COLUMN ONE : FBI Quest Outlives Cold War : The impending trial of an American leftist reflects the long campaign against Communist front groups. As the agency looks for vindication, others see a vendetta.

Five years ago, when the Soviet Union was still the Evil Empire to many Americans, the Rev. Alan Thomson was videotaped in a hotel room allegedly handing a female FBI informant $17,000 he had received from Communist officials in Moscow.

Government officials say the cash was intended to help finance the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, an alleged “Communist front” organization chaired by Hollywood actor John Randolph. The council had arranged exchange visits by Americans and Soviets and engaged in pro-Moscow advocacy since its creation by the U.S. Communist Party in 1943.

Now, Thomson, who was executive director of the council, faces trial in June on charges that he violated currency disclosure requirements by telling the woman to deposit the money in a Buffalo bank in two transactions so it would not come to the attention of authorities.

Thomson’s attorney contends that the Presbyterian minister was illegally “lured” into a technical currency violation by the informant. He says the money was a legitimate reimbursement for council outlays on behalf of Soviet tourists visiting the United States.

But the relatively narrow money-laundering charge belies the true significance of the case. The prosecution of Alan Craft Thomson may well represent the last of the bitter domestic political battles emanating from the ideological hostilities of the Cold War, battles that pitted left against right and created deep scars that endure today.

For the first time, the U.S. government is prepared to surface an informant in an effort to prove the contention it has made for seven decades: that the Soviet Union regularly provided funds to Communist front groups that took their marching orders from Moscow and that, in the early years, may even have been recruiting grounds for spies.

The FBI believes that a conviction would add credibility to its long crusade against the Communist Party U.S.A. and other “fellow travelers” in this country, a campaign in which it was accused, sometimes rightly, of Red-baiting activities and violations of constitutional rights.

“The bureau is an agency that never gives up,” said Wayne Gilbert, assistant FBI director for intelligence. “If everything came out, the totality of what they did over the years with front groups . . . about how much money was involved . . . not just here but worldwide--I think it would be startling.”

But some U.S. officials consider the case anticlimactic, little more than a postscript to the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism around the world. They worry that a jury will reject the evidence against Thomson as vindictive persecution of a front group that seems to be fast going out of business anyway.

“What the FBI sees as vindication, the jury may see as a vendetta,” one official said. In fact, the climate may be better for a plea-bargained settlement than a full-blown trial, according to those familiar with the case, and the final act of the drama may end with a whimper rather than a bang.

Even the FBI appears to be adapting to the changing landscape. While he declined to discuss details of the Thomson case, Gilbert revealed that the bureau has closed the books on its decades-long investigation of the Communist Party U.S.A.

The outcome of the Thomson case could signal how the government intends to handle recent allegations that Gus Hall, head of the Communist Party U.S.A. and its perennial presidential candidate, received millions of dollars in secret financial support from Moscow.

In 1987, Hall signed a handwritten receipt for “$2,000,000 dollars USA” in cash allegedly delivered by a KGB courier, according to Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Yevgeny Lisov. A photocopy of the receipt was recently published in Moscow.

The money for Hall was approved at a Politburo meeting chaired by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, then boss of the Soviet Communist Party, Lisov said. Gorbachev reportedly said it was “absolutely normal” to secretly fund the Communist Party in the United States as well as 97 other Communist parties around the world.

The practice dated back to the early 1950s, when Josef Stalin was still alive, Lisov said. The payments apparently stopped in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet Union began to unravel. Lisov says he hopes to recover some of the payments, which he contends were illegal diversions of Soviet state funds.

The Communist Party U.S.A.’s national headquarters in New York did not respond to several requests for comment about the alleged payments to Hall and the Thomson case.

Gilbert, without referring directly to Hall, said that any American citizen who took money under the circumstances described by Lisov could face prosecution under various U.S. laws. “If that (Lisov’s) information becomes available, we’re not going to ignore it, we’re not going to turn away from it,” Gilbert said. “We’d be damn fools not to be interested in it.”

The FBI has long known that the Communist Party U.S.A. got its funds from Moscow, according to William H. Webster, former chief of the FBI and the CIA. “We tracked the money that came through Gus Hall,” he said, “$2 million or $3 million at a crack.”

Despite its paymaster, Webster said, the Communist Party U.S.A., often referred to as CPUSA, was not an important FBI concern during his tenure at the FBI from 1978 to 1987. “It never had more than 4,000 members,” he recalled, “and the Soviets never used CPUSA for espionage purposes” during his watch.

Earlier, through the 1940s at least, some Soviet spies also were party members, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage. And in the 1960s, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was “seriously concerned that the Communist Party was influencing the civil rights movement” through an adviser of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Webster said.

No such accusations have ever been directed at Thomson, who in many respects seems an unlikely target for a serious criminal prosecution. If convicted on the currency charge, Thomson could be imprisoned for up to five years and fined up to $250,000.

Thomson, now 60, has been deeply involved in peace and human rights activities for most of his life. A slight, short man with wiry, gray hair, he “could be somewhat abrasive,” said one former associate.

His lawyer would not let him be interviewed for this article, but in previous comments he left no doubt about his pro-Soviet views.

