The first decade of the Cold War in the United States was characterized by fears of both internal subversion and external aggression. Worry about the possibility of a massive Communist conspiracy at home merged with alarm over
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Now, in a changed world, we have the opportunity to take a new look at the Cold War. Reviews of recent works on the era reflect the title of the historian John Lewis Gaddis's book, We Now Know, and trumpet the startling revelations of newly available documents. But how complete and reliable are those new documents? Will the revelations provide new interpretations for understanding the Cold War years, or have the authors of recent works seized upon new sources to substantiate old interpretations?
The lines of the interpretive battles over the Cold War have been in place for more than 40 years. On the domestic front, the pervasive atmosphere of fear generated in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Senate Internal Security Committee, and Joe McCarthy's Senate hearings, produced bitter disagreements between those who saw innocent citizens persecuted as Communists for no more than youthful membership in the Art Students League and those who saw a government riddled with Communist agents. Who, among all those investigated, were the guilty ones? Assuming there was Communist espionage, how widespread was it? With little information except that compiled by belligerent Congressional committees and a few judicial proceedings against alleged spies, the arguments and discussions became more and more politicized as the Cold War continued.
Historians of foreign policy, meanwhile, were arguing over the origins of the Cold War. How did it happen? The United States and the Soviet Union were allies until 1945, yet by 1947 the Cold War appeared to have solidified into permanence. For years, scholars scrutinized the role of Harry Truman and his advisers; analyzed and psychoanalyzed Stalin's actions; dissected policy decisions. Most historians placed the blame squarely at the feet of an aggressive Stalin, eager to subvert democratic countries while consolidating his control behind the Iron Curtain. A minority insisted that the United States was not passive, but prepared to counter Soviet domination to promote its own global economic hegemony. In that view, both countries had to share the blame for the long Cold War.
Every student of recent American history knew that two pieces of the puzzle were missing. First, no Western researcher had access to documents from the Soviet Union, its Eastern European allies, or China -- all of which were essential to understanding Cold War foreign policy. Second, no one could penetrate the records of either the U.S. or the Soviet intelligence agencies, whose clandestine operations were key to understanding much about the Cold War. Little wonder that recent revelations from the Soviet archives, and from Soviet and American intelligence agencies, have reignited interest in the postwar decade of spies, loyalty boards, and what we now call the era of McCarthyism.
A selection of Soviet intelligence records forms the basis of The Haunted Wood, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. In 1993, taking advantage of the end of the Cold War, the president of Random House negotiated access to sections of the K.G.B. archives in the Soviet Union for a small group of scholars. Weinstein, an American historian, and Vassiliev, a former K.G.B. agent, were among them.
From the collection they saw, Weinstein and Vassiliev have constructed a narrative, from the early 1930s to the beginning of the Cold War, of intensive and pervasive Soviet intelligence operations in the United States that reached up into the American government. How did that happen? The Haunted Wood implies that the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations were not vigilant enough, although the main focus of the book is on individual American spies for the Soviet Union.
The authors amplify the Soviet material with a few additional sources. Weinstein's book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case and Vassiliev's (with A. Koreshkov) Station Chief Gold are quoted at length in the appropriate sections. The authors also use the recently opened "Venona" files from American intelligence agencies, largely to confirm the information found in the Soviet archives. For the most part, however, The Haunted Wood lets the files speak for themselves, relying on the "substantial and exclusive access" that the authors boast of. Many questions should be raised about that fact.
First, the conclusions of The Haunted Wood are based on a small portion of the Soviet archives. No one in the West has been allowed into the Soviet military-intelligence archives, and there is no assurance that Weinstein and Vassiliev even saw the most important K.G.B. files. The Haunted Wood also mixes apples and oranges when it fails to differentiate the names of agents from the names of sources found in the K.G.B. files. Both agents and sources have complicated roles to play, and both commit espionage. But an agent works under a superior, recruiting other agents and new sources. A source provides information (wittingly or unwittingly), but remains a free agent. Mixing them muddies the discussion. Jacob Golos was an agent, a Soviet "group handler" in New York; but Lauchlin Currie, an assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was probably no more than a source, occasionally a reluctant one. Weinstein and Vassiliev discuss the two men as if they played comparable roles in espionage.
Moreover, the authors cite the K.G.B. files with little explanation of how the records were organized, or even indicating whether file folders had subject headings. A citation that simply states "File 84490, Vol. I, pp. 264-71," followed by some 30 Ibid.'s, tells the reader little about the source of the information.
The authors' approach suggests that they examined the files by searching for particular names: Known spies such as Elizabeth Bentley, Martha Dodd, Klaus Fuchs, Golos, and Michael Straight, for example, are treated at length. The authors also sought information to substantiate accusations that were leveled during the Cold War at high-ranking government officials, such as the State Department's Laurence Duggan and Alger Hiss as well as Currie.
But did the authors specifically ask for the files they saw? How did they find them? The reader is left wondering.
