IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 27

their indignation that secret documents really are
secret. But this is not news, and it serves no useful
purpose. ( " Official secrets are for sharing, " was a
dissident slogan that I liked when a graduate student
in 1970s London: U.K. has a draconian Official
Secrets Act that would be unconstitutional here.)
Albert Einstein's FBI file runs to a thousand pages,
of which 45 are reproduced here. Many of these are
illegible. Most of those that one can decipher mention
the great physicist's friendships with what used
to be called " fellow travelers " and his associations
with groups that had some sort of Communist connection.
Nothing was ever done to Einstein-he was
not harassed, accused of a crime, or dismissed from
his job at Princeton's Edenic Institute for Advanced
Study. The ten pages of Isaac Asimov's file, which
the Bureau opened only in 1960 (he and my Mom
were fellow students in the mid-1940s), are heavily
redacted and have little to offer. Asimov, who was
born outside Moscow to Russian Jewish parents,
suffered for his suspected leftist connections by
becoming the most published science fiction writer
in history and a multimillionaire. Timothy Leary,
psychedelic guru, worked as an informant for the
FBI on the activities of the Weather Underground, a
1960s left-wing terrorist group comprised mainly of
rich white kids enamored of Chairman Mao. He did
not suffer any serious repression either, and his file
seems almost a quid pro quo, as does that of Alfred
Kinsey, the Harvard grad who used FBI files for his
own research. The Bureau seems to have taken a
warm interest in Kinsey's more arcane revelations
about the sexual activities and proclivities of boys:
his file includes careful, neutral reviews of his work
that do not seem to have anything to do with leftwing
politics or criminal activity.
Overall, " No further action " (a note concluding
one file, on p. 255) might serve as a fitting epigraph
to this poorly published, rather slapdash, soporific
book-or as the epitaph to the editors' presumed
intentions, which are reflected in their lurid backcover
blurb: " Armed with ignorance, misinformation,
and unfounded suspicions, the FBI under J.
Edgar Hoover cast a suspicious eye on scientists in
disciplines ranging from physics to sex research. "
" As chilling as it is pertinent, " shrills Noam Chomsky
on the front and back covers.
This reader failed to be chilled. What is in fact
much more chilling is the treatment of scientists in
the Stalinist USSR, which was the superpower rival of
March 2022
the United States and its allies during the Cold War.
Prof. Loren Graham, the MIT historian of science,
published Lysenko's Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia
(Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2016); it
is an excellent study of the way state-imposed Marxist
ideology destroyed both genetics and the lives of
geneticists in Russia. My mother, the first woman to
be tenured in chemistry at the City College of New
York, used to fume about being lectured to about
Soviet versus " bourgeois " science by her father in
law, who was a founding member of the Communist
Party of the USA. (My beloved Grandpa was a
publisher of rare scholarly reprints: American capitalism
punished him by making him comfortably
rich in his later years.) The Soviet NKVD, unlike the
FBI, did not just question neighbors, poke around
garbage cans, and assemble voluminous files on
scientists: it arrested, tortured, exiled, and executed
them by the hundreds and thousands. Some of the
luckier ones were imprisoned in laboratory facilities
called sharashkas, where living conditions were tolerable.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel In the First
Circle describes the life of the inmates of one such
Gulag facility near Moscow ca. 1950. He describes
how American magazines like Popular Mechanics
were kept under lock and key there as top secret
technical documents. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov,
the great Leningrad agronomist who assembled the
world's largest archive of seeds, criticized Lysenko's
crackpot pseudo-genetics and for his opinions was
arrested and condemned to death in 1941. He died
in a Soviet prison in 1943. Ideology corrupted every
field of learning in the Soviet Union. In the humanities,
the all-powerful state favored the lunatic linguistic
theories of Nicholas Marr; in the arts, it imposed
the deadening orthodoxy of " socialist realism. " By
contrast, America, even at the height of the McCarthy
era, was the home of abstract expressionism-
and New York, a haven for painters, sculptors, and
composers fleeing European fascism, had become
the art capital of the world.
As to the pertinence of which Chomsky speaks,
one might indeed compare the darkest moments of
the Cold War to the present day, not in Russia but
here at home. At the time of this writing, innumerable
American writers, artists, scientists, mathematicians,
and teachers are being hounded out of private
and public institutions on the basis of denunciations
about " micro-aggressions " and other innocuous peccadilloes.
Authors of scholarly books and articles are
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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