and edited by William S. Lind. Patrick J. Buchanan replicated the story in chapter four of his 2002 book The Death of the West, in which Buchanan acknowledges the editorial advice of his friend, Bill Lind. I have checked footnotes in Buchanan’s book and found them to be bogus, indicating only a more sophisticated variety of intellectual dishonesty than Breivik’s inept plagiarism.

I have been unable to locate a copy of Toledano’s book at a nearby library but the promotional blurb from the publisher presents a lurid recapitulation of the Larouchite/Lind slander. So I am curious about what kind of documentation the book contains or if it is yet another raucous production of the vast, resonant right-wing echo chamber — apparently even crediting the Frankfurt School with the rise of the Nazis. Here is an excerpt from the publishers’ blurb:

Cry Havoc! is Ralph de Toledano’s most ambitious work. Its modest length (254 pages) belies a volume jam-packed with information. One hardly knows where to begin. Anyone seriously absorbing it will end up with a heavily underlined book that connects the dots and timeline of the planned decline of Western Civilization.

Those dots lead ultimately to the Institute of Social Research planted in prestigious Frankfurt University in Germany in the Twenties. The “Frankfurt School,” as it was called, was “dedicated to neo-Marxism — contributing to the corrupt miasma of Weimar Germany and the victory of Adolph Hitler’s National Socialists.”

Ultimately, the “school” moved to America where it was accepted by Columbia University in New York. This was accomplished by John Dewey, the educator credited (or blamed) by many with leading to the corruption of America’s education system. Dewey, as Toledano notes, was in league with “a crypto-communist professorial cabal — and a conspiracy and a war so vast and so cunning that it went unnoticed.”

A few — unfortunately very few others — have written about the Frankfurt school. Toledano takes one more step toward laying the conspiracy directly on the doorstep of the Comintern. As with Soviet funding of the Communist Party USA, it takes no great leap of imagination to surmise as much. Again, the question lies in “the smoking gun.” Toledano makes the case that it is there in writings or words of V.I. Lenin and other original Bolsheviks.

Cry Havoc! traces the Frankfurt school plot to 1922 and to the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow and to Karl Radek — a power in the Politburo — and to other key players in the then-new Bolshevik revolution. Among them was Muenzenberg, who openly boasted, “We will take over the intellectuals. We will make America stink.”

And your point is??? It is just as possible that Adolph Berle was in CYA mode at having been told things earlier that in retrospect he should have acted on. Could also be that Chambers was conflicted in going to him in the first place and was only ready to reveal what he knew in increments.

Regarding Venona, are you suggesting that ALES was not Alger Hiss? If so, who was he?

Furthermore, I have not read the originaal Venona documents. I am only relying on reports of those who have and have written about it. And from what I can tell, the prevailing view is that ALES was Hiss. You have not offered anything yet to contradict this view.

Critical is this Chambers’ noting of the union of the Bolsheviks and Romanovs behind Putin’s Marxofascist Russia — also the similarities with Marxofascist China, Europe, Brazil — and America. Intramural rivalries have been assuaged in favor of the global insurrection.

Also, the words of Ike shout forward, however…

Would either of these two understand the full extend of the subversion of the followers and comrades of Gramsci, Trotsky, Alinsky and Cloward-Piven?

If so, I think both Chambers and Eisenhower would be compelled to point out the intentional sabotage in the current Soft War against Sovereignty and Freedom, in America and throughout the world. And yes, the central bank complex is behind it all, or the Rothschilds would not have financed both Maurice Strong and George Soros (among others).

With that in mind, I think Whittaker Chambers would have tipped his big fedora to Robert Welch, if Ike wouldn’t.

Let us understand what is being subtly but very forcefully done, in the here and now, thank you.

GRAND JURY: You made it rather clear, I think, and it can be presumed that there could have been no mistake on the part of Mr. Berle that Chambers was talking about espionage, is that correct?

LEVINE: Yes, sir.

GRAND JURY: In other words, you say that he mentioned documents, obtaining documents and microfilms and things of that sort?

LEVINE: Yes, sir.

GRAND JURY: So there could be no mistake that Mr. Berle knew there was espionage and it was beyond a doubt a fact that these were Communists?

LEVINE: Not to the best of my recollection except for the fact that Mr. Berle was a very tired man that night, but he did make some notes. I never saw them.

GRAND JURY: Was there any question at that time, Mr. Levine, about immunity for Chambers?

LEVINE: Not in Chambers’ presence. But the question was raised between Mr. Berle and myself when the arrangements were made for dinner.

GRAND JURY: With reference to the name of Alger Hiss in that conversation in Mr. Berle’s home, did Whittaker Chambers indicate in that conversation that Alger Hiss was actually taking material out of the State Department for the purpose of photographing it?

LEVINE: To the best of my recollection, Mr. Chambers indicated that material was being taken out of the State Department. I cannot tie up Mr. Alger Hiss with that operation.

Levine jotted down the names he could recall from the Berle meeting after he left. “My notes,” he informed the grand jury, “I want to emphasize here, dealt only with names, not with circumstances or operations….”

Now for Chambers’s grand jury testimony:

GRAND JURY: Now, in the course of the Grand Jury questioning, Mr. Chambers, you were asked whether this was an espionage group back there, and you said it was not an espionage group; is that correct?

CHAMBERS: Probably yes, that’s correct.

GRAND JURY: Mr. Chambers, at the time you talked to Mr. Berle, or at the time you talked to any other individuals with reference to this apparatus, did you tell anybody that you yourself were engaged in espionage, and that you had transmitted information…?

