New Evidence of Soviet Spying

...Shortly after my book, The Secret World of American Communism, appeared in 1995, an angry Russian Intelligence Service sent investigators to the archive I had worked in and "reclassified" the already published offending material...

...Browder wound up losing money on the deal, but he never cooperated with American intelligence or spoke about his ties to Soviet espionage, even after he broke with Communism...

...Other than some who were turning over technical information like industrial formulas, most of the USSR's American spies— including those working on the atomic bomb—were ideologically motivated and wanted no monetary reward...

...But Dickstein was an exception...

...The Soviet documents they quote dovetail nearly perfectly with the Venona decryptions and largely confirm the stories of espionage told by such defectors as Whirtaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley toward the end of the 1940s...

...Directed by J. Peters, this body, which reported to the party leadership, established connections with Soviet intelligence and actively recruited American Communists for espionage tasks...

...He maintained a relationship with Soviet intelligence until 1940, receiving more than $12,000 (the equivalent of $133,000 today...

...Others did lose their jobs or their reputations when they were named before Congressional committees...

...Weinstein and Vassiliev detail the involvement of party leader Earl Browder in the KGB's activities, but their failure to make full use of the Venona decryptions leaves this story one of the weaker sections of the book...

...As part of an effort to discredit the Communist regime, Yeltsin was anxious to let scholars mine material that was bound to discomfit defenders of the old order...

...Allen Weinstein has had a similar experience...

...Dickstein's efforts to institutionalize such probes led the House to establish the Special Committee on Un-American Activities in May 193 8, chaired by Martin Dies of Texas...

...His Moscow superiors sensibly responded that such a strategy might induce Chambers' former sources to cooperate with the FBI out of anger about being duped into working for the Nazis...

...At one meeting in Washington, Straight told his Soviet controller that he had a spare $ 10,000 and offered it to him...

...The method of choice, a slowacting poison, was never employed...

...Weinstein and Vassiliev trace Larry Duggan's career as a Soviet spy to his recruitment in 1936...

...He continued to subsidize the British Daily Worker even after being recruited as an agent by Anthony Blunt...

...In 1993 Random House reached an agreement with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service that allowed a retired KGB officer, Alexander Vassiliev, to make detailed notes and transcriptions of KGB files on Soviet espionage in the United States during the 1930s and '40s, and to then share them with Weinstein...

...What they had agreed to, partly to trumpet their espionage successes in America, threatened to reveal too much about their operations and agents...

...They were located in an archive that had belonged to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was seized by Boris N. Yeltsin's government when it outlawed the party and confiscated its property...

...The 2,900 eventually decrypted identified the Rosenbergs, virtually all of Bentley's agents and—in one cable—referred to an agent whose profile fit Alger Hiss...

...One of the oddest concerns the activities of the Soviets' only Congressional spy, Samuel Dickstein of New York...

...The previous July Dickstein was contacted by the KGB and shortly afterward he offered to supply material of interest for cash...

...Years ago a supporter of Alger Hiss, asked what evidence would convince him that Hiss was indeed guilty of serving as a Soviet agent, replied that even if Hiss himself confessed, he would not believe him...

...Weinstein's coauthor, Vassiliev, soon left Russia with his family and now lives in England...

...The Russians worried that too many of their spies knew each other...

...But his value plummeted when he was left off the Dies Committee...

...Reviewed by Harvey Klehr Coauthor, "The Secret World of American Communism, and the forthcoming "lenona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, once-sacrosanct files have become available to Western researchers...

...Only a handful of Soviet spies were ever legally punished...

...The KGB archives close the circle...

...release of the Venona decryptions—intercepts of cables that exposed hundreds of Soviet spies in this country—the flow of archival material was stopped and the Russians expressed their disquiet...

...Despite their ultimately limited access to Russian intelligence files, the two have produced a fascinating, detailed and revealing portrait of Soviet intelligence activities in the United States during the Stalin era...

...At times there were so many agents that they were literally tripping over each other and the KGB worried that some of its sources might be exposed to Soviet military intelligence sources and vice versa...

...When I went to Moscow in 1992, less than a year after the abortive coup against Mikhail S. Gorbachev, I was one of the first Americans given access to the papers of the Communist International...

...Named by both Chambers and Hede Massing as a Soviet agent during the 1930s, he admitted having been approached to spy but denied doing so...

...He has often been portrayed as a victim of paranoid anti-Communism—what later came to be called McCarthyism...

...Duggan headed the State Department's Latin American division from 1935 to 1946...

...Like Hiss, Laurence Duggan is another contested figure whose guilt is clearly established by the new evidence...

...Michael Straight, son of the founders of the New Republic, joined the Communist Party while a student at Cambridge University...

...When the KGB tried to re-establish contacts in 1948, the authors maintain, only a handful were left...

...Contacts with practically all their agents stopped in a futile effort to protect them...

...In the meantime, The Haunted Wood is an invaluable resource for understanding both the successes and the failures of Soviet espionage in America...

...In Bentley's case the preferred option was killing her...

...They often got together for social gatherings where they would compare information they had obtained, discuss who was best suited to fulfill assignments and type up reports...

