The Eric Metaxas Show - David Adams Cleveland (Encore)

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

David Adams Cleveland, a novelist and art historian, shares an "engaging fictionalized account of an absorbing espionage case" from decades back, in his new novel, "Gods of Deception." (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy pm investments.com. That's legacy pm investments.com. The Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. We have something particularly special for you today. Do I always say that? It's only because it's true. I guarantee you right now what we have is particularly special. I'm talking to a novelist. You know what a novel is, don't you?

It's fiction. But this is historical fiction. This is very interesting. The title of the book is Gods of Deception. The author is David Adams, Cleveland. Now, just so you know his literary bona fides, Evan Thomas, if you don't know who Evan Thomas is, you need to time out. Time out. Evan Thomas says, God's of deception is a lushly vivid tale.

of a haunted time. Kirkus Reviews, writes, truly compelling and engaged, fictionalized account of an absorbing espionage case. On and on it goes, this is not just well written, but it's about an important part of our history. And I'm just thrilled right now to have the author David Adams. Cleveland, welcome. Eric, it's delightful to be with you. Do you know Evan Thomas? I mean, that's a pretty wonderful blurb from a respected author. I know, Evan, just at a distance, not personal. Okay, so part of the reason I was excited to have you on is because of the background of the story. And I realize that are a lot of younger people who are not familiar with, it's really one of the most important things that happened in the latter part of the 20th century.

Talk to my audience or tell us the background of your novel gods of deception. The background of the novel takes place or begins to take place at a trial of the century, 1949, 1950, the trial of Alger Hiss for espionage. Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury about passing top secret State Department papers to Whitaker Chambers in the late 1930s. At the time, that didn't seem like such a big deal. the crime itself. But the question about whether Alger Hiss was innocent or guilty divided the country for 50 years. This was a very, very controversial subject. Really astonishing that even

though he'd been convicted by a jury of his peers with overwhelming preponderance of the evidence for his conviction, a lot of people still believed that he was innocent, that he'd been framed by Nixon and the FBI. And for 50 years, this divided the country. But at the same time, the conviction was a wake-up call to America, that in fact, the U.S. government had been penetrated by spies like Alger Hiss. We now know a few things. One, Alger Hiss was the tip of the iceberg.

There were over 500 Soviet agents that had infiltrated the American government and related war industries in the 30s and 40s. And to back that up, there was an infrastructure of 200,000 American members of the American Communist Party, which provided the underground financial and logistical base for those 500 Soviet spies. So the conviction of Alger Hiss was both controversial and also a wake-up call that the U.S. had been penetrated by Stalin's willing agents. It was a pretty amazing event in its time. There's really no way to overstate this. And one of the reasons I'm excited to have you on and to talk about this new book, Gods of Deception, is that people need to understand evil is real. So when people say, oh, it's no big deal, it's not big. This is real. And we know when we talk about communist agents, again, if you're young, maybe you're unfamiliar with the satanic evil of Stalin. We're talking about a level of evil. Anti-American is putting it very mildly. Evil, evil Marxist monsters, torturing and killing millions in the Soviet Union who then infiltrated the United States.

States of America. So when we talk about the infiltration of, you know, Chinese communism, we're not making this up. This has been going on. What's really fascinating to me, David, is how some people can turn a blind eye to it or they can just wave it away as though it's, it doesn't fit their narrative. They hate Nixon more than anything or they hate Trump more than anything. Whatever it is that that creates their blind spot, that they don't want to see that something is happening that simply needs to be dealt with. And I mean, this is to me the classic case, the HIST story. Well, it goes beyond that because Alger Hiss was convicted of passing top secret State Department papers in the late 1930s. In fact, we now know recent evidence from

Soviet intelligence files and decrypted Soviet cable traffic. We now know that Hiss was in fact a very bad spy. He was an agent of influence. Now, get this. Alger Hiss sat at Roosevelt's right hand at Yalta. Every morning he was debriefed by his Soviet handler as to the Soviet and Allied negotiating position. For my audience, who doesn't remember Yalta, because I was very young then, this was when Roosevelt is sitting. with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. They're figuring out the future. These three tremendously important human beings.

