The Cambridge spies—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who burrowed into the heart of the British establishment and betrayed its secrets to the Soviet Union have been the subjects of dozens of nonfiction books and inspired numerous novels, including some by…
Noel Field was never a very consequential spy. Unlike Alger Hiss or Larry Duggan, fellow Soviet agents in the State Department, he did not hold a policy-making position or have access to high-level information. He did his most significant damage to American and Western interests long after leaving…
Noel Field was never a very consequential spy. Unlike Alger Hiss or Larry Duggan, fellow Soviet agents in the State Department, he did not hold a policy-making position or have access to high-level information. He did his most significant damage to American and Western interests long after leaving…
Atlanta
J. Edgar Hoover may have called Herbert Aptheker “the most dangerous Communist in the United States” in 1965, but an attentive reader of Gary Murrell’s interesting but very flawed biography will come away with a picture of an ideological fanatic who squandered his talents as a historian, gave…
The Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and directors who briefly went to prison in 1950 for contempt of Congress when they refused to answer questions about Communist party affiliations from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), have, in the past few decades, become cultural…
When Martin Luther King visited the White House on June 22, 1963, President John Kennedy took him on a private walk in the Rose Garden and urged him to cut his personal and organizational ties to both Stanley Levison, a white businessman and lawyer who was a close confidant, and Jack O’Dell, a…
A front-page obituary of David Greenglass published this week in the New York Times is seriously flawed. Not only does it contain inaccurate statements of fact, it also misrepresents the views of historians about the Rosenberg atomic espionage case.
There is a story, probably apocryphal, that Franklin Roosevelt, when informed that Whittaker Chambers had named Alger and Donald Hiss as Soviet agents, responded by derisively dismissing the possibility that two products of Harvard Law School and elite East Coast law firms could possibly betray…
Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president and the Progressive party candidate for president in 1948, was once again in the news earlier this year. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick produced a multipart Showtime series and large book blaming the Cold War on his removal from the…
The ostensible subject of Jon Wiener’s account of his visits to several dozen Cold War museums, monuments, and memorials is how badly many of them convey what actually happened during that era. He reports that, by and large, they do a poor job of explaining the Cold War and of justifying the…
Few American cultural figures have suffered as steep a decline in reputation as Lillian Hellman.
Red Conspirator
Final Verdict
The World That Never Was
With the just completed exchange of spies between the United States and Russia, the media storm will undoubtedly soon disappear. Amid all the accounts of such arcana as steganography, brush passes, and dead drops, the fascination with Internet photos of a naked and sexy Anna Chapman, and tales of…
The arrests this week of ten Russian spies in the United States (another was picked up in Cyprus, released on bond, and has been missing ever since) have provoked an outpouring of news stories and commentary, not only here but abroad. The FBI’s complaint includes scenes that appear to come from a…
Defend the Realm
The Anti-Communist Manifestos
In our forthcoming book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, we identify several dozen Americans never before suspected of working for Soviet intelligence. These identifications are based on KGB archival records of its operations in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op
The Lost Spy
How the Cold War Began
Shooting Star
The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov
American Prometheus
SINCE THE END OF THE Cold War, documents released from American and Soviet archives have convinced most Americans that long-disputed spy charges against Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Lauchlin Currie, and Harry Dexter White, among others, were accurate, and that hundreds of Americans worked for Soviet…
The Lives of Agnes Smedley
Crossing the River
Family Circle
A Death in Washington
Sacred Secrets How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History by Jerrold and Leona Schecter Brassey's, 320 pp., $18.95 SINCE THE END of the Cold War a flood of revelations about Soviet espionage in America has discomfited old leftists and startled many Americans. Easy assumptions about…