Harold Ware
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Harold Ware (1890–1935) was a United States communist and head of the Ware group, a covert organisation of Communist Party operatives within the United States government in the 1930s, which aided Soviet intelligence agents.
He was the son of Ella Reeve Bloor and Lucien Ware. In the early 1920s, Harold Ware met Jessica Smith in Moscow. They tried to establish a “model” collective farm in the Ural mountains using American tractors. Back in New York City, they were married by Norman Thomas. Ware returned again to the Moscow and attended the Lenin School, an institute for the study of sabotage, revolutionary organization, and espionage. Jessica Smith remained in the United States and became editor of Soviet Russia Today, holding the position for more than twenty years.
In the 1930s, Ware was an official of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) employed by the federal government. He founded the Washington, D.C. group of United States government employees belonging to the CPUSA underground called the "Ware group". In 1934, the Ware group had about 75 members and was divided into about eight cells. The members had first been recruited into Marxist study groups and then into the CPUSA. Each of these agents not only provided classified documents to Soviet intelligence, but was involved in political influence operations as well.
The Ware group initially consisted of young lawyers and economists hired by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), a New Deal agency that reported to the secretary of agriculture but was independent of the Department of Agriculture bureaucracy. Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, John Abt, Charles Kramer, Nathan Witt, Henry Collins, George Silverman, Marion Bachrach, John Herrmann, Nathaniel Weyl, Donald Hiss and Victor Perlo were all members. Harry Dexter White, then Director of the Division of Monetary Research in the United States Department of the Treasury, was also affiliated with the group.
Ware died in an automobile accident in 1935. After his death, John Abt married Jessica Smith, Ware's widow.
[edit] References
- Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 101–123.
- Joseph Lash, Dealers and Dreamers (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 218.
- Nathaniel Weyl, Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1950).
- Nathaniel Weyl, The Battle Against Disloyalty (New York: Crowell, 1951).
- John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). ISBN 0-300-08462-5
- Cold War Intelligence
- "Testimony" of Whittaker Chambers before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, August 3, 1948
