Loyalty and security screening programs.

After 1945, the free world was terribly damaged by people whose allegiance was anchored somewhere in outer space and certainly not in the nation that provided them with security, freedom, and professional opportunity.

The following quote is from an article by Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University in a review of a book by Alexander Feklisov, the man who had been the Soviet control officer of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of violations of 18 U.S.C. Sect. 794(b) and executed in 1953.

Discussion of the Cold War and the problem of communist subversion may seem anticlimactic at this remote time. However, it has bearing on the issue of extranational allegiance and the ability of otherwise intelligent people to delude themselves as to the reality of their own blessings and the nature of the blessings that follow supposedly from allegiance to other countries, religions, and ideologies.

The delusional nature of the thinking of certain intellectuals permitted them to conclude that the U.S.S.R. — which had killed millions of its own citizens — was benign, whereas their own country, the U.S.A. — which had killed few and liberated millions from the control of kings and thugs — was unworthy of allegiance.

Such delusions have a half life of something just short of infinity and the Colonel will return to this topic in spades in the near future:

[Feklisov] soon admits that "almost all of my informers were persons of high moral character who were extremely brave and acted according to their convictions, out of devotion to the Communist cause or simply because their understanding of the notions of good and evil went beyond everyday politics.” Unlike the spies of the last few decades (the Walker family, Aldrich Ames, Christopher Boyce, Robert Hanssen), the spies of the 1930s and 1940s (Alger Hiss, Harry White, Laurence Duggan, Lauchlin Currie, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Julius Rosenberg, and many others) were not motivated by greed or thrill-seeking or blackmail. They were Communists or Soviet patriots.

These spies did not feel that they were betraying their country. Their homeland, Feklisov rhapsodizes, "was not the United States or Great Britain but the World itself and their compatriots were all the inhabitants of the earth. It is in the name of this community for the common good that they shared secrets with us that appeared to be too dangerous to be held by one side alone." But such an attitude is an ordinarily powerful argument for a serious loyalty-security program that would exclude Communists from sensitive or diplomatic positions. If Communists did not adhere to traditional notions of patriotism or recognize such provincial codifications of good and evil as American law, did that not justify a presumption that they were unfit to hold certain sensitive jobs?

The loyalty program instituted by President Truman in the 1950s was effective in deterring communists from remaining in and entering federal civilian service. Nor has the need for such a program gone away with the demise of the Soviet Union.

The issue of allegiance to hostile nations and destructive beliefs is still very much on the table today.

"Case Closed Again." By Harvey Klehr, Enigma Books, Fall 2001 (emphasis added), in which he reviews "The Man Behind the Rosenberg," by Alexander Feklisov.