Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War

Conclusion: Espionage in the Cold War and Beyond

265 Conclusion Espionage in the Cold War and Beyond The exposure of Soviet spy networks after World War II finally wakened a slumbering America to the espionage threat. At the dawn of the Cold War, the FBI significantly increased its counterespionage efforts against the Soviets and their allies. Besides that, almost two centuries after its birth, the United States finally established a peacetime intelligence service with the creation of the CIA in 1947. The CIA was only part of the huge growth in America’s national security apparatus during the Cold War. As a result, the number of American citizens with access to government secrets significantly increased, which consequently complicated the problem of finding spies among them. In addition to the FBI’s scrutiny of Soviet activities, the US government established stricter security measures to protect its classified information and monitor signs of espionage among federal employees with security clearances . Unfortunately, in many cases, these security measures were only loosely observed and spies went undetected. In other cases security measures were simply outdated. The Truman administration instituted a program for US government employees that required the swearing of a loyalty oath and undergoing a background investigation to determine communist sympathies. By that time, however, America ’s flirtation with Soviet communism had passed. Communism attracted ! 266 The Atomic Bomb Spies: Prelude to the Cold War few Americans after the revelations of Stalinist purges, the Soviets’ heavyhanded imposition of control in Eastern Europe, and the exposure of Soviet subversion inside the United States. Americans would continue to spy for the USSR, but their motivations had drastically changed from the ideological commitment of earlier espionage networks. Meanwhile, the FBI and other investigative agencies limited their security programs to narrow investigations of an employee’s communist sympathies instead of his or her overall suitability for work in sensitive positions. Since the Revolutionary War, Americans had spied for a broad spectrum of motives. Some, like Benjamin Church and Edward Bancroft, passed secrets to the enemy because of outright greed, whereas others, like Benedict Arnold, betrayed secrets because of a complex brew of motives including money, ego, and revenge. Still others spied out of loyalty to a cause, such as the vast majority of Civil War spies and the Soviet spies of the 1930s and 1940s, who were lured by the promise of a communist utopia. From the onset of the Cold War, Americans continued to spy for these same reasons, but the overwhelming majority of them were more interested in dollars than doctrine and betrayed their country for purely financial motives. According to a Department of Defense study on espionage by Americans between 1947 and 2001, “Americans most consistently have cited money as the dominant motive for espionage and over time money has increased in predominance among motives. . . . Of individuals who professed a single motive for espionage, one-fourth of the civilians and three-fourths of the military claimed they had spied for money.”1 Alexander Feklisov, the Soviet handler of the Rosenbergs, nostalgically bemoaned the passing of the ideological spy in his memoirs: “The time for national missions and civic loyalties had returned and the great ideological spies finally disappeared from the scene. After that, payment became the norm.”2 His colleagues in the Soviet intelligence services, however, quickly adjusted and recruited a number of military enlisted men to exchange secrets for money in the first decade of the Cold War. The exposure of these spies eventually convinced US security officials to focus on sudden or unexplained wealth as an indicator of espionage activity and to conduct background investigations on overall suitability, not merely the existence of communist sympathies. 267 Conclusion • Espionage in the Cold War and Beyond Security measures like background investigations and monitoring potential indicators of employee problems or espionage are essential to combating foreign espionage, but ultimately the best method to catch spies in one’s own ranks is to have spies in the enemy’s counterintelligence apparatus . Although John Jay’s Committee on Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies made some fledgling attempts in this regard, the United States placed little emphasis on penetrating hostile intelligence services until the Cold War. During the height of Soviet espionage in the 1930s and 1940s, defectors like Walter Krivitsky had alerted the US government to spy networks in America, but the FBI never exploited these defectors for leads to other disaffected colleagues who might have been recruited to identify American spies.3 During...