HaynesSoviet Inte andll igenceKlehr Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era Alexander Vassiliev’s Notebooks and the Documentation of Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era ✣ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/11/3/6/697250/jcws.2009.11.3.6.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 The history of intelligence and espionage can be a frustrating ªeld for historians, particularly if their period of interest is within the last 75 years. Most countries are signiªcantly slower to open their intelligence agency archives than their diplomatic records, and many have not released even a tiny fraction of intelligence material, the only exception being the partial opening of the intelligence archives of a few of the collapsed Eastern European Com- munist regimes. With the archives largely closed, the bits and pieces of infor- mation released by governments to placate public curiosity about espionage can be misleading. Ofªcial government statements often have more to do with public relations than with the truth. The spies themselves have rarely been available to be interviewed and have good reasons to avoid being too speciªc or entirely candid. When they do speak through memoir literature, they are as prone as autobiographers in other walks of life to romanticize their own importance, minimize their mistakes, and pass over unpleasant or sensi- tive events in silence, misdirection, or outright lies. In the United States and Great Britain, partial openings of the records of counterespionage agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Security Service (MI5), of- fer some access into espionage directed at those countries, but even there the ªles are subject to severe redaction. Occasionally trials have brought to light information on espionage operations, but only a fraction of intelligence activ- ities ends up being the target of public prosecution. For these reasons, Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks provide a uniquely rich insight into Soviet espionage. As Vassiliev explains in detail in his introduc- tion to our newly published coauthored book, Spies, from early 1994 to the spring of 1996 he had unprecedented access to the archival record of Soviet Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 2009, pp. 6–25 6 Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era espionage activities in America from the 1930s to the early 1950s.1 The Rus- sian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), successor to the ªrst main directorate of the Soviet Committee on State Security (KGB), had decided to assist a project that partnered an active or retired KGB ofªcer with a Western author to produce a series of books on selected intelligence topics. Vassiliev, who had resigned from the KGB in 1990 to enter journalism, accepted an SVR offer to work with Allen Weinstein to prepare a book on KGB operations in the United States.2 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/11/3/6/697250/jcws.2009.11.3.6.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Vassiliev did not have access to all KGB ªles, but he was allowed to exam- ine many operational ªles of the KGB’s legal stations, some personal ªles of both ofªcers and sources, and the ªrst volume of the ªle on Project Enormoz (Enormous), the KGB nuclear weapons intelligence project, which covered the Soviet intelligence services’ assault on the Manhattan Project up to the end of 1945. Although Vassiliev was prohibited from making photocopies, he was allowed to make handwritten notes without restriction, including copy- ing verbatim passages out of hundreds of individual documents. Under the policies of the project, however, the notes were only for his own use and were not to be shared with his American coauthor. Instead, under SVR guidelines he prepared sanitized summaries of major topics and themes. With some ex- ceptions, only the cover names of sources—not their real names or identifying information—could be disclosed. And certain matters could not be discussed at all. Once the summaries were prepared, an SVR committee of senior of- ªcers reviewed them to conªrm that the guidelines had been followed. By the spring of 1996, complications had arisen. Crown Publishers, which had arranged the publishing project, had run into economic difªculties and canceled the contract with the SVR in 1995. Although the books already under way found new publishers (the Weinstein-Vassiliev volume was eventu- ally published by Random House), the SVR attitude toward the project also cooled. The SVR and its sister Federal Security Service (FSB, the main succes- sor to the internal apparatus of the KGB) had regained their footing in Rus- sian society, and the need for good press that had partly motivated the project was no longer urgent. Elements in the agency, particularly its still strong Communist faction, had always been hostile to any arrangement to publish Russian secrets, regarding it as a breach of security. Moreover, in early 1996 1. Alexander Vassiliev, “How I Came to Write My Notebooks, Discover Alger Hiss, and Lose to His Lawyer,” in John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. xxvii–liii. 2. The predecessors to the foreign intelligence agency best known in the West as the KGB went through a number of organizational and title changes in the 1930s and 1940s. For reasons of simplic- ity, “KGB” will be used throughout this article to avoid the distraction of multiple titles and acro- nyms. 7 Haynes and Klehr President Boris Yeltsin seemed in danger of losing his reelection bid to Gennadii Zyuganov, the Communist candidate, in the presidential vote scheduled for June. After threats of retaliation from Communist ofªcers in the SVR, Vassiliev decided to leave Russia. He got a journalistic assignment in London and has not returned to Russia since. He is today a British citizen. Concerned about a physical search at the airport, Vassiliev did not take his original handwritten notebooks with him in 1996. Instead, he put his summary chapters, some of which had been approved by the SVR committee Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/11/3/6/697250/jcws.2009.11.3.6.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 and others that were awaiting review, on computer disks and left Russia with the data. These summaries were given to Allen Weinstein and were the basis for The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era, pub- lished in 1999.3 That Weinstein had only Vassiliev’s sanitized summaries to use did not lessen the importance of The Haunted Wood, the ªrst survey of So- viet intelligence in the United States written from KGB archival sources, but it did limit the information contained in the book. Vassiliev retrieved his original notebooks from Moscow in 2001. Friends had been keeping them and simply shipped them to him in London by DHL. As explained in our preface to Spies, in 2005 we learned of the existence of the notebooks and traveled to London to examine them and discuss their prove- nance with Vassiliev. The following year we convened a one-day private meet- ing in Washington, DC, during which experienced historians, archivists, and intelligence professionals examined the notebooks and discussed with Vassiliev at length how they had been prepared. With the unanimous agree- ment of the participants at the meeting that the material was genuine, we ob- tained a foundation grant to have the notebooks professionally translated and a contract from Yale University Press to publish a book based on them. Alex- ander Vassiliev is a coauthor of the book and was fully engaged in the project. He prepared a transcription into word-processed Russian of his handwritten original notebooks, a great assistance to translators Philip Redko and Steve Shabad, and reviewed their translations, clarifying a number of ambiguities. In 2007, realizing that only a portion of the material in the notebooks could be used in our book, we distributed copies of the translated notebooks to specialists with established records of signiªcant archival research so that they could prepare essays in their areas of expertise. We exercised no review over their writing, requesting only that nothing be used prior to the appear- ance of Spies. Those essays are published in this special issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies, which sent out the manuscripts for external review to re- viewers who likewise agreed not to disclose the contents. 3. Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Sta- lin Era (New York: Random House, 1999). 8 Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era Alexander Vassiliev recorded his notes in eight separate notebooks, la- beled Black, White #1, White #2, White #3, Yellow #1, Yellow #2, Yellow #3, and Yellow #4, plus a ninth collection of loose pages labeled Odd Pages. In to- tal the notebooks come to 1,115 pages. Three versions of the notebooks exist: the original handwritten versions, transcriptions into word-processed Rus- sian, and translations into English. The latter two duplicate the pagination and page formatting of the original handwritten version. Thus the material on page 65 of the handwritten White #1 is parallel to the material on page 65 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/11/3/6/697250/jcws.2009.11.3.6.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 of the transcription and translation of White #1. Researchers wishing to verify a passage because of a concern about translation or some other ambiguity can move among the three versions with a minimum of confusion.