As Vassiliev would explain years later, he discovered a list of “names and code names of agents and sources of Soviet intelligence,” entitled “Collapses in the USA,” at an early stage in his research. ² The list was composed by Anatoly Gorsky, then an officer of the MGB foreign intelligence headquarters, who was a station chief in Washington, D.C. from September 1944 to December 1945. It listed the names and cover names of 77 Americans and 15 Soviet intelligence operatives in five groups that were compromised by betrayals of their group leaders and/or couriers from 1938 to 1948. The list included (in the order of their appearance):

1. The group of “Karl,” identified as Whittaker Chambers, listing 21 persons, including  Alger Hiss and his brother Donald Hiss, Harry Dexter White and one Soviet operative, Boris Bukov;

2. The group of “Redhead,” identified as Hedwig Gumperz, a former Comintern and OGPU agent who defected to the FBI in 1947, listing six persons, including State Department official Laurence Duggan and the famous Soviet spymaster, Elizaveta Zarubina;

3. The group of “Buben,” identified as a former official of CPUSA Louis Budenz, who denounced Communism in 1945, listing six people, including one Soviet operative;

4. The group of “Sound” – “Mirna,” identified as Jacob Golos, an American Communism and a longtime agent of Soviet intelligence who died in November 1943, and Elizabeth Bentley, his assistant since 1938, who defected to the FBI in November, 1945. The group listed 43 persons, including seven Soviet operatives;

5. The group of “Berg” – “Art,” identified as New York engineer Alexander Koral and his wife Helen, who testified about their involvement in Soviet espionage in 1948, listing 16 persons, including five Soviet operatives.

Despite the list’s obvious riches, it was not cited nor even mentioned in The Haunted Wood. Its existence had remained unknown to the public until 2004, when Dr. David Lowenthal, professor emeritus of the University College of London, discovered its copy among the papers of his late brother, the lawyer, author, filmmaker and a longtime Alger Hiss defender John Lowenthal. In early 2002, the copy of the list was entered by Vassiliev as evidence that he had seen the name of Alger Hiss in the clear, in the course of a libel case against John Lowenthal’s London publisher, Frank Cass & Co Ltd. That libel case centered around Alexander Vassiliev’s assertion that he had seen the name of Alger Hiss written in the clear in the KGB intelligence files released to him in 1994-1995.

Dr. David Lowenthal shared his finding with Dr. Eduard Mark, a historian with the United States Air Force (now deceased), who, in turn, brought it to the attention of Dr. John Earl Haynes at the Library of Congress, who arranged for its transliteration and translation, which in early 2005 was posted on H-HOAC (an online forum for discussing the history of American Communism), which was followed by a heated discussion.

The copy of the Vassiliev’s notes sent by Dr. David Lowenthal to Dr. Eduard Mark, was apparently deficient –with a few lines missing on top of the first page. Following my request, Dr. Lowenthal kindly re-scanned the copy in his position. The new scan displayed the missing lines, which included the title on top: “Report of Anatoly Gorsky to Savchenko S.R., 23 December, (19)49.” The list with Vassiliev’s notation in its bottom, “Dec. 1948,” was likely an attachment to the December 23, 1949 report.

In late 2005, Vassiliev saw the Gorsky list posted on Dr. John Earl Haynes’s website. Their subsequent contact eventually resulted in the second collaborative book based on Vassiliev’s notes, SPIES: The Rise and Fall of KGB in America (2009), which Vassiliev co-authored with Haynes and the latter’s longtime coauthor, historian Harvey Klehr. ³ In the spring of 2009, Vassiliev’s notebooks were posted on the web site of the Woodrow Wilson Center and subsequently deposited at the Library of Congress. The Gorsky List is part of Vassiliev’s so-called Black Notebook, posted at WWC website and itself part of Alexander Vassiliev Papers at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. ⁴

Click here to see my discussion of the Gorsky list

Among the information from the Soviet military attaché’s files which Guzenko had secreted was the cover name of Ignacy Samuel Witczak – a longtime GRU “illegal” agent residing in Los Angeles on a false Canadian passport. An FBI investigation revealed that Witczak worked as an instructor at the University of Southern California and probably “set up clandestine GRU networks along the West Coast.” In late fall 1945, “Witczak” went on a trip, and agents from the FBI Los Angeles office followed him all the way to New York, where the tail was turned over to agents from the New York “Soviet squad.” This office put “fifty or sixty men out to watch his logical departure places.” However, “Witczak” had already managed to catch a train back to Los Angeles, where he would play a cat-and-mouse game with the Bureau’s West Coast agents for the next couple of months before he finally managed to disappear.

