This Week's Suggested Book
from the Ashbrook Center
(Monday, March 01, 1999)
 | | The Haunted Wood:
Soviet Espionage in America-The Stalin Era
by Allen Weinstein |
Random House
402 pages, January 1999
Hardcover, 30.00
ISBN: 0679457240
A percentage of the proceeds from your purchase of this book from Amazon.com will benefit the
Ashbrook Center.
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 Wood narrates 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 American, 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 wartime 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 understanding of Soviet espionage in the United States during the Stalin era.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Cast of Characters
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- Part One: Burden of Innocence: The New Deal Years
- 1. Communist Romantics, I: The Reluctant Laurence Duggan
- 2. Creating the Soviet Networks: Hiss, Chambers, and Early Recruits
- 3. Love and Loyalties, I: The Case of Martha Dodd
- 4. Communist Romantics, II: The Exuberant Michael Straight
- 5. Love and Loyalties, II: Elizabeth Bentley and Jacob Golos
- 6. Double Agent/Hollywood Hustler: The Case of Borris Morros
- 7. "Crook": A Soviet Agent in Congress
-
- Part Two: The Third Front: Soviet Espionage in the Second World War
- 8. Harvest Time, I: The Silvermaster Network in Wartime Eashington
- 9. Atomic Espionage: From Fuchs to the Rosenburgs
- 10. Harvest Time, II: The Perlo Group
- 11. OSS and NKGB: Penetration Agents
- 12. Harvest Time, III: Hiss, Glasser, and Warning Signs
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- Part Three: Discovery: Cold War Confrontation
- 13. Flight from Exposure, I: The Washington Sources
- 14. Flight from Exposure, II: The Atom Spies
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- Epilogue: Aftermath and Legacy
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- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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