Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics (review)

In November 2007 the then-president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, honored the late George Koval—a hitherto unknown South Dakota native—for his role as a spy working for Soviet military intelligence during World War II at Oak Ridge, among other sites. Koval had been publicly identified as a Soviet spy in the early 1980s in the memoirs of Lev Kopelev and later in the unexpurgated Russian edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle, but the revelation drew almost no notice for some 35 years until Putin suddenly conferred a posthumous medal on Koval. Even experts about Soviet espionage were caught unawares by Putin's comments, which The New York Times mistakenly reported as the first time that Koval's identity had been publicly disclosed.

Putin's commemoration of Koval underlines how Soviet espionage—despite the collapse of the USSR—is still an actively unfolding story as well as a source of pride for the current Russian regime. Koval was never prosecuted in the United States. He returned safely to Russia at the end of the war. But that, as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr suggest, is scarcely the point. As they argue, only a score or more of the hundreds of Soviet spies who were identified in the 1940s and 1950s were ever prosecuted. Those who faced the courts, including the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, and Elizabeth Bentley, participated in trials of intense political interest, and the authors provide full treatment of those judicial dramas. But such trials were rarely effective as an instrument of justice—and law enforcement officials often avoided resorting to them because of their inherent risks: the hazards of exposure of secret information, of revelations of government "sources and methods," and of just plain embarrassment. As the authors argue, the U.S. legal system is "flawed" when it comes to the prosecution of espionage; its restraints are "inappropriate" for such sensitive matters (p. 201). Beyond that, as they point out, espionage is extraordinarily hard to find, and to prove in a court of law—it is designed, after all, to leave no trace behind.

Haynes and Klehr have already filled a library bookshelf with works on the covert operations of the Soviet Union and American Communism, including such earlier overviews of the Soviet archives as The Secret World of American Communism (with Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov; 1995), as well as their stereograph on the Soviet wartime cables, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America [1999). This volume, however, is their first to offer a synthetic overview of Soviet espionage cases in the Cold War. Early Cold War Spies is thus an excellent resource for undergraduates, as well as many others less familiar with the intricacies of these cases. Most gratifying for seasoned veterans, the work also includes some surprises. The cases under examination include not only the usual suspects but many less familiar characters, including Steve Nelson, Ted Hall, William Weisband, the Soble and Soblen brothers, and the treacherous Mark Zborowski. The book's treatment of controversial figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer and complex cases like Amerasia, moreover, is balanced and masterly. But the book offers more than a helpful compilation of Cold War spy cases. Its sharp and insightful treatment of the U.S. legal system provides much to chew on.

By scrutinizing the cases through the lens of law, the authors take a tack different from that of many previous works on American political culture during the Cold War. Often, books on this topic have placed most of their emphasis on the evils of a certain Wisconsin senator (e.g., Norman Fried's 1990 book, Nightmare in Red, and Ellen Schrecker's 1998 book, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America), while down-playing espionage. In such works, the focus has been largely on the excesses of government persecution of non-spies. By contrast, other studies have not only underlined Soviet espionage but have vigorously flayed its practitioners; for example...