Sad Truth About Agnes Smedley
(Conspiracy
Nation, 09/02/07) – Agnes
Smedley (1892-1950) was a remarkable woman. Born in Missouri, her
family moved to Colorado when she was 10 years old. That would have
been about 1902 and the American west at that time still had little
use for dainty women. One of this editor's great aunt's, from the old
west, used to carry a pistol in her boot. Agnes Smedley escaped
stereotypes of femininity. But the sad truth recently revealed from
declassified Soviet archives is that Agnes Smedley worked as a secret
agent for Communism.
Smedley did not begin as
a Communist, however. Like many lured in by Marxist utopian dreams,
she was strongly idealistic and had great compassion for the average
working person. Eventually she worked as a journalist and was present
at key international events.
Present in Germany in
1921, Smedley wrote, in a letter to Florence Lennon, “Germany
is in terrible condition this year... Gambling in the mark has been
the great indoor sport of the capitalists for months, and
consequently food has increased by 25 to 100 per cent.”
Earlier, Smedley had
described conditions in Russia in 1921. “Much that we read of
Russia is imagination and desire only. And no person is safe from
intrigues and the danger of prison. The prisons are jammed with
anarchists and syndicalists who fought in the revolution. Emma
Goldman and Berkman are out only because of their international
reputations. And they are under house arrest; they expect to go to
prison any day, and may be there now for all I know. Any Communist
who excuses such things is a scoundrel and a blaggard. Yet they do
excuse it - and defend it. If I'm not expelled or locked up or
something, I'll raise a small-sized hell. Everybody calls everybody a
spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You
never feel safe.”
(http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAsmedleyA.htm)
Before “Feminism”
was captured by a man-hating clique of Ivy Leaguers, Smedley
exemplified much of what was good in the original movement. She had
“no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may
be.” Writing to Florence Lennon in 1923, Smedley did “not
think that present society is rational or normal, either as regards
men or women or the classes. I bow to nature, but I don't bow to a
social system which has its foundation in the desires of a dominant
class for power. That system perverts the very source of life,
starting with the home and the schools.”
It was while in China in
the 1930s that Agnes Smedley worked for Richard Sorge, a Soviet
spymaster. “Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, who served with
Gen. Douglas MacArthur's chief of intelligence, claimed Smedley was a
member of the Sorge spy ring. After the war, Smedley threatened to
sue Willoughby for the accusation.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Smedley)
Although biographers of
Smedley have insisted she did not work for the Comintern (Cominform),
research into declassified Soviet archives proves otherwise.
“Documents from the Comintern archives demonstrate, however,
that Smedley was an integral, although ill-disciplined, part of the
Comintern apparatus in China.” (The Secret World Of American
Communism, by Harvey Klehr,
et al. Yale University Press, 1995).
Documents
reproduced in chapter two of the Klehr book (op. cit.) show that
“clandestine habits of mind and behavior pervaded all levels of
the Communist party – from well-known party figures like John
Reed and Earl Browder, to prominent businessmen like
Armand Hammer and journalists like Agnes Smedley...”
(Emphasis added).
When
the FBI interviewed Whittaker Chambers in 1945, Chambers, a former
Communist spy, claimed that Smedley was a secret member of the
Communist Party USA (CP-USA). Research by Conspiracy Nation
spells out that CP-USA had an outer shell of acknowledged members and
also an inner core of secret agents owing allegiance to Moscow
alone. During the 1940s, Angela Calomiris was one of several private
citizens recruited by the FBI to go undercover, without pay, inside
of CP-USA. In her book, Red Masquerade, Calomiris described
how “many Party members go underground not only to protect
themselves, but to worm their way into positions where they can
influence business organizations, labor unions and Government
agencies more effectively.” It is erroneously stated at one web
site that Chambers was mistaken about Smedley, but since 1995 this
has been shown up: Agnes Smedley, sad to say, was “an integral,
although ill-disciplined, part of the Comintern apparatus in China.”
(Klehr, op. cit.)
Prescient, Smedley warned in 1945 that the Capitalists
would inevitably engineer yet another World War. “It is a
satisfaction to know that the Red Army took Berlin,” she wrote
in a letter to Karin Michaelis. “It was of the utmost
importance that the Russians give the warning to all Fascists
throughout the world of what will happen to anyone who tries to
emulate Hitler. May they take warning - though I do not think they
will. This is not the last war... We have so many American Fascists
who would much rather have joined with the Nazis against the USSR.
They will bide their time - and they will engineer another world war.
You and I will not be on this earth by that time, but I am convinced
that that will be the last world war and that a socialist system of
society will thereafter rule the earth. I do not think that ruling
classes learn anything from history.”
Conspiracy Nation
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html