Harvey Klehr - Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America

John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev

with translations by Philip Redko and Steven Shabad

To my beloved wife, Janette

-JOHN EARL HAYNES

To women of valor Susan Kline Klehr and Robin Klehr Avia

-HARVEY KLEHR

To my son, Ken Vassiliev

-ALEXANDER VASSILIEV

CHAPTER 1:

CHAPTER

CHAPTER 3:

CHAPTER 4:

CHAPTER 5:

CHAPTER 6:

CHAPTER 7:

CHAPTER 8:

CHAPTER

Is there anything new to be learned about Soviet espionage in America? After more than a decade of fresh revelations, it may seem that we must know most of the details and there is little left to uncover. But new information continues to emerge. In the fall of 2007, after Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a posthumous award to a previously unknown spy, George Koval, credited with enabling the USSR to steal vital atomic secrets, the New York Times published a front-page article detailing the remarkable story of his transition from an Iowa-born child of RussianJewish (and Communist-sympathizing) parents who moved in 1932 to Birobidzhan, Stalin's artificial Jewish homeland in Siberia, and his transformation into a Soviet spy sent back to the United States who wound up working at the secret Oak Ridge atomic facilities during World War 11.1

The Koval story illustrates some of the dilemmas faced by anyone attempting to write a factual account of Soviet espionage. The original story relied on Russian claims about the value of the material Koval supplied. Despite a number of clues pointing to his having a less significant role in atomic espionage than the claims boasted, a credulous press inflated his importance, inadvertently echoing his employer. Russian military intelligence, the GRU, has, in recent years, attempted to emulate the public relations offensive that its long-time sister agency and rival, the KGB, embarked on in the 199os to convince the Russian public and government officials that it had a major role in the military and political successes achieved by the Soviet Union.

When the underlying documentation for a spy story is unavailable, the bits and pieces of information released by governments to placate public curiosity about espionage can be misleading. Official government statements often have more to do with internal bureaucratic factionalism or public relations than the truth. The spies themselves are rarely available to be interviewed and have good reasons to avoid being too specific or entirely candid. And when they do speak through memoir literature they are as prone as autobiographers in other walks of life to romanticize their importance, minimize their mistakes, and pass over unpleasant events with silence or misdirection. Frustratingly, archival information regarding intelligence and counterintelligence activities from the 1930s onward continues to be tightly held and parceled out in a miserly fashion.

For all these reasons, Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks provide a uniquely rich insight into Soviet espionage during the 193os and 1940s. As Vassiliev explains in his introduction, he had unprecedented access to the archival record of KGB activities in America in that era. Contemporaneous documents, written at the time the events they describe were occurring or shortly afterwards, they also have the virtue of being a record of how the very agency that conducted the spying understood its operations. These official communications are neither the conclusions or guesses, sometimes inspired, sometimes incorrect, of counterespionage organizations dedicated to uncovering the spies; nor the reluctant admissions of suspects minimizing their involvement; nor statements from defectors who may have a personal agenda. Instead, they are the contemporaneous accounts of the successes and failures of the KGB by the KGB itself. They are not public "spin" offered by bureaucratic organizations and officials anxious to demonstrate their value to a public or protect an organization's self-image. Any archival historian knows that even contemporaneous documents can sometimes mislead because their author didn't correctly understand the events he was reporting for some reason, harbored prejudices and assumptions that distorted what was reported, or for self-promotion or self-protection distorted what actually happened. But that danger of misleading is true of all archival records, no matter what the subject, and it is why historians feel more confident when there are multiple documentary sources that corroborate one another and allow one to screen out the misleading outlier. And given the several thousand KGB documents transcribed, quoted, extracted, and summarized in their more than 1,115 pages, Vassiliev's notebooks provide researchers with an abundance of material that offers both internal corroboration and ample basis for corroboration with independent sources.

We traveled to London in the fall of 2005 to meet with Vassiliev after learning that the 1948 "Gorsky memo," introduced as evidence in his libel suit (see the introduction) in Great Britain, was not the only extract of a KGB document in his possession that scholars had not yet examined. A preliminary look at Vassiliev's notebooks made clear how valuable they were, and we quickly decided to find funding to undertake a skilled translation and produce a book based on them.2

Despite everything that has appeared in the past decade, the Vassiliev notebooks offer the most complete look at Soviet espionage in America we have yet had or will obtain until the likely far off day when Russian authorities open the KGB's archives for independent research. Material from Communist International (Comintern) and Communist Party, United States (CPUSA) files, while significant and helpful and shedding some light on espionage in the United States, includes only KGB material that made its way to those bodies and represents only a tiny fraction of KGB activities. We dealt with such material in two books, The Secret World of American Communism and The Soviet World of American Communism. The World War II KGB and GRU cables deciphered by the National Security Agency's (NSA) Venona project and released in the mid-199os are also a very valuable documentary source, out of which we wrote Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. But the Venona decryptions are only a few thousand cables out of hundreds of thousands sent, and those decoded were random, the result of the few cables out of the total body that were vulnerable to deciphering. Consequently, the subjects of the deciphered messages ranged from the trivial to the important, and often they were only partially decrypted. Even when complete, they were messages boiled down for transmission by telegram, often short, terse, and lacking detail. 3