COLUMNISTS

Deidre Dare

I don't know what the KGB was doing during the war, but the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, was apparently busy spying on members of America's armed forces to discover if they had pro-Soviet leanings.

The US Freedom of Information Act gives citizens the right to view certain classified government records after a certain amount of time has elapsed. Pursuant to this law, I recently managed to get a copy of my father's FBI File. My father always claimed that he had such a file, but I never believed him, chalking this claim of his up to delusions of grandeur and paranoia (two traits I have inherited from him in spades).

According to these records, my father was inducted into the US Army in 1942 and the FBI spent the greater part of 1943 spying on him, suspicious that he was a subversive and a Red.

My father would be delighted.

The FBI and Army Intelligence seem to have spoken to everyone who ever came into contact with my father and, amazingly, there are still chunks of these interviews that continue to be marked "Classified" and so are redacted from the records I received under the act.

There were a number of reasons for Hoover's worries. According to the file, my grandparents were born in Besserabia, Russia, certainly cause for concern, no? In addition, my father was a "great talker" and liked to "expound on everything and anything, particularly economics." "Subject," the file went on to say, "is inclined to take the workers' side in arguments on economics."

Thanks to the FBI, I also found out that my father was associated with a group the FBI described as "parlour pinks," and that he believed in "everyone being free from want, and having a good livelihood." The recently declassified file added that "Subject expounds on a belief that the government should support those who could not support themselves."

Lions and tigers and bears, OH MY!

But by far the most dangerous thing about my father was that while he was at the Army's Reception Center, he "preached a doctrine that might be called subversive and insinuated that he was connected with an undercover organisation that had already laid plans for a revolution of negroes and Jews after the current conflict is over." The file continued as follows: "Subject is reported to have stated that he is a ‘friend' of the coloured people... A statement attributed to subject is ‘Our time is coming: there is plenty of money to back us up.' Subject stated that after the war there would be thousands of coloured people organised. There would be trained men among the negroes who would strike while the nation was still in the reconstruction period immediately following the war."

Ultimately, the FBI came to the conclusion that my father "could easily be influenced to take a stand which would be Communistic" and so "should not be afforded too much freedom of action in the Army, have access to classified information or have any position of trust in the Army." After all, "Subject is loyal and patriotic to the present Allied war cause, but his loyalty and patriotism to the United States under normal conditions may be very different."

In addition to delusions of grandeur and paranoia, it turns out I have a lot of traits in common with my father. The FBI variously described my father as a "crackpot," "hot headed," "positive that he is right," "given to enthusiasms" and having a "persecution complex," not to mention "well-bred" and "brilliant".

The war was so horrifically grueling for Russia, I doubt the KGB had a lot of time to spend spying on its enlisted men in search of pro-American sympathies. And I wonder if the US government's time might have been better spent fighting the Nazis than worrying about its Communist ally?

It all certainly seems absurd today, when this American's biggest problem with Russia is a love affair with a Russian man that seems to have gone way off its tracks.

What with making statements like that, living in Moscow and having my own persecution complex and delusions of grandeur, I'm certain there's an FBI File on me.

Frankly, I think my father would be delighted.

xxoo

DD