Whereas, each employee of the Government of the United States is endowed with a measure of trusteeship over the democratic processes which are the heart and sinew of the United States; and
Whereas, it is of vital importance that persons employed in the Federal service be of complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States; and
Whereas . . .
—from the preamble to Executive Order 9835, signed into law seventy years ago this week (March 21, 1947) by President Harry Truman
After the opening niceties, EO 9835 directed that all present and prospective State Department employees be subjected to “a loyalty investigation,” those investigating given access to all “pertinent” information — FBI files, military records, police records, school and job records, political affiliations, and “any other appropriate source.” Over the next five years, after some 4 million loyalty checks, the designated boards and tribunals had found “reasonable grounds” (this amended to “reasonable doubts” in the fifth year) to dismiss or not hire 378 people, none of them ever charged with any espionage- or treason-related crime.
Many historians regard EO 9835 as being politically motivated. In the 1946 Congressional elections the Republican Party had made the postwar Red Scare a central issue, promising to find and topple the “pink puppets in control of the federal bureaucracy.” When the Republicans swept the elections, gaining control of both houses of Congress, Truman hoped his “loyalty oath” would satisfy the anti-Communist lobby. Instead, EO 9835 emboldened J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, created the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, energized the House Un-American Activities Committee, and opened the door for Senator Joe McCarthy — one of those Republicans elected in 1946 on the anti-Red platform.
Historians also connect these and related Cold War developments to the origins of America’s modern security state. In The Devil’s Chessboard, David Talbot argues that the key power player in this formative era was Allen Dulles, a corporate lawyer who transitioned to intelligence gathering during WWII and then became director of the nascent CIA from 1953 to 1961. As a youth, Dulles loved chess; as director, says Talbot, he “liked to think he was the hand of the king, but if so, he was the left hand — the sinister hand”:
Allen Dulles outmaneuvered and outlived Franklin Roosevelt. He stunned Harry Truman, who signed the CIA into existence in 1947, by turning the agency into a Cold War colossus far more powerful and lethal than anything Truman had imagined. Eisenhower gave Dulles immense license to fight the administration’s shadow war against Communism, but at the end of his presidency, Ike concluded that Dulles had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left him nothing but “a legacy of ashes.” Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office.
Describing Dulles as “the chairman of cloak-and-dagger America,” Talbot says he worked closely with “the principal members of his ‘board’ — the Washington and Wall Street men of influence who quietly dominated the nation’s decision-making.” Among other current discussions of “deep state” insiders and “leak state” outliers is Edward Jay Epstein’s How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft. While Epstein agrees with those who suggest that Snowden’s whistleblowing has generated a necessary debate about the “surveillance leviathan” now threatening America, he calculates that the “the Snowden Effect” — our current widespread distrust of all government policies and statements on the security topic — will cost us too much at home and abroad.
Whether or not the Trump administration’s emphasis on vetting and security will bring a new round of loyalty checks, the West needs increased vigilance, argues Edward Lucas in Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today. In his previous book, The New Cold War, Lucas explored Putin’s favorite weapons and strategies for political destabilization; in his new book the author offers “a message that officials find hard to articulate openly, and that the public seems so unwilling to hear”:
It is this: Russian spies’ activities are not just a lingering spasm of old Soviet institutions, twitching like the tail of a dying dinosaur. They are part of a wider effort to penetrate and manipulate, which targets the weakest parts of our system: its open and trusting approach to outsiders and newcomers . . . The battle lines were more clearly drawn in the days of the Cold War, when the threat was of communist victory. The corrupt autocracy that rules Russia now is playing by capitalist rules — and the threat is even more corrosive.
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Sig Nordal 