Return to Responses, Reflections and Occasional Papers

Return to Vassiliev’s Notes on Gorsky Index Page

Comments on Vassiliev’s notes on Gorsky’s “Failures in the U.S.A. (1938-48)”

October 2005

by John Earl Haynes

The Gorsky memo, “Failures in the U.S.A. (1938-48),” is of value for several reasons. First, just the sheer volume of Soviet sources identified is impressive. Second, it allows the identification of a number of cover names found in the deciphered Venona messages that could not be connected to real names by NSA/FBI analysts. Third, it reinforces the view that Soviet espionage in the United States took a heavy blow immediately after World War II with the defection of Bentley and what followed. Fourth, while the credibility of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley has been amply corroborated by other evidence, and the Gorsky memo adds just an additional bit, that of Louis Budenz and Hede Massing also had corroboration but not as ample; here the Gorsky memo, consequently, is of greater weight.

One point to be kept in mind: as the title above states, these are Alexander Vassiliev’s notes on Gorsky’s memo entitled “Failures in the U.S.A. (1938-48).” The original is still held in a closed archive and Vassiliev’s notes are all that is available. Obviously, one would prefer to have the original, but that option is not at present available. Historians must work with what is available, not with what one would like to be available. Still, that these are notes rather than the original adds the possibility of error by way of a garble or a missed or omitted item. Additionally Vassiliev’s notes in are handwritten in Russian and the handwriting is not always clear.

As background, after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Intelligence Service (SVR), successor to the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB, shaken by the end of the Soviet order and in need of cash, made a deal with Western publishers to partner a Western author and a Russian with a KGB background to write on certain topics. The Russian coauthor was able to examine the KGB’s archives to extract selected documents on specified topics. The KGB veterans’ association received a generous payment from the publishers. Once the SVR regained its footing in the new Russian state in the mid-1990s, it ended the arrangement and closed the small window that had opened on the KGB archive. Nonetheless, from the earlier opening, limited as it was, four books emerged. One of these was The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era authored by the American historian Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer.^[1]

Under the agreement with the SVR, 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. The information Vassiliev extracted from the KGB archive was cited and quoted in The Haunted Wood. However, not all of Vassiliev’s notes were used. The Gorsky memo, under discussion here, was not quoted or cited, although portions of the material on the same page of Vassiliev’s handwritten notes reproduced here, material preceding the start of Gorsky’s memo, was quoted in The Haunted Wood.^[2] Vassiliev’s notes on Gorsky’s memo 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.^[3] 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. David Lowenthal makes this statement about the notes themselves:

Vassiliev's handwritten pages give no hint of when he redacted the Gorski Memo from the KGB files. His witness statement of 14 July 2002 reads: "I started researching the files in January or February of 1994 ... with the operational correspondence files which contain letters and cables between the Centre (Moscow) and stations in other countries covering all operational matters, as well as copies of documents written in the Centre for internal correspondence.... In 1995 it became more difficult for me to obtain files... In early 1996 I was denied access to the files." That year he left Moscow for London. "At an early stage of my research I found a list of real names and code-names of many American agents composed by a high-ranking intelligence officer Anatoly Gorsky in December, 1948." He later altered that to "a list of names and code-names of American agents AND SOURCES ... prepared by Soviet operatives" and "composed in connection with [Elizabeth] Bentley's defection", although that had taken place three years previously. Vassiliev's 3-page handwritten transcription of the Gorsky Memo was sent to the Court on 1 February 2002, identified as pp. 49-55 of "operational correspondence file 43173 vol.2(v), which contains letters, cables, memos, etc. written in the 1940s." The first page also includes Vassiliev extracts from pages 46, 47, and 48 of that file. These memoranda, reproduced in translation at the start of the document as posted here, are unrelated to the Gorsky Memo, but crucial for an understanding of its later dissemination, as shown below.

