Brace yourself. Everything we know is wrong!

 

 

Hi folks. My name is Michael Flores. I work in Chicago in film and theatre, I also DJ mash ups. Before that I taught 20th Century art and Film History at the Art Institute and like everyone else thought I had a good grasp of the 1950's and the censorship and fear generated by Tailgunner Joe McCarthy.

Then I came across the KGB files on the era, and realized there was more to the era than I had thought.

Recently I came across the declassified CIA documents on the era. I was shocked. I could not believe what I was reading.

Everything, and I mean everything I knew was wrong. Everything.

I did not know the McCarthy era at all. I knew a lot of propaganda from both sides, but they too were wrong. Because they never asked one key question.

How did a Senator who spent most of his time getting drunk with the press, avoiding any kind of committee, get his hands on a list of names that according to the KGB files recently released, more often than not, correctly identified spies in our government? How did a party animal get his hands on these names? No one has ever asked before.

I now know. And the revelation will shock you.

To my friends on the left- I do not agree with Anne Coulter's new look at  McCarthy- she only knows half the story. But there are going to be some difficult revelations here, for both sides. Many are still difficult for me.

To my friends on the right- the Democrats can not be blamed for the view they have of the period. THEY NEVER KNEW THE FACTS. Neither did the conservatives.

AC: Now who was in charge of finding spies in America at the time?

 

FLORES: J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Clearly, as I discovered, they failed to see the extent to which our government had been infiltrated by people loyal to Stalin. Those they did discover they blew any chance of prosecuting because they gathered information illegally. So they tainted the investigations of the time. Hoover would later start the spin that Democrats were to blame and were soft on communism, which exists still. Conservatives tend to see McCarthy as the wrong man with the right message. I disagree. He was the first government whistle blower and he was destroyed for it. Anyone that had discovered what he discovered, would have been destroyed. So the first group to fail to protect this country was the FBI.

 

The Hollywood 10. Loyalty oaths. Strict immigration. Persecution of innocent communists. These are the legacy of Joe McCarthy. Right?

 

Nope. That's the spin. There were actually two hearings on communists in Hollywood. And Senator's don't head House committees. The 1947 hearings went after Hollywood as a whole, and were chaired by J. Parnell Thomas. These hearings were resisted by many in Hollywood, and today are forgotten, or dropped from the "spin" of the era. In 1951 Democrat John Wood from Georgia went after communists in Hollywood and TV- not a condemnation of the industry as a whole. The industry, still reeling from the 1947 hearings on the industry as a whole, happily went along with this more focused campaign. Three hundred names had been given up at the 1947

 

 

 

 

 

 

hearings, ten was the number of the Hollywood "victims". More on that when we profile Humphrey Bogart.

 

So now you must be asking yourself, how did Republican Joe McCarthy, who had nothing to do with any of these hearings and never attended any of them nor did he have anything to do with the laws we now refer to as McCarthyist" get blamed for the actions of the other party? I think the word is called, "spin".

 

In fact, all the things that McCarthy is attacked for, one can go down the list and quickly discover he didn't do any of them.

 

After the War ended, the consolidation of Eastern Europe under the influence of the Soviet Union , the success of the communists in mainland China in 1949, and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 stimulated a fierce anti-communist backlash in the United States. Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), head of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Internal Security Subcommittee, initiated an investigation of the administrations of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to search for communist infiltration. He promoted the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which required American Communist Party members to register with the Attorney General. Title II of this Act used the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans as a precedent for rounding up alleged subversives under "loyalty clearance programs."

 

Two years after passage of the McCarran Internal Security Act, Senator McCarran and Congressman Francis Walter (D-PA), who would become chairman of the Committee on Un-American Activities in the late 1950s, teamed up to write the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act. Like McCarran's previous efforts, the legislation contained provisions aimed at "subversion". In this case, it permitted the exclusion or deportation of any alien who engaged or had purpose to engage in activities prejudicial to the public interest or subversive to national security. Although the exclusion or deportation of aliens on purely ideological grounds was not a new concept in immigration law, the modern adaptation of this practice in the 1952 Act would have a lasting effect. Despite a repeal of most ideological grounds for deportation by Congress in 1990, provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act have been used as recently as 2002 in the ongoing deportation cases against two Palestinian activists who as students distributed magazines and raised funds for a group the government later designated as a terrorist organization.

 

Laws that McCarran wrote and pushed through Congress made it easy to fire federal employees without telling them why or giving them a way to appeal and set up concentration camps in this country for imprisoning left-wing dissidents during "emergencies." With the end of World War II, there were seven million Europeans homeless and adrift. McCarran considered all immigrants to be potential spies, and he hated Jews. Using the McCarran-Walters Immigration Act and his Internal Security Act of 1950 to tighten immigration, he limited the number of refugees to only half a million over a two-year period -- fewer than 10,000 were Jews.

In 1951 McCarran created the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee "to investigate subversive activities" and named himself chairman. Although the House Un-American Activities Committee got much more publicity, the SISS was a goon squad, "the most fearsome of the congressional investigating committees in mid-twentieth century America."

