Codename CROOK – how a leading “anti-nazi” spied for Moscow

FBI files uploaded last week to the Bureau’s online archive include details about the strange career of US Congressman Sam Dickstein, one of the leading Jews in American politics during the 1930s and 1940s, who is now known to have been a paid agent of Moscow.

Dickstein led a campaign against German-Americans during the 1930s whom he accused of being “nazi agents”. He then became one of the first to amplify propagandist stories about the supposed mass murder of Jews in German camps (allegations which later became known as the “Holocaust”). And during the 1930s and 1940s he took the lead in promoting increased Jewish immigration into the United States, while condemning British policies in Palestine.

As part of these efforts, as early as spring 1939 (long before most “Holocaust” propaganda had begun) Dickstein held congressional hearings where he questioned the American journalist Quentin Reynolds about his reporting from Germany. He asked Reynolds: “Do you contemplate that there will be another pogrom?”

Reynolds replied: “I not only contemplate it, but I am confident the complete pogrom is not very far away.”

Dickstein asked again: “In other words, there will be a new slaughter?”

Reynolds replied: “Yes, there is no doubt about that.”

Dickstein interjected: “Annihilation!”

Reynolds replied: “Yes, a complete pogrom.”

This testimony instigated by Dickstein in the US Congress qualifies as one of the first examples of Holocaustian propaganda, in which Jews and their allies had advanced from complaining about persecution to speaking about “Annihilation!”

Yet it’s now known that at the very time of this testimony, Dickstein himself was a paid agent of the Kremlin’s intelligence service NKVD (later known as the KGB). He was so greedy in his demands for payment that his Soviet handlers privately referred to him by the codename ZHULIK (“Crook”). The story of Dickstein’s services to Moscow was first revealed in the 1990s, during the brief period when certain files in the KGB’s archive became available to Western researchers.

Most of the FBI’s less informative Dickstein file was released under the US Freedom of Information Act in 2015, and it was published on the FBI website last week.

Son of a Rabbi, the future politician came to the USA with his family as a two-year-old in 1887 having been born in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Dicksteins settled in a Jewish district of New York, and like many of his co-religionists the young Sam Dickstein attended New York’s City College and later Law School, joining the Hyman & Gross law firm in 1908.

As a young politician working his way up New York’s Democratic Party machine, Dickstein was a strong advocate of US entry into the First World War, and partly because of this pro-war record he won election to the New York State Assembly in 1919 and the US Congress in 1922. He soon established a specialism in immigration issues – both in promoting the interests of Jews and in opposing non-Jewish Germans – and acquired the influential post of Chairman of the House of Representatives’ Immigration Committee.

In the early 1930s (at the instigation of Jewish lobby groups) Dickstein began pushing for investigation into “anti-semitism” and argued that those who opposed the activities of organised Jewry were “nazi agents”. Most famously, in 1934 he introduced a congressional resolution to establish a Special Committee on “Un-American Activities”, specifically to witch-hunt “nazi propaganda” spread by “foreign subversives”.

At the same time Dickstein himself was profiting from a lucrative sideline in selling his influence to prospective Jewish immigrants. In 1939 the FBI received information that Dickstein was “running a very large racket which is, in substance, that he claims to be able to help Jewish refugees obtain admittance into this country. His fee for this ‘assistance’ is $1,000 per person.”

(The author of this blog is aware of parallel rackets in Britain, which were organised to help fund illegal Zionist intelligence operations and were run by a ‘British’ lawyer who was formerly private secretary to Zionist leader and future Israeli President Chaim Weizmann. Further details on this Anglo-Jewish enterprise will be published later this year.)

In 1937 Soviet intelligence discovered Dickstein’s racket after one of its operatives from Austria – a Jew named Leo Helfgott – paid the congressman his standard $1,000 fee to obtain a permanent residence visa in the USA. The NKVD’s senior New York officer Gaik Ovakimyan sent a report to Moscow that Congressman Dickstein was “heading a criminal gang that was involved in shady businesses, selling passports, illegal smuggling of people, and getting them citizenship”.

A few months earlier Dickstein had approached the Soviet Ambassador in Washington offering to sell information about an anti-communist exile, and after some consideration (and learning of his pattern of corrupt behaviour) Stalin’s spy chief Nikolai Yezhov, known as the “Bloody Dwarf”, personally approved Dickstein’s recruitment on a monthly stipend of $1,250. In return Dickstein agreed to “get for us documentary materials about fascist work – both from the government organs and private [i.e. Jewish] intelligence organisations he is connected with.”

These “fascists” whom Dickstein agreed to betray included exiled Ukrainian nationalists.

As with several other Jewish agents, the NKVD was often unsure whether Dickstein was a genuine agent, or as one NKVD officer described him in June 1939 “a complete racketeer and blackmailer” and “a very clever snake”. During that year (acting on the NKVD’s behalf) Dickstein carried out numerous efforts to discredit and harass the important Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, who was found shot dead in a Washington hotel room in 1941.