And you're telling me, I didn't know this, that Hiss, he's working for the Soviets, here's Stalin, here's Roosevelt, and Roosevelt is listening to what Hiss has to say. This is like something out of a novel, and if you read it, you'd say, well, this is preposterous, this could never happen in real life.

You're saying this happened. I was astonished when I found this out doing my research. He sat at Roosevelt's right hand. He was debriefed each morning by his Soviet handler about everything that was being negotiated at Yalta. We're talking about the disposition of Eastern Europe. We're talking about giving to the Soviets islands in Southeast in Asia. We're talking about the return of millions of Russian refugees at the end of the Second World War to their certain death. All these kind of things were agreed upon at Yalta

and basically Kiss and his compatriot spies in the White House, in the Treasury Department, had worked on the Yalta agreements and were instrumental in turning the Yalta agreement into a catch-all for everything that Stalin wanted out of the West. It's devastating. when you realize that the damage that Aljahis and his fellow spies did, it's unbelievable. I tell you, I'm not somebody who likes the idea of eternal hell, but when I hear stories like this, I just think the level of evil is frankly incomprehensible. I mean, I really think that the wisest thing is we have to avert our eyes at some point, because it's too horrific to think about what happened after,

World War II. I mean, this idea, oh, we've defeated the Nazis, but then we turn over millions and millions of people to Joseph Stalin, Poland and the whole Eastern bloc. It's nightmarish. My mother grew up in East Germany. The evil of that regime is, it's incomprehensible, frankly, I think, to most Americans. We've been so blessed and spoiled, really, that we can't imagine that, which is why I think it's important for us to revisit this. history and if we can do it in the form of well-written novels, all the better. But of course, this does bring up where we are now. Nothing has really changed. There are plenty people either working with the Chinese or unaware of the implications for human lives, whether it's Uyghurs in death camps or in concentration camps, that we have to be honest. communists don't have the same view of the human person that Americans have had. Well, that is certainly the case here. And one must remember that the evil that you discuss, that you've brought up, goes way beyond even Yalta.

Just to give you a brief... Actually, forgive me, I didn't see the clock. David Adams, Cleveland is my guest, folks. We will be right back to let him continue that sentence. We're talking about his new book, Gods of the... deception. Tell me, Eric, why is relief factor so successful at lowering or eliminating pain? I'm often asked that question. The owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right, designed to heal. And I agree with them. So the doctors who formulated

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offer, feel the difference. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to David Adams, Cleveland, the author of a brand new book novel, gods of deception. And David, you were just making a point, and we had to cut you off. Please forgive me and go back to that point. Just to give you some idea about the depths of evil that were perpetrated by these Soviet spies in the American government, besides Alger Hiss, Alger Hiss, Al Jus, by the way, on the way back from Yalta, stopped in Moscow for one day with elements of the American delegation. And in a secret ceremony, he was taken aside by the head of Soviet intelligence and given the order of the Red Star for his contributions to Soviet intelligence.

That's just for beginners. But here's something even more astonishing that Americans need to know about the level, the depth of evil that was going on at this time. There was a Soviet spy at the upper echelons of the Treasury Department by the name of Harry Dexter White. Well, in 1941, the summer of 1941, Harry Dexter White was approached by his Soviet handler. Victor Pavlov was his name, same name as the guy that had the salivating dog, Victor Pavlov. And he wanted to meet with Harry Dexter White at Old Ebbets Grill in Washington, D.C., right off the Treasury Department.

And Pavlov says, I'm going to meet you there. I'm going to have a copy of the New Yorker with me. You'll recognize me. They'd never met before. They sit down. They have lunch. And Pavlov pushes a piece of paper across the table to Harry Dexter White. He says, I want you to read this and put it to memory.

