SPIES LIKE US

March 11, 1999

David Gergen interviews Allen Weinstein, president of the Center for Democracy and co-author of The Haunted Wood.

DAVID GERGEN: Allen, your new book came from some very unusual circumstances in the Soviet Union. Can you tell us about them? ALLEN WEINSTEIN: It was possible because of the honeymoon period in Russian-American relations, David, after the end of the Soviet Union, when the retired agents group of the KGB signed an agreement with my publisher, Random House, to publish four books-one of which was mine-and to allow access to the KGB records to the co-authors. One of the authors would be a Westerner, one would be a Russian. DAVID GERGEN: They were looking for money? ALLEN WEINSTEIN: They were looking for nothing else. This was a very difficult period back in '92 and '93, you may remember. And Random House basically negotiated for this. I still don't know how much they paid, but I assume it was a significant sum. DAVID GERGEN: So you and your co-author, former KGB - ALLEN WEINSTEIN: Alexander Vasilayev produced a book which is just out called The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America, the Stalin Era. DAVID GERGEN: And you were the first ones to go in and have a look at the files from the Stalin era of the 1930's and 1940's. ALLEN WEINSTEIN: Precisely. Precisely. DAVID GERGEN: What did you find? ALLEN WEINSTEIN: Well, we found a number of suspicions confirmed in terms of individuals who had been suspected of being agents during the 1930's and 1940's. We can go into specific cases, but in connection with some of the more significant cases, like the Hiss and Rosenberg cases, we did find confirmatory material about most of the major principals. DAVID GERGEN: How extensive was the spying here in this country done by Americans for the Soviets in the 30's and 40's? ALLEN WEINSTEIN: It was significant. During the war years especially, the various Soviet networks had top agents in the State Department, in the Treasury Department, in the OSS, the wartime intelligence agency, even an aide close to Roosevelt, Lachlan Currie, and in other Government agencies. So the Soviets gained significantly in two ways during this-three ways during the Second World War-a great deal of information on U.S. policies so they could basically chart the flow of U.S. policy; secondly, a great deal of information on various war equipment that was useful to them. And finally, of course, the atomic espionage that Theodore Hall and Klaus Fuchs and others engaged in, and David Greenglass, on behalf of the Soviets helped them accelerate their possession of the atomic bomb probably by several years. DAVID GERGEN: By several years. ALLEN WEINSTEIN: At least. DAVID GERGEN: And so they were able to develop an atomic bomb within three or four years after the Americans - ALLEN WEINSTEIN: Correct. DAVID GERGEN: -- had one at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ALLEN WEINSTEIN: Correct. And most scientists feel that they gained several years - DAVID GERGEN: How much damage did that do to American interests, that acceleration? Did it lead to the arms race itself or what other - ALLEN WEINSTEIN: No, the arms race was in progress even then, and of course the Korean War began in 1950, and there were a whole batch of other things that brought on the Cold War tensions of the late 40's. But it didn't help any, and of course, it gave the Soviets a certain kind of confidence, particularly in those final years of Stalin's rule, it may have intensified the Cold War during that period. DAVID GERGEN: Do you think Stalin may have been more aggressive as he went into Eastern Europe and grabbed things behind the Iron Curtain? ALLEN WEINSTEIN: No way to prove what Stalin was or wasn't like, but certainly it helped if you had an atomic bomb in your arsenal or one about to come out. DAVID GERGEN: So there was serious damage to American - ALLEN WEINSTEIN: Serious damage to American interests-but very clumsy individuals in many instances. It's a very complicated story that way, because a number of the agents who operated during the Second World War operated almost in groups, family-in groups, practically. They would gather together in the homes of the people who were the directors and overseers of these networks and type documents in common, talk to one another about what each person was doing, things that in normal trade craft would never have been allowed, emerged as part of the intractable, American, individualist reality. DAVID GERGEN: Now, the American spies during the 30's and 40's, especially during the war, were not taking money, particularly. What was their main motivation? ALLEN WEINSTEIN: There are several. You had people who were dedicated Communists, members of the Communist Party or the Communist Movement, others who may not have joined the Communist Party as such, but were devoted to the Soviet Union felt it was the best hope of mankind. Antifascism was a critical motive