From the beginning of the chapter:
The FBI's political surveillance began long before the establishment
of the national security state during the Cold War, and the reasons for
the Bureau's power must be found on a deeper level than in the
machinations of its legendary director. The FBI's political role
stretched back to World War I and the Red Scare and it did not
originate because of a popular anticommunist hysteria or because it
was out of control, as most historians have argued.
The Question About the Nature of the Communist Threat
Since the end of the Cold War, some of the archives of the American
and Soviet intelligence agencies have been made available to historians.
The Comintern archives have shown that the American Communists
slavishly followed the directives from Moscow, that they from the
very beginning to a large extent were financed by the Russians, and
that the Communist Party maintained an underground apparatus for
illegal activities. The archives of the KGB and the National Security
Agency have revealed that American Communists were recruited on a
massive scale by the Soviets from the middle of the 1930s to infiltrate
the government and the defense industry, influence the policy-making
process, and provide information for Soviet intelligence services. Not
a few of those who were persecuted during the McCarthy era were, in
fact, Soviet spies.
...