And White picks up the paper and reads it and nods and says, yes, I understand. What that was on that piece of paper was what the Soviets called Operation Snow. It was a plan for the U.S. to ratchet up the pressure on Japan in summer of 1941. That is embargoes on oil and raw materials. with the idea of pressuring the Japanese so that instead of invading north into Siberia, where they'd been fighting with the Soviets for a number of years, that Japan would be forced to go south. That is to Pearl Harbor in the South Pacific in terms of getting their hands on oil

and metals and war materials of one kind or another. This was precisely at the time that the United, U.S. Navy was warning the Roosevelt administration that we were in no situation to fight a war in the Pacific. We didn't have the ships. We were more concerned about Germany at the time. For the next few months after that meeting with Pavlov, Harry Dexter White did everything in his power to push the U.S. to increase its sanctions on Japan, pushing and pushing and pushing, and finally pushed the Japanese military and the decision to attack at Pearl Harbor. Now, you can't say that Harry Dexter White alone was responsible for that, but having someone in the highest reaches of the American government

pushing a policy to start a war with Japan when we were not ready to do that, that just gives you an idea of how devastating solid agents at this time, the level of evil is just mind-boggling. I really don't think many people, especially Americans, because we've had it so good here, really understand evil and understand how wicked not just some people are, but somehow some administrations. What Stalin did, what others have done, it's really beyond our ability, our scope in this country, because we have been so blessed. And as I say, we're facing similar things today. I mean, evil is evil. It just takes different forms. But how many people in those days, and this gets to your book, they really didn't want to acknowledge that Alger Hiss had done anything wrong?

They just didn't want to acknowledge this and really refused to acknowledge it until very recently. I mean, when Hiss died, there were people still kind of fighting this battle. The old Stalinists, they, they. kind of never went away. It's like they have this kind of a worldview, and they've stuck to it despite everything, despite the Ukrainian famine, despite whatever it is. It's like these people were all in for communism. It's bizarre in some ways. It's a very troubling situation. I mean, Alger Hiss was considered a gentleman of the Eastern establishment. He was a new dealer. He was an old-style liberal to many people's mind. He seemed to be a paragon of the Roosevelt administration,

and people could not believe that somebody with his background, Harvard Johns Hopkins, working in the white shoe law firms before he went into government, that people couldn't believe that a guy with his credentials and background could be turned to the dark side, But more importantly, I think is probably that they didn't want to admit it. Because if they admitted that a large part of the liberal establishment in the U.S. were inveigled by the communist or by socialism or by Stalin's latest five-year plan, if any of that was acknowledged, it would kind of undermine their, their, their, their, their, ideology, their sense of self. And it's, there's no way that these 500 Soviet spies could have circulated in the U.S. government and war industries without the American Communist Party, which was 200,000 strong. I think the fascinating thing for many people, looking back on the history of this,

is that in the 50s and 60s and 70s, people thought, well, someday these guys are going to write their memoirs and we're going to find out about what really went on in the 30s and 40s and early 50s. But in fact, they all just faded away. They just faded into the woodwork and were not, heard from. So we know almost nothing really about the mindset of these people except it's gone underground and emerged today, as you thought. Well, I mean, when we think of people like Lillian Hellman, there were so many figures that were all in with style. and the communists. And I think, you know, after you have read Solzhenitsyn and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, this information comes out. And we have to have

a reckoning. But of course, we didn't have the end of history. It just goes underground and it comes up in various other forms. I don't know if you saw there was a film that came out about two years ago called Mr. Jones, directed by Ineska Holland, which really deals with the Ukrainian famine and the complicity. This is a nightmare of Walter Durante and the New York Times. He got a Pulitzer Prize. It has never been rescinded. Walter Durante of the New York Times was acting as a propaganda agent for Stalin, murdering literally millions of Ukrainians. The evil, again, It's just, was it Stalin who said at some point, you know, these numbers of deaths just becomes a statistic? It means nothing. People don't care. They go about their business. But it's a level of evil.

And the left in America has been tremendously complicit and is today complicit in this, which is why we have to understand this. So obviously, I want to talk to you about the book, Gods of Deception. So what's the general plot of this novel, Gods of Deception, with this background we've been discussing? Well, one of the things that fascinated me was how Hiss managed to assemble a defense team. Most of them were Harvard Law School guys. They were people that knew Hiss pretty well. But I mean, when the evidence started coming through, I just couldn't believe how could these guys really believe their client was innocent? as the evidence they had papers, top secret State Department papers with Hiss's handwriting on them. They had documents that have been typed on the Hiss typewriter.

