Editorial illustration showing declassified intelligence cables contrasted with anonymous accusation files, symbolizing the difference between documented espionage and politically motivated fear campaigns.

On real spies, invented ones, and the recycled art of the fear campaign

Every successful swindle needs a grain of truth to work with, the way a pearl needs a grain of sand. Joseph McCarthy’s swindle had one, and it was real: the Soviet Union did, in fact, run agents inside the United States government during the 1930s and ’40s. Alger Hiss was not a fantasy conjured by a junior senator from Wisconsin with a drinking problem and an eye for headlines. Nor was Harry Dexter White, nor Klaus Fuchs, nor Julius Rosenberg. This is the part of the story McCarthy’s admirers, then and now, like to lead with, as though the presence of a genuine crime retroactively justifies every fabricated one committed in its name. It does not. It never has. And the current Republican habit of waving “communism” at Democrats the way a bullfighter waves a cape is the same trick performed on an audience that, God help it, seems no better prepared to spot it than the one in 1950.

What Was Actually True

Start with the part the apologists are, for once, correct about, because intellectual honesty requires giving the devil his due even when the devil is Roy Cohn’s mentor. Hiss, a senior State Department official who had been present at Yalta and helped midwife the United Nations, was passing material to Soviet intelligence. White, the Treasury official who did more than perhaps any other American to design the Bretton Woods system and the IMF, was doing the same. Fuchs, a physicist embedded in the Manhattan Project, handed Moscow the bomb years ahead of schedule. Rosenberg ran a network that did likewise. None of this is contested by serious historians. The Venona intercepts — Soviet cable traffic the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service began decrypting in the 1940s and didn’t declassify until 1995 — confirmed it in the agents’ own paymasters’ words, and the opened Soviet archives after 1991 confirmed it again.

So the infiltration happened. Now ask the second question, the one McCarthy’s defenders always seem to skip: what did McCarthy have to do with catching any of it?

The answer is nothing. Not one of Joseph McCarthy’s headline-grabbing lists produced a verified active Soviet agent. He caught the ghost of a scandal that had already been solved.

The Man Who Arrived After the Fire Was Out

Here is the inconvenient chronology. The major Soviet networks inside the U.S. government — the Silvermaster group, the Perlo group, the ring that fed Los Alamos secrets to Moscow — had been identified, penetrated, or dismantled by the FBI and the federal loyalty-security apparatus over the course of the mid-to-late 1940s, largely through counterintelligence work that predates McCarthy’s public existence as an anti-communist crusader by years. Hiss was already convicted of perjury by January 1950. Fuchs confessed to British authorities that same month. McCarthy did not deliver his famous Wheeling, West Virginia speech — the one where he claimed to hold a list of 205 known communists in the State Department, a number that would shrink and mutate every time anyone asked to see it — until February 9, 1950. He arrived, in other words, roughly at the moment the fire department was mopping up, and announced himself the man who’d put it out.

“The choice in front of the country was never really between communism and capitalism. It is, and always has been, between citizens willing to ask for evidence and citizens willing to accept a label instead.”
– Civil Heresy

What followed for the next four years was not counterintelligence. It was theater with the moral seriousness of counterintelligence borrowed for costuming. McCarthy’s numbers changed constantly because they were never real numbers to begin with — they were rhetorical props. He smeared career diplomats, Army officers, and academics on the basis of old associations, guilt by acquaintance, and testimony from informants whose credibility ranged from questionable to fabricated. He accused George Marshall — the author of the plan that rebuilt Western Europe and the man most responsible for Allied victory in World War II — of being party to “a conspiracy so immense” as to eclipse ordinary treason. He never produced a Hiss. He never produced a Fuchs. He produced ruined reputations, and he produced them wholesale.

Confirmed by Venona & Soviet Archives

Alger Hiss — State Department, convicted of perjury 1950
Harry Dexter White — Treasury, died 1948 before hearings concluded
Klaus Fuchs — Manhattan Project physicist, confessed 1950
Julius Rosenberg — ran an atomic-espionage network, executed 1953

Active Agents Identified by McCarthy, 1950–54

List of “205 communists” at Wheeling — never substantiated, count never stable
Accused Gen. George Marshall of conspiracy against the U.S.
Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954 — no espionage uncovered, McCarthy censured by the Senate that December

The Purge That Outran the Crime

The government was never the whole target, and this is the part of the story that ought to trouble anyone tempted to wave away McCarthyism as an overcorrection to a real problem. The Communist Party USA did have a genuine constituency among ordinary Americans, concentrated in labor unions, civil rights circles, and the arts, and it grew for reasons that had rather more to do with the Depression and Jim Crow than with Moscow’s five-year plans. The overwhelming majority of the Americans who passed through that world were not spies, were not plotting revolution, and were in fact agitating for things — collective bargaining, an end to lynching, unemployment relief — that the country would later adopt without controversy and largely credit to itself.

None of that saved them. The Hollywood Ten went to prison in 1950 for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee’s questions about their political affiliations, and the blacklist that followed ended or crippled hundreds of careers in the industry on the basis of suspicion alone. Teachers and professors were dismissed for declining to sign loyalty oaths. Union leaders lost their positions for the crime of having attended the wrong meeting a decade earlier. The dragnet that was sold to the country as an espionage investigation functioned, in practice, as a purge of dissent — and the distinction between “national security threat” and “person whose politics I find distasteful” collapsed almost immediately, because it is a distinction that costs political capital to maintain and McCarthy had no interest in maintaining it.

