Of course, for every U.S. citizen who joined a front organization, there were many more who kept their distance. For anticommunist Americans, then and since, the Popular Front was cheap political theater, a marionette show in which foreign puppet-masters pulled the strings of the naïve and foolish. Recently this view has apparently been vindicated, in dramatic fashion, by a series of documentary revelations that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War. First, historians who gained access to the archives of the Communist International and the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) in Moscow discovered papers showing that not only had American communists received large sums of cash from the Kremlin (rumors of “Moscow gold” had circulated for years without hard evidence to back them up) but also that the CPUSA leadership, including no less a figure than the Party’s General Secretary throughout the Popular Front era, Earl Browder, had actively connived in spying by Soviet agents in the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s.10
Then, in 1995, the National Security Agency revealed the existence of
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I N N O C E N T S ’ C L U B S
VENONA, a top-secret Cold War signals intelligence operation that had succeeded in decoding a number of messages between Soviet diplomats in America and Moscow that had been intercepted during World War II.
Here was proof that many of the claims about Soviet espionage made in the reckless, overcharged, anticommunist atmosphere of the late 1940s and early 1950s were in fact true. Julius Rosenberg, executed for treason in 1953 and long afterward thought to be a victim of judicial murder, was indeed an “atom spy.” Many of the U.S. government officials accused of espionage by the emotionally unstable “blonde spy queen” and FBI informer Elizabeth Bentley really had, it turned out, passed government secrets to the Soviets. There were even intercepts strongly suggesting that Alger Hiss, the suave, patrician New Dealer at the center of the period’s most controversial spy case, was a Soviet agent after all (although Hiss’s defenders are disputing this interpretation of VENONA even now).11
Given the new evidence, it is hardly surprising that many commenta-tors have concluded that the American communist movement was a mere automaton, the unswervingly loyal servant of the Kremlin. Such a verdict on the CPUSA leadership is, it seems, inescapable. Yet it does not entirely account for the motives and aspirations of ordinary communists, the vast majority of whom were never involved in anything remotely resembling espionage. (Even the most generous estimate of the number of spies within the Party, 300, seems small when placed in the context of a total membership during World War II of some 50,000.)12 For the average member of a Popular Front organization—a Jewish fur-worker dismayed by the rise of anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany, a student inspired by the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, an African American protesting Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia—the communists might have deserved praise for their efforts resisting fascism, but supporting the Soviet Union was far down his or her list of priorities, under other, more pressing concerns, such as fighting unsafe working conditions, challenging the in-justices of racial segregation, or alleviating the hardship caused by unem-ployment. True, in the background were the Soviet paymasters and their agents in the United States, the apparatchiks of the CPUSA; but the fronts would never have got off the ground if they had not also reflected the particular values and needs of the groups they represented.
Ironically, for Willi Münzenberg himself, the man who, to quote Koestler again, “produced Committees as a conjurer produces rabbits out
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of his hat,” the advent of the Popular Front marked the beginning of the end.13 Forced to abandon Germany for France after Hitler’s rise to power, he strove to maintain Stalin’s favor as, one by one, his old Bolshevik friends disappeared. It was not long before the Gestapo spies who shadowed him in Paris were joined by agents of the NKVD (the predecessor organization to the KGB). Expelled from the German Communist Party in 1938, he began feeling out contacts in the western intelligence services, raising the intriguing possibility that, had he survived the war, he might have been on hand to advise the CIA as it began setting up its own front operations in the late 1940s. Such an outcome was not to be, however. After France fell to the Wehrmacht, he fled south toward the Swiss border, disappearing in late June 1940 somewhere between Lyons and Grenoble. Precisely how he met his end remains a mystery, although there is general agreement among historians that the coroner’s verdict of suicide was unsound. As Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico in the same year showed, Stalin’s reach could be long and deadly.