Showing posts with label McCarthy Era. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McCarthy Era. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Was it a honeytrap?

Never get into an elevator with a Polish blonde”

David M. Evans, Consular/Economic Officer, Warsaw, 1964-1967

Cold War era Greek poster warning Greek officers not to yield to oddly friendly women.

The British newspaper The Guardian seems to think so, but The Guardian tends towards the salacious.

It would explain, however, a lot.

We speak, of course, of Epstein Island and the ongoing cover-up of what occurred there.

Yes, cover-up.  The U.S. government is covering it up.

A honey trap is an age old espionage technique.  A country sends somebody, make or female, to have compromising sex with the target.  Once he's compromised, he, and it's almost always a he, is really compromised.  Sexual sins can be amongst the very worse, even in this libertine age.

The Soviet Union was a master at the honey trap. Max Hastings, in his book on World War Two espionage, details this quite a bit and well known examples abound.  While not often put this way, Soviet recruiting in pre World War Two and early Cold War Britain was based on honey traps, with the added element that they wer\e homosexual honey traps.  Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time as well as devastating to a person's reputation, but surprisingly common in the "public school" system.  The Soviets learned who would be well placed at some point to be a spy, and provided the sexual target to bring the person in.

The more common female honey trap is of course well known, and was also well deployed by the Soviets, as well as other nations.

Maria Butina is a recently example who buddied up to the Trump administration and the National Rifle Association to gather intelligence from Conservative power brokers, although there's no accusation that she employed sex in her efforts.

Fang Fang, as Christine Fang had sex with two US mayors and targeted Democratic politicians in what US officials believe was a political intelligence operation run by China.

Why wouldn't the Russians use it?

What we know about Epstein Island at least gives us every reason to question whether or not it was a honey trap.  The number of very wealthy and connected men that went through it, from all over the globe, made it somewhat unique, although the wealthy and powerful travel in certain circles and there are likely other places that meet this criteria.  What those other places probably didn't have, however, was mid to late teenage girls who were on the dinner menu.

There's utterly no way that the Russians did not know this.

We are told that just because men traveled to the island doesn't mean that they had sex with underage teenage girls.  Quite a few men whose names have been exposed denied every doing that, or denied every knowing that this was going on.  No doubt, that's true min many instances.  Mere wealth is enough to cause some of the wealthy to go to a place. The appearance of wealth attracts the wealthy like shit attracts flies, and I use that analogy intentionally.  But that doesn't mean ever single man who went there ended up in bed with a 15 year old.

Having said that, however, it's clear that girls about that age were there for the offering, and that's the next point.  A honeytrap isn't a rape of the target, it's an offering that tempts the target.  Some men might very well go through a place, particularly perhaps like Bill Clinton did with his wife, and never be tempted, maybe, or even know what's going on.  But to not have some clue strains credibility.  One thing that's showing up, and thank to the Guardian you can see them, is photos of the young girls.  Their faces are blacked out, and in some cases their boobs, but what's interesting is they are of a type.  They're thin girls and look like teens, not the heavy chested women of the Playboy magazine type.  They look, even in the redacted photographs, just like what they were, thing flat chested girls who should have been in high school.

They look like the girl that Donald Trump drew on Epstein's birth card.

And all the more appropriate for a honeytrap.

World War Two Navy era poster.  If the Honeytrap thesis is correct, it's not the girls who were actually the spies. They were only used to compromise the targets, if that happened.

If you are attracting the flies in this fashion, you have to have something to attract them to, and something that compromises them.  Back in the 1970s illicit sex alone would have done that, but in the 2000s?  Maybe not.  And on top of it the guests on Epstein Island were flying in and out, although some did that quite a bit.  Offer a super model up on the plate might not work for a variety of reasons, one being that the supermodel would probably say no.  You aren't going to get any Kate Uptons on Epstein Island.

