Soviet Espionage Research Articles

Red spy queen: a biography of Elizabeth Bentley

When Elizabeth Bentley slunk into an FBI field office in 1945, she was thinking only of saving herself from NKGB assassins who were hot on her trail. She had no idea that she was about to start the greatest Red Scare in US history. Bentley was a Connecticut Yankee and Vassar graduate who spied for the Soviet Union for seven years. She met with dozens of highly placed American agents who worked for the Soviets, gathering their secrets and stuffing sensitive documents into her knitting bag. But her Soviet spymasters suspected her of disloyalty - and even began plotting to silence her for ever. To save her own life, Bentley decided to betray her friends and comrades to the FBI. Her defection effectively shut down Soviet espionage in the US for years. Despite her crucial role in the cultural and political history of the early Cold War, Bentley has long been overlooked or underestimated by historians. Now, new documents from Russian and American archives make it possible to assess the veracity of her allegations. This biography rescues Elizabeth Bentley from obscurity and tells her dramatic life story.

The Historiography of American Communism: An Unsettled Field

Scholarly treatment of American Communism began in the late 1950s and 1960s. The ‘traditionalists’ argued that the Communist Party, USA, was subordinate to the Soviet Union, possessed a totalitarian ideology, and had no legitimate place on the democratic left. In the 1970s and 1980s a wave of ‘revisionist’ scholars presented a benign view of American Communism as a progressive force, stressed locally-oriented social histories, placed the movement in the traditions of native American radicalism, and minimized the importance of Soviet ties. The opening of the Russian archives in the 1990s reinvigorated the traditionalist approach and inserted CPUSA cooperation with Soviet espionage into the debate. Today the field is unsettled and debate vigorous. Revisionists are on the defensive while traditionalists increasingly control the argument.

Soviet Espionage on American TV: The VENONA Story

Soviet Espionage on American TV: The VENONA Story

‘No Wishful Thinking Allowed’: Secret Service Committee and Intelligence Reform in Great Britain, 1919–23

The May 2002 tranche of British Security Service files released to the Public Record Office included hitherto classified policy files containing documents on Secret Service Committee meetings held from 1919 to 1923. This body wrote an important yet relatively obscure chapter in British intelligence history: the post-First World War reorganization and retasking of British secret service machinery, the focus now being Soviet Russia. However, by encouraging the deliberate overstatement of the Bolshevik 'subversive' threat and then backing excessive measures to counter it, some British officials may have sown the seeds of government's later inability to detect a much graver peril to national security, that of Soviet espionage.

Socialist Triumph as a Family Value: Earl Browder and Soviet Espionage

Socialist Triumph as a Family Value: Earl Browder and Soviet Espionage

The spy that never was

The article1 investigates persistent attempts to link the late Sir Rudolf Peierls and his wife Genia to atomic espionage for the Soviet Union. After discussing the work done by Klaus Fuchs and Rudolf Peierls at Birmingham as part of the British nuclear effort, their contribution to the Anglo-American-Canadian Manhattan project is examined. Here the collaboration of Fuchs and Peierls as well as the nature of their personal relationship is looked at. By analyzing evidence from the ‘Venona’ transcripts and the Peierls private papers, it is concluded that allegations linking Peierls to the Soviet espionage, in particular atomic espionage cannot be sustained and that, on the contrary, evidence strongly suggests that neither Rudolf Peierls nor his wife Genia were implicated in any such activities.

Investigating soviet espionage and subversion: the case of Donald Maclean

This essay sets out the dimensions of investigating Soviet espionage and subversion, highlighting how Maclean's image as a Soviet agent has developed over the past 50 years. It will then consider to what extent new documents at the Public Record Office alter his image. Maclean's crime was treachery but what exactly is the intellectual challenge in investigating espionage? Just what can be achieved? Sir Dick White former head of MI6 offered this advice:Espionage is a crime that often leaves no trace of evidence. The investigator relies upon intuition for coincidences. After considering the circumstances, he might reach the moment of epiphany when all the facts added up to one conclusion1

KGB general Naum isakovich Eitingon (1899–1981)

