Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (3 page)

If Vassiliev's notebooks represent only a segment of the vast documentation of Soviet espionage in the United States, it is a far richer and
more extensive portion than we had before. Combined with other once
secret information about Soviet espionage made available in recent years
-Comintern and CPUSA records, Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) files released under the Freedom of Information Act, the Mitrokhin archive, and the Venona deciyptions-they enable us to piece together the most complete picture of KGB activities in the United States ever seen. In this enormous jigsaw puzzle, there are still gaps and a number of missing pieces. Sometimes one part of the puzzle lacks a few jagged
pieces here or there. Occasionally, another portion has just the outlines
of a figure and lacks identifying details. Blank spots remain, but we have
filled in many of the missing pieces.

In addition to obviously not including what Vassiliev did not see, we
have not included much of what he recorded in the notebooks. To have
discussed everything would have required a book much longer than any
publisher, either commercial or academic, would tolerate or almost any
reader would wade through. Portions of Vassiliev's notes dealing with the
Soviet campaign to gain diplomatic recognition in 1933 or lengthy reports about American diplomacy in the 1940s are of interest and relevance to diplomatic historians but of less significance to a study of
espionage. We have only touched on the material in the notebooks about
KGB infiltration of anti-Bolshevik Russian exile groups and Ukrainian
nationalists. There is ample material for additional books and articles on
a variety of specialized interests. Some segments from the notebooks have
already appeared in The Haunted Wood, of course, and we have occasionally lightly glossed over some topics that volume covered in detail,
such as the amazing story of the KGB's bribing of Congressman Samuel
Dickstein. By the same token, we have decided not to go over in detail the
same ground we have already covered in our own earlier books on Soviet
espionage, particularly accounts of Soviet sources about whom the notebooks add only limited substance. Thus, while we have discussed members of the Golos/Bentley network whose names were not discovered in
Venona, we have largely avoided repeating in detail the stories of its most
prominent and well-discussed members here except when new evidence
deepens our understanding of their role or changes our knowledge of
their activities.

A word about how this book was produced. Vassiliev made a Russianlanguage transcription of his handwritten notebooks to facilitate translation. Two translators, with access to both transcription and original, then
produced an English-language translation that was double-checked by
Vassiliev, who speaks and reads English with facility. John Haynes developed a concordance to enable us to maintain consistency in translating
cover names, providing the correct English spelling of American names
in the notebooks in phonetic Russian and keeping track of the cast of
hundreds of characters, with sometimes two or three cover names and the
occasional confusion of spelling garbles in the KGB files. Harvey Klehr
and Haynes both wrote preliminary drafts of chapters and, as in all of their previous books, constantly edited and reedited each other's work.
Vassiliev then vetted each chapter and made his suggestions and corrections. In all ways this has been a joint and cooperative endeavor.

The chapters that follow revisit some old controversies and tell some
new stories. After demonstrating that the argument about whether Alger
Hiss committed espionage is now closed, we offer the most complete account yet of the Soviet effort to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb, including the stories of several hitherto unknown atomic spies. That is
followed by chapters on the remarkable number of journalists who
worked for and with the KGB, including I. F. Stone; the extensive Soviet
networks devoted to technical and industrial espionage, in which for the
first time we identify previously unknown members of the Rosenberg
ring; and surprising KGB sources in the State Department, Commerce
Department, and other places. Another chapter looks at the remarkable
number of KGB spies within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
America's wartime intelligence agency. A chapter on KGB couriers examines the often anonymous support personnel, whose devotion and diligence enabled the espionage apparatuses to function. We also discuss
several KGB obsessions, occasions when recruitments either failed or did
not produce meaningful results despite years of efforts. The book concludes with a look at KGB tradecraft and its problems, examining the obstacles and roadblocks that confronted its operations in the United States.
Although it cost the United States a great deal in both resources and secrets, the KGB was far from a smoothly functioning and error-free organization. Its lapses and mistakes deserve, if not just as much attention
as its triumphs, at least some recognition.

A number of factors made us confident that the Vassiliev notebooks
were indeed genuine notes and transcriptions of authentic archival documents. We are not inexperienced in assessing archival documents. We
were the first American historians to examine Communists International
and CPUSA records in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union
and have written books based upon them. We assisted in opening the
Venona deciyptions to research in Washington and wrote a book based on
those as well. Our eyes have glazed over reading thousands of pages of
mind-numbing FBI investigatory files opened by the Freedom of Information Act. Based on our prior research, we have no doubts of the authenticity of the material recorded in Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks.

Apart from the contract with Crown that gave Vassiliev access to KGB
files and his indisputable presence at the SVR's Press Office for two years
reading files and making notes on them, there is the evidence of the note books themselves. They include archival file numbers and, more important, details that could come only from internal KGB documents. Take,
for example, the cover names of agents. In addition to confirming the
identifications of more than a hundred cover names figured out by the
NSA in its Venona decryptions, the notebooks enabled us to correct errors made by American counterintelligence. While American cryptographers concluded that in addition to "Dir," Mary Price was known as
"Arena," documents copied by Vassiliev make it clear that "Arena" was actually Stanley Graze-and the particulars about "Arena" in Venona match
Graze perfectly.

