![]() This is not to deny the preponderance of the evidence that the Soviets had willing and able friends in high places in Washington (yes, probably including the State Departments Alger Hiss and the Treasury Departments Harry Dexter White). The documents in the KGB files speak for themselves, to be sure, but do they speak the truth? The problem for the historian (and the reader) resembles the oldest paradox in the book: the man from Crete says, ∺ll Cretans are liars. Is he telling the truth? An agent in the field is a professional liar on the run. Not to put too fine a point on it, they sometimes make things up. Spies reporting to headquarters tend to exaggerate the number and importance of the agents they have recruited they inflate the value of documents they purloin. Raw intelligence files can resemble a novel with an unreliable narrator. The reader of The Haunted Wood has to take things on faith to a certain degree not all will. With rare exceptions, the true names of agents appear in brackets, supplied by the authors the decoding of their aliases depends on the work of the analysts who worked to decipher the Venona intercepts, the cables from Soviet stations to Moscow intercepted by American counterintelligence in the 1940s. To the extent that the KGB files provide new information, in many cases it is in the biographies of selected American agents, not in the nitty-gritty details of whatthose agents may or may not have done, or what the meaning of their work might have been. The stench of authenticity is present in these chapters, not least because these characters speak in their own voices about their own lives.īut the problem of documentation haunts this book. The book is best where the evidence is least ambiguousfor example, on Martha Dodd, daughter of the American ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, and on Boris Morros, a Hollywood hustler turned Soviet agent (and, later, a double agent for the FBI). Before the Russians cut them off in 1995, the authors of The Haunted Wood, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, unearthed some fine stories of perfidy, greed, fecklessness, blind loyalty, and cunning among the Soviet spymasters and their agents in America. Hopes for revelation were high when the Russian intelligence service opened up the Stalin-era archives of the KGB to Random House in 1993, in exchange for a large sum of cash. There has never been a comprehensive and coherent account of this effort, in part because full access to primary documents has been impossible. Underground networks proliferated like hothouse plants, but agents quickly became ensnarled, with three separate strands of intelligence gatheringthe KGB, the GRU (military intelligence), and the Communist Party of the United Statesintermingling to ill effect. There was no American counterintelligence to speak of before Pearl Harbor, and the romance of American communism was strong in the few years between Hitlers rise and Stalins purges. And the flowering of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s was fast but fantastically tangled. Where there are diplomats, there are spies (one Soviet ambassador actually doubled as station chief, a sticky arrangement). The Soviets started building their files in 1933, after President Roosevelt granted them diplomatic recognition and allowed them to open embassies and consulates in the United States. The Central Intelligence Agency, founded in 1947, did not have a station in Moscow until the early 1960s its director in that decade, Richard Helms, now says half jokingly that there were no files on the Soviet Union in the CIAs early days, that the agencys analysts were better off doing research at the Library of Congress. ![]() The United States and the Soviet Union knew little and understood lessof one another before and during the Cold War. They worked in a world of secrecy, ignorance, and fear. But in the long tradition of Russian espionage services, whose roots go back to Peter the Great, the Soviet spies in the United States did what they could to buy or steal American secretsscientific, technical, military, and political informationwith the help of American agents. Might the same be said for the Great Fear of the 1950s? All that fury, all that noise, all for nothing but emptiness and pain?īefore the Cold War, the primary function of Soviet espionage in the United States was to serve as a listening post on the wider world, with the greatest attention given to gathering intelligence on the war aims of Japan and Germany. It was all for nothing.nothing had been gained except the misery of others, was the way Whittaker Chambers summed up his testimony against Alger Hiss. ![]()
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