during this period. You had - this, after all, this was a period in which Adolf Hitler is running Germany, in which the threat of a Second World War becomes more and more acute as the decade goes on, the Spanish civil war begins and that intensifies it. And so for many, ideology was a motive, not all of them, but for most of them. Also, there is another interesting underside to that. Many of them who became Soviet agents had essentially lost faith in the democratic process because, after all, some of their friends and colleagues were working for the New Deal or working on various social agencies and trying to change things on a piecemeal basis. These people wanted to do something more dramatic and more intense. DAVID GERGEN: I want to ask you briefly about major controversies that erupted in the 1950's about this spying and what we now know based on what you found in your earlier research. First, Alger Hiss. ALLEN WEINSTEIN: I did an earlier book called Perjury, the Hiss-Chambers Case. A new edition came out recently. I began thinking Hiss was probably innocent. I changed my mind under the weight of evidence. In terms of the material which emerged from the KGB archives, there is some new material on Hiss's involvement in the 1930's, and cables related to an individual, who was most likely Alger Hiss, at the time of the Yalta Conference. So there is new material that Hiss worked for military Intelligence. Those files remain closed. DAVID GERGEN: But you think that the evidence is very persuasive - ALLEN WEINSTEIN: I thought the evidence was persuasive even without this new material. This new material has helped. DAVID GERGEN: Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist. ALLEN WEINSTEIN: I found-we found no evidence whatsoever that Oppenheimer was anything but a loyal American scientist. There was one memorandum to Moscow in which one of the Soviet operatives here alleged that Oppenheimer had been a secret member, or was a secret member, of the Communist Party. We didn't find backup to that. Therefore, I think it has to be treated with great caution. DAVID GERGEN: You think he may have been mistreated by his own government? ALLEN WEINSTEIN: I think most definitely he was mistreated in the later years, after the Second World War, when his security clearance was revoked. No question about it. DAVID GERGEN: The couple who were executed for spying for the Soviet Union, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. ALLEN WEINSTEIN: One of the ironies of the Rosenberg situation is that although we turned up in our research additional evidence of Julius's having spied for the Soviets and having been a handler of other agents, this was mostly in the non-atomic area. These were a whole bunch of areas that had nothing to do with atomic energy. His one contribution in that regard was the recruitment of Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, via Greenglass's wife, Ruth, who was a machinist at Los Alamos and who did give over information to the Soviets. Obviously, the execution of the Rosenbergs would not take place today. Probably Ethel would not even be indicted today, because in the Soviet files there was no code name for her. She was listed simply as Julius's wife. And she undoubtedly knew what he was doing, but that was that. DAVID GERGEN: Perhaps the biggest controversy came with Senator Joseph McCarthy. ALLEN WEINSTEIN: Right. He was late, David. He was five years late, because after a Soviet agent named Elizabeth Bently defected to the FBI and to the United States Government in November of 1945, this information went to Moscow via a gentleman named Harold Kim Philby, who monitored in England, sent it on to Moscow. And the Soviets immediately ordered the dismantling of their American networks so that most of the Soviet agents, Soviet operatives, and American agents scurried for cover at that point. By the time McCarthy appears on the scene five years later in 1950, waving documents alleging there are hundreds of Communists in the State Department and elsewhere, this was rank nonsense. DAVID GERGEN: What lessons do you draw today, based not only the spying that went on during the war, but then the aftermath, the hunt for spies that occurred afterward? ALLEN WEINSTEIN: Well, I think one of the dilemmas, of course, was that we didn't know all of this at the time. Americans were, many Americans at least, were persuaded that there were still Soviet agents at the time. So McCarthy and others like him were treated with greater credibility than we would give them given a more probing and skeptical media today. But this -- the balance story of this generation after, if you will, the greatest generation, the Cold War generation from 1945 to the late 1950's, that story has yet to be written in a fully balanced way. And there is a prospect I'm thinking of doing that as my next book. DAVID GERGEN: Allen Weinstein, we'll look forward to your next book. ALLEN WEINSTEIN: Thank you.