Paranoid…or just cautious

I read with interest the Wall Street Journal online opinion piece by Ion Mihai Pacepa this morning. I was going to comment on it here, but as I looked around, I noticed it was being covered broadly. I’ve always been a Cold War buff, having spent time on the bayonet point of Western Democracy in the old West Germany and spent some time studying and writing about the US foreign policy of those days.

This evening I stumbled onto Gateway Pundit (one of my favorites, by the way) and read his take on it. Of course, it focused on John Kerry’s shameful performance in Congress back when I was 16 years old. GP noted the stunning similarities between Pacepa’s piece and Kerry’s testimony.

But at the bottom of GP’s post there was a link to somewhere I’d never been – Maggie’s Farm. Maggie wondered aloud in her post “Paranoid” that in light of GP’s highlighted text, perhaps we should be concerned about Bill Clinton and his trip through the Iron Curtain countries of the era. Well, I’ve always thought that was suspicious.

But then I remembered the foreward of a book I read a few years back. The book was The Haunted Wood, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. I met Weinstein lately, but I wasn’t able to bring up the question that had plagued me since I read the book the first time in 1999.

Weinstein wrote the book directly from research he conducted personally in the Soviet KGB archives in the years immediately following the collapse of our old enemy. He had intended to clear Alger Hiss’ name by proving he wasn’t on the Soviet payroll – unfortunately for the life-long Democrat, he couldn’t infact he found records that proved that the Soviet Union was paying not only Hiss but also other employees of the Federal government, congressmen and actors.

Being a rare type of researcher, Weinstein wrote the book the way the research led him. Of course, there was quite a bit of furor in academia.

His research was dismissed – not because of the lack of proof, but because when Weinstein reached the part of the archives that stored the records of the 1960s and forward, Weinstein was abruptly banned from the archives and the archives was closed to western researchers. With no explanation from Russian officials. With the archives closed, no one could verify Weinstein’s research, so it was largely dismissed by the Left.

But, I’ve always wondered what other secrets remain in the KGB archives and what caused them to suddenly curtail Weinstein’s research. And who’s skeletons are buried there. Of course, there’s plenty of room for speculation and I’ll just keep my speculation to myself.

Category: Foreign Policy, Historical, Politics, Society