Category Archives: Soviet Espionage

Spy Catcher, The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer

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This book by Peter Wright, former assistant director of England’s MI5, must not have been a best seller.  I bought a hard cover copy at the Westminster, CO library for a dollar as part of their campaign to clear out books no one had been reading.  The book chronicles the author’s quarter of a century in British intelligence.  It is not an easy or fun book to read, because it contains so many details of people, organizations, and events.  It is undoubtedly an excellent reference book for those reasons.

The book presents an astonishing contrast between the British and Soviet intelligence operations.  Seldom is there mention of any Soviet secrets being collected by the British unless the Soviets wanted the British to know the secret.  Practically every British secret of any importance was known by the Soviets, and Stalin often knew it before it had filtered through the British bureaucracy.  The British were a bit similar to the Soviets in their freedom to use any means to gather intelligence.  The author said it was made clear MI5 operated on the basis of the 11th Commandment, “Thou shalt not get caught.”

There are also astonishing indications that some events that were viewed as defeats for the Soviets based on the West learning their secret plans were in reality the outcome desired by the Soviets.  The Cuban missile crisis is one example.  Wright believed the Soviets intentionally allowed the United States to learn they had installed intermediate range missiles in Cuba to create the crises.  Their purpose was to get an agreement from the United States to cease in the attempts to assassinate or overthrow Castro.  The Soviets believed having a staunch ally just off the Keys from Florida was worth the perception the Americans had found their missiles and forced their removal.   Continue reading →

DOE Comments about “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats”

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I’ve mentioned that a person who was a senior DOE official provided comments about the book after reading it on line at this web site. I’ll first mention for people who don’t like to read on a computer screen that the book is now available in paperback and can be ordered from both Amazon.com and CreateSpace.com. The book continues to be free at the book link on this web site.

The comments began with the sentence, “The mid to late 1980’s were a perfect storm of national and international events that affected the future of Rocky Flats.” The events mentioned included funding of the international anti-nuclear movement by the Soviet Union, major international accidents, DOE’s loss of a lawsuit on regulation of wastes, and a Congressional act that had a major impact on operation of DOE facilities. I’ll discuss the first three here.

The book, “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” discusses the declining reputation of Rocky Flats over time. There are several reviews about Soviet Espionage against the United States (Venona, Witness, Perjury, and Out of Bondage) in that link on this web site. However, I hadn’t considered the possibility of Soviet involvement in anti-nuclearprotests. A Wikipedia article, “Soviet influence on the peace movement,” discusses how the Soviets supported organizations such as the World Peace Council. That group received millions in funding from the Soviets, organized peace conferences, and refrained from criticizing the Soviets. There was a Congressional report in 1980 that listed six peace groups that received Soviet funding and were “closely connected” with the World Peace Council. I don’t doubt the anti-nuclear protests had a negative impact on the public’s perception of places such as Rocky Flats, because that was the intent of the protestors. I do doubt that most of the people participating in those protests knew or thought what they were doing was encouraged or was even funded by the Soviets. (I intend to do addtional research on this subject, and have requested references listed in the Wikipedia article.)

The commenter also provided an insightful analysis of how nuclear and industrial accidents affected the public’s acceptance of risk. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl strengthened the anti- nuclear movement. The Challenger explosion startled the nation, and the leak of a toxic gas in Bhopal, India that killed thousands was an international scandal. “When it became clear that the causes of these accidents had similar causes to the allegations that had been made about Rocky Flats, the public’s view toward Rocky Flats further hardened.”

I don’t intend to spend much time on the issue of DOE losing lawsuits in which they contended they weren’t required to comply with hazardous waste laws, since I gave that quite a bit of attention in the book. I’m working on writing a posting about how Congressional action created immense “unintended consequences” for DOE facilities.

Perjury, The Hiss Chambers Case

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By Allen Weinstein, 1978

This review pertains directly to the “Witness” review, but it also provides insight into the allignment of forces against Elizabeth Bentley. The American Civil Liberties Union helped Weinstein obtain FBI files about the Hiss case for use in a lawsuit, and the author began his investigations believing Hiss had been unfairly convicted. Those on the political left were absolutely convinced that Chambers was wrong about Hiss and, that Hiss was unfairly convicted of perjury. The book presents a very detailed description of the five years of research that led to the author’s conclusion, much to the dismay of Hiss supporters, that Hiss had indeed been guiltiy of perjury. The book also confirms the magnitude of Soviet espionage in the United State. ….Nadya Ulanovskaya has confirmed the substance of Chamber’s account of his underground activities from his recruitment up to the time when Ulrich…returned to Russia in 1934. Nadya Ulanovskaya, who confirmed the substance of Chamber’s accounts of his Communist activities in the 1930s “scoffed at the dangers involved in conducting an espionage in the United States.” Nadya said: “If you wore a sign saying ‘I am a spy,’ you might still not get arrested in America when we were there.”

