In the early 1950s, Americans were confronted by deeply disturbing questions and charges regarding the loyalty of federal government employees to their own country. "A conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man" was afoot, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy declared sensationally on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1951. According to McCarthy, Communist infiltrators had extended their influence to the very highest councils of the executive branch of the U.S. government during the years in which Franklin Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, sat in the White House.
Newspaper headlines and courtroom verdicts seemingly buttressed the Republican senator's fervently partisan accusation that there had been "20 years of treason" in Washington. In 1948, in testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Whittaker Chambers, a self-confessed former agent of Soviet military intelligence, accused a long list of former government employees including Alger Hiss, a senior American diplomat in World War II, and Harry Dexter White, a former assistant secretary of the treasury, of having provided secret government documents to him in the 1930s. All of them denied the charges. White died of a heart attack before he had to face the legal consequences of Chambers' accusation. But Hiss was convicted in federal court on perjury charges in 1950 for having denied his involvement with Chambers in the 1930s.
The Truman administration's efforts to purge the government of Communists and their fellow-travelers through an extensive "loyalty-review" program, though resulting in hundreds of firings and forced resignations, did little to reassure an increasingly panicked public. In fact, the program did little to reinforce national security: most of those who lost their jobs were guilty of nothing more than signing the wrong petition or subscribing to the wrong periodical. The triumph of the Communist revolution in China in 1949 led to an ill-tempered debate in the United States over "who lost China?" and to the resignations of a number of the State Department's most experienced "China hands" from government service.
One case in particular seemed to dramatize the potentially disastrous consequences of unchecked disloyalty. Julius Rosenberg, a civilian wartime employee of the Army Signal Corps, along with his wife Ethel, were arrested in 1950, convicted in 1951, and executed in 1953 for having aided the Soviets in their penetration of the top-secret Manhattan Project that developed nuclear weapons during World War II. In sentencing the two "atom spies" to death, Judge Irving Kaufman declared that the American people had to realize that they were engaged in "a life and death struggle with a completely different system." Not only were the two sides engaged in a struggle for supremacy abroad, but "this case indicates quite clearly that [the struggle] also involved the employment by the enemy of secret as well as overt outspoken forces among our own people." The Rosenbergs, Kaufman concluded, had "altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country."
When Secret Archives Open
A half century after these events, the Rosenbergs, Chambers, Hiss, White, and others from that turbulent era were once again making headlines and provoking debate. Old controversies took on new life, thanks to the release of previously secret documents from official archives in the United States and the former Soviet Union. Among the most significant of these new sources are the files of the Venona project (Soviet diplomatic cables intercepted by U.S. intelligence during World War II and painstakingly deciphered in a decades-long, top-secret effort), as well as the partial opening of Communist Party and Soviet intelligence agency archives in Moscow.
These archives have provided evidence that confirms the guilt of many of those previously accused of espionage, and have revealed the names of scores of other individuals who were either active participants in Soviet espionage, or at the least compromised by their contacts with Soviet agents in the 1930s and 1940s. While some sensationalist and unreliable accounts, in their own way all too reminiscent of the excesses of the McCarthy era, have drawn on these sources to tarnish the names and reputations of the innocent, Venona and the Moscow archives have also provided the basis for such sober and searching accounts as Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel's Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (1997), Sam Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997), Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev's The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era (1999), and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999). Taken together, these books offer a detailed and authoritative account of the successes and limits of Soviet espionage efforts in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.
The heyday of Soviet espionage occurred in a single decade, roughly 1935 through 1945. Before then, very little actual spying went on, at least insofar as it affected the American government. Soviet agents had been arriving on American shores since shortly after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, but they had concentrated on rather mundane tasks, such as acquiring American passports for use abroad by other agents, or keeping tabs on Russian exile groups. As late as 1934, according to documents uncovered by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev in the Moscow archives of the NKVD (the Russian acronym for the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Soviet intelligence agency known in later years as the KGB), Soviet spymasters were complaining among themselves that they didn't have "any agents" in Washington, D.C.