Just how - and hence how accurately - the Gorsky document was transcribed is uncertain. Vassiliev said (16 Apr 2002) he "made summaries or verbatim transcriptions from the [KGB] files in his note-books which he kept at home," but he did not say whether these transcriptions had done so at the press bureau or at home. If done at the press bureau, if would have been difficult, not to say dangerous, to remove his notes from the bureau premises without submitting them for declassification. If done at home from rough notes or memory, his transcriptions must have been subject to considerable error. Moreover, the Gorsky Memo given to the High Court and reproduced in this list is almost certainly not from Vassiliev's original notebook but a later transcription. "My notebook file is in Russia because I didn't think I could smuggle them through the customs. So I put all my stuff on floppy discs. What I smuggled was floppy discs." Thus we don't have the Gorsky memo, only what Vassiliev extracted. Nor do we have even that at first hand. As noted in my 5 January H-DIPLO posting, it is unclear how he acquired and transcribed what he presented. His handwritten pages could be (a) original notes smuggled out in that form, (b) a transcription from the smuggled disks, (c) edited or altered versions of the originals or the retranscriptions. I think (b) ....^[4]

However, Alexander Vassiliev, after reading the comment above on the web, stated that Mr. Lowenthal had misunderstood his comments. He also said the remark attributed to him, “My notebook file is in Russia because I didn't think I could smuggle them through the customs. So I put all my stuff on floppy discs. What I smuggled was floppy discs,” was not stated at the trial but in 1999. Vassiliev explained that he had only brought out his disks when he fled Moscow in 1996 but had arranged for the transfer of his original notebooks from Moscow to London by the time of libel trial. Consequently, the Gorsky memo notes were photocopies taken from his original notebooks, not a transcription from his disks or a reconstruction of any sort.^[5]

In terms of the Gorsky memo, it is necessary to remember that it is dated December 1948. In the autumn of 1947 the Soviet government reorganized its foreign intelligence agencies. What historians usually refer to as the KGB (and its institutional predecessors MVD, MGB, NKGB, NKVD, OGPU, GPU, Cheka) was then the foreign intelligence directorate of the MGB, Ministry of State Security.^[6] In the fall of 1947 the MGB foreign intelligence directorate was combined with the foreign intelligence arm of Soviet military intelligence (GRU, Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye or Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff) to form an entirely new combined agency, the Committee of Information or KI. The MGB remained as a separate agency but with only domestic responsibilities. The new KI not only combined the human intelligence arms of the former MGB and GRU, it also combined the MGB’s Fifth (cipher) Directorate with the GRU’s cipher arm to form the Seventh Department of the KI.

The KI was not, however, a happy merger. The Soviet military argued strongly that it needed a dedicated foreign military intelligence agency as well as a combat and battlefield intelligence arm. In the summer of 1948 the military personnel in KI were returned to the Soviet military to reconstitute a foreign military intelligence arm of the GRU but under guidelines to stick strictly to military matters. KI sections dealing with the new Soviet dominated Eastern European regimes as well as Soviet emigres were returned to the MGB in late 1948. Finally, in 1951 the KI’s foreign intelligence functions were returned to the MGB, and the latter evolved into the KGB in 1954. (One should also note that briefly in the late 1930s there was a similar quasi-merger when in 1937 the foreign intelligence arm of the GRU was transferred from Commissariat of Defense to Commissariat of Internal affairs, NKVD, which, of course already had a foreign intelligence arm. Just as in 1948, the Red Army succeeded in getting its the foreign intelligence arm back, but in the process losing some of its officers, sources, and networks to the increasingly powerful NKVD, later the KGB. Even earlier, in 1919-1921, Red Army military intelligence lost its autonomy to the KGB’s predecessor, the Cheka, for a time.^[7])

The point here is that at the time Gorsky wrote this memo Soviet intelligence organization was in flux. The Gorsky memo is a Committee of Information, KI, memo, a memo of an agency that had been created with a mandate of combine and coordinating all Soviet intelligence and briefly did control both GRU and what became the KGB.