Even more problematical to historians is the special access given to Weinstein and Vassiliev. Many questions could be answered if other scholars could examine the same records. But Russian officials have now closed the K.G.B. files to researchers, and we have no way to confirm the contents of this book.
The historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr take a different approach in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. This book is the third produced by the authors as part of Yale University Press's series on American Communism. For the earlier books, Haynes, Klehr, and their co-author (Fridrikh I. Firsov) used the Soviet files of the Comintern, the Communist International founded by Lenin. In their latest book, Haynes and Klehr turn their attention to American intelligence records.
Venona was a code name given to an American effort to read ciphered cable communications between the Soviet government and its diplomats or agents in the United States. The U.S. Army Signal Corps, a predecessor to the National Security Agency, began collecting the coded messages in 1939, but there was no attempt to break the Soviet cipher until 1943. It took three more years before the first messages could be read, but Haynes and Klehr tell us that by 1948, the cables "showed that the Soviets had recruited spies in virtually every major American government agency of military or diplomatic importance."
To Haynes and Klehr, the Venona codes are just the icing on the cake. Their sources include F.B.I. files; the deposition and memoir of Elizabeth Bentley, a disaffected spy for the Soviets; Soviet archives; and more. The codes, for example, are used to corroborate Bentley's accusations and to confirm the covert Soviet ties of Americans suspected of espionage during the Cold War -- such as the Treasury official Harry Dexter White. Information from the Venona codes thus provides the essential confirmation of the extensive espionage network revealed in other sources.
As a result, Venona is far more opinionated than The Haunted Wood. Haynes and Klehr marshal their evidence on behalf of a clear interpretation: "The Soviet Union launched an unrestrained espionage offensive against the United States," they write. This covert assault was undertaken just as President Roosevelt was seeking friendship and accommodation with the Soviet Union. It was, Haynes and Klehr say, the kind of assault that a nation directs at a temporary ally expected to become an enemy. Behind that argument lies another: A lax American government ignored Soviet espionage or discounted its effect. Haynes and Klehr's indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations is even stronger than Weinstein and Vassiliev's.
There is no question that the information gained from coded cable traffic is important and fascinating. Furthermore, unlike the K.G.B. information, the transcribed Venona cables are in the National Archives and Records Administration, and other researchers will continue to use them.
But Venona has some unique problems. First, the translation of the codes -- and the fact that many have never been completely deciphered -- presents problems for identifying who was implicated in espionage. Haynes and Klehr discuss a total of 349 individuals who had a "covert" relationship with Soviet intelligence. Roughly half of those were identified in the codes by their true names; others had pseudonyms that the code-breakers interpreted -- how well, we don't know. The names of still others remain unknown. The huge number of names in Venona may be why it paints such a frightening picture of Soviet espionage -- but the names can be confusing.
Another problem in the book is inherent in using intelligence files. Agents tend to tell their superiors what they want to hear. Haynes and Klehr cite the case of the journalist and screenwriter Walter Bernstein. In his 1996 memoir, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist, Bernstein notes a meeting or two with a Communist Party leader and a Soviet diplomat. The agent reporting on Bernstein, however, sent messages indicating that the journalist was an important source. Did the agent inflate Bernstein's contribution? Or does Bernstein play it down? Haynes and Klehr don't ask those questions. Because the authors view all covert contact with a Russian agent as a tilt toward espionage, it is up to the reader to differentiate between the dangerous and the trivial.
Finally, it should be noted that Venona and The Haunted Wood share a significant problem. While they seem to prove charges made during the Cold War, the documents cited by both books date from the New Deal years and World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union were allies. Although that relationship does not absolve the spies, it might explain the lax enforcement of security during a period when Hitler, not Stalin, was the enemy to fear. Neither book seems to consider that point.
Meanwhile, historians of foreign policy have also been probing newly opened records for answers to a multitude of questions related to seminal policy decisions. The products of that search have differed somewhat from the recent books that use intelligence files, because the foreign-policy works center on particular events, rather than broad treatments of a period.
The Cold War International History Project provides an example. Since 1991, the project has been engaged in seeking, translating, and publishing records from previously closed collections in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Cuba. Financed by private foundations and supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the project publishes the documents it finds with accompanying comments for context. Its most recent Bulletin (Issue 11, Winter 1999) contains new documents on the relationship between Poland and the Soviet Union in the early Cold War, the Berlin crisis of 1958 to 1961, the Soviets in the Korean War, and the opening of Sino-American relations.
Although valuable, the documents have not been opened in any rational manner. (Often, they have been released in conjunction with particular conferences.) Nevertheless, the material that the Cold War project has made available has greatly enhanced our understanding of critical decisions made during the long struggle. Historians have gained new insights into Soviet-Chinese-Korean relations, and relations between the U.S.S.R. and its satellites. But the documents from the Cold War project also present only a partial picture: They need the context of historical narrative. The real question is how historians will use them. For the most part, that remains to be seen.