The First Soviet Spies
That would shortly change. Starting that very year, the Soviets gained their first significant contacts within the federal government. The key initiator was an American Communist organizer, Harold Ware, who drew together a network of left-wing sympathizers in Washington. Many of them were lawyers who had recently been hired on to staff the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration -- and among their number was Alger Hiss, a young, ambitious, and politically and socially well-connected graduate of Harvard Law School.
At first the Ware group -- as it has come to be called in subsequent histories -- functioned mostly as a kind of earnestly radical if otherwise unobjectionable study circle, meeting periodically to read and discuss the writings of Marx, Lenin and the like. But in time, and apparently without much self-reflection, members of the group began passing along government documents to Ware, who in turn passed them on to the headquarters of the American Communist Party in New York. As one member of the Ware group, John Abt, acknowledged in his 1993 memoir Advocate and Activist, "If there were developments we thought were particularly interesting or important," in terms of government policy or the internal politics of the Roosevelt administration, "someone would be asked to draft a report to be given to Hal [Harold Ware], who presumably passed it on to the national [party] leadership in New York for its consideration."
Abt chose his words with lawyerly care, admitting only to passing along "reports" of his own drafting to Ware, and not purloined documents. He never admitted that his actions or those of his comrades amounted to espionage. And in their own minds, it may not have, at least in the beginning. Clandestine meetings, secret reports, even the occasional theft of an official letter or memorandum, could all be rationalized as a kind of rebellious bureaucratic counterpart to the raucous protests then being led by radical organizers in the streets and workplaces of the United States.
Washington Communists didn't have the luxury of openly proclaiming their political affiliations, which would have led in short order to their dismissal from federal employment. They were even instructed by Ware to avoid purchasing The Daily Worker or other Communist publications from newsstands or bookstores. Instead, they could aid the cause by other means. They would be making their contribution to the revolution by bending the rules of official confidentiality.
Steps to Espionage
Soviet spymasters were quite expert at this kind of incremental cultivation of sources. Rarely if ever did they send even the most eager recruits out after really big secrets until they had gotten them used to the idea of handing along materials of considerably less consequence with no obvious harm done to the security interests of the United States. Harry Gold, later to gain notoriety as the courier who carried data on the atomic bomb from Los Alamos to his Soviet controller in New York, got his start in industrial espionage in the 1930s by stealing the secret of how best to use dry ice to keep ice cream from melting. Another important figure in wartime atomic espionage, Morris Cohen, accepted as his first NKVD assignment the task of keeping tabs on the pro-Nazi activities of German-American Bundists in New York City. The initial steps into espionage were, by design, made easy to take, really nothing more than a political good deed involving at most a trifling indiscretion -- and given the stakes, who could quibble over legal or ethical niceties?
The 1930s were ideologically charged years. In the midst of the most catastrophic depression in the history of capitalism, and with war looming ever closer on the horizon, it seemed to many people -- and not just Communists -- as if the entire world was choosing up sides in a titanic international struggle that would determine the fate of humanity for the foreseeable future, if not forever. Franklin Roosevelt spoke of his generation of Americans as having a "rendezvous with destiny." For Americans to the left of FDR, the road to that rendezvous often seemed to require a detour to Moscow. The American Communist Party grew from fewer than 10,000 or so members at the start of the 1930s to over 75,000 at decade's end, and tens of thousands of other Americans adopted what was at least a mildly benevolent attitude toward what was commonly referred to in those days as the "Soviet experiment."
Most of those accused in later years of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union would prove reluctant, for obvious reasons, to discuss the political views they had held in the 1930s. While awaiting trial, and then execution, the Rosenbergs wrote literally hundreds of letters -- to each other, to their children, to friends and associates -- with excerpts published by their supporters in The Death House Letters of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1954), and in a more extensive edition later edited by their son Michael Meeropol, The Rosenberg Letters (1994). Never once in those letters did they explicitly acknowledge their membership in the Communist Party, let alone any illegal activities. Alger Hiss was similarly circumspect in his two memoirs, In the Court of Public Opinion (1957), and Recollections of a Life (1988).
