Harry Dexter White and Pearl Harbor. Soviet Plot?

Harry Dexter White with John Maynard Keynes.

DATE: October 16, 1950

TO: The Director

FROM: Mr. Ladd

SUBJECT: ESPIONAGE - R

PURPOSE: To advise you of the positive identification of agent Jurist (the cover name of a Soviet agent operating in 1944 and named by [Venona project]) as Harry Dexter White, deceased. White was formerly the Administrative Assistant to former Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau.

DETAILS: You have previously been advised of information obtained from [Venona project] regarding Jurist who was active during 1944. According to the previous information received from [Venona project] regarding Jurist, during April, 1944, he had reported on conversations between the then Secretary of State Hull and Vice President Wallace. He also reported on Wallace's proposed trip to China. On August 5, 1944, he reported to the Soviets that he was confident of President Roosevelt's victory in the coming elections unless there was a huge military failure. He also reported that Truman's nomination as Vice President was calculated to secure the vote of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. It was also reported that Jurist was willing for any self-sacrifice in behalf of the MGB but was afraid that his activities, if exposed, might lead to a political scandal and have an effect on the elections. It was also mentioned that he would be returning to Washington, D. C., on August 17, 1944. The new information from [Venona project] indicates that Jurist and Morgenthau were to make a trip to London and Normandy and leaving the United States on August 5, 1944.

On the basis of the foregoing, the tentative identification of Harry Dexter White as Jurist appears to be conclusively established inasmuch as Morgenthau and White left the United States on a confidential trip to the Normandy beachhead on August 5, 1944, and they returned to the United States on August 17, 1944.

You may recall that Harry Dexter White was named by Whittaker Chambers in his statements as having been a source of information for Chambers in his work in Soviet espionage until Chambers broke with the Soviets in 1938. Chambers produced a handwritten memorandum that White had given him and our Laboratory established this memorandum as being in White's handwriting. The Treasury Department advised that parts of the material were highly confidential, coming to the Treasury Department from the Department of State.

In addition to the foregoing, Elizabeth T. Bentley in November, 1945, advised that she had learned through Nathan Gregory Silvermaster that White was supplying Silvermaster with information which was obtained by White in the course of his duties as Assistant to the Secretary of the of the Treasury.

RECOMMENDATION:

There is attached hereto a blind memorandum which has been prepared for the information and assistance of   setting forth this identification. There is also attached a memorandum to the Field giving them the new information from [Venona project] which establishes conclusively the identity of White as Jurist.

Attachment

I really like the Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World podcast.  I want to note that upfront, as I think these next two episodes, while really entertaining and interesting. . . well, they sort of lay an egg.

At least sort of.

Not completely.

Countdown to Pearl Harbor? (FDR, Advance Knowledge)

Pearl Harbor Conspiracy? (FDR, Advance Knowledge, Soviet Spy)

Now, before a person assumes too much based on the title, Akin isn't suggesting, as some have, even occasionally some serious historians, that Roosevelt knew about Japanese designs on Pearl Harbor and let the attack happen.  Indeed, the conclusion to the second one pretty much definitively smashes that concept in a very general way.

Rather, what this two part episode suggests, but never flatly states, is that Treasury employee Harry Dexter White used his position to bring about an American diplomatic stance that made the war with Japan inevitable, as that's what the Soviets wanted.

The evidence, however, just doesn't support that.

Well, at least not completely.

This isn't a new theory, by the way.  It's been around since at least the 1990s.

White was a Soviet agent.  That's perfectly clear.  There are those who will dispute that even now, but we can set that aside.  He might not have been a Communist, but he was a Soviet mole without a doubt.

Harry Dexter White was a brilliant economist who came to that profession somewhat late, entering university at age 30, by which time he had already served as an Army officer in World War One.  He ultimately obtained a PhD in economics at age 38, and then taught at Harvard.  Later, he came into the Treasury Department at a time at which, for PhD's in economics, you either taught or worked for the government.  He was a very valued employee there.

The administration of Franklin Roosevelt was the most left leaning administration that the United States has ever seen, and the administration was full, at the office level, of many hard left thinkers. While the Wilson Administration had suppressed the then growing radical Socialists movements after World War One, FDR's administration was not interested in this and his coming into power in 1932 proved to be a respite for those with really radical views.  By and large, the government didn't care that much whether lower functionaries were hard line leftists.  

