ABSTRACT
Paul Buhle is a faculty member in American Civilization at Brown University and one of the luminaries in the study of American radicalism. Like many of his colleagues in this area, he has impeccable radical credentials. He writes for such journals as Radical History Review—a publication that plainly states it "rejects conventional notions of scholarly neutrality and 'objectivity,' and approaches history from an engaged, critical, political stance"—and contributes regularly to Tikkun. Buhle first stated that the Office of Strategic Services, America's chief World War II intelligence agency, gave a new dimension to left-wing secret work by hiring radicals and thus "unleashed an unprecedented flurry of left-wing spy activity, some of which inevitably continued into the Cold War era." Buhle's unsupported and spurious claim functions in The Encyclopedia of the American Left as a distraction from the issue of secret work by the Communist Party of the United States on behalf of the USSR.
