I can't believe that anyone who lived through the period when Stalin had his show trials would believe that she was working to bring peace and understanding and equality for the world. Just how delusional can you be! Gotta love the lefties.
Another American Spy for the Soviets Dies … and the Left Regards Her as a Hero
March 2, 2011 - 11:56 am - by Ron Radosh
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Every day, it seems, The New York Times reports on the death of another American Communist, or an American Communist who saw fit to join up with the KGB as an espionage agent for Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. This time, the obituary by Sam Roberts is about Judith Coplon, who over sixty years ago was arrested by the FBI in a classic sting operation. The Bureau’s agents, having received solid data from the then secret Venona decrypts of KGB messages from Moscow Central to its American agents, fed her false data about atomic power. As they hoped, the 27-year-old Coplon, who was then working at the Justice Department as a political analyst, took off to meet her lover and handler, KGB agent Valentin A. Gubitchev, to whom she planned to hand over the materials.
The Russian and Coplon were both arrested in 1949 under the Third Avenue subway line (which no longer exists) in Manhattan, and Coplon was caught red-handed. As it turned out, America’s democratic legal system protects even those Americans who were actual Soviet agents. Coplon, although found guilty by the jury of espionage in 1949 and conspiracy with Gubitchev in 1950, had both of the convictions overturned. The FBI neglected to follow protocol; they illegally heard conversations with her lawyer, and also had arrested her on “probable cause” without a necessary warrant for her arrest.
Thus the civil liberties of the system Coplon wanted to destroy worked to protect her, even though she was totally guilty. Like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, Coplon went to her death proclaiming that she was not a Communist and that she was innocent. “The only crime I can be said to be guilty of,” Coplon had later said, “is that I knew a Russian.” She also said: “I will always say that I’m innocent and that I’m being framed.”
What is most amazing about her passing, however, is the defense on her behalf told to Roberts by Coplon’s daughter, Emily Socolov. Like historian Staughton Lynd, whom I noted a week ago acknowledged the Rosenbergs’ guilt but argued that the couple had a moral obligation as Communists and “citizens of the world” to spy for the Soviet Union. Socolov told the following to journalist Roberts:
The subject of her innocence or guilt was something that she would strictly not address…It’s very hair-raising to read about your mother being given a code name and moved around like a chess piece. Was she a spy? I think it’s another question that I ask: Was she part of a community that felt that they were going to bring, by their actions, an age of peace and justice and an equal share for all and the abolishing of color lines and class lines?
If these were things that she actually did, she was not defining them as espionage. If you feel that what you’re doing answers to a higher ideal, it’s not treason.
Rather than admit the obvious truth that she was guilty — a conclusion made by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which noted that “her guilt is plain,” and confirmed by the Venona releases in the past decade — Socolov justifies her acts by implying that she does not believe that her mother was a spy, but that even if she was, she was doing it to “bring an age of peace and justice and an equal share for all,” as well as the abolishing of class and color lines!
One must ask: how? By spying for Joseph Stalin, who murdered millions of his own subjects and who embarked on a vicious and murderous campaign of anti-Semitism in the final years of his life? This is the same Stalin who was waging an expansionist foreign policy that led to the decades-long Cold War with the West and was trying to create the fall of Western governments in France and Italy in order to spread the Soviet empire.
Coplon was not acting as a deluded American Communist who tried to organize labor unions and break the color bar in the South, but as an American spy for the Soviet Union. By making her argument, Socolov does not seem to realize she is actually saying that both actions are one and the same. Communists did both, and their motives are what must count, not the result of their actions.
Then Socolov says that the point is that her mother did not define this as espionage! In other words, a criminal act is not what everyone says it is if the criminal defines it differently. And remember, her motives were good — she wanted a better world! One can excuse anything that way. The Nazis believed in the racial inferiority of non-Aryans, and believed science proved that Jews were not humans but vermin. They were wrong, but they only thought in acting on those beliefs that they were doing good for humanity. (I know, I’ve committed the unpardonable sin for the Left of equating wonderful Communism with evil Nazism.)
And that final sentence of Socolov: “If you feel that what you’re doing answers to a higher ideal, it’s not treason.” The great British author Rebecca West once titled her book about Western spies for the Soviets The New Meaning of Treason. She would have seen Socolov and others as the essential Western dupes: naïve do-gooders who are willing to serve tyranny or justify those who do so by the standards they establish themselves for their apologetics.
The problem is that they were and are wrong. Their higher ideal was the liberation of the graveyard, and the society of the guillotine. Those who in this day and age have still not learned that lesson are nothing less than pathetic. They are not useful idiots — but simply idiots.
