89 of 94 people found the following review helpful
The "Golden-Age" of Soviet espionage in America
May 4 2009
By
Mila Filatova
- Published on Amazon.com
Format: Hardcover
Verified Purchase
Like Hugo's fictional Inspector Javert, historians Haynes and Klehr are dogged in the pursuit of their quarry--American communists who betrayed their country through covert relationships with the KGB in the 1930s and 40s. Nevermind the fact that the Statute of Limitations has long since expired on these crimes, or that the characters themselves were long ago swept into the dust bin of history, the historians have devoted their careers to exposing the perfidy of secret communists, and to hauling their corpses, time and again, before the court of public opinion. It is the historians' investigative spadework and their constrained sense of justice at long last being served which provides the narrative drive to "Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America."
Much of the evidence presented in the book is drawn from the notebooks of the Russian journalist Alexander Vassiliev. In 1993 Vassiliev was granted limited access to the KGB's operational files for the 1930s and 1940s. His transcripts of pages from these files would eventually fill 8 notebooks comprising more than 1000 pages. Summaries of the documents were used in writing the book "The Haunted Wood (1998)," which Vassiliev co-authored with Allen Weinstein. In a lengthy introduction to "Spies," Vassiliev tells the story of his notebooks and his defamation suit against the publisher Frank Cass. He also paints a sympathetic portrait of the American spies, whom he views as heroes, which helps to counterbalance the more severe portrait painted by Haynes and Klehr.
The authors open the book by revisiting the Hiss case in a chapter subtitled "Case Closed." Aside from conspiracy theorists for whom there exists no untainted Hiss evidence, it seems impossible not to agree with the authors' contention that Hiss was a committed communist and a Red Army (GRU) source until his exposure in 1948. Some of the evidence in this chapter was documented earlier by Vassiliev in the "Haunted Wood," and the lengthier treatment given here by Haynes and Klehr fully corroborates the sixty-year-old testimony of Hede Massing and Whittaker Chambers. The authors cite new evidence from the KGB files of Michael Straight and Lawrence Duggan which confirms Hiss's bona-fides as a GRU agent. They also argue persuasively, using both Venona and Vassiliev material, that Hiss was the agent cover named JURIST, LEONARD, and ALES; and they supply the likely identity of the party worker, cover named PAUL, who became Hiss's liaison with the GRU following Whittaker Chamber's defection.
For readers interested in the atom-bomb spies, the book is a treasure-trove of new information. The Venona decrypts exposed the damaging Los Alamos spies MLAD (Theodore Alvin Hall) and STAR (Saville Sax), but researchers were unable to identify all the people behind the cover names in the decrypted Soviet cables. The masks have now been ripped from the faces of these spies. The authors reveal the name of PERS/FOGEL, an engineer recruited into espionage by Julius Rosenburg; the name of QUANTUM, a foriegn scientist who, in exchange for money, delivered atomic information to the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C.; the name of ERIC, a refugee Austrian physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory who provided atomic research to the Soviets in Great Britain; and the name of RELE/SERB, the crippled Spanish Civil War veteran who supplied technical data on sonar. After sifting the evidence, the authors conclude that Robert Oppenheimer was a concealed member of the CPUSA in the late 30s, but that he distanced himself from the party and did not supply information to the KGB. Unfortunately, Vassiliev was granted access to only a single file pertaining to atomic espionage and the authors can shed no new light on the continuing debate about whether the Soviets obtained the secret of the hydrogen bomb from penetration agents.
The chapters on the U.S. government and the OSS corroborate the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, the "Red Spy Queen," and supplement the voluminous FBI "Silvermaster File." The names of many heretofore unknown secret KGB agents are also revealed. Certainly two of the most interesting and colorful are LEO, an immigrant journalist, and WILLY, the Director of the Bureau of Indexes and Archives at the State Department. This mercenary pair engaged in a racket selling copies of State Department cables to the KGB for money. When they pretended to recruit a third agent and asked the KGB for a larger sum, their greed was discovered. The pair had a falling out and their names disappear from the KGB files, though in a curious twist of fate, WILLY would later appear as a government expert in the Hiss case. The authors expose spy after spy and it is by this slow, mounting presentation of evidence that the reader is led to the conclusion that far more Americans, operating on a far larger scale than had been previously imagined, conspired with the KGB in the 1930-40s. The apparatus employed Americans as couriers, talent spotters, watchers, journalists, bagmen, legitimate fronts, photographers, and agent handlers. There were hundreds of Americans who secretly abetted Stalin's KGB.
