It may be although according to the popular TV show, NCIS, which based the plot of their May 4, show on a renegade former KGB agent planted to run a bookstore and pretend to be an American. He was known by a typical Anglo name cribbed from a dead infant in Canada.
This plot dreamed up by a Hollywood script writer was a fact during WWII -- it was a common ploy of the Soviets from early in their undeclared war against their saviour, the United States on whose dollars they lived.
The Soviets may have thought they dreamed up the techniques of planting agents as if they were native born to the culture to which they were assigned, ready to carry out at a moment’s notice whatever duties for which they were trained, but they were not. In 1860, only a dozen years after Marx’s Manifesto first appeared, a novel by Willkie Collins, based on such a deception was published in England, under the title of The Woman in White.
In the Soviets’ 20th Century assignments of this nature, they usually and frequently called for the death penalty of someone, deceptively made to look natural, suicide, or even assassinations. Chores of this type were usually carried out through Department 13, SMERSH, Department of Blood Wet Affairs.
In a conversation with my niece many years ago, I mentioned this department and she laughed. She thought it was a figment of Ian Fleming’s imagination and didn’t exist. I assured her it was very active indeed, and, after all, Fleming had once been a British agent himself. Why wouldn’t he know?
In fact, one of my first endeavors to write a book was a puny effort to tell the story of murders which had taken place on U.S. soil –murders of people who impeded KGB’s efforts –got in the way so to speak.
I called my poor effort “Murder With a Guarantee” and my dear daughter typed it for me, even while telling me it was too gruesome! The manuscript is still floating around here some place, but others told the story better and one of them had bona fides and I had none! And, of course, it was common to speak of the “cold war,” almost reassuring, as if in that kind of war, no one ever died, whereas under Stalin people died by the thousands—but it wasn’t nice to talk about in polite society!
Being a voracious reader, particularly of mystery novels, it was just a short step to change my reading habits when I first realized something was seriously wrong in our country. So how about true life crime instead? Guenther Reinhardt‘s recounting in Crime Without Punishment about political crimes was published not long after I became aware something was seriously wrong in this country. My 1952 copy of his book is in terrible shape, fallen apart at the seams so to speak, sere and brown, but still legible as he tells about the crimes of “Soviet agents who worked …and committed the crimes that went unpunished.”
His publishers previewed the book’s contents for readers, saying: “This shocking story of Soviet espionage and violence in America is told by one of the foremost authorities….. He reopens some of the most mysterious political crimes of modern times, …marked for death by Moscow bosses….and the shooting of Carlo Tresca..by Agents of Murder Inc. – financed by the the Soviet secret police and never officially solved… Reinhardt discloses the wartime infiltration of U.S. government agencies by carefully trained spies…..the powerful Communist apparatus in Mexico which directed the penetration of Latin America….he details the infiltration of the structure of America’s occupation of Germany by Soviet agents …who committed the crimes that went unpunished.”
Reinhardt’s subtitle was: “The Secret Soviet Terror Against America.”
Reinhardt wrote: “these crimes, as committed by the Soviet secret services, are so commonplace that I have met and investigated them around the world in hamlet and metropolis, …. horrible enough, that largely they have gone unpunished is a surpassing horror.”
In one chapter Guenther tells of a meeting he had in Mexico with a strange little man he did not like who was introduced to him as “Mr. Kaufman,” who 7 years later achieved much more status as J.V.Peters, named by Whittaker Chambers “as the man who gave orders to Alger Hiss….One of his jobs during the war was to place Communists in important posts in the armed forces. He had already put them into other branches of government…. he could hardly spend too much time on a matter concerning the murder of one man when he had the murder of a world on his mind.”
Later Reinhardt tells of the murder of an American newspaperman in Oslo whose body was recovered five months after his disappearance. Norwegian and American governments, Reinhardt claimed, held evidence proving death by murder, as well as the identities of the murderers, and that “All of them are members of the Soviet intelligence apparatus. Technicalities of law and the still nervous reluctance on the part of some American officials to meet Soviet atrocities with direct action keep both the punishment and even the facts of the crime secret behind what might seem a Lace Curtain of hesitancy….Russia offers only treachery in return for the friendship extended by the other occupying powers….There were all too few officials of the occupation who saw the Red picture….too few, actually, to ever force a revelation to the American public of the crimes committed by the Soviet every day against the United States…….”
So what’s new? How different is it today? Billions and trillions of dollars (your tax dollars at work) later and we are still behind the eight ball. Many unknown heroes sacrificed their lives in this secret struggle, believing they were dying on behalf of freedom, liberty, the Stars and Stripes, not knowing the enemy was at their backs. More on this later.
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