A few years later, the FBI was able to trace some of “Witczak”’s West Coast operations; having located people in California who had worked for the Soviet “illegal,” the agents were able to obtain confessions from some of them. However, the FBI had never learned the real name of “Witczak” – nor the true scale and purpose of his activities. ¹

Click here to read how two American historians, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, turned “Witczak” into an “agent-sleeper.”

Witczak’s cover was blown in Russia in early 1990s, when his real name was revealed to be Zalman Vulfovich Litvin in publications written by GRU brass. ²

Alger Hiss at HUAC, August 1948

A landmark American criminal case, the two trials of Alger Hiss are generally considered among the most important legal proceedings in American history – and one of the most controversial spy stories of the Cold War. This early Cold War case set the stage for the McCarthy era, put liberal Democrats on the defensive to such an extent that the case continued to have an impact on American foreign policy for many decades to come, and marked the beginning of the modern conservative intellectual and political movement. It also catapulted to political stardom an obscure freshman Congressman from California named Richard Nixon.

In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Communist and Time-Life editor, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Alger Hiss – a former New Deal lawyer and diplomat who had been one of the architects of the United Nations in 1945 and was currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – had been part of the Communist underground in the 1930s. Hiss denied the charges and sued Chambers for libel. Chambers responded by escalating the charges. On November 4, 1948, Chambers changed his story and claimed that Hiss had been not only a Communist but also a Soviet spy. To back up his allegations, on November 17, 1948 Chambers produced physical evidence – a collection of copies or summaries of U.S. government documents (later called the “Baltimore Documents“), which he claimed he had received from Alger Hiss for transmission to the Soviet Union. Two weeks later, Chambers dropped a public bombshell when he led HUAC investigators to his Maryland farm and, from a hollowed-out pumpkin, pulled out five rolls of 35mm film (later called the “Pumpkin Papers“). He claimed that the film contained photographs of documents implicating Hiss and others in an espionage conspiracy.

A federal grand jury investigated Chambers’s charges – and indicted Hiss for perjury when he denied them. The formal charge was that Hiss had lied when he told the grand jury that he had neither seen Chambers nor passed documents to him in the first months of 1938. ¹ In the first perjury trial, which lasted from May 31 to July 8, 1949, the jury failed to reach a verdict, but Hiss was convicted on January 25, 1950, after a second trial. He was sentenced to a five-year prison term – and served almost four years (1951-1954) in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary on a charge which subsequent court rulings in other cases showed had been illegally obtained and was thus not a federal offense. ² Paroled in 1954, Hiss maintained his innocence – and presented his case in a 1957 book, In the Court of Public Opinion. Earlier, Chambers presented his version of the case in his autobiography, Witness (1952).

The public debate over Hiss’s guilt or innocence and Chambers’s veracity, as well as over the conduct of the Hiss perjury trials, has continued for more than half a century. Chambers’s story, Hiss’s indictment, the so-called “evidence box” and the conduct of the perjury trials all contained enough inconsistencies and ambiguities to leave a shadow of doubt hanging over the case for decades. The Hiss Case has become the subject of many books and magazine articles and a few film documentaries – with two irreconcilable accounts of the Hiss-Chambers conflict emerging. The believers in Hiss’s innocence saw Chambers as a liar and the case as an attempt to discredit the New Deal and social reform. The believers in Hiss’s guilt emphasized the danger of the Communist threat to the United States. ³

