Journalist Drew Pearson graces the cover of TIME on Dec 13th, 1948.
According to the authors of KGB controller Yuri Modin’s biography My 5 Cambridge Friends (1994), the American FBI was first alerted to the existence of the ‘Cambridge Five’ spies by prominent American journalist Drew Pearson. Pearson wrote a sloppy piece of pro-Stalin propaganda which contained correspondence between Winston Churchill and Harry Truman; correspondence which could only have been pilfered by a highly-placed Soviet mole.
After Pearson’s article was published Yuri Modin et alia say that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI began to search the White House, US State Department, and the British Embassy in Washington D.C. for the source of the leaks. Pearson’s foolish article, coupled with information from the slowly-churning VENONA project, eventually lead the Americans to identify Donald Maclean of Philby’s network.
This is how Modin describes Pearson’s piece, from My 5 Cambridge Friends:
On June 15th 1945, Drew Pearson, a well-known American journalist, published a seven-page magazine article revealing the full substance of the Stalin-Hopkins talks at the Kremlin, as well as that of Churchill’s telegrams to Truman. His piece contained so much exact detail that the FBI’s suspicions were thoroughly aroused. There was another reason: Pearson seemed to have gone out of his way to paint Stalin as tolerant, genial, open-minded and respectful of democracy, whereas in fact there was no question whatever that Uncle Joe planned to offer the West the smallest possible concession over Poland.
I was not able to find the name of the magazine in which Pearson’s pro-Stalin article appeared, which means I can’t verify what Modin et alia say about the piece. Modin claims that the article contained the substance of the Stalin-Hopkins Kremlin talks; Churchill-Truman correspondence from June 5th 1945 (telegrams 72 and 73); and five Hopkins-Churchill telephone transcripts which Pearson wrote about even though Hopkins had failed to report them to the communications control room at the White House.
According to Modin, Pearson’s information was doubly dangerous to the ‘Cambridge Five’ because of Soviet sloppiness: when Pearson published on June 15th 1945, Maclean had just leaked telegrams 72 and 73 from New York City. Soviet technicians in NYC did not encode their dispatches to Moscow well, so the Americans could have identified that the leak of telegrams 72 and 73 had originated from the British Embassy in D.C. by going over their recordings of Soviet transmissions. Four years later in 1950, VENONA leader Meredith Gardner had cottoned on to this sloppy Soviet mistake.
Picture from the NSA’s hagiography. Gardner’s 1951 work on Soviet transmissions of the same telegrams 72 and 73 from Maclean ultimately uncovered the Cambridge Five, unfortunately Gardner also tipped off Philby.
Modin asserts that only the British Embassy in D.C. would have had access to all Pearson’s information, but the FBI didn’t dig deeply enough to see that. What Modin claims doesn’t make sense– if the Brits had access to the full Hopkins-Stalin transcripts they could have had access to all of Pearson’s leaked information. However, Harry Hopkins, FDR’s emissary between Churchill and Stalin, certainly had access to this data. Hopkins is also known to have done work for the KGB.
Harry Hopkins’ July 18, 1938 cover, the last of three TIME covers enjoyed by the KGB asset.
Yuri Modin goes out of his way to absolve the White House from any responsibility for the leaks because Modin wanted to protect Harry Hopkins, who was not outed as a Soviet spy until the publication of The Sword and the Shield by Prof. Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin five years after Modin’s book. (Andrew, Cambridge University’s espionage guru, outs Hopkins in the most sympathetic way possible. Glad to know that problem’s fixed.) This is what Modin claims happened with the Pearson article:
What really happened? The American journalist [Pearson] was an unwitting tool of Moscow. His article was orchestrated by the Soviet secret services without his knowing it. Naturally, his information was lifted straight from the document [telegrams 72 and 73] that had been purloined by Maclean and transmitted by Henry to the Centre [Soviet intelligence HQ].
If Pearson really was part of a Soviet propaganda offensive as Yuri Modin and his co-authors claim, it was unforgivably stupid to use information that alerted unfriendly elements in the FBI to the existence of the ‘Cambridge Five’. Modin asks us to believe that the Soviets told Pearson to endanger one of the most profitable spy-rings in history in exchange for a few clumsy political points for Stalin. Unlikely. Who was Pearson really working for?
Regular readers will remember Drew Pearson from my post on the assassination of Gen. George Patton: in 1943 Pearson was used by FDR-henchman Ernest Cuneo– who was also Pearson’s media lawyer– to place a false story about Patton slapping a shell-shocked soldier in Pearson’s NBC radio show Drew Pearson Comments. The purpose of this attack against Patton was to lobby for Patton’s removal from the European War Theater because Patton had suggested continuing the war against FDR’s good buddy Stalin once Germany fell. When Patton couldn’t be removed through dirty tricks, he had an ‘accident’.
Pearson sailed through the Patton debacle relatively unscathed because of Cuneo’s political power. Readers will remember that both Pearson and Cuneo had close working relations with William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination– a Frankenstein-like creation formed when Stephenson grabbed control of no less than eight different intelligence offices after Churchill’s ascent to power. Cuneo was an official liaison between the OSS, British Security Coordination (BSC), the FBI, the United States Department of State and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.
