The recent ISIS attacks in Beirut, Sinai, Paris, and now San Bernardino, and subsequent discussion about Syrian refugees highlight the seriousness of the potential threats to the U.S. homeland.
At the same time, however, the charged political rhetoric surrounding the topic may make it harder for law enforcement and intelligence professionals to deal with the threat. Donald Trump has even endorsed an effort to block Muslim travel and track all Muslim Americans.
We’ve been here before.
For much of the 20th century, law enforcement and intelligence professionals were working to uncover Communist infiltration and Soviet espionage. The threat was a real one. There were hundreds of Soviet spies in the senior levels of our government.
Sadly, however, the genuine threat was often lost in the bitter political battle between the left and right. In retrospect, many of the most vocal anti-communist groups hurt the anti-communist movement more than they ever hurt any real communists or spies. Their sometimes rabid rhetoric and irresponsible actions helped protect real communists by allowing those accused of being communists to portray themselves as innocent victims. At the same time, the left too often dismissed legitimate threats by assuming that anything coming from the right was suspect.
As we look to battle ISIS and radical Islamic extremists, we must not again fall into this trap and make the job of our law enforcement and intelligence professionals more difficult by irresponsible rhetoric and action. We will need the help of Muslim allies and influential U.S. Muslim leaders to defeat ISIS and radical Islamists.
The first real effort of U.S. authorities to tackle the perceived threat of leftist radicals and anarchists was in 1919 when then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer authorized a dragnet to arrest and deport radicals immediately following WWI. At the time, there was a fear that communists and radical leftists were seeking to overthrow the government. The future FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, led the fight for the Justice Department. Unfortunately, the Palmer “Red Raids” went further than just arresting the perpetrators. Instead, they rounded up and deported anyone associated with leftist activity in an effort to destroy the entire movement, jailing thousands of leftists who had no connection to criminal acts. It is generally agreed that the massive overreaction and deportation of hundreds of innocents boomeranged against the government and tainted the anti-communist cause for decades to come.
By making the threat seem bigger and more insidious than it was in reality, Hoover and the Justice Department provided the left with a powerful weapon for future fights – the ability to paint anti-communists as the enemy of the Constitution and civil liberties.
A later Red Scare followed WWII, when Senator Joseph McCarthy leveled reckless charges of communist subversion and led a series of witch hunts against supposed communists in the Army, State Department, and elsewhere. Since that time, the term McCarthyism has come to encompass the use of unsubstantiated accusations in order to spread fear and restrict dissent. This destructive pursuit of communists did harm to legitimate anti-communists and fed the existing stereotype of the movement as an unconstitutional conspiracy against the left in America.
Sadly, as in the case of the Palmer raids, the hysteria masked a real problem. Despite his rabid assertions and assault on the Constitution, there was some truth to McCarthy’s claims - there were indeed scores of communist spies in high places in the government, to include the nation’s nuclear program. The partial opening of the Soviet archives and the declassification in the 1990s of the Venona project have provided a window in to just how successful the Soviets were in penetrating U.S. institutions. However, the charged political atmosphere at the time, brought on by McCarthy’s overreach, allowed many communists and communist enablers to look like innocent victims and defenders of the oppressed, and anti-communists as the agents of repression. Anti-communist zealots had overreacted so many times that liberals stopped listening, even if what they were saying was true.
Just how this public narrative hurt the real work of counterintelligence and law enforcement is highlighted in two of the best books of the Cold War: Whittaker Chambers’ “Witness” and Allen Weinstein’s “Perjury” about the Alger Hiss Trials.
Whittaker Chambers was a Marxist and Communist spy who eventually broke with the party at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact in the late 1930s. After defecting from his life of espionage, he approached Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle to inform on others within his Soviet spy cell, including extremely high ranking officials such as Alger Hiss at the State Department, Harry Dexter White at Treasury, and Lauchlin Currie who was an assistant to President Roosevelt. Berle passed the information to the White House and FBI. However, in the wake of the Palmer raids and witch hunts against leftists, Chamber’s accusations were swept aside. Truman later famously dismissed the eventual case against Alger Hiss as a “red herring,” apparently viewing the accusations as part of the predictable pattern of anti-communist overreach. Many Soviet spies went untouched.
The view that the anti-communist movement was little more than a political effort to encroach on civil liberties became a matter of faith to many on the left. McCarthy and his ilk had launched so many merciless witch hunts that even justifiable accusations could be deflected by communists and their enablers by screaming “witch hunt.” Clearly, anyone who was attacked by McCarthy, Hoover, and Richard Nixon must be innocent.
In this vein, academic and author Allen Weinstein set out in his book “Perjury” to demonstrate conclusively that Alger Hiss was innocent, and that he had been the victim of a right-wing witch hunt. Instead of becoming a hero to opponents of McCarthy by proving his thesis, however, Weinstein came to realize, as he collected more material and interviewed more witnesses, that Hiss was guilty. Ultimately, Weinstein came to be regarded as a heretic by the intellectual left. His fabulous study “Perjury” provided the defining indictment of Hiss as a Soviet spy and became an account of his journey away from the petrified presumptions of the left and right.
As we face a worldwide menace from radical Islamists, we cannot afford to let each side of the political spectrum in the U.S. demonize the other and deflect us from the hard work of defeating ISIS and their sympathizers. In this sense, rabid anti-Muslim rhetoric is not helpful to those professionals who must deal with the issues on a day-to-day basis. During the Cold War, many of those who flirted most closely with Soviet Communism became the most effective fighters against the real communist threat. Like Chambers, they were the ones who saw the real face of dehumanizing Soviet communism up close and realized that it had to be destroyed. Likewise, in our present struggle, we must acknowledge that we need key Muslim governments and leaders in the U.S. Muslim community in order to counter the threat posed by Muslim extremists.
Despite the real risks of radical Islamic terrorism, it is a danger that can be handled by constitutional methods and the marriage of professional intelligence and law enforcement – as long as the political climate does not overheat to the point where common sense can no longer prevail. If our professionals are pressured to track all Muslims, it will polarize our political process and make their job much harder, not easier.