Until the 1970s, the contents of the evidence box were mostly limited to Chambers’s story and the court evidence. However, during the 1970s, research possibilities significantly expanded with the release of the FBI Hiss records, as well as with scholarly use of the files of the Hiss defense attorneys. Both sets of records served as the basis for a 1978 book, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, by Allen Weinstein, who was then a professor of history at Smith College. Weinstein’s account of Hiss’s guilt has been cited by many historians as the most important, thorough and convincing book on the Hiss-Chambers case. ⁴ Most American historians conceded to Weinstein the argument that Alger Hiss was part of an underground Communist cell in the 1930s and that he passed information to the Soviet Union, via Whittaker Chambers, from late 1936 until early 1938. However, the skeptics maintained that the case would remain open until the Russian archives disgorged incontrovertible proof that Hiss was or was not a knowing Soviet agent.

Indeed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, one of the first goals of American historians was to gain access to Moscow archives and settle the question. The earliest effort concentrated on finding corroboration of Chambers’s evidence in the records of the Comintern and the Communist parties of the USA and the USSR. Although not a single document with Hiss’s name or that of his accuser, Chambers, has ever been produced from these records by American scholars, miscellaneous records discovered in the 1990s were used as sources for several books, which in turn have been declared to corroborate Chambers’s veracity and prove Hiss’s guilt. ⁵

The second effort grew out of a 1992 Crown Publishing Group deal that provided the company with exclusive world rights to publish several books based on KGB foreign intelligence records. Since December 1991, these records have been in the custody of a KGB successor agency, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, commonly known as the SVR. ⁶ On the U.S. side of the story, the parties in the project were American author Allen Weinstein and a former KGB foreign intelligence officer and journalist named Alexander Vassiliev. Vassiliev was to research the records on site at the SVR press bureau. He was authorized to make notes and a few photocopies and to write draft chapters, which were then to go through the declassification process.  Weinstein was to rely on his Russian co-author’s notes – and judgment. Vassiliev’s handwritten notes and subsequent draft chapters would become the basis of their collaborative book, The Haunted Wood, published in 1999. ⁷ Although the book leaves the impression that Hiss was repeatedly mentioned in Soviet-era KGB documents, upon closer scrutiny we find that his name appears in only a few 1936 and 1938 reports cited from two circumstantially related files – both rather confusing and, in legal terms, amounting to hearsay. Most puzzling is the fact that Hiss’s name did not appear in any of the discussions cited in the book regarding the setbacks suffered by Soviet intelligence in the latter part of the 1940s.

Until the mid-1990s, American historians accepted Chambers’s assertions that Hiss’s associations with the Soviets were confined to the brief period from 1937 through early 1938. However, with the release in 1995-1996 by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of the so-called “Venona documents” – Soviet World War II-period intelligence cables partially decrypted in the course of the Venona operation – students of the case claimed that Hiss may have continued his presumed espionage into the World War II years. This conclusion was reached on the basis of a single KGB decrypted cable, dated March 30, 1945, which discussed an agent of the KGB’s “military neighbors” with the cover name “Ales,” who attended the Yalta Conference and then went to Moscow on a brief visit, where he was “thanked” by a high Soviet official. The NSA released its English translation of the cable in 1996, with a footnote saying that Ales was “probably Alger Hiss.” ⁸

The Haunted Wood quoted from three more early 1945 documents which discussed “Ales” as a Soviet source at the U.S. Department of State, simply substituting Hiss’s name in brackets for “Ales.” As it turned out, Weinstein identified “Ales” as Hiss against his Russian co-author’s protests. “I never saw a document where Hiss would be called Ales or Ales may be called Hiss. I made a point of that to Allen,” Vassiliev said in a 2000 interview. ⁹

With the arrival of the early 2000s, the body of documentation on the Hiss case expanded significantly, this time on the American side, with the unsealing of two important archival collections: the records of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) ¹⁰ and the grand jury minutes from the Hiss case – the first grand jury transcripts ever released principally because of their historical importance. ¹¹ Although almost 10 years have passed since the release of the Hiss case grand jury transcripts, this significant repository of undisclosed information about the case still has not been fully assessed by students of the case.

