Peter W. Klein: My Father's Red Scare
[Peter W. Klein is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.]
THIS week the United States government will begin automatically declassifying hundreds of millions of documents from the cold war, under a law meant to streamline the cost and hassle of keeping secret files that are more than 25 years old. Among the dossiers bearing names like Alger Hiss, Theodore Hall and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg will be one labeled “Frigyes Klein”: my father, Fred Klein.
My father was never a spy, never a member of the Communist Party. He came by ship to the United States in 1956, fleeing Communism during the Hungarian revolution to pursue the American dream. He worked on a Ford automobile assembly line in Cincinnati by day and moonlighted sharpening lawnmowers at night, saving enough money in a few years to buy a small house. To him, treasonous behavior meant buying a car made outside of America. Nonetheless, as I discovered recently, the F.B.I. kept a file on him from the day he arrived in the United States....
My father once mentioned that during the voyage over, he got into an altercation with another refugee, a man he didn’t know from a town he had never visited. According to the file, this man told an Army captain that my father had been an agent for AVO — the Hungarian K.G.B. — in his town of Tatabanya, that he had interrogated and beaten the man for speaking out against the regime, and that he’d subsequently sent the man to a prison camp. The story was a complete fabrication.
I can only imagine how many names of patriotic, law-abiding Eastern European immigrants like my father are to be found in the millions of documents being released by the F.B.I. and other agencies. In a recent article in this newspaper about the declassification law, L. Britt Snider, a former intelligence official who is advising the White House on the process, warned that most of the documents were boring and suggested that the agencies concentrate first on those that were interesting and important.
But I would caution intelligence officials not to discount both the interest and the importance of files like my father’s, if only to avoid repeating some of the embarrassing legacies of the cold-war era....
Read entire article at NYT
THIS week the United States government will begin automatically declassifying hundreds of millions of documents from the cold war, under a law meant to streamline the cost and hassle of keeping secret files that are more than 25 years old. Among the dossiers bearing names like Alger Hiss, Theodore Hall and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg will be one labeled “Frigyes Klein”: my father, Fred Klein.
My father was never a spy, never a member of the Communist Party. He came by ship to the United States in 1956, fleeing Communism during the Hungarian revolution to pursue the American dream. He worked on a Ford automobile assembly line in Cincinnati by day and moonlighted sharpening lawnmowers at night, saving enough money in a few years to buy a small house. To him, treasonous behavior meant buying a car made outside of America. Nonetheless, as I discovered recently, the F.B.I. kept a file on him from the day he arrived in the United States....
My father once mentioned that during the voyage over, he got into an altercation with another refugee, a man he didn’t know from a town he had never visited. According to the file, this man told an Army captain that my father had been an agent for AVO — the Hungarian K.G.B. — in his town of Tatabanya, that he had interrogated and beaten the man for speaking out against the regime, and that he’d subsequently sent the man to a prison camp. The story was a complete fabrication.
I can only imagine how many names of patriotic, law-abiding Eastern European immigrants like my father are to be found in the millions of documents being released by the F.B.I. and other agencies. In a recent article in this newspaper about the declassification law, L. Britt Snider, a former intelligence official who is advising the White House on the process, warned that most of the documents were boring and suggested that the agencies concentrate first on those that were interesting and important.
But I would caution intelligence officials not to discount both the interest and the importance of files like my father’s, if only to avoid repeating some of the embarrassing legacies of the cold-war era....