It was quite clear that Hiss was guilty. So how was it that his defense team could have stood by him through all of this? So the way I worked the fictional arc of the book was having one of the main characters, be one of Hiss's defense lawyers who had actually defended him in the trial. And come 50 years later, now Edward Dimmick is known as the judge in the book, is writing his memoirs. And he enlists his grandson, who is a Princeton astrophysicist, to help him to write these memoirs.

And it's actually the grandson's exploration of what's in the memoirs and what's in the memoirs and talking to his grandfather to try to figure out what had really happened in the Alger Hiss case. And what the book exposes and describes is three generations of an American family, where the patriarch of the family had defended Aljahis and the impact of that trial and the impact of all the corners that had been cut by various participants in the trial and defenders of Alger Hiss and how that impacted one American family. We're going to go to another break. We'll be right back for the rest of the hour with David Adams.

Cleveland, the book is Gods of Deception. Don't go away. Funny, but it seems that it's the only thing to do. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed, and when oil prices go up, the cost of transportation and shipping spikes, leading the prices of goods to rise. And when we're already seeing record inflation, that's the last thing we need.

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where you still own the physical gold. They can also ship gold and precious metals safely and securely to your house. Call Legacy at 866-5281903 or visit them online at Legacypminvestments.com. Hey there, folks. We continue the conversation with author David Adams, Cleveland, The book is Gods of Deception. We've been talking about it. And David, I think what's fascinating to me is that, you know, sometimes there is evil that behaves evil, like evil.

And then there are other people that they just, they sort of, they kind of blur things. And they sort of say, well, listen, and maybe Alger Hiss technically was wrong. But it was part of a larger narrative. our enemies were worse. We had to do what we had to do. McCarthy was evil. Nixon was evil. I think that's kind of how some people reason. In other words, that you're talking about these establishment figures. Of course, we have that today all through our government. People that they're establishment figures, they think of themselves as respectable. They don't want to be seen as, you know, culture warriors. They don't want to be seen. as Cold War warriors. They want to be seen as somehow respectable. It strikes me that that's part of why some of these Ivy League educated elites

will throw in with defending somebody, whether it's Alger Hiss or, you name it today, why we will call the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation or whatever fiction needs to be put out there because somehow we believe we're on the right side and we need to do what we need to do. do. It strikes me that that's part of their thinking. I don't know if that makes sense to you. Well, it goes beyond that. Not only to people rationalize their behavior, but what actually,

the damage that is really done in the real world, in real time history, is just overwhelming. Just to give you one more example from the book, there was a Soviet spy in American Army Intelligence. This was in the years immediately after the Second World War. His name was William Weisbe. And he was in the depths of the Army intelligence. And he found out, he was aware, that U.S. Army intelligence had been. broken the Soviet military codes. That is the codes they use for the movement of men and supplies within the Soviet Union and to their proxies around the world. And he contacted his Soviet

handler and tipped off the Soviets that we had broken the Soviet military codes. This was in 48, 49. All of a sudden, the American military. in the White House went totally in the dark in terms of being able to read Soviet intentions. The Soviets then changed their military code. So what happened? It was at this period that Stalin began supplying the North Koreans with war materials, tanks, planes, fuel for an invasion of the South. We were totally blindsided by that Korean invasion of the South. We were totally blindsided by that Korean invasion of the that Stalin had signed off on. If William Weissbent had not tipped off the Soviets that we'd broken those codes, we would have known what the Soviets were up to, and we would have warned

Stalin that if a North Korean invasion of the South took place, we would respond to it militarily. That would have stopped Stalin from giving the go sign to the North Koreans. We would have prevented the Korean War. The Korean War that ended up with the death of over 30,000 American soldiers, millions of Chinese and Koreans, a devastating war. That is the result of what Sond's agents were able to achieve back in the 40s and 50s. It's, again, it's horrifying. And so why do you suppose we would be less vigilant, knowing what we now know. Today, obviously, the Chinese are the superpower that are pushing forward Marxism in the world. And we, I mean, we've been very naive about it over the decades. But then now suddenly you would think that we'd be aware of what's

