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Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case

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There is a tendency common among biographers to fall in love with their subjects and then to excuse or ignore all of the bad things that they have done. There is also a more recent trend among left-wing academics to claim that although many people spied for Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s and betrayed the United States and their colleagues and friends, their hearts were in the right place and they really did not do much damage. R. Bruce Craig exhibits both of these traits in his book about Harry Dexter White. He performs mental and moral gymnastics to claim that White, possibly the most important spy working for the Soviets in the 1940s, was justified in his actions because they served a utopian ideal and did not do much damage to American national security.

Alger Hiss was accused of espionage and found guilty of perjury (lying about his spying). The Rosenbergs were accused and found guilty of espionage, and executed for their actions. Both of those cases became famous and for decades various academics insisted that Hiss and the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of a McCarthyite witch hunt. With the end of the Cold War we now know that they were in fact guilty--something that does not help the credibility of their longtime defenders. But few people remember Harry Dexter White, despite the fact that he was a more senior government official than Alger Hiss and ran a more important and effective spy ring than the Rosenbergs. White actually enacted government policy that favored Stalinist Russia during World War II and thwarted investigations into other spies. But White is all but forgotten these days because he died of a heart attack in 1948 before he could go on trial for his crimes.

Although he never became the cultural symbol of the evils of McCarthyism that his fellow spies did, the evidence against White is substantial and there was no way that R. Bruce Craig could completely avoid it in his biography of White. Nevertheless, Craig chose to ignore significant evidence that White actually enacted policies to benefit Stalin, ignore evidence that White was not simply an "internationalist" but a committed communist, and chose to explain away White's treasonous actions.

Craig states that White engaged in a "species of espionage," which is his rather bizarre way of saying that what White did fit the definition of espionage, but was somehow not _really_ espionage. He claims that the information that White turned over to the NKVD (forerunner to the KGB) was not really significant. The big problem with this claim is that there is no proof that it is true. We know that he turned over information, but we do not know about the quality of that information because the Soviets have not released it.

What we _do_ know is that the Soviets called White "one of our most valuable [agents]." Look in the book "Venona" produced by the CIA and NSA in the mid 1990s. Look at document #50, a decryption of a Soviet cable discussing White's proposal for how to meet with his Soviet handler. "He proposes occasional conversations lasting up to half an hour while driving in his automobile." This is a classic piece of espionage tradecraft--driving around in a car so that nobody can hear what you are saying. Or look at document #71, where White discusses being paid for his work for the Soviets. Not the actions of an innocent man.

Craig originally wrote this biography as a Ph.D. dissertation. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr addressed that version in their 2003 book "In Denial." Anyone wishing to see a more detailed critique of Craig's biography should start with that book. But what is clear is that Harry Dexter White spied for the Soviet Union, betrayed his colleagues, his superiors, and his country, supported the brutal dictator Stalin--and R. Bruce Craig does not really have a problem with any of this.

I purchased this book in the hope of advancing my understanding of the apparent ascendancy of Treasury over State during the mid 1940's (as White and Henry Morgenthau Jr. were the chief architects of the move). Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed. Instead it appears to be simply a whitewash of Harry Dexter White's treason masquerading as history. Not since Khrushchev on Khrushchev, by the Russian Premier's son has a book so speciously tried to rehabilitate a disgraced corpse. I don't begrudge Craig his benighted hero worship but there is a limit.
How Craig can ignore the irrefutable evidence of White's treason contained in the Soviet archives begs credulity. The author's claim that White's actions were only a "species of espionage" demonstrates the depths of moral relativism that today's left has sunk. To construe White's actions at the Treasury Department as anything other than a deliberate attempt to advance the cause of communism and the Soviet Union at the expense of his own country's well being is intellectually deceitful. Naivety can be somewhat fetching in an 18 year old ingénue; however in a 45 year old supposed historian it is sadly pathetic.

By all accounts Harry Dexter White was a brilliant international economist and bureaucrat under Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. As early as 1935 he was working on a new concept of international financial arrangements to answer the "beggar-thy-neighbor" disaster of the Great Depression, and even before the United States entered World War II he was completing his first draft of ideas for post-war international financial stabilization and reconstruction. He worked on post-war planning sometimes in tandem, sometimes in competition with Britain's far more famous academic economist/government adviser John Maynard Keynes, and always with the full support and backing of Secretary Morgenthau and President Roosevelt. His concept of a new international financial order was brought into being at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference of 1945 (Bretton Woods), in the creation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. It was a triumph of American financial diplomacy that laid the way for American international economic dominance to the present day.

