From this evidence West presents ( emails, conflicting stories from witnesses ) it does appear the Hopkins was indeed Agent 19, Political Chick. I looked this up this morning. Note the email dialogue. This looks like a cover up.
The Death of the Grown-Up | Diana West > Home - Warning: Historians at WorkThen Radosh went farther still.
He describes a dramatic scene at a gathering of espionage experts and authors he, Radosh, in part presided over at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC in 2009. Among the assembly were M. Stanton Evans, John Earl Haynes, Harvard's Mark Kramer, Eduard Mark (d. 2009) Herbert Romerstein (d. 2013), and Alexander Vassiliev.
In this company, Radosh writes, Mark “publicly” recanted his 1998 findings that identified Hopkins as “19.”
Radosh:
At a conference on Soviet espionage held a week before his untimely death, West’s source, Eduard Mark, publicly stated that he now acknowledged that Harry Hopkins was not Agent 19, and that the conclusion he had reached in his 1998 article was false.”
In Part Two of The Rebuttal, I flag a discrepancy in the record. I compare Radosh's August 7, 2013 statement -- Mark recanted his thesis -- with what he wrote me in an email two months earlier on June 13, 2013.
Addressing the same topic -- Hopkins/"19" vs. Duggan/"19" -- Radosh wrote me:
Were Mark still alive, I’m certain he would have conceded the point.”
What was that again?
Were Mark still alive, I'm certain he would have conceded the point.
On August 7, 2013, Radosh describes Mark's public recantation of his thesis in 2009. Mark died the following week.
But in June 13, 2013, Radosh is speculating that "were Mark still alive," he would have recanted his thesis.
Both statements cannot be true.
Here is the full email of June 13, 2013:
Diana,
Re what Bostom says about Hopkins is wrong, and if it is from your book, it is also incorrect.
Here's what John Haynes just e-mailed me:
"Ed Mark was wrong about 19. Harvey and I always treated 19 as unknown. Mark was sure he an eliminated all of the possibilities and Hopkins was the the last man standing. I disagreed with him and told him he was putting too much faith in his analysis of who was at various Trident conference social events. I thought he might be right but that the evidence was just too thin to reach a conclusion, even a tentative one. This was prior to AV's notebooks [Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks of hand-copied KGB cables]. When AV's notebooks came out, 19 was repeatedly identified as Laurence Duggan."
The Vassiliev papers show conclusively that Larry Duggan was 19, not Hopkins. So while Hopkins might have been pro-Soviet, as others were, and naive and a fellow-traveler, he was not an agent.
One has to be meticulous and careful when making charges, and very careful about consulting the most authoritative sources. Were Mark still alive, I'm certain he would have conceded the point. He was a careful scholar for the most part.
Ron
It's hard not to linger a little over the undercutting tone of that final enconium to Mark, but the fact remains that as of June 13, 2013, Radosh and John Earl Haynes both are writing as if Mark's 1998 thesis is still intact. In other words, there is not any indication, not a whisper, about Marks' 2009 before-death public recantation that Radosh reports in his August review.
It is also worth pointing out that Haynes similarly treated the Mark thesis as current in a January 2013 essay he posted here. In this essay, Haynes argues that “19” was Laurence Duggan, not Harry Hopkins as Mark's 1998 paper argued. Discussing Mark, Haynes wrote: “But on the matter of Venona 812 he and I disagreed.”
Note that he didn’t say, “On the matter of Venona 812, he and I disagreed until Mark publicly recanted his paper’s findings in 2009.”
I asked John Earl Haynes for any further information he could offer about what transpired at the 2009 conference. Here is an excerpt from his August 16 email. (Full email exchange below.)
At the symposium Ed did mention briefly in one of the Q&A sessions that he no longer held to his view that "19" was Hopkins. cont reading on link to see email dialogue which exposes a cover up.
______________________
It is very suspicious that Eduard Mark dies suddenly only one week after he allegedly recanted on his own findings about Hopkins being "19" at a meeting with men who offer different versions of what happened. It looks like Eduard was murdered which would prove he was right. It also proves Political Chick is right! Good job!
Question! Are Americans so gullible as to believe that a man who stood by his findings since 1998 would suddenly change his mind before a few people in 2009 for absolutely no reason and then die a week later unexpectedly? The Communists are certainly hoping we are!