Descendants of Soviet Spy Victor Perlo
I previously wrote about Harold Ware and the “Ware Group” and Ware’s descendants.
One of the members of the Ware Group was Victor Perlo. Perlo also allegedly ran the “Perlo Group” later. The Ware Group was active from 1933-1938 at least. Harold Ware created the group, and then upon his 1935 death, it was taken over by Whittaker Chambers. The years of activity of the Perlo Group are a little more vague.
And whereas the Ware Group was a little more obviously focused on influencing policy and concentrating itself, at least initially, within the AAA at the Dept. of Agriculture, the Perlo Group was a bit more dispersed across more agencies.
If this was just an espionage ring and not a blended espionage/policy-making ring, then this at least looks a lot more like espionage.
Victor Perlo was never imprisoned. He was never charged. He complained that he was effectively ‘blacklisted’ after the accusations were made public, but later in life he worked directly for the Communist Party USA. He was the campaign manager for Gus Hall’s 1980 Presidential Campaign, the official Communist candidate for President. Hall’s Vice Presidential candidate was Angela Davis, the noted violent psychopath Commie.
Members of the “Perlo Group” in the 1930’s were:
Victor Perlo, Chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board; head of branch in Research Section, Office of Price Administration Department of Commerce; Division of Monetary Research Department of Treasury; Brookings Institution - NYT Obit
Edward Fitzgerald, War Production Board
Harold Glasser, Deputy Director, Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of the Treasury; United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration; War Production Board; Advisor on North African Affairs Committee; United States Treasury Representative to the Allied High Commission in Italy
Charles Kramer, Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Price Administration; National Labor Relations Board; Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education; Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Senate Subcommittee on Civil Liberties; Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee; Democratic National Committee
Harry Magdoff, Statistical Division of War Production Board and Office of Emergency Management; Bureau of Research and Statistics, WTB; Tools Division, War Production Board; Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, United States Department of Commerce
Allen Rosenberg, Board of Economic Warfare; Chief of the Economic Institution Staff, Foreign Economic Administration; Senate Subcommittee on Civil Liberties; Senate Committee on Education and Labor; Railroad Retirement Board; Counsel to the Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board
Donald Wheeler, Office of Strategic Services Research and Analysis division
Whittaker Chambers was a bit tardy to the accusation game. Chambers was the first to defect from Communism in 1938ish among the prominent spy handler defectors, but he was also the last to come forward.
Perlo’s accuser was Elizabeth Bentley. Tabloids anointed her, and her biographer reiterates her label as the “Red Spy Queen.”
Educated at Vassar, she was tall and awkward. She fell in love with Jacob Golos, who was overseeing a spy ring as a Soviet agent. After his untimely heart attack in 1943, she was tasked with picking up the pieces.
Unnerved by the ease with which the Soviets dispatched with inconvenient souls, she understandably became nervous for her own survival. By November 1945, she went to the FBI and started spilling names.
The Daily Beast claims she “opened the door to McCarthy hysteria” by telling the truth.
The Soviets saw the coming conflict with the West, Moscow rarely had permanent allies anyway. They needed to take control of the spy ring, and so met with Bentley to try and let her down easily. She saw the writing on the wall and decided to get drunk. In her stupor, she berated her Soviet contact “Al” and made veiled threats to go public.
Later, sobered up, she realized she may have sealed her fate with her indiscretions. Subsequent revelations decades later show that “Al” did implore Moscow to kill her. But the Soviets thought they could mollify her instead with some money, so they gave her $2,000 for her troubles.
There’s a certain irony that the downfall of the Soviet spy rings came, in no small part, because they thought they could buy the loyalty of someone motivated by ideas and principles. They tried to solve a political problem with money like every capitalist businessman they ideologically despised.
It’s also just endlessly amusing that the hard-edged murderous Soviet espionage apparatus couldn’t beat this chick:
Bentley named names, a lot of them. She first went into the FBI and signed a 108 page confession on November 30, 1945.
One of the names was Victor Perlo. Bentley said that Perlo ran a spy ring that reported to her.
