Soviet espionage in the United States
[8] Historian Harvey Klehr describes that the American businessman Armand Hammer "met Lenin in 1921 and, in return for a concession to manufacture pencils, agreed to launder Soviet money to benefit communist parties in Europe and America.
"[10] According to journalist Alan Farnham, "Over the decades Hammer continued traveling to Russia, hobnobbing with its leaders to the point that both the CIA and the FBI suspected him of being a full-fledged agent.
"[11] Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), served as an agent recruiter himself on behalf of Soviet intelligence.
Browder advocated the use of a United Front involving other members of the left, both to strengthen advocacy of pro-Soviet policy and to enlarge the pool of potential recruits for espionage work.
[14] In 1935, NKVD agent Iskhak Akhmerov entered the US with false identity papers to assist Bazarov in the collection of useful intelligence, and operated without interruption until 1939, when he left the US.
Akhmerov's wife, an American who worked for Soviet intelligence, was Helen Lowry (Elza Akhmerova), the niece of CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder.
Browder oversaw the efforts of Jacob Golos and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bentley, whose network of agents and sources included two key figures at the Department of Treasury, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and Harry Dexter White.
Jake Golos (birth name Jacob Golosenko, Tasin, Rasin or Raisen) was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet secret police (NKVD) operative in the USSR.
Golos' controller was the head of the NKVD's American desk, Gaik Ovakimian, also known as "The Puppetmaster", who would later serve a key role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
[16] In March 1940, Golos pleaded guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent, paid a $500 fine (equivalent to $11,000 today), and served probation in lieu of a four-month prison sentence.
[citation needed] By the end of 1936 at least four mid-level State Department officials were delivering information to Soviet intelligence: Alger Hiss, assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre; Julian Wadleigh, economist in the Trade Agreements Section; Laurence Duggan, Latin American division; and Noel Field, West European division.
Some documents revealed that the CPUSA was actively involved in secretly recruiting party members from African-American groups and rural farm workers.
Thanks to an official in the State department sympathetic to the Party, the confidential correspondence, concerning political and economic matters in Europe, ended up in the hands of Soviet intelligence.
[20] In the late 1930s and 1940, Soviet intelligence had multiple staging areas for plots to murder exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, then living in Mexico City.
Josef Grigulevich, an NKVD agent who had direct orders from Stalin to kill Trotsky, had a safe house in Zook's Drugstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Alleged members of their spy ring, the Zlatovskis, remained in Paris, France, where the laws did not allow their extradition to the United States for espionage.
Robert Soblen was sentenced to life in prison for his espionage work at Sandia National Laboratories, but jumped bail and escaped to Israel.
[25] Thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) were photocopied or stolen, including a complete set of design and production drawings for Lockheed Aircraft's new P-80 Shooting Star fighter jet.
Pavel Fitin, the 34-year-old chief of the KGB First Directorate, was directed to seek American intelligence concerning Hitler's plans for the war in Russia; secret war aims of London and Washington, particularly with regard to planning for Operation Overlord, the second front in Europe; any indications the Western Allies might be willing to make a separate peace with Hitler; and American scientific and technological progress, particularly in the development of an atomic weapon.
Following the Moynihan Commission, the declassification of the Venona project in 1995 revealed more information about the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case, and confirmed that a widespread Soviet spy network did exist during the Cold War.
[30] During this time, George Koval who infiltrated the Manhattan Project as a member of the GRU, also passed stolen atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.
Whittaker Chambers states White's principal function was aiding the infiltration and placement of Soviet operatives within the government, and protecting sources.
[35] In a twist of history, Harry Dexter White would participate in the Bretton Woods Conference, which created the American-led, post-war financial and economic order.
[36] Dr. James C. Van Hook, joint historian of the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency., says "It is difficult to understand how White's detractors could characterize Bretton Woods, a fundamental institution of liberal capitalism, as inherently pro-Soviet.
[42] In 1952, Jack and Morris Childs—both American-born ex-Soviet spies—became FBI double agents, and informed on the CPUSA for the rest of the Cold War, monitoring the Soviet funding and communications with Moscow.
[43][44] According to longtime CIA officer Frederick Wettering, many turncoats to the Soviets were not ideologically communist, such as Aldrich Ames and John Walker who "did it strictly for the money."
In addition to its espionage abroad, the KGB was always busy collecting “intelligence from the territory,” a euphemism for recruiting foreign nationals in the Soviet Union, with an eye to subsequently running them as agents in their home countries.
[38][49] Active measures (Russian: активные мероприятия, romanized: aktivnye meropriyatiya) are a form of political warfare that was conducted by the Soviet Union.
According to intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, "Martin Luther King was probably the only prominent American to be the target of active measures by both the FBI and the KGB."
Investigation of Ames' activities led to the 1995 CIA disinformation controversy revealing that false reports were fed to the United States through Soviet double agents.
