United States

During the late 1940s and early 1950s there was widespread fear that Soviet agents had infiltrated and embedded themselves in the United States government. The arrest and conviction of several alleged agents, the high-profile and highly publicized proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and especially the sensational allegations made by Senator Joe McCarthy, created an atmosphere remembered as the “Red Scare.” It was a deeply polarizing time, with some contending that efforts to expose spies were being thwarted and impeded by communist sympathizers in the government, while others contended equally vehemently that the search for spies was nothing more than a populist witch-hunt, which jeopardized American civil liberties.

McCarthy’s antics eventually caused him to lose credibility, and after he was censured by the Senate in 1954 his political career was effectively ended, and the Red Scare faded away. McCarthy died in May 1957 at age 48 (probably from the effects of alcoholism) with “McCarthyism” having entered the lexicon as a term meaning the fear-driven making of false, unfounded accusations of subversion and treason. “McCarthyism” and the “Red Scare” are now usually remembered with embarrassment as a cautionary tale of the damage that can be done by unscrupulous or irresponsible politicians playing on public fear.

But history seems to be issuing a surprising verdict on the Red Scare.

In the 1990s Russian authorities began to make KGB files available to researchers, and in 1995 the CIA released declassified files from its top-secret Verona Project, in which it had been secretly intercepting and decrypting encrypted Soviet messages for over 30 years. What those files revealed was astonishing.

After the Verona Project files were made public, Senator Daniel Moynihan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, described the intercepts as “the greatest counterintelligence achievement in our history,” adding, “They revealed the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States and helped us understand how deeply infiltrated we had been.”

So, how deeply?

In fact, the information now available (including the testimony of former KGB agents) reveals that during the 1950s there were indeed hundreds of Soviet spies embedded in the United States government and military, as well as in key positions in American academia and industry. In the cases of Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, long considered by many to be innocent victims of anti-communist hysteria, the evidence now available seems to have conclusively demonstrated their guilt (although they still have their defenders). The full extent of the Soviet infiltration continues to be studied and debated, but it is now clear that there were Americans working in the State Department, at the Los Alamos nuclear research facility, and in other sensitive positions, who were covertly conducting espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.

So, has the evidence exonerated Joe McCarthy? While there may be some who say so, most historians of the era are more likely to conclude that McCarthy’s demagoguery and sensational antics were counterproductive. He was such a controversial and polarizing figure that his intense insistence that the government had been infiltrated by communists, and his unfounded allegations against innocent persons, had the ironic effect of making all such claims dubious and less credible, so that actual spies could hide behind claims that they were victims of “McCarthyism.” President Truman (who, incidentally, was never briefed on the Verona Project) called McCarthy “a pathological liar,” and “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has.” Like the story of the boy who cried wolf, it became difficult to distinguish actual treason from invented claims of treason. Rather than exposing the extent of Soviet infiltration, McCarthy’s tactics eventually killed public interest in the issue.

Obviously this post just scratches the surface of many interesting topics. McCarthy, the McCarthy hearings, the Rosenberg's, Hiss, and the Verona Project, will all be subjects of future Doses.