Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (107 page)

Sometimes the CPUSA political apparatus unknowingly intruded on
the KGB's turf. After Michael Straight returned to the United States in
1938, he began meeting periodically with Akhmerov. Moscow had very
high hopes for him; his wealth and family connections with the Roosevelts
suggested he might be able to secure a position with great potential. No
sooner did he start working at the State Department, however, than
Solomon Adler, a secret Communist at the Treasury Department, began
trying to recruit him for the party's political underground. His reputation
from Britain, and likely his history of extremely generous cash donations
to the British Communist Party, had preceded him. Moscow Center was
upset, warning that "`under no circumstances"' could he be allowed any
ties to the CPUSA and demanded that Browder be asked to call off such
an approach.9'

Some sources had to juggle their responsibilities to different apparatuses. Charles Kramer, a congressional aide, provided information to
the KGB via the Perlo apparatus and to Albert Blumberg, who supervised legislative work for the CPUSA. After the KGB achieved direct
contact, Joseph Katz reported on Kramer: "`To Blumberg, he gives materials that are of interest to the local Comparty [Communist Party] and
to `Raid' [Perlo], materials that are of interest to us [KGB]. However,
`Mole' [Kramer] occasionally experiences difficulties and does not know
how to get his bearings.... He is completely willing to make adjustments to his work and his intentions in accordance with whatever we
think would be best. The only question he raised had to do with how to
resolve the problem of interrelations with Blumberg and us."' Kramer
thought it "`unwise for him to break off his connection with Blumberg,"'
both because "`he would end up in a very awkward position"' and because "`he often receives valuable info"' from Blumberg "`about materials given by oth. members of the cell."' Unable to figure out on the
spot how to disentangle the matter, Katz temporarily advised him "`to
continue working as before and that we would come back to this question in the near future." 92

KGB organizational structure and tradecraft often failed to live up to textbook expectations. Nor should that be surprising. Organizations in practice rarely live up to their myths (or their textbooks). Any large operation, so fraught with secrecy and deception, relying so heavily on often
flawed and odd people, was bound to stumble and sometimes fall. The
documents in Vassiliev's notebooks demonstrate that how an intelligence
agency should operate sometimes bears little resemblance to how it actually did.

Many of the Soviet intelligence officers who served in the United
States were well-trained and competent professionals. Some, however,
were poorly trained or poorly prepared. Some were shrewd judges of
character; others were bullies and boors. Some knew what they were
doing, others were the lucky recipients of intelligence windfalls, and a
few were comically inept. Moscow suspected some of its most competent operatives of ideological deviation, recalled them, and shot them.
Even good officers were sometimes stymied by the complicated bureaucratic structure of Soviet intelligence, exacerbated by the lack of institutional memory occasioned by the purges and the sheer number of players in the intelligence game. Not only did the KGB and GRU and the
Naval GRU all have their own apparatuses in the United States, so too did
the Communist International. The CPUSA also had its own underground
apparatus. All of these secret groups bumped into each other. Operatives
from one apparatus tried to recruit agents belonging to another. Poaching on another agency's territory was discouraged, but officers often puzzled over whether someone in whom they were interested belonged to
someone else and was off limits or not.

Then there were the agents and sources themselves. They were
human beings, prey to all of the emotions and petty grievances all people have. But they were also under enormous pressure and stress from
living double lives. They resented some of their fellow spies; sought to
inflate their own importance and status; and suffered from personal
problems, marital difficulties, and psychological afflictions. Most were
Communists, but some of them had doubts about the USSR, particularly
during the purge trials and after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Even true believers sometimes wondered why they needed to expose themselves to danger while the United States and USSR were allies and sometimes resented the demands placed on them. And spying could be personally expensive, necessitating providing support both for expenses and, sometimes, subsidies. KGB officers sometimes had to act as social workers or
psychologists, soothing wounded egos and solving lovers' quarrels. While
sometimes working out well, not all these therapeutic efforts succeeded.

The KGB was not a ten-foot-tall superman. In the world of intelligence, it was surely a strapping six-footer, but one that tripped over its
own shoelaces from time to time and occasionally shot itself in the foot.
And in the late 1930s, it turned into a paranoid schizophrenic who heard
voices telling it to cut off its limbs, and it proceeded to do just that.

spionage is a secretive business. It is rare that the agents engaged in it or the agencies they serve speak honestly and
openly about what they have done because the incentives to
lie, dissemble, and continue to deceive are so strong for all
concerned. The tendency to romanticize sometimes dangerous but usually tedious activities also has fed an insatiable public appetite for fictional
accounts of spying. Such literature, even when skillfully executed, often
cannot match the oddities of the real world, where the best-laid plans of
intelligence agencies and their operatives collide with the idiosyncrasies,
strengths, and weaknesses of the people on whom they must rely to provide information and the equally human strengths and weaknesses of
their adversaries and targets. The documents in Alexander Vassiliev's
notebooks open the most complete view we have ever had of how Soviet
intelligence functioned, revealing its triumphs, methods, failures, and
frustrations as it strove to obtain American secrets during a crucial era of
world politics.

The most striking point to emerge from this new information is that
a remarkable number of Americans assisted Soviet intelligence agencies.
The total exceeds five hundred, only a portion of whom have been discussed in the preceding chapters. There was no shortage of people will ing to provide information or assistance to the KGB. Not all of them were
classic spies, smuggling secrets out of their government offices or scientific laboratories. Some were talent spotters who suggested friends and
colleagues as likely participants, while others facilitated espionage by providing safe houses, serving as couriers, or otherwise aiding and abetting
Soviet intelligence operations in the United States.

