Soviet Espionage Research Articles

The MacDonald Discussion Group: A Communist Conspiracy in Britain’s Cold War Film and Theatre Industry—Or MI5’s Honey-Pot?

During the cold war, the British entertainment industry escaped the extent of the anti-communist sentiments that gripped America, but recently released files from MI5 (Britain’s domestic security-intelligence agency) indicate that British intelligence authorities were nonetheless concerned about possible covert communist activity at work in the industry in Britain. This article presents the case of the MacDonald Discussion Group, a private left-wing discussion group operating in London in the early 1950s, designed to appeal to professionals in the film, theatre and architecture industries, attended by actors such as Mai Zetterling, Herbert Lom and Ferdy Mayne. Penetrated from its earliest meetings by MI5, it was viewed with increasing concern as a site of communist indoctrination and potentially of Soviet espionage, and those who attended the group were investigated as potential communist sympathisers by MI5. Despite these investigations, the group's activity never resulted in the sort of influence or growth that MI5 feared, to the extent that it appears that it was actually MI5’s agent who propped-up the group beyond the point when it would have otherwise collapsed. This article therefore analyses MI5’s surveillance of the group, and asks what implications this sort of attention might have had for the careers of those industry figures linked to the group.

Shanghai's “Mysterious Westerner”: The Walden Affair And Soviet Military Intelligence Operations In China, 1933–1935

AbstractDuring the 1930s, Shanghai was a major center of Soviet espionage. By 1935 Chinese and Japanese agents of the USSR's military intelligence service, the Razvedyvatel'noe Upravlenie or RU, had successfully penetrated key Guomindang, Japanese, and U.S. targets, providing critical intelligence for Moscow and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These accomplishments collapsed after the detention of RU leader Yakov Bronin (commonly known as Joseph Walden) and several of his Chinese associates in May 1935, the culmination of a series of tradecraft errors and misjudgments. As attempts to establish Bronin's nationality foundered, a classic confrontation developed between Chinese authorities seeking Bronin's immediate rendition and those of the International Settlement and French Concession, both determined to uphold the principle of extra-territoriality. Once Bronin's fraudulent claim to French nationality was exposed he was duly extradited and received a 15–year jail sentence for espionage, leaving RU netw...

Spies in the News: Soviet Espionage in the American Media During World War II and the Beginning of the Cold War

Broken down by occupation, more American journalists worked clandestinely for Soviet intelligence in the United States during the early 1940s than in any other profession except engineering. However, since reporters had no direct access to government secrets, most research focuses on their role as messengers, recruiters, and sources of inside information. While not discounting these roles, this article argues that journalist spies also collected a large amount of secret diplomatic and military information. Covering the years 1941 through 1946, this article also shows that the information collected by these spies evolved as World War II morphed into the Cold War.

The interrogation of Sándor Radó: geography, communism and espionage between World War Two and the Cold War

This essay uses recently released intelligence files to consider a pivotal episode in the long and eventful career of Alexander (Sándor) Radó (1899–1981), geographer, journalist and Soviet intelligence agent who lived and worked in various European cities before and during World War Two and later became an internationally renowned cartographer during the 1960s and 1970s in his native Hungary. In January 1945, Radó arrived unexpectedly at the British Embassy in Cairo, having apparently escaped from Soviet officials escorting him against his wishes from Paris to Moscow. For the next six months he was detained in Egypt while British intelligence officers investigated his claim to be an innocent geographer drawn unwittingly into the dangerous world of Soviet espionage. This investigation drew attention to a previously unexamined, intensely political form of geographical practice constructed outside the academy in the worlds of publishing and journalism and shaped by the needs of communist propaganda and Soviet espionage. The decision to return Radó to the Soviet Union, following a characteristically ambiguous intervention by MI6 double agent H. A. R. ‘Kim’ Philby, suggests that this style of radical geography, rooted in the cosmopolitan culture of the European inter-war left, was a casualty of the brief transition from the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany to the Cold War division of Europe.