Cuneo’s mission with the OSS was to flood American media with British propaganda, to which end he purchased 1) a huge number of American newspaper concerns and 2) the loyalty of many journalists, including Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, Robert Ingersoll, Whitelaw Reid, Dorothy Thompson, Edmond Taylor; and very likely including Edward Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith and William Shirer.
Perhaps the most telling thing about Cuneo and his loyalties is this quote in which he defends his British intelligence friend Dick Ellis against allegations of working for the Soviets, from Thomas Mahl’s Desperate Deception:
The influence of British Security Coordination in America to involve the United States in WWII and to prepare the United States to participate in war is impressive, even startling. In the Ernest Cuneo papers in the Franklin Roosevelt Library is an article written by Cuneo that, while its main purpose was to defend Cuneo’s friend from charges of being a Soviet mole, captures a telling fact known to few people: British Intelligence created Donovan’s CIO/OSS. “If the charge against Ellis [Dick Ellis] is true,” wrote Cuneo,”… it would mean that the OSS, and to some extent its successor, the CIA, in effect was a branch of the Soviet KGB.”
Charles Howard ‘Dick’ Ellis, courtesy of mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com
The MI5 investigation into Dick Ellis’ work for the Soviets was carried out by Peter Wright, who also did a similar investigation into Kim Philby, which earned Wright a lot of animosity from MI6. This is how Wright describes the Ellis investigation in Spycatcher:
The real difficulty with the Ellis case was trying to determine whether he was working for the Germans or the Russians, or both…
The first thing which convinced me Ellis was always a Russian spy was the discovery of the distribution of the Abwehr officer’s report in which he claimed Von Petrov’s British source was a Captain Ellis. The report was sent routinely to Kim Philby in the Counterintelligence Department. He had scrawled in the margin: “Who is this man Ellis? NFA,” meaning “No further action” before burying the report in the files. At the time Ellis’ office was just a few doors down the corridor, but it seemed to me to be a most suspicious oversight by the normally eagle-eyed Philby.
Ellis wasn’t just Ernest Cuneo’s pal, he was also a BSC buddy of William Stephenson who retired shortly after Philby fell under suspicion. Later, Ellis had odd dealings with Philby over the defection of Soviet agent Vladimir Petrov. Ellis eventually confessed to spying for the Germans, but never the Soviets. British Prime minister Margaret Thatcher refused to confirm or deny Dick Ellis’s work for Soviet intelligence— so I leave it to readers to surmise what Cuneo’s assertion about his friend Dick Ellis and the KGB means for the CIA.
So much for Pearson’s lawyer … what about Pearson himself? In short, Drew Pearson was one of William Stephenson’s pet American journalists who could be relied on to promote British interests in his writing. Could Drew Pearson have been the “unwitting tool of Moscow” while at the same time being the witting tool of the FDR administration?
I think that Pearson’s handler-cum-lawyer, Ernest Cuneo, and Pearson’s ultimate sponsor, William Stephenson, would have noticed if their boy was being used as an “unwitting tool of Moscow” and Cuneo/Stephenson would have moved to reclaim Drew. I dare say Moscow would have been smart enough not to use Pearson in the way Modin claims.
I believe it’s far more likely that a proactive friend of Stalin in the White House, someone like Harry Hopkins, could have leaked telegraphs 72 and 73 to Pearson while being unaware of the damage he inadvertently did to the British ‘Cambridge Five’ because of freakish ciphering sloppiness by the Soviets in NYC.
So was Drew Pearson really a Soviet agent? Yes and no– he was a Soviet agent in the same way as Bill Colby was a Soviet agent. Drew Pearson was part of that incestuous espionage fifth column in which it’s difficult to distinguish between KGB, BSC and CIA.
Readers interested in how the spook world works will want to know that Drew Pearson’s heir and protégé Jack Anderson was also part of this fifth column.
Jack Anderson was a Mormon journalist and a WWII news correspondent for the Americans before Pearson and his patrons took Anderson under their collective wing. According to William Colby’s self-serving 1974 ‘Family Jewels’ leaks, the CIA spied on Anderson after he published mobster Johnny Rosselli’s information about the planned Castro assassination– i.e. Colby made Anderson look good in the ‘Family Jewels’. Colby’s sheltering of Anderson probably means that Anderson was one of Colby’s pet journalists to whom the CIA director leaked information that 1) damaged his enemies within the Agency and 2) benefited the KGB. Colby had suspicious dealings with a known KGB agent in Saigon, dealings which he hid from the CIA. (See Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior.)
As you can see, high-level double-dealing between US, U.K. and Soviet potentates is a long-term problem that I believe had its roots in the 1890s, well before Pearson’s stupid article.
Ironically, it was the ‘help’ of Stephenson’s sneaky American allies which kicked-off the undoing of the ‘Cambridge Five’. In their eagerness to help their Soviet allies and lie to the American people, clumsy White House conspirators compromised their British buddies’ operation. It’s almost enough to make one pity Kim Philby.
