Soviet Espionage Research Articles

Soviet industrial espionage against American military technology and the US response, 1930–1945

Between 1930 and 1945, the Soviet Union played a significant role in American domestic affairs. Although its agents’ infiltration of social movements and government agencies is well known, their parallel and highly successful practice of espionage against American industrial and military technology is less familiar. Washington officials were aware of Soviet spying, but mired in the Depression and then preoccupied with war, they mounted only a limited response, reflecting a political culture that did not emphasize active counterintelligence efforts. As a result, early Cold War revelations of unmistakable Soviet espionage shocked Americans, polarizing the Soviet‐American relationship and introducing a zealous domestic security apparatus.

The Cold War and the Curate's Egg

Let me tell you a story, begins the fairy tale. It is early September 1945, a hot Ottawa day, the start of a steamy late summer weekend. At the Soviet embassy, at the top of Charlotte Street, a bulky, sweating figure emerges, like many others from Ottawa's office buildings, and heads for home. Igor Gouzenko is a cypher clerk at the embassy; his duties, among other things, involve encoding espionage reports from Soviet agents in Canada.The year was a busy one in Gouzenko's business. The war ended, in stages: indeed the last stage, the war against Japan, had just been completed with the surrender of the Japanese empire after an American atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It was a subject about which Moscow had some curiosity, and, since Canada was involved, in a minor way, in the development of the American secret weapon, fragmentary reports on atomic research featured in the traffic back to Russia, along with information on the movements of allied armies in Europe, descriptions of Canadian military research projects, and other moderately interesting data.All routine stuff, except for the fact that Gouzenko the cypher clerk had stuffed the lot into his briefcase. For Gouzenko had been recalled to Moscow with his family, and he did not want to go. Instead he hoped that by handing over the Soviet espionage files he would be able to interest the Canadian government and secure asylum for himself and his family in Canada.The sequel is well known. The bewildered Gouzenko, used to a government in which the secret police never slept and knew no rest breaks, found that the Canadian government was taking a collective siesta in the first weekend of peace since 1939. Successively the minister of justice, the police, and then finally the free press told Gouzenko that they did not want to hear from him, at least not until after the weekend. With the clock ticking, and detection certain, this might have been a death sentence. And indeed in his desperation Gouzenko threatened to commit suicide rather than go back to the embassy. Meanwhile, glancing out their apartment window, the Gouzenkos noticed that they were being watched.Fortunately for Gouzenko things were not quite what they seemed. The government, in its roundabout way, had taken note of the Russian's story. Prime Minister Mackenzie King was seized of the problem. The people watching the Gouzenko apartment were Canadian police agents. Yet, anxious to avoid an incident, and fearful of thrusting Canada forward into an international scandal, Mackenzie King had grasped the most hopeful element of this whole puzzling incident. It would be most convenient, the prime minister mused, if Gouzenko did indeed commit suicide. Then the police could seize his documents and scan them, all the while professing ignorance and innocence to the Soviet Union. All in all, the perfect solution -- the Canadian way, to adapt the title of a recent book.Finally, Gouzenko was rescued, with his family, and spilled the beans, such as they were, to Canadian intelligence, such as it was, and to the British and by extension to the Americans. Six months later the news broke, and, just as Mackenzie King anticipated, it was a major scandal and served as a milestone in the deterioration of relations between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies.Later historians, myself included, have appreciated both the dramatic qualities and the symbolic value of the Gouzenko affair. Its timing was almost perfect, both in the discovery and in the disclosure, its coincidences many and gratifying, its encapsulation of the nature of the Soviet government -- and incidentally some of the weaknesses of the Soviet system -- nearly flawless.Yet the standard accounts of the Gouzenko affair have another side. Dramatic and convenient as they have been, they also have a tendency to mislead even as they illuminate. One is almost tempted to say that the affair casts a false light over the development of Canadian policy in the early years of the cold war -- not because anything in the standard story is untrue, although details and interpretations may be disputed -- but because we have been concentrating on some of the wrong details and drawing some tangential conclusions. …