But  you might very well get the desperate and confused.  Pretty girls on the economic and domestic edge, whose parents are desperate as well.  They'd make ideal entries on the sexual menu.  They are like the prostitute who is murdered to set up the Senator in The Godfather, Part II.  Girls with nothing who "never existed".

You only have to offer them up to the willing, have a camera around, and voila, the target is compromised.

Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre, need we say more.  Posted under fair use exception.

What we know for an absolute certainty is that there were a lot of rich and powerful men who went to Epstein Island.

We also know for sure that a selection of them screwed teenage girls there.

We know for certain that the first time that Epstein was arrested, he got a mysteriously sweetheart deal from a Federal Prosecutor.1  He was being protected.

He was being protected, because his clientele was being protected on some level.

We also know that people who claimed to be horrified about what was going on and to have cut off their connection with him, didn't when they claimed to.  Even while he was in prison he was receiving contacts from the rich and powerful.

We know that right now only a little over 50% of the materials the government has on him has been released and we are informed that the rest will not be.  We've learned of more of the names, but we haven't learned the names of the girls. Their anonymity isn't protection, it makes them a hostage.

We now that there's been a diehard effort to keep material from being revealed and that the names of the victimizers have not been fully revealed, or even really slightly revealed.

What we just don't know, is why.

What we also know is that early on Trump claimed to be for releasing the files.  He radically changed his view when he was in office, but we don't know why.  It could be that his name shows up more than he thought it would, even if so far nobody has come out and said this material shows he screwed teenage girls.2   Or it could be that there's something so compromising in these files that its hugely damaging to somebody he's protecting.

Without a full release of the files, we don't know what that is.  But it'd have to be pretty bad.  

Sex with underage males will still bring a figure down, we know this.  The story of Kevin Spacey proves that.  But what about teenage girls?  A lot of the men that are in Trump's circle already, including Trump himself, have lived a life of sexual license, would teenagers be the line they couldn't cross?

Well, maybe.  Coerced sex proved the downfall of Harvey Weinstein.  Drugged sex brought down Bill Cosby.  Maybe teenage sex is still a bridge too far. We can all hope so.  And frankly somebody who would stoop so low as to engage in this activity in this situation may have well brought additional perverted elements into this.

But what would espionage do?

First, is there any evidence of it at all.

It does turn out that there were girls from what had been the USSR who showed up on the island.  Model  Ruslana Korshunova went there at age 18, and then went out a balcony window three years later in what was ruled a suicide.  Model Anna Malova is known to have flown with Prince Andrew to the island, but at the time the now 52 year old woman would have been 25.  And there are other accusations, but they are pretty murky.

There's enough, however, that Poland is launching an investigation into connections between Epstein and Russian intelligence.

Would this mean that Trump was compromised?  No, not at all.  But it might very well mean that somebody in his orbit was, and he's protecting him, or them.  There's precedent for that.

It's pretty clear that Truman attempted to bury information that the Roosevelt Administration had been compromised by Soviet spies, and frankly, the Democratic Party of the late 1940s and 1950s pretty much succeeded at that effort. The Roosevelt Administration was definitely compromised, but the effort to squash the efforts to reveal that were so successful that they destroyed the reputation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and have caused there to be a common belief that all of his acquisitions were baloney.  They weren't.  They were pretty much dead on.

And this would somewhat explain Trump being extraordinarily careful with Putin.  He's not always in Putin's camp, but he often is.  It's been hard to grasp, although there are other explanations for it.  Keeping a lid on whatever is in the Epstein files might be good for Trump. . . and Putin, and really bad for both of them if it turns out that the US, and perhaps other Western, governments were, and maybe are, heavily penetrated by Russian intelligence.


And, as a final wild note, for years now people have claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.  The accusations frankly are not credible, but if you are going to entertain them, why isn't a Russian connection a possibility?  MAGAs have claimed that the Clinton's had him murdered, which is absolutely absurd. Frankly, it's make more sense for the Republicans to have him murdered, which would also be absurd, but make a little more sense.

If anyone was going to murder him, the Russians make the most sense.

