Wow, I remember Winston Burdett very well from the late 1960’s and 1970’s. He had such an impressive speaking voice, was soft spoken and came across like a knowledgeable and popular small town college history professor.
by Paul Miller
LIKE EVERY other American born since 1950, I was raised on some very basic and universally acknowledged notions of our country’s history.
Near the top of the list of things written in stone was that the McCarthy era was a shameful period of paranoid witchhunting and blacklisting based on fabricated or imagined allegations, and that the man it was named for, former Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, was one of our greatest villains — a man who saw communists everywhere he looked, and who publicly vilified hordes of perfectly innocent people and ruined their lives for no other reason than his own personal gratification.
What a surprise, then, to find out that one of the most prominent broadcasters of the McCarthy era, and a man I looked up to 25 years later when he was at the height of his career and I was just a kid hanging around the CBS newsroom, had actually been a spy for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
A real spy for the USSR? Was that even possible?
The newsman’s name was Winston Burdett, and for many years he was a familiar, comforting presence on the radio and on the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” reporting from Rome, where he especially gained distinction for his coverage of the Vatican.
To me, as a young assistant editor on the CBS News foreign desk from 1977 to 1981, he was a friendly, but intimidating, voice on the other end of numerous international telephone calls. [……..]
Burdett was just one of the broadcasting giants who had me in awe. There was Walter Cronkite, of course, whose program I nominally worked for, but who only spoke five or six words to me in the three-and-a-half years I toiled no more than 30 feet from his desk. The other old-timers were friendlier. Douglas Edwards, Charles Collingwood, Eric Sevareid, Dallas Townsend, etc., etc. — these men had actually worked with Edward R. Murrow, for God’s sake. [……..]
I don’t remember the McCarthy era coming up much, but if it did, it could only have been with scorn. Nobody mentioned that one of the people we put on the air every day had worked, in his youth, to help overthrow the government of the United States in favor of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
It wasn’t that Burdett’s role was a secret. He admitted it — first, in a letter to his bosses at CBS in March 1951, and later to the FBI and in testimony to a congressional committee. But 25 years later, with the McCarthy era neatly put in its “national embarrassment” cubbyhole — an era of hyperventilated accusations, not actual spying — nobody talked about it, and Burdett was allowed to continue his broadcasting career in peace. […….]
Secrets revealed
The 1990s, however, also happened to be the time when quite a few of the Soviet Union’s secrets started to emerge. The USSR collapsed in 1990, and there was brief access to some of its Stalin-era espionage archives. In 1993, a former KGB officer, Alexander Vassiliev, was permitted to copy some of those documents, which he turned into a book, “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America.”
And in 1995, the United States declassified more than 2,500 cables which had been intercepted in the 1940s and early 1950s between Soviet agents in this country and their handlers in Moscow. Decoding those cables had been called the Venona Project, and several books examined their revelations in detail, including “Venona — Decoding Soviet Espionage in America,” by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr.
Lo and behold, the secrets that were suddenly spilling out of Moscow and Washington revealed that Joseph McCarthy and his supporters, while they unfairly targeted some people who were innocent, actually grossly underestimated the extent of Soviet espionage in the U.S. government. Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Dexter White, Laughlin Currie and Laurence Duggan were just the most prominent names among hundreds of American citizens who not only gave Moscow the atom bomb, but a very long list of other diplomatic, military and industrial secrets, helping Stalin enslave his own people, send millions to their deaths by violence or starvation, conquer Eastern Europe, start the Korean War, and nearly bring the world to a nuclear Armageddon. And these American traitors did so not because they were paid, but because they believed Soviet communism was a better form of government than American capitalism and democracy, and they wanted it to succeed and spread.
Even during the notorious period from August 1939 to June 1941 — when Stalin had a peace pact with Hitler, helped himself to half of Poland, and made it possible for the Nazis to conquer Europe and launch the Holocaust — the Americans stayed loyal to the communist dictator.
It was in the book by Haynes and Klehr that the name Winston Burdett popped up. The book revealed that in 1937, as a young reporter for a left-wing newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle, Burdett joined the Communist Party of the USA, which was controlled and funded by Moscow, and which was used to attract supporters among the American public, and especially from its universities and labor unions. The CPUSA was also used to recruit spies, and Burdett soon agreed to become one.
According to the declassified Venona documents, he was told by his handlers to volunteer for an assignment for the Brooklyn Eagle to Finland, where he would pretend to be a disinterested journalist, but where he would actually gather intelligence to help the USSR defeat Finland after the Soviets invaded it in November 1939. Later, with World War II raging across the European continent, Burdett also travelled to Romania, Turkey and other front-line countries on behalf of the Soviet government.
[……..]
But Burdett’s past haunted him. In 1951, CBS was under pressure to purge its ranks of known communists, and the network’s owner, Bill Paley, asked every employee to sign a “loyalty oath,” disclosing whether he had ever been a “member of a group which advocated the overthrow of our constitutional form of government, or which has adopted a policy approving of acts of violence to deny other persons their rights under the United States Constitution, or of seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”
‘An idealistic guise’
For most employees, having to answer such a question was a silly annoyance. But Burdett’s answer to the momentous question on the CBS loyalty oath was, “Yes.”
He had joined the communist Party in 1937 when he was 24 years old, he said in an accompanying letter to his CBS bosses, because “to a young person, Communist notions present themselves in an idealistic guise.”
Since then, he said, communism had become “as abhorrent to me as anyone I know,” but that he had only realized after his period of youthful foolishness what the Communist Party was “in fact, all about, and how dishonest it was, both morally and intellectually.”
He apologized for embarrassing CBS, but he also called his story “rather banal,” and said his activities as a communist union activist had been harmless. In fact, he was covering his tracks: Only later did he admit to the FBI and to a Congressional committee that he had been much more than a simple member of the Communist Party; he had been a hostile spy in the middle of a war.
In his 1955 congressional testimony, Burdett made a full confession and identified numerous other members of the Communist Party of the USA in the 1930s, including some in prominent positions in the media, academia and politics. Because he “came clean,” CBS decided not to fire him, and it may have been the furor over naming names that led to his exile to the Rome bureau for the rest of his career. […….]
As the decades passed, what had been a notorious story in the 1950s was forgotten. On a recent trip to New York, I asked several of my CBS colleagues in the 1970s who also knew Burdett whether they’d ever heard anything about his espionage career.
They all said, “No.”
[…….]