 

 

 

"Years before Joe McCarthy ever opened his mouth in public," writes Ybarra, "McCarran believed -- really believed -- that the Democratic Party was controlled by the Communists and that one mysterious person especially had managed to exert a malign influence that could be felt at the highest levels of government." He once told a friend, "If I . . . eventually find that one, I will have served my country well."

 

Let's start with 2001. A barn in Virginia . Boxes are found and opened to determine what is in them.

 

To the surprise of the people going through the boxes there is information about OSS, our spy group in World War 2. Then CIA documents. Then to the shock of those going through the boxes, information on a secret agency within CIA.

 

Virginia is also CIA headquarters and a phone call is made to the agency. These documents have been found. The receptionist is baffled. Something about CIA documents and a secret group within CIA. Some agents are dispatched. To their surprise, the documents are real. Immediately the family is sworn to secrecy and baffled CIA agents cart out the boxes of Intel history. No press had been called. Only the family and the CIA agents know.

 

The documents are real. But no history in CIA exists of a group called THE POND. What are these papers? Older, retired agents are contacted. They inform the agency that The Pond did exist. It's history was deliberately erased from the records. A group that started in OSS and when that agency was transformed into CIA played a role in both hidden until now. Even though the military at the time and most agents knew nothing about it, the Pond was in charge of finding spies within the military and government. The OSS had become known as the Oh So Social agency under wild man William Donovan ( a cool character himself, more on him coming) and some in Washington wished we had set up the agency more like the British Intel groups. So The Pond became it. The Pond as far as we know, was America's only truly secret Intel organization.

 

Jean Grombach was a Frenchman who believed deeply in America. He became a United States citizen and went to West Point believing as many did in those days that becoming a soldier was the way to thank the country for citizenship. He loved to work hard and was an athletic star. But he also liked to party hard and had many demerits which kept him from getting a military commission.

 

There is a type of career soldier that has always existed in our military. The men and women who know how or are willing to stretch the rubber band of military rules until they got their way. Grombach was like that. He got a military commission anyway, and was sent to the Panama Canal zone. This was apparently when he first became involved in Intel work (spying to the public). He left the military and joined the National Guard. In 1929 he worked for CBS radio, and developed several radio shows. However he was still in Intel, as in 1937 we discover that he has worked on a top secret project for State Department. In 1940 an article appears in INFANTRY JOURNAL on the importance of radio in warfare, and how radio can be used to send messages that the public wouldn't get.

 

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was born in Appleton , Wisconsin and would attend a one room school house until 9th grade, when he left to help work on the farm. As he got older he tried his hand at chicken farming but a disease wiped out his crop. After this he got a job at a grocery store and completed his 4 years of high school in just 9 months. He went to law school  He ran for

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a Judge postion after that and beat a 24 year incumbent becoming the youngest judge in the history of Wisconsin. He was highly praised for his work on the bench, except by the Wisconsin Supreme Court who censured him for running for public office while still a sitting judge.

 

What can we surmise from these facts? He was poor, dirt poor. His family was poor. He never resigned himself to his fate and constantly bent the rules to achieve his goals. How did his working class, Catholic manners go over later in Washington, D.C. with Protestant rich Senators? That will come.

In 1942 McCarthy took a leave of absence and joined the Marines. He was immediatley given rank and made part of military Intel. Again, leaping ahead of rules to get the job he wanted.

 

In 1942, a person we have met before, John Grombach entered the offices of wild man (and frankly one of my heroes) William Donovan, head of COI (Coordinator of Information) which would morph into OSS ( Office Of Strategic Services) and later CIA. However in a twist that reflects attitudes in Intel to this day, all the other Intel groups tried to dismantle COI. They did not care for, or co-operate with, this new kid on the block. Many were turned off because Donovan liked to socialize, and recruited eccentrics that would never be allowed to advance in military Intel. Ian Fleming, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard. Disgusted, Army Major General George Strong decided we needed a new secret Intel group that no one would know about, as opposed to COI and later OSS. A long term, secret rival to Donovan and his "motley crew".

 

Strong went to Brig. General Hayes Kroner head of the War Department's Military Intelligence Service and was told to start up the most secret spy group in the history of U.S. Intel.

 

He went to Grombach, and asked him to head the group. COI had the code name "The Lake", so the name of this group became "The Pond". Only a few people in the War Department and the President's office knew of the group. Because the President authorized some of their actions, he knew. Some in the State Department knew, and provided members of the Pond with covers as case officers. Grombach was to find and reveal communist subversion in our government. His first major score was Alexander Barmine a Soviet military Intel officer.

 

It is a great irony that the explosion that would shake society, would begin with the approval of the Army and the State Department!

 

Barmine made up a list of Soviet spies within OSS!

 

Next score Grombach enlisted a serial killer, Marcel Petiot a Parisian doctor. He obtained gossip from his German Intel patients and told Grombach that the Soviet NKVD had massacred 18,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest . Gromback, sickened and angry, rushed the information to Col. Alfred McCormack the person he reported to at the War Department.

 

He was told that he should remember that the Russians were our allies, but that the report would be passed on.

 

Grombach, confused, waited to hear from others as the report made it through the bureaucracy. Surely someone would see it and rush it to the President.

 

And he waited.

 

 

 

 

 

And he waited.