And the country had quite a few of them. Socialism, and other radical left wing philosophies, had been growing in the US since the mid 19th Century and by the 1910s it was coming into its own.  It was very much in vogue in some circles in the 1920s, in spite of efforts of the government to suppress it, and it drew encouragement from the example of Soviet Russia, which was in actuality very poorly understood.  Its base was in the working class, of course, but it was also heavily represented by Eastern European and Southern European immigrants, and oddly enough young academics.  

White wasn't young, but he'd come to academia late. And, additionally, he was a first generation American of Jewish Lithuanian extraction, so he had a foot in both the academic community and the immigrant one.  His Eastern European parents had only been in the US for twelve years at the time of his birth, and they were a working class family.  As noted, he was undoubtedly a brilliant man.

While even to this day he has his defenders, its clear that he was recruited as a Soviet mole by Jacob Golos, who was successful in recruiting numerous other Americans to the same role.  White became associated in that role with Whitaker Chambers, whom he reported to. And whatever it was he personally believed, it is clear that he was highly sympathetic to the USSR, so sympathetic that on rare occasions he was willing to voice that sympathy, as when he once engaged in a restaurant argument with a colleague to whom he maintained that Soviets had successfully worked out a system that would replace capitalism and Christianity.  And he was willing to carrying his admiration of the USSR as far as espionage and theft.  If he wasn't a Communist, he obviously had deep sympathies for the Communists.

When Chambers came out of the cold, he reported White among those who were Soviet agents, which he did as early as 1938.  Chambers didn't think that White was a Communist and further thought that while he was a Soviet agent, he thought White thought he was manipulating the Soviets to his ends, rather than the other way around, a rather naive thing to believe, if he believed it, but one which may be very well correct.   

Chambers' 1938 accusations were wholly dismissed by the Government.  He'd repeat them in March 1945 at which time the State Department was reaching out to Chambers.  Chambers at that point indicated that White had brought Communists into the government, but that White himself was timid.

In November 1945 the news on White was corroborated by defecting American Communist courier Elizabeth Benchley.  The Truman Administration basically ignored this, however, and even at this late date White's career in the government continued on, although he was less influential than before, and his boss Morgenthau was replaced by Truman.  Real problems for White didn't develop until 1948, however, when he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs. Following his testimony, he had a heart attack. Shortly after going to a farm he had bought to recuperate, he had a second one and died due to an overdose of a drug he administered to treat it.  His death came a mere two days after he testified and it might have been suicide.  He was one of two figures caught up by the HCUA at the time who died from mysterious deaths during the investigations.His untimely death, and the fact that the Army closely guarded the Venona secretes, not really trusting anyone, meant that here was room for years to portray him as an innocent victim of a false accusation, rather than what he was, an exposed spy for the Soviet Union.

Okay, why does all of this matter?

Well, White's role as a Communist agent. . . again he might not have been a Communist himself, certainly are critical in regard to his wartime role in the Treasury Department.  More than that, however, he was the principal architect of the Bretton Woods Agreement which governed the world's post-war economy up until the early 1970s.  He was also the principal architect of the Morgenthau Plan, which saw the future of Germany as split into regions, deindustrialized, and made agrarian.

It can't be said that White's recommendations on the Morgenthau Plan and the Bretton Woods agreement were Communistic, so if he was himself heavily sympathetic to the Communists, it didn't fully show in that work, at least not in an openly obvious way.  It's known that he was passing information to the Soviets, but based on his actual work, he didn't seem to be really openly aiding them much in his work product during the war.

Well, what about accusations that he did before the war?

I'm not really seeing it there in an effective way either, although he may have tried a bit.

This is based on the claim that the Soviets developed an Operation Snow which was to attempt to get the United States and Japan into a war against each other.  The thought is that this would alleviate the Soviet fear of fighting a two front war, should Japan come in against the USSR. And, in spite of those who nay say that, the Japanese Army in fact wanted to do that, even though the wisdom of taking on the USSR at the same time that the Japanese were unable to defeat China was obviously pretty questionable.