Now, I don't think that occurred.

But I don't think Harry Dexter White was murdered either.  Just compromised.

A Russian honeytrap?

We really don't know, but it is an interesting possibility.

Footnotes.

1.  Chris Christie spoke about this on the last This Week, noting he was a U.S. prosecutor at the time and that all the U.S. Attorneys wondered what on earth was going on.  His comment was "now we know".  He didn't say, exactly, what we know, but what he meant was that we know that something was going on inside the Administration at that time that secured Epstein a deal where he was allowed to go home every day and just slept in the prison.

2.  It's not true that he hasn't been accused of that.  He has been, but so far law enforcement has not found those accusations credible, and they're never going to find them to be credible during the current administration, no matter what the situation regarding them may be.

Friday, April 25, 2025

The Very American Roots of Trumpism | The Ezra Klein Show


This is the first commentary I've seen with a sense of American history and the Trump movement.  Like Klein, I'm not worried that there won't be midterms or a 2028 election.

Worth listening to.

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Tuesday, January 14, 1975. Un-American.

The House Un-American Activities Committee was disbanded by the U.S. House of Representatives.

It's roots went back to 1918 and it had investigated a wide range of Communist activities in the US dating back to that time.  Often missed, quite a few figures that the committee investigated unsuccessfully prior to World War Two would be again after the war.  Many of those whom it suspected of Communist activity would, in fact, prove to have done just that, in spite of the reputation of the committee being tarnished during the McCarthy Era.

It's demise after the Watergate and the Vietnam War was inevitable, but it had a much better track record than is popularly recalled.

Henry Kissinger announced that the Soviet Union was rescinding its agreement to a trade deal with the United States following enactment of the Jackson–Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974.

The Convention on Registration of Launched Objects into Outer Space was signed in New York.  It requires the signatories to inform the United Nations of things that are launched into space.

U.S. Vice-President Rockefeller was appointed to head a committee to investigate domestic espionage by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Last edition:

Saturday, January 11, 1975. Storms. Things can, and do, get worse.

Sunday, June 9, 2024

A repeat. June 9, 1954. The lesson of past hearings. . .

Lex Anteinternet: The lesson of past hearings. . .

The lesson of past hearings. . .

Joseph Welch, hand in head, being questioned by Joseph McCarthy

Joseph Welch was the chief legal counsel for the U.S. Army when it fell under the gaze of Joseph McCarthy.  McCarthy asserted that there were Communist that had not been brought to light by the Army in the Army, in defense plants, or in institutions associated with national defense.  The claim wasn't actually wholly without merit, actually as at least a few Communists, in 1954, were in the service and more in industry, which was not surprising if we consider that the 1930s had been the high water mark of American Communism and there were more at that time, the 30s, than there ever would be again. Some would end up in the service by default, and indeed at least one openly Communist American officer, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, received the Silver Cross for heroism in the Pacific before later being killed in action. The Army certainly wasn't a hotbed of Communism, however, and the claims were seen as extreme at the time.

On June 9, 1954, Welch, now in day 30 of the hearings, challenged McCarthy confederate Roy Cohn to provide the Attorney General with the names of the 130 subversives that McCarthy claimed were working in American defense plants "before sundown" that day.  That wasn't done, but McCarthy called out the name of a lawyer who worked in Welch's Boston law office as a member of a Communist front organization.  The lawyer had indeed been a member of it in his youth (recall the comment about the 30s again).

When this occurred, the famous exchange resulted.  Welch at first commented:
Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us....Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.
McCarthy should have known better than to attempt to joust with a figure like Welch, but he kept on and didn't yield, resulting in:
Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
McCarthy still wouldn't yield. Welch rebuked him and informed him he wouldn't answer any more questions. The audience broke into applause.

McCarthy was wrecked forever.

