Exchange on Vassiliev Notebooks and Alger Hiss

Editor’s Preface: An overwhelming amount of evidence has emerged over the past twenty years from the archives of the former USSR and from other former Soviet-bloc countries confirming that Alger Hiss was both a secret member of the American Communist Party and a Soviet spy in the 1930s and 1940s. The case against Hiss was already very strong on the basis of vast quantities of declassified U.S. documents, and it has grown immeasurably stronger with the release of materials from the former Eastern bloc. The late Eduard Mark published his final article in the Summer 2009 issue of the JCWS (a special issue on Soviet espionage in the United States during the Stalin era) amassing further evidence that Hiss was a Soviet spy and rebutting an article published by two of the small number of Hiss’s remaining defenders. After the special issue appeared, the journal received a commentary from David Lowenthal, the brother of John Lowenthal, who tried for many years to convince people that Hiss was innocent. David Lowenthal does not respond to the devastating evidence presented by Eduard Mark; instead, he raises other points about the use of Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks that, to varying degrees, were already addressed in the special issue and in the complementary 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). We agreed that we would publish Lowenthal’s commentary as a letter to the editor with a response by Haynes and Klehr, which Lowenthal has not seen.

To the Editor:

Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks are hailed as an “invaluable resource” revealing new insights into Americans’ collaboration with Soviet intelligence agents in the 1930s and 1940s, as set forth in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America.¹ But there are troubling discrepancies between how the notebooks are currently assessed and how Vassiliev’s data were previously deployed in the draft chapters he wrote in 1994–1996 for The Haunted Wood (THW), in THW itself, coauthored with Allen Weinstein in 1999, and in his 2001–2003 libel suit in Britain against the publisher of John Lowenthal’s criticism of THW.² Varying accounts of how Vassiliev wrote and transported his notes and draft chapters are discussed in Amy Knight’s review of Spies.³ Here I contrast their substantive use in THW and at the libel trial with the way they have been evaluated since their recent publication. New evidence from Vassiliev and others updates and amplifies what the late Eduard Mark, although disagreeing with my conclusions, nonetheless termed the “most trenchant questions” I posed in 2005.⁴

Because Weinstein knew no Russian and Vassiliev recovered his notebooks only in 2001, it is often assumed that Weinstein relied almost exclusively on the sanitized summary draft chapters Vassiliev wrote for him.⁵ “Only a small portion of the material in Vassiliev’s notes found its way into The Haunted Wood,” Mark concluded, “and what did appear is often less telling than what remained unused.”⁶ Hence some of THW’s acknowledged FLaws. But that interpretation overlooks Vassiliev’s 2003 pretrial testimony that he had provided Weinstein with numerous translated documents, including many transcribed in his notebooks. “I put every document in . . . to let Allen make up his own mind,” he told Susan Butler in 2000. “To preserve his scientific correctness I wanted him to read as much of the documents as possible.”⁷ Indeed, THW quotes and cites many documents at length.

Neither quoted nor cited in THW, however, is the list of “Failures” or “Collapses” compiled by the Soviet foreign intelligence station chief in the United States, Anatoly Gorsky, on 23 December 1949 (not 1948, as dated by Vassiliev), which I brought to scholars’ attention in 2005.⁸ This is strange. For the Gorsky list is said to be the most pertinent document about Alger Hiss” in Vassiliev’s notebooks, referring to him by the cover name “Leonard.” To many the list is conclusive...