In 1983, when U.S.-Soviet relations were particularly tense over the Soviet deployment of new SS-20 nuclear missiles in Europe, Thomson told an Iowa college audience that the media and Congress were to blame for superpower tensions. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in self-defense, he said, because it felt threatened.

Thomson was born in 1931 in Canton, China, where his father was a missionary surgeon. Graduated from Oklahoma A&M; in 1952, he taught in a mission school in Tehran for three years before attending Union Theological Seminary in New York. He was ordained in 1959.

He went back to Asia, serving in Indonesia, Singapore and Hong Kong before returning to the United States in 1974 “for personal reasons,” according to the Presbyterian Historical Assn. He was a “human rights activist,” an association official said, and may have been barred from returning to one of the Asian countries. He was married in 1952 and has three sons. He and his wife are separated, according to his attorney.

Thomson became executive director of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship in 1981. He left the organization in 1990, a year after his arrest, and now serves at St. James United Church in New York.

The government charges that Thomson, in a Washington hotel room in February, 1987, gave FBI informant Barbara Makuch $17,000 and advised her to deposit it in a Buffalo bank in two amounts, $9,000 and $8,000, “to conceal the true origin” of the money. U.S. law requires disclosure of the source of deposits of $10,000 or more.

An FBI press release at the time of Thomson’s arrest said that “these funds were provided to Thomson in Moscow by a Soviet official of the U.S.S.R. Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.” The society, run by the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee, was the sister organization of Thomson’s friendship council.

Immediately after his indictment, Thomson told the Associated Press that government officials had decided to prosecute him because “they’re trying to put a scare into the peace movement.”

Thomson’s lawyer, Morton Stavis of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says his client is the victim of “a classic case of entrapment” in which Makuch, described as in her 40s and attractive, lured Thomson into an “intimate relationship.” She had been a member of the Buffalo chapter of the friendship council for almost a decade.

Thomson’s alleged crime was “instigated and induced” by Makuch after she “wormed her way into his confidence and affections,” Stavis said.

A U.S. official denied there had been any sexual relationship between the two.

The friendship council has long been a favorite target of the government’s anti-Communist crusade. In the late 1950s, the now-defunct Subversive Activities Control Board branded it a Communist front and tried to make it register as a foreign agency.

But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington ruled in 1963 that the government had failed to prove that the council was “directed, dominated or controlled” by the CPUSA, despite the extensive overlapping of both organizations’ membership and leadership.

A 1987 FBI report said the council “provides the Soviets with an excellent conduit to promote its active measure (propaganda and disinformation) campaigns, meet with U.S. persons of influence, spot and assess U.S. persons for recruitment operations and influence certain groups of activists in the U.S. peace movement.” It said the council was “a bridge to reach people who would be reluctant to participate in an openly pro-Soviet disarmament organization.”

At the time of Thomson’s arrest, the council included 27 active chapters around the country, each of which often sponsored visiting Soviet groups. These sponsors, a 1989 U.S. government report said, “are frequently unaware that Soviet intelligence officers utilize their opportunities to gain access to sensitive areas in the United States that are closed to Soviet diplomats or require special permission to visit.”

While the council is still alive, it is much less active today. The headquarters has been moved from New York to Cleveland, and its Washington office has been closed. Court records list the council’s Los Angeles affiliate as the Society for Cultural Relations USA/USSR.

Council Chairman Randolph, 76, said in a brief phone interview that in view of the upheavals in the Soviet Union, “we’ve been seriously thinking of declaring the group obsolete.”

Randolph has been a self-proclaimed radical since his college days. He was blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951 after invoking the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. He essentially did not work for 15 years.

The Bronx-born actor won a Tony award as a “Trotskyite, Communist, left-wing grandfather” in Neil Simon’s comedy “Broadway Bound.” His other notable roles include Jack Nicholson’s father in “Prizzi’s Honor.”

Randolph has been associated with many left-wing causes, from striking coal miners to the Rosenbergs. During the Depression, he has said, “many of the people I admired were Communists, who were good fighters and good union people.”

To some extent, the Thomson case presents Americans with the same dilemma that has occupied East Europeans in the aftermath of four decades of Communist rule: Is it better to punish old tormentors, or simply to forgive and forget?

While each nation there is addressing the issue in a different way, the general pattern has been to prosecute the leaders and perpetrators of major crimes, while largely ignoring the small fry.

In Czechoslovakia, for example, three former secret police and intelligence chiefs are now on trial for abuse of power in connection with the jailing of political dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.

But Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, who was himself imprisoned four times during the period, said he cannot condemn the defendants. Havel has openly sought to avoid a witch hunt.

“It still cannot be said that we have found a really good, civilized, legal key to come to terms with the past,” Havel has said.

In the United States, the Bush Administration must weigh whether it should take the more generous course now with Thomson--and, by extension, with Hall--of allowing history to judge and public exposure to punish rather than seeking jail terms or fines.

Randolph, the friendship council chairman, clearly favors the more lenient course. He said he was stunned that the government had even filed charges against Thomson, and he denounced the case as a “hangover from Cold War mentality.”

“It’s a frame-up,” he said.

Toth reported from Buffalo and Ostrow from Washington.