The Side-Show Act

There is an interesting side show going on with the arrest of a Russian woman, Maria Butina, in the US on a student visa.  While she was here, she was acting as an agent of Russia - in other words, she was not here to be a student but to engage with politicians who were mostly Republicans (the party in power here).  That won’t be good news since many of them are Congressmen, political leaders, and organizations.  The accompanying documents are really thin on sustantive facts of what those organizations and people were doing.  It looks like dinners and emails to establish contacts.  This is hardly new to the Russians who have done that for 35 years or more after the birth of email. She was getting direction from Moscow on her activities and it is certainly illegal to act as a representative of a foreign government without registering.  It is more frequent than most of my readers know.

What concerns me here is the language used by the press release and the supporting documents.  This is starting to sound like the same kind of accusations made during the McCarthy Era when the Russians were doing the same kinds of things but the brunt of the government came down on those who were cooperating with anything Russian.  We forget sometimes that the McCarthy Era was based on real Russians doing real activities to undermine the institutions of the US.  That was in the late 1940’s to the 1950’s.  The Russian threat was not just imagined then, or now because it was real.

J.Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI at that time, and he started a campaign to rid the world of some of the organizers in the US.  He conducted surveillance, indicted organizers and ran a number of them out of the country without trial.  He also inserted damaging information on some US Congressmen to the press to influence public opinion.  Starting in 1954 he managed to get a Committee to make some of these accusations public through formal hearings.  After three years the government and press had had enough of the good Congressman and stopped the activity.  If you have never seen the movie Good Night, and Good Luck, you can watch that and get a flavor of what kinds of things the Committee was doing and the reaction to it.

I remember this time as ugly.  We were writing anti-Communist papers in the third grade, and gleefully followed our teachers’ directions to stand against Communism and for Democracy.  That part wasn’t such a bad idea, but the methods of Hoover and McCarthy look a lot like what we are seeing today.  It took them 10 years to get geared up and rolling.  It sneaks up on a third grader and his parents and it can easily sneak up on the adults we have grown into.  Our current Justice Department and FBI look a lot like the one Hoover was influencing.