"Victim of McCarthyism" was Soviet Spy

Cedric Belfrage never made it to the big leagues like Alger Hiss, but even though the evidence had been clear all along, the left stood in his corner, as it stood in the corner of the other Soviet fellow travelers.

Here's the evasive obituary the New York Times wrote for him.

Cedric H. Belfrage, an author, editor and translator who was deported from the United States to his native Britain in 1955 after refusing to tell Congressional investigators whether he had ever been a Communist, died yesterday at his home in Cuernavaca, Mexico...

A self-proclaimed ''independent radical,'' Mr. Belfrage was the editor and co-owner, with James Aronson, of The National Guardian weekly newspaper when he was deported...

In 1973, he was permitted to visit the United States for a monthlong tour to promote his book ''The American Inquisition,'' published by Bobbs-Merrill. The book described what he called ''massive'' assaults on the Bill of Rights from 1945 to 1960.

A few things were left out. Belfrage wasn't just a Communist, he was a Communist spy. And the National Guard promoted the Party line. The Brits covered for him, but the final evidence is in.

Newly declassified British intelligence files have revealed the identity of a spy who passed military secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II.

The files, which were released on Friday by the British internal security service MI5, reveal that author and journalist Cedric Belfrage passed highly sensitive information to Russian operatives during World War II, when he was employed as a New York-based assistant to William Stephenson, the most senior British intelligence agent operating in the Western Hemisphere.

According to the files, among the documents Belfrage handed over to the Soviets were summaries of briefings with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Christopher Andrew, the former official historian of MI5, told the Financial Times that between 1942 and 1943, Soviet intelligence valued Belfrage more highly than his more famous counterpart, Kim Philby.

Why a Communist party member was ever allowed to hold such a position is part of the reason why the whole thing had to be hushed up. And so Belfrage got away with it and then came back to whine about the "American Inquisition".

The American Inquisition 1945-1960: A Profile of the "McCarthy Era." was subsidized by the NEA, because subsidizing enemy spies and traitors spewing anti-American propaganda on behalf of the Communists is the sort of thing it did.

Belfrage's work is still used as a resource by academics despite the extensive evidence that he was a Soviet spy. The last of that evidence is in now. If liberals were at all honest, it would bury his place on the curriculum. But it won't.

While Belfrage and other enemy agents whined about being persecuted, the Communist regime he was serving was engaging in true persecution, which didn't involve losing lucrative screenwriting gigs, but firing squads and gulags. The left has turned Communist agents like Belfrage into heroes while suppressing those murdered by their comrades in the Motherland of Socialism.