The Sequel Nobody Asked For

Which brings us, with the grim inevitability of a rerun scheduled by a network that has run out of ideas, to the present. When the current occupant of the White House and the party that has made itself an extension of his moods start reaching for “communism” and “Marxism” to describe a Democratic Party whose most radical recent legislative achievement was capping the price of insulin, they are not making an argument. They are running the McCarthy play with the serial numbers filed off. There is no Venona project waiting in some future archive to vindicate this round of accusations, because there is no espionage ring to uncover — there is only a domestic political opposition being relabeled, for tactical convenience, as a foreign enemy. That is the whole of the technique, and it does not require the target to be guilty of anything. It only requires the audience to be frightened enough not to ask for evidence.

It is worth being precise about why this matters and where the analogy to interwar Germany, however uncomfortable, earns its place rather than merely provoking. The Nazi party did not seize the German public’s fear of “the Jew” and “the Bolshevik” from nowhere; it manufactured and amplified an association between a minority and a hostile foreign ideology until ordinary Germans could no longer distinguish their neighbor from an existential threat. The mechanism was never really about the target’s actual beliefs or actions. It was about training a population to accept the criminalization of a category of people as a substitute for governing. A society that has been taught once that “communist” can mean “union organizer” or “civil rights lawyer” has already demonstrated it can be taught, a second time, that “communist” can mean whoever is inconvenient this year.

FOUR SPIESconfirmed, decades laterA THOUSAND CAREERSruined on suspicionThe Red Scare’s ledger, weighed honestly: confirmed espionage on one side, the scale of the purge on the other.

None of this requires believing the two moments are identical to take the parallel seriously; history doesn’t repeat with that kind of obligingness, and anyone who tells you 2026 is 1933 is selling something almost as crude as what McCarthy sold. But the mechanism — manufacture a foreign-ideological threat, attach it to a domestic political rival, let fear do the work argument can’t — is not a German invention or an American one. It is simply what authoritarian movements do when they would rather not compete for votes on the merits. America ran this exact program once before, against people whose actual crime was wanting a forty-hour week and the right to vote unmolested, and the country spent the better part of two decades and Edward R. Murrow’s career admitting it had been had.

The Question on the Table

So here is where the essay stops being a history lesson and starts being a question the reader has to answer personally, because that is the only honest way to end it. A population that has been shown, in its own archives, exactly how this con was run once — who was actually guilty, who was actually innocent, and how completely the guilt of four men was used to justify the ruin of thousands who weren’t — has no excuse left for falling for the sequel. Fear tactics work by asking you not to check the record. The record, in this case, is sitting in plain view, declassified, footnoted, and taught in every reasonably competent high school in the country.

The choice in front of the country was never really between communism and capitalism. It is, and always has been, between citizens willing to ask for evidence and citizens willing to accept a label instead.

Whether the current population chooses to remember that or repeat the 1950s’ worst instincts is not a question history can answer for us. It’s the one question in this whole sorry chronicle that remains, mercifully and dangerously, unresolved.

Why It Matters

History rarely repeats itself exactly, but political tactics often do. This essay distinguishes genuine Soviet espionage from the political exploitation of that espionage by Joseph McCarthy, arguing that real threats were transformed into a broader campaign of fear, accusation, and guilt by association. It asks whether modern political rhetoric repeats the same pattern by substituting emotionally charged labels for evidence.

Key Takeaways

The Venona decrypts and Soviet archives confirmed that several significant Soviet espionage operations existed within the United States during the 1930s and 1940s.
Joseph McCarthy did not uncover those espionage networks, which had largely been identified or dismantled before his rise to national prominence.
McCarthy’s investigations produced widespread accusations and damaged countless careers while failing to identify active Soviet spies.
The essay argues that fear campaigns often begin with a legitimate concern before expanding into indiscriminate political labeling.
The central lesson is that democratic societies must distinguish documented evidence from politically useful accusations.

Key Questions to Consider

Q1. What is the central argument of the essay?

The essay argues that genuine Soviet espionage existed, but McCarthy exploited that reality to justify accusations that extended far beyond the documented evidence.

Q2. Why are the Venona decrypts important?

They confirmed that Soviet intelligence had successfully recruited several American agents, allowing historians to separate documented espionage from McCarthy’s unsupported allegations.

Q3. What criticism does the essay make of McCarthy?

It argues that McCarthy arrived after major espionage investigations had already exposed key networks and then used exaggerated claims, changing numbers, and guilt by association to fuel political theater rather than counterintelligence.

Q4. Why does the essay connect McCarthyism to modern politics?

It argues that labeling political opponents as agents of hostile ideologies without evidence follows a recurring authoritarian pattern designed to generate fear rather than debate.

Q5. What broader lesson does the essay offer?

The essay concludes that citizens have a responsibility to distinguish documented facts from political labels, because fear campaigns depend upon audiences who stop asking for evidence.

If this essay challenged your understanding of McCarthyism, political fear, or the importance of evidence, subscribe to receive future Civil Heresy essays examining history’s lessons for modern democracy.

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The Cables and the Con