Editor’s Note

This special issue on Soviet espionage in the United States during the Stalin era has been in the works for some time. In early 2006, John Earl Haynes, an eminent historian of American Communism and Soviet espionage whom I had known since the mid-1990s, called me to let me know that in late 2005 he and Harvey Klehr, another distinguished historian and frequent coauthor with Haynes, had met in London with the former Soviet foreign intelligence officer Alexander Vassiliev, who had agreed to make available to them the 1,115 pages of notes and transcribed documents he had compiled in the mid-1990s when working in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) archive. As soon as I heard about this, I was eager to see the materials myself, especially when Haynes mentioned that the notebooks apparently contained many transcriptions and other information that was even more interesting and important than that included in Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999). Haynes was interested in having me review the notebooks and in meeting with him, Klehr, Vassiliev, and a few others to discuss the possibility of translating the notebooks, making them fully available to everyone in three versions (the original handwritten notes, a typescript in Russian, and an English translation), and producing a book and articles based on them.

In April 2006, Haynes and Klehr convened a workshop in Washington, DC, with a small group of experts on Soviet intelligence and espionage and the former Soviet archives. At that meeting, I pored over all of the notebooks and quickly realized their immense value for scholars. I spent many hours over the next couple of days going through the hundreds and hundreds of densely handwritten pages of transcriptions and notes. The more I read, the more convinced I was that this was an invaluable resource for all those interested in the Cold War, Soviet espionage, and Soviet foreign policy. Because Vassiliev’s knowledge of the subject was quite limited when he started his research in the SVR archive, he erred on the side of writing down too much rather than too little. For those who now use his notebooks, this is a huge benefit because it gives a much better sense of the context of particular documents. Also, as I was going through the notebooks I was pleased to see how many documents were complete or nearly complete transcriptions rather than just brief excerpts. Vassiliev deserves great credit for having sedulously noted the archival location and page numbers of all the documents he transcribed (in full or in part). I know from my own experience in the archives that it is often tempting to cut corners in jotting down all the archival information, and I was therefore relieved to see that Vassiliev did not cut corners. The information was all there.

Equally important, the workshop gave me an opportunity to question Vassiliev at length. Not having met him before, I was a bit apprehensive beforehand. I am always wary of former Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) officers, even those who broke with the Soviet regime. But I found Vassiliev refreshingly open, engaging, and candid. I asked a few “trick” questions early on to see whether he might try to dissemble, but he was always scrupulous about saying what he knew and acknowledging what he did not know. Any concerns I might have had prior to the workshop were put at ease. Also, Vassiliev explained to me precisely where the notebooks had been from 1995 to 2002 and how they were transferred to him in the United Kingdom from Russia. He later wrote up this account, and it is published as a long introductory essay, “How I Came to Write My Notebooks, Discover Alger Hiss, and Lose to His Lawyer,” in the important new book by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Readers who want to know more about the provenance of the notebooks should read Vassiliev’s essay as well as the opening article...