Yesterday Republicans in the Impeachment hearings suggested that Lt.Col. Vindman, the child of Ukrainian immigrants, might not be fully loyal to the United States as the Ukrainian administration offered him a position as their defense chief several times.  He declined every time.  There's no suggestion that he ever entertained the offer, and to entertain it would not be a sign of anything in particular.  After all, Douglas McArthur was head of the Philippine's army after retiring, the first time, from the U.S. Army. That didn't make him disloyal.  And apparently at least one senior American Air Force officer with Eastern European ties has taken up such a position.  Claire Chenault spent years in the service of the Nationalist Chinese, but he's never been considered to have been disloyal.

The real question should have been what did Lt. Col. Vindman hear, and what did it mean.  Both Vindman and another witness said that they were distressed by what they heard, Vindman very much so, but that they didn't hear the word "bribe" and neither came so far as to claim what they heard was regarded as a bribe. Vindman did go further than the other witness in his opening remarks in upholding the reputation of the removed ambassador, a noble thing to do, but perhaps straying outsides of the confines of what he should have done.

Still, for the second time in two weeks the House Republicans have managed to attack a witness and have the attack fall back on themselves.  

Joseph McCarthy attacked a lot of witnesses in his hearings in the early 1950s.  Now forgotten, McCarthy's claims were a lot more accurate, indeed highly accurate, than recalled.  He benefited from the work of a prior committee from the 1930s and he was also almost certainly getting information secretly and without Administration knowledge from the FBI.  But his behavior just went to far.  Attacking the Army itself went too far, and then attacking Fred Fischer in a collateral attack went way too far.  It was so devastating, in fact, that McCarthy's apologist have accused Welch of cleverly setting  it up.  But McCarthy' set himself up.

Americans don't like politicians attacking servicemen, and the GOP, which has been closest to the service since World War Two, has members who dislike it most of all.  McCarthy didn't survive attacking the Army.  Today's House Republicans would have done well to remember that.

The results of these hearings, as already noted, are foreordained.  But the election isn't.  For undecided voters seeing a soldier like Vindman impugned may be hard to forget. 

McCarthy ended up censured later that year.  His career declined.  He died in 1957 with the cause officially being hepatitis, but which is widely believed to have been due to alcoholism or contributed to by alcoholism.  He was 48 years old.  He left behind a wife of for years, Jean, whom was 33 years old at the time of his death.

Joseph Welch would die three years after that, at age 69.  He's often best remembered today for his role as the judge in Anatomy of a Murder, which he played after his role in the Army McCarthy hearings.

Last prior (chronologicaly) edition:

Friday, May 10, 2024

Saturday, May 10, 1924. J. Edgar Hoover becomes the head of the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation.

J. Edgar Hoover was named acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, which later became the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  He'd occupy the position of the agency's head until May 2, 1972, the latter being the date of his death.

Hoover in 1932.

Hoover was a lawyer who had graduated from Georgetown with an LLB in 1916 and obtained a LLM from the same institution in 1917.  That year, he went to work in the Justice Department War Emergency Division at age 22.  He was 77 when he died, the mandatory Federal retirement age having been waived in his case.  His extremely long retention is peculiar, and has given rise to speculation that various Presidents were afraid of what he might have on them in his files.

Hoover was foundational for the FBI, as might be suspected. As an individual personality he was peculiar and notably never married, and lived with his mother into his 40s and was extremely close to assistant director Clyde Tolson, who inherited his estate, all of which has given rise to speculation about his sexuality but nothing has been proven one way or another about it.

Personally, I suspect that Hoover was the source of information used by Joe McCarthy on Communists in the US government, something that the Truman Administration early on had attempted to keep the lid on, but I've never seen that speculated upon elsewhere.

It was a Saturday.



Last prior edition:

Monday, November 13, 2023

Blog Mirror: Have they no sense of decency?

A Robert Reich item about Elise Stefanik:

Have they no sense of decency?

The descent of Stefanik has been epic.  It hardly makes sense, at least in the case of a person who has any integrity at all. Starting off as a centrist, she's turned into a Trump hack.

