Two Faces of the KGB
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing TWO FACES OF THE KGB BY BARRY GEWEN DURING THE post-World War II period, when spies were front-page news and legitimate security concerns had begun mushrooming into the public...
...I do not believe it is the whole story...
...He was also, during his years with the FBI, a "man with a mission...
...In 1948, he went to Moscow for a five-year training program at the Military Academy...
...Justice Department who was caught redhanded turning over classified documents to her Russian connection, yet who escaped prison through what Lamphere considers a technicality...
...It has been said that the Eisenhower Justice Department acted as if it were trying to jail each of the approximately 30,000 American Communists one by one...
...But when he announced his true identity in 1953, the Soviets imprisoned him without charges for six months, eventually permitting him to return to Poland and a teaching position...
...His rise was rapid...
...The author is equally disdainful of Roy Cohn's chest-thumping behavior as an assistant prosecutor during the Rosenberg trial...
...Shainberg tells of a wealthy friend who escaped in a purchased airplane, merely to be returned to the Ghetto after being rejected by England and the United States...
...In 1957, Shainberg was allowed to migrate to Israel...
...His is a remarkable tale of horror, brutality and deception...
...Lamphere watched as talented and dedicated agents were demoted for petty reasons...
...A member of the Jewish resistance, he managed to escape from a train bound, he believes, for the Treblinka death camp, and to hook up with a band of Polish partisans...
...Probably the book's most wrenching section is the part describing the terrible isolation that Jews experienced as the noose tightened around them...
...He became determined to present his—the FBI's—side, to describe the months of legwork, the enormous efforts to decode secret Soviet messages, and the arduous accumulation of evidence in his many cases...
...Lamphere spent 14years with the FBI, hanging up his cloak and sheathing his dagger in 1955 for the quieter preserves of the Veterans Administration and the insurance business...
...Many of the events in Shainberg's account are painfully familiar, but they are not the sort of subjects that jade...
...A view from the other side, as it were, is provided by Maurice Shainberg's Breaking from the KGB (Shapolsky, 295 pp., $16.95...
...Lamphere was, in short, a professional, and his book resonates with the sincerity of a person trying to do his job...
...He claims to have visited a school in Moscow that indoctrinated children kidnapped from the West, and then returned them to their native lands as Communist infiltrators...
...Others, who devised less elaborate schemes, were turned in by anti-Semitic Poles to their Nazi occupiers...
...For included in the public that got an education, unfortunately, were dim, overzealous rough beasts occupying seats in the United States Senate and other high places, who learned both too much and not enough, and whose attention-getting antics managed to tarnish the less-publicized good work of Lamphere and his associates, probably forever...
...Some of the FBI discipline," he writes, "verged on thought control...
...It included an interview with Lamphere carefully edited to exclude his explanations of disputed facts, leaving him with the feeling that he had been used:" If there had been a frame-up perpetuated bythe FBI, I would have had to beat the centerofit...
...Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt "was always anathema to me...
...The FBI was initially ill-equipped to meet the challenge, too, and for a time "counterintelligence was playing catch-up ball...
...The British services, leaking from every pore, dragged their feet for years, much to the frustration and anger of their American counterparts...
...Like so much else written about the time and place, the book deals strictly in extremes...
...While serving with the Soviets, Shainberg saw Polish nationalists tortured, women raped by high-ranking Soviet officers, and anti-Communist troops deported to certain death...
...About the only headline case of the period he did not figure in was Hiss/Chambers...
...Although Lamphere fit the FBI's cookie-cutter ideal of the conservative, patriotic middle-American, he was no Red-baiter either...
...When the first major case broke in Ottawa in late 1945 with the defection of Igor Gouzenko, the Canadian Prime Minister wrote in his diary: "the idea that the Russians might be spying on Canada came as a complete shock...
...Yet the break is continually delayed and, instead, for almost a decade he climbs higher and higher up the military ladder...
...More troubling is the peculiar ebb and flow of the narrative...
...Writers & Writing TWO FACES OF THE KGB BY BARRY GEWEN DURING THE post-World War II period, when spies were front-page news and legitimate security concerns had begun mushrooming into the public hysteria of a Red Scare, Robert J. Lamphere was playing a role as an insider's insider...
...In Breakingfrom the KG B, Shainberg has given us a fascinating story...
...Inculcation of fear began on our first day, and dread of our superiors' wrath never let up during my whole career in the FBI...
