WORKING FOR STALIN
WEINER, LAUREN
WORKING FOR STALIN Why Americans Make Bad Spies By Lauren Weiner Left-wing historians used to say that their anti-Communist opponents greatly exaggerated the American Communist party's Cold War...
...It adds not just to the historical record but to our knowledge of how many permutations there really are to dishonesty in the human heart...
...As Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev's new study, The Haunted Wood, shows, the Americans who worked in Russian spy rings helped the Soviet Union inform itself about everything from U.S...
...Duncan Lee of the Office of Strategic Services, atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, and the State Department's Michael Straight and Lawrence Duggan were among those who agonized about giving information to the Russians...
...Abt's other defense is that the official papers he handed over as a lawyer at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration had no real intelligence value anyway...
...That happens to be true, but The Haunted Wood also provides us with the information that Abt and his underground unit were outraged when the NKVD lost interest in them and shifted to more valuable sources...
...Earl Browder, head of the open Communist party, also worked for the NKVD...
...Golos and Bentley insisted that their skittish recruits would only stay if they were told their documents were being transmitted to officials at American Communist party headquarters in New York, not to Soviet intelligence...
...The weak characters availed themselves of this psychic shield, while the strong made fun of it as flimsy...
...John J. Abt, for example, wrote in his 1993 Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer that his underground work in Washington was not treasonous because he thought he was only sending reports to his compatriots at Communist party headquarters in New York and not to "foreign governments...
...Weinstein and Vassiliev's fine new volume is full of stories like this...
...American spies Boris Morros and Congressman Samuel Dickstein—who were in it for the money—ran rings around their Soviet minders, bilking them of large amounts of cash...
...The guilt seems marginally commendable and the worry rather craven, but the combination, in any case, was powerful enough to drive Lawrence Duggan to commit suicide as U.S...
...I am not a child," the Treasury Department's Harold Glasser told his handler...
...Two impudent underground go-betweens, Nathan Gregory Silver-master and Jacob Golos, fought their NKVD bosses for control of their delivery operations...
...anyone who still admires the independent spirit of American communism— for it turns out that the Americans were quite a handful...
...Morros, a Holly- wood producer, was supposed to set up Soviet-controlled business ventures in Tinseltown...
...American spies like Bentley were often offered what Weinstein and Vas-siliev call the "comforting fiction" that they were dealing only with the American party and not really with Stalin, author of the bloody purges and the nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler...
...law enforcement everything she knew in late 1945—who forced the Russians to dismantle much of their effort as the war drew to a close...
...The more intrepid underground members (Julius Rosenberg, Victor Perlo) could not be persuaded to observe security rules, while those who wavered in their devotion to the cause worried Soviet intelligence for another reason: They might defect and squeal to the FBI...
...Likewise the GRU, or Soviet military intelligence, gave Alger Hiss high marks...
...Their gre-gariousness ("purely American anarchism," sniffed one Soviet agent who posed as a diplomat in New York) kept fouling up the compartmentalization of contacts so necessary to Soviet-style kon-spiratsia...
...The two entities were connected...
...The Haunted Wood breaks new ground on Dickstein, a New York Democrat who was overpaid by the NKVD to deliver information on vast networks of American fascists that existed only in his imagination...
...war preparations and the Roosevelt administration's foreign-aid plans to how to build atomic bombs...
...Like her lover Jacob Golos, Bentley had been intent on buffering Americans from Soviet control...
...Several of the Russian agents, not unlike the hapless abductors in the O. Henry story "The Ransom of Red Chief," were in over their heads...
...The same people who took seriously the fact that they were betraying their country also seem to be the ones who most hated the prospect of their secret activities' becoming known...
...It is with us today in the lore of elderly Communists...
...The Russians yearned for more like them: The files show that loyalty obsessed the Kremlin every bit as much as it did the White House...
...Admit-but-minimize is a weak strategy...
...Many who appear in these pages, of course, were rock solid...
...After Golos's death in 1943, Bentley lost control of her network to Soviet agent Ishkak Akhmerov—though it was a pyrrhic victory for the Russians, given her imminent defection and testimony against her former confederates...
...The NKVD documents, including cables sent back and forth between Moscow and stations in New York and Washington, attest to Soviet anxieties about the unruly Americans...
...The waverers are the most interesting people in the book...
...Based on files from the Soviet secret police (the KGB, or NKVD, as it was called during the 1930s), The Haunted Wood pieces together the fascinating stories of well-known and not-so-well-known Americans who betrayed their country, together with the NKVD officers who managed the secret networks...
...Were they "such a threat to the nation's security" that they justified intrusive investigations and loyalty oaths...
...Indeed it was defectors— most prominently, the courier and group handler Elizabeth Bentley, who told U.S...
...Even a commitment to social justice—which they associated entirely with communism—could not keep a certain tortured patriotism from asserting itself...
...In fact, however, what Weinstein and Vassiliev have discovered should hearten Lauren Weiner is a writer living in Baltimore...
...authorities closed in on him...
...But nowadays, with evidence pouring in from Soviet archives, the Left has shifted into a mode that might be called "admit but minimize...
...The NKVD never had a moment's trouble with the physicist Theodore Hall...
...He played at doing this until, to the Russians' consternation, he became a double agent with the FBI and ended up getting his NKVD handler and the handler's wife convicted of espionage...
...I realize exactly where and to whom my materials have been going for several years...
...As the historian Ellen Schrecker recently asked, "Were these activi- ties so awful...
...WORKING FOR STALIN Why Americans Make Bad Spies By Lauren Weiner Left-wing historians used to say that their anti-Communist opponents greatly exaggerated the American Communist party's Cold War ties to Moscow—and thereby impugned a political organization that did so much for progressive causes...
...Curiously, Golos and Bentley's shield, flimsy as it was, managed to outlive the Soviet Union...
...Ironically, Dickstein pioneered the smear tactics for which Senator McCarthy would become famous, and it was Dickstein's antifascist crusade in the House of Representatives that metamorphosed into the House Un-American Activities Committee...
Vol. 4 • February 1999 • No. 22