The memo’s author, Anatoly Veniaminovich Gorsky, joined the predecessor to the KGB in 1928 and worked in its internal political police section until he transferred to foreign intelligence in 1936. He became deputy chief of the KGB’s station in London in 1936 and chief in 1940. In this position he managed the “Cambridge Five” and the initial KGB penetration of the British atomic bomb project. He returned to the USSR in 1944 for work at the central KGB headquarters but was then hastily sent to Washington to become chief of the KGB station in the U.S. after the sudden recall of Vasily Zubilin. In the U.S. Gorsky, using the name Anatoly Gromov, officially held a position as a senior Soviet diplomat at the Soviet embassy in Washington. He returned to Moscow in 1947 to take a supervisory position in foreign intelligence and in 1953 shifted to internal security work. He attained the rank of colonel and was awarded the Orders of the Red Banner, the Red Banner of Labor, Badge of Honor, and the Red Star.

Vassiliev’s notes do not state the context for Gorsky preparing this memo in late 1948, and the context might not have been apparent from the memo itself. The subject, however, is clear. The five lists of groups are preceded with the title “Failures in the U.S.A. (1938-48),” and there is no doubt that Soviet espionage in the United States took sever blows from a series of defections. The groups are not listings of espionage networks, although several networks such as the Silvermaster and Perlo apparatuses managed by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers’ own network are encompassed. Rather, the groups are lists of Americans who consciously cooperated with Soviet intelligence as well as the Soviet intelligence officers who worked with them who were compromised or likely compromised by a defector (Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, and Hede Massing) or an agent who broke under FBI interrogation (Alexander Koral).

It should be noted that there would be no reason for Gorsky to list persons who were innocent contacts, unconscious sources, or somehow innocently cooperated with Soviet intelligence as compromised or part of a collapsed network. Chambers, Budenz, Bentley and Massing in their work and social life met hundreds of persons who might innocently provide some information or assistance. Anatoly Gorsky would have been unconcerned about now a defection would have affected such innocent contacts if he even knew of them at all.

The sensitivity of Soviet intelligence for its sources who had been compromised by a defection is also brought home by the note for Laurence Duggan in Redhead’s group that he had killed himself. The KGB had lost contact with Duggan in 1945 when many of its officers were withdrawn in the wake of Bentley’s defection. However, in 1948 the KGB station in the U.S. attempted to revive Duggan and approached him initially in July but received a brush-off. (To be precise, it was then the New York KI station.) What the KGB did not know at that time, but learned after his death, was that Hede Massing in 1947 had identified Duggan to the FBI as one of her mid-30s recruits in Washington. The FBI then interviewed Duggan on December 11, 1948. Duggan denied that he had been a spy but gave a confused statement in which he admitted he had been approached about spying for the Soviets but could not explain why he had not informed his State Department superiors of the approach. Then on December 15th the KGB again approached Duggan and attempted to reopen contact. He killed himself five days later. Immediately, the American media, Edward R. Murrow of CBS in particular, blamed his death on FBI harassment and ant-Communist smears of a totally innocent man, but the KGB knew better. Duggan had been compromised, and the stress of the KGB’s attempt to reopen contact with him when he was also under FBI pressure may have been too much for him. Gorsky’s noting Duggan’s suicide underlined the sensitivity the KGB needed to exercise in dealing with a source who had been or might have been compromised by a defector.^[8]

All of the lists include at least one “cadre colleague,” a Soviet intelligence officer who had been compromised by the defector.^[9] For “Buben’s Group,” for example, it is the KGB officer Gregory Rabinovich. “Buben’s Group,” one should note, is not Louis Budenz’s (Buben’s) espionage apparatus. In the late 1930s Rabinovich approached Budenz, then a senior CPUSA official in Chicago, to assist him in recruiting Communists for infiltration into the American Trotskyist movement. Budenz did as requested but he was largely a recruiter and did not “run” an anti-Trotsky infiltration apparatus. Those he recruited were, in fact, widely dispersed: for example Sylvia Caldwell was sent to New York to infiltrate the headquarters of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party while the KGB assigned Robert Menaker to anti-Trotsky work in Mexico and South America. “Buben’s Group,” then, is not a listing of members of a network but rather a list of those known to Budenz to have assisted Soviet espionage and who, consequently, might have been compromised when Budenz broke with the CPUSA in 1945 and cooperated with the FBI.