...Finally, the decision was made to cut him off...

...nonetheless, they were delighted with the quality of the information that was being produced...

...This may be true, yet from the Venona decryptions it is apparent that there were a significant number of other Soviet agents besides those whose files they were able to access...

...The KGB also wrestled with how to handle Chambers and Bentley...

...Perhaps he will believe the KGB documents in which Hiss is mentioned in plain text by name as a valuable source...

...Most American Communists were not spies, of course, but most Americans spying for the Soviets were Communists...

...The KGB files show that idealists could be hard to control...

...And an internal KGB report notes that the agency itself thought an attempt to re-establish contact with him just before his death may have precipitated his suicide...

...As for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, their defenders frequently contended that the only evidence against them came from confessed Soviet agents Harry Gold and David and Ruth Greenglass, who had concocted a fictitious conspiracy to save themselves...

...After Bentley's defection in 1946, the Soviets virtually shut down their espionage operations in the United States for nearly two years...

...Apart from confirming the activities of Hiss, Duggan and such other spies as Harry Dexter White, Alfred and Martha Dodd Stern, Michael Straight and Duncan Lee, the KGB files contain several startling revelations...

...The Russians were rightly concerned that such amateurs posed a security risk...

...Fearing he might expose Soviet spy rings, it warned Stalin that without a "more tactful line of behavior" toward him, its efforts in the U. S. might be harmed...

...It presents dramatic and conclusive evidence, too, that most of the assertions about Soviet spies in the United States made during the 1940s were on the mark...

...Alexander Panyushkin, its station chief in America—who doubled as the Soviet Ambassador—suggested faking documents to show that Chambers was actually a Nazi agent infiltrated into the CPUSA...

...To placate him, the USSR arranged to give him exclusive contracts with several Soviet publishing companies for the publication of their books in the United States...

...A New Deal liberal, Dickstein persuaded the House of Representatives to investigate subversive activities in 1934 and served as vice-chair of the subsequent committee headed by John McCormack of Massachusetts, which largely targeted American Nazis...

...Ten days after he was questioned by the FBI in 1948, Duggan either jumped or fell to his death...

...the KGB began to doubt it was getting its money's worth...

...Late in 1995, following the U.S...

...One of the most productive Soviet agents, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, shared a house—and his wife Helen, herself an active Soviet agent—with another agent, William Ludwig Ullman...

...Acting in accordance with instructions from the Communist International, the CPUSA created a "secret apparatus" in the early 1930s to carry out various "underground" tasks...

...During World War II American intelligence collected hundreds of thousands of commercial cables sent in code between Moscow and the Soviet Embassy in Washington and consulates around the U.S...

...Chambers' defection frightened Duggan enough to reduce his aid to the Soviets...

...More important, he feared that if the Soviet government was as riddled with spies as the purges implied, his own espionage might be detected and reported to Washington...

...The startled Russian declined the donation, but Moscow quickly cabled him to accept the offer...

...For nearly 50 years a cottage industry was devoted to debunking Chambers and proving that Alger Hiss was framed...

...The authors note that Browder's expulsion from the CPUSA in 1945 at Stalin's behest troubled the KGB...

...Like many bureaucracies, though, the Russian government was perturbed to learn that independent researchers can often find what proves embarrassing...

...Chambers and Bentley were long regarded as unreliable witnesses...

...Dickstein promised to steer investigations in certain directions and to rum over data on Fascist organizations in America...

...Couriers had affairs with some of their sources, resulting in frayed marriages and increased security problems...

...The Venona program undercut all of these arguments...

...Although Weinstein and Vassiliev give no figures, the Venona decryptions reveal that more than 350 Americans were connected to Soviet intelligence in the '30s and '40s...

...The CPUSA itself was thoroughly enmeshed in espionage...

...He knew some of those being executed and could not believe they were Fascists...

...His KGB-assigned code name, "Crook," reflected Soviet intelligence's assessment of his motives...

...But the KGB concluded that shooting was too noisy, arranging an accident was too risky and faking a suicide was too chancy...

...Buried amid the hundreds of thousands of routine—but intriguing—documents shedding light on the activities of the Communist Party of the United States were a few dozen dealing with the close relationship between the CPUS A and Soviet intelligence agencies...

...Further disenchantment set in when he failed to persuade the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky...

...Perhaps many of them were also never reactivated, but we will not know until all the files are opened...

...Elizabeth Bentley, following the death of her Soviet boss and lover, Jacob Golos, propositioned Anatoly Gorsky, her new KGB controller, leading him to urge Moscow to supply a husband for the lonely, lovesick agent...

...A few accepted payment for expenses, but in contrast to recent operatives—Aldrich Ames, say, or Navy Warrant Officer John A. Walker—they were devoted Marxists and Soviet sympathizers...

...He was upset, however, by the Soviet purge trials...

...Although the KGB files indicate Moscow was not happy with the amount of information he was turning over during World War II, from the Venona decryptions it appears he did provide some very valuable material...

...Because virtually none of the dozens of alleged agents named by Bentley was ever prosecuted and she herself descended into alcoholism, her charges were either ridiculed or regarded as unproved...