Spy vs Spy

...Nevertheless, the GRU spy ring had penetrated a variety of Canadian institutions, enlisted a disconcerting number of Canadian citizens, and broken the law to benefit a foreign dictatorship...

...What Knight does not seem to understand is why the government was unable to prosecute the dozens of spies Bentley named: Kim Philby had tipped off the Soviets that she was talking, they had cut off ties to their agents, and the United States government had determined not to use the only hard evidence it had—the Venona docu-ments—in open court...

...In general, anyone who confessed to the commission was convicted, while those who remained silent or denied guilt were more likely to escape punishment...

...Knight reserves her indignation for those responsible for ferreting out spies...

...Although the Canadians, British, How the Cold War Began The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies by Amy Knight Carroll & Graf, 384 pp., $27.95 and Americans kept mum the news that Gouzenko was in custody (hoping to persuade the Soviets that he was on the run), Kim Philby, one of the KGB's moles within the British intelligence services, kept them informed on the progress of the investigation...

...Amy Knight, a freelance Russian expert, is only slightly exaggerating when she titles her account of the case, How the Cold War Began...

...The Canadian Communists had been interned during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact because their onetime antifascism had been superseded by an alliance with fascists with whom their government was at war...

...The events he set in motion guarantee that students of the Cold War will long remember him...

...At times she suggests that Soviet intelligence officers routinely exaggerated their accomplishments and claimed sources they didn't have in cables back to Moscow, but she provides no evidence to support that claim...

...Most Communists, of course, did not become spies, and most people who joined the Communist party in the 1930s eventually abandoned it...

...That inconvenient fact escapes Knight...

...Eventually taken into protective custody by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Gouzenko eagerly provided additional information, including the news that an assistant to the U.S...

...Elsewhere she brushes off most of the spying that went on as harmless or insignificant...

...She agrees that the Soviets were doubtless infuriated that Western governments used the Gouzenko affair "to fight domestic communism," a struggle whose virtues she does not appreciate...

...But Carr, Rose, and Browder had been involved with the Communist underground and conspiratorial networks for years before the war...

...secretary of state was a Soviet agent, thus launching an FBI investigation of Alger Hiss, and implicating a British physicist, Allan Nunn May, as part of an effort to steal atomic bomb secrets...

...Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that Harry Dexter White consciously provided information to the KGB, Knight balks at acknowledging his espionage...

...Because Bentley retained no documents from her espionage career, Knight is not inclined to credit her story...

...Virtually all key atomic espionage work, for example, was turned over to the NKVD during World War II...

...But she is even more irritated by the uses made of the case by American counterintelligence agencies, decrying the impetus it gave to investigations of such Americans as Alger Hiss, the ways in which J. Edgar Hoover used it to buttress allegations by American defectors from Soviet intelligence, like Elizabeth Bentley, and the extent to which it contributed to a "spy scare" that decimated the American left...

...While she has thoroughly canvassed recently opened archives about Gouzenko and the firestorm he created, Knight is not a terribly reliable guide to what the case revealed about Harvey Klehr is the Andrew Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory...

...Knight dismisses Elizabeth Bent-ley's allegations of widespread espionage as unsupported and unconvincing...

...Instead, she accepts at face value the statements of spokesmen for the Russian foreign intelligence service (SVR) that Alger Hiss's name does not appear in their archives...

...In Knight's legalistic world, no one can be a spy unless they are convicted in a court of law...

...She also ignores all the other evidence against Hiss, including testimony from Hede Massing, another spy who testified about his activities, and the detailed information uncovered by Allen Wein-stein and Sam Tanenhaus in their splendid books...

...Why, then, did they take such a risk...

...She never considers that Earl Browder and Eugene Dennis, leaders of the American Communist party, were also enmeshed in espionage, just as reckless...

...She laments that Israel Halperin, a chemist, and Arthur Steinberg, a biologist, had their careers blighted even though they were never convicted (or, in Steinberg's case, even indicted) for espionage...

