Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (7 page)

One of the cover names that appeared in several interesting documents was "Crook." I asked for his personal file and got it. "Crook" turned
out to be Samuel Dickstein, a U.S. congressman who had been a paid
agent of the Soviet NKVD in the 1930s. That discovery surprised not only
American scholars and readers of the book Weinstein and I wrote, The
Haunted Wood, but it was a big surprise for the SVR too, as no one there
knew the service used to have such an agent.2

Getting personal files wasn't always easy. Different files on Soviet operations in the United States belonged to different departments, and the
issue of my access to them depended on the head of a relevant department. The fact that SVR director Primakov approved the book project in
general didn't mean I could get every file I wanted because Primakov left
it to the discretion of the department heads. The chiefs of departments "S" (illegal intelligence) and "T" (scientific technical intelligence) didn't
want to have anything to do with the project, and I never received their
files. However, the new boss of the U.S. department was quite enthusiastic, and many personal files I needed were under his jurisdiction. As to
operational correspondence files, I needed only the permission of the
head of the archives department to get access to them.

File distributions were strange in the SVR bureaucracy. Julius Rosenberg's file belonged to department "T," and I couldn't see it, but the files of
David and Ruth Greenglass, as well as the "Enormous" file on atomic espionage, were in the U.S. department's domain, and therefore I got them.

Now I should explain why it was so important that the files didn't have
cover lists of the persons and organizations mentioned in them. For instance, the SVR didn't want me to see personal files on Julius Rosenberg
and Harry Dexter White (in the latter case for unexplained reasons), and
preventing my access to them was easy because Rosenberg and White
were registered in the archives by their names and cover names. But no
one knew what kind of information the operational correspondence files
contained because there were no lists, and I never had any problems with
receiving those files-and they turned out to be a gold mine. There I
found documents on Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White,
and many more that I wasn't supposed to see.

Sometimes it was difficult to restrain myself from jumping from my
chair and screaming, "Yes! I got him! Look what I found!" When Oleg
Tsarev and Boris Labusov asked if I had found something interesting, I
often sighed and said, "Same old, same old" because I didn't want the
SVR to know I was digging too deep. (Sorry, Oleg and Boris, but you
know what it's like-you've got much more experience in this kind of
thing.) I tried to copy into my notebooks as many documents as possible
verbatim since I believed we had a unique chance to tell the story of Soviet espionage in America through the words of operatives and agents. I
made summaries of documents I didn't find quite as vivid. In every case
I noted file and page numbers.

In 1995 I started writing draft chapters for The Haunted Wood on the
basis of the material I had collected in my notebooks. The draft chapters
were to be vetted by the Declassification Commission (composed of the
chiefs of the SVR operational departments relevant to the book project),
the head of the archives department, and Yury Kobaladze. I could give the
draft chapters to Allen Weinstein only after they had been released by the
commission. As far as I know, Yevgeny Primakov asked the Declassification Commission to look at the draft chapters from the point of view of whether the information they contained could damage the current operations of the Foreign Intelligence Service. I didn't see any problems with
that since I was writing about the 193os-194os and the espionage methods
are practically the same in all major intelligence agencies.

There was, however, a more serious obstacle. The SVR has a very simple policy about admitting whether a person had cooperated with it or
not: if that person doesn't admit it himself, the SVR will never do so, even
if the agent was put in prison. Therefore all requests from journalists and
scholars for information regarding hot espionage cases receive the same
answer: "No comment." This principle works even if the person in question had cooperated with the Soviet NKVD seventy years ago. By invoking it, the Foreign Intelligence Service assures its future agents that the
fact of their cooperation will remain secret.