CHAMBERS: I did not, but it was so strongly implied that I need scarcely have added much more.

GRAND JURY: [Y]ou did not tell him [Berle] anything about espionage – is that correct?

CHAMBERS: The word was never used.

GRAND JURY: And … nothing was said about the transmittal of documents?

CHAMBERS: That is technically true, also.

GRAND JURY: Did you tell Mr. Isaac Levine that you had confidential State Department documents in your possession?

CHAMBERS: I am not sure at this date whether I did or not. I may have implied it strongly, but I am not sure whether I told him.

GRAND JURY: You have testified previously, I think, with reference to these matters, but [we] would like to have any testimony you have on these points repeated, particularly with reference to whether any statements were made by you to Mr. Berle in that meeting at his home in 1939, that documents had been taken out of the State Department and that microfilms had been made and that espionage activities had been going on in the State Department.

CHAMBERS: I … told Mr. Berle the nature of the underground apparatus … and gave him, I believe, a complete list of the people involved in that apparatus. Now, the sum total of what I told Mr. Berle of course added up to a picture of espionage. Now, that word, I’m sure, was never used during the conversation. I’m equally sure that everyone present understood, of course, what was implied.

GRAND JURY: Now, was there any discussion about microfilms?

CHAMBERS: I do not recall that we talked about microfilms.

GRAND JURY: Was there any mention of the transmission of documents?

CHAMBERS: I don’t recall that there was.

GRAND JURY: Wouldn’t you have to explain something about the transmission of documents and the photographing of them, in explaining the nature of the apparatus? I mean, it wouldn’t be in general terms but it would have to be rather specific, wouldn’t it?

CHAMBERS: We did not use the word “espionage” as nearly as I can recall, and therefore —

GRAND JURY: No, I don’t mean that you described what happened; what you did.

CHAMBERS: I did not describe, as far as I can recall, describe the transmission of documents.

GRAND JURY: Was there any reference to Alger Hiss in the conversation?

CHAMBERS: Yes.

GRAND JURY: [I]n connection with his taking documents out of the State Department and giving them to you?

CHAMBERS: I do not believe so.

This is a brief excerpt of Berle’s testimony:

GRAND JURY: When Chambers talked to you did he indicate that he had any tangible evidence to back it up with?

BERLE: Not a thing. Not a thing. That was one of the difficulties. There was always the fair possibility this was a straight screwball. Mr. Chambers gave evidence of having been through some deep emotional strain, and that could have been his separation from the Communist Party or it could have been merely mental disturbance.

GRAND JURY: Did Mr. Chambers tell you he had come from the underground or [was he] just a Communist? Did he tell you he was from the underground? Because if such was the case, all of these things would be done underground; they wouldn’t be done aboveboard.

BERLE: Mr. Chambers’ story was that he had been a Communist and, as I recall it, that he had been in a position to see certain of the underground reports, that he in New York was in a position to see certain reports coming from Washington. He did not make himself out in any sense a principal.

GRAND JURY: But by the same token, he was talking about people in your department who were in this cell or in this apparatus and they probably, by his word, were working in the underground with him. By deduction you could get that.

BERLE: Well, as he told it to me, this would be hearsay on hearsay. The one thing that he did not indicate was his own connection with what was going on.

GRAND JURY: I say, if he hadn’t mentioned any names, I could understand that. But actually naming the people for you to be on guard against was something like a sort of red light.

BERLE: Well, of course, you could get into the position of the police state where people stick communications into the mouth of the lion and something happens, but you are apt to be in trouble if you do.

As for Venona, perhaps you should actually read up on it instead of taking it for granted that it is some sort of smoking gun. If you think this constitutes proof, well…

MGB
From: WASHINGTON
To: MOSCOW
No: 1822

30 March 1945

Further to our telegram No. 283 [a.]. As a result of “[D% A. ‘s]” [i] chat with “ALES” [ii] the following has been ascertained:

1. ALES has been working with the NEIGHBORS [SOSEDI] [iii] continuously since 1935.
2. For some years past he has been the leader of a small group of the NEIGHBORS’ probationers [STAZhERY], for the most part consisting of his relations.
3. The group and ALES himself work on obtaining military information only. Materials on the “BANK” [iv] allegedly interest the NEIGHBORS very little and he does not produce them regularly.
4. All the last few years ALES has been working with “POL’” [v] who also meets other members of the group occasionally.
5. Recently ALES and his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations.
6. After the YaLTA Conference, when he had gone on to MOSCOW, a Soviet personage in a very responsible position (ALES gave to understand that it was Comrade VYShINSKIJ) allegedly got in touch with ALES and at the behest of the Military NEIGHBORS passed on to him their gratitude and so on.

No. 431 VADIM [vi]

Notes: [a] Not available.
Comments:
[i] A.: “A.” seems the most likely garble here although “A.” has not been confirmed elsewhere in the WASHINGTON traffic.
[ii] ALES: Probably Alger HISS.
[iii] SOSEDI: Members of another Soviet Intelligence organization, here probably the GRU.
[iv] BANK: The U.S. State Department.
[v] POL’: i.e. “PAUL,” unidentified cover-name.
[vi] VADIM: Anatolij Borisovich GROMOV, MGB resident in WASHINGTON.

8 August 1969

You state that Whittaker Chambers was incapable of telling the truth. Do you agree or disagree that the Venona Transcripts speak to the veracity of Chambers statements? IF you disagree, how do you explain your position which goes against the grain of current historical understanding?