going on. I mean, you talk about lack of human rights, respect for any kinds of freedom, religious liberty for the Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong and others, you would think that we would be more vigilant. But it seems to me that the left in this country, and certainly the quote-unquote moderate Republicans, they don't take this very seriously. They don't seem to think that there is such a thing as evil or that we need to be vigilant or that we have any responsibility to freedom. I don't know if you see parallels, but it's hard for me to avoid them. There are parallels of plenty. I think the most, the biggest wake-up call, of course, is Putin's invasion of the Ukraine. And Putin is an ex-KGB guy. His leadership circle are all ex-KGB. The whole operation in Ukraine is basically a KGB operation writ large. And I mean, what you see there is the use of the big lie, false flags. And, I mean, all the Ultimately, the application of brutal power when all else fails.

But I think what disturbs me most about what Putin is doing and what the Chinese are doing is that the old Marxist KGB playbook that was used in the 30s and 40s and early 50s in this country, that is divide and conquer. In other words, you identify your enemy and you start using names and you accuse them of this, that, and the next thing. If you're a Marxist, it's the bourgeoisie versus the working class. Forgive me, we're going to another break. This is a very important point. We'll explore that in our next segment talking to the author of Gods of Deception. Don't go away. When you get the blues, it only costs a dime just a nickel.

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3057. 800-978-3057. Folks, the book is Gods of Deception, the author David Adams, Cleveland, who is my guest. David, you were just making this point, and this it's an important point,

that what Marxists do, whether actual Marxists or cultural Marxists, they divide and conquer. This is part of, it's just part of what they do. And it's happening now again. It's, it's setting certain groups against other groups, and then they take advantage of that. So you were just talking about that. Yes. Identity politics, as it's been used in the last 10 years in this country,

is basically out of the Stalinist Marxist playbook. This is a classic use of turning one group against another. And it plays out whether you use the race card or you use the more of a Marxist interpretation of history of the bourgeoisie against the working class, white collar versus blue collar, all of this kind of the rich against the poor. This is basically Marxism 101 or neo-Marxism 101. And this is something that Stalin and his willing agents in the 30s and 40s were masters at. And you see it being used today in American politics. It's very sad. I think it's quite clear that America's strength is our unity as a country. And so if you get us fighting against each other, turning on one another. It weakens the body policy. It weakens the

economy. It weakens our ability to make decisions and move on. It's a very sad thing. Although, I mean, I have to say, at the risk of sounding divisive, it's the left in this country that has opened the door wide to critical race theory, to the transgender madness. I mean, it really is astonishing to me that, you know, we talk about the New York Times. You know, they let Walter Durante do this. Now they're pushing forward the 1619 project, things that are just preposterous. It's not even like there's anything to discuss, but they seem to be really at war ideologically. They care less about the details and the facts than about pushing a kind of narrative that they don't question that narrative.

So I don't know what we can do other than try to draw attention to that. I think from my standpoint, from the background of my novel, gods of deception, the Russian collusion narrative was something that absolutely reminded me of the late 30s and 40s,

how such a narrative that was just nonsense on the face of it could be pushed by people for a political reason when there was simply no rhyme or reason to it. This is something that, again, is right out of Stalin and Marx's playbook. You come up with a narrative. You see Putin doing it in the Ukraine when he accused the Ukrainians of being Nazis and that he was just going in there to take care of Nazis. I think it's that kind of lie, that kind of false flag,

and the application of brutal power when all else fails. But I'm never surprised if somebody like Putin does it, but when our people do it, when you have generals, Millius, when you have people in our state department, in our FBI, in our CIA, signing a letter, saying the Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation, it's a satanic lie. There's not even any truth in it. It's the most brazen kind of lie.

And what you're doing, you're not just lying, but you're undermining the very idea of truth in the culture, because people no longer know what to believe. And I just have to say, you know, again, I can't speak for Putin. I sort of expect that from Putin or the head of China, but I don't expect it from people in America. And that's when I realize that these people are so wedded to a narrative that they will literally say anything and do anything. Also, I think, gambling that they're not going to be prosecuted. They're not going to be whatever it has cost us. They're not going to pay that price.

