Early Cold War Spies

The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics

John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr

Cambridge University Press, 2006

Paperback

 (ISBN-13: 9780521674072 | ISBN-10: 0521674077)

Hardback

 (ISBN-13: 9780521857383 | ISBN-10: 0521857384)

Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of American anticommunism varied from passive disdain in the 1920s to fervent hostility in the early years of the Cold War. Nothing so stimulated the white hot anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had co-operated with Soviet espionage against the United States and had assisted in stealing the technical secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the U.S. State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book reviews the major spy cases of the early Cold War (Hiss-Chambers, Rosenberg, Bentley, Gouzenko, Coplon, Amerasia and others) and the often-frustrating clashes between the exacting rules of the American criminal justice system and the requirements of effective counter-espionage.

• A compact and concise survey of the major spy cases of the early Cold War
• Offers a retrospective look at the trials in light of evidence that became available at the end of the Cold War and with the collapse of the USSR
• Each chapter summarizes a major case or a group of related cases, noting any historical or legal controversies

Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword
1	Introduction: Early Cold War Spy Cases
	Early Cold War Spy Trials
	A Word about Trials and History
	Spy Trials and McCarthyism
	Politics of the Early Cold War
2	The Precursors
	Amerasia: The First Cold War Spy Case
	Gouzenko: A Canadian Spy Case with American Repercussions
3	Elizabeth Bentley: The Case of the Blond Spy Queen
	The Silvermaster Group
	The Perlo Group
	The Trials of William Remington
	Venona and Bentley’s Vindication
	The Bentley Case: A Conclusion
4	The Alger Hiss–Whittaker Chambers Case
	Whittaker Chambers
	Alger Hiss
	Dueling Testimony
	The Slander Suit, the Baltimore Documents, and the Pumpkin Papers
	The Grand Jury
	The First Hiss Trial
	The Second Hiss Trial
	Chambers after the Trial
	Hiss after the Trial
	The Historical Argument
5	The Atomic Espionage Cases
	Klaus Fuchs: The Background
	Theodore Hall: The Background
	Rosenberg and Greenglass: The Background
	J. Robert Oppenheimer and Communists at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory
	The Red Bomb and the Postwar Trials
	J. Robert Oppenheimer after the Manhattan Project
	The Trials of Rudolf Abel and Morris and Lona Cohen
6	Judith Coplon: The Spy Who Got Away with It
	Coplon’s Recruitment into Espionage
	The Washington Trial
	The New York Trial
	On Appeal: Justice Frustrated
7	The Soble-Soblen Case: Last of the Early Cold War Spy Trials
	Infiltrating the Trotskyist Movement
	Mark Zborowski
	Boris Morros: Double Agent
	The Soble Ring Trials
	The Robert Soblen Trial
8	Conclusion: The Decline of the Ideological Spy
	Spy Trials and Understanding Soviet Espionage
	Counterespionage and the American Criminal Justice System
	The Elusive Balance between Security and Liberty
Index