Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics

by John Earl Haynes , Harvey Klehr

• ISBN13: 9780521674072
• ISBN10: 0521674077
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-08-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of American 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 anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had co-operated 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 counter-espionage.

Author Biography

John Earl Haynes is a 20th-Century Political Historian in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Harvey Klehr is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University in Atlanta

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Foreword	xi
1 Introduction: Early Cold War Spy Cases	1	(22)
Early Cold War Spy Trials	3	(3)
A Word about Trials and History	6	(1)
Spy Trials and McCarthyism	7	(1)
Politics of the Early Cold War	8	(15)
2 The Precursors	23	(37)
Amerasia: The First Cold War Spy Case	25	(23)
Gouzenko: A Canadian Spy Case with American Repercussions	48	(12)
3 Elizabeth Bentley: The Case of the Blond Spy Queen	60	(32)
The Silvermaster Group	66	(1)
The Perlo Group	67	(6)
The Trials of William Remington	73	(9)
Venona and Bentley's Vindication	82	(6)
The Bentley Case: A Conclusion	88	(4)
4 The Alger Hiss—Whittaker Chambers Case	92	(46)
Whittaker Chambers	93	(4)
Alger Hiss	97	(2)
Dueling Testimony	99	(4)
The Slander Suit, the Baltimore Documents, and the Pumpkin Papers	103	(4)
The Grand Jury	107	(13)
The First Hiss Trial	120	(4)
The Second Hiss Trial	124	(6)
Chambers after the Trial	130	(2)
Hiss after the Trial	132	(1)
The Historical Argument	132	(6)
5 The Atomic Espionage Cases	138	(54)
Klaus Fuchs: The Background	139	(3)
Theodore Hall: The Background	142	(1)
Rosenberg and Greenglass: The Background	143	(3)
J. Robert Oppenheimer and Communists at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory	146	(5)
The Red Bomb and the Postwar Trials	151	(26)
J. Robert Oppenheimer after the Manhattan Project	177	(5)
The Trials of Rudolf Abel and Morris and Lona Cohen	182	(10)
6 Judith Coplon: The Spy Who Got Away with It	192	(16)
Coplon's Recruitment into Espionage	193	(6)
The Washington Trial	199	(5)
The New York Trial	204	(1)
On Appeal: Justice Frustrated	205	(3)
7 The Soble-Soblen Case: Last of the Early Cold War Spy Trials	208	(22)
Infiltrating the Trotskyist Movement	209	(3)
Mark Zborowski	212	(8)
Boris Morros: Double Agent	220	(2)
The Soble Ring Trials	222	(3)
The Robert Soblen Trial	225	(5)
8 Conclusion: The Decline of the Ideological Spy	230	(13)
Spy Trials and Understanding Soviet Espionage	232	(2)
Counterespionage and the American Criminal Justice System	234	(2)
The Elusive Balance between Security and Liberty	236	(7)
Index	243