Harry Magdoff and espionage
Magdoff was never indicted, but after the end of the Cold War, a number of scholars have inspected declassified documents (including those of the Venona project) from U.S. and Soviet archives.
An FBI file description says Magdoff and others were probed as part of "a major espionage investigation spanning the years 1945 through 1959" into a suspected "Soviet spy ring which supposedly had 27 individuals gathering information from at least six Federal agencies.
The public accusation that Magdoff was working for Soviet intelligence was itself not new; it had originated with defector Elizabeth Bentley who provided this information to the FBI and later testified to that same effect in open hearings.
Bentley told the FBI: Victor Perlo, leader of the group, asked if the material was going to "Uncle Joe" (Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).
On 13 May cable, "MAYOR", according to Arlington Hall counterintelligence Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov, reports on the first meeting Elizabeth Bentley had with the Perlo group for the purposes of obtaining secret government information to transmit to the Soviet Union.
The authors of Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America, researchers Allen Weinstein, currently Archivist of the United States, and ex-KGB Officer Alexander Vassiliev say cover name "KANT" was replaced with "TAN".
The code name "TAN" appears Anatoly Gorsky's Memo dated December 1948, a document from the KGB archives analyzed by Alexander Vassiliev.
Though Belmont was of the opinion that Venona evidence could lead to successful convictions, it was ultimately decided, in consideration of compromising the Army Signals Intelligence efforts, that there would not be prosecutions.
The memo also raises questions about the disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons based upon an exception to the hearsay rule requiring expert testimony of cryptographers revealing their practices and techniques to identify specific code names.
^8 Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism, 1995, p. 312 (Document 90) ^9 "A NKVD/NKGB Report to Stalin: A Glimpse into Soviet Intelligence in the United States in the 1940s"[permanent dead link] Vladimir Pozniakov, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Cold War History Project Virtual Archive: "Feklisov, pp.
1st rank, Chief Navy Main Staff, Intelligence Directorate, and Petrov, Military Commissar, NMS, ID to G. Dimitrov, 15 August 1942, No.
of Economic Warfare"), and Harry Magdoff (War Production Board) -the request dated 29 Sept. 1944-and to Judith Coplon who according to the FCD information worked for the Dept.
^10 "Alexander Vassiliev’s Notes on Anatoly Gorsky’s December 1948 Memo on Compromised American Sources and Networks (Annotated)," John Earl Haynes: "3.
