Also Present at the Creation.

AuthorDoenecke, Justus D.
PositionRed Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War - Book review

Review of the book: Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War. By Katherine A.S. Sibley. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). Pp. xiii, 370. $39.95 cloth.)

Scholars have written a small library of books about various individual Soviet spies. Few, however, have focused on Russian espionage as a whole. Katherine A.S. Sibley, chair of the history department at St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia, and author of several works on Soviet-American relations, offers a strong and comprehensive volume on this topic. To do so, she utilizes such hitherto neglected sources as the long-classified case files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; materials of the Senate's Special Committee on Un-American Activities, popularly known as the Dies Committee; and Soviet archives from the period before World War II. She also uses manuscripts from army and navy intelligence, the State Department, the Criminal Records Division of the Department of Justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Sibley makes several major observations. First, she effectively challenges the popular myth that American officials only focused on Soviet espionage when the Cold War began. She shows that American officials were cognizant of such spying from the outset of World War II, though their knowledge was always fragmentary and their success always limited. Once the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, Moscow gained access to America's secrets, for scores of Russian technicians inspected US plants, gathered major intelligence, and groomed the entry of numerous agents. Surveillance by the FBI and military caused some Soviet representatives to return home and hindered others from conducting more espionage than they did. True, American counterintelligence had little knowledge of such rings as those led by Nathan Silvermaster and Julius Rosenberg. They did, however, investigate the Amtorg trading concern as well as operations at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory.

Success was limited, in part, according to Sibley, because the FBI bungled revelations made by turncoat agents Whittaker Chambers and Walter Krivitsky. Here she lays direct blame on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who ignored crucial data. To say that a courageous FBI was being stymied by naive pro-Soviet New Dealers is sheer myth.

Second, Sibley finds that American knowledge of Soviet spying during World War II influenced the mindset and...

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