Well, I think narratives like that, there's a long history in this country. And one of them is about the Rosenbergs, the Rosenbergs who were convicted of pounds, passing atomic bomb secrets to Stalin and the Soviet Union. A lot of people, just like in the Algeris trial, were convinced that the Rosenbergs had been framed and maybe it really didn't matter what they did. But in fact, the passing of those atom bomb secrets to Stalin in the 40s was instrumental, again, in the outbreak of the Korean War, because Stalin made it very clear. that once he had tested an atom bomb in 1949, years and years ahead of what they would have been able to do without the secrets from Los Alamos, once he had the atom bomb in hand, he felt emboldened to go ahead in Korea.

And he let the North Korean leadership know that. If he had not had the atom bomb facilitated by the Rosenbergs, the Korean War would not have happened. And yet there were people in this country probably still to this day that believe in the Rosenberg's innocence and that what they did really didn't matter. Well, it did matter. It resulted in the deaths of millions and millions of people. Well, it's just astonishing. We've just got a minute left in this segment and then a final segment. But tell us more about the novel gods of deception. Tell us more.

What led you decide to write a novel about this? There's a question. Well, it's a big subject, Alger Hiss. And I was looking for a way to kind of put a human face on it or a number of human faces on it. And I wanted a way to show how the Alger Hiss case played out over time. So the way that I've found to do this was to use three generations of an American family, where the patriarch of the family was a defender of Algerhist. And the real question in the book was, as any good defense lawyer, we always are wondering, do they know that their client is guilty, or are they just playing by the rulebook and defending their client at any cost in any way they can because that's their job?

So I had three generations of an American family with the impact of the patriarch and his defense of Alger Hiss being. the starting place. We're going to go to another break. Final segment coming up with the author of a brand new novel. Well reviewed. It's called Gods of Deception. Folks, I'm talking to David Adams, Cleveland, the author of Gods of Deception and novel. I just want to ask you, when did you know that this was your thing?

Fiction is not so easy to do. Well, from an historical standpoint, there were some things that entreat me about the Alger Hiss trial. What was most intriguing was the unexplained deaths that surrounded the trial. These were people that could have been called as witnesses in the Alger Hiss trial. And there was a bad habit these people had a falling out windows to their deaths. There were a whole bunch of unexplained deaths. There was Lawrence Duggan, who was a State Department colleague of Alger Hiss who fell out of the 16th story floor on 45th Street to his death. There was Harry Dexter White, I mentioned, who was in

Treasury, who died suddenly at his home in New Hampshire of a heart attack, looked like an overdose of digitalis. There was another colleague in the Justice Department of Alger Hiss, Marvin Smith, who died in a six-story fall inside the Justice Department. There was Noel Field, another State Department colleague of Alger Hiss, who disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. There were all kinds of incidents like this that were remarked on their time, in their time. Drew Pearson wrote columns about the disappearance, the deaths of these people involved with the Alger Hiss trial. And to anyone looking back, it looks very much like the KGB specialty was disappearing witnesses that would have convicted Al Jus.

So this was something that I really wanted to get at in my fiction. But it could have been a natural outbreak of de-fenestration, you know, just one of those medical freaks. The narrative in America, the narrative on the left, the narrative in Hollywood, there haven't been many films, if any, made about this. I mean, I don't think of anything more central to the American story than the story that you're telling than this episode.

but Hollywood, really, they make a million stories about Dalton Trumbo and that kind of thing, but they don't seem to care about this. Well, the most important person, perhaps, in the Algeist trial, of course, was Whitaker Chambers, who had been his Soviet handler, who was his accuser, and who bore witness in the trial to years and years being a friend and colleague and Soviet operative with Aljahis and his wife, Priscilla Hiss. In the trial, Whitaker Chambers was absolutely disparaged by the Alger Hiss defense. He was accused of everything under the sun from being a pederast to a crazy guy, to vindictive vendetta against Hiss.

And Whitaker Chambers actually wrote one of the most profound books in American history called Witness, which is not just witness to his days as a Soviet agent handling Alger Hiss, but to the whole problem of the U.S. political life and how it had been turned. by the left and by the communes. Well, the shock is that very little has changed in all these years. David Adams, Cleveland, congratulations on the book, Gods of Deception. And thank you for your time today. Hey, folks, Eric Mattaxas here.

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