P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 This page intentionally left blank ii P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 EARLY COLD WAR SPIES Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of Amer- ican anticommunism varied from passive disdain in the 1920s to fervent hostility in the early years of the Cold War. Nothing so stimulated the white-hot anticommu- nism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had cooperated with Soviet espionage against the United States and had assisted in stealing the technical secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the U.S. State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book reviews the major spy cases of the early Cold War (Hiss-Chambers, Rosenberg, Bentley, Gouzenko, Coplon, Amerasia, and others) and the often-frustrating clashes between the exacting rules of the American criminal justice system and the requirements of effective counterespionage. John Earl Haynes is a 20th-Century Political Historian in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington,D.C. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is the author or editor of four books: Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era: Essays on the History of the 1920s (editor, 1998); Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (1996); Communism and Anti-Communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings (1987); and Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota’s DFL Party (1984). Harvey Klehr is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of five books, Communist Cadre: The Social Back- ground of the American Communist Party Elite (1978); The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (1984); Biographical Dictionary of the Amer- ican Left (1986); Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today (1988); and The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (1996). He was honored with the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award from Emory College in 1983. Haynes and Klehr have jointly coauthored five books: In Denial: Historians, Com- munism and Espionage (2002); Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999); The Soviet World of American Communism (1998); The Secret World of American Communism (1995); and The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (1992). In addition, their articles have appeared in scholarly journals including International Newsletter of Communist Studies, Film History, American Communist History, Journal of Cold War Studies, Labor History, Labour History Review, and Problems of Post-Communism,aswell as in such journals of opinion as Commentary, the New Republic, New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, American Spectator, and the Weekly Standard. i P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 ii P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 CAMBRIDGE ESSENTIAL HISTORIES Series Editor Donald Critchlow, Saint Louis University Cambridge Essential Histories is devoted to introducing critical events, periods, or individuals in history to students. Volumes in this series emphasize narra- tive as a means of familiarizing students with historical analysis. In this series leading scholars focus on topics in European, American, Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, African, and world history through thesis-driven, concise vol- umes designed for survey and upper-division undergraduate history courses. The books contain an introduction that acquaints readers with the historical event and reveals the book’s thesis; narrative chapters that cover the chronology of the event or problem; and a concluding summary that provides the historical interpretation and analysis. Volumes also include a bibliographic essay. iii P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 iv P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 Early Cold War Spies The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics JOHN EARL HAYNES Washington, D.C. HARVEY KLEHR Emory University v cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521857383 © John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2006 isbn-13 978-0-511-24943-3 eBook (EBL) isbn-10 0-511-24943-8 eBook (EBL) isbn-13 978-0-521-85738-3 hardback isbn-10 0-521-85738-4 hardback isbn-13 978-0-521-67407-2paperback isbn-10 0-521-67407-7 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 John Earl Haynes To my son Joshua Harvey Klehr To Mickey and Marilyn Steinberg, my father-in-law and mother-in-law, with love, admiration, and gratitude vii P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 viii P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 Contents Series Editor’s Foreword page xi 1 Introduction: Early Cold War Spy Cases ..............1 Early Cold War Spy Trials 3 AWord about Trials and History 6 Spy Trials and McCarthyism 7 Politics of the Early Cold War 8 2 The Precursors ..............................23 Amerasia: The First Cold War Spy Case 25 Gouzenko: A Canadian Spy Case with American Repercussions 48 3 Elizabeth Bentley: The Case of the Blond Spy Queen .................................60 The Silvermaster Group 66 The Perlo Group 67 The Trials of William Remington 73 Venona and Bentley’s Vindication 82 The Bentley Case: A Conclusion 88 4 The Alger Hiss–Whittaker Chambers Case ............92 Whittaker Chambers 93 Alger Hiss 97 Dueling Testimony 99 The Slander Suit, the Baltimore Documents, and the Pumpkin Papers 103 The Grand Jury 107 The First Hiss Trial 120 ix P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 x Contents The Second Hiss Trial 124 Chambers after the Trial 130 Hiss after the Trial 132 The Historical Argument 132 5 The Atomic Espionage Cases ....................138 Klaus Fuchs: The Background 139 Theodore Hall: The Background 142 Rosenberg and Greenglass: The Background 143 J. Robert Oppenheimer and Communists at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory 146 The Red Bomb and the Postwar Trials 151 J. Robert Oppenheimer after the Manhattan Project 177 The Trials of Rudolf Abel and Morris and Lona Cohen 182 6 Judith Coplon: The Spy Who Got Away with It ........192 Coplon’s Recruitment into Espionage 193 The Washington Trial 199 The New York Trial 204 On Appeal: Justice Frustrated 205 7 The Soble-Soblen Case: Last of the Early Cold War Spy Trials ................................208 Infiltrating the Trotskyist Movement 209 Mark Zborowski 212 Boris Morros: Double Agent 220 The Soble Ring Trials 222 The Robert Soblen Trial 225 8 Conclusion: The Decline of the Ideological Spy ........230 Spy Trials and Understanding Soviet Espionage 232 Counterespionage and the American Criminal Justice System 234 The Elusive Balance between Security and Liberty 236 Index 243 P1: KAE 0521857384agg.xml CUNY459B/Haynes Printer: sherdian 0 521 85738 4 July 9, 2006 2:46 Series Editor’s Foreword In the late 1940s, the shock waves that followed the sensational news of Communist spy rings operating deep inside the government in Washington, D.C., affected American politics, culture, and society for the next decade. The first reverberations of spy activities began in the summer of 1945 when six people, including a high-ranking State Department official, were arrested for passing classified government documents to the left-leaning journal, Amerasia, edited by Philip Jaffe, a friend of Communist Party chieftain Earl Browder. Shortly afterward, the American public learned of other spy operations through the revelations of Elizabeth Bentley, a former Communist and courier for a Soviet spy network; Igor Gouzenko, an intel- ligence officer working in the Soviet embassy in Canada; and Whittaker Chambers, a former underground Communist agent in the 1930s. These reports revealed the existence of an atomic spy ring headed by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; two spy rings operating in Washington, D.C., that implicated high officials in the Roosevelt administration, including White House aide Lauchlin Currie, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, and Alger Hiss, a former State Department official in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Other cases followed. Fears of widespread Communist infiltration into American institutions intensified as U.S.