...At one point Knight inaccurately suggests that Chambers provided no evidence to support his allegations against Hiss...

...She misstates key pieces of evidence and labors to exonerate individuals now confirmed to have been Soviet agents...

...Like many defectors, he proved to be a difficult person, headstrong, inflexible, obsessed with money, and convinced that everyone he dealt with was either a simpleton or obtuse...

...Although Knight is aware of the Venona transcripts, she does not have much confidence in what they reveal...

...She consistently minimizes the seriousness of the spying and the damage it did...

...She allows that "White was at least an unwitting informant to the Soviets," ignoring a Venona document in which a KGB agent reported White's commitment to providing information at periodic meetings while driving around Washington in his automobile, or another where he revealed the American negotiating strategy at the first United Nations Conference to the Soviets...

...She trumpets the fact that there were no indictments stemming from Bentley's charges, even though the Venona documents demonstrate that Bentley told the truth...

...Soviet espionage in North America or the Western response to it...

...Why would leaders of Western Communist parties believe the welfare of the Soviet Union was more important than the fate of their own Communist parties, let alone the countries of which they were citizens...

...At one point she criticizes the Canadian government for going public with spy allegations rather than pursuing quiet diplomacy to resolve the issue...

...And even though Whittaker Chambers did produce documents typed on the Hiss family typewriter and others in Alger Hiss's handwriting, she doesn't believe him, either...

...Were they just dupes, or was the Soviet code name in Venona for party members—"Fel-lowcountrymen"—indicative of the true loyalties of such hardened cadres...

...After years of ill health, Gouzenko died in 1982...

...May, who was arrested and convicted in Great Britain, was a far less important source on atomic research than Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall, and even David Greenglass, all run by the NKVD and exposed several years later...

...As a result, they were able to withdraw key personnel, including Zabotin, from Canada, and warn their agents, including May, that they were under suspicion and to avoid any incriminating behavior...

...Their decision to cooperate with Soviet espionage was, Knight concludes, reckless and "catastrophic" for the party...

...Given her despair about the consequences of his actions, Knight is actually quite balanced in her discussion of Gouzenko himself...

...The Canadian government quickly convened a Royal Commission, detained 13 people under a special war powers order that enabled them to be held incommunicado, questioned without benefit of lawyers, and threatened with severe penalties for refusing to testify before this fact-finding body...

...The material gathered by the commission was later used in court, most notably the confessions of several of the defendants...

...Some may have thought the information they were asked to provide was innocuous...

...In other places she argues that most of the names mentioned in Venona are simply discussions of potential targets for recruitment, even though most of the messages discuss real sources turning over real material...

...Most Soviet spies, however, were never prosecuted because the evidence of their guilt was not admissible in court, either because it was derived from decrypted cables or obtained by illegal wiretaps or break-ins...

...His latest book is In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage...

...Despite all her research, she misunderstands both the institutional loyalties of domestic Communist parties and the nature of the threat faced by counterintelligence agencies...

...Her animus towards American anticommunism is not only inaccurate—the CPUSA was never outlawed—but also ironic, given that no American Communists were ever treated with such disregard for basic legal rights as the Canadians sequestered in the Gouzenko case, even though it seems a stretch to call the Mountie tactics "Gestapolike...

...She gives a backhanded compliment to the Canadian government, praising it for not outlawing the Communist party, unlike the United States...

...Igor Gouzenko set in motion a hunt for Communist spies, but it was no wild goose chase...

...While Knight believes the key question to be asked is "why so many innocent people were accused of spying," she is remarkably incurious about why so many American and Canadian Communists were willing to spy...

...Fred Rose was a Communist representative in Parliament and Sam Carr was one of the party's leading functionaries...

...She defends him by insisting that "there is no evidence that he was doing this with the intention of subverting American policies...

...That may represent one of the glories of the Western system of law, but it hardly exonerates those who betrayed their country...