Numerous cover names that were unidentified in Venona are outed
in the documents Vassiliev saw. We were able to link more than fifty-five
additional people to cover names. In some cases, these were individuals
named by such spies as Elizabeth Bentley but whose cover names were
not identified or did not even appear in the particular messages decrypted
by the Venona project. In other cases the cover names in the Venona decryptions were never linked to real names because too little detail had
appeared in the terse KGB cables to allow NSA/FBI analysts to reach a
conclusion. Many of these previously unknown spies are discussed in this
book. Some of these individuals had been investigated by the FBI or
questioned by congressional committees; others were far more obscure.
In case after case, research confirmed that the careers and activities of
these heretofore obscure people matched what was in the notebooks.
Take just one example. The Venona decryptions provided the cover
names of five of the sources of Julius Rosenberg's technical intelligence
apparatus with sufficient details that they were easily identified: Julius
himself ("Antenna" and "Liberal"), David Greenglass ("Bumblebee" and
"Caliber"), William Perl ("Gnome" and "Yakov"), Joel Barr ("Scout" and
"Meter"), and Alfred Sarant ("Hughes"). One other source, cover-named
"Nil," had earlier had a partially deciphered cover name whose first two
letters were "Tu." NSA/FBI analysts left "Nil"/"Tu" unidentified. Not only
can we now identify this source as Nathan Sussman, a Communist engineer and long-time friend of Julius Rosenberg, but we can also provide
his earlier cover name, "Tuk." There are also a number of KGB messages
that were only partially broken in Venona that Vassiliev copied in toto.
And, of course, there are examples in his notebooks of complete Venona
decryptions, many of which had not yet been released when Vassiliev left
Moscow in 1996. One example is Venona 1251, dated 2 November 1944,
in which New York KGB station chief Stepan Apresyan cabled Moscow
confirming fourteen changes of cover names and proposing alternatives for eight more of its suggestions. The same list appears in Vassiliev's White
Notebook #i on page 55.

In the spring of 2oo6 we convened a small panel of historians,
archivists, and retired intelligence personnel with expertise on the KGB
to meet with Vassiliev, examine his notebooks, and question him about his
methods of work. One retired officer and historian didn't doubt the authenticity of the notebooks, but he did question the accuracy of a KGB
report in one document that one of the daughters of Allen Dulles, later
head of the CIA, had, like her father, worked for the OSS in World War
II. After checking the OSS records in the National Archives and contacting her surviving sister, he reported that Clover Todd (Toddie) Dulles
had in fact worked for the OSS in 1944 and 1945, even though there was
no mention of it in the published biographies of Dulles and "no one at the
archives, or any former OSS officer I know, was aware of this bit of
trivia."h

We are confident that the unanimous judgment of these scholars and
experts that the notebooks are an invaluable and reliable source of information on the KGB will be confirmed as this unique tool for comprehending Soviet espionage in the United States is used over the years.

John Earl Haynes

Harvey Klehr

Throwing light on the murky world of espionage is a cooperative endeavor, and we have been fortunate to have had the assistance of numerous people, whom we are delighted to acknowledge. We are grateful
to scholars and retired intelligence officers who gave us sage advice and
shared information and documents with us as this project developed.
They include Ronald Bachman, Wkodzimierz Batog, Raymond Batvinis,
Robert Louis Benson, Leonard Bruno, Alan Campbell, John Fox, Leo
Gluchowski, David Hatch, Greg Herken, Max Holland, Mark Kramer,
Harold Leich, Dan Mulvenna, David Murphy, Eduard Mark, John McIlroy, Stan Norris, Charles Palm, Hayden Peake, Ronald Radosh, Louise S.
Robbins, and Steve Usdin. Nancy Reinhold at the Robert W. Woodruff
Library of Emory University was an enormous help. The skilled work of
Philip Redko and Steven Shabad in translating Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks was not only of great assistance to us but will also benefit other researchers for decades to come.

We are deeply grateful to the Smith Richardson Foundation, which
generously provided a grant that enabled us to translate Vassiliev's notebooks, and to our program officer there, Allan Song. Harvey Klehr was
able to spend the 2007-2008 academic year as a senior fellow at the Bill
and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. He
is grateful to the center's director, Martine Brownley, and assistant director, Keith Anthony, for creating such a pleasant environment for scholarship.

Working with the editors and staff at Yale University Press is always
a pleasure. We are once again indebted to our editor, Jonathan Brent,
whose enthusiasm, prodding, and appreciation for the importance of the
study of communism is unmatched. That he is the Alger Hiss Visiting
Professor at Bard College only increased his well-developed sense of
irony and humor as he sheparded this project to completion. We are
grateful as well for the work of our copy editor, Bojana Ristich, for her
close attention and diligence in noting the flaws that we could not see. We
also greatly appreciate the keen eye and patience of Margaret Otzel, senior production editor, who saved us from a number of errors.

Finally, our families deserve medals for enduring several more years
of our obsession with cover names, dead drops, and konspiratsia without
themselves defecting. We thank Marcy Steinberg Klehr, Ben and Annsley Klehr, Gabe Klehr, Josh Klehr, Aaron Hodes, Erik Benjamin, and
Janette, Amanda, and Bill Haynes.

This book deals with the activities of the Soviet foreign intelligence service that originated as part of the "Cheka." This agency, while having a
continuous organizational history, went through a variety of title changes
and was at various times part of a larger entity. For reasons of simplicity
and to avoid confusion, the agency in most instances will be referred to
as the "KGB," the Committee of State Security, its title from 1954 until
the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991. But readers should keep in
mind that its actual title prior to 1954 was as specified below: