Donald Niven Wheeler
Donald Niven Wheeler was born in White Bluffs, Washington in 1913. His mother had been a school teacher and his father a bricklayer, a socialist and trade unionist. (1) He later recalled: "My father's people were originally Puritan, they came to this country in the Great Migration of the 1630s and settled in Massachusetts. At the time of the Revolution, they were farmers in upstate New York and, in the 1830s, they moved to Wisconsin when the state was first being settled." His father was a small farmer who became a Christian Socialist. His father taught him to admire radical figures in history such as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Eugene Debs and Lenin. (2)
Wheeler attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and in 1935 won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. While at university he joined the Communist Party of Britain, as did two other Rhodes scholars, Duncan Chaplin Lee and Michael Straight. Wheeler was active in his support of the Popular Front government during the Spanish Civil War. In October 1937, he moved to Paris to work with a group of Americans working on behalf of the International Brigades. (3)
Donald Niven Wheeler and New Deal
In 1938, he returned to the United States to teach at Yale University. Soon after joined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Soon afterwards he was recruited as a Soviet spy (codename Izra) and worked under the guidance of Jacob Golos. It has been argued by Allen Weinstein, the author of The Hunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999): "Politically, Wheeler's life followed a familiar are among the romantic, radical Americans who volunteered their service to Soviet intelligence, from milder reform traditions into communism, though in his case, family background dictated a wider range of involvement." (4)
Wheeler also worked in the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In 1941 he was appointed as section chief of the Research Division of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American wartime strategic intelligence agency, where he worked closely with Duncan Chaplin Lee, another secret member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and a fellow spy. Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin, the authors of The Mitrokhin Archive (1999), have argued that because of people like Wheeler, "throughout the Second World War the NKVD knew vastly more about OSS than OSS knew about the NKVD." (5)
Soviet Spy
In 1943 and later became a member of the Victor Perlo group. Perlo later wrote to his Soviet supervisors: "He has access to excellent material and once given an explanation of what was wanted, worked hard and bravely to get it... He has not been reckless but has gotten materials regularly under security conditions more difficult than those faced by most others in the group." (6) "Beginning in 1944, virtually the entire range of OSS analytic and planning documents on Nazi Germany and its postwar prospects flowed continuously from General Donovan's Washington headquarters through Donald Wheeler to Pavel Fitin's offices in Moscow." (7)
On the 30th May, 1944, Iskhak Akhmerov described Donald Niven Wheeler as "an old Communist Party member for several years... capable, works in the Labor Division, Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS." (8) Wheeler explained his own role in the OSS in a biography he supplied to the NKVD. "Up to the present, the work of my section has been mainly strategic analysis and estimating population and the manpower factors of strategic importance to the enemy's position. In particular, we have worked on the German civilian manpower situation, military manpower, the strength and disposition of enemy forces, and enemy losses." (9)
Three months later, Duncan Chaplin Lee, another Soviet spy in the OSS, told Elizabeth Bentley that Wheeler was being investigated for espionage. Akhmerov reported to Moscow: "About ten days ago (Lee) told us very unpleasant news concerning (Wheeler's) situation... he is included on the list of officials who allegedly provide us with information from their department. (Bentley) says (Lee) is one of the senior people in the department in charge of checking the officials, etc." Akhmerov admitted that Wheeler would be a great loss to the network: "As you know, (Wheeler) passed to us more interesting materials than anybody else from this group. Three weeks ago (Bentley) met with him for the first time. He made a very good impression on her. I asked (Bentley) to be very prudent and to do everything possible to fortify his position in the OSS. He seems to be very brave and does not care about his situation. He says it makes no sense to be afraid: a man dies only once. He treats his OSS colleagues very critically and considers them all empty-headed." (10)
Donald Niven Wheeler continued to pass documents to the Soviet Union after the war. In November, 1945 he sent information on various issues. This included a report on the Italian domestic political situation on the eve of elections in that country; a copy of the confidential report written by the military governor in the U.S. occupation zone of the USSR; OSS reports about current political events in the USSR; OSS weekly reports on political events in Europe and a State Department intelligence report on the Middle East. (11)
Elizabeth Bentley
On 30th July 1948, Elizabeth Bentley appeared before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Over the next two days she gave the names of several Soviet spies including Donald Niven Wheeler, William Remington, Mary Price, Victor Perlo, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Silvermaster, Duncan Chaplin Lee, Abraham George Silverman, Nathan Witt, Marion Bachrach, William Ludwig Ullman, Julian Wadleigh, Harold Glasser, Henry Hill Collins, Frank Coe, Charles Kramer and Lauchlin Currie. One of the members of the HUAC, John Rankin, and well-known racist, pointed out the Jewish origins of these agents. (12)
As a result of this information Donald Niven Wheeler was blacklisted. Wheeler and his family moved to a dairy farm in Sequim, and remained active in the Communist Party of the United States. He was also active in the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 took part in the March on Washington. (13)
In 1968, Wheeler returned to Oxford University and completed his doctorate, and in 1970 he became an associate professor of economics at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada. According to Evelina Alarcon: "He was a man of encyclopedic knowledge, a passionate teacher on topics ranging from economics to the beauty of nomadic oriental rugs, which he argued were far greater than most Renaissance paintings. He was an outspoken foe of war, racism and capitalist exploitation and never wavered in his belief in socialism. (14)
Donald Niven Wheeler died in Seattle on 8th November, 2002.
