Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (108 page)

When sanity returned in 1941, the KGB's American stations were not
entirely starting over, but the reconstruction task was considerable. The
Nazi attack on the USSR made the need for intelligence acute, but the
crippled American stations had few resources. Fortunately for the shortterm needs of the KGB, the American Communist Party maintained large
networks of secret party members working in government (managed by
Jacob Golos, assisted by Elizabeth Bentley) that it called upon to fill in
the gaps while it rebuilt its professional intelligence apparatus. Although
it recognized the serious operational deficiencies that the amateurish networks run by the CPUSA posed, its desperate need for information slowed
down its ability to professionalize the operation and sowed the seeds of the
disaster that began in 1945 with a series of defections, Bentley chief among
them, that ultimately destroyed most of its assets and networks. By the
late 1940s, the KGB networks in America were shadows of their former
selves, with the dwindling number of sources less able to provide the kinds of information Moscow was demanding. One of the few bright spots for
Soviet intelligence in the postwar era was the combination of good luck
and skill that placed one man, William Weisband, in a position to warn
Moscow in 1948 that the United States was reading its military cipher systems, and that one success ended in 1950, when the FBI, following up
clues going back to 1943, tracked him down. Judith Coplon, another valuable postwar sources, was arrested in 1948.

How much damage did these spies do? As evidence of extensive Soviet espionage has mounted in the past decade, some academics and partisans, despite knowing nothing of the substance of what information was
passed to Moscow, have simply claimed on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that it was trivial or did little damage to American security. Like
most intelligence agencies, the KGB was sometimes disappointed or
unimpressed by the quality of information it received from its sources.
Some people to whom it devoted much attention produced little. And a
few sources turned out to be charlatans or even double agents. But the
KGB stations in the United States also produced an extraordinary amount
of vital information. The scientific and technical data they transmitted to
Moscow saved the Soviet Union untold amounts of money and resources
by transferring American technology, which enabled it to build an atomic
bomb and deploy jet planes, radar, sonar, artillery proximity fuses, and
many other military advances long before its own industry, strained by
rapid growth and immense wartime damage, could have developed and
fielded them independently. Sources in the American government sometimes provided low-grade intelligence, but they also gave the USSR an
unprecedented window on American diplomatic, economic, and political
developments and plans. Sources in the world of journalism passed along
useful insights into government, the media, and potential recruits. While
any intelligence service covets the key document or set of blueprints, it
also relies heavily on a stream of less dramatic information that enables
it to form a coherent picture of its adversary and provides a check, a second source, on what has been learned from the open media and conventional diplomacy-and the KGB's hundreds of American sources and
agents did their best to provide such insights. The evidence is that Soviet
espionage in the United States changed history. The espionage-enabled
rapid acquisition of the atomic bomb emboldened Stalin's policies in the
early Cold War and contributed to his decision to authorize North Korea's
invasion of South Korea. Soviet espionage also led to the loss of America's
ability to read Soviet military communications and ensured that the Korean invasion was a surprise for which American forces were unprepared.

In addition to enriching our understanding of who worked for the
KGB and what information they provided, the documents in Vassiliev's
notebooks are a reminder that some KGB sources went on to successful
careers, either because they were protected by the American legal system
or because they never came under suspicion. Whether it was Bernard
Redmont overseeing a distinguished school of journalism; Russell McNutt building the planned community of Reston, Virginia; David Salmon
retiring from the State Department with the government's thanks; or
I. F. Stone lecturing intellectuals about truth-telling, the spies who got
away with it lived lives built on lies and deception.

The story of KGB espionage in America is not only an account of Soviet infiltration, but also a panorama of individual lives and frustrations,
resentments, and dreams that a foreign intelligence agency was able to
take advantage of and manipulate. An espionage service is, in part, a social service agency, required to minister to its charges' emotional, financial, and marital woes. The documents in the notebooks include accounts
of agent handlers and KGB officers soothing, counseling, and admonishing their recruits, worrying about their physical and mental health, financing vacations at health spas, advising about career moves and matrimonial worries, and fretting about their poor decisions or silly mistakes.
The Silvermaster network was one of the KGB's most productive sources
of diplomatic and military information, and it also was, to the unease of
its officers, a cauldron of unhappy, bitter, and frustrated people, constantly sniping at each other and led by a manage a trois. Even less dysfunctional groups required constant soothing and ego stroking, whether
to reassure Julius Rosenberg that he remained highly valued despite the
need to reduce his role after the government dismissed him from his job
because of Communist connections or to persuade diplomat Laurence
Duggan, naively believing the Moscow Trials claims that leading Soviet
figures had been in league with Germany, that his fears that these Soviet
traitors might have revealed his treachery were baseless.