One NKVD/KGB document records: “We intend through CROOK [Dickstein] to sound out the possibilities of arranging, with his participation, the deportation to our country on our instructions of White Guard and Trotskyist elements who are living in this country [i.e. the USA] and could be of operational interest to us.”

However in 1940 it seems that the NKVD ended their payments to Dickstein, perhaps suspecting that he was more loyal to his own financial interests than to the Kremlin.

Beginning in 1941-1942 Dickstein lent his support to one of the main Zionist propaganda efforts – the Committee for a Jewish Army. This was designed to put pressure on the British government to create a specifically Jewish fighting force – not because Jews were especially keen to be fighting on the front line, but because having a explicitly defined Jewish Army fighting on the Allied side would allow Jews a seat at the postwar negotiating table and greatly strengthen their claim for a Jewish state in Palestine.

It was of course for this reason that the British Foreign Office was very hostile to the idea of a Jewish Army, and regularly restrained Winston Churchill from endorsing it. Early versions of ‘Holocaust’ propaganda were closely connected with the lobbying campaign for a Jewish Army. In 1944 Dickstein was one of numerous politicians who signed the proclamation of the American League for a Free Palestine, which denounced “the calculated extermination of the ancient Jewish people by the barbarous Nazis” and again demanded a specifically Jewish army, linked to demands for a Zionist state. He addressed meetings in New York attacking America’s supposed ally Great Britain for its “closed door” policy to Jews wishing to enter Palestine.

At the same time Dickstein served on the executive committee of the main outlet for “Holocaust” propaganda in the USA – the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. This committee’s organiser was Peter Bergson, who was also the main American representative of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, raising funds and arms for this brutal gang which was responsible for numerous bomb attacks and atrocities against both British and Palestinian targets.

As with many Jewish-Americans (and perhaps reflecting the instructions of his friends in Moscow) Congressman Dickstein was keen to make trouble for his supposed British allies even before the war’s end. For example, when the famous British actor and songwriter Noel Coward was reported as saying that he was “less impressed by some of the mournful little Brooklyn boys lying there in tears amid the alien corn with nothing worse than a bullet wound in the leg or a fractured arm”, Dickstein threatened to use his congressional influence to have Coward declared persona non grata in the USA.

In June 1944 Dickstein introduced a congressional resolution as part of efforts to make “anti-semitism” a crime in the USA, punishable by imprisonment.

And as the end of the war approached, Dickstein was one of the strongest supporters of the idea of “war crimes trials”. It was far from certain that what eventually became the Nuremberg Trial would be instituted, because legal experts and senior officials in the US State Department and the British Foreign Office had grave doubts about the wisdom of a vindictive and propagandist “victors’ justice”. Dickstein was among the leading supporters of the main American advocate of such trials, the former ambassador Herbert Pell.

In 1946 Dickstein left Congress to become a judge of the New York Supreme Court, and was still serving in this role when he died in 1954.

Despite his earlier “anti-nazi” activities, Dickstein had no qualms about entering into a corrupt business relationship with a “right-wing” Italian-American businessman closely tied to the Mafia. This was Generoso Pope, head of what was at the time the largest sand and gravel company in the world. Pope bribed Dickstein to obtain favourable rulings in immigration cases. (His son Generoso Pope, Jr., owned the notorious magazine National Enquirer, famous for its bizarre conspiracy theories and invented tales about celebrities.) The Dickstein-Pope relationship is an example of the way that corrupt Zionists have been happy to work with the political “right” as well as the “left”.

In addition to his work for Moscow, the FBI learned in 1951 that Dickstein had taken bribes from two crooked businessman, Murray Garsson and Henry Garsson. These London-born Jewish brothers had been convicted in 1947 of conspiracy to defraud the US Government in connection with various munitions contracts. Mortar shells produced by the Garsson brothers had defective fuses, resulting in numerous premature explosions and the deaths of 38 American soldiers.

A well-placed Washington source informed the FBI that if all the facts about Dickstein’s involvement with the Garsson brothers became known, the congressman would end up either in jail or in the grave. His meaning might be deduced from the circumstances of Murray Garsson’s death: the fraudster either fell or was pushed down a staircase in March 1957, bashing his brains out.

For much of his career as a Soviet agent, Dickstein was protected by the fact that he had set out to flatter and win over FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, helped further by the fact that Dickstein’s own brother Abraham worked as an FBI officer (i.e. as what the Bureau confusingly terms a “Special Agent”) from 1934-1944.

Eventually, the FBI had no choice but to recognise the depth of Dickstein’s perfidy. But to this day the traitor remains honoured by having part of New York named after him.

Samuel Dickstein Plaza, off Broadway in southern Manhattan, is named after this corrupt Jewish politician and Soviet agent, who made his career from lies and selling political influence. A true American hero.