This principle explains why the SVR reacted as it did to Alger Hiss in
1992. On 3 August 1992 Hiss wrote a letter to General Dmitri Volkogonov, chairman of the Commission for the Accession of KGB and Soviet
Communist Party Archives of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation. Hiss gave a short account of his official career and trials and then
wrote the following:

I denied the accusations. Nonetheless, after two trials, I was convicted in 1950 of
perjury and sent to prison. Ever since, I have been trying to prove my innocence
and clear my name. Thus, I have a direct interest in seeing the KGB and other
Soviet Union archives about me, my accuser Whittaker Chambers, and the case.
Moreover, it would be an historical injustice if those archives were given to any
publisher or other person on an exclusive basis. Whittaker Chambers died in
1961. I am 88 years old and unable to travel to Moscow. I hereby authorize John
Lowenthal, director of The Nation institute project on the Hiss case Soviet
archives, to act in my stead. Please let Mr. Lowenthal examine and obtain copies
of all documents about me, Whittaker Chambers, and the Hiss case.

It was very touching and very naive-or very clever if the person who
wrote this letter knew what kind of reply he would get. Naturally, John
Lowenthal had no chance of examining and obtaining copies of Soviet
intelligence files. But the Hiss team got what it really wanted. On 25 September 1992, less than two months after the Hiss letter, Dmitri Volkogonov sent John Lowenthal a fax:

Esteemed Mr. Lowenthal, 1 would like to ask you to convey to Mr. Alger Hiss
the following. On his and your request, I looked through the archive of the intelligence services and studied the information which the archive staff gave
me. On the basis of a most careful analysis of the data, I can report to you that Alger Hiss was never an agent of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union.
Probably, the old accusations against him are based on misunderstanding or
incorrect information.

General Volkogonov was being economical with the truth, and later he
admitted that he had never done proper research in the archives.3

In a letter of 30 September 1992 Yuiy Kobaladze wrote as follows to
Lowenthal: "In connection with the letter of Mr. Alger Hiss to Yevgeny
Primakov dated August 3, 1992, we inform you of the following: In the
archives of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation,
there is no material indicating that Alger Hiss at any time or in any manner cooperated with the foreign intelligence of Russia or its predecessors."
I still don't know why the SVR didn't give its usual "no comment" answer.
My guess is that Volkogonov's reply, which preceded Kobaladze's letter by
five days, set the general tune. After Volkogonov's letter a "no comment"
response would actually have meant the SVR had something on Alger
Hiss. Another possible explanation: the SVR didn't have a personal file on
Hiss because Hiss was handled by Soviet military intelligence (GRU), and
it just didn't know there was material on him in operational correspondence files, which I found later during my research.4

The period between Hiss's letter and Kobaladze's-3 August 1992 to
25 September 1992-was very brief. Did Russia's Foreign Intelligence
Service stop working and send every operative in "the Forest" to the
archives to research the files to satisfy Alger Hiss's and John Lowenthal's
curiosity? If not, claiming that someone had "looked through the archive
of the intelligence services" is nonsense. The files of the 193os-194os are
not indexed, and there must be hundreds of them on operations in the
United States alone. One can't go down to the archives and ask what
they've got because they don't know what they've got. I found some materials on Alger Hiss by researching the files for two years and by reading every page; I found them in different files for different years. Had
anyone done it before me? I don't think so.

As for the GRU archives, Serge Schmemann's report in the New York
Times of 17 December 1992 quoted Volkogonov as saying, "The Ministry of
Defense also has an intelligence service, which is totally different, and many
documents have been destroyed. I only looked through what the KGB had.
All I said was that I saw no evidence." Further the same report added, "General Volkogonov said he was `a bit taken aback' by the commotion his letter
caused. He acknowledged that his motive in writing the letter was 'primarily humanitarian,' to relieve the anguish of a man approaching death." The Washington Times of 25 November 1992 noted that in testimony before the
Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs "Gen. Volkogonov described the chaotic condition of files of the GRU." The paper also quoted
Volkogonov: "You must go through a number of documents page by page ...
literally hundreds of thousands of documents."

Another example on the same subject is the case of Julius Rosenberg.
For many years KGB colonel Alexander Feklisov, who had handled
Rosenberg in New York in the 1940s, unsuccessfully lobbied the service's
chiefs to admit that Rosenberg had cooperated with Soviet intelligence
and to acknowledge him as a hero. However, such an acknowledgment
would violate one of the basic principles of the Russian espionage agencies. Despite Feklisov's argument that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would
have wanted it themselves, their participation in Soviet espionage in the
United States was not officially confirmed by the Russian side because
they died in the electric chair without confessing.

