Descendants and Progeny of Soviet Spy Harold Ware
Networks Around the Most Substantial Home-Grown American Espionage Ring
Harold Maskell Ware lived from 1889-1935. He died relatively young after a car accident.
He was a federal government employee, active in politics and left-wing movements, and a Communist espionage agent.
He actually recruited and set up the largest and, to date, most impressive espionage ring within the United States government that we know of.
The Ware Group, as it was known, comprised some of the most important technocrats of its day. These were men and women of quiet non-public stature and responsibility who agreed to engage in espionage against their home government to the benefit of a foreign government. Most did not do so for money, but because they believed in a competing set of ideas.
The group was active from 1933-1938 or later. Ware died in 1935 in a car accident in Pennsylvania. The group had an estimated 75-80 members according to testimony from one of its members, Lee Pressman. The various associations of the prominent members is hidden behind quite a few links and poorly-written pages.
I wanted to create a list to see the value of this spy ring. In doing so below, I think it reveals some of what the Soviets were up to, and why this ring was treated separate from the rest. At first, many of these various positions seem random, and to some extent they are in that I’m sure they represent the position of the person at the time they were recruited into so-called ‘underground’ work. It’s not easy to move people’s lives around and change jobs on the fly.
But the placement of these individuals seem to be in critical junctures to control the U.S. economy during the 1930s. One wonders how much influence these Communist agents had, and by extension Moscow possessed, over the U.S. economy and economic planning during this period of time.
In 1920 30% of all American workers were on the farm. By 1950, that number had halved to 15%. The number is roughly 1% today.
The purpose of the AAA program, the Agricultural Adjustment Agency has been a detail that has been muddied by historians. The AAA set prices, set production numbers, and subsidized farmers for growing the crops that they dictated. The AAA was Communism for farming: total central planning for the major industry of the U.S. economy at the time.
Harold Ware - Dept. of Agriculture, AAA
John Abt - Attorney for Dept. of Ag, AAA, then the WPA, later the longtime counsel for CPUSA
Lee Pressman - Attorney for the Dept. of Ag, AAA, then the WPA, later counsel to the AFL-CIO
George Silverman - Railroad Retirement Board, U.S. Tariff Commission, National Recovery Administration; later with the Treasury Department. Was apparently notable for passing along military and Pentagon secret files to the Soviets.
Victor Perlo - National Recovery Administration, Federal Home Loan Bank Board, later the Brookings Institution and the Dept. of Commerce, Office of Price Administration
Alger Hiss - Senate Nye Committee; Dept. of Ag, AAA; later with the State Dept., Yalta Conference; United Nations; Carnegie Endowment
Charles Kramer - Dept. of Agriculture, AAA; then the National Youth Administration; Worked for a variety of Congressional Committees. Interestingly he reportedly gave LBJ his first job in Congress.
Nathan Witt - Dept. of Agriculture, AAA; National Labor Relations Board; later Attorney to Paul Robeson and a wide variety of union interests.
Henry Collins - National Recovery Administration, Dept. of Ag., AAA; later the Dept. of Labor, Congress, U.S. Small Business Committee
Marion Bachrach - Office Manager to Rep. John Bernard, who was far-left and later a CPUSA member. Notably Bachrach is the sister to John Abt, above.
John Herrmann - Journalist who worked with Ware, served as CPUSA courier, later fled to Mexico
Nathaniel Weyl - Dept. of Ag., AAA
Donald Hiss - Clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; Dept. of Ag., AAA; U.S. Senate; U.S. Dept. of Justice; later, State Dept.
Hope Hale Davis - Dept. of Ag., AAA
Harry Dexter White - U.S. Treasury; later, Bretton Woods; IMF; World Bank
Of these 15 people considered the most prominent and important spies identified as part of the “Ware Group”, 10 were working in the AAA.
One analysis of FDR’s policies during the ‘Great Depression’ suggest that the policies delayed recovery by 7 years and what should have been a rapid recovery was, instead, prolonged by ‘cartelization’ that the administration favored. This is exactly what the AAA was doing: creating a cartel to begin the ‘collectivization’ of American agriculture.
Think of the absurdity of the mainstream position here: dozens of Soviet Communist spies were busy trying to ‘fix capitalism’ by ‘keeping supply low and demand high’ and save the American economy by destroying hundreds of thousands of pounds of food at a time while their fellow citizens were starving.
People like Ware, who personally went to the Soviet Union and saw the horrors of forced collectivization and participated in them, weren’t trying to economize and streamline inefficient systems. They weren’t trying to ‘reduce waste’ in the private sector.
They were using government policy to bring the private sector into control.
The same way that Stalin used collectivization to crush his political opponents, they were doing the same. The same way Stalin and friends used food policy to starve their political opponents in Ukraine to death, they were starving the American economy to destroy all of its independent farmers and producers.
