A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss

The Witches In Our Midst
September 13, 1999


I hear from one of my well-placed high school sources that they're still teaching Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible' in 10th grade literature classes.

What's more, they're still teaching it the old-fashioned way -- as a sermonette on what the unrepentant left persists in calling 'McCarthyism.'

Miller's drama shamelessly bends history to imply that the 17th century witch trials in New Salem Village were merely a warm-up act for the 20th century 'Red Scare.'

EMAIL: DEB WEISS

Not that it's an absolutely bad play: Miller is a clever, if tendentious, playwright. Though he doesn't exactly offer his audiences a jolly evening at the theater, "The Crucible" is still watchable, unless you're one of those low-brow types who'd just as soon stay home and watch "Ferris Buehler" on the VCR. (Heaven knows, I am.)

The trouble is, "The Crucible" is bad history -- Miller bends the facts until they scream for mercy. It's the only way he could make them work for him.

Above all, the play's smug, self-serving metaphor is bogus: a fraud, and a rather silly one, at that.

Witches were imaginary: communists were not.

We've learned a lot about Red espionage in recent years, as documents have been declassified and Cold War secrets have been unpeeled. What we've learned suggests that the paranoid right-wingers weren't so paranoid, after all.

Now, new evidence comes to us in a book by British historian Christopher Andrew.

"The Mitrokhin Archive," based on documents smuggled out of the USSR by Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin, exposes decades of Soviet espionage in the most amazing detail.

During his years as an obscure KGB archivist, Mitrokhin, now 77, spirited hundreds of intelligence reports (some dating back as far as 1918) out of KGB headquarters, hiding them in his country house, in cubby-holes under the floorboards. The notes ultimately filled six trunks, an unprecedented documentary treasure. They were his ace up the sleeve when he persuaded the British to help him defect in 1992 (our CIA had given him the cold shoulder).

Mitrokhin's archive exposed Soviet agents who'd long eluded discovery, like American NSA clerk Robert Lipka, a Soviet mole since the 1960s, finally prosecuted and convicted in 1996.

Portions of the documents withheld from publication apparently shed light on -- among other cases -- the curious matter of Felix Bloch, the State Department official and suspected Soviet agent who was pressured into resigning in 1990 (he was treated as quite the martyr by the press).

In Britain, several agents have been 'outed', including an 87-year-old granny named Melita Norwood, who spied for the Reds from 1937 to 1972. Because of her age and her fragile demeanor, she has, predictably, become a favorite of the British left. The Tories, however, aren't charmed: they're grimly pressing Tony Blair's government to explain its failure to prosecute Mrs. Norwood, who gave British atomic secrets to Moscow.

"The Mitrokhin Archives" illuminates the KGB's elaborate disinformation and dirty tricks apparatus. This seems, perhaps, less shocking than it might have ten years ago. Nowadays, KGB strategies of smear and character assassination evoke a purely domestic image: media darling James Carville, joyously craning his neck and glittering with creepy but calculated venom.

Still, the facts are startling.

To deflect attention from Lee Harvey Oswald's communist credentials, for instance, KGB agents seeded the fringes with conspiracy theories linking JFK's assassination to 'right-wing' groups and the CIA.

They concocted that ugly whisper campaign deriding FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as a closet queen. (Unlike, say, Richard Nixon, or Joseph McCarthy, the businesslike Hoover didn't provide his own rope: in his case, it seems, they had to make it up from whole cloth, with sequins.)

KGB operatives labored to marginalize Martin Luther King, who they saw as a dangerous accomodationist. To exacerbate racial tensions, they even forged poisonously racist documents, making it appear they'd been written by white extremists.

Pope John Paul II was a long-time target, smeared even before he ascended to the Papacy as punishment for his unyielding anti-communism. (The left's loathing for His Holiness persists: in 1997, Carl Bernstein, the red-diaper baby whose Watergate reporting helped bring down Richard Nixon, co-authored a dim, feverish, and largely indefensible book charging the Pope and Ronald Reagan with a bizarre conspiracy against the Soviet Union.)

As the evidence rolls in at the end of this bloodiest of centuries, one thing is abundantly clear: whatever it was we were dealing with, it sure wasn't a witch hunt.

But my well-placed high school source indicates to me that so far, at least, news of this revelation hasn't made it into the classroom.

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A VIEW FROM HERE archive

Peter Singer's The Hell Curve -- September 9, 1999

Pat And The Poor Old Elephant -- September 6, 1999

Some Kind of Heroes: Mumia, Soliah, Et Al -- September 2, 1999

Being Janet Reno -- August 30, 1999

The Ghost At Our Banquet -- August 26, 1999

Solving Maleness -- August 23, 1999

The Media: A Nose Like a Vacuum Cleaner -- August 19, 1999

A Voter's Guide To The 21st Century -- August 16, 1999

A Good Town -- August 12, 1999

Singing The Praises Of Government News -- August 9, 1999

The First Couple's Chamber Pot -- August 5, 1999

Lifetime's Woman of the Year -- August 2, 1999

Thinking Over This Tax Cut Thing -- July 29, 1999

The John John Show -- July 26, 1999

America's One China, Two Alka Seltzer Policy -- July 22, 1999

The Politics of Speaking Ill of the Dead -- July 19, 1999

The Nasty Legacy -- July 15, 1999

All in a Slow News Week... -- July 12, 1999

Traps For The Young -- July 8, 1999

Remembering Michael Dukakis -- July 5, 1999

R.I.P., O.I.C. -- July 1, 1999

Mr. Clinton's Post-War Vengeance -- June 28, 1999

Guns, Cuisinarts and the Bill of Rights -- June 24, 1999

Attack of the Concerned Advocates -- June 21, 1999

FTC Nation -- June 17, 1999

The Very, Very Coincidental World of Bill and Hillary Clinton -- June 14, 1999

Water-boiling in Our Time -- June 10, 1999

Crisis and Peace -- June 7, 1999

Reinventing God -- June 3, 1999

On This Memorial Day -- May 31, 1999

The Un-McCarthy Era -- May 27, 1999

Unspeakable Spin -- May 25, 1999