U.S. Navy Lt. Bob Woodward
According to Texas A&M University’s Colodny Collection of Watergate materials:
Bob Woodward lied to conceal his early ties to General Alexander Haig. In 1969 and 1970, Navy Lt. Bob Woodward manned the Pentagon’s secret communications room, which transmitted messages around the world, including the back channel communications for Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon. In that duty, Woodward often delivered messages from the world’s top leaders to Gen. Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy at the National Security Council.
“Woodward held a ‘top secret crypto’ security clearance,” Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin wrote in their book “Silent Coup: The Removal of a President.”
The other half of the Watergate “dynamic duo” also had a history that would bring to mind questions regarding his motivations.
Bernstein’s Communist Party family tied to Soviet atomic spies
The upside-down irony of this Watergate 2.0 circus is that Carl Bernstein’s family is connected to the most famous Soviet atomic spies.
Former “Washington Post” reporter and current CNN contributor Bernstein, leading the network’s Trump-Russia collusion hysteria, is the son of Communist Party members who were under FBI surveillance for 35 years.
Bernstein’s parents were deeply connected to the Soviet spies who stole America’s nuclear secrets and other critical classified military intelligence: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell.
Carl Bernstein grew up in a nest of communism.
In his book Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir, Bernstein tells that his parents were atheists. “There was no Hebrew, no Torah, and sparse mention of God.” Every fall the Bernstein family commemorated the Bolshevik revolution — “the anniversary of the Russian Revolution — October Division.” The Bernsteins’ religion was, as prescribed by collectivist regimes everywhere, communism.
The FBI monitored the activities of Carl Bernstein’s parents Sylvia Walker Bernstein and Alfred David Bernstein in San Francisco and in Washington D.C. The FBI amassed 2,500 pages of files on Carl Bernstein’s parents, according to Bernstein’s book. A search for Sylvia Bernstein in the FBI Vault returns two pages of links to declassified documents alone.
“Starting in 1942, the Federal Bureau of Investigation put the family under surveillance, which became a full-scale investigation” The New York Times noted in its review of Bernstein’s book.
Frank S. Tavenner, Chief Counsel to the House Un-American Activities Committee, questioned Sylvia Bernstein before the committee on July 12, 1954.
Mary Stalcup Markward was the Director of Party Membership for the Washington, D.C. District Communist Party while secretly working as an FBI informant.
During the hearing, Tavenner told Sylvia Bernstein that Markward had previously testified that Communist Party officials transfer the communist wives of U.S. government officials into the secret underground Communist Party club to protect their husbands’ jobs. Markward testified that Elizabeth Searle, “Chairman of the Communist Party in Washington, D.C, told me to get in touch with Sylvia Bernstein and inform her she was to be transferred to this underground club because it was too dangerous to her husband’s position for her to be in the white collar section of the party.”
When Tavenner asked Sylvia Bernstein if Markward’s testimony was true, Sylvia Bernstein refused to answer, invoking her Fifth Amendment right so as not to incriminate herself.
Carl Bernstein conceded that not only were his parents Communist Party members, but that they also held a meeting at the Bernstein home with accused Soviet spy and fellow communist party member Helen Levitov Sobell, wife of convicted Soviet spy Morton Sobell. The U.S. government also compiled a massive FBI file on Helen and Morton Sobell.
Also attending the meeting at the Bernstein household was communist defense attorney Emanuel “Manny” Bloch. Bloch represented Soviet atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their codefendant, admitted Soviet spy Morton Sobell. Bloch, the Bernstein couple, the Rosenbergs, and the Sobells were all comrades in the Communist Party.
Carl Bernstein wrote in Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir:
I cannot say precisely how old I was when the Rosenbergs became a presence in our house. Six or seven, maybe eight. At first they were just a name, the subject of dinner-table conversation between my parents. There were a series of names, actually: Emanuel Bloch, Helen Sobell, Ethel Weichbrod, Michael and Robbie, others. Over the next couple of years some of the names became faces and everything became terrifyingly real. Bloch was the Rosenbergs’ lawyer; he and Morton Sobell’s wife Helen, came to visit us. Sobell had been convicted with the Rosenbergs. My mother and her friend Ethel Weichbrod organized the Washington Committee to Secure Justice for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Morton and Helen Sobell had previously fled to Mexico, where the two fugitives sought ocean passage to the Soviet Union. Mexican authorities apprehended the Sobells and turned them over to the FBI. During their capture, Morton Sobell attempted to grab a Mexican agent’s firearm.
Helen Sobell was on the FBI’s Security Index. The Security Index was a list of individuals considered such a high risk to national security that they were to be rounded up were hostilities to break out between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Alfred Bernstein, who obtained a law degree from Columbia University, “defended 500 public employees accused of disloyalty,” the “Los Angeles Times” noted. Alfred Bernstein was also on the Security Index.
Carl Bernstein wrote in Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir:
In San Francisco the peer pressure to join the Party was incredible,” my mother said by the pool . . . I picked this moment to ask my mother whether she had wanted a revolution in this country . . . “I always thought by peaceful means . . . public ownership of the means of production . . . what happened to us would have happened anyway, without the CP membership.
“THIS BOOK IS FOR MY PARENTS. I AM PROUD OF THE CHOICES THEY MADE” Bernstein wrote in dedication section of Loyalties, which he also dedicated to Woodward.
The U.S. government accused the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell of conspiracy to commit atomic espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, a fact later proven by the secret U.S. Army/NSA Venona Project that decrypted Soviet cable traffic. Venona was so secret that not even President Franklin D. Roosevelt was notified of its existence.
The decrypted cables proved that Julius Rosenberg led the Soviet spy ring that penetrated the Manhattan Project.
The Rosenberg-Sobell atomic espionage trial shocked the nation as Americans came to grip with the fact that U.S. national security had been severely compromised by Soviet spies.