Notice also that Gorsky in listing those compromised goes back to defections in the late 1930s (Chambers in 1938 and Hede Massing then or soon after) although it would not be until the late 1940s that they provided a full account to American authorities. Consequently, several of the lists contain names of persons who Gorsky thought were known to these late 1930s defectors as having assisted Soviet intelligence then without regard to their subsequent activities and one, Peter MacLean in Karl/Chambers’ group, is listed as having been out of contact with Soviet intelligence since 1937.

“Karl’s Group” consists of Soviet sources Gorsky believed were known to Whittaker Chambers in the mid-1930s. Chambers did not precisely “defect” in the spring of 1938 but rather dropped out. He provided some limited information to American authorities in the fall of 1939 and similar limited information in FBI interviews in the early 1940s. But it was not until late 1948 that he provided a comprehensive accounting of his role in Soviet espionage to American authorities. Chambers’ did not in the mid-1930s know to which Soviet intelligence agency his network reported. It was only in 1939 when he met Walter Krivitsky, a senior defecting KGB officer who had earlier been a GRU officer, that he learned that his network reported to the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. That Chambers’ network was GRU was later confirmed in the late 1940s by Hede Massing, a KGB defector. Massing had learned of Chambers’ GRU network when a member of Chambers’s network unknowingly attempted to recruit one of her KGB sources.

Chambers’ dropping out of Soviet service in 1938 broke-up the network he had worked with. Fearing that Chambers’ might go to U.S. authorities, Joseph Peters, the chief of the CPUSA underground, with whom Chambers had worked closely, was replaced as head of the CPUSA covert apparatus and kept out of clandestine work for several years. Boris Bykov, the GRU officer to whom Chambers’ reported, was withdrawn from the United States. It would have been common sense trade craft to cut contact with others members of Chambers’ network for a time after telling them to lay low and do nothing until contacted. Further complicating the picture was the then ongoing Stalin purge of his security apparatus that disrupted both GRU and KGB operations in the U.S. in the late 1930s.

However, the cut off of contact did not need to be permanent given the weakness of American counter-intelligence in the 1930s and once the lack of fallout of Chambers’ defection was clear: there was no serious government follow-up of even the limited information he provided in the fall of 1939. Subsequent information from Soviet sources and Venona indicates that some of the members of Chambers’ network were revived individually by the KGB in the early 1940s (White, Silverman, Glasser, for example) while others resumed GRU contact. (By that time the KGB had displaced the GRU as the chief Soviet espionage agency operating in the U.S., although the GRU retained a sizable presence and some high-level sources.) Some were probably never revived if they were no longer employed in areas of interest to Soviet intelligence or were suspected of having become ideologically disillusioned.

The Russian historian Svetlana Chervonnaya assailed the Gorsky memo on the grounds that:

... the prominent presence of a ‘Karl’s group’ on an OGPU-NKVD ‘political list’ is a nonsense!

No OGPU-NKGB-NKVD-MGB-KGB-SVR operative - no matter how important - would ever know the operational code names of agents – not to say of whole networks – of their 'neighbors' – e.g. REGISTRUP-RAZVEDUPR-GRU (and vice versa). Even in those rather rare cases when agents of ‘the military neighbors’ were transferred under NKVD control (like Klaus Fuchs in 1944), they would be assigned a totally new code name (thus Fuchs at that point became REST).

