Another Cold War Soviet Agent

Monday, August 31st, 2015

For decades, stalwarts of the Left depicted those accused of disloyalty in the McCarthyite era as victims of an American witch-hunt:

One such individual, who until his death made a good living portraying himself in this fashion, was Cedric Belfrage, a British expatriate who lived in the U.S. from the ’40s until 1955.

Belfrage was the founder and editor-in-chief of what was the major fellow-traveling American weekly newspaper, The National Guardian, which was created in 1948 as an adjunct of the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket. The British subject Belfrage was hauled before both Senator McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee and by HUAC in the 1950s, where he invoked the Fifth Amendment. Eventually, he was arrested and deported back to Britain in 1955.

Belfrage then wrote a few books. Among them was one published by a major American publisher in 1973, The American Inquisition: 1945-1950, in which the author claimed that he too was a victim of vicious false accusations that he was a Soviet agent.

We have known for some years, from both the Venona files and the Vassiliev KGB Notebooks, that in fact Belfrage was working for the KGB.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

Comments

  1. Morris says:
    September 1, 2015 at 12:34 pm

    “Belfrage then wrote a few books. Among them was one published by a major American publisher in 1973, The American Inquisition: 1945-1950, in which the author claimed that he too was a victim of vicious false accusations that he was a Soviet agent.”

    Brass nerve in English, chutzpah in Yiddish.

  2. Sheldon says:
    September 1, 2015 at 12:36 pm

    Seems that Tailgunner Joe was right after all. Joe did not have access to Venona. If he had, I can only well imagine what his response would have been.

  3. Slovenian Guest says:
    September 2, 2015 at 5:39 pm

    McCarthy was not a real threat. He got a few people fired, most temporarily. Most of them were actually Soviet agents of one sort or another. They became martyrs and have been celebrated ever since. His goal was a purge of the State Department. He didn’t even come close. If he had somehow managed to fire every Soviet agent or sympathizer in the US government, he would not even have done any damage. As Carroll Quigley pointed out, McCarthy (and his supporters) thought he was attacking a nest of Communist spies, whereas in fact he was attacking the American Establishment. Don’t bring a toothpick to a gunfight.

    (From The ugly truth about government by Moldbug.)

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