Looking for the Public in the Private: American Lives, Un-American Activities

Book Reviews Review Essay Looking for the Public in the Private: American Lives, Un-American Activities Thomas W. Benson Whittaker Chambers. By Sam Tanenhaus. New York: Random House, 1997; pp. 638. $35.00. Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten. By Edward Dmytryk. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996; pp. 210. $34.95 cloth; $14.95 paper. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. By Walter Bernstein. New York: Knopf, 1996; pp. 292. $24.00. Anything Your Little Heart Desires. By Patricia Bosworth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; pp 416. $27.50. Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties. By Sally Belfrage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994; pp. 263. $22.50. fohn Wayne's America. By Garry Wills. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; pp. 380. $26.00. American politics, according to its own myths, is the definitive enactment of the democratic promises of the public sphere. At the same time, participants in American politics, from left, right, and center, necessarüy conduct their own political activities in what are at best only approximations of genuinely accessible public settings and in language that appeals as much to personal identity, virtue, religious or ideological conviction, and tribal hostilities as to civic ideals. Where can we look to find the public? One answer suggested by a diverse collection of recent accounts is that public and private are necessarüy fuzzy, partial, approximate, and simultaneous. According to our actual practices, it appears that Thomas W. Benson is Edwin Erie Sparks Professor of Rhetoric atPenn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1,No. 1,1998, pp. 117-141 ISSN 1094-8392 118 Rhetoric & Public Affairs we often enact, affirm, or critique our public life from the perspective of the private, or the reverse, or find one in the other, or mistake one for the other, or ruin one for the sake of the other. I propose to read as a rhetorical critic some recent accounts of the intersection of a great public event with a series of private lives. These accounts offer themselves both as political enactments—that is, as rhetorical appeals—and as, at least implicitly, political theories—that is, theories of the relations of public and private experience as revealed in biography and autobiography. These stories recall the time we now call the McCarthy era, though McCarthy himself was an opportunistic intruder on territory first exploited by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and its most junior member, Richard Milhous Nixon.1 Fifty years after the House Committee on Un-American Activities launched its October 1947 investigations of communism in Hollywood, and fifty years after Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss, before the same committee, in August of 1948, of having been part of Chambers's Soviet spy ring in the 1930s, the echoes of those painful days continue to resound. Sam Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of Chambers (19011961 ), whose autobiography, Witness, was for years a bible of postwar American conservatism.2 Alger Hiss (1904-1996) had been a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and a star among young New Deal bureaucrats. Hiss transferred to the State Department in 1936; in 1945 he served as secretary-general of the conference that created the United Nations. In 1946 he became the president of the Carnegie Endowment. In 1948 the seemingly patrician Hiss was accused by Chambers, then a senior editor at Time, of having participated in a Soviet espionage ring in Washington in the 1930s. In a confrontation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Hiss, who had at first denied knowing Chambers, said that he had known Chambers slightly, but under the pseudonym George Crosley. As a result of his testimony before HUAC and a grand jury, Hiss was eventually tried for two counts of perjury. A first trial resulted in a hung jury; the second jury convicted Hiss for having "lied twice to the grand jury, first in saying he had not seen Chambers after July 1, 1937, second in saying he had not transmitted the spy papers to Chambers" (431). Hiss denied until his death that he had been guüty. For decades, many liberals believed...

Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957

Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957

Allied scientific co‐operation and Soviet espionage in Canada, 1941–45

(1993). Allied scientific co‐operation and Soviet espionage in Canada, 1941–45. Intelligence and National Security: Vol. 8, Espionage: Past, Present, Future?, pp. 100-128.

Russian Scientists Save American Secrets

Many have feared that the collapse of the Soviet Union has created new opportunities for would-be nuclear proliferators. Until recently, those dangers have seemed mainly theoretical. However, the former Soviet world was recently on the brink of breaching the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) from an unexpected corner -- the KGB. This article discusses the irony that a move to publicize Russia's files on early Soviet espionage activities in the United States would originate from the KGB. It is of note that a publication of such secrets could have been useful to countries currently trying to develop a basic nuclear bomb.

Inside the KGB: My Life in Soviet Espionage

Inside the KGB: My Life in Soviet Espionage

Spies, Ciphers and 'Zitadelle': Intelligence and the Battle of Kursk, 1943

For students of the Soviet-German war, the revelations concerning Allied signal intelligence between 1939 and 1945 only underscore our ignorance of the intelligence aspects of the second world war's greatest land campaign. Where the course and outcome of operations in western Europe, the Atlantic and the Pacific can now be seen in clearer perspective, the Eastern Front remains in twilight and shadow. The lack of Soviet documentation, always a handicap, becomes even more acute in this field, as analysis necessarily diminishes to conjecture, with the focus of research shifted away from the organization, methodology and technology of Soviet intelligence to the activities of master spies and highly-placed traitors. The results can be seen in the treatment of the Soviet espionage network known as the 'Lucy' ring, and especially in the latter's perceived decisive contribution to Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk in summer 1943. Vital intelligence of German plans supplied by 'Lucy' has received much of the credit for defeating the longdelayed offensive (codenamed 'Zitadelle' or 'Citadel') against Soviet forces in the Kursk salient. The search for the exact identity of the intelligence sources working for Lucy has generated a prodigious amount of literature over the years, of variable quality and disparate conclusions. Far more significant than any of their findings, however, is the tendency to denigrate the performance of other Soviet intelligence services in the field. A recent study illustrates this tendency with the observation:

Soviet espionage: Furore over French allegations

Soviet espionage: Furore over French allegations

Russian Counterfeit Dollars: A Case of Early Soviet Espionage

The history of Soviet espionage, by the party’s own admission, did not begin in earnest until 1927, when the tiny and previously ineffectual military espionage operation came under the direction of a Moscow-trained Latvian immigrant, Alfred Tiltin. Living in New York as a Canadian under the fictitious name of “Joseph Paquette,” the debonair new director of the Soviet Military Intelligence organization in the United States recruited arid began grooming a second-in-command who would assume control of the spy group Upon Tiltin’s recall to Moscow early in 1929. The man was Nicholas Dozenberg, an early member of the American Communist Party, the first editor of the Communist publication Labor’s Voice, which later became the Daily Worker, and a man whose dedication to the Comintern was above question.

Soviet Espionage

Soviet Espionage

Soviet Espionage.

Soviet Espionage.

Soviet Espionage

Soviet Espionage

Soviet Espionage

Soviet Espionage