Other new sources of information on foreign policy are already being interpreted by historians. One such interpretation is "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy 1958-1964, yet another in a list of books on the Cuban missile crisis, by the Russian historian Aleksandr Fursenko and the American historian Timothy Naftali. Many of the previous books concentrated on the crisis itself, and the United States' role in it; Fursenko and Naftali reach back in time to seek a more complicated, international story.
The real contribution of this book, however, is in the completeness and variety of its documentation. The authors were able to construct their history from previously closed documents from the Soviet Politburo and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from a diverse set of recently released collections from the U.S. State Department and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Fursenko knows his way around the Russian archival world, and Naftali has a firm grip on American sources.
Nevertheless, in some cases "One Hell of a Gamble" uses documentation that no one else will ever see, because the window of opportunity to work in the Soviet archives has been closed by Russian authorities. In those instances, historians can only trust the judgment of the authors, while remaining skeptical of their implicit assumption that no other documents will change the story.
Finally, the most recent book by the historian John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, will have a prominent place in universities across the country. Gaddis is an influential scholar, and, as in his previous work, he provides a thoughtful synthesis of the early Cold War. But We Now Know is also very much a conversation with the past -- a response to the various interpretations of Cold War international history, particularly the so-called "revisionist" assessments. For 20 years, the "orthodox" view of American foreign policy identified an aggressive, ideological Soviet Union as the sole instigator of Cold War tensions. In response, the revisionists emphasized the dual responsibility of the United States and the Soviet Union, and described American foreign policy as a search for global economic hegemony.
A proponent of "post-revisionism," Gaddis has previously discounted U.S. economic motives, but agreed that the United States shared some of the blame for the Cold War. In We Now Know, Gaddis returns to the original orthodox view.
He concedes that both the United States and the Soviet Union built empires after World War II, but says that they were very different from each other. One was invited by Western European states, the other imposed by force on Eastern European nations. At the beginning of the Cold War, Gaddis says, many people in Europe and elsewhere saw the war "as a contest of good versus evil" -- even if some historians did not. What "we know now," he concludes, is that "as long as Stalin was running the Soviet Union a cold war was unavoidable." Gaddis argues that Stalin's foreign policy cannot be separated from his domestic practices or "personal behavior." Stalin fought many cold wars -- within his country, party, and even family. Each must be taken into account when discussing his foreign policy.
Gaddis's narrative is important, and historians will discuss and debate it in the years ahead. But it should be noted that, although he cites a wide range of newly obtained documents, memoirs, and new secondary sources, his book primarily reflects the research of others. It largely uses sources, seen in the archives by other scholars, that Gaddis can now study at his own desk. Thus Gaddis talks about the importance of multi-archival research and anticipates still more revelations to come. He says the conclusion of the Cold War will bring a "new" Cold War history. But he has not written it.
It is time to move on. We need to be examining, for example, the impact of the Cold War on nationalism; looking at the diversity of ethnic groups and interests behind the Iron Curtain; re-evaluating the role of American intelligence agencies, such as the C.I.A., in the Cold War. But many of today's authors are still rehashing old debates.
Impressed by the talk of newly opened documents, recent reviewers of the books considered here have similarly tended to fall back on old arguments about the Cold War. When considering spying within the United States, most reviewers have concluded -- like Weinstein and Vassiliev, and Haynes and Klehr -- that the Cold War red-baiters had it right: There was widespread espionage after all. Reviewers have varied in the intensity of their enthusiasm, but all have agreed that the documents are definitive, especially the coded messages from the Venona project. People on the left, who remember the travesties of the Red Scare's guilt-by-association, are more cautious in their support of the documents; those on the right feel vindicated. Similarly, when considering foreign policy, revisionist reviewers have questioned some of the premises behind We Now Know and the triumphalism expressed in the book. Reviews on the right have congratulated Gaddis.
But very few reviewers -- or authors discussed here -- seem to question the premise that the American people now have definitive answers to the old questions about the Cold War. A headline over the review of The Haunted Wood in the Los Angeles Times, for example, read "Case Closed."
Before closing the case, we need to ask the kind of questions about newly opened documents that we routinely ask about the documents historians have consulted over the years: Who wrote them, and why? Are they being released -- and used -- for scholarly reasons, or political ones? How complete are they? What is missing? How can other researchers check on their validity? Otherwise, we will continue to use new documents to refight the "old" issues of the Cold War.
Anna Kasten Nelson is the Distinguished Adjunct Historian in Residence at American University. She was recently a member of the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board.
The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America,
by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (Random House, 1999)
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"One Hell of A Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy 1958-1964,
by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali (W.W. Norton, 1997)
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to buy this book]
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America,
by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr (Yale University Press, 1999)
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to buy this book]
We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History,
by John Lewis Gaddis (Oxford University Press, 1997)
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to buy this book]