Anyhow, Stalin did worry about this, to be sure.  And the NKVD could have hatched a plot to try to get figures in the American government to aid them in some fashion here, but the evidence is pretty sketchy, even if such journals as Time and The Wall Street Journal have published articles acknowledging the effort and, in the case of Time, even crediting the Japanese attack on Pearl Habor to White.

Claims about Operation Snow come from one source, a figure formerly in the KGB, who claimed to be part of it.  It's possible that he had the knowledge on it, but based on what we otherwise have come to learn about White's role as a mole, this claim is on a narrow strand.  What that source claimed is that in 1941, prior to the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets were working to reestablish their spy contacts with American agents. Those contacts had been disrupted by Stalin murdering everyone.  Anyhow, the claim is that a new contact reached out to White and vaguely suggested that it would be in the best interest of the US and the USSR if Japan was aggressively isolated.  White, this claim asserts, stated that his own thinking aligned with this.  You have to do a lot of reading between the lines here from there.

White did issue a memo on his views on what to do regarding Japan prior to Operation Barbarossa.  It came, however, in the context of the Roosevelt Administration becoming increasingly aggressive with Japan in any event.  That memo was, moreover, oddly anti-British, a peculiar position to take in regard to a country that was, at the time the supposed meeting occurred, the only major power fighting the Germans.  A person could rationalize that a Japanese attack on the US would mean that the Soviets would only have to fight the Germans, but what would the point of alienating the British be?  While a person might claim that this would refocus American eyes from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there was never going to be a war in which the Soviets weren't going to be glad to have the British fighting the same enemy.

Indeed, it would be frankly more likely that, if the Soviets had a plot, the point was to distract the Japanese, rather than to actually provoke them into a war.

At any rate, White's first note was rejected and therefore not influential.  A second one some months later, however, is more problematic.

Some weeks prior to Pearl Harbor the Japanese signaled that they'd be willing to evacuate China and northern Indochina under an agreement with the United States, if they were allowed to retain control of Manchuria.  Roosevelt in fact leaned away from this, and that did result in a White memo to Morgenthau which in turn issued to Roosevelt under Morgenthau's signature. That resulted in an ultimatum to Japan to withdraw from China.

Having said that, there's also evidence that the Japanese offer wasn't understood in the context of what was being offered in regard to northern Indochina.  Moreover, by that time the US had already taken a really hard line on Japan in China. A compromise regarding Manchuria in fact would have been problematic, even if Roosevelt was considering it.

And of course White was one man, with apparently mixed motives.  His suggestion may have been influential, but he wasn't the one conveying it.  Did he have such influence over Morgenthau by that point that Morgenthau would do what he wanted?  Moreover, did they both have influence over Cordell Hull?  That's pretty problematic.

And that one man aspect of it, at the end of the day, is the significant thing.  White was a lieutenant of Morgenthau's, and Morgenthau wasn't a Communist and didn't know that White was.  And neither of them set foreign policy, Cordell Hull had a bigger role in that, and the President the ultimate role.

So, did White "cause" Pearl Harbor.  No.

Did he influence the road to war at all?

That's really hard to say.  

White isn't an innocent figure in the Cold War story.  He was highly influential on the Morgenthau Plan and he did have a major role in it.  Somebody at the Treasury Department didn't like it, and it was leaked. Was it a Communist document?  Well no.  But it did propose, basically, to disestablish Germany as a state, and split into regions, something that was to the Soviet Union's advantage, but something that was also not outside of the desires of many others.

He did have a role in holding up wartime financing to the Nationalist Chinese, even at the time they were fighting our common enemy, the Japanese. That's more problematic to say the least.   The only reason to have done that was likely due to his Communist sympathies.  So he could indeed act with Moscow in mind.

And he definitely acted with Moscow in mind in supplying currency plates to the Soviet Union. That has been described as "outright larceny" and it definitely operated against American interest in all sorts of ways.

So in the end, the most we can probably say is that he was part of a group of Communist or Communist sympathizers, within the Treasury Department who pushed it in a certain direction, but there were lots also pushing.

Leaving us back where we started.  The war with Japan was brought about as the US was drifting towards war anyway, and wanted to get Japan out of China.  That goal was shared by a lot of people, and White's role in pushing in that direction, even if done at secret Soviet urging, was hardly the final factor.