Bentley’s August 1948 public accusation was captured on photo in the committee room:
Here is Bentley’s testimony before HUAC in August 1948.
By 1953, Perlo refused to tell Senate investigators whether he led a Soviet espionage ring.
In 1948, Whittaker Chambers also told HUAC that in 1939 he told Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in the Roosevelt Administration that Perlo was a Communist. Berle did very little and later lied about how Chambers approached him, in contrast to his own personal notes. Berle’s dissembling was excused and dismissed by author Allen Weinstein as wanting to protect Truman’s administration in 1948.
Victor’s parents were Samuel and Rachael Steinman.
Victor was the brother to Rhoda Perlo (1915-2010). Rhoda married Dr. Tobias Weinberg around 1940 and were married for 29 years. They had one son together, David J. Weinberg.
Victor (1912-1999) married twice.
The first marriage was to Katherine Wills Perlo (1909-2006). They were married on March 19, 1934 and divorced on June 30, 1943. They had one daughter, named Katherine Wills Perlo (1937-Present).
The second marriage was to Ellen Menaker Perlo (1916-2019). The marriage license application was on December 23, 1943, about six months after the divorce was finalized. Ellen was the niece of Robert Menaker, who was also accused of being a Communist spy. They were together until his death in 1999. They had two sons together, Stanley and Arthur.
Perlo was quite prolific in his writing, but a bit circumspect in his reproduction. He published 29 books and had three children with two women. His writings were commonly on the topic of economics and generally misstating and mischaracterizing Capitalism vis a vis Communism.
At the time of his death in 1999, Victor Perlo had three living children among his survivors:
A widow, Ellen Menaker Perlo (1916-2019) Obituary
daughter, Katherine Wills Perlo, of Dundee, Scotland, who appears to still be alive. (1937-Present)
son Stanley P. Perlo of Ithaca, N.Y., who also appears to still be alive. (1946-Present)
son Arthur J. Perlo of New Haven, CT (11/2/1947-12/18/2021) Obituary
three grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Ellen died in 2019 after 20 years as Victor’s widow. She appears to have been involved in far-left activism her entire life. She had two children with Victor: Stanley, and the late Arthur.
Katherine/Kathy
Born in 1937 to Victor’s first wife, Katherine, who went to the FBI during their divorce and tried to rat out Victor’s spying for the Soviets. lol
It appears Katherine grew up with Victor and second wife Ellen. She appears to have attended college in Utah and was active in journalism as well as the Hillel chapter. She seems to have lived her adult life in Scotland, whereas her mother was alone and in Wichita Falls, Texas living out her final years, finally dying in 2006.
Life can separate a mother and a daughter, but Wichita Falls and Scotland seem about as far apart as they can possibly get. Additionally, it seems odd that she chose Utah as the site of her studies considering her family was so localized to New York City. There was some rumor that mother Katherine Sr. had schizophrenia, so that may have played a part.
She presents herself as an “Independent Researcher” in Scotland.
Aren’t we all, Kathy?
Interestingly, Katherine seems to have bucked the party line hard-left trend and was caught protesting against assisted suicide in Scotland in 2015. She seems to have missed the memo that Communists are typically in favor of self-suicide.
She’s written letters to the editor for the Independent occasionally. She was in favor of Scottish Independence, and generally in favor of more benefits and entitlements. Her language often uses direct Communist verbiage.
She published in 2022 a journal article in “Politics and Animals” arguing animals should be a respected class for the purposes of class warfare. She presents false philosophical choices to lessen the public’s value of a child’s life compared to that of an animal’s. So I guess she’s a hard-left Communist who doesn’t want to be pressured into dying off too early and cares deeply about her cats.
She holds herself out as an animal rights advocate. She published this related book on the topic in 2009.
Stanley spent time in Ithaca, N.Y. and appears to have retired in Westchester County. At age 78, he was born in May 1945. He appears to play a mean game of bridge, placing in local competitions. He wrote letters to the editor praising its coverage of Chess. I saw him referenced in a news story as an “Ithaca Mathematician” so perhaps he was a professor of math at either Cornell or Ithaca College. I searched the Ithaca College website and found nothing. I searched the Cornell site and found a few leads. I ran across a 1989 workshop for the IEEE that Stanley was a co-presenter for.