Since early 2005, the corpus of documentation on the Hiss case has expanded further, with the appearance of the notes on KGB documents that Alexander Vassiliev had made for Allen Weinstein. Vassiliev’s notes first came to light in 2002, during his libel suit against the late John Lowenthal, a lawyer, writer and long-time Hiss defender. In July 2001, Vassiliev brought a libel suit against Lowenthal’s London publisher, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., in connection with John Lowenthal’s article, “Venona and Alger Hiss,” ¹² Early in 2002, and later in the course of pre-trial proceedings, Vassiliev entered some of his notes as trial evidence – to prove that he had seen the name “Alger Hiss” written in KGB intelligence files that he had researched. Later, copies of some of these notes would be discovered by John Lowenthal’s brother, David Lowenthal, among the papers of his late brother. Through David Lowenthal’s efforts, copies of Vassiliev’s notes were added to the corpus of documentation on the Alger Hiss case.

Furthermore, Vassiliev not only made notes and verbatim transcripts of documents but went on to prepare the rough draft of a book, based upon his understanding of the KGB documents he had read. Vassiliev’s draft chapters were to be translated into English for the use of his co-author, Allen Weinstein. Vassiliev’s book-length discussion of the files he had seen, along with his notes on the documents he had read, have limitations, but nonetheless provide a valuable glimpse into the Soviet record of Stalin-era espionage.

As we now know, Vassiliev contacted historian John Earl Haynes in 2005 – inspiring Haynes and his frequent co-author, Harvey Klehr, to rewrite the story of KGB espionage in America during the Stalin era. Their new book was published by Yale University Press in spring 2009. Entitled Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, the 704-page tome [14. By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, Yale University Press, 2009.]] has been presented as the final word on the Hiss case. ¹³ However, for any serious historian, the controversy of more than half a century will not be settled until a definitive first-hand record is released from SVR or GRU archives.

Click here for a 2009 Chambers Primer

Click here for a glimpse into the documentation on Chambers’s underground years.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

This landmark American early Cold War espionage case involving the “theft of the atomic bomb” ended in death sentences for Julius Rosenberg, a New York electrical engineer, and his wife Ethel, the mother of two young children. Branded “the crime of the century,” the case resulted in a decades-long controversy surrounding the conduct of the trial, the trial evidence and the appropriateness of the sentences, as well as the very question of whether Julius Rosenberg actually did pass information to the Soviets.

In July 1950, Julius Rosenberg was arrested in New York on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage; after he refused to plead guilty, his wife, Ethel, was arrested in August 1950, as a means of putting pressure on her husband to confess. In the trial that followed in March 1951, the government charged that in 1944 and 1945 the Rosenbergs had recruited Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, to pass on information from the U.S. atomic bomb installation at Los Alamos, where he worked as a mechanic in one of the laboratories. The key evidence, which sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, came from Greenglass and his wife Ruth. Both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were found guilty, and their death sentences were carried out despite many court appeals and pleas for executive clemency. Electrocuted on June 19, 1953, the Rosenbergs became the first civilians in U.S. history to be executed for espionage.

The controversy around Julius Rosenberg’s providing information to the Soviets during World War II was settled with the release in the 1990s and afterwards of some wartime Soviet intelligence communiqués — cables partially decrypted in the course of the Venona operation, and records released in the early 1990s for a Russian-American collaborative book project that became The Haunted Wood (1999), by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. These records, along with oral history evidence from Alexander Feklissov, ¹ Julius Rosenberg’s case officer in 1944-1945, confirmed that Rosenberg was, in fact, a recruiter and courier for a small group of engineers (his former classmates and friends), who provided the Russians with up-to-date information on American developments in electrical and radio engineering, as well as aviation and avionics. However, the same records have provided no corroboration of Ethel Rosenberg’s participation in espionage, with the exception of some indication that she “knew” about her husband’s activities.

