Haunted Wood : Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era

by VASSILIEV, ALEXANDER

• ISBN13: 9780679457244
• ISBN10: 0679457240
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Random House

Summary

Based upon previously secret KGB records, The Haunted Wood reveals for the first time the riveting story of Soviet espionage's "golden age" in the United States throughout the 1930s, World War II, and the early Cold War. Historian Allen Weinstein, author of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, and Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB agent-turned-journalist, were provided unique access to thousands of classified Soviet intelligence dispatches that documented the KGB's success in acquiring America's most valuable atomic, military, and diplomatic secrets.The Haunted Woodnarrates the triumphs and failures of Soviet operatives and their American agents during the 1930s and 1940s, describing as well the compelling human dramas involved. Reconstructed from Moscow's messages to its operatives and reports from Soviet recruits in America, The Haunted Wood describes many previously unknown personal tales: struggles for control among contending Soviet operatives and American agents, love affairs, business ventures, defections, and plotted or actual murders. The authors also detail the remarkable range of classified government documents and information stolen for Soviet intelligence during the 1930s and the war years. Complementing its use of the KGB archives, The Haunted Wood incorporates, also for the first time, a number of the previously classified VENONA cables released in 1995-96 by the CIA and NSA. Among these thousands of translated intercepts sent by Soviet agents in the United States to the USSR during World War II were dozens that matched those found in the Moscow records. The highly placed Americans who assisted Soviet intelligence operatives during this period included: the passionate daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to Nazi Germany an influential member of the U.S. Congress one of President Roosevelt's personal assistants key officials of the OSS, America's wartime spy agency a flamboyant Hollywood producer-director the head of the American Communist Party Several chapters provide major new accounts from Moscow's own record of its relations with Alger Hiss and atomic spies Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, and Julius Rosenberg, among others, along with fresh information on Soviet espionage in the United States by British agents for the Kremlin--Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Harold "Kim" Philby. The Haunted Wood's pages are filled with extraordinary and previously untold stories, including those of one war-time American spy ring whose head lived in a domestic menage a trois with other agents, of Soviet involvement in a Hollywood music publishing company and possible major film investments, and of a station chief who proposed (with Moscow's agreement) funding U.S. journalists and congressional political campaigns. The authors show how defection at war's end by a single emotionally depressed agent, despondent since the death of her Soviet station-chief lover, provoked the swift and virtually complete shutdown of Moscow's intelligence operations in the United States--ironically, years before the FBI and congressional investigations began their decade-long pursuit of "Soviet agents," who, by then, had either returned to Moscow or left the U.S. government! With its new and uniquely documented information, The Haunted Wood offers the first fresh, realistic, and non-judgmental und

Author Biography

<b>Allen Weinstein</b>  is founder and president of The Center for Democracy. His books include Freedom and Crisis: An American History, and Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. He lives in Washington, D.C.<br><br><b>Alexander Vassiliev</b> is a Russian journalist. He is a former KGB agent and lives in Western Europe.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	xv
Cast of Characters	xxi
PART ONE: Burden of Innocence: The New Deal Years	1	(150)
Communist Romantics, I: The Reluctant Laurence Duggan	3	(19)
Creating the Soviet Networks: Hiss, Chambers, and Early Recruits	22	(28)
Love and Loyalties, I: The Case of Martha Dodd	50	(22)
Communist Romantics, II: The Exuberant Michael Straight	72	(12)
Love and Loyalties, II: Elizabeth Bentley and Jacob Golos	84	(26)
Double Agent/Hollywood Hustler: The Case of Boris Morros	110	(30)
``Crook'': A Soviet Agent in Congress	140	(11)
PART TWO: The Third Front: Soviet Espionage in the Second World War	151	(130)
Harvest Time, I: The Silvermaster Network in Wartime Washington	153	(19)
Atomic Espionage: From Fuchs to the Rosenbergs	172	(51)
Harvest Time, II: The Perlo Group	223	(15)
OSS and NKGB: Penetration Agents	238	(27)
Harvest Time, III: Hiss, Glasser, and Warning Signs	265	(16)
PART THREE: Discovery: Cold War Confrontation	281	(58)
Flight from Exposure, I: The Washington Sources	283	(28)
Flight from Exposure, II: The Atom Spies	311	(28)
Epilogue: Aftermath and Legacy	339	(6)
Notes	345	(32)
Bibliography	377	(6)
Index	383

Excerpts

CHAPTER 1
Communist Romantics, I:
The Reluctant Laurence Duggan

Who was Laurence Duggan and why was he targeted for recruitment as a Soviet intelligence agent? Officials in Moscow might well have asked that question in 1934 when word came from one of their Washington, D.C., operatives that Duggan had been approached.

He had come to town the previous year along with thousands of other Americans, many--like Duggan--in their twenties, to work in Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" government. Most were liberals, committed to the Administration's experimental plans for achieving economic recovery from the catastrophic depression. Some favored a more radical solution comparable to the Communist experiment in state economic management underway in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics since the Bolshevik Revolution.

Soviet intelligence operatives resident in the United States sought to identify and involve in espionage people sympathetic to the USSR and for whom covert activity might seem exciting but who were, at the same time, innocent and morally committed. Especially after Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohort took power in Germany in 1933, "doing something" concrete (and secret) to help the struggle against fascism, a battle in which the Soviet Union claimed the leadership of "progressive forces," attracted a number of the more adventurous spirits in Washington's new reformist political class.

