The Barghoorn Affair

 

Now forgotten, Yale Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn was front-page news in the middle of November, 1963, after being released from a Soviet prison. A scholar in the field of political science whose specialty was Sovietology, he had been participating in a government-sponsored cultural exchange trip to the Soviet Union, where he was arrested and charged with espionage. “It was President Kennedy’s concern for Barghoorn that brought the Russians around to turning him loose,” the Daily News reported. “But they refused to back down from their charge – a charge denied by the President – that he spied on them during his visit to the Soviet Union on a tourist visa.“ Soviet authorities continued to insist that “they had enough evidence to bring him to trial.” [1]

Barghoorn’s 1991 obituary in The New York Times gives this account of the incident:

A well-known scholar on the Soviet Union, Mr. Barghoorn was seized in 1963 as he was completing a trip in that country made to conduct interviews for a book.

As he later recalled, he arrived in front of the Metropole Hotel when a stranger walked up and handed him a roll of papers. Before he could examine them, Soviet officers instantly appeared, clapped on handcuffs and whisked him off to Lubyanka prison. He was held incommunicado for days. When word of his arrest got out, American diplomats protested and demonstrations were held at Yale and elsewhere.

President Kennedy, in what would be his last White House news conference, denounced the action as “unjustified”. He declared that Mr. Barghoorn “was not on any intelligence mission of any kind” and called the detention “a very serious matter”. The President said American relations with the Soviet Union were “greatly damaged” and warned that impending wheat sales were jeopardized. [2]

US-Soviet relations had been on the mend until late October, when suspected Russian spies in the US were arrested, with observers at the time of the Barghoorn affair speculating that the professor had been framed in retaliation:

Authorities in Moscow, the theory is, decided to arrest an American immediately after the FBI arrested a Russian chauffeur [Igor A. Ivanov] and an American electronics engineer [John W. Butenko] on Oct. 29 on spy conspiracy charges. Two Soviet diplomats also were seized. They have diplomatic immunity, were released and expelled. [3]

A delegation of Soviet writers and scientists arriving in America “at the height of the Barghoorn furor” were given a “cold-shoulder treatment” by the US State Department, with US-Soviet relations “so severely chilled […] there could be no immediate recovery,” wrote Michael O’Neill of the Daily News in an article toughly titled “OK, Ivan, We’ll Talk Culture … But Later” [4]. The Barghoorn affair is particularly noteworthy for occupying the headlines with US-Soviet friction in the days leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy, officially pinned on Lee Harvey Oswald, who purported to be a Castro-supporting Marxist fanatic who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. “Tit-for-Tat Russians Call Yale Prof a Spy” reads an item on the incident in the November 22 issue of Life, which, interestingly, also allows for some ambiguity: “Whether or not Barghoorn was really a spy, his presence and his reputation […] provided the Soviets with bargaining material to get their agents back in a ‘spy-for-a-spy’ swap that is becoming an international game.” [5]

Washington Times columnist and anti-communist ideologue Arnold Beichman offered a much more colorful rendering of the Barghoorn story in 1986:

Something had to be done by the Soviet secret police to save their non-immune agent [i.e., Igor Ivanov] from going to jail. Vladimir Ye. Semichastny, KGB chairman from 1961 to 1967, went to Leonid Brezhnev (Mr. Khrushchev was out of town) on Oct. 31 and got permission to frame, yes, frame as a US spy Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn, Yale University political scientist and a leading Sovietologist, who happened to be visiting Moscow. By arresting Mr. Barghoorn, the Soviets could then offer an honorable exchange of prisoners, one innocent American academician for one Chekist […]

According to John Barron, a senior editor at Reader’s Digest [and naval intelligence veteran] who is regarded as our leading authority on the KGB, the Soviet police on this same tour had already drugged Mr. Barghoorn’s coffee while he was visiting Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. He became so ill that he had to be hospitalized. The KGB gave him the Mickey Finn so Mr. Barghoorn’s clothes, baggage, and notes could be searched. They found nothing incriminating.

So Mr. Barghoorn on his last night in Moscow is driven in the US ambassador’s car back to his hotel from a farewell drink with Walter Stoessel, then the charge d’affaires. As he enters the hotel, someone shoves a bunch of papers into Mr. Barghoorn’s hands and runs away. The papers, concocted by the KGB disinformation department, ostensibly contain data about Soviet air defenses. The KGB pounces on Mr. Barghoorn and drags him off to a cell in the infamous Lubyanka Prison with a copy of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy for light reading. […]

According to Mr. Barron, Mr. Khrushchev didn’t at all mind the frameup by Mr. Semichastny. After all it’s standard Soviet operating procedure.

