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Alexander Vassiliev’s Notes on Anatoly Gorsky’s December 1948 Memo
on Compromised American Sources and Networks
October 2005
Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, coauthored The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era with Allen Weinstein. Under an agreement with the SVR (successor to the KGB), Vassiliev has access to a segment of KGB records dealing with Soviet espionage in the United States. While he could not remove copies from the archive, he could make notes. One of the documents he made notes about was a December 1948 memo written by Anatoly Gorsky. Gorsky was a senior official of the Committee of Information (KI), the agency then supervising Soviet foreign intelligence.
Portions of the notes were quoted in The Haunted Wood. The notes were made public as a part of Vassiliev v Frank Cass & Co Ltd., a 2003 libel case in the United Kingdom. David Lowenthal obtained a copy and provided it to Eduard Mark who provided a copy to John Earl Haynes in January 2005. David Lowenthal cites the document as: transcript of KGB file 43173 vol.2 (v) pp. 49-55, attached to Alexander Vassiliev to Hartwig, 1 February 2002, in Alexander Vassiliev and Frank Cass & Co Ltd, High Court of Justice Queen's Bench Division Claim No. HQ1X03222, Amended Particulars of Claim.
Images of Vassiliev’s handwritten notes can be found here:
Russian linguists Harold Leich and Ronald Bachman prepared both a transcription of Vassiliev’s handwritten notes in Russian (Vassiliev’s handwriting is not always clear) to typed Cyrillic Russian as well as a translation to Latin alphabet English.
Transcription to typed Cyrillic Russian
Translation to Latin alphabet English
In the fall of 2005, Alexander Vassiliev came across this site. Noting the difficulty that others had had in reading some of his handwritten notes on the Gorsky document, he forwarded his own transcription to typed Cyrillic Russian and translation to Latin alphabet English.
Vassiliev’s own Transcription to typed Cyrillic Russian
Vassiliev’s own Translation to Latin alphabet English
John Earl Haynes prepared an annotated version of the Bachman-Leich English translation along with comments on the significance of the document and a comparison of cover names (code names) in the memo with those in the deciphered cables of the Venona project.
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