The professional and social relationships that linked individuals in the New Deal often blurred their political differences. Avowed or covert Communists, democratic socialists, farmer-labor activists, and Roosevelt Democrat loyalists found common ground within the many new agencies and older departments of FDR's government. This intermingling of related but distinct political agendas did not usually trouble the youthful bureaucrats crowding into Washington, which had been until then a far smaller and less-important governmental capital.

Soviet intelligence files document the mixture of accidental encounters, underlying ideological beliefs, romantic antifascist views, and Soviet persistence that led some New Dealers on the Left at the time to become espionage agents. The case of Laurence Duggan illuminates a pattern that affected a number of Soviet sources in the New Deal, including a few of his colleagues. Duggan moved willingly into the Moscow underground during the 1930s only to struggle later and without complete success to free himself from its orbit.

A 1934 memorandum by one Soviet operative urging Laurence Duggan's recruitment described "his character [as that of] a very soft guy . . . under his wife's influence, a very lively, energetic and joyful woman. Laurence is cultural and reserved."1 Duggan's father headed the prestigious Institute of International Education, a major organizer of teacher and student exchanges. The younger Duggan was an official in the State Department's Latin American Division when he and his wife, Helen Boyd, first attracted Soviet interest. Boyd--described in a station cable to Moscow as an "extraordinarily beautiful woman: a typical American, tall, blonde, reserved, well-read, goes in for sports, independent"--had been cultivated as a friend by the anti-Nazi exile and NKVD agent Hedda Gumperz ("Redhead").2

Peter Gutzeit, who ran Moscow's "legal"* cover station from the Soviet Consulate in New York, reported home on October 3, 1934, that he had begun recruiting Duggan, who "is also interesting to us because through him one will be able to find a way toward [Noel] Field . . . of the State Department's European Department with whom Duggan is friendly."3 (The European Division's information was a priority interest of Moscow's throughout the decade, and Field, too, would later launch a covert career as a Soviet agent through Gumperz.)

Concerned lest a Soviet diplomat be exposed recruiting spies only a year after formal U.S. recognition of the USSR, in 1935, Moscow reassigned contacts with Duggan from Gutzeit to Hedda Gumperz.4 Throughout 1935 and early 1936, social exchanges and prerecruitment talks on the Soviet Union continued between Gumperz and both Field and Duggan. Both men held key posts at State, a department the NKVD had code-named "Surrogate." Both were considered likely candidates for advancement in rank and responsibilities.

In April 1936, however, an encounter occurred involving Noel Field (code-named "Ernst" at the time) that, a decade later, would affect gravely both his life and Duggan's. The story emerged in a memorandum that month from Hedda Gumperz to her superiors concerning her efforts with Field. She informed them that a week before the latter's departure for Europe to attend a London conference representing State, he was approached by another New Deal friend, Alger Hiss,* then completing an assignment at the Justice Department and scheduled to join State that fall: "Alger let him know that he was a Communist [Gumperz's memo continued], that he was connected with an organization working for the Soviet Union and that he knew [Field] also had connections but he was afraid they were not solid enough, and probably, his knowledge was being used in a wrong way. Then he directly proposed that [Field] give him an account of the London conference."

Field described himself and Hiss, according to Gumperz's memo, as "close friends," hence Field's willingness to discuss the subject of espionage. (Gumperz used Alger Hiss's actual name in her memo because she obviously did not know his code name.) Noel Field told Hiss that he was already reporting to his own Soviet NKVD contacts on the conference.

Hiss was then a member of a Soviet military intelligence (or GRU) network headed by Harold ("Hal") Ware, a group that had been energetic in recruiting new "believers"--especially friends--into its work.ç Hiss was not dissuaded by Noel Field's initial refusal to cooperate.

Gumperz's memo chronicled Field's account of the subsequent discussion, which at times seemed almost like a polite debate over joining competing college fraternities:

Alger kept insisting on the report, and [Field] was forced to tell him that he needed to consult his "connections."
In the next couple of days, after having thought it over, Alger said that he no longer insisted on the report. But he wanted [Field] to talk to Larry and Helen [Duggan] about him and let them know who he was and give him [Alger] access to them. [Field] again mentioned that he had contacted Helen and Larry. However, Alger insisted that he talk to them again, which [Field] ended up doing. [Field] talked to Larry about Alger and, of course, about having told him "about the current situation" and that "their main task at the time was to defend the Soviet Union" and that "they both needed to use their favorable positions to help in this respect." Larry became upset and frightened, and announced that he needed some time before he would make that final step; he still hoped to do his normal job, he wanted to reorganize his department, try to achieve some results in that area, etc.*
Evidently, according to [Field], he did not make any promises, nor did he encourage Alger in any sort of activity, but politely stepped back. Alger asked [Field] several other questions; for example, what kind of personality he had, and if [Field] would like to contact him. He also asked [Field] to help him to get to the State Department. Apparently, [Field] satisfied this request.
When I pointed out to [Field] his terrible discipline and the danger he put himself into by connecting these three people, he did not seem to understand it. He thought that just because "Alger was the first to open his cards, there was no reason for him to keep a secret." Besides, Alger announced that he was doing it for "us" and because of the fact that he lived in Washington, D.C. . . . and, finally, [since] I was going to go out of the country for a while, he thought it would be a good idea to establish contact between us.5

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Excerpted from The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era by Allen Weinstein, Alexander Vassiliev
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