Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev
Yale £25, 704 pages

In the first half of the 20th century, American communists – like communists everywhere – believed that the Soviet Union was a new civilisation. Many were young, idealistic and admirable in their beliefs and courage. Many more were working people, black and white united (a rarity), who believed communism would usher in a better society than that offered by the depression-era, racially divided US.

And some spied for the KGB. The most ‘useful’ were those in the Federal Government, especially the few in senior jobs. But others did what they could: the campaigning journalist John L Spivak, for example, supplied low-grade intelligence – few journalists could do more. Like most of the members, Spivak was an idealist, harshly critical of his own society, dreamily romantic about the one communism would build.

Spies reverses that order. It is damning, and detailed in its exposure of the American communists who spied on their country, and of their beliefs. While not romantic about the US, it nevertheless makes clear that it had a superior system, whose betrayal to the agents of a tyranny was a major crime. The authors do not commend the anti­communism movements of the 1940s and 1950s, but they do not condemn them either.

The revelations in Spies are the result of a Russian-US collaboration. In 1993, Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer turned Russian journalist, was permitted by liberal-minded KGB senior executives to do extensive work on Soviet espionage in the US, using newly opened files – with a view to publishing a book in the west. He filled notebooks with the material, which he passed to American scholars John Haynes and Harvey Klehr. From these notes, which contained evidence never before seen, the scholars have fashioned a narrative which allows them to claim that “a remarkable number of Americans assisted Soviet intelligence agencies” – and to cast new, damning light on men whose innocence has long been asserted by many on the left.

The authors’ prime exhibit is Alger Hiss. No spy has generated more controversy: his supporters have for years claimed that this cultivated, Ivy League graduate was a victim of rightwing persecution. It was considered a grave injustice when, in his early forties as head of a department preparing the US for the conference that created the United Nations, he was convicted for spying. But the documentation provided by Vassiliev’s notes from the Soviet secret services’ archives leaves no doubt that he was indeed a Soviet spy. Hiss is identified in these documents many times.

More important still was Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist and communist who had fled to Britain – where he worked on the British nuclear programme – then to the US, where he was hired to work on the Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, in New Mexico. He was the linchpin