Soviet Espionage in America: An Oft-Told tale

It has been nearly two decades since the collapse of the USSR. Clearly a disaster in almost every respect from the point of view of its citizens, the largely inept Soviet regime did boast at least one major achievement: during the Second World War, its espionage agents penetrated the U.S. government and its top-secret atomic-bomb project. Because most of the dozens, if not hundreds, of Americans involved with that operation were in or near the Communist Party (CP), political controversy has dogged most discussions of the subject from the start. As the two books under review here reveal, that controversy has yet to subside, even though—thanks to twenty years of revelations from American and former-Soviet archives—the facts about that espionage are no longer in dispute. Still, the debates continue, fueled primarily by historiographical disagreements over the nature of McCarthyism and by the broader ideological conflicts among the nation's political and intellectual elites.

However we may interpret it, it is clear that the Kremlin mounted a massive espionage operation during the 1930s and 1940s. Over 500 Americans, according to John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, "assisted Soviet intelligence agencies," although what that "assistance" actually consisted of is unclear (p. 541). The most important contribution of these people—by far—came from the scientists and technicians within the Manhattan Project who enabled their Russian counterparts to develop nuclear weapons several years before they would otherwise have done so. Other members of the Soviet apparatus passed on material of varying sensitivity from their positions in the federal government and private industry, or else they served as couriers and recruiters, or perhaps just chatted with the KGB's men. It is important to note that, whatever we may think of it today, this espionage occurred at a time when the struggle against fascism and the U.S. World-War-II alliance with the Soviet Union gave some Americans both the opportunity and the motivation to spy for Russia. By the end of 1945, the unique political conditions that had favored the Soviet espionage operation had changed and the KGB was never again to achieve such a success, even as revelations about that espionage began to figure prominently in the growing anticommunist furor of the McCarthy era.

Americans first learned about the Kremlin's covert activities in 1946 when Igor Gouzenko, a defecting Soviet code clerk, testified in Canada. Then Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, who had managed some Washington spy rings during the 1930s and 1940s, implicated dozens of federal employees (Alger Hiss among them) at a series of congressional committee hearings in the summer of 1948. Hiss soon gained notoriety by denying Chambers' allegations so ferociously that the government decided to try him for perjury, the statute of limitations for espionage having run out. At the same time, the highly publicized arrests of Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for what the FBI called "the crime of the century" revealed that the Russians had penetrated the Manhattan Project. By the early 1950s, those revelations, intensified by the trials and convictions of Hiss and the Rosenbergs, not only heightened the growing hostility toward American communism but also legitimized it as a matter of national security. Even so, the verdicts remained contested—especially in those quarters on the left that opposed the injustices of McCarthyism. After all, both Hiss and the Rosen-bergs had insisted on their innocence to the end, while the prosecution had relied on some seemingly unreliable witnesses and materials that could not be produced in court.

Over the following decades, however, as more and more evidence of Soviet espionage emerged, the ranks of the doubters began to dwindle. The expansion of the Freedom of...