The Soviet Union went through the collectivization program starting in 1928. The Holomodor in Ukraine was from 1932-1933. The Soviets had another famine earlier in 1921-1922, where Western support ended when they realized that the Soviets were exporting the aid to Western Europe for currency.
Needless to say, one thing that the Soviet Union did not do well, and had no interest in improving upon, was agriculture and food production. So the presence of these Soviet agents concentrated at this critical department within the Department of Agriculture is extremely suspect.
In making this list, and presenting the information in this way, I think a few things jump out at me:
There was a high concentration of Communist agents in certain departments, suggesting there was a collective plan to focus on those departments.
If the goal was to collect espionage and then relay it to a foreign government, they would not have concentrated themselves in specific departments. The counterargument here is that perhaps that’s just where they found the easiest recruits. But in looking at the history of the individuals, that argument is dispelled because they were consciously hired into the AAA and WPA programs. Did the Soviets have an overriding interest in American agriculture? Doubtful.
The Communist agents were not in the place where they might be expected to focus such as on political agencies such as the high-profile governmental agencies like State, Military, DOJ.
These were people meant to make an economic impact. Many of them are economists and Attorneys meant to facilitate policy changes. They were not meant to just soak up information or pass-along information to the Soviet Union. They were in place to affect policy.
As much as I love Whittaker Chambers, I’ve always felt as though he was ‘holding back’ from disclosing certain information and details. You can see the pained way in which he is betraying his former colleagues. The lists and names of those whom Chambers named are also not consistent, a fact which the left attempts to use to discredit his testimony, but which I would argue is an effort to protect people he still cared about.
I don’t think the scale, focus, agenda, and priority of Soviet espionage during this period has been sufficiently detailed or revealed.
It’s notable there was never a serious investigation into the Ware Group. In searching Amazon and WorldCat and JStor, it doesn’t appear there’s any major work on the topic either.
And similarly, I notice that most historians ‘pull their punches’ these days for fear of being mocked, ridiculed, or relegated to the ash heap of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ - they traffic in comfortable well-documented mainstream theories. It’s one reason mainstream history is so boring: no one is willing to say anything new.
What’s doubly frustrating about this, is that the narrative was quickly set by left-wing historians, and then no one bothered to investigate further.
The government did very little to investigate further.
The academic world did little to honestly look into the matter, with one notable exception of Allen Weinstein’s work taking apart Alger Hiss’ lies in his 1979 work “Perjury.”
The few historians on this beat are Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes. Previously it was Theodore Draper. On the right, there is Herbert Romerstein and the late great Stanton Evans.
But with the exception of Evans, all were firmly, originally, of the left, and two of the three are former Communists. Can one really be expected to critically analyze and dissect political movements one previously had great personal sympathies towards?
There is a specific academic journal on this topic, American Communist History. It’s members are a little suspect in that many of them are primarily focused on African-American history and not Communism, to read their biographies and CV’s. One of the board members is Thai Jones, whose parents were on the run for being domestic terrorists with the Communist Weather Underground and who glowingly brags of his Communist grandparents.
The people doing the writing and analyzing are firmly of the left, and their sympathies and prejudices are firmly to cover up left-wing crimes.
And in the meantime many of the primary people involved grew old, wrote memoirs, and deposited their papers into various institutions. Members of the Ware Group have their papers scattered amongst various institutions as diverse as Harvard and Frostburg State University.
Archives that I suspect none of them have looked into.
For many years I think the country expected colleges and universities to engage in this kind of work, or for it to be supported by non-profits and private foundations, but the truth is that the job of developing this kind of history has just been neglected and lost. It was relegated to third-rate academics who steadfastly refused to do the job because they were too busy catering to various academic fads and left-wing trends.
And I’m not signing up for this fight, I have neither the time or the finances/financial backing to do this kind of work. Not to mention I’m disorganized and a sloppy writer. But I want to be clear that this kind of work has simply not been done. It doesn’t exist anywhere. I have a hard time understanding why, especially in the age of digital databases, declassifications, and various other disclosures that weren’t available a generation ago.
If one were to engage a study of these networks of subversive malicious betrayal, it would start with Harold Ware and those around him.
Harold Ware left behind four children: Robert, Nancy, Judith, and David.
Harold’s mother Ella “Mother” Bloor was born in 1862, and died in 1951. “Mother Bloor” was a major left and Communist figure in her time.
Harold’s ex-wives were Margaret Stephens (1886-1916, m. 1912-1916), Clarissa “Cris” Smith (1893-1923, m. 1917-1923). His widow was Jessica Smith (1895-1983, m. 1925-1935). I’ve found photos of each, below.
Harold’s siblings were Pauline and Charles, who died young, as well as Grace Ware (1885-1964), Helen Ware (1887-1974), and Hamilton Disbrow Ware (1892-1968). Harold’s half brothers were Carl Reeve Cohen (1900-1980) and Richard Hugo Reeve Cohen (1898-1969).
Of his four children, Robert, Nancy, Judith, and David, how many children did they have, meaning how many grandchildren exist from Harold Ware?
I believe that answer is three. Two of Harold Ware’s four children from three different women ever had any children of their own. None have graves available at FindaGrave.com, that might mean they had a private service, or, more likely, that they were cremated and their ashes scattered.
In 1960, 3.5% of funerals were cremations. By 2025, that rate is expected to be 63%. Even NPR admits that there’s a secular and left-wing connection to those choosing cremation. Amusingly, the Washington Post contends that Americans just need consumerist choices for how to handle their deaths.
But it’s notable that no one in this far-left family ended up doing what was considered normal in their age. They always wanted to be avant garde. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There’s always a pressure to conform, and the kind of family that produces spies through intellectual pressure and coercion surely knows how to steer their biological progeny towards the same.
I think you can know something about a political movement by the progeny of their main adherents, the fruit of their tree. I think you can tell something about Communism by the way in which the children of major Communists turned out.
The oldest child of Ware was Robert/Robin Ware, who died in 2006.
Robert “Robin” Stephens Ware (1913-2006)
He died at 93. His mother died in childbirth with his younger sister Nancy. Nancy herself died in a horrible Washington, DC house fire in 1979, where she had lived for a decade. Perhaps they were lightly estranged. He lived in central PA in Bradford Township. He died in Silver Spring, Maryland. He married Margery Fitz Stevens Taylor (1915-2006) in 1946. He died two days after her in 2006 after nearly 60 years married. She died from renal failure. They were Unitarians, even though she was the daughter of an Episcopal minister. They had no children together. They were a month away from their 60th wedding anniversary. They say that elderly widows like this are at significant risk of suicide, which is what I would expect to have happened here. It would also explain the lack of a grave, because there was no one who wanted it.
Harold’s first daughter was:
Nancy’s mother died in childbirth with her. No doubt that was a form of ‘survivor’s guilt’ that she carried for many years. She married a man named Charles Inman and apparently had a son named Donald. I’m having a hard time finding details on Donald.
There is no FindaGrave link for Nancy.
Nancy died in 1979 in a fire in the retirement-type housing in Washington, DC that she was living in, along with 8 other elderly women, aged 63. She had reportedly been living there nearly a decade.
Here’s the news clipping on Nancy’s tragic death, that took the lives of 8 other elderly women in 1979.
Judith was Harold’s second daughter from his second wife, the first child born to the second wife Clarissa. Judith looks a lot like a young Clarissa:
Judith Ware (1919-2017)
Born in Arden, New Castle, Delaware. She was married July 26, 1943 in Alabama City, Alabama to Daniel Boone Dodson (1918-1991) yet was divorced by January 1944. She had two daughters: Dorian and Elizabeth.
Husband Daniel Dodson was a Columbia professor and defender of obscene 60s comedian Lenny Bruce. He taught at Columbia from 1947-1980, and died in France in 1991 at age 72. According to the NYT obituary he and Nancy were still married at the time of his death.
Harold’s second son, from his third wife Jessica, was David:
David Ware (1928-1989)
He died in New York City in 1989 at the age of 61.
He does not appear to have married or had any children. He grew up with John Abt as a stepfather, who was also in the Ware Group as a spy as well as the long-time attorney for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
There is no FindaGrave listing for David Ware either.
The common traits within this family is that they were either childless or certainly did not prefer having as many children as their contemporaries. They lived through the baby boom and yet still managed to have much lower-than-average family sizes.
The left-wing mindset is secular in disposition. It’s sad that none of them seemed to break loose from this curse, though Judith looks the most promising here.
Ultimately, a left-wing mindset is a mind virus that infects its host and leads to objectively worse outcomes and worse lives. A left-wing lifestyle is self-destructive and destructive to society, inculcating the worst habits and behaviors in individuals.
Despite its flaws, there are many redeeming parts of America, primarily the quality of her people. The quality of the human material in America, in the form of friendships, valued neighbors, community, are amplified by strong families. A healthy community is one that is filled with children who are playing, competing, fighting, shouting, which is a little microcosm of the traits society tempers but whose passions never dim, later in life.
This family, the Ware family, seems to have been stuck on permanent subversive mode. They were transgressive in their politics but alienated and at odds with the values of their neighbors. To be an effective Communist no doubt one needs to believe in, but also keep, a certain distance from your actual fellow man otherwise you might start questioning the validity of the tactics you are using to assert the will of the people.
Harold was groomed by his mother to be the most impactful type of left-wing agent possible: a spy corrupting the government for Communist ends. That mindset of course sheds that mind virus upon those around them, consciously or subconsciously, even in the way people talk and engage society. So it’s little surprise the children grew up to live lives that mirrored those warped values.