At about that time I received a phone call from a man with a thick Russian accent who said he was with the Novosti Press Agency and wanted to have lunch. I remember clearly that his first name was Lev because I immediately associated it with Trotsky. Later on, after the experience was over, I learned that Lev was the third man in the Soviet embassy, a post usually reserved for officers of the KGB.
Lev wore the badly-tailored black suits favored by Soviet officials and was a man of medium height with thin white hair and a pasty Slavic complexion. In the course of our relationship, he insisted always on calling me from a pay-phone, a precaution I accepted as natural. This was not because I presumed from the outset that he was a spy, but because it was normal in the left to assume that phones were tapped and that “sensitive” political matters should be discussed in person. The fact that Lev was a Soviet official merely made the discretion seem particularly prudent.
Our meetings took place in London’s more expensive restaurants, like Prunier’s, where I first sampled Coquilles St. Jacques and other elegant cuisines courtesy of the Soviet Union. My reaction to this treatment was a mixture of enjoyment—I could not myself afford such extravagances—and guilt. In my private thoughts I deplored the way the Soviet government was ready to squander wealth that properly belonged to Soviet workers on such luxuries, but it seemed rude to bring up such matters to my host, nor did I want to lose an opportunity to present my views to an influential Soviet official. My host routinely ordered a bottle of wine, which I did not hold well, so that by the middle of the meal I was always a little tipsy.
The topics of our discussions were wide-ranging and I did most of the talking. I took it as my mission to convert Lev to New Left ways of thinking. I advised him that it was important to publish Trotsky’s writings in the Soviet Union and tried to persuade him that it was counter-productive to incarcerate dissidents in psychiatric institutions, the current Soviet practice. Repressive methods may have been necessary, I suggested, during the period of “primitive accumulation” when the Soviet Union was catching up with the industrial powers. But now that Russia was a superpower, the controls could be relaxed.
The focus of our discussions often shifted to the subject of Bertrand Russell, for whom I was working at that time, and his secretary, Ralph Schoenman. Lev wanted to know the answer to the question on everyone’s mind. How influential was Schoenman in shaping the philosopher’s political stands? Russell had made some public statements the Russians didn’t like. Did they reflect his views or Ralph’s? Later, I discussed these conversations with Ralph and he gave me some background to Lev’s curiosity. The Johnson administration had recently begun bombing military targets in North Vietnam. At Ralph’s prompting, Russell issued a public appeal to Moscow to supply MiG’s to the North Vietnamese so they could shoot down the American planes. The Soviet consul general had summoned Ralph to a meeting. After explaining to him that sending Russian planes would mean war with the United States, the consul warned: “Mr. Schoenman, people who advocate World War III are either crazy or working for the CIA, and they get into trouble.”
When Lev was not asking me questions about Russell and Schoenman, I lectured him on how the Soviet future could be reshaped. He didn’t try to discourage me from the belief that I was making an impression. At the end of the second or third session he gave me a Parker fountain pen. It was still in the store box and wasn’t wrapped like a present. I didn’t know how to refuse it without insulting him. The next time we had lunch it was raining and I was wearing my trench coat. As we walked into the street at the end of the meal, he stuffed a thick white envelope into my left pocket.
I knew instinctively what it was, but was so frightened that I didn’t dare remove it until I reached home. Without taking off my coat, I went into the bedroom and closed the door, laying the envelope out on the bed. Inside, there were 150 one-dollar bills. I was not so much surprised as dumbfounded. How could these people be so stupid in their own interest and so reckless with mine? The Free World Colossus was the first left-wing history of the Cold War that could not be tainted as the work of a Soviet apologist. It had taken me years to develop this perspective, which promised to be far more effective in persuading readers that America was responsible for the Cold War and far more valuable to the Soviets, if they wanted to look at it that way, than any information I might be able to obtain as an intelligence asset. Yet they thought nothing of putting my work in jeopardy by attempting to recruit me as an agent. The thought enraged me.
I returned the envelope at our next meeting and told him never to give me another. He was disappointed but not discouraged, especially since I agreed to go on with our lunches. But a few sessions later it became apparent that my rejection of the money had prompted a more drastic test. When we left the restaurant, he brought up my job as an instructor in a University of Maryland course at the American army base outside of London, and asked me if I would be willing to obtain information about NATO for him. We were standing in the middle of the street, but I screamed at him: “You’re crazy. I’m not going to spy for you or anyone else. Get the f—k away from me and don’t ever contact me again.” I walked away and never saw him again.
I was not the only radical courted by Lev. I had seen him with a Marxist economics tutor at the London School of Economics. I had discussed him in a veiled manner with the editor of the leftwing magazine Views, who had also been having lunches with him. Members of the New Left Review crowd knew him, as did activists I recognized from the Labour Party left. How many had failed to reject him as I did? How many had become suppliers of information to the KGB?
After my stint in London, I returned to the United States to join Ramparts magazine. Beginning in 1966, a series of sensational Ramparts stories drew a national spotlight to the magazine and expanded its circulation to 100,000 readers, making it the largest publication of the left. The stories featured the CIA and its global intrigues. The first had come to Ramparts courtesy of an obscure assistant professor of economics at Michigan State, named Stanley Sheinbaum, who had participated in a CIA-funded program to train police in South Vietnam. Sheinbaum’s story provided a politically explosive link between the campus and the war. When a student came to Ramparts with information that the CIA was funneling secret funds to the National Student Association, a further connection was established. This scoop led to revelations about the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other liberal institutions that had been created to oppose the Communist offensive. In the hands of Ramparts’ editors, a moral equivalence between Russia’s police state and America’s democracy was established. In the absence of similar stories about KGB operations among the organizations of the left or of links between the antiwar movement and the Communist forces in Vietnam, the Ramparts articles seemed to confirm the New Left view of the world.
One of the writers who worked on these stories was Sol Stern, whom I had met and gotten to know in Berkeley. In 1968 Ramparts sent Sol to Bratislava, along with Tom Hayden and an SDS delegation, to meet Madame Binh and other leaders of the National Liberation Front. For the radicals attending, this was not just a fact-finding mission. The organizers allowed Sol to be present only after Ramparts agreed that he would not report on the “sensitive” political discussions taking place. Long afterwards, Sol told me what these were: “The SDS’ers held a seminar with the Communists on how to conduct their psychological warfare campaign against the United States.” According to Sol, Hayden was particularly vocal in making suggestions on how to sabotage the American war effort. He also tried to get the group to endorse publicly the Communist line on the war, but Sol and the sociologist Christopher Jencks, who was also present, objected and Hayden’s proposal was voted down.
Their dissent had consequences. Following the Bratislava meeting, members of the group were scheduled to go to North Vietnam. Hayden had already been there, publicly proclaiming that he had seen “rice-roots democracy” at work. As a consequence, he enjoyed the confidence of the Communist rulers and had become one of their gatekeepers, screening American radicals for his hosts. To punish Sol and Jencks, Hayden saw to it they were denied permission to go on with the others to Hanoi.
Hundreds, maybe even thousands of similar