As far as the “crime of the century” is concerned, the release in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s of the once top-secret documents pertaining to the Soviet atomic project ² has relegated the information provided by mechanic David Greenglass to a minor contribution (mostly, it seems, corroborating the information provided by professional physicists).

These documents revealed that the first Soviet atomic device, exploded on August 23, 1949, was indeed a replica of the American plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki – and that the details of the American bomb’s production were provided to the Soviets by two physicists inside Los Alamos, “Charles” and “Mlad.” These code names were identified by Venona translators as those of Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, respectively. Fuchs was a German-born nuclear physicist who provided information to the Soviet intelligence services — first in Great Britain, then as a British participant in the American atomic bomb project, and then again in London between 1947 and 1949. In September 1949, Fuchs was identified by the FBI as “Charles” from a fragment of a cable decrypted in the course of the Venona operation. During questioning by British MI5, he confessed to passing on information to the Soviets – and, in February 1950, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison, of which he would serve nine. Theodore Hall was a 19-year-old, Harvard-educated nuclear physicist who in late 1944 volunteered information to Soviet foreign intelligence representatives in New York. He cooperated with the Soviets until the fall of 1945 and again in 1949 and early 1950. According to the official history of the Venona operation, ³ the fragments of the cables from the later part of 1944 mentioning Hall’s name and the recruitment of “Mlad” were decrypted “some time in 1949-1950″ — and it did not take the FBI much time to match the real name with the code name. In early 1951, the FBI opened an investigation — and Hall was repeatedly questioned; however, he did not confess, and no charges were brought against him. Much later, Theodore Hall’s wife, Joan, would write in a letter to a friend, describing the evening of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg execution: “We were painfully aware that there, but for some inexplicable grace, went we. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg could so easily have been Ted and Joan. … And Ted would have been forced to claim innocence just as they did.” ⁴ These developments have dramatically reduced the significance of David Greenglass’s espionage, and, correspondingly, of Julius Rosenberg’s complicity in “the crime of the century” — the end of the American monopoly of the atomic bomb.

Furthermore, it has turned out that the conviction and execution of Ethel Rosenberg was based on perjured testimony. This revelation came from none other than the Greenglasses themselves — first, from David Greenglass’s interviews with New York Times writer Sam Roberts, ⁵ and next, from the Rosenberg case grand jury transcripts (released in October 2008), which formed the basis of the charges against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In a series of interviews with Sam Roberts in the late 1990s, David Greenglass recanted his testimony that Ethel Rosenberg had typed the notes on atomic bomb design that he had brought to New York from Los Alamos. The released grand jury transcripts revealed that Ruth Greenglass (with whom the charge, according to David Greenglass, had originated) did not tell the grand jurors that she had seen Ethel Rosenberg type her brother’s notes. In fact, Ruth said that she herself copied the information in longhand. This claim is consistent with oral evidence from Alexander Feklissov, Julius Rosenberg’s handler in 1944 and 1945, who told me on the record that David Greenglass’s notes were “in handwriting” (he “vividly remembered” this), and that “Ethel did not type anything.”

Watch for alerts on this website to read more about:

• What Alexander Feklissov said about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg that did not get into his book
• Some of my research on the Rosenberg case from early 1990s

In early 1933, following Hitler’s accession to power in Germany, the Comintern instructed all Communist parties to “prepare to go underground.” Initially, the American Party’s efforts were limited to introducing a small “group system,” which provided for the existence of both open and secret party units. ⁵ By November 1934, each CP USA district had established a “special apparatus” for sending confidential communications ⁶, and by early 1935 this CP USA special apparatus appeared to be in place. ⁷ This was confirmed by an early 1939 “Brief Report on Conspiratorial Apparatus C.P. U.S.A.,” written in Moscow by one Raymond Baker, who had been head of the CP USA special apparatus since 1938. Among the functions of this apparatus, the report listed organizing “the system of communications” between the Party Central Committee and Party organizations in the states; the “safeguarding of vital documents of the Central Committee;” the first use of “radio communications, simple reproducing machines, electrical instruments for tracing enemies” – and “arranging for special income for this work.” ⁸

Pumpkins, Chambers Farm, 1948

The second batch of material evidence in the Alger Hiss perjury trials, consisting of two strips of developed film and three undeveloped rolls that Whittaker Chambers had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin at his farm in Westminster, MD. On December 2, 1948, Chambers handed over the contents of the pumpkin to HUAC investigators to support his claim that Hiss had engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. HUAC leaked to the press some of the Pumpkin Papers from the developed film, containing photos of State Department documents – and claimed that Hiss was their likely source.

