Read Online The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners by Diana West - Free Book Online

but “the materials that go into making an
atomic bomb… up to and including uranium. ” (Her emphasis.)”
    This, of course, is supposed to
sound appropriately “unhinged” if not “crackpot” – just so many more
“yellow journalism conspiracy theories.”
    My italics underscore the historical
fact that a US government program run by a suspected Soviet agent of influence
procured three-quarters of a ton of uranium (including
Manhattan-Project-embargoed uranium) and other atomic materials for Stalin.
Additionally, as George Racey Jordan writes in From Major Jordan’s Diaries, his memoir of Lend-Lease, “It seems
fair to take into account not merely what the Russians got, but what they tried
to get.”
    This was a huge news story in 1950
and then it virtually vanished from our “narrative,” a matter I explore in
depth in American Betrayal.
    I do not, however, “insist,” as Radosh
claims, that “Hopkins and the NKVD” “orchestrated” Lend-Lease. Once again, he
is exaggerating a fact to deride his own exaggeration..
    In this case, however, the reality
is too not much different.
    What is in my book is that it was Harry Hopkins, Armand Hammer, and
Harry Dexter White who got Lend-Lease going in the first place – a trio
of veritable Soviet assets. Rather than convey these alarming facts as laid out
in American Betrayal, Radosh invokes the “NKVD,” as if to inspire snickers. You
can almost hear jackboots stomping through the White House.
    Then again, the NKVD did have a line
of sorts into Lend Lease for real. Over security objections of both the State
and War Departments and Army chief of staff Gen. George C. Marshall, Hopkins
insisted on elevating Army officer Philip Faymonville, a.k.a. the “Red
Colonel,” to run Lend-Lease in Moscow. There, Soviet records show, Faymonville
was recruited by the NKVD in 1942.
    NKVD recruit Faymonville would help
run − “orchestrate?” − Lend-Lease for the duration.
    As for my discussion of Lend-Lease
as “rogue operation,” I frame it with a question and end it with a question.
    We’ll start on p. 128:
    “…
Just because Lend-Lease, in effect, said everything was all right—even as
Lend-Lease cogs Jordan and Kravchenko knew that what was going on wasn’t all
right— was the Lend-Lease atomic flow, indeed, all right, kosher, and
aboveboard from the point of view and national interest of Uncle Sam? Or was
Lend-Lease covering up a rogue operation? Was Lend-Lease, as run out of the
White House by the president’s top adviser Harry Hopkins, itself a rogue
operation?
    Eleven pages and 44 endnotes later,
I pose another question:
    “From
Hammer to Hopkins to White and back again to Hopkins: The question now becomes,
How could Lend-Lease not have been a rogue operation?”
    Take my arguments or leave them. But
don’t distort them.
    ON
THE AGGRESSIVELY ATTACKED DETAIL OF URANIUM
    As “19” was attacked (above) to
obscure American Betrayal’s widely
sourced and -detailed discourse on Harry Hopkins, the new detail under attack
is “a” (as in “one”) shipment of uranium.
    That would seem bad enough, of
course. Why was Harry Hopkins’s Lend-Lease scouring all over creation for
uranium for Stalin?
    For a reality check, I’ll note that
when Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, testified on this
subject of uranium shipments to the USSR before Congress in 1949, he could not
answer how many shipments of uranium Lend-Lease had in fact transferred to
Stalin, because, he said, “we don’t know how many leaked through.”
    Radosh, however, discusses only one
shipment that Groves did indeed permit to go through, against his will, rather
than alert the Soviets to the value we were placing on uranium during this
period of frantic, top secret atomic research. Radosh repeatedly insists this
was the only shipment to go through – and cites another book to
supposedly prove this, completely
ignoring the additional evidence contained in American Betrayal