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Another American Spy for the Soviets Dies … and the Left Regards Her as a Hero
March 2, 2011 - 11:56 am - by Ron Radosh
Share |
Every day, it seems, The New York Times reports on the death of another American Communist, or an American Communist who saw fit to join up with the KGB as an espionage agent for Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. This time, the obituary by Sam Roberts is about Judith Coplon, who over sixty years ago was arrested by the FBI in a classic sting operation. The Bureau’s agents, having received solid data from the then secret Venona decrypts of KGB messages from Moscow Central to its American agents, fed her false data about atomic power. As they hoped, the 27-year-old Coplon, who was then working at the Justice Department as a political analyst, took off to meet her lover and handler, KGB agent Valentin A. Gubitchev, to whom she planned to hand over the materials.
The Russian and Coplon were both arrested in 1949 under the Third Avenue subway line (which no longer exists) in Manhattan, and Coplon was caught red-handed. As it turned out, America’s democratic legal system protects even those Americans who were actual Soviet agents. Coplon, although found guilty by the jury of espionage in 1949 and conspiracy with Gubitchev in 1950, had both of the convictions overturned. The FBI neglected to follow protocol; they illegally heard conversations with her lawyer, and also had arrested her on “probable cause” without a necessary warrant for her arrest.
Thus the civil liberties of the system Coplon wanted to destroy worked to protect her, even though she was totally guilty. Like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, Coplon went to her death proclaiming that she was not a Communist and that she was innocent. “The only crime I can be said to be guilty of,” Coplon had later said, “is that I knew a Russian.” She also said: “I will always say that I’m innocent and that I’m being framed.”
What is most amazing about her passing, however, is the defense on her behalf told to Roberts by Coplon’s daughter, Emily Socolov. Like historian Staughton Lynd, whom I noted a week ago acknowledged the Rosenbergs’ guilt but argued that the couple had a moral obligation as Communists and “citizens of the world” to spy for the Soviet Union. Socolov told the following to journalist Roberts:
The subject of her innocence or guilt was something that she would strictly not address…It’s very hair-raising to read about your mother being given a code name and moved around like a chess piece. Was she a spy? I think it’s another question that I ask: Was she part of a community that felt that they were going to bring, by their actions, an age of peace and justice and an equal share for all and the abolishing of color lines and class lines?
If these were things that she actually did, she was not defining them as espionage. If you feel that what you’re doing answers to a higher ideal, it’s not treason.
Rather than admit the obvious truth that she was guilty — a conclusion made by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which noted that “her guilt is plain,” and confirmed by the Venona releases in the past decade — Socolov justifies her acts by implying that she does not believe that her mother was a spy, but that even if she was, she was doing it to “bring an age of peace and justice and an equal share for all,” as well as the abolishing of class and color lines!
One must ask: how? By spying for Joseph Stalin, who murdered millions of his own subjects and who embarked on a vicious and murderous campaign of anti-Semitism in the final years of his life? This is the same Stalin who was waging an expansionist foreign policy that led to the decades-long Cold War with the West and was trying to create the fall of Western governments in France and Italy in order to spread the Soviet empire.
Coplon was not acting as a deluded American Communist who tried to organize labor unions and break the color bar in the South, but as an American spy for the Soviet Union. By making her argument, Socolov does not seem to realize she is actually saying that both actions are one and the same. Communists did both, and their motives are what must count, not the result of their actions.
Then Socolov says that the point is that her mother did not define this as espionage! In other words, a criminal act is not what everyone says it is if the criminal defines it differently. And remember, her motives were good — she wanted a better world! One can excuse anything that way. The Nazis believed in the racial inferiority of non-Aryans, and believed science proved that Jews were not humans but vermin. They were wrong, but they only thought in acting on those beliefs that they were doing good for humanity. (I know, I’ve committed the unpardonable sin for the Left of equating wonderful Communism with evil Nazism.)
And that final sentence of Socolov: “If you feel that what you’re doing answers to a higher ideal, it’s not treason.” The great British author Rebecca West once titled her book about Western spies for the Soviets The New Meaning of Treason. She would have seen Socolov and others as the essential Western dupes: naïve do-gooders who are willing to serve tyranny or justify those who do so by the standards they establish themselves for their apologetics.
The problem is that they were and are wrong. Their higher ideal was the liberation of the graveyard, and the society of the guillotine. Those who in this day and age have still not learned that lesson are nothing less than pathetic. They are not useful idiots — but simply idiots.
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