Elizabeth Bentley and cold war representation: Some masks not dropped
During the 1930s and 1940s Soviet intelligence operated spy rings within the United States. America Communist Elizabeth Bentley managed these networks until she defected to the FBI in 1945. Bentley's story of Communists in government ‐ the first of the Cold War — caused a public scandal. Some commentators, offended by Bentley's failure to fulfil traditional gender prescriptions, ridiculed her and shed doubts upon her story, which received less serious consideration than Whittaker Chambers’ similar tale. This article explores these criticisms, Bentley's attempts to counter them with her own public performances of traditional feminity, and, implicitly, gender's role in American Cold War politics.
Cold War Exile: The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin
In 1953 Maurice Halperin was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to defend himself on charges of espionage. He was accused of having supplied Soviet sources with classified material from the Office of Strategic Services while he was an employee during World War II. The Cold War was in full force. McCarthyism was at its peak. Caught up in the rapids of history, Maurice Halperin's life spun out of control. Denying the charges but knowing he could never fully clear his name, Halperin fled to Mexico and then, to avoid extradition, to Moscow. Among the friends he made there were British spy Donald MacLean and Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara. Disenchanted with socialism in the Soviet Union, he accepted Guevara's invitation to come to Havana in 1962. There he worked for Castro's government for five years before political tension forced him to leave for Vancouver, Canada, where he now resides. Was Halperin a spy or a scapegoat? Was he a victim of Red- baiting or a onetime Communist espionage agent who eventually lost faith in Communism? Halperin's accuser was Elizabeth Bentley, a confessed Soviet courier who accused more than one hundred Americans of spying. Yet Bentley had no proof, and Halperin continues to maintain his innocence. One of them was lying. As Kirschner unravels the engrossing facts of the case--utilizing FBI files and dozens of interviews, including extensive interviews with Halperin himself--the reader becomes the investigator in a riveting real-life spy mystery. Along the way Kirschner offers new material on the OSS and further disturbing information about J. Edgar Hoover's use of his considerable power. Maurice Halperin has lived a life like few Americans in our century. A left-wing American exile, he experienced two socialist worlds from the inside. In recounting the unclosed case of Maurice Halperin, Cold War Exile is both a gripping account of that remarkable life and a significant contribution to our understanding of a fascinating and controversial era in American political history.
Conflictual Media Events, Eyewitness Images, and the Boston Marathon Bombing (2013)
The proliferation of camera phones over the past decade has created an unprecedented landslide of visual information in the online public sphere, transforming the form and amount of communication in relation to crisis events. International research on this subject has primarily centered on the way in which the production and dissemination of eyewitness images convert mainstream media's coverage of crisis. This article broadens the perspective by focusing on eyewitness images in relation to “conflictual media events.” The article contributes to discussions on the definition of conflictual media events in today's mediatized and connective media environment, which has undergone radical changes from the era of mass media hegemony when Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz first outlined media events. The article further examines the ways in which the circulation of eyewitness images erodes established boundaries between experts and laymen and between professionals and non-professionals in relation to conflictual media events. The bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013 constitutes the empirical point of departure.