Catching the K.G.B.

The U.S. speaking tour of identified K.G.B. agent Wilfred Burchett has been a dismal failure. Instead of large campus crowds, Burchett has faced virtually empty halls; and, even in cities with substantial radical populations, promoters of the dissolute Red have been hard pressed to fill the seats. Large turnouts have occurred only on his opening night in New York City, where the appearance of the U.N. Ambassador from Communist Vietnam was the real attraction, and subsequently in the San Francisco area where some 800 radicals gathered to express their support for the Communist conquest of Indochina and Angola.

The contempt shown Comrade Wilfred on the campuses resulted from exposure by The Review Of The News of the fact that Wilfred Burchett was in 1969 identified as a K.G.B. agent in the sworn Senate testimony of the very Soviet official who had recruited him. For years Burchett has been assigned to countries in which Communist forces have been engaged in active campaigns of terrorism, warfare, and subversion, serving as both propagandist and advisor. During the Korean War, he was a member of Red Chinese and North Korean interrogation teams that extorted false germ-warfare confessions from captured U.S. airmen. During the war in Vietnam he again served as an interrogator of U.S. prisoners of war. In both North Korea and North Vietnam the American P.O.W.s who were brought to Burchett were carefully “prepared” for this honor by days of torture, beatings, and starvation.

In 1965, for example, the North Vietnamese Communists began a campaign to extort “war crimes” confessions from senior American officers held in their prison camps. One of these was Rear Admiral Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., shot down over North Vietnam in July 1965, who later provided a powerful account of his experiences in When Hell Was In Session (Reader’s Digest Press). The “softening up” of Admiral Denton, then one of the three most senior officers held by the Communists, went on for seven days and nights under the direction of a Communist officer’ Major Bail Repeatedly tortured into-unconsciousness, the Admiral was then brought to make a videotaped interview with the traitor Burchett and a Japanese “socialist” newsman. That TV interview was shown around the world before someone recognized Admiral Denton was blinking his eyes in Morse code. The word he spelled out was Torture.

We reached Rear Admiral Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., now retired, at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, where he is an executive. Disgusted that Burchett had been allowed into the country, the Admiral described his tormentor as a highly sophisticated intellectual who had sold himself to the Communists for the power and influence he wields as a Western advisor and agent to Asian Communist regimes. The Admiral said that, after the systematic torturing, Burchett’s role was to elicit as much cooperation from his target as possible. Others who faced Wilfred Burchett during the Korean War have described under oath how he personally attempted to terrorize them.

In 1971, Burchett was nonetheless brought to Washington, D.C., at the instigation of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, to discuss the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. The Communist agent has himself written that he had been in contact with Kissinger since 1967 when a third party who had met Kissinger at a 1966 Pugwash conference in Poland introduced them. This was well after the torture-interview with Admiral Denton and four years after Burchett had been identified under oath to Western intelligence services as a K.G.B. agent by George Karlin, born Yuri Krotkov, who was from 1946 until his defection in 1963 a K.G.B. officer assigned to subverting Western journalists.

George Karlin testified that Burchett bragged how he got his money, living accommodations, and other favors not from the governments of Red China and North Vietnam, but from their Communist parties. He asked Karlin to make similar arrangements for his stay in Moscow. Burchett has, however, refused to state who has financed his current trip. His interests have shifted as the theaters of Soviet aggression have moved from Asia to Africa and southern Europe. During the past two years he has been based in Paris and reporting on events in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, and the drive by Marxist terrorists for control of Rhodesia. He once had close personal relationships with such now dead Communist overlords as Chou En-lai and Ho chi Minh. But he commenced his U.S. speaking tour with the remark that he had recently visited North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung, who he said was in “excellent health.”

When exposure of Wilfred Burchett’s work for the K.G.B. appeared in The Review Of The News and in editorials published by the Hearst newspapers, he wrote an hysterical response in the November 16th edition of The Guardian, the U.S. Communist newspaper which has provided his press credentials since the mid-1950s and whose staff set up his current speaking tour. In his reply, as one might expect, Burchett slanders as “perjurers” the loyal military officers who testified against him during the 1974 libel suit he lost in Australia. These witnesses included four American officers, a British officer, and chiefs of staff of the Australian Army from the Korean and Vietnamese wars.

Wilfred claims that former K.G.B. officer George Karlin “listed almost everyone he had ever met as either known members of the K.G.B., or those he had recruited personally. The list was long and included . . . John Kenneth Galbraith….” Caught cold, identified under oath as a K.G.B. agent, Burchett resorts to the big lie. Examination of Karlin’s testimony shows that what he actually said about Galbraith was that Soviet diplomatic officials in India regarded the U.S. Ambassador as easy to influence since Galbraith had to their great delight made what he believed to be personal “unofficial” contacts with Soviet officials.

Burchett’s duties have included the recruiting of new Communist agents. It would therefore be appropriate to question Wilfred Burchett as to whether K.G.B. recruitment and “talent scouting” have been among his activities during his U.S. tour among the New Left. Certainly Burchett has so far refused to answer questions about his financial backing and activities here. But he will be speaking in Washington, D.C., on November 22nd; in New York City on November 28th; in Ann Arbor on December 7th; and, in Philadelphia on December 10th. Our correspondents are seeking the opportunity publicly to examine identified K.G.B. agent Burchett on these topics.

But in light of the public information on Burchett’s career as a Communist agent, and his participation in torture/interrogation programs against American P.O.W.s in two wars over a 20-year period, the big question is why he was given the U.S. visa that permitted him to enter this country. On November 15th, Representative Lawrence Patton McDonald (D.-Georgia), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, demanded a full explanation from the U.S. State Department. Dr. McDonald reports:

“Two officials of the State Department’s Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, Deputy Administrator John W. DeWitt and Visa Office Director Julio J. Arias, have appeared in my office to inform me that the State Department was aware of no reason why Wilfred Burchett should be excluded from the United States. This, despite his public record of participation in the abuse of U.S. prisoners of war in violation of the Geneva Conventions; and in spite of the fact that, had Korea and Vietnam been fully declared wars, Burchett would have been a war criminal.”

Representative McDonald continued:. “These officials asked me to believe that the State Department records on Burchett contained only some news clippings and brief reports stating that he had fulfilled the provisions of his earlier restricted C-2 visas to go to the United Nations and to attend the Guardian’s anniversary dinners in New York City. They did admit to knowing that the Guardian was a ‘Communist-left publication.’ I found it very interesting that these State Department spokesmen claimed to have no surveillance reports on Burchett or any other information about occasions on which this Communist agent had deliberately evaded surveillance during his previous visits.”

An angry Congressman McDonald said he found it particularly significant that “Despite the public testimony that Burchett is a K.G.B. operative and Communist agent, and despite his activities in tormenting and extorting false confessions from our helpless P.O.W.s, Deputy Administrator DeWitt claimed that the State Department had to consider potential ‘adverse publicity if we deny him a visa.’ Perhaps it is time that the State Department was treated to some ‘adverse publicity’ as a result of granting a visa to an identified K.G.B. operative to tour American college campuses under cover of being a journalist.”

Representative McDonald suggests that patriotic Americans, particularly veterans of Korea and Vietnam, write or telephone their own Congressmen immediately to urge a formal investigation. The matter should also be brought to the attention of local newspapers, which McDonald says should be urged to take a stand against this incredible abuse of press credentials by a Communist war criminal.