“Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB In America,” by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Yale University Press, May 2009, 704 pages, $35.
Joe McCarthy was right after all. There were Communists in the State Department. Maybe not the number Tail Gunner Joe claimed — or even the ones he suspected. However, Soviet spies were, indeed, employed by the U.S. government in the 1930s and ’40s.
Documentation of these Soviet espionage efforts in the United States comes from KGB archives — as revealed in “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB In America.” After the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB opened up its archives to an American publishing house for a history of the KGB. The Cold War was over. The Soviets lost, but the KGB was proud of its achievements, and wanted to raise money for a pension fund. (Even spies get old and retire.)
The KGB wanted to hold some things back. They hired a former KGB man to vet the material — and serve as a handler of the American co-author. That Russian — Alexander Vassiliev — made separate copies of the material he found, unknown to anyone, Russian or American. He smuggled these notes out of Russia in the late 1990s.
“Spies” is the result. Vassiliev collaborated with John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, two American historians noted for their work on Soviet espionage. The resulting book may be the most authoritative history of the Soviet Union’s efforts to spy on America during the 1930s and 1940s. It may be the first study of Soviet espionage to extensively use both Soviet and American archives.
The most startling aspect of the book is how deeply and broadly the Soviets penetrated. The book has excellent and fascinating chapters on the infiltration of the federal civil service and the atomic bomb program. The KGB and its predecessors had agents in the OSS. Many in the media are shown to have been in the pay of the KGB.
There was even a Congressman on the Soviet payroll during the late 1930s. He even attempted a McCarthy-style witch hunt for truly nonexistent fascist spies.
“Spies” also shows that several people who were used for decades as examples as martyrs of McCarthyism actually were Soviet spies. It also reveals that Soviet tradecraft was often poor. Soviet successes frequently depended upon American indifference to security.
“Spies” is a long book, and occasionally difficult to read. It’s worth the effort. It challenges much accepted conventional wisdom about Soviet spying and American counterintelligence — and explains why those myths are so pervasive.
Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian and model-maker, lives in League City.