This effort to sanction the court and the court's clerk is shocking.

Stefanik is really playing with fire here. There's at least a halfway decent chance she'll be sanctioned for filing such a bogus challenge. And if the country survives the next election, long term she's going to have the same sort of reputation that Joe McCarthy now has, save for the fact that she'll fully deserve it and McCarthy only partially did.

Unlike McCarthy, Stefanik is a mother. What a legacy for that child will be left.

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...hmmm. . .

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...Today In Wyoming's History: March 151943  Franklin Roosevelt used executive authority to proclaim 221,000 acres as the Jackson Hole National Monument, the predecessor to today's Grand Teton National Park.  Governor Hunt threatened to use the Highway Patrol to prevent Federal authority on its grounds.  Congress, for its part, refused to appropriate money for the monument. 
His principled stance on McCarthyism aside, it's just this sort of thing that makes it so you can't really be too sorry that the Legislature didn't honor Hunt this session.

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Tuesday, November 3, 1942. The 1942 Election.

Today was election day in 1942.  Overall, the nationwide election saw an increase in Republican office holders.

In Wyoming, the following occurred:

Hunt's death, it should be noted, remains an enduring tragedy of the McCarthy Era, and one which, at least in some Wyoming circles, came to define McCarthyism and certain right wing elements of the press.

More on Hunt:

Baseball, Politics, Triumph and Tragedy: The Career of Lester Hunt


Robinson, on the other hand, gives us a rare example of a nearly completely forgotten Wyoming politician.  In some ways, that's a shame, as his life story was one that was somewhat typical of the era in that he was an early, post Frontier Era, immigrant to the state when a person could still enter ranching, which he did, in spite of having an engineering background.  Following his defeat for reelection he ultimately retired to Pendleton Oregon in 1958, where he died in 1963. 

 The Marines and Army begin an offensive on Guadalcanal at Koli Point.

Marine Corps pack artillery in action at Koli Point

Sunday, August 29, 2021

Friday August 29, 1941. Shifting sands

On this day in 1941, Charles Lindbergh at a rally of the American First Committee in Oklahoma City warned the audience that the United Kingdom might turn against the US "as she had turned against France and Finland". 

Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana.

Lindbergh was backed up by Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler who counseled that "If our interventionist want to free a country from the domination of another country, we ought to declare war on Great Britain and free India.  I have never seen such slavery as I saw in India a few years ago".

Wheeler was an outspoken left wing Democrat who had at one time crossed over to the Progressive Party and then back.  He opposed entry to the war right up until December 7, 1941 and was instrumental in the leaking of US plans to aid the British prior to the war, which went to press on December 4, 1941.  His isolationist stances caused him to suffer defeat in the first Montana election in which he was up after December 7, and he never returned to politics. A lawyer by training, he returned to practicing law and defended Max Lowenthal in front of the House Committee On Un American Affairs in the 1950s.  He's an example of how opposition to entry into the war was not, as sometimes imagined, politically uniform.

The rally itself was not well received by the public, and polls started increasingly swinging towards the Administration's interventionist policies.

Speaking of Finland, the Finns retook Viipuri.  Not forever of course, its Vyborg, Russia.

Flag for the city of Vybork, in the Leningrad Oblast.

The city did have a Finnish population at the time, but its entire population was evacuated in 1944 with the collapse of the Eastern Front.  It is, therefore, an example today of the massive population disruption brought on by the Second World War.

Finnish victory parade, August 31, 1941.

In Serbia, the puppet collaborationist Government of National Salvation commenced control of the country.

Vichy authorities arrested American journalist Varian Fry.  Fry was running an underground railroad effort helping Jews escape from France and to the United States, using Spain and Portugal as conduits.  He'd be expelled from the country.

Arthur McFadden became Australian Prime Minister in a coalition government.  He was a member of the minority Country Party.  The National Country Party, the "Nats" is a center right party that's strongest in rural areas and which has a focus on agrarian issues.