What Mr. Khrushchev supposedly minded was that KGB Chairman Semichastny hadn’t known that Mr. Barghoorn was a friend of JFK and that the president would make it an embarrassing personal issue. [6]

That Barghoorn could have made himself useful to the Central Intelligence Agency is not implausible, Yale’s relationship with the Agency being no secret, as the Yale Daily News freely acknowledges:

[…] it has historically proven to be a popular career choice for many Yale graduates, most notably former President George H.W. Bush ’48 and legendary operatives William Bundy ’39 and James Jesus Angleton ’41. […]

A number of Yale graduates have worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor. They dominated the CIA’s leadership throughout the Cold War period and continue to join the agency in large numbers, said Diplomat-in-Residence Charles Hill […] [7]

Also participating in the cultural exchange group to which Professor Barghoorn had been attached was literary celebrity John Steinbeck, whose 1942 play The Moon Is Down received its Moscow premiere in conjunction with the 1963 junket. The author, despite “the hospitality heaped upon him” by the Russians, thundered that the door to US-Soviet cultural exchanges had been “slammed shut” [8]. “I don’t know why they arrested him,” Steinbeck declared. “They should have arrested me. I don’t know what espionage is,” he lied. “But I have asked more questions and covered more country.” [9] Steinbeck, as would be revealed decades after his death, had been an asset of the Central Intelligence Agency since at least the early 1950s, and possibly earlier [10]. Brian Kannard, author of Steinbeck: Citizen Spy, notes that the writer “was still working with the CIA” during the period of the cultural exchange program, adding that “there are indications of CIA fingers in the 1963 Russian trip”, with related material in Steinbeck’s FBI file having been redacted by the CIA [11].

Steinbeck’s enthusiasm for Kennedy’s successor and his support for escalation of American military intervention in Vietnam are, perhaps, also deserving of mention:

Although Elaine Steinbeck, John’s wife, and Lady Bird Johnson had known each other years earlier when they both attended the University of Texas, the President and the Nobel Prize-winning author first met in late 1963 when the Steinbecks attended a private dinner at the White House. At that time, the couple had just returned from a trip to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that was part of the US Information Agency’s cultural exchange program and were in Washington, DC, for three days of debriefing by the State Department. The dinner at the White House was their opportunity to report directly to the President on their travels behind the Iron Curtain.

Following the dinner, a warm relationship developed between the two couples. In the summer of 1964, Steinbeck helped Johnson write his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination. In September of that year, LBJ conferred upon Steinbeck the Medal of Freedom. Throughout the Johnson administration, the Steinbecks were frequent overnight guests at the White House […] [12]

1966: President Lyndon Johnson (right) meets with author John Steinbeck (center) and his son, John Steinbeck IV, who served as a war correspondent for the US Department of Defense.

Seymour Freidin, a journalist who in 1977 would admit to having had a “relationship” with the CIA [13], reminded the public about the Barghoorn case in an October 1964 article aimed at sustaining suspicions that the KGB had a hand in the Kennedy assassination and thereby discouraging curiosity about the possibility of a domestic conspiracy. Under the headline “Soviet KGB Link Traced (Faintly) to Barghoorn, Oswald”, Freidin insinuates that the Barghoorn arrest and the president’s murder might have resulted from internecine Kremlin strife and plots of “a truly invisible regime” of KGB hardliners “maneuvering clandestinely” to undermine friendly relations between Kennedy and Khrushchev [14].

Was Barghoorn, as some claimed, an innocent man caught up in a Soviet prisoner-swap scheme, or was he performing an intelligence function? Did Steinbeck, who boasted, “They should have arrested me”, play a part in an intelligence game through the USIA’s cultural exchange program, and is it possible that the writer was somehow complicit in the series of events that led to Barghoorn’s brief imprisonment? Is it impossible that the CIA itself orchestrated the Barghoorn incident to exacerbate US-Soviet tensions in the days preceding the Kennedy assassination and complement the spinning of the Oswald mythos? The Barghoorn affair, in the harried professor’s own unsatisfying assessment, was “inexplicable and mysterious.” [15]

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] “Freed by Reds, Prof in Today”. Sunday News (November 17, 1963), p. 2.

[2] Lambert, Bruce. “Frederick Barghoorn, 80, Scholar Detained in Soviet Union in 1963”. The New York Times (November 26, 1991): https://archive.ph/TfAQM

[3] “Capital Relieved by Soviet Action”. The Pensacola News-Journal (November 17, 1963), p. 4A.

[4] O’Neill, Michael. “OK, Ivan, We’ll Talk Culture … But Later”. Sunday News (November 17, 1963), p. 2.

[5] “Tit-for-Tat Russians Call Yale Prof a Spy”. Life (November 22, 1963), p. 49.

[6] Beichman, Arnold. “Plenty of Frame-Up Practice”. Washington Times (September 5, 1986): https://archive.ph/ZZfX6

[7] Post, Julie. “For God, Country, Yale and the CIA”. Yale Daily News (September 24, 2004): https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2004/09/24/for-god-country-yale-and-the-cia/

[8] “Bitter Steinbeck Sours on Soviet Hospitality”. The Charlotte Observer (November 15, 1963), p. 1-A.

[9] Ibid., p. 2-A.

[10] Kannard, Brian. “Did John Steinbeck Work as a Citizen Spy for the CIA?” Steinbeck Now (October 4, 2013): http://www.steinbecknow.com/2013/10/04/john-steinbeck-citizen-spy-cia/

[11] Kannard, Brian. Steinbeck: Citizen Spy: The Untold Story of John Steinbeck and the CIA. Nashville, TN: Grave Distractions Publications, 2013, p. 268.

[12] https://archive.ph/DQv9e

[13] “Seymour Freidin”. Orlando Sentinel (April 17, 1991): https://archive.ph/DrNzS

[14] Freidin, Seymour. “Soviet KGB Link Traced (Faintly) to Barghoorn, Oswald”. The Boston Globe (October 12, 1964), p. 40.

[15] Lambert, Bruce. “Frederick Barghoorn, 80, Scholar Detained in Soviet Union in 1963”. The New York Times (November 26, 1991): https://archive.ph/TfAQM