...His initial efforts were a comedy of errors, as various civil servants, newspaper reporters, and police officials shuffled him from one office to another, either confused by his rambling and broken English or, like subordinates of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, worried that they might offend Russian allies...

...His documents also identified two important leaders of the Canadian Communist party, including a member of Parliament, as key figures in the espionage ring...

...In addition to the shock of discovering that a significant number of its citizens were covertly aiding a foreign country, Canadian authorities were most startled by the involvement of two leaders of the Labour Progressive party, as the Communists were then styled...

...Likewise, she denounces the Loyalty-Security program instituted by the Truman administration, even though it was based on the rational premise that Communist loyalties were potentially in conflict with national security...

...By 1944, the GRU had been supplanted as the premier Soviet intelligence agency by the NKVD, which had its own network in Canada and the United States...

...Norman committed suicide and his guilt or innocence remains an open question, but Knight is livid that his lies led to investigations that led to his suicide...

...Knight notes that several of those implicated by Gouzenko were reluctant to spy and sometimes resisted entreaties to hand over information...

...And while most Communists were not spies, most assuredly, virtually all the spies had emerged from the Communist movement...

...But she is less concerned that they never bothered to inform authorities that they had been approached to spy and that they lied when confronted with Gouzenko's evidence...

...Although she acknowledges that Klaus Fuchs was an atomic spy, she absurdly sniffs that there were "no real atomic secrets to be lost...

...In retrospect, it is clear that the Canadian ring was hardly the Soviet Union's most valuable group of agents...

...No doubt many of those recruited to spy were idealists who wanted to help their gallant Soviet allies during World War II...

...She is far angrier at investigators who suspected that the Canadian diplomat E. Herbert Norman was a spy based on his secret Communist party membership while at Cambridge in the 1930s than she is at Norman for lying about his past to those investigators and to Canadian officials...

...He wrote one surprisingly gifted novel, but otherwise seemed to enjoy only suing critics for libel, griping about his relationship with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and, together with his wife, raising his eight children, none of whom learned his true identity until they turned 16...

...Knight does not bother to inform readers that the SVR's official policy is not to identify as an agent anyone who has not admitted it himself, including Hiss...

...Gouzenko was about to be recalled to Russia when, enamored of life in the West and fearful of being disciplined for security lapses, he secreted evidence of a large GRU (Soviet military intelligence) spy ring directed by his superior, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, and sought political asylum along with his pregnant wife and young daughter...

...Spy What Igor Gouzenko taught the West by Harvey Klehr Igor Gouzenko was a code clerk in the Russian embassy in Ottawa whose decision to defect in September 1945 set off a political earthquake...

...In February 1946, J. Edgar Hoover leaked the news that Gouzenko was supplying dramatic information to columnist Drew Pearson...

...What Venona and the Mitrokhin archives make absolutely clear is that hundreds of Western Communists willingly spied for the Soviet Union because their ultimate loyalties were not to the countries of which they were citizens, but to the country that enshrined the cause of communism...

...at another she implies, again with no evidence, that Chambers fabricated the documents he did produce...

...Knight is critical of the Canadian government for its violations of civil liberties and even its decision to publicize the case...

...Because he took with him a few hundred pages of documents that implicated a number of Canadian civil servants and scientists as Soviet spies, his case generated headlines, roiled diplomatic waters, and reverberated in both American and Canadian politics for years afterwards...

...His legacy is far more positive than Amy Knight is willing to grant...

...Other Canadian spies provided useful but hardly groundbreaking information on weapons systems, diplomacy, and military issues...

...It was unsporting and reckless of J. Edgar Hoover to initiate investigations of Hiss and White based on mere snippets of information from sources like Gouzenko and Bentley, who had never met them...

...Knight displays extraordinary naivete, imagining that Rose, a long-time party functionary, and Carr, a onetime student at the International Lenin School in Moscow, were somehow "duped by the Soviets into thinking their country was a glorious utopia...