Early parts of the book describe the depths reached by Hiss and his supporters to discredit Chambers. There were unproven allegations of homosexuality (which would have been called “homophobic” today), insanity (the term “psychopathic personality” was used by one of their psychiatrist in testimony), imposture, and criminal behavior. There is no question that Chambers had a checkered personal life. He did come from dysfunctional family life as a child, and his father abandoned the family to move in with a male lover. There also is no dispute that Chambers served as a dedicated Communist courier for Soviet espionage rings. There is also the practical matter that he was dowdy and rumpled in appearance while his was handsome and always presented himself in well-tailored fashions. Continue reading →

Out of Bondage: The Story of Elizabeth Bentley

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Published by The Devin-Adair Company, New York, 1951
(Buy this book on Amazon.com.)

Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American who served as a courier for Soviet espionage cells who became disillusioned, and like Whitaker Chambers (see the “Witness” review), went to the FBI.  Bentley was a well educated liberal who became concerned about Fascism during a year in Italy and became a Communist when she had trouble finding work after she returned to the United States.  Her intelligence and dedication attracted the attention of members of the Russian Secret Police.    One was a woman named Juliet Glazer (actual name Juliet Poyntz) who scared her.  Glazer was liquidated by her Soviet handlers not long after meeting Bentley.  Over the next few years Bentley would work with others who would suffer the same fate as Glazer (Poyntz).

Elizabeth called herself a “steeled Bolshevik” by the time she went to work for a man called “Timmy,” and she was told to cut off contact with all her Communist friends to go deep under cover.  “Timmy,” who she later called “Yasha,” was Jacob Golos, chief of Soviet espionage operations in the United States.    Elizabeth, whose Venona code name was “Clever Girl,” served as courier for Golos, and the two became lovers against orders from the Soviets and despite the fact he had a wife in Lithuania and a mistress in Manhattan.

Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and orders came to Golos to get as many comrades as possible into the U.S. government.  Bentley assumed the name of “Miss Wise,” and she found a job in the United States Services and Shipping Corporation.  Bentley was surprised at how easy it was for hard core Communists to be hired into sensitive U.S. government jobs.  There were so many agents that she and Golos worried that American intelligence would “trip over one of them.”  So much information was stolen that it was difficult to keep up with the microfilming.  The information included plane production data, planned destinations, and performance data.  “Besides this purely military information, we had a steady flow of political reports from the Treasury…the Office of Strategic services, the Navy, the Army, and…the Department of Justice.  We knew what was going on in the inner chambers of the United States Government.” Continue reading →

Witness

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by Whittaker Chambers
Originally published in 1952; reprinted in 2001 by Regnery Publishing, Inc.
ISBN 0-89526-789

This 800 page small print book is regarded as reference material about the dangers of liberalism by conservatives. I assure you I can’t sort out all the key points in a short review, but I’ll give it a try.  The book chronicles the life of Jay Vivian Chambers (who, after a lifetime of embarrassment about what his parents had named him, changed his name to the one listed as the author above).    Chambers grew up in a destructively dysfunctional family and turned to Communism out of despair over world events.  He was the courier for an active espionage network in the government for several years, and began to doubt the validity of communism after word began to spread about the extent of the Soviet purges.  He decided he had to leave the party after Stalin signed a mutual defense pact with Hitler.  He initially went into hiding, remembering the Communist saying, “Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes and artist to commit a good natural death.”  He went to Adolph Berle of the FBI in 1939 and told him about his association with the Communists and named several of his associates.  He omitted discussion of espionage.  (Berle’s notes on the meeting begin on page 466.)  Berle briefed FDR on the information, who laughed at him.  When Berle became insistent about the information,   FDR told him to “go fly a kite,” only in less polite language.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which included a young Richard M. Nixon, called Chambers to testify nine years later.  Chambers had been accepted into the Communist party by Ben Mandel, who was the research director for HUAC when he was called to testify.  His testimony accurately repeated the allegations he had filed previously with the FBI, and mentioned (once again) that Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official in the then Truman administration, was part of his spy ring.  That allegation ignited a storm of publicity and controversy.  Hiss denied the charges (and maintained his innocence until his death in 1996).  There followed years of investigations, including two Grand Jury trials, and the eventual perjury conviction of Alger Hiss. Continue reading →

Venona, Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

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by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan persuaded the American intelligence community to declassify the Venona Project in 1995, which was more than forty years after the Soviets learned that the project had uncovered their massive espionage penetration of every sensitive department of the United States government.    The project began because Colonel Carter Clark did not trust Joseph Stalin.  In February 1943 he ordered the Signal Intelligence Service, the Army’s elite code breakers, to attempt to decode cables between Soviet diplomats in the United States and Moscow.  The cables were virtually impossible to decode as long as they were sent using a complex two-part ciphering system.  However, about 1700 cables, or a bit over one percent of the total were sent in which the “one time pad” had been reused, and that allowed at least partial decoding.  “The deciphered cables of the Venona Project identify 349 citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States who had had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence agencies.”  About 200 were never identified except by code name, which means that those people remained in their government and military positions unimpeded in their activities.

The Soviets learned about the Venona project from a high level official in the Roosevelt administration within a year and a half of its origin.  Ironically, the first cables weren’t successfully decoded until 1946, which was after the Soviets learned of Venona and had corrected the mistake of reusing the one time pads. Continue reading →