Spies: the Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev: Review

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev: review Spies by Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev proves that the KGB’s infiltration of America started earlier and went deeper than we thought, finds Andrew Lownie By Andrew Lownie Published: 5:50AM BST 28 Jun 2009 A common perception is that, both before and after the Second World War, the British Establishment was penetrated by Soviet spies (most notably by the Cambridge Spy Ring) while America somehow escaped infiltration. This important new book, however, which is based on archival material – a rare luxury for intelligence historians – shows the huge extent of Soviet espionage activity in the United States during the 20th century. The authors estimate that from the Twenties more than 500 Americans from all walks of life, including many Ivy League graduates and Oxford Rhodes Scholars, were recruited to assist Soviet intelligence agencies, particularly in the State Department and America’s first intelligence agency, the OSS. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have previously collaborated on books about the Venona spy intercepts and American Communism. Their co-author Alexander Vassiliev, a Russian journalist and former intelligence officer, collaborated on The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America. That book was based on controlled Russian intelligence documents, access to which was negotiated during a moment of Glasnost in the Nineties with a view to supplementing the KGB pension fund, championing Russian intelligence successes and creating a bit of disinformation mischief. What hadn’t been known until recently is that while working on The Haunted Wood, Vassiliev had transcribed and summarised innumerable KGB documents which he had smuggled out with him – more than 1,000 pages of notes – when he began a new life in America. It is this information which forms the basis of Spies. Placed alongside the Venona intercepts of Soviet intelligence communications, the evidence from the Mitrokhin archive of Soviet foreign intelligence – brought to the West and published in 1999 and 2005 – and the testimony of defectors, it has now been possible to fill in much of the Soviet espionage puzzle putting real names to cover names and identifying new spies. Spies is a serious book, whose effectiveness is built up with detail, and it makes for sober reading both in terms of style and content. It proves beyond doubt that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were Soviet agents, reveals the full extent of Soviet efforts to steal the secrets of the atom bomb, gives details of technical and industrial espionage and names many new agents, including a spy who may later have given away Israeli nuclear secrets to the KGB. It also shows just how many journalists worked for the KGB and argues that, while Ernest Hemingway (code-named 'Argo’) never provided significant information, he was recruited in 1941 and was in contact with Soviet agents for several years. The authors are also not afraid of setting the record straight. They prove, for example, that J Robert Oppenheimer, denounced for the last 50 years as the most damaging Soviet spy inside the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb, was targeted but never became a KGB spy. Another revelation is the confirmation in more than 20 KGB documents of Harry Dexter White’s involvement in Soviet espionage. One of the architects of the Bretton Woods monetary agreement, White was senior adviser to the delegation at the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco and gave away the US negotiating strategy. He assured his KGB case officer that if the Soviet diplomats held firm on the USSR veto of UN actions then the Americans 'will agree’. While it is clear that Soviet penetration of America was immense and started early, the British are not off the hook. There are sections on Michael Straight ('Nigel’) and John Cairncross ('Liszt’), both recruited by Burgess and Blunt at Cambridge, and on the two chief intelligence sources on the Manhattan Project – Melita Norwood ('Tina’) and a newly identified spy Engelbert Broda ('Eric’), a refugee Austrian physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory who probably recruited the British atomic spy Alan Nunn May. And though he doesn’t appear in the book, the authors have also subsequently 'outed’ the former civil servant Arthur Wynn ('Scott’), a contemporary of Philby, Burgess and Blunt at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a recruiter for the Oxford Spy Ring. Although less well-known and less effective than the Cambridge Ring, the Oxford Ring had some notable successes and the naming of Wynn has opened up fresh areas of research. Perhaps a subject for the authors’ next book? Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev YALE, £25, 650pp Available from Telegraph Books 0844 871 1516 .

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