Soviet spies came in all varieties and from almost all corners of the
United States. There were men and women, Jews and gentiles, "old
stock" Americans who could trace their lineage to signers of the Declaration of independence, and those born abroad. (Only one identifiable
black American appears as a Soviet agent, Paul Williams, a minor aviation
source. Largely excluded from positions of authority or places where they
handled secrets in the 193os and 1940s, blacks were also too conspicuous
when interacting with whites to serve as couriers or agent handlers.)
Some spies grew up in poverty; others basked in luxury from their childhoods. While many agents had grown up on the sometimes rough streets
of New York or Chicago, others were products of rural or small-town
America. Some, like Alger Hiss, were graduates of elite prep schools and
Ivy League colleges, holding prestigious government jobs where they
were entrusted with great responsibilities and pledged to serve the nation's interests but nonetheless cooperated with agents of a foreign power.
Others were anonymous people, living quiet lives and struggling with ordinary problems and burdens. Some had been seduced by a visit to the
USSR; others only read about the supposed paradise in the USSR and
yearned to recreate it in America. A number had been born in Russia
and retained a visceral national loyalty. For some it was poverty that had
embittered them about capitalism; others feared the rise of fascism and
grasped at the Soviet Union as its most resolute foe. Most were energized
by ideological zeal; others, however, had no commitment beyond monetary gain. Most had no difficulty working for the American government
and pledging loyalty to the American constitution while giving away
American secrets to the Soviet Union, believing they were serving a
higher cause. A few were tortured by ethical doubts and vacillation, and
others feared the consequences of their actions.

And risks there were. Documents recorded in Vassiliev's notebooks
contain accounts of the KGB's frantic efforts to exfiltrate such valued
sources as Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass as the net closed in
around them and the genuine shock experienced by KGB officers that
the Rosenbergs faced the same fate that many thousands of "enemies of
the people" had suffered on the basis of far less and usually imaginary evidence in the Soviet Union. (Similarly, since the early 19305 the USSR
had been in a permanent state of mobilization against foreign spies, but
in their internal communications KGB officers indignantly complained at
various times that American "spy mania" was interfering with their management of dozens of, well, spies.) Some agents thrived on the excitement, professing few qualms or fears of exposure and insisted on providing stolen material even during periods when the KGB counseled
caution. Others had to be constantly reassured or coaxed to continue.
And even ideological sources sometimes worried about exposure or put
their own career interests ahead of their work as spies.

Many sources were identified and questioned by the FBI or congressional committees, although relatively few were prosecuted and even
fewer convicted and jailed. (The awkwardness and near inability of American criminal law to deal effectively with espionage is a separate matter.)
The KGB shut down agents and networks when danger threatened, reducing the chances that its assets would be caught in the act. Only a few
of those confronted confessed (Klaus Fuchs in Britain and Alfred Slack
in the United States), and even fewer testified against others, most notably Jack Soble, David Greenglass, and Harry Gold. Some, like Amadeo
Sabatini, made partial confessions, and one, Nathan Sussman, successfully diverted the justice Department by admitting Communist membership and testifying about the hidden Communist loyalties of others
while concealing years of work as a spy. Most accused agents, however,
simply lied or took the Fifth Amendment.

The single most disastrous event in the history of Soviet intelligence
in America was Elizabeth Bentley's decision to turn herself in to the FBI
in 1945 and tell all she knew. An agent handler, not only did she identify
scores of Soviet sources inside the U.S. government and KGB officers
with whom she had worked, but her information also led the FBI to focus
on Soviet espionage precisely at a time when the end of World War II
freed up hundreds of its agents who had been working on German and
Japanese counterespionage. Her revelations triggered a wholesale withdrawal of experienced KGB officers that left its American stations woefully unprepared for the opening years of the Cold War; led to the public exposure of links between the American Communist Party and Soviet
intelligence that destroyed the former's use as an espionage Fifth Column; and additionally tainted the Communist movement with treason,
contributing to its political marginalization.

FBI investigations and voluminous congressional testimony supported Bentley's story. The documents in Vassiliev's notebooks, as well as the KGB cables deciphered by the Venona project, demonstrate unequivocally that Bentley told the truth. Yet the consensus of several generations of American historians (backed by many journalists and other
opinion leaders) routinely mocked, ridiculed, and dismissed her as a fraud
and mountebank. Those she named were often defended and even
praised as devoted public servants unfairly smeared because of leftist associations. They were, however, guilty.

Bentley's defection was the worst but not the first disaster the KGB
faced in America. After the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1933,
it had set up a legal station operating out of the Soviet Consulate in New
York, as well as an illegal station staffed with officers living covertly under
false identities. After a series of successes and the construction of networks supplying scientific, diplomatic, and political information, much of
what had been built was destroyed, but not by indifferent or inept American security agencies or defectors. The KGB decapitated its own organization in the late 1930s in an obsessive and murderous search for
nonexistent traitors. Stalin's purges of the late 193os devastated its headquarters, so much so that in late 1939 a Moscow Center memo noted that
illegal officers working covertly in the United States were "unknown to
anyone in the department" since everyone who had known them was
dead or in the Gulag. Scores of professional field officers were recalled
from abroad, accused of being "enemies of the people," and executed,
including the chiefs of the American legal and illegal stations. The robust
networks created in the 1930s were deactivated and some of the sources
lost forever.'