Although the Pumpkin Papers were presented to the public at the time as evidence of the greatest conspiracy in the history of the nation, only the two developed strips of film were introduced at the Hiss perjury trials. One of the undeveloped rolls later turned out to be completely blank, while the two others proved to contain photos of Navy  Department documents, which, far from being highly sensitive, were in fact accessible to the public at the U.S. Bureau of Standards library.

In the course of pre-trial depositions in Baltimore, MD, Chambers produced what would become known as the Baltimore documents. On December 2, 1948, he produced what became known as the Pumpkin Papers. This physical evidence shifted the argument in the case from the issue of whether Hiss had been a Communist in the 1930s, and whether he had known Chambers longer and better than he admitted, to the question of whether Hiss had committed espionage. However, due to the statute of limitations, Hiss could not be prosecuted on espionage charges. Therefore, on December 15, 1948, a federal grand jury in New York indicted him on two counts of perjury: first, that he was lying when he testified before the grand jury that he had never given any documents to Whittaker Chambers; and, second, that he was lying when he claimed he had never seen Chambers after January 1, 1937.

The first perjury trial opened on May 31, 1949 and ended on July 8, 1949 with a hung jury. The second trial began on November 17, 1949 and ended on January 21, 1950 with a guilty verdict. Hiss was sentenced to five years of imprisonment and served 44 months in the Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

Baltimore Documents Envelope

The name given to the documents produced by Whittaker Chambers, which became physical evidence in the Alger Hiss perjury trials. After Chambers charged Hiss with belonging to the Communist Party in the 1930s, Hiss sued Chambers for libel. On November 17, 1948, in the course of pre-trial depositions in Baltimore, MD, Chambers produced a collection of typed copies – or in some cases summaries – of U.S government documents, which he claimed he had stashed away as a “life preserver” from January to mid-April 1938, while planning his defection from the Communist cause. Most of the Baltimore Documents, as they are commonly known, were typed copies of State Department documents, which Chambers claimed he had received from Alger Hiss for transmission to the Soviet Union. Chambers also produced four short summaries of State Department cables, or fragments thereof, in Alger Hiss’s handwriting.  Click here for more.

Following this investigation, the United States refused to recognize Mr. Rubens-Robinson as an American citizen but insisted on its right to defend the interests of his wife, who was identified as an American citizen named Ruth Marie Boerger. The U.S. continued to press the Soviets for information regarding Mrs. Rubens’s fate – and then, for the right to hold a prison interview with her. When the interview was finally granted on February 10, 1938, Mrs. Rubens refused American assistance. On June 9, 1939, Ruth Marie Rubens was sentenced by a Soviet court to 18 months in jail, which by that time she had already served. On June 19, she visited the U.S. Embassy and declared that she did not intend to return to the United States. On October 10, 1939, Ruth Marie Rubens took Soviet citizenship and relocated to Kiev, which became her permanent residence. Her husband was convicted of espionage and sentenced to “10 years without the right to correspondence,” which in those years was often equivalent to a death sentence. We now know that Rubens-Robinson was an officer of the Soviet military intelligence named Arnold Adamovich Ikal. [[1. Sovetsko-Amerikanskie otnoshenija: Gody nepriznanija, 1934-1939. Dokumenty. Moskva: Mezhdunarodnyi fond "Demokratija", 2002, s. 600. ( Soviet-American Relations: The Years of Non-Recognition, 1934-1939. Moscow: International Foundation “Democracy,” 2003, p. 600); FRUS. Soviet Union, 1933-1939, p. 911.]