Primary Sources
(1) Victor Perlo, report on Donald Niven Wheeler (January, 1945)
He has access to excellent material and once given an explanation of what was wanted, worked hard and bravely to get it... He has not been reckless but has gotten materials regularly under security conditions more difficult than those faced by most others in the group.
(2) Donald Niven Wheeler, biography produced for NKVD (1945)
Up to the present, the work of my section has been mainly strategic analysis and estimating population and the manpower factors of strategic importance to the enemy's position. In particular, we have worked on the German civilian manpower situation, military manpower, the strength and disposition of enemy forces, and enemy losses.
(3) Iskhak Akhmerov, report to Moscow (17th September 1944)
About ten days ago (Lee) told us very unpleasant news concerning (Wheeler's) situation... he is included on the list of officials who allegedly provide us with information from their department. (Bentley) says (Lee) is one of the senior people in the department in charge of checking the officials, etc.... As you know, (Wheeler) passed to us more interesting materials than anybody else from this group. Three weeks ago (Bentley) met with him for the first time. He made a very good impression on her. I asked (Bentley) to be very prudent and to do everything possible to fortify his position in the OSS. He seems to be very brave and does not care about his situation. He says it makes no sense to be afraid: a man dies only once. He treats his OSS colleagues very critically and considers them all empty-headed.
(4) Evelina Alarcon, The People's Weekly (22nd November, 2002)
He was active in the Party until his death, riding the ferry from his home on Bainbridge Island to get to his club meetings in Seattle. Crippled in one hip, he walked miles in a United Farm Worker demonstration a few years ago. He took part in the “Battle of Seattle” WTO protests in 1999. On a visit to family in Maryland one year, he helped distribute leaflets in Virginia exposing Oliver North, the Iran-contra criminal, who was running for the U.S. Senate. He was proud that four generations of his family are active members of the CPUSA and the Young Communist League.
Wheeler was born on Oct. 23, 1913, in White Bluffs, Wash., on the banks of the Columbia River. His mother had been a school teacher and his father a bricklayer, a socialist and trade unionist. They were evicted from their farm to make way for the Hanford Atomic Reservation during World War II.
Wheeler attended Reed College in Portland, Ore., where he was active in the National Student Union. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he joined the university branch of the Communist Party. Active in the Popular Front against fascism, he was one of hundreds of students who physically expelled Sir Oswald Moseley, head of the British Union of Fascists, from the campus.
He went on to post-graduate work at the University of Paris but dropped out to assist the International Brigades in Spain. He was joined in this work by Mary Lukes Vause, a fellow Reed student, a new mother and widow of his best friend, Clare Vause. They were married in 1938.
He taught briefly at Yale before joining the U.S. Treasury Department. From 1940 to 1941, he was the Clerk of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. From 1941 to 1946, he served as Section Chief of the Research Division of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), recruited to the position by OSS Director William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, who later wrote in his Annals of America of Wheeler’s highly accurate estimates of German war casualties.
Wheeler also helped prepare the OSS Strategic Bombing Survey, which concluded that bombing of Germany caused civilian casualties but did not slow the Nazi war machine. It bolstered the argument for opening the Second Front to relieve Nazi pressure on the Soviet Army and hasten defeat of Hitler fascism.
Blacklisted during the Cold War years, the family moved to a dairy farm in Sequim, Wash. Wheeler was subpoenaed as a hostile witness before federal grand juries in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, leaving his pregnant wife and four children to milk the cows. He was also summoned three times before the House Un-American Activities Committee. His sister, Margaret Jean Schuddakopf, said that his courage and steadfastness was her beacon as she fought her own battle for the right to teach.
The farm became a safe haven where the children of left and progressive families spent summers helping with farm chores. Mary and Don Wheeler, together with Vivian Gaboury, became mainstays of the Clallam County CP, which fought the McCarthyite witch-hunt against the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. The club sponsored a peace booth at the Clallam County fair, concerts by Pete Seeger and a delegation to the 1963 March on Washington. A steady stream of speakers included CPUSA leaders Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Roscoe Proctor, Victor Perlo and Jarvis Tyner.
In 1965 Wheeler was hired to teach at Franconia College in New Hampshire. He returned to Oxford in 1968 and completed his doctorate. In 1970 he was hired as Associate Professor of Economics at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada.
He had been teaching there for a decade when reactionary campus elements, goaded by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, cancelled a one-year extension of his contract approved by the Economics Department. Wheeler had earned administration ire by helping turn the Faculty Association into a certified faculty union.
Students and faculty fought for Wheeler’s reinstatement. When it seemed the battle was lost, Wheeler wrote a letter of thanks for their solidarity and retired. But a student boycott of the courses he had taught continued and the administration relented. Wheeler returned to campus a hero. He often described it as the happiest year of his life.
A writer on many topics, he wrote a column for Labor Today. He was a man of encyclopedic knowledge, a passionate teacher on topics ranging from economics to the beauty of nomadic oriental rugs, which he argued were far greater than most Renaissance paintings. He was an outspoken foe of war, racism and capitalist exploitation and never wavered in his belief in socialism.
He is survived by his children, Stephen F. Vause, Tim Wheeler, Susan Wheeler and Marion Burns. Son Nathaniel died in 1985. He has 11 grandchildren and six great grandchildren. His wife, Mary Lukes Wheeler, died in November 1992.
Wheeler’s papers are in the archives of the University of Washington and his library will be donated to the George A. Meyers Collection at Frostburg University in Maryland. Memorials are planned Dec. 22 in Portland, Ore., and on Bainbridge Island, Dec. 28. In lieu of flowers, please contribute to a newspaper he loved, the People’s Weekly World.