To reconstruct the worldview of the few who engaged in espionage, we thus have to rely on the memories of the many who were drawn to Communism in the 1930s -- bearing in mind that accounts written many years later may, for many reasons, reflect imperfectly the reality of that period of political turbulence. Sympathy for the Soviet Union did not automatically translate into willingness to engage in espionage on its behalf, even when the opportunity presented itself. (The director of the Manhattan Project, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer -- whose brother was a Communist, whose wife was a Communist, and who may well have been a Communist himself -- was ideally placed to help the Soviets learn about American progress with nuclear weapons during World War Two. But nothing uncovered in Venona or the Moscow archives provides any credible evidence that he did so.)
How Communists Saw The World
How did ordinary Communists view the world in the 1930s? First of all, not every Communist was the same. There were those who were virtually born into the movement, and accepted on faith its preachments. Peggy Dennis, born in Los Angeles to exiled Russian revolutionary parents, joined a Communist Party children's group at the age of 13. In her memoir The Autobiography of an American Communist (1977) she recalled of her childhood political enthusiasm how she and her young comrades thought of themselves as "a vanguard far removed from mainstream America, and we were fiercely proud of being different. For public occasions we wore the flaming red, embroidered shirts of the Soviet Russians, our songs pledged our lives to the International Soviet that would free the human race. We were confident that we alone were tapped by history to fulfill its mission for humanity's liberation from exploitation and oppression."
For a young Communist like Peggy Dennis, the Soviet Union was her real homeland, while life in the United States was a kind of unfortunate exile she had to endure until the great day came when American workers overthrew their own oppressors. Others, who came to Communism at a less tender age, sought to combine their new political convictions with their older national identity and loyalties. Walter Bernstein, who would later become a well-known Hollywood screenwriter, was a fairly representative figure. Like Dennis, he was the child of immigrants, and like her he had some family connections to the radical left -- his father's sister was a charter member of the American Communist Party. But his aunt's politics was regarded by the rest of the family in the 1920s as "a stain" and "something to be avoided." He identified much more closely with two uncles who had served in the American military during the First World War, and spent a childhood immersed, not in tales of the wonders of the Soviet homeland, but rather in Tom Swift adventure tales, the Brooklyn Dodgers "and, above all, the movies." It wasn't until he left Brooklyn for his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College that he finally joined the Young Communist League -- doing so in 1936, a year in which Communist Party leader Earl Browder was proclaiming that "Communism is 20th century Americanism." Writing in his memoir Inside Out (1997), published many years after he had left the movement in disillusionment, Bernstein remembered of his younger self circa the mid-1930s: "I believed in antifascism and international solidarity and brotherhood and the liberation of man, and the Soviet Union stood for all of these. ... I was in the grip of a new kind of patriotism, one that transcended borders and unified disparate peoples."
The Popular Front Against Fascism
That "new kind of patriotism," of which Bernstein spoke, plus a genuine horror at the prospects of a world in which Hitler and Mussolini could spread their power unchallenged, made it all too easy to overlook the grim realities of Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union. In 1936, when Bernstein became a Communist, there was disturbing news coming from Moscow about the trials of the Old Bolsheviks who were now accused of conspiring to betray the Soviet Union to its enemies. But 1936 was also the year in which Spanish fascists, backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, launched an uprising against the democratically elected Spanish republic. The purge trials were distant, blurry, poorly understood , while the horrors unleashed in Spain seemed all too vivid and close at hand.
Writing in the liberal weekly New Republic in January 1937, editor Malcolm Cowley declared that for supporters of the Soviet Union like himself, "the personal character of Stalin [seems] relatively unimportant." Cowley never joined the Communist Party, but counted himself a strong supporter of the "Popular Front," the Soviet-supported movement in the Western democracies that called for domestic anti-fascist unity, and international collective security in the face of German, Japanese, and Italian expansionism. The purges and other repressive measures then under way in the USSR -- were, in Cowley's view, "the inevitable result" of Stalin's efforts "to unify and strengthen the Soviet Union in the face of an international fascist alliance."
"Disloyalty is a matter of principle with every member of the Communist Party," Whittaker Chambers declared in his testimony before Congress in 1948. Thus it was not at all surprising, he suggested, that American Communists should agree to spy on behalf of the Soviet Union -- that was part and parcel of their decision to become revolutionaries in the first place. But Venona and the Moscow archives suggest otherwise. Robert Oppenheimer was not the only hold-out. Soviet spymasters often had to go to elaborate lengths to draw even the most committed Communists into agreeing to cooperate, and then, after documents had begun to change hands, they often had to maintain elaborate fictions about the final destination and purpose of the purloined materials. As one NKVD agent reported to Moscow of a potential espionage recruit in 1937: "He has very little experience and sometimes behaves like a child in his romanticism. He thinks he is working for the Comintern [the Communist International], and he must be left in this delusion for a while."
