Let's say I'm a bright, conservative guy. Well, everyone inside the beltway knows that the FBI had an informant named Matt Cvetic who dug up all kinds of information revealing communist infiltration in all levels of local, state, and federal government. This is well-documented.

It's also well-documented that in 1946, the Secretary of State, James Byrnes, is on record noting 284 communist agents working for the government. 79 of them were fired, but 205 remained. Why did they remain if they were proven to be communists? That same year, the Senate Appropriations Committee expressed deep concerns about security risks in the State Department, and granted Byrnes broad latitude to fire federal employees suspected of communist ties. Why did so many communists remain?

By 1950, the Civil Service Commission, headed by Senators Kenneth Wherry and J. Lister Hill, found that there were 3700 suspected communists working for the federal government in Washington, DC! Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy revealed that 91 federal employees had been fired for demonstrated ties to communism. What's even more shocking is that 13 of these men made their way back into the federal government's employ, despite having been fired for their proclivity to communism. How could there have been so many suspected communists working for the government, and how could they be rehired if they were such security risks? Does that suggest someone on the inside?

In fact, Wherry is on record saying:

Only the most naive could believe that the Communists' fifth column in the United States would neglect to propagate and use homosexuals to gain their treacherous ends."

I should, of course, mention that the Wherry-Hill commission sought out suspect homosexuals, based on the belief that homosexuality was explicitly linked to communism because it showed a "moral weakness." This was "proven" by a sitting US Senator, who later "exposed" 57 federal employees in the communist party. That senator was, of course, the infamous Joseph McCarthy, of "no sense of decency" fame. Those 3700 suspected communists were actually 3700 suspected homosexuals. Those 91 employees who were fired, and the 13 who returned, were homosexuals.

I'm using this as an example, because frankly, I'm not going to be bothered to "disprove" your friend with academic sources that he's going to just discount out of hand anyway. "Of course they'll say that!" Instead, I happened to have a copy of Prologue, the journal put out by the National Archives, sitting close at hand. The Summer 2016 issue (vol. 48 no. 2) details the "Lavender Scare" of the 40s through the 60s. If I take the details of that out of context, it sounds like I'm talking about a real conspiracy. But when I mention that the "suspected communists" were gay men, it sounds like what it was -- a witch hunt.

Did you notice that my most inflammatory remarks were questions? "Why did those federal employees stay in the government's employ if they were known to be communists?" "How could 3700 suspected communists have been working for the government?" "How could people fired for their ties to communism be rehired, if not for a communist insider?" I didn't actually answer any of those questions, because the answers didn't support the conspiracy theory narrative.

Just for fun, I also brought up Matt Cvetic. An FBI informant rooting out communists sounds pretty serious! Except that Cvetic is the guy whose stories of communist infiltration were turned into the radio serial I Was A Communist For The FBI, and he was pretty quickly determined to be an unreliable source by the FBI, even at a time of extreme paranoia. But hey, it's a name! If you didn't know who Cvetic was, you might not know that he's a total bullshit source.

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OK, so your friend makes an outlandish claim, admits that he has no academic sources whatsoever, and vaguely attributes his lack of sources to manipulation by "the powers that be." That's how every conspiracy theory is maintained: a lack of evidence is only further evidence of the conspiracy, because they don't want people to know the truth.

I have friends and family who work in government, and I have friends "in the beltway." This does not grant them magical powers to know history better than professional historians, this grants them magical powers to aggressively name-drop and bullshit their way to impressing people.

I have a suspicion that your friend’s views are a garbled version of those expressed by pundit Ann Coulter in her 2003 book Treason. In one chapter she offers a defense of the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, insisting that the American government had indeed been infiltrated by Soviet spies in the 1940s and 1950s. She attacks historians critical of McCarthy: “Liberals’ insistence that there was ‘no evidence’ of Soviet spies apparently meant, ‘We were Soviet spies.’”

She goes on to argue that “McCarthy’s gravest error was in underestimating the problem of Communist subversion.”

The scale of the conspiracy was unprecedented. Hundreds of Soviet spies honeycombed the U.S. government throughout the forties and fifties. America had been invaded by a civilian army loyal to a hostile power. There was no room for denying it. Soviet operatives were stealing technical information from atomic, military, radar, aerospace, and rocket programs.

The main source of Coulter’s assertions is the Venona project – a counter-espionage program that intercepted Soviet messages to operatives in the US from the 1940s to the 1970s, and whose documents were declassified by the National Security Administration in the 1990s. More specifically, Coulter cites the work of Emory University historian Harvey Klehr and affiliated scholars, who have detailed the connections between Moscow and spies in the United States, particularly those affiliated with the Communist Party, drawing on the Venona papers and other documents.

Klehr and others have demonstrated fairly convincingly that the Communist Party was influenced to a significant degree by Moscow, and that espionage did indeed take place from the 1930s onward. There may have been as many as five hundred spies during this period who reported to Moscow, although only a minority of them passed on secrets to the Soviets. Some of them were high-profile figures such as Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. In the 1930s there were agents in the State Department, Commerce Department, the Justice Department, and the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA), and some of these agents disclosed atomic secrets and helped Stalin to approach negotiations at the Yalta Conference in 1945.

Yet it would be a real stretch – indeed, a falsehood – to say that the Soviets had “inflitrated and operated” the American government. This small network of spies did compromise American national interests in some instances, but it’s absolutely untrue to insinuate that the entire Roosevelt administration was a communist front – overwhelmingly, his cabinet members were liberals who looked askance at communism and who were only willing to make alliances with the Soviets in order to promote American geostrategic interests.

Klehr himself made the point that Joseph McCarthy’s allegations that a Soviet fifth column operated within the US government were largely fabrications:

[V]irtually none of the people that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Soviet agents turn up in Venona. He did identify a few small fry who we now know were spies but only a few. And there is little evidence that those he fingered were among the unidentified spies of Venona. Many of his claims were wildly inaccurate; his charges filled with errors of fact, misjudgments of organizations and innuendoes disguised as evidence. He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies — distinctions that were important to make. The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. He remains a demagogue, whose wild charges actually made the fight against Communist subversion more difficult.

This was nothing new; many conservative opponents of Roosevelt’s New Deal had tried to tar liberals with the brush of communism; the Dies Committee in the 1930s had levelled the accusation that many New Deal agencies were overrun with communists.

This tactic of conflating with liberals with communists had a long history, and it continues to the present day. As journalist Anne Applebaum has written,

The truth, of course, is that neither Coulter nor Navasky, nor any of the many others who have joined this particular battle, is really interested in history. They and their respective allies instead wish to score points about contemporary politics--points that bear only a tendentious relationship to the events of the 1930s and the 1940s. Coulter and her ilk want modern liberals to be identified with the CPUSA: Hiss = Obama. Navasky and his friends suspect that anyone who investigates Hiss is covertly promoting "the wholesale suspension of liberties": historical research = Guantanamo. There is something dim and lifeless about this kind of apologetic argument, which is why wading though the writings of the Coulters and the Navaskys is a torment, like watching an endless episode of Crossfire.

Do you happen to remember any of the authors/titles of the books your colleague is citing? I'm not really qualified to answer but I'm sure knowing the specific sources of those claims would be helpful for someone that is qualified.