...Shainberg, born in Warsaw in 1919 to a prosperous family of Orthodox Jews, witnessed the Nazi invasion of Poland and the erection of the Warsaw Ghetto...
...A supervisor in the FBI's counterintelligence section, he was directly involved in almost every maj or espionage case the Bureau handled at the time...
...Behind Greenglass were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...
...Indeed, they succeeded too well...
...This strains credulity, having more in common with The Manehurian Candidate than with anything most of us consider to be true of human nature...
...They succeeded admirably, with each breakthrough— Elizabeth Bentley, Coplon, Hiss, the Rosenbergs—hammering the lessons home ever deeper...
...Lamphere is out to set the record straight, not to make the Bureau look good...
...He was after spies and genuine subversives, individuals who had broken the nation's espionage laws, and he knew enough to make crucial distinctions—between beliefs and actions, and between different kinds of actions as well...
...His work helped convict Gerhart Eisler, the brother of composer Hanns Eisler, identified by one witnessinl946 as the " Number One Communist in the U. S.,' and Judith Coplon, the agent in the U.S...
...Lamphere had the responsibility for following up all of Gold's information...
...he even knew the spy Kim Philby on a personal basis...
...As the frontline soldiers in this unprecedented, undeclared "war" against the KGB, FBI agents like Lamphere had a cause: to educate themselves and the public...
...Out of those sessions came Fuchs' identification of Harry Gold as a Soviet courier, and from Gold's confession that he had engaged in espionage f or 15 years came dozens of additional leads...
...At the conclusion of the War, most people had to make a considerable readjustment in their thinking to be able to accept the fact of peacetime espionage...
...He decided to write this book after a pro-Rosenberg film perpetuating the notion that the couple had been railroaded was twice aired on public television during the 1970s...
...Thus Lamphere's memoirs, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story (Random House, 320 pp., $ 18.95), written with Tom Shachtman, are an account of a momentous and formative epoch in our recent history, told from a perspective not frequently encountered among the abundant literature on the era...
...It could only have occurred during the World War II and postwar years in the Eastern European cauldron where totalitarianisms clashed and entire civilizations were destroyed...
...In other instances, overeagerness may have led him to report rumor as fact...
...Following numerous passages recording his shock and dismay, the reader expects Shainberg to announce his break...
...At moments such as these Breaking from the KGB takes on something of the quality of Jerzy Kosinski's horrific fiction, The Painted Bird...
...After assuming a Polish identity and taking the name of Mieczyslaw Pruzanski, he became an intelligence officer with the Red Army as it pushed on toward Berlin...
...He declares, "it is difficult to say which was the more repulsivegovernment—that of the Nazis or that of the Soviets...
...On certain narrow points he must simply be mistaken, as when he states he was 23 at the time of the German surrender in 1945, despite having already informed us that he was born in 1919...
...By the age of 26 he was a maj or, the winner of the Stalin Gold Medal and a member of the five-man Polish delegation sent to Reims to accept the German surrender...
...McCarthy's approach and tactics hurt the anti-Communist cause and turned many liberals against legitimate efforts to curtail Communist activities in the United States, particularly in regard to government employment of known Communists...
...The most significant of these proved to be a former employee at Los Alamos, David Greenglass, whom Gold had contacted once in 1945...
...He forthrightly notes his obj ections to the cult of personality that surrounded J. Edgar Hoover and to the authoritarian rigidity of the bureaucracy...
...In 1950, Lamphere flew to London to spend two weeks interrogating Klaus Fuchs, just convicted in England for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets...
...That was never Lamphere's goal...
...What is more, they had to drastically revise their perception of our wartime ally, the Soviet Union...
...He is aware that the Russians cynically sold out Poland's partisans by denying them support when the Germans were crushing their uprising (though he attempts some feeble apologies for Moscow's wretched policy...
...He points out, for example, that "no one in the hierarchy of the FBI who was at all connected with the Rosenberg case wanted a death sentence for Ethel Rosenberg...
...Something is definitely wrong here, and to state quite bluntly what that something probably is, 1 strongly doubt anyone could have succeeded in the Communist intelligence services at this time without getting the blood of innocents on his hands...
...It is meant as no diminution of the suffering Shainberg must have endured to raise questions about portions of his work...
...Two years later he and his family came to the United States, where he was at last able to settle down into a normal existence as the manager of a cardboard carton factory...
Vol. 69 • October 1986 • No. 14