Soviet Espionage in Israel, 1973–1991

In June 1967, the Soviet Union abruptly cut off diplomatic relations with Israel and withdrew its embassy staff from Tel-Aviv, including its large KGB Rezidentura. To develop new sources of intelligence in Israel, the KGB recruited under duress hundreds of Russian Jews to spy in Israel in return for allowing their families to leave the Soviet Union. Most of these ‘recruits’ abandoned their task once they reached Israel, leaving Soviet intelligence with only a small number of agents in Israel who were handled by KGB illegal case officers working out of Russian churches. These agents were able to make careers in Israel and obtain some access to confidential military information, but generally failed to reach Israel's inner circle of political and military decision makers. This inner circle was only breached in 1983 by the treachery of a highly placed former Mossad officer who offered his services to the Soviets and became the KGB's best source for secret information deep inside the Israeli government.

Harry Hopkins and Soviet Espionage

One of the intriguing unidentified cover names in the Venona decryptions released in the mid-1990s was ‘19’, a Soviet source senior enough to report taking part in a conversation with President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Vice-President Wallace at the 1943 Trident conference. While some historians thought the evidence too ambiguous to identify the real name behind ‘19’, others built a case that it was presidential adviser Harry Hopkins. Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks, made public in 2009, resolved the issue by firmly identifying ‘19’ as State Department official Laurence Duggan. There remain, however, writers who refuse to accept the evidence that ‘19’ was Duggan and insist that Hopkins was a Soviet agent on the basis of insubstantial evidence.

Correspondence: Exchange on Vassiliev Notebooks and Alger Hiss

Editor’s Preface: An overwhelming amount of evidence has emerged over the past twenty years from the archives of the former USSR and from other former Soviet-bloc countries conarming that Alger Hiss was both a secret member of the American Communist Party and a Soviet spy in the 1930s and 1940s. The case against Hiss was already very strong on the basis of vast quantities of declassiaed U.S. documents, and it has grown immeasurably stronger with the release of materials from the former Eastern bloc. The late Eduard Mark published his anal article in the Summer 2009 issue of the JCWS (a special issue on Soviet espionage in the United States during the Stalin era) amassing further evidence that Hiss was a Soviet spy and rebutting an article published by two of the small number of Hiss’s remaining defenders. After the special issue appeared, the journal received a commentary from David Lowenthal, the brother of John Lowenthal, who tried for many years to convince people that Hiss was innocent. David Lowenthal does not respond to the devastating evidence presented by Eduard Mark; instead, he raises other points about the use of Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks that, to varying degrees, were already addressed in the special issue and in the complementary book by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). We agreed that we would publish Lowenthal’s commentary as a letter to the editor with a response by Haynes and Klehr, which Lowenthal has not seen.

Loving Nature, Fearing The State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan by Brian Allen Drake

 OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 It draws from an expansive range of sources: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, magazine articles, cookbooks, school curricula, and more. The bibliography includes over 750 references and there are over 60 pages of notes. The book is both entertaining and scholarly. Pumpkin adds to a literature of food that perhapsstartedwiththeaforementionedpotato andnowincludesbananas(Bananas:AnAmericanHistorybyVirginiaScottJenkins ,Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), apples (The Apple: A History of Canada’s Perfect Fruit by Carol Martin, McArthur & Co., 2007), dates (Dates: A Global History by Nawal Nasrallah, Reaktion Books,2011),andmanyothers.Wemayseeaday when all foods have books about them. Ott reexamines American history through the lens of the pumpkin. It is an undertaking that is both intellectual and fun. She traces the pumpkin’s trajectory, by describing its presence in the food and spiritual culture of Native Americans and its later adoption by European colonists. The pumpkin appears in Europe based on “overseas encounters” and quickly moves to the symbolic as demonstrated by its use as a common motif in sixteenth century art: buxom women surrounded by a bountiful harvest including overflowing baskets of pumpkins“in an exuberance of natural abundance ” (pp. 21, 27). The trajectory continues with the pumpkin’s transformation to its current emblematic role. From livestock feed to canned product to jack-o-lantern, to roadside stands and community festivals, Ott demonstrates how the pumpkin became entwined in the American agrarian myth. “The pumpkin fulfills many Americans’ desire to maintain connection to the mythical family farm of lore.” (p. 195). Twentieth century small-scale farmers took advantage of this rural nostalgia to support their farms. In the same vein, Ott observes this nostalgia can be a symbol of resistance to the loss of rural community identity. As a resident of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, describes their pumpkin festival:“We’re maintaining our small-town identity. We have Starbucks and a Gap has come in. We need something to hold onto” (p. 166). The pumpkin is present in American social changefromanti-slaverysentimentof thenineteenth century to misguided anti-gay pushback by people reacting to rainbow flags innocently flown over a pumpkin patch in Virginia. The book also includes revelations (and dinner party trivia) that pumpkins were not present at the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621 and that microfilm linking Alger Hiss to Soviet espionage was hidden in a hollowed out pumpkin. The book sets the record straight about many things related to pumpkins with one exception:what it is.Pumpkins are in the genus cucurbita — the cucumber family — a family that includes watermelon,melons and gourds. Botanically, it is a fruit but is often treated like a vegetable. Ott embraces pumpkins as vegetables ; a teachable is moment lost. The book ends with a curious photograph taken in 1978 by Joel Sternfeld. The photo is of McLean’s Farm Market inVirginia.In the background , a farmhouse is on fire and firefighters are battling the flames (a training exercise).Yet, in the foreground at the farm stand is a lone firefighter — in full fire fighting gear — selecting pumpkins, illustrating our preoccupation. Garry Stephenson Oregon State University Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics before Reagan by Brian Allen Drake University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2013. Bibliography, notes, index. 292 pages. $34.95 paper. In July 1940, Barry Goldwater became the seventy -third person to float the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The trip stayed  Reviews with him through later years, in memory and emotion, perhaps partly because he was already a recognized and published photographer of Arizona and the American West’s natural scenic wonders. But that memory did not stop him from voting to authorize construction of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1956. Reclamation was foremost in his mind then, and the Colorado River represented power and irrigation to fuel Arizona’s economic development. The controversy over damming the Snake River in Idaho’s Hells Canyon developed at the same time, and Goldwater vigorously supported the private-power initiative for three low dams on the Snake rather than the single government-owned high dam favored by federal planners. For Goldwater, the high dam would be a “gross violation of free enterprise” (p. 38). Yet twenty years later, Goldwater told the Senate...

Geopolitics and Global Democracy in Owen Lattimore's political thought

This article analyses the international thought of the US sinologist and political advisor Owen Lattimore (1900–89). A well-known expert on China and the Far East, Lattimore was a ‘public intellectual’ and advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1950, after Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him of Soviet espionage, Lattimore's reputation was irrevocably damaged and his political thought forgotten. By assessing his visions of global democracy and geopolitics, this article claims Lattimore made insightful contributions to international thought. On the eve of the cold war, Lattimore's ideas of pluralistic democracy and tripolar world order offered an alternative vision of the post-war era, focusing on political participation and diversity. This article focuses on Lattimore's published writings in the 1940s, when, as political advisor and director of the Johns Hopkins’ Page School of International Relations, he sought to shift international attention from Europe to the Far East as the potential birthplace of a new version of post-colonial democracy. A fervent anti-imperialist, Lattimore crafted new political space for global democracy in a post-imperial age. His thoughtful discussion of participation, co-operation, democracy, knowledge, and pluralism make his vision of world order an interesting contribution to international thought in the twentieth century.

Stalin’s Man in Canada: Fred Rose and Soviet Espionage by David Levy (review)

Stalin’s Man in Canada: Fred Rose and Soviet Espionage by David Levy (review)

Ignacy Witczak’s Passport, Soviet Espionage and the Origins of the Cold War in Canada

Ignacy Witczak’s Passport, Soviet Espionage and the Origins of the Cold War in Canada

Soviet Espionage in America: An Oft-Told tale

Soviet Espionage in America:An Oft-Told tale Ellen Schrecker (bio) John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev. Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. liii + 650 pp. Notes and index. $35.00. Susan Jacoby . Alger Hiss and the Battle for History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. x + 256 pp. Chronology, notes, selected bibliography, acknowledgements, and index. $24.00. 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 [End Page 355] 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...