I had to find a way around this roadblock. I knew that it would be a
shock for the Declassification Commission to see the real names of American agents in my chapters, especially of those who had not confessed.
However, the final text for The Haunted Wood didn't have to be approved
by the commission, and Allen Weinstein could rewrite my chapters anyway. What I needed was the right to use quotations from the KGB documents. I tried to use mostly cover names in my own text when I wrote
my chapters. Since many cover names had been identified in the United
States, there would be no problem for Allen to understand who was who,
and if he had any difficulties, I would help him using Anatoly Gorsky's
list and my notebooks.

I could use the real names of Soviet operatives and people like Elizabeth
Bentley and Boris Morros. I presented Jacob Golos as an illegal station chief
rather than an agent (he was described both ways in the documents) to be
able to call him by his name. Writing about Laurence Duggan, I accentuated the fact that he had tried to break with the NKVD several times (that
chapter wasn't submitted to the commission anyway). I used Martha Dodd's
and Alfred Stern's real names because they went to live in the Soviet bloc
and by doing so admitted they had been connected to the Soviets. There was
no way to hide Martha from the Declassification Commission under her
cover name: the fact that she was the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to
Nazi Germany was too important for her story. And I couldn't do it with
Samuel Dickstein because I needed juicy quotes showing that "Crook" was
a member of the U.S. Congress.

As far as I know, there was a discussion in the Declassification Com mission about whether to release the chapter on Dickstein since his role
in Soviet espionage had previously been unreported. But the story was
amazing, and Dickstein really was a crook! In the end, "pro-book circles"
in the commission won, and this chapter, as well as chapters on Martha
Dodd, Jacob Golos, Elizabeth Bentley, and the cooperation between the
NKVD and the OSS during World War II, were released for publication.

At the time I didn't know what to do with the materials that contained
the real names of people like Alger Hiss. I would never have given them
to Allen Weinstein to be used in The Haunted Wood if I had stayed in
Russia. I am sure the SVR realized I would behave sensibly; that's probably why I was able to do my research and even keep my notebooks at
home. However, in 1995 it became more difficult for me to work. The
mood in the country was changing. President Yeltsin's popularity was
plummeting, and the results of the 1996 presidential elections were very
uncertain. People in the SVR press bureau were telling me that foreign
researchers had lost access to various Russian archives. It was getting increasingly hard for me to obtain new files-I had to wait longer. I already
had extensive material in my notebooks, but naturally I wanted more.

I submitted my draft chapter on atomic espionage to the Declassification Commission, and approval was delayed for months. Someone
seemed to have decided to turn the screws. It may have been good for my
country, but it was certainly bad for my book.

The worst blow came from America: Crown, in financial distress, canceled the book project, and the agreement with ARIO ended. Allen
Weinstein, who was the project's adviser on the American side, was informed about the cancellation by fax, and he was furious. I learned the
news from Yury Kobaladze, who nevertheless allowed me to continue
working in the hope that a new publisher would be found, and I was extremely grateful to him. By this time I had spent almost two years on the
project; I had abandoned my television career, and I was losing my clout
on the Komsomolskaya Pravda. Now the whole project was in jeopardy.
According to the Crown-ARIO agreement, the SVR was supposed to declassify a certain number of the top secret KGB documents to support the
books. I don't think there was a clear indication of how many documents
would be released, but I know that the SVR was prepared to declassify
some. I was meticulously transcribing the files under the assumption that
other scholars would be able to see copies of those documents-the more
documents, the better-and I prepared several lists of documents I
thought should be included. But since the Crown-ARIO agreement had
been canceled, so was the SVR commitment. In the end I received about fifty more pages of mostly useless papers. The only interesting document
was a report by Anatoly Gorsky about his meeting with U.S. secretary of
commerce Henry Wallace in October 1945, and we reproduced it in The
Haunted Wood.