Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War

Abstract

Katherine A. S. Sibley's book is an account of Soviet espionage in America and of U.S. responses to it. She thinks that President Franklin D. Roosevelt showed “naïveté about the scope of Soviet intentions” (p. 8). Against the background of sensational German spy cases at the start of World War II, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) proceeded relatively “quietly” with its investigation of espionage conducted under cover of the Soviets' Amtorg trading corporation (p. 60). She refers to the fbi's “scattershot” approach to Moscow's atomic espionage in 1942 (p. 139). These are merely qualifications to Sibley's main argument, however. She insists that the fbi did perceive the developing threat of Soviet espionage. The bureau began to take appropriate action and showed itself to be on a learning curve that would yield fruit in the Cold War. Setting aside the macro-debate about the early origins of Russo-American rivalry, her book is a contribution to the micro-debate about when, precisely, American suspicions of the Soviet Union took root in World War II. Her answer is, earlier than one might think.