Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2 page)

We traveled to London in the fall of 2005 to meet with Vassiliev after
learning that the 1948 "Gorsky memo," introduced as evidence in his libel
suit (see the introduction) in Great Britain, was not the only extract of a
KGB document in his possession that scholars had not yet examined. A
preliminary look at Vassiliev's notebooks made clear how valuable they
were, and we quickly decided to find funding to undertake a skilled translation and produce a book based on them.2

Despite everything that has appeared in the past decade, the Vassiliev
notebooks offer the most complete look at Soviet espionage in America
we have yet had or will obtain until the likely far off day when Russian authorities open the KGB's archives for independent research. Material
from Communist International (Comintern) and Communist Party,
United States (CPUSA) files, while significant and helpful and shedding
some light on espionage in the United States, includes only KGB material that made its way to those bodies and represents only a tiny fraction
of KGB activities. We dealt with such material in two books, The Secret
World of American Communism and The Soviet World of American Communism. The World War II KGB and GRU cables deciphered by the
National Security Agency's (NSA) Venona project and released in the
mid-199os are also a very valuable documentary source, out of which we
wrote Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. But the Venona
decryptions are only a few thousand cables out of hundreds of thousands
sent, and those decoded were random, the result of the few cables out of
the total body that were vulnerable to deciphering. Consequently, the
subjects of the deciphered messages ranged from the trivial to the important, and often they were only partially decrypted. Even when complete, they were messages boiled down for transmission by telegram,
often short, terse, and lacking detail. 3

In 1992, retired KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin defected to Great
Britain. In the latter part of his career he had been the KGB's archivist
and privately made notes on some of the documents that passed through
his hands. After he retired in 1984, he secretly typed up his notes into
ten manuscript volumes (eight geographical and two case histories), destroying the original notes. When the British Secret Intelligence Service
(SIS; also known as M16) exfiltrated him to the West, he brought with
him the ten volumes of transcribed notes and some envelopes of original
notes not yet transcribed. These materials formed the basis for two highly
valuable books on Soviet intelligence, Christopher Andrew and Vasili
Mitrokhin's The Sword and the Shield and The World Was Going Our
Way, as well as a KGB lexicon. Andrew is one of the leading historians of intelligence and Mitrokhin's material is extremely rich, but as valuable as
the books are, scholars would like to have the underlying material open
for independent review. As of zoo8, the SIS and the Mitrokhin family
have released only a small portion of the transcribed material or original
notes, none of it dealing with operations in the United States. (In any
case, only a portion of Mitrokhin's material dealt with American operations, whereas all of Vassiliev's material focuses on American-related subjects. )4

In order to facilitate research and allow others to see the basis for our
interpretations, we are making available electronic scans of Vassiliev's
original handwritten notes, a Cyrillic word-processed transcription, an
English-language translation, and a supplementary concordance of cover
names and real names, simultaneously with the publication of this book.
Alexander Vassiliev gave his original notebooks, along with hard copy of
the Cyrillic transcription and English translation, to the Library of Congress, where they are available for research without restriction.

From a historian's point of view, the ideal situation would be for the
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), successor to the KGB, to
open its archive of KGB documents so that researchers could compare
Vassiliev's transcriptions and summaries with the originals. We hope that
will happen, but it is likely to be in the distant future. The partial and restricted opening that allowed Vassiliev access came at a unique historical
moment. Just a year after the collapse of the Communist regime, with
economic chaos and inflation threatening pensions and government
budgets, the intelligence service responded to a proposal from Crown
Publishers, which offered a substantial payment to a pension fund for its
retired officers in return for cooperation on a series of books on Soviet intelligence. As part of the agreement that ensued the SVR gave Alexander
Vassiliev permission to examine archival records for a book project that
teamed a Russian (Vassiliev) and an American (Allen Weinstein) for a
book on Soviet espionage in the United States in the 193os and 1940s.
Vassiliev did not sign a document limiting the use he could make of his
material or pledging secrecy. The plan was for the Russian partner to produce material from the archives that would be vetted by a declassification
committee before being turned over to the American partner for final
writing and shaping into a book.5

From the beginning the Crown agreement was controversial and engendered anger and resistance within the Russian intelligence community. Many nationalists and hard-line Communists, a substantial element
in the intelligence services, perceived it as a serious breach of security and a sale of the national patrimony to the state's enemies. By 1996
Alexander Vassiliev himself felt so threatened by the prospect of a Communist electoral victory, the not-so-veiled warnings of retaliation, and the
fear that he might be accused of communicating state secrets because of
rumors that his co-author, Weinstein, had ties to American intelligence
that he felt it expedient to leave the country. That brief and limited KGB
archival opening of the early 199os ended as Russia stabilized and the
SVR regained its authority in the Russian state.