Throughout their long and brutal existence, the Soviet intelligence and security services produced numerous shadwy figures whose work accorded those services a unique effectiveness. This article lifts the veil of secrecy from one of the most ruthless and merciless of those figures, N. I. Eitingen. During his over 30‐year career as a security operative, Eitingen's was involved in a virtual catalogue of the security and intelligence services’ most infamous exploits spanning the globe from Mexico to China. In peacetime he was instrumental in Soviet espionage activities in China, the US, and Western Europe and in the assassination of Stalin's arch enemy Leon Trotsky. During wartime Eitingen was instrumental in the formation of reconnaissance and diversionary forces, the forerunners of the infamous post‐war Spetsnaz. Fittingly, after war's end, Eitingen fell victim to the very security organs he so ruthlessly and efficiently served.

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

The Venona secret US army project of the 1940's was a monumental achievement in this history of American code breaking and one of the America's most closely guarded secrets. This book exposes the greatest domestic counter-espionage operation that has ever been launched against the Soviet Union.

Soviet Espionage and the Cold War

Not since Martin Abegg of Hebrew Union College used a computer program to reconstruct the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1991 and the Huntington Library almost simultaneously released a complete photographic set of the same have human documents stirred more excitement among scholars than the opening of government archives in the former Soviet Union and the release, beginning in 1995, of decrypted Soviet diplomatic cables first begun in 1939 by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, the forerunner of the National Security Agency, code named VENONA.1 The VENONA decrypted cables plus those documents gleaned from Soviet depositories, especially the records of the Communist International (Comintern), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and the Committee for State Security (KGB, also known as NKVD during World War II), have opened a new window on the history of the Cold War much as the Dead Sea Scrolls filled some gaps and cast fresh light on many obscure passages and interpretations of the world of the Old Testament. But while documents may resolve certain questions, they often leave the most important ones unresolved. Goliath, we learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls, was only six feet, nine inches tall, not nine feet, nine inches. But reputable biblical scholars continue to debate whether or not the famous scrolls found at Qumran belonged to the ascetic sect called the Essenes or were a library hidden during the Jewish uprising against the Romans. And so it is with the cache of new documents, both American and Soviet, from the era of the Cold War: they close the book on some historical controversies, but leave still others open to interpretation.

Oleg Tsarev's Synthetic KGB Gems

The Crown Jewels, published in Great Britain in 1998 and the United States in 1999, is Oleg Tsarev's second book drawn from KGB archives and written in cooperation with a Western author in this case, Nigel West.1 This important, complex book has much to offer historians, especially those inclined toward archeology, for Tsarev has skillfully choreographed his version of history to dance around the facts of some very well known intelligence and espionage cases. Consequently, he deposits another dense layer of evidence to sift, sort, and evaluate. But an assessment of Tsarev's volume also leads to three major points. Admittedly, two are glimpses of the blindingly obvious,'' restated here because these fundamentals become buried under media hype. First, that new historical evidence requires careful interpretation. Second, the secrets spies gather should be evaluated within the context of national and institutional policy formulation and implementation. Third, the notion of damage'' from Soviet espionage, has been exaggerated and misunderstood, and it is now time to investigate the impact of Soviet espionage upon national and international politics. And, most relevantly, Tsarev, a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, also serves as a consultant to the Service's press department.

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

Guilt by Association? Lauchlin Currie's Alleged Involvement with Washington Economists in Soviet Espionage

Guilt by Association? Lauchlin Currie's Alleged Involvement with Washington Economists in Soviet Espionage

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

The sword and the shield: the Mitrokhin Archive and the secret history of the KGB

Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and Secret History of KGB. New York: Basic Books, 1999. xix, 700 pp. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $32.50 US, $47.50 CAD, cloth. Here it is, another history of Committee of State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti-KGB), Soviet secret police. This one, the secret is based on notes laboriously made over a twelve-year period from files process of being consigned to KGB archives. After collapse of Soviet Union, Vasili Mitrokhin's partly handwritten, partly typed archive was brought to Britain and now has had a narrative written around it by renowned Cambridge specialist on intelligence history, Christopher Andrew. Apparently no specific criteria were used to sift dross from 300,000-odd files seen by Mitrokhin between 1972 and 1984 as he archived them for First Chief Directorate (i.e., foreign intelligence). Christopher Andrew has therefore wisely decided to fit archival material into a straightforwardly chronological history of KGB's foreign operations. It begins with Cheka, original Soviet ancestor of KGB. In this and many later chapters, there is some obvious repetition of Andrew's earlier collaborative writing with another defector, Oleg Gordievsky, as well as opportunity to answer critics and to incorporate newer Russian works on subject. The story continues with accounts of Great Illegals of 1930s, magnificent five (Kim Philby et al.) recruited at Cambridge University by Anthony Blunt, pursuit of Trotsky, war, and Cold War. Throughout these early chapters, as well as later, we discover or rediscover some of great Soviet espionage successes, and occasional failures. The failures resulted from intelligence being sidelined by ideology, with Stalin, Khrushchev, and even Andropov acting as their own analysts, and with residencies providing Moscow with what it wanted to hear rather than what it needed to know. Christopher Andrew does a phenomenal job of matching data handmade archive with rest of literature, current and past, field of intelligence studies. Intelligence agencies West will be pulling up names and aliases from this book to match up with their files, if they have not already done so, as a check on their own past counterintelligence records. For non-specialist, neither historian nor analyst, however, it is all just a long, sad story of betrayal and deception based on misplaced faith a false cause or, more recently, purely mercenary motives. It shakes one's faith human intelligence and intelligence of humans as none of deceptions, spying, active measures, or theft of scientific and technical knowledge prevented decay and eventual collapse of USSR The author skillfully brings very many bits and pieces of information together to answer a vast array of questions, as well as to debunk numerous myths about overblown reputations. There is much to ponder this volume, but end this world of spies remains a hall of mirrors. The book devotes considerable attention to Soviet operations against its main adversary, United States. Moscow had greatly inflated expectations of its illegal agents. In fact, though, just how much can an unacculturated foreigner living undercover teeming New York City learn about American government secrets? One such illegal did work as a piano tuner for Steinway & Sons. And from archive we do learn how, exactly, Vladimir Horowitz liked to have his piano tuned. There is no indication as to whether this was a vital American secret or whether it influenced Soviet policy. Moscow was also for a long time convinced United States was planning to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike; its agents fed that preconception. Rather than its network of legal and illegal spies, KGB had better results from American citizens working intelligence trade, such as Aldrich Ames, who would walk in to Soviet residencies offering their services. …

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

The Cold War Debate Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism

This article reviews the huge Cold War-era and post-Cold War literature on American Communism and anti-Communism in the United States. These issues have long been the subject of heated scholarly debate. The recent opening of archives in Russia and other former Communist countries and the release of translated Venona documents in the United States have shed new light on key aspects of the American Communist Party that were previously unknown or undocumented. The new evidence has underscored the Soviet Union's tight control of the party and the crucial role that American Communists played in Soviet espionage. The release of all this documentation has been an unwelcome development for scholars who have long been sympathetic to the Communist movement.

The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives

This lively account of Soviet foreign intelligence activity in Great Britain during Cold War is based on documents newly released from KGB archives, their crown jewels, as KGB unofficially called its most valuable assets. Written by Nigel West, called by Sunday Times the unofficial historian of secret services and Oleg Tsarev, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, The Crown Jewels provides much new information on activities of all well-known British pro-Soviet spies, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, as well as many lesser-known spymasters and recruiters, reproducing many of their reports for first time. The book adds unsuspected dimensions to famous Cambridge ring (including details of Burgess's offer to murder his fellow conspirator Goronwy Rees). It also reveals a completely unknown Soviet network based in London and headed by a named Daily Herald journalist; describes huge scale of Soviet penetration of British Foreign Office from 1927 to 1951; explores a previously unknown spy ring in Oxford; and tells about key role played by Blunt in supervising post-war Soviet espionage activities in London.

Venona: decoding Soviet espionage in America

Venona: decoding Soviet espionage in America

The haunted wood: Soviet espionage in America--the Stalin era

The haunted wood: Soviet espionage in America--the Stalin era