The notebooks also suggest that the KGB's success, while owing in
part to the skills and perseverance of its professional officers, also was the
result of a great deal of luck and freely offered gifts. While it took advantage of many of its opportunities, it was not the super-efficient,
smoothly running machine of popular myth. It was very lucky to have a
committed CPUSA anxious to help, government leaders who largely regarded the Soviet intelligence threat with indifference for many years,
and a distracted and sometimes clueless FBI as its foe in the 1930s. And
even after the FBI learned the skills needed for counterespionage, it was not until the mid-1940s that the Bureau turned its full attention to the Soviet intelligence threat. But when it did, several key defections, the National Security Agency's decoding of wartime KGB cables, the inherent
vulnerability of the party-based networks, and its full-court press against
the CPUSA combined to shatter Soviet intelligence in America .2

A substantial portion of the KGB's success came from the sources and
agents handed to it by the CPUSA. The Silvermaster, Perlo, and Rosenberg rings all came to the Soviets courtesy of leaders of the American
Communist Party. Most of its other productive spies were ideological
agents whose recruitment was a result of their commitment to communism; indeed several key sources such as atomic spies Theodore Hall and
Klaus Fuchs and the engineer spy Julius Rosenberg were not recruited
but sought out the KGB and volunteered their services. But the KGB
did recruit a number of sources whose chief commitment was money,
such as biomedical spy Earl Flosdorf and aviation source Jones York.
Some of the sources recruited by the KGB itself turned out to be more
trouble than they were worth. Martha Dodd Stern and Victor Hammer,
for example, consumed a great deal of time from professional KGB officers but in the end did not deliver very much useful information or, in
Hammer's case, anything at all. One KGB recruit, Boris Morros, repeatedly filled the heads of KGB officers with intoxicating tales of his highlevel social and business contacts. While he did perform some useful services, in the mid-1940s the FBI turned him into a double agent, and he
went on to expose to prosecution members of a Soviet espionage apparatus. Perhaps there was something to Iskhak Akhmerov's observation
that having Americans like Silvermaster run the sources made them more
productive, that the KGB officers were unable to get the most out of their
commitments or accurately assess their motivation. Without the CPUSA,
Soviet espionage rings in the United States would have been far, far less
effective and widespread. The weakening of Soviet intelligence operations went hand in hand with the weakening of the CPUSA.

Ideological spies present a particularly disturbing challenge in a country where citizenship has never been defined by blood and heritagewith the partial exception of blacks and Indians-but by commitment to
a set of democratic ideals. Citizens accused of allegiance to a foreign
power have engendered outrage, whether it was Aaron Burr, allegedly
seeking to dismember the Union, or German-Americans suspected of
disloyalty during World War I. But those who have rejected the principles
of the Constitution for another vision of government have earned particular wrath. No era of American life saw so many accusations of espionage and covert activities on behalf of a foreign country as the decade after
World War II.

The McCarthy era has long since attained iconic status in American
history as the symbol of paranoia about "reds hiding under the beds." Although the postwar attack on the CPUSA preceded Senator McCarthy's
rise to prominence, the picture of a relentless governmental persecution
of a perhaps annoying but ultimately harmless movement is regularly invoked as an object lesson in the erosion of civil liberties. Most American
Communists were not spies; the KGB did not need or want the CPUSAs
fifty-to-sixty thousand members as agents. But the documents in Vassiliev's notebooks make crystal clear that the CPUSAs leadership in the
193os and 1940s willingly placed the party's organizational resources and
a significant number of its key cadres at the service of the espionage agencies of a foreign power. The CPUSA as an organized entity was an auxiliary service to Soviet intelligence. Dozens of its members working for the
American government or employed in scientific research handed over information, sometimes with the full knowledge that they were serving the
Soviet Union, sometimes comforting themselves that they were only informing the CPUSA leadership, and occasionally willfully deceiving
themselves about the ultimate destination of the material.

It was no witch hunt that led American counterintelligence officials
to investigate government employees and others with access to sensitive
information for Communist ties after they became cognizant of the extent
of Soviet espionage and the crucial role played in it by the CPUSA, but
a rational response to the extent to which the Communist Party had become an appendage of Soviet intelligence. And, as the documents in Vassiliev's notebooks make plain, they only knew the half of it.

1. William J. Broad, "A Spy's Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor," New
York Times, 12 November 2007.

2. Anatoly Gorsky, "Failures in the USA (1938-48)," December 1948, KGB
file 43173, v.2c, PP. 49-55, Alexander Vassiliev, Black Notebook [2007 English Translation], trans. Philip Redko (1993-96), 77-79.

3. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret
World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Harvey
Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American
Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). NSA released the Russian text of a single Venona decryption, the
one discussing the source "Ales" [Alger Hiss]. John R. Schindler, "Hiss in VENONA:
The Continuing Controversy," paper presented at Symposium on Cryptologic History, Laural, MD, 2005.

4. Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield:
The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books,
1999); Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our
Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2005);
V. I. Mitrokhin, KGB Lexicon: A Handbook of Chekist Terminology (London and
Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2ool); "The Mitrokhin Archive-A Note on Sources," in
The Mitrokhin Archive: Cold War International History Project Virtual Archive
(2004); "CWIHP Note on the Mitrokhin Archive-A Note On Sources," in The
Mitrokhin Archive: Cold War International History Project Virtual Archive (2000).
In addition to the segment of Mitrokhin material available at the Cold War International History Project, the SIS gave Mitrokhin's material on Italy to the Italian government, which released the material in 2002. The cables deciphered by the Venona project are available on the Web at http://www.nsa.gov/venona/index.cfm. Hard copy
of the cables is also available at the National Ciyptologic Museum (Ft. Meade, MD).
Histories of the Venona project includeRobert L. Benson, The Venona Story (Ft.
Meade, MD: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2oos);
Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939-1957 (Washington, D.C.: National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, 1996).

5. Four books ultimately derived from the original Crown series: John Costello
and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993); David E.
Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs.
KGB in the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Nigel West and
Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev,
The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in Arnerica-The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999).