Unfortunately, understanding and analysis of White's achievement have always been distracted by his alleged participation in the Soviet spy ring which came together in the United States in the 1930s and unraveled at the end of the 1940s with the Hiss case. This invaluable historical study of White's record finally lays to rest for all but the most devoted conspiracy theorists any doubt as to Harry Dexter White's knowing complicity in furnishing copies of thousands of pages of the most sensitive policy memoranda of the US Treasury to Stalin's spies in the United States during World War II. Through his meticulous examination of the copious evidence previously available and much studied, and his extension of the analysis to the so-called Verona decrypts of Soviet cable traffic late in the war, declassified by the US in 2000, R. Bruce Craig carefully lays out White's place in the spy network. Certainly, White's participation in the network was as an informant, not a strategist or tactician, but he was clearly key in passing information from his own desk, privy if not instrumental to the plans and thinking of Morgenthau and Roosevelt on wartime economic issues, to the Soviets.

The question Rich's careful account cannot answer, and perhaps it never can be, is what White thought he was doing and why he did it. White left few clues and his post-war participation in constructing the new institutions he had so brilliantly planned was cut short when the was caught up in the spy allegations. It was an untimely denouement and one which cut short as well the kind of strategic, visionary thinking on international economic relations and institutions that is so much needed today to ensure international economic security for all the world's nations and peoples.

In August 1948, Harry Dexter White, the distinguished architect of the international institutions created at Bretton Woods, appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to defend his reputation. Two former spies, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, were alleging that he had spied for Russia. Bentley had never met White, but said his colleagues had passed information to her from him. Chambers claimed that White gave him documents for an underground Communist cell in the 1930s. White, though recovering from a series of heart attacks, stoutly proclaimed his lifelong commitment to the principles of democracy and the ideals of Roosevelt's New Deal. His performance even impressed his interlocutor, Congressman Richard Nixon. But the strain was too great. He died three days later and a contrite HUAC retreated from the case.

But not J Edgar Hoover. He had opposed White's appointment as US executive director of the IMF in 1946 and later learned, from the secret "Venona" project, that his name appeared in some decrypted wartime Soviet cables. In 1953 he briefed Attorney-General Herbert Brownell who resurrected the politically charged case and declared that White was a spy. White's bronze bust was ignominiously removed to the IMF's basement. When "Venona" was declassified in 1995, there was a recrudescence of neo-McCarthyite triumphalism: "Now we know," declared prominent historians.

Meanwhile Bruce Craig had for years been building an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Harry White case and was alarmed at the partisan literature spawned by "Venona". His own even-handed treatment rebukes others for writing like court-room prosecutors whose job is to put the most sinister case possible. The temptation so to do is great. With substantial evidence of espionage by some of White's friends, guilt-by-association is easy to assign. And for those seeking to justify the Cold War, the more spies "unmasked" the better.

Craig reviews the evidence in meticulous detail and shows that the more lurid allegations do not stand up: White was not responsible for provoking Pearl Harbor to divert the Japanese from Soviet borders; he did not subvert US policy when in 1944 the Soviets were given occupation currency plates (used wantonly, at great cost to the US); he was not acting on Soviet instructions when discussing a plan for the possible pastoralisation of Germany; and his advice on China was designed to keep the Kuomintang fighting Japan, not to promote Communist revolution.

Philosophically, he was a Keynesian New Dealer, not at all attracted to the Communist creed. As a dedicated Rooseveltian internationalist his energies were directed at continuing the Grand Alliance and maintaining peace through a liberal trade regime. He believed that powerful multilateral institutions could avoid the mistakes of Versailles and another world depression. Nothing supports Lord Skidelsky's claim, in his recent biography of Keynes, that White wanted to cripple Britain to help the Soviets.

According to Craig, White's passionate commitment to the noble ideals of Bretton Woods and the United Nations led him to talk too freely to the Russians - in particular to a special Soviet agent with whom he socialized openly at Bretton Woods and later in private - to try to keep them on board. Craig believes (without convincing this reviewer) that this was a "species of espionage", but espionage nonetheless.

He thus arrives at a rather strange "treasonable doubt" about a man striving to build a world that would remove the uglier features of both unfettered capitalism and Soviet-style planning. Ranged against him were Elizabeth Bentley, a brazen liar who had never met him; Whittaker Chambers, a chronic fantasist who possibly never met him either; and the fragmentary and ambiguous Venona decrypts. Despite these thin reeds, Craig thinks there could have been enough evidence to convict White of espionage in a court of law. However, as his actions were all consistent with administration policy, Craig clears him of disloyalty. Happily, White's bust now sits proudly alongside that of John Maynard Keynes in the IMF Board Room.

It seems that there is a desperate urge on the part of Harry White's detractors (some of whom have published mean-spirited and error-ridden reviews of Craig's book in some prominent newspapers) to show that, while his methods were heavy-handed, Joe McCarthy was right all along. There is a refusal to acknowledge that during WWII most Americans regarded the USSR as an admired and indispensable ally, and that those who dealt with their representatives in Washington were bound to have close, frank dealings with them. This became "treasonable" only retrospectively and for political reasons. Read Craig for ample evidence of this.

- Roger Sandilands (r.j.sandilands@strath.ac.uk)