In 1971, Stanley shows up as being associated with the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
Let’s highlight that so that it’s importance isn’t lost: the guy whose father was part of the Ware spy ring and likely LED HIS OWN SPY RING OF KEY GOVERNMENT AGENTS, whose FATHER WAS THE CAMPAIGN MANAGER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, whose sister lives abroad writing and protesting various left-wing causes, and whose other sibling is a committed Communist actively working with Communist agents, is developing systems for the military to control information flow.
#HonkHonk
The idea that Uncle Sam ever ‘fought Communism’ or that there was a ‘Cold War’ is a sick joke. The endless caterwauling by leftists about McCarthyism is such a tired and busted meme. If Stanley Perlo could get a security clearance, then anybody should get a security clearance.
Perlo appears to still be alive. Since Katherine and Arthur appear to have been childless, and Victor’s obituary mentioned three grandchildren and one great-grandchild, they are probably the children and grandchild of Stanley.
Arthur was in IT at Yale in New Haven, CT and a ‘lifelong Communist’ according to his 2021 obituary. He had a ‘life partner’ and not a wife, in the form of Joelle Fishman. Joelle was apparently the Connecticut Chair for the CPUSA. His obituaries describe a litany of hard-left political activism throughout the years. It appears he had no children.
His life seems completely overshadowed by his wife/life-partner Joelle Fishman. Art is a bit player in her story, and her story includes almost no mention of him. He was a beta orbiter around Joelle, and that seems to be the common role for left-wing straight men, even before the transgender cult pandemic of 2015-Present.
Art is the kind of guy who hid behind a fedora, an overgrown handlebar mustache, and prescription glasses that were probably the wrong prescription. He wanted to wear a plain mask so that Joelle could get all the attention and live out 50 years of being in her 20s.
Joelle got the fame, the attention, the plaudits. And Art got the light satisfaction of being in her orbit.
Art is kind of the faint sad low-t echo of his father’s zealousness for treason.
I mean it’s fun to psychoanalyze, but it’s also somewhat exhausting.
Not only are these people clearly pushing the most destructive and divisive policies possible, it’s disheartening to see how much cultural, social, legal, and political agency they have and have had, over the past few generations.
These were not the best and brightest minds of the left. As Trump is want to say, “they’re not sending their best.”
But these were extremely well-placed, well-networked, and well-financed zealots to tear down the nation. They wanted to erect a Soviet-style America where they would be its permanent elites. They sought to squash merit, hard work, equality, justice, Christianity, in order to impose the harsh, cruel rule of an irrational class backed by an NKVD.
Many academics seem to give Soviet-adjacent people a pass because of bad faith challenges to the historiography of Soviet terror. But that’s such a sad cope.
There were plenty of opportunities over the decades for the Perlo family to reject Communism. Perlo was Jewish by ethnicity. Whittaker Chambers’ wife Esther was also Jewish. Chambers was permanently alienated from Communism by the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet empire. It’s hard to reconcile how that action affected the Chambers family and yet had no effect on the Perlo family.
There were a variety of left-wing operatives who disappeared in the 1930’s. There were former leaders of the Communist Party USA who defected and denounced Soviet terror. Emma Goldman wrote her book “My Disillusionment in Russia” in 1922.
I’ve even heard hard-left nuts say that Communism was defensible until the ”Prague Spring” of 1968. I don’t agree, but it’s notable that Perlo continued his support even through the Soviets brutally crushing even modest political reforms.
Victor Perlo was a Communist organizer his entire life, until his death in 1999. Perlo never repudiated his beliefs. His children never changed their wayward ways. They never adapted and adjusted to historical revelation, they simply continually doubled down.
Their treason was deeper than their intellect, and greater than facts. We’d like to think that they, like Hiss and others, never came to terms with the consequences of their actions. But the harsher truth is, perhaps they saw Soviet terror not as a bug, but as a feature of the regime they sought to impose globally.
