Let Me Tell You About Harry Hopkins

By Rich Kozlovich

I you looked up Hopkins in Wikipedia you could only come away with the impression he was a dedicated public servant from his early life who was called into service by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s to administer New Deal programs such as the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration.  

Hopkins became a major policy voice in the Roosevelt administration and he easily had more access to the President than any other advisor, especially since he ended up living in the White House for three and one half years, even living there with his third wife for a time.  His influence was so strong he was known as the “deputy President.”  It is also  believed that he was a Soviet agent. 

This appeared in Wikipedia regarding comments from one of his defenders. 

“Verne W. Newton, author of FDR and the Holocaust, said that no writer discussing Hopkins has identified any secrets disclosed, nor any decision in which he distorted American priorities in order to help Communism. As Mark demonstrates, Hopkins was not in fact pro-Soviet in his recommendations to FDR, he was anti-German and pro-U.S. Any "secrets" disclosed were authorized. Mark says that at the time, any actions were taken specifically to help the American war effort, and to prevent the Soviets from making a deal with Hitler.”

Well, that is what we shall examine, especially since so much information has come out in the 1990’s regarding Soviet spies, communists and fellow travelers who infiltrated the highest levels of the Roosevelt Administration, including Hopkins.

We have to understand that the media was heavily infiltrated with Stalinist sympathizers or outright Communists from the 1920's on. But not only the media!  During the Great Depression FDR expanded government tremendously when he created all those new agencies.  Agencies which very quickly became infiltrated by Communists, allowing them to act secretly as agents for the Soviet Union while on America's payroll; largely with the help secret communists acting as agents for Stalin like Harry Hopkins.  

In the book entitled The Sword and the Shield information about this era and the people involved in Soviet spying during the 20th century was based on copied KGB documents smuggled out of the USSR, which had been hidden under the floor of his country home until “1992 when British intelligence managed to get both him and his six trunks of copied documents out of Russia”.  

Hopkins was in fact a Soviet agent, as confirmed by KGB defector Oleg Godievsky named as a Soviet intelligence agent. In fact he quoted another KGB operative Iskhak Akhmerov as saying that Hopkins was “their most important Soviet war-time agent in the United States”.  The intercepted messages between the Soviet Union and their agents in the U.S. (known as the Venona intercepts) clearly showed that Hopkins was contact No. 19. 

Hopkins was directly responsible for getting Roosevelt, who was totally unprepared and extremely ill, to go to Yalta and negotiate what would become the fate of Eastern Europe under Stalin's iron boot, as Reed Irvine states in his January 5, 2000 article, “Harry Hopkins: Traitor, Not Hero”, saying; 

“Hopkins said the Russians had been "reasonable and farseeing." Robert Sherwood, a Roosevelt speechwriter, called Yalta "a monstrous fraud." Hopkins had been instrumental in our supplying, with no conditions, the arms that enabled Stalin to defeat the Germans. He helped seal their control of Eastern Europe, and he is suspected of having authorized shipments of uranium that helped them develop their A-bomb."

Hopkins would time and time again come down supporting Soviet positions, including sabotaging the Polish government in exile’s efforts while extolling the Soviet puppets as the true leaders of Poland.  He even denounced in vehement terms the Red Cross investigation of the murders of several thousand captive Polish officers murdered in Russia’s Katyn Forest.  A crime we in fact know was committed by the Russians, in order to be assured there would be no leadership in Poland that could work against their long term goal of absorbing Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. 

There is an argument in defense that he was and “unconscious agent” and "simply acting as a "back channel" to the Russians, maintaining informal East-West contact."   Evans and Romerstein point out that this is an explanation that doesn't fit the facts:

"If Hopkins were merely trying to maintain such contact, he could have done so through Soviet ambassadors Litvinov, Constantine Oumansky, or Andrei Gromyko, or members of the Soviet Purchasing commission, all of whom were in the United States in legal fashion at one time or another, and with whom Hopkins could hve had all the dealings that he cared to.

They go on to say:

Akhmerov, however was an illegal operating under false cover and would not have revealed himself to Hopkins unless absolutely certain his secret KGB identity would be protected.  So, whatever Hopkins’s motivation, “unconscious agent” doesn’t fit the picture.

Hopkins died young in 1946 at 56 years old, but Hopkins may have been one of the most influential people of the 20th century because through his deception and treason he left a legacy of Communist imposed tyranny on much of the world.  But he didn't do it all by himself!