NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW Volume 82 Number 5 Law, Loyalty, and Treason: How Can the Article 10 Law Regulate Loyalty Without Imperiling It? 6-1-2004 Stealing Secrets: Communism and Soviet Espionage in the 1940s Ellen Schrecker Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Ellen Schrecker, Stealing Secrets: Communism and Soviet Espionage in the 1940s, 82 N.C. L. Rev. 1841 (2004). Available at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr/vol82/iss5/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Carolina Law Review by an authorized administrator of Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. STEALING SECRETS: COMMUNISM AND SOVIET ESPIONAGE IN THE 1940s ELLEN SCHRECKER' The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War liberated thousands of pages of previously secret records. Coming from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, these materials have greatly expanded what is known about the long-hidden world of Soviet policymaking. The most sensational of those releases dealt with the Kremlin's espionage operations at the time of the World War II, revealing that somewhere between one and three hundred Americans and others gave information to Soviet intelligence agencies and that the Communist Party officials recruited many of these people. This Article examines this new material in order to understand espionage and the questions it raises about individual loyalty and disloyalty. It explores the activities of the main espionage networks and assesses the motivations of many intelligent and idealistic men and women who willingly entered the murky world of passwords, covernames, secret cameras, and all the other accoutrements of tradecraft or conspiracy that KGB operations required.