Moreover, due to the rigid compartmentalization even within the same service, the operatives on one line (like atomic or scientific-technical – the so-called “X-line”) would not know even the agents – let alone their code names – who worked on other lines (like the “P-line,” or political line).^[10]

This view of the KGB - GRU relationship is mistakenly rigid for the period when the memo is prepared and in light of the history of the two agencies. To impose on this era the strict separation of KGB from GRU of the later high Cold War is anachronistic. The Gorsky memo is a Committee of Information memo, a memo of an agency that had been created with a mandate of combining and coordinating all Soviet intelligence and briefly did control both GRU and what became the KGB. Additionally, the subject of the memo is the crippling of Soviet intelligence operations in the United States that took place between 1945 and late 1948. At the end of WWII the success of Soviet espionage in the United States was by any standards remarkable in the number of sources that had been developed and the size of its networks. Yet much of this collapsed due largely to five defectors. The number of Soviet sources compromised by these five is astounding. Any KI assessment of this intelligence disaster must include Whittaker Chambers. Gorsky's memo could not leave Chambers out, no matter which agency his network originally reported to in the mid-1930s. An insistence that Gorsky and the KI in 1948 could not have known of Chambers’ GRU network and would not have included it in an assessment of what went wrong is not persuasive.

Returning to the substance of the Gorsky memo, “Redhead’s Group” consists of Soviet sources Gorsky believed known to Hede Massing [Gompertz or Gumperz]. She and her husband dropped out of Soviet service in 1938. (It is not precisely clear when the Massings dropped out. She put it at 1938 but there is some indication that the Massings retained some occasional link to Soviet intelligence into World War II.) Hede Massing did not provide an account of her role in Soviet espionage until 1947. She later testified at the Hiss trial regarding Hiss’s inadvertent brush with her and her network.

The Berg – Art Group was not linked to any particular espionage apparatus at all. Berg (Alexander Koral) and Art (Helen Koral) worked as couriers between a variety of American sources and KGB officers over a number of years. The FBI observed Alexander Koral, a secret CPUSA member and building maintenance engineer working for the New York City public school system, meeting with several persons suspected of being Soviet sources. Confronted by the FBI in 1947, Koral admitted that from 1939 to 1945 he had worked as a clandestine courier. He attempted to conceal his Communist loyalties and explained that he had been paid generous sums by someone known to him only as Frank to travel to different cities to pickup and deliver small packages and envelopes to different persons. Despite attempts to minimize his activities, he eventually identified a number of persons with whom he had had contact.

The longest list of those compromised by a defector was that of the “Sound and Myrna Groups.” Elizabeth Bentley (Myrna) turned herself in to the FBI in the fall of 1945 and quickly provided the FBI with a lengthy account of her work that identified dozens of Soviet sources. Her defection galvanized FBI focus on Soviet espionage. It also came at a time when with the end of World War II, the FBI was in a position to shift its counter-intelligence resources from concern with German, Japanese, and Italian espionage to the Soviet threat.

Gorsky provided forty-four names for the “Sound and Myrna Groups,” i.e., the two large networks (one headed by Victor Perlo and the other by Gregory Silvermaster) and a number of independent sources put together by Jacob Golos (Sound) drawn from secret Communist party members working for the U.S. government and covert CPUSA networks in Washington established in the 1930s. Golos’s several apparatuses and independent sources were taken over after his death in 1943 by his assistant Elizabeth Bentley. After her defection in the fall of 1945 the FBI found convincing corroborative evidence, albeit largely indirect and circumstantial, of the truth of her story of Soviet espionage. (The KGB quickly learned of Bentley’s defection and immediately informed its potentially compromised sources that contact was being cut and they should cease espionage activity and destroy any incriminating evidence.) Documents from newly opened Soviet archives and, even more, the Venona decryptions released in the 1990s later provided ample documentation and direct confirmation of her truthfulness.