Spies: the rise and fall of the KGB in America

This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account. Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, Spies resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. Spies also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted for American nuclear spies. Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.

Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks and the Documentation of Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era

Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks with 1,115 pages of handwritten transcriptions, excerpts, and summaries from Soviet Committee on State Security (KGB) archival files provide the most detailed documentation available of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. This article discusses the provenance of the notebooks and how they fit with previously available Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files, KGB cables decrypted by the Venona project, Communist International records, court proceedings, and congressional investigations. As an example of the richness of the material, the essay reviews the notebooks' documentation of Soviet spy William Weisband's success in alerting the Soviet Union to the U.S. decryption project that tracked Soviet military logistic communications, allowing the USSR to implement a more secure encryption system and blinding the United States to preparations for the invasion of South Korea in 1950.

Danger of Deploying Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space

Danger of Deploying Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space

The Trilling Files

The FBI dossier on Lionel Trilling discloses that the Bureau followed his activities intermittently for almost three decades. An active file was maintained on Trilling from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. Most of these reports address Trilling’s peripheral connection to ongoing FBI probes and to its scrutiny of communist figures and issues, and reveal how out of touch FBI intelligence was about which American intellectuals posed security threats. Although Trilling’s FBI dossier contains no bombshell revelations and discloses no technical violations of his civil liberties, his surveillance by the FBI was wasteful and unnecessary; in any event, it demonstrates a skewed understanding of the balance among national security, social order, and personal liberty.

How the Cold War began: the Igor Gouzenko affair and the hunt for Soviet spies

On September 5, 1945, cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko severed ties with the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, reporting to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police allegations of extensive Soviet espionage in North America, providing stolen documents detailing Soviet intelligence matters to back his claims. This action sent shockwaves through Washington, London, Moscow, and Ottawa, changing the course of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified FBI and Canadian RCMP files on the Gouzenko case, author and Cold War scholar Amy Knight sheds new light on the FBI's efforts to incriminate Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White in order to discredit the Truman Administration. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover seized upon Gouzenko's defection as a means through which to demonize the Soviets, distorting statements made by Gouzenko to stir up spy fever in the U. S. , setting the McCarthy era into motion. Through the FBI files and interviews with several key players, Knight delves into Gouzenko's reasons for defecting and brilliantly connects these events to the strained relations between the Soviet Union and the West, marking the beginning of the Cold War.

‘Giving the Russians a Bloody Nose’:1 Operation Foot and Soviet Espionage in the United Kingdom, 1964–71

On 24 September 1971 the British government expelled 105 Soviet diplomats and trade delegation officials resident in the UK. This was a response to the expansion of Soviet espionage in Britain during the 1960s, and to Moscow's refusal to respond to London's protests on this issue. This article examines the impact of the espionage problem on Anglo-Soviet relations during this period, and analyzes the reasons behind the expulsions (known as Operation Foot). Foot was implemented not only for reasons of national security, but also because of British resentment at the USSR's frequent abuses of diplomatic privileges.

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

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.

MOSCOW'S INTERWAR INFILTRATION OF BRITISH INTELLIGENCE, 1919–1929

The celebrated ‘Cambridge five’ have hitherto been believed to be the first long-term communist penetration agents in HM government, beginning with Donald Maclean in 1935. However, new research indicates that by 1919 another Cambridge man – like four of the ‘five’, a Trinity graduate – had already begun working for Moscow. This article is the first to examine how William Norman Ewer, known as ‘Trilby’ to his co-conspirators, organized networks in Great Britain and France to target the governments of those two powers. Under close Soviet supervision, Ewer's subordinates infiltrated half-a-dozen Whitehall departments, foremost among them Scotland Yard. Operating under the aegis of the home office, the Yard was a vital cog in the machinery of government set up to combat the ‘red menace’ in this country immediately after the First World War. By compromising the lead agency tasked with fighting them, the Bolsheviks thus created the requisite conditions for the metastasis in Great Britain of Soviet espionage in the 1920s.