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Whoa, Nellie!
Nellie Ohr, the conduit for the Steele dossier from Fusion GPS (where she worked) to the DOJ (where her husband worked) turns out to be a Russian scholar with a dissertation and other publication record full of Marxist and revisionist dog whistles.
A representative quote:
To convey the terror and excitement of the [Stalinist] period, one can assign a memoir of a prison camp victim or an observer such as John Scott or Maurice Hindus.
Diana West notes, “[n]ot incidentally, Maurice Hindus was an epic Soviet apologist. As for John Scott, Whittaker Chambers i.d.’d him in Witness as belonging to the cabal inside Time magazine that tried to get the ex-Communist witness fired; much later (to be fair, probably after Ohr wrote her review) Scott was revealed to have infiltrated the OSS for the NKVD (codename ”Ivanov”).”
West goes into more detail on her blog on Ohr and the Russia connection. Excerpts:
I am not offering a full explanation for Fusion’s pro-Putin and anti-Putin lobbying; I don’t have one yet. I am suggesting, however, that there are games going on in Washington and elsewhere that we do not understand. I feel this particularly acutely when contemplating the globally expanding Magnitsky Act sanctions on mainly individual wealthy Russians, which, contrary to all the self-congratulating bombast, are actually functioning as the most effective means yet devised to compel these oligarchs and their wealth to return from the West to Russia, in the process bonding them more closely to the regime of Comrade Putin. (NB: I didn’t think of that brilliant idea, Jeff Nyquist did.)
“This system [the fact that the Soviet regime controlled what archives a Western scholar had access to] had the potential to limit inquiry to be acceptable topics and interpretations sanctioned by the Soviet establishment.”
No, this system had the power to place American scholars under Kremlin discipline. That has to go for Nellie Hauke Ohr, circa 1989, if we think about it, but who thinks about it? Ponder the facts too long and it becomes hard to see these advanced degrees American researchers would earn –having shaped their topics and methodologies to satisfy the Kremlin establishment — as anything but Soviet degrees.
I should mention that there is a joker in this deck. Even post-1991, even after the Soviet Union “disappeared,” little if anything changed when it came to the preservation of the most vital Soviet secrets — the intelligence archives, the Central Committee archives and other repositories of communist crimes against world, including humanity. From earliest days, the “new” Russian government served to protect the “old” Soviet government. Which suggests there is more than a thread of continuity between the two.
What draws my attention today, however, is another Fusion subcontractor, someone with whom Simpson says “we have a long-standing relationship”; someone [Fusion GPS founder Glenn] Simpson named in both his Senate and House interviews: Edward Baumgartner.
Here is part of what Simpson said about Baumgartner in the House interview:
He works for us on Russian things … oh, heavens — not a degree in Russian history from Vassar!
Could it be that Fusion’s Edward Baumgartner was a student of Fusion’s Nellie Ohr’s?
Yes, Baumgartner attended Vassar between 1991 and 1995 — which certainly does overlap Nellie H. Ohr’s years of teaching there.
Published in GeneralAccording to the Daily Mail account, “confirmed socialist” [Christopher] Steele went straight from Cambridge into MI6, where he remained until his retirement in 2009. And why not? MI6 has had such fabulous luck with “confirmed socialists” in the past (Philby, Blunt, McLean …) — at least, depending on your point of view.
The CIA, by the way, is similarly inclined, as, for example, we see in its hiring of a young CPUSA-voting John Brennan. Such doings may shock a healthy (i.e., middle) American mind, but that’s because the extent to which our national security organizations have been subverted from within remains largely unknown. “Avowedly Left-wing” and even “CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; per MI5, “Communist and subversive” and known to be heavily infiltrated by Soviet agents] credentials” are just the thing with these international elites. It’s who they are.
Is John Le Carre still writing? This sounds like great fodder for one of his novels.
We have all known that the Dept. of State was overrun with Socialist and Communist sympathizers. Now we find they are in our Dept. of Justice, too.
At least we got rid of the one in the White House.
Between the paleo Marxists and revisionists and the Frankfurt School influence, we’re in trouble.
Hmmmm. The same Nellie Ohr who got her HAM radio license during this period. Just who was Nellie talking to?
Indeed.
LeCarre’s 2017 “A Legacy of Spies” brings the old gang back together; Smiley, Guilliam, et al.
Except that LeCarre despises America so he’s not worried about our problems with Russia. He thinks were far worse.
“You can’t make this stuff up!” Said just about anyone who has been paying attention to this clusterfark.
That simply isn’t true. There was an enormous flowering of work by writers such as Lynn Viola, Jörg Baberowski and Jonathan Daly (among others) that have relied heavily on Soviet archives to document what went on.
Thanks. That’s a problem with Diana West: she’s right about a lot of things, but is heavily self-taught and not always balanced. Plus the J. J. Angleton Syndrome is always a risk when Moscow is involved.
I haven’t read Maurice Hindus (at least if I did, it was so long ago it has slipped from my memory), but I think Nellie Ohr’s recommendation that you read John Scott’s memoirs of living and working in the Soviet Union is a good one if you want to get a good idea of the atmosphere.
John Scott was the son of Scott Nearing, who was a Communist for many years. His son, Scott, was a lefty, of course, He worked in Magnitogorsk while it was being constructed. He recounts the prosecution of members of senior management for constructing apartments for visitors (high Soviet officials) and then moving into them themselves once they were finished.
He met and married a Russian woman. As the thirties advanced, security got tighter and tighter until it became impossible to work there. Working with an American was dangerous for the management of any enterprise. From the memoir, you get a distinct impression of the difficulties, suspicion, and uncertainties of Soviet Society.
He and his wife were permitted to leave the Soviet Union, an event with which the memoir closes. They settled in Connecticut. His wife loved the United States, I understand from one of their neighbors and was not interested in moving back to the USSR ever.
True, his memoir helps us grasp the meaning of “Stakhanovite.” But he ” belong[ed] to the cabal inside Time magazine that tried to get the ex-Communist witness [Whittaker Chambers] fired” which was, I think after he had been an NKVD infiltrator in the OSS (though West thinks Ohr may not have known this.) He was working for the NKVD after he was debriefed at the U.S. Embassy in the USSR, and after he got out in 1942 (is it why he got out?
All this makes me wonder how sincere the “anti-Bolshevism” of his later career (Radio Free Europe, for example) was. Was this a sort of atonement, or was it more agent of influence work because even though “the USSR was not really true Communism, it was the closest thing we have?”
Is this a case of “Ohr should have known better” or “Ohr knew perfectly well what she was doing?”
It’s my impression that except for brief periods the access to the archives was curated and not fully open. Of course, unexpected discoveries still get made anyway even it that’s the case.
Diana West at CPAC. In case you’re not depressed enough already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYVzxYqfGlI
Blacklisted by History is a superb book. Necessary reading.
I don’t know of any national archives that are fully open. There are usually time limits at a minimum. And if you’re looking for MI5 British colonial administration documents you won’t find them because they were destroyed intentionally.
Some archives in Moscow and Petersburg are closed because the buildings are falling down. At least that’s the reason given and it is true the buildings are in bad repair.
One way that has been found of getting around this is going out to provincial cities. And that is where the harvesting is going on at the moment. And the archives in the -stans are also available.
This is getting a bit far afield. As West pointed out, Ohr’s thesis research was during the Gorbachev era. Access was not all that open, was often curated by the organs, and the -stans were not then available. To a significant extent she saw what they wanted her to see, and I think West sees her frame of mind correctly.