After the Second World War, between 1947 and 1957 there was a scare, in America and other countries that had only just recently been allies of Communist Russia against Nazi Germany. These included England, Australia, Canada. The scare was that their countries were infiltrated with Communist agents everywhere. As the old Garfield joke goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t meant they’re not out to get you.
The scare had more substance that people ever knew. It's not the number of Communists working in your country to betray your country that mattered, it was what power they had, what positions they held and what access to vital, top secret information they had.
The Democratic regime that was ushered in with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, swept into office with it’s supporters, many significant people who were either Communist spies, or fellow travellers. People sympathetic to Communism. They were the people who Lenin called useful idiots. So the problem of having your top secrets, including vital intellectual property, handed over to the Communists didn’t begin in 1947, it began in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn into office.
The man who was destined to play a major role in dragging America into a war with Japan, to advance Joseph Stalin’s goals, was a man with the very traditional and American sounding name of Harry Dexter White. He was not then and never was a member of the United States Communist Party, but he was a spy working and reporting variously to members of the United States Communist Party and later Stalin’s secret service agents, in the GRU, located in the United States, mostly thanks to Roosevelt giving diplomatic recognition to Russia against his experts’ advice.
What motivated Harry to betray his country isn’t known but he had more than almost anyone else to do with the air force of the Imperial Japanese Navy arriving over Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 to attack his own country. In this programme I’m going to look at how America and Japan were tricked by Stalin into going to war with each other. This programme isn’t the end of what Harry got up to – but that’s for another programme in this series.