Those who agreed to become spies did so, no doubt, for the same complicated mixtures of reasons that almost always motivate people to break with accepted patterns of behavior and belief. Some craved the fraternity of common, clandestine bonds, others the sense of power that came from working behind the scenes, knowing more about what really mattered than those who did not share in their secret world; still others craved the excitement of taking on such a risky assignment. No one seems to have done it for the money -- indeed, the archives are full of anecdotes about spies indignantly refusing payment from their Soviet controllers.
"Romantic Anti-fascism"
There were lots of small, personal reasons why this or that individual became a spy. But beyond the individual idiosyncrasies lay the spirit of the age -- an age that, today, in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of Communist doctrine, requires an enormous leap of historical imagination to understand. Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev argue persuasively that what the men and women drawn into the Soviet espionage network in the United States in the 1930s shared in common was a "romantic anti-fascism." This seems much more persuasive to me than the "they-sold-their-souls-to-the-devil-so-what-else-would-you-expect?" interpretation so popular in the years after Whittaker Chambers took the stand. The 1930s and early 1940s -- unlike the later 1940s and 1950s -- were years when terms like "underground" and "resistance" were celebrated in popular culture as standards of moral purity and commitment.
This was the atmosphere in which, by ones and twos in the years leading up to and during the Second World War, certain American Communists began to find their way to the Soviet espionage network. The Ware group itself was short-lived (Ware died in a traffic accident in 1935). It was important chiefly as a dress rehearsal for later and more significant Soviet efforts to acquire official secrets from the U.S. government. The inside scoop on New Deal agricultural policies couldn't be all that interesting, after all, to the men in the Kremlin. But when veterans of the Ware group began to find their way into more important jobs, such as the new position Alger Hiss took on in the fall of 1936 as aide to Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Sayre, the potential value of their contributions increased.
Over the next half-decade, the Soviet espionage effort in the United States remained a surprisingly haphazard enterprise. As most of the Ware veterans drifted off to other pursuits, a few new sources like State Department employees Laurence Duggan and Noel Field were drawn in. We still lack an exact head count. Writing in his autobiography Witness in 1952, Whittaker Chambers declared that to his knowledge the Soviets had five "active sources" and four "contacts" in Washington as of 1938, but as he noted, and as recently released documents also show, there were others working in networks of which he was kept in ignorance. Still, it is likely that there were no more than a few dozen reliable sources for Soviet espionage operating in any kind of official capacity in Washington through the end of the 1930s. (Other non-governmental sources, most of whom were engaged in industrial espionage, were run by a separate network operating out of New York City). Some reported directly to American Communist leaders, others to couriers working for Soviet military intelligence (among their number was Chambers, who took over some of the Ware group contacts, including Alger Hiss), and still others to the NKVD.
Clandestine Washington was a small place in the 1930s, and spies from one network were always crossing paths with spies from other networks -- a violation of elementary tradecraft that horrified the espionage professionals in Soviet intelligence. It didn't help that there was a constant turnover among the resident Soviet spies entrusted with coordinating espionage efforts in the United States, as many of them were recalled to Moscow, arrested, and shot in Stalin's great purge of the late 1930s.
Worried Over Stalin's Purges
The spectacle of the self-devouring of the Soviet elite was not good for the morale of the Americans who had risked so much in agreeing to spy on their behalf. On the whole, ironically, those Americans who had crossed over into the Communist underground in the 1930s seemed to pay closer attention to the dark side of the "Soviet experiment" than their peers in the aboveground movement. Laurence Duggan badgered his NKVD controller, Itzak Akhmerov, with his doubts. "He claims he cannot digest events in the Soviet Union," Akhmerov cabled Moscow in early 1938. "He thinks something is fundamentally wrong, since there cannot be so many members of the Right and Left oppositions [within the Soviet Communist Party] who become traitors."