The majority of those Bentley identified as Soviet sources were directly identified as such in Venona. The Gorsky list fills in most of the rest. Of the forty-four names on the Gorsky list for the “Sound and Myrna Groups,” Elizabeth Bentley discussed thirty-eight in her statement to the FBI or later testimony. The six not discussed included two KGB personnel: Vladimir Pravdin and Michael Shaliapin. Bentley in her statement discussed one Soviet officer known to her only as John that has not been clearly identified. The only four American sources on Gorsky’s list that Bentley did not identify to the FBI are Eva Getzov, David Weintraub, and the Graze brothers, Stanley and Gerald. Additionally, three persons (Harry White, George Silverman, and Harold Glasser) Bentley identified as working with her networks during World War II are not listed by Gorsky under the “Sound and Myrna Groups” but under “Karl’s Group” because they had worked earlier with Chambers in the mid-1930s. She also told the FBI that one member of her network, Glasser, had for a time worked for a network she knew little about except that it was run by a man named “Hiss” at the State Department. Both Alger and Donald Hiss, both working for the State Department, are also listed under Karl’s group.

The Gorsky list’s confirmation of Bentley’s story further discredits two generations of historians who have variously ridiculed, mocked, laughed at, dismissed, or studiously ignored Bentley’s story and depicted her as a paid liar, fraud, or delusional hysteric. The depiction of the role of Soviet espionage and of the CPUSA in espionage that prevailed in academic history from the late 1960s to the mid-1990 was that Soviet espionage, to the extent any existed, was a minor matter and, emphatically, the CPUSA was innocent of involvement in what little espionage that might possibly have occurred. This view was profoundly wrong. The determined refusal of leading historians to take Bentley’s testimony serious was symptomatic of a broader failure of the scholastic judgment of the historical establishment of that era to understand the nature of the American Communist movement of the 1930s and 1940s and of the aggressive nature and broad scope of the Soviet espionage offensive against the United States in that era. Contemporary historians should not only now get the story right but also reflect on the ideological blinders and surrender to partisanship that led their predecessors to profoundly misunderstand the history of the period.

The defection of Elizabeth Bentley in late 1945 as well as coming forward of other defectors not only compromised and rendered unusable a large number of Americans who had cooperated with Soviet espionage, it also compromised a number of Soviet intelligence officers who were withdrawn from the United States: the illegal ones hastily in 1946 while those with diplomatic cover left more orderly in 1946 and by 1947. These officers had by 1945 become highly experienced in working in the United States, many spoke excellent English, and had developed a wide array of contacts. It took the KGB several years to replace this experience cadre with new officers, and most of the initial replacements lacked the language skills and cultural sophistication of those compromised by the multiple defections. Eventually Soviet espionage would recover from these disasters, but it is well to remember that just as the Cold War got underway in the late 1940s Soviet espionage in the United States sustained a crippling blow.

Gorsky’s listing for “Redhead’s Group” provides confirmation of Hede Massing’s 1947 identification to the FBI of Laurence Duggan as a Soviet source she and her husband had recruited. Its listing of Franz Neumann as a recruit of the Massings is not surprising: Neumann was a member of the German neo-Marxist “Frankfurt School” as was Paul Massing.

Gorsky’s description of “Buben’s Group” confirms Louis Budenz’s story that Soviet intelligence enlisted him as a talent spotter and recruiter for its late 1930s anti-Trotsky work, a fact that should discomfort several generations of American historians who confidently dismissed Budenz as a fraud. This, of course does not mean that Budenz, particularly from the late 1940s onward, did not exaggerate, embellish and perhaps falsify on some points, but Budenz’s basic story and his early statements ought to be taken seriously.

In March 2005, H-HOAC, the Historians of American Communism e-mail/web historical discussion list (part of H-Net) held a symposium on Vassiliev’s notes on Gorsky’s memo. The messages posted during the symposium can be found on the web at H-HOAC archive available at <http://www.h-net.org/~hoac/> (click on “Discussion Logs”). The symposium included three lengthy comments on the Gorsky memo by David Lowenthal, Eduard Mark, and John Earl Haynes, all on March 14, 2005. A number of other comments and exchanges followed before the symposium ended on March 20, 2005. Some of the comments of Svetlana Chervonnaya, a critic of Vassiliev and the document, have been noted; worth reading as well are comments by Mark Kramer and Leo Gluchowski.

Return to Responses, Reflections and Occasional Papers

Return to Vassiliev’s Notes on Gorsky Index Page