In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt wrote Winston Churchill a letter with one of the most arrogant lines of the entire war: “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department.”
He meant it. And three years later at Yalta, the world paid for it.
Roosevelt’s whole strategy toward Stalin was to make him like him. His former ambassador to Moscow later said FDR told him that if he gave Stalin everything he could and asked for nothing back, Stalin would respond in kind and wouldn’t try to annex anything. He was talking about a man who had just starved millions of Ukrainians, purged his own officer corps, split Poland with Hitler, and shot 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. Roosevelt thought he could charm him.
It started at Tehran in 1943. FDR decided the way to break the ice with Stalin was to mock Churchill in front of him. He teased him about his Britishness, his cigars, his habits, until Stalin finally laughed. Roosevelt later bragged that this was the moment he and Stalin became friends. He called him “Uncle Joe.” Stalin wasn’t making a friend. He was taking notes. By Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt was dying of heart failure. Stalin refused to leave Soviet territory, so the sick American president traveled 14,000 miles to meet him on his home turf. The Soviets put the Americans up in Livadia Palace. It was bugged. Stalin knew what Roosevelt’s team was saying before he walked into the room. And Roosevelt kept playing the same game. Before the conference even opened, he met privately with Stalin and made jokes at Britain’s expense, telling him the British wanted to have their cake and eat it too. His closest wartime ally was frozen out so he could look good to a dictator. Then he handed Stalin the most important piece of information in the entire conference. He told him American troops would probably be out of Europe within two years.
Think about that from Stalin’s side of the table.
The only power on earth that could stop him had just told him it was going home.
Churchill happily handed over Poland. Britain had gone to war over Poland. But Roosevelt accepted a vague Soviet promise to “reorganize” Stalin’s puppet government and hold free elections, with no real way to enforce it. Stalin signed the Declaration on Liberated Europe pledging democracy for Eastern Europe. Then, with Churchill out of the room, Roosevelt gave Stalin the Kuril Islands, southern Sakhalin, a naval base at Port Arthur, and control of railways in Manchuria.
All to get Soviet help against Japan. China, an American ally, wasn’t even consulted. Stalin broke his promises almost immediately. Roosevelt figured it out too late. In late March 1945 he reportedly admitted Stalin had broken every promise he made at Yalta. Two weeks later he was dead. The man who was sure he could “handle” Stalin had been handled from the first handshake. He wanted Stalin to like him. Stalin wanted Eastern Europe.
Only one of them got what he came for. Poland’s elections in 1947 were rigged. Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, East Berlin, Bucharest, and Sofia disappeared behind the Iron Curtain.
They wouldn’t be free again until 1989.
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“Even more than White, Harry Hopkins was assuredly a major-league agent. Author Robert Sherwood once wrote that Hopkins was “generally regarded as a sinister figure, a backstairs intriguer, an Iowan combination of Machiavelli, Svengali, and Rasputin.” This from a puff biographer!
Both friendly and critical biographers acknowledge that Hopkins, who lived in the personal quarters of the White House, became the most powerful man in FDR’s Administration, progressing from his early role in managing national relief operations, to conducting a political purge of recalcitrant conservative Democrats, to becoming a confidant of Churchill’s and an intermediary with Stalin. President Roosevelt once commented that “Harry and Uncle Joe got on like a house afire. They have become buddies.” And why not? Hopkins even ridiculed the notion that Stalin was a Communist.
While some who have studied the Venona documents grant Hopkins generous historical wiggle room as an “unconscious” agent, Romerstein and Breindel conclude that FDR’s alter ego was a Soviet spy with many comrades in the administration.”
Reds in the White House review
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The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service and later absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA), that ran from February 1, 1943, until October 1, 1980. It was intended to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union (e.g. the NKVD, the KGB, and the GRU).
During the 37-year duration of the Venona project, the Signal Intelligence Service decrypted and translated approximately 3,000 messages. The signals intelligence yield included discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the United Kingdom, and also of Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project in the US, known as Project Enormous. Some of the espionage was undertaken to support the Soviet atomic bomb project. The Venona project remained secret for more than 15 years after it concluded.