Whittaker Chambers was also worried -- not so much about whether or not Stalin's purges were trumped up, but whether he might find himself among the victims (one of Chambers' fellow agents, Juliet Stuart Poyntz, had already disappeared under mysterious circumstances in New York in 1937). Chambers' anxieties led to his defection in 1938. He broke all ties with his former associates in both the Communist movement and Soviet intelligence, and shortly made a new life for himself as an editor of Time magazine. Fortunately for the Soviets, Chambers proved a fairly indecisive character, who wrestled for many years with the question of whether or not he would turn on all his erstwhile comrades in espionage. Though making an initial effort in 1939 to warn State Department officials in general terms of the dangers of Soviet penetration, he did not specifically accuse Alger Hiss of spying for another nine years.
The popular image of Soviet spies as crisply efficient super-villains does not accurately capture the reality of their operations in the United States in the 1930s. The Americans involved in the effort were, almost without exception, rank amateurs, playing at a conspiratorial craft they were far from mastering. But even their Russian controllers seemed to be decidedly second-string. Throughout the 1930s the United States was simply not very important as a target of Soviet espionage, save as a kind of listening post from which information could be gleaned about places of greater concern to Soviet policymakers. The NKVD first team was sent off to places that counted, like Great Britain, Japan, and Nazi Germany.
That changed in 1941. The war saw the expansion, professionalization, and centralization of Soviet espionage efforts in the United States. Wartime cooperation between the two great anti-Nazi partners made it much easier for the Soviet Union to move experienced spy handlers into the United States under diplomatic and trade cover identities. It also became easier to recruit sources in Washington: Because of the vast expansion of the wartime bureaucracy, because of the relative ease with which Communists and other Soviet sympathizers could gain government employment, and because of the widespread public gratitude to the Red Army for handing the Nazis their first significant military defeats in the war. The Russophilia of the war years would be forgotten by the time Whittaker Chambers took the stand in 1948, but only five years earlier such an ultra-respectable organ of American mainstream opinion as Life magazine would pay the Russians the supreme compliment of being "one hell of a people," who "look like Americans, dress like Americans, and think like Americans." (In the same issue Life's editors would offer a flattering portrait of Soviet NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, and describe the NKVD as the equivalent of the American FBI.)
World War, then Cold War
The few dozen American spies of the 1930s grew to scores, perhaps hundreds, during the war (there are coded references to about 350 Americans in Venona, about half of whom have been identified -- although not all of these code-named individuals were successfully recruited as agents). Much of the purely political intelligence passed along by sources in Washington was of little ultimate consequence -- nothing that "altered the course of history" as Judge Kaufman would say of the Rosenbergs at their sentencing in 1951. It was the Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project, undoubtedly the greatest triumph ever achieved by the NKVD, that created the illusion in the United States after the war that an infamous conspiracy of traitors had gained the upper hand in Washington.
However spectacular its wartime record, NKVD successes within the United States were short-lived. The defection of espionage courier Elizabeth Bentley to the FBI in 1945 crippled Soviet intelligence gathering in Washington. The defection of a Soviet cipher clerk in Canada in 1946, and the subsequent decoding of Soviet wartime diplomatic messages in the Venona project, led in a few years time to the detection and arrest of most of those involved in the theft of atomic secrets during World War II. By the time Joe McCarthy came on the scene with his charges that hundreds of Soviet agents and spies remained in positions of influence within the American government, the reality was quite different. In a 1951 memorandum uncovered in the Moscow NKVD archives by Weinstein and Vassiliev, Soviet spymasters acknowledged to their superiors that they no longer had any inside sources in the American government: "the most serious drawback in organizing intelligence in the U.S. is ... the lack of agents in the State Department, intelligence service, counterintelligence service, and other most important U.S. governmental institutions."
By 1953, the FBI had quietly written off the American Communist Party as a serious espionage threat. In subsequent decades, Soviet espionage could no longer tap the resources of "romantic anti-fascism": The only sources it was able to recruit, such as Aldrich Ames in the 1980s, were in it strictly for the money.
Maurice Isserman is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., and is the author of numerous books on the history of 20th century American radicalism. His most recent published work is The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington, Public Affairs Press, 2000.