To meet the needs of Stalin's policy of forced industrialization, the KBG actively recruited spies with technical/scientific information. Some acted as paid informants, while others, such as the Rosenburgs, were motivated by ideology. The past two decades have not been kind to Rosenburg defenders. In 1995 the Venona decrypts identified Julius as the Soviet spy with the cover names LIBERAL and ANTENNA; in 2001 Alexander Feklisov, the Rosenburg's Soviet handler, published "The Man Behind the Rosenburgs;" and in September 2008 Rosenburg accomplice Morton Sobell, after decades of denial, confessed that he was an active participant in Julius's spy apparatus. Haynes and Klehr add to our knowledge of the Rosenburg apparatus by exposing the agents PERS and TUK, and by pointing out that Rosenburg agents YAKOV, METER, and HUGHES delivered an extraordinary cache of classified technical information to the Soviets. The only reasonable act left in this drama is for the Russian government to admit that the Rosenburgs were Soviet spies and to build a monument in their honor.
The book is arranged as a series of topically related biographical sketches and one criticism of Haynes and Klehr is that they do not provide enough context for readers unfamiliar with the ideological landscape of the 1930s. The book does not help us to understand why so many Americans joined the communist party in the 1930s and why a number became witting agents for the Comintern, GRU, and KGB. And it also does not give a clear explanation as to why many of these same people abandoned their communist faith in the years prior to McCarthy's speech at Wheeling. It is ironic that the fortunes of the KBG in American were at their lowest ebb at precisely the moment when the 1950's "Red Scare" began. Readers can gain a greater understanding of the milieu by seeking out Vivian Gornick's "The Romance of American Communism" or Whittaker Chamber's autobiography "Witness."
For many years, "Spies" will remain the definitive history of the golden-age of Soviet espionage in America.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
SPIES: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KGB IN AMERICA
Aug. 30 2011
By
Robert A. Lynn
- Published on Amazon.com
Format: Paperback
SPIES: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KGB IN AMERICA
HARVEY KLEHR, JOHN EARL HAYNES, AND ALEXANDER VASSILIEV
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009
HARDCOVER, $35.00, 704 PAGES, PHOTOGRAPHS
A common perception is that, both before and after the Second World War, the British establishment was penetrated by Soviet spies (most notably by the Cambridge Spy Ring) while America somehow escaped infiltration. This important new book, SPIES: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KGB IN AMERICA, however, which is based on archival material-a rare luxury for intelligence historians-shows the huge extent of Soviet espionage activity in the United States during the 20th Century.
The authors estimate that from the 1920s, more than 500 Americans from all walks of life, including many Ivy League graduates and Oxford Rhodes scholars, were recruited to assist Soviet intelligence agencies, particularly in the State Department and America's first intelligence agency, the OSS.
Authors John Early Haynes and Harvey Klehr have previously collaborated on books about the Venona spy intercepts and American communism. Their co-author, Alexander Vassiliev, a Russian journalist and former intelligence officer, collaborated on The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage In America. That book was based on controlled Russian intelligence documents, access to which was negotiated during a moment of Glasnost in the 1990s with a view to supplementing the KGB pension fund, championing Russian intelligence successes and creating a bit of disinformation mischief. What hadn't been known until recently, is that while working on The Haunted Wood book, Vassiliev had transcribed and summarised innumerable KGB documents which he had smuggled out with him-more than 1,000 pages of notes-when he began a new life in America. It is this information which forms the basis of SPIES: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KGB IN AMERICA.
Placed alongside the Venona intercepts of Soviet intelligence communications, the evidence from the Mitrokhin archive of Soviet foreign intelligence-brought to the West and published in 1999 and 2005-and the testimony of defectors, it has now been possible to fill in much of the Soviet espionage puzzle putting real names to cover names and identifying new spies.
Joe McCarthy was right after all. There were Communists in the State Department. Maybe not the number he claimed or even the ones he suspected, Soviet spies were, indeed, employed by the U.S. government in the 1930s and 1940s.
This book also shows just how many journalists worked for the KGB and argues that, while Ernest Hemingway (codenamed 'Argo') never provided significant information, he was recruited in 1941 and was in contact with Soviet agents for several years. The authors are also not afraid of setting the record straight. They prove, for example, that J. Robert Oppenheimer, denounced for the last 50 years as the most damaging Soviet spy inside the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb, was targeted but never became a KGB spy. Another revelation is the confirmation in ore than twenty KGB documents of Harry Dexter White's involvement in Soviet espionage. One of the architects of the Bretton Woods monetary agreement, White was senior advisor to the delegation at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco and gave away the US negotiating strategy. He assured his KGB case officer that if the Soviet diplomats held firm on the USSR veto of UN actions, then the Americans 'will agree'.
SPIES: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KGB IN AMERICA is a serious book, whose effectiveness is built up with detail, and it makes for sober reading both in terms of style and content. This also may be the most authoritative history of the Soviet Union's efforts to spy on America during the 1930s and 1940s.
Lt. Colonel Robert A. Lynn, Florida Guard
Orlando, Florida