Venona. Partial decryption of 4 August 1944:
"As regards the technique of further work with us JURIST said that his wife was [B% ready] for any self-sacrifice[;] he himself did not think about his personal security, but a compromise[PROVAL] would lead to a political scandal and [B% the discredit] of all supporters of the new course[o], therefore he would have to be very cautious. He asked whether he should [5 groups unrecovered] his work with us. I [O% replied] that he should refrain. JURIST has no suitable apartment for a permanent meeting place[;] all his friends are family people. Meetings could be held at their houses in such a way that one meeting devolved on each every 4-5 months. He proposes infrequent conversations lasting up to half an hour while driving in his automobile."
Everything else sent to Moscow with White as a source can be explained away as relatively normal wartime inter-allied chit-chat--the kind of thing that Harriman would have told to every British official he came across in the course of a day. It's things like White telling the NKVD agents that Roosevelt will win the 1944 election, that the inclusion of Truman on the ticket is calculated to ensure the votes of the conservative wing of the party, that the U.S. will not insist on the inclusion of the most anti-Soviet groups in the Polish coalition government, that Morgenthau and White's trip to Smyrna has been postponed, that a $10 billion credit loan for the USSR is being worked on this fall, that the Treasury is working on how much to extract from Germany in post-war reparations, that the British and American delegations to the San Francisco U.N. conference do much of their business over friendly dinners.
But this is much more damaging.
It is *possible* that this cable misrepresents the conversation because the NKVD agents wanted to pretend that they had more sources than they did, and so misrepresented friendly people interested in U.S.-Soviet cooperation as their spies.
It is *possible* that Harry Dexter White thought that he was just being a friendly person interested in U.S.-Soviet cooperation--and then suddenly realized when this conversation began that they thought he was their agent, under NKVD discipline, and was trying to wriggle out--stressing that the Russians would not want to try to expose him as a spy if he didn't cooperate because it would discredit the entire New Deal.
But these possibilities are of the same order of magnitude as that a reasonably well-read disbeliever in Nazi gas chambers will turn out to be an apolitical liberal. The only wriggle room I can see is to argue that White wasn't really a Soviet agent because he never gave them anything of value that threatened to harm the interests of the people of the United States.
:-(
Brad DeLong