When he moved to Great Britain, Vassiliev left the notebooks behind,
fearing they would be confiscated at customs. (In zoos, he had them
shipped to him in London.) For this reason, the original notebooks were
never seen by his co-author, Allen Weinstein. Consequently, Weinstein
wrote The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era
from summary sanitized chapters written by Vassiliev and approved by an
SVR declassification committee (as planned by the Crown agreement), as
well as chapters intended for that committee that had not gone through
the committee by the time Vassiliev left Russia. Since the policy of the Soviet and Russian intelligence service was and is not to identify any sources
or agents who have not themselves admitted to working for it, those summaries generally did not contain the real names behind the cover names.
In other cases, Vassiliev left out information, not knowing how it fit into
the summary chapters he wrote. These drawbacks did not lessen the importance of The Haunted Wood, the first survey of Soviet intelligence in
the United States written from KGB archival sources, but they did limit
the information it contained.

When we first met with Vassiliev and became aware of what was in the
notebooks, we recognized the opportunity to write a more complete, factual, and detailed portrait of Soviet intelligence than ever before was at
hand. Not only was it now possible to identify scores of previously unknown or unidentified Soviet spies, but also already told stories could be
enriched by the detail provided by the documents recorded in the notebooks. And what a wonderful tapestry the notebooks revealed-an astounding array of characters, some long known or suspected of KGB ties,
others never remotely believed to be involved. The following chapters
provide fresh revelations about such prominent Americans as Alger Hiss,
Ernest Hemingway, J. Robert Oppenheimer, I. F. Stone, Lee Pressman,
and Corliss Lamont. But some of the most fascinating characters in this
book are previously unknown men and women about whom we have
been able to turn up enough information to allow us to glimpse the remarkable diversity and occasionally bizarre backgrounds that led them to work with the KGB. Henry Ware, Stanley Graze, James Hibben and
Russell McNutt are not household names, but their stories and their lives
are stranger than fiction.

The Venona material not only provided abundant evidence of the espionage activities of more than a hundred Americans who worked for Soviet intelligence, but it also included over a hundred other cover names
that American counterintelligence never identified. Many of the mysteries can now be solved; in the pages that follow we identify more than seventy previously unknown Soviet sources. Some of them are obscure men
and women about whom we still know little more than their names and
where they worked; others are reasonably well known or significant portions of their life stories can be reconstructed. Famous journalists, brilliant scientists, important government employees-their connections
with Soviet intelligence reveal a picture that no one has ever before suspected.

Beyond the identities of sources and agents, we can provide an unparalleled glimpse of the real world in which espionage takes place. There
is often a vast gulf between the rather spare, bureaucratic, and stilted
prose of official communications and the frequently lurid, recreated, and
seemingly implausible dialogue used by popular writers on espionage or
in autobiographies. Embellished and embroidered, first-person accounts
often provoke disbelief or disdain. But the workaday KGB documents
Vassiliev saw and copied in Moscow are filled with marvelous human details, sometimes absurd, sometimes tragic, occasionally amusing, and always reminders that espionage is an activity engaged in by human beings
with foibles and quirks, and espionage agencies are sometimes efficient,
occasionally bumbling, and always staffed by human beings, not automatons.

Some readers may wonder why it all matters. Is the account of Soviet
espionage merely of antiquarian interest, a matter of fascination to the
handful of scholars who have made it their specialty and the somewhat
larger community of spy buffs who delight in learning the details of this
secret world? While filling in the blank spots in the historical record is
enough of a justification, especially for historians, the question of who
worked for the KGB has importance well beyond the purely historical.
On this particular topic the need for clarity and completeness is especially significant.

