The KGB in the USA

[Mark]

Now We Know

Anne Applebaum, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, June 17, 2009


Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America

By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev

(Yale University Press, 637 pp., $35)

If one were trying to define the lowest point in the long and venerable tradition of American anti-communism, surely it came in 2003, with the publication of Ann Coulter's Treason. Coulter's "thesis" in this work of cut-and-paste-from-the-Internet history was that a straight line could be drawn between Americans such as Alger Hiss, who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1940s, and Americans such as Barack Obama, who criticized the war in Iraq half a century later. Both of these groups--along with assorted socialists, liberals, trade unionists, and pretty much anyone whom she defined as "Left"--were guilty of nothing less than treason: "Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down."

To be fair, which in Ann Coulter's case counts as an irony, she is not the only writer to have lost her sense of proportion, and maybe even her sanity, while contemplating the exceedingly complicated history of the American Left, and in particular its extended flirtation with the Soviet Union. Madness of a different sort--or perhaps of a deceptively similar sort--also characterizes the writings of Victor Navasky, the former editor and publisher of The Nation. Navasky has written many times on the subject of Hiss and other Soviet spies, with a sense of urgency that the passage of time never diminishes. An excellent example of his thinking on this subject can be found in an article in The Nation in 1997, describing the work of historians who were just then beginning to find evidence in the Soviet archives confirming that a number of Americans, including Hiss, had indeed collaborated with Soviet intelligence. "Like crazed lepidopterists with their butterfly nets," Navasky wrote, "they wildly try to capture every fugitive document that flutters into view to pin on their post-Cold War specimen boards. Their manic goal: to prove that the forties and fifties red-hunters with whom they now identify were right all along ... [and that] the wholesale suspension of liberties that characterized the Cold War years was justifiable after all." It is a striking use of metaphor. Would Navasky use the phrase "crazed lepidopterists" to describe those who keep pursuing, say, the still-mysterious fate of Raoul Wallenberg? I don't think so.

Somewhere between these two poles--between Navasky's pathological inability to believe that there really were Soviet spies in America and Coulter's pathological inability to make distinctions between liberal Democrats and paid foreign agents--lies the remarkable work of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. If there is any reasonable middle ground to be found in this particularly fraught debate--and by middle I mean historically true--Haynes and Klehr have done their best to define it and to occupy it. Working for more than a decade, making the best possible use of newly released Soviet archival material, the two scholars have produced multiple books, including three learned and exceptionally sane works of history in Yale University Press's splendid Annals of Communism series.

The first of their volumes, The Secret World of American Communism, used the newly opened archives of the Comintern, the organization that ran the international communist movement, to determine the extent of Soviet funding of the American Communist Party--which, it turns out, was quite substantial. The second, The Soviet World of American Communism, also used Soviet archives, but focused more directly on the Soviet Union's ideological influence on the Communist Party of the United States, or CPUSA, which was--surprise!--even more substantial. The third, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, examined the National Security Agency's declassified "Venona" files as well as Soviet archives relevant to it. Venona was a joint American and British cryptological project that deciphered Soviet wartime cables. Among other things, the cables provided direct evidence that the Soviet Union was running a large espionage network in the United States during the 1940s--and that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were among the Soviet Union's most valued agents.

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