Couple Corrections for Glenn Beck's Program Today

Beck's guest, M. Stanton Evans is to be commended on his superb research. For the back story of my novel I've been re-reading Blacklisted by History since it came out in 2007. It's well-written with original documents and sources and is plastered with yellow sticky notes. If your history education stopped at high school or most colleges, you might think there are "two American Histories" but there's just the one... Evans tells and shows the truth about Communism in America.

Now, to the corrections about VENONA and "Harry Dexter." Don't get me wrong, I love his blackboard jungle and I think Glenn Beck is providing a service to our country that future historians will either study or completely ignore...depending on the 2010 and 2012 elections.

1) VENONA was not something "compiled by the Soviets" during WWII and was not released in the 1980s (Beck did verbally correct it to 1995 but in repentance he should pledge an entire hour on VENONA). Almost as important as VENONA existing in secret or exposing Soviet agents is that since it was released in 1995 it has been ignored by the media and academia. The VENONA program is an American compilation of encrypted Soviet telegrams from NY to Moscow, Washington to Moscow, San Francisco to Moscow, Canberra to Moscow, Ottawa to Moscow and London to Moscow and from Moscow to all those Western cities. The messages were highly encoded using a one-time cipher pad, but the Soviets reused their one-time pads for a short period during the war, thus our American cypher experts were able to decode, beginning in 1946, just some of the Soviet messages intercepted during WWII. One officer in the Army Signal Intelligence Corps (pronounced core) decided VENONA was too secret for the Truman administration to know about (Communist agents in FDR's White House were already known by the FBI and others in 1946). The CIA wasn't brought in on VENONA until 1951--that's the same year VENONA identified Donald Maclean as a Soviet Agent. He fled to Moscow a day before his arrest in London: Maclean was Churchill's highest ranking diplomat at the British embassy in Washington in 1944--he was privy to every secret message between FDR and Churchill. Maclean is part of my novel, as are FDR and Churchill. I recommend VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by Haynes and Klehr and the NSA website.

2) The man's name was Harry Dexter White, not Harry Dexter as Beck named him...and White was more than a Soviet spy who worked for FDR's treasury secretary. He helped to steer and design the International Monetary Fund in 1944...something used today to bail out Greece...and he died of a heart attack between his first and second appearances in front of the same Congressional committee that would send Alger Hiss to prison for lying about his communist ties. Both White and Hiss play parts in my novel, as does Duncan Lee, the Leftist who was "Wild Bill" Donovan's right hand man at the OSS during the war.

Beck has less than sixty minutes per show and it seems lately he's trying to read in a short time what I've been reading since the 2004 election worried me. That's when I started researching my novel, a story based on a single question: "If a WWII soldier had been isolated for sixty years and came back before the 2004 election, who would he vote for?" Of course it occurred to me that the old GI would need an education of some sort, so the question changed to: "How would you teach history to a WWII GI who has been isolated since 1944?" The title changed from Mister Crusoe Votes to Educating Finn Larkin. And then Ronald Reagan died during my initial plotting stages, so the novel no longer starts on Memorial Day, but the day Ronald Reagan dies, June 5, 2004...of course it's June 6 for Finn Larkin because his island is west of the International Dateline...but that's not an issue until Chapter Five, when elderly pirates with Soviet-made pistols attack the yacht taking Finn home and...

Anyway, I'd never heard of the Cloward-Pivens Strategy until Beck's show, although I'd already had a Stalin-era plan built into my plot that attempts to destroy America sort of like Cloward and Piven dreamt of destroying America. And I won't read Beck's recently-released thriller until I've sent my own novel off to some lucky editor.

I've continued to plot my novel since 2004 and it has grown into a series. Originally the antagonist was a teacher union president, but by 2005, sometime after I discovered VENONA, a WWII-era Soviet agent had taken over trying to wipe out Finn Larkin and his messages from the past. I've kept the teacher union lady as co-nemesis because it is, after all, Educating Finn Larkin. You can learn more at finnlarkin.blogspot.com between now and the 4th of July, when I hope to have an agent-ready draft completed.