Few eras in American history are as quickly and easily characterized
as the one to which an otherwise undistinguished Republican senator
from Wisconsin gave his name. Although Joseph McCarthy did not burst into national prominence until 1951, his name is popularly used to characterize the post-World War II years, during which, it is alleged, America was obsessed with the issue of domestic communism in general and
the theme of Communist subversion in particular. McCarthy's charges
that scores of Americans working for the Department of State (DOS) and
other government agencies had cooperated with Soviet intelligence or
otherwise served Communist (as opposed to American) interests have
been harshly judged by most historians and derided in the popular culture, where the victims of entertainment industry blacklists and campaigns by labor groups and all sorts of associations to expel Communist
members have been hailed as heroes or paragons of virtue persecuted by
anti-democratic and fear-ridden enemies of free speech and free association.

The debate over the nature of American communism and the fierce
reaction it engendered has remained a topic provoking passionate emotions long after most of its principals were dead and the CPUSA itself
nearly comatose. In the past decade the fervid, one-sided rhetoric about
McCarthyism has been replaced by heated debates as newly opened
archives have disgorged long-held secrets. Many of the people profiled in
this book insisted to their dying days that their lives had been unfairly
blighted by false and rash accusations against them motivated by an unthinking and obsessive anti-communism, a crass desire to tar the New
Deal with the Communist brush or to discredit otherwise noble causes
with the charge of serving Soviet interests. Others never fell under suspicion. A handful really were falsely accused. Was the hunt for Communist spies in fact a witch hunt, a search for fictional demons, that tells us
more about the paranoia and madness of the inquisitors, or was it a rational, if sometimes excessively heated, response to a genuine threat
posed by scores of otherwise normal Americans who had decided to assist the Soviet Union? This book supplies the details that enable us to answer these questions based on fact, not emotion.

Just consider that in recent years there have been fervent and angry
debates about such symbols of the 1940s and 195os as Alger Hiss, I. F.
Stone, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. President Bill Clinton's nominee to
head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Anthony Lake, was forced
to withdraw after he publicly doubted Hiss's guilt. A new Web site at New
York University is devoted to Hiss's innocence, and so fervid in some circles is the belief in Hiss's innocence that in 2007 The American Scholar;
the official magazine of Phi Beta Kappa, published a lead article accusing an innocent man, Wilder Foote, a respected American journalist and foreign affairs specialist who worked for the State Department and the
United Nations, of being the spy Alger Hiss has been thought to be. Journalists who proudly claimed I. F. Stone as their mentor and model have
angrily charged "neocons" anxious to tarnish his legacy with concocting
false charges about his ties to the KGB, the better to justify their own
support for foreign aggression. And a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography
of Oppenheimer ridiculed allegations that he had ever joined the
CPUSA, much less cooperated with the KGB. In many ways we still live
with the legacy of these questions. Now they can be answered and the
cases closed.

As illuminating and detailed as Vassiliev's notebooks are, they are not
a complete record of KGB operations in the United States. Although
Alexander Vassiliev examined more KGB files about American espionage
than any other researcher, he did not have unrestricted access to the
KGB's secrets. Limited to two years' work in the archives, he was also
constrained by the spy agency's unwillingness to provide certain types of
files. Beginning his research with the correspondence files for the 1930s,
he initially was able to read the messages sent between Moscow Center
and the American station. Many contained references to or comments
about agents and potential agents. Requests for the operational or personal files of those agents usually brought results and also reminders of
the agency's policy of refusing to confirm the identity of sources who had
not themselves admitted their work for the KGB. Although there were
occasional inconsistencies-Vassiliev received operational files on such
people as Harold Glasser and Victor Perlo, sources named by Elizabeth
Bentley and neither of whom ever publicly confessed-his requests for
other operational files were rebuffed. For his research on atomic espionage, Vassiliev received the first volume (KGB archival files are usually
bound into book-like volumes) of the "Enormous" file, details of the Soviet effort to penetrate the Manhattan Project during World War II, but
volume z and any subsequent volumes on postwar atomic espionage had
not arrived by the time he left Russia in 1996.