Tea at Trianon: When Crime is Stranger than Fiction

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 29, 2022

When Crime is Stranger than Fiction

From CrimeReads:

“For the temper of Stalin’s mind requires a strategy of multiple deceptions, which confuse the victim with the illusion of power, and soften them up with the illusion of hope, only to plunge them deeper into despair when the illusion fades, the trap is sprung, and the victims gasp with horror, as they hurtle into space.” From Witness by Whittaker Chambers

As Chambers wrote, and my title suggests, deception was the modus operandi of the KGB and the Communist Party underground in the United States: it was not just a strategy of disinformation but a way of life, a secret life lived in the shadows, where lying was second nature, and pretending one thing while doing another was considered the height of trade craft. In doing research for the novel, it became clear to me that with the turn of the century—the early 2000s—the controversy about the guilt or innocence of Hiss began to fade. This had less to do with the dying off of many of the antagonists, than with the release by American intelligence of the Venona cables, Soviet communications gathered by Army intelligence during the Second World War. The painstaking decryption of these cables, starting in the late 40s, took decades, but when they were finally published and made available to scholars, it was revealed that hundreds of Soviet spies had indeed infiltrated the US government in the 1930s and 40s. Adding to this treasure trove of data were Soviet era intelligence files that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were briefly opened to journalists and scholars during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency of Russia. Information in these files not only confirmed much of what had been gleaned from the Venona cables but confirmed without a doubt that Alger Hiss had indeed been a spy for Stalin. For the history on this, I recommend: Spies, The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev; Yale University Press, 2009.

As Spies makes clear, there were over 500 Soviet and/or Communist Party assets deployed throughout the country as Stalin’s willing agents. Most were in government positions or defense industries stealing secrets to be passed on to their KGB handlers, most infamously by the spy ring run by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which succeeded in stealing the secrets of the atom bomb from Los Alamos, and hastening Stalin’s acquisition of nuclear weapons by years. It is something of an irony that Alger Hiss was convicted for lying about passing top-secret State Department papers to Whittaker Chambers in the late 30s—of little substantive value, when the real damage he did was as an agent of influence in the highest reaches of the State Department. Hiss sat at Roosevelt’s right hand at Yalta, where he was debriefed by his Soviet handler each morning about the US position in these crucial negotiations on post-war Europe and the Far East. We now know from Venona that after Yalta, Hiss flew on to Moscow with elements of the US delegation, and there, in a secret ceremony, was taken aside and given the Order of the Red Star by the head of Soviet intelligence. (Read more.)