Charles Kramer

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Charles Kramer, originally Charles Krevisky, was an American economist who worked for FDR as part of his brain trust. His family lost everything in the Depression as a result of his youngest brother's illness. Kramer was forced to quit medical school and go to work. Among other contributions, he wrote the original idea for the Point Four Program. He worked for several congressional committees and hired Lyndon B. Johnson for his first federal job. He was accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union, but no charges were brought against Kramer and he never served time in jail. Never an admitted member of the CPUSA, he did sympathize with views that favored the working class.

Evidence of Kramer's membership in the CPUSA and his contacts with known Soviet agents comes from several sources: the direct testimony of Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, Lee Pressman, and Nathaniel Weyl; the Venona decrypts; and the Moscow archives of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

Fellow members of the CPUSA underground allegedly assisted him in obtaining all his jobs. John Abt hired him for the Senate Civil Liberties Subcommittee (the LaFollette Committee). Nathan Witt helped him get a job within the Department of Labor National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) before World War II. Victor Perlo signed Kramer's job performance rating at the Office of Price Administration (OPA) during the war and was listed as a job reference. Kramer took time off in 1944 to work for the Democratic National Committee and in 1946 to assist the reelection campaign of California Democratic representative Ellis Patterson, who worked with the CPUSA since the 1930s. Kramer also worked for the United States Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization (the Kilgore Committee[1]) and the Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education during the war; and the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee after the war.

Kramer is supposed to have provided information to the Soviets from his position as staff member of the Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization on a dispute among American policy makers concerning the Comité National Français, or Free French National Committee of Charles de Gaulle and an internal U.S. government investigation of German corporate links to American companies. Kramer also passed information from the Democratic National Committee about President Truman's likely appointments in the State Department and views of Truman by various Senators.

The Venona decrypts from 1945 suggest that Kramer was an unwilling source. His contacts with Anatoli Gorsky, the legal Rezident, provided little information beyond what could be obtained from a newspaper article or overheard at a Washington D.C. restaurant.

[edit] Venona

Kramer is referred to in Soviet intelligence intercepts and the Venona files as "Plumb", "Lot" and "Mole". Kramer is referenced in the following decrypts:

• 588 KGB New York to Moscow, 29 April 1944
• 687 KGB New York to Moscow, 13 May 1944
• 1015 KGB New York to Moscow, 22 July 1944
• 1163 KGB New York to Moscow, 15 August 1944

"Mole"'s reporting and Kramer's contemporaneous activity concur in an extremely tight fashion, although NSA and FBI analysts list code name "Mole" as "unidentified". "Mole" is used as a code name only after "Plumb", Kramer's previous identified cover name is no longer used in Venona transcripts.

• 3612 KGB Washington to Moscow, 22 June 1945
• 3640 KGB Washington to Moscow, 23 June 1945
• 3655 KGB Washington to Moscow, 25 June 1945
• 3706 KGB Washington to Moscow, 29 June 1945
• 3709 KGB Washington to Moscow, 29 June 1945
• 3710 KGB Washington to Moscow, 29 June 1945

[edit] Sources

• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press
• Charles Kramer testimony, 6 May 1953, “Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments,” Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 83d Cong., 1st sess., part 6, 327–381.
• Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 271–272, 403.
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era, New York: Random House, (1999)