World Policy Journal: Soviet Spies: Did They Make a Difference

World Policy Journal
Volume XVI, No 1, Spring 1999

Soviet Spies: Did They Make a Difference
By Tim Weiner

“It was all for nothing...nothing had been gained except the misery of others,” was the way Whittaker Chambers summed up his testimony against Alger Hiss. Might the same be said for the Great Fear of the 1950s? All that fury, all that noise, all for nothing but emptiness and pain?

Before the Cold War, the primary function of Soviet espionage in the United States was to serve as a listening post on the wider world, with the greatest attention given to gathering intelligence on the war aims of Japan and Germany. But in the long tradition of Russian espionage services, whose roots go back to Peter the Great, the Soviet spies in the United States did what they could to buy or steal American secrets—scientific, technical, military, and political information—with the help of American agents.

They worked in a world of secrecy, ignorance, and fear. The United States and the Soviet Union knew little and understood lessof one another before and during the Cold War. The Central Intelligence Agency, founded in 1947, did not have a station in Moscow until the early 1960s; its director in that decade, Richard Helms, now says half jokingly that there were no files on the Soviet Union in the CIA’s early days, that the agency’s analysts were better off doing research at the Library of Congress. The Soviets started building their files in 1933, after President Roosevelt granted them diplomatic recognition and allowed them to open embassies and consulates in the United States. Where there are diplomats, there are spies (one Soviet ambassador actually doubled as station chief, a sticky arrangement). And the flowering of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s was fast but fantastically tangled.

The ground was certainly fertile. There was no American counterintelligence to speak of before Pearl Harbor, and the romance of American communism was strong in the few years between Hitler’s rise and Stalin’s purges. Underground networks proliferated like hothouse plants, but agents quickly became ensnarled, with three separate strands of intelligence gathering—the KGB, the GRU (military intelligence), and the Communist Party of the United States—intermingling to ill effect.

There has never been a comprehensive and coherent account of this effort, in part because full access to primary documents has been impossible. Hopes for revelation were high when the Russian intelligence service opened up the Stalin-era archives of the KGB to Random House in 1993, in exchange for a large sum of cash. Before the Russians cut them off in 1995, the authors of The Haunted Wood, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, unearthed some fine stories of perfidy, greed, fecklessness, blind loyalty, and cunning among the Soviet spymasters and their agents in America.

The book is best where the evidence is least ambiguous—for example, on Martha Dodd, daughter of the American ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, and on Boris Morros, a Hollywood hustler turned Soviet agent (and, later, a double agent for the FBI). The stench of authenticity is present in these chapters, not least because these characters speak in their own voices about their own lives.

But the problem of documentation haunts this book. To the extent that the KGB files provide new information, in many cases it is in the biographies of selected American agents, not in the nitty-gritty details of whatthose agents may or may not have done, or what the meaning of their work might have been. With rare exceptions, the true names of agents appear in brackets, supplied by the authors; the decoding of their aliases depends on the work of the analysts who worked to decipher the Venona intercepts, the cables from Soviet stations to Moscow intercepted by American counterintelligence in the 1940s.

Taking Things on Faith

The reader of The Haunted Wood has to take things on faith to a certain degree; not all will. Raw intelligence files can resemble a novel with an unreliable narrator. Spies reporting to headquarters tend to exaggerate the number and importance of the agents they have recruited; they inflate the value of documents they purloin. Not to put too fine a point on it, they sometimes make things up. An agent in the field is a professional liar on the run. The documents in the KGB files speak for themselves, to be sure, but do they speak the truth? The problem for the historian (and the reader) resembles the oldest paradox in the book: the man from Crete says, “All Cretans are liars.” Is he telling the truth?

This is not to deny the preponderance of the evidence that the Soviets had willing and able friends in high places in Washington (yes, probably including the State Department’s Alger Hiss and the Treasury Department’s Harry Dexter White). It is to question the quality and the meaning of the intelligence they provided, and whether any of it made much difference in the long run, much less changed the course of history.

It would have been a blessing for all concerned had the archives settled the question of precisely what Hiss actually did to earn his reputation as a Soviet spy. There is one new piece of evidence here concerning Hiss: a message to Moscow, written in 1936, from one Hedda Gumperz, an operative based in New York. It reports on a conversation with Noel Field, then a State Department official, and it is unique in the annals of the Hiss case in that it uses his real name.

“Alger let him know that he was a Communist, that he was connected with an organization working for the Soviet Union,” the Gumperz memorandum reads in part. This text goes beyond anything yet unearthed from the Venona files, wherein an operative codenamed “Ales” was later identified by American counterintelligence in a footnote as “probably Alger Hiss.” The authors state flatly that Hiss was a member of the Soviet military intelligence network in the United States; the military intelligence files have never been opened, however, and until they are, skeptics will be left with that footnote as an answer to the question of Hiss: probably.

The evidence is much thinner in the case of Harry Dexter White. The files suggest that White was a voluble if nervous informant—but nowhere is it revealed exactly who his Soviet contacts were. White “doesn’t pass information or documents,” reads one of the files. So what kind of agent was he? If White, a world-class expert on monetary policy at the Treasury, was simply handing over his own ideas (as Sam Tanenhaus’s masterful biography of Whittaker Chambers suggests), what did that gain the Soviets, or cost the United States? If he or Hiss clued the Soviets’ San Francisco station in on American policy at the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945, was the world safer or more dangerous?

Purges and Paranoia

What is unquestionable here is how feckless so many of the Soviets and their American agents were. Stupidity and clumsiness so often trumps conspiracy in these annals. Tradecraft and compartmentation were shaky at best, often nonexistent. One Soviet station chief in Washington spoke no English, rendering him useless in American society. Elizabeth Bentley, a key courier, was so dangerously careless, and her network of contacts so well known to one another, that one of her Soviet handlers worried (presciently) that the smallest mistake or the most superficial investigation would bring her network down.

After purges and paranoia in Moscow put some of the best operatives in prison or the grave in the late 1930s, all it took was a crisis of confidence on Bentley’s part, sparked by the dismissal of the Communist Party of the United States chief Earl Browder, and the thin walls of the shoddy house began crumbling. Browder was purged, triggering Bentley’s defection to American counterintelligence, which sparked the testimony of Chambers. At the war’s end, the Soviet networks were in ruins. By 1946, almost every member of the Soviet spy network recruited in the United States before and during the Second World War was out of business, the Soviet station in Washington reduced to clipping newspapers.

True, the Soviets had had successes, notably the information their agents gathered on the making of the atomic bomb. The KGB even had a man in Congress: Samuel Dickstein, who represented Manhattan’s Lower East Side and sold snippets of political information to Moscow. But his handlers regarded him as ?a complete racketeer and a blackmailer,? and often worse than useless.

So what value was this intelligence coup to Stalin? Nil, it seems. Compare what Dickstein provided secretly—essentially, nothing of lasting value—with what William J. Donovan, the head of the wartime spy organization, the Office of Strategic Services, provided openly. Donovan undertook deep exchanges of intelligence with the Soviets, sometimes exceeding his instructions from Roosevelt, and would have gone farther had not J. Edgar Hoover roared his opposition. Donovan even gave the Soviets back a crucial code book captured by Finnish spies (no fool, he secretly kept a copy, which eventually helped the Venona analysts break the Soviet spy rings).

The lesson is that by and large Moscow gleaned more, and more of value, from its open wartime alliance with Washington than by its secret underground rings. And therein lies a sad truth about the world of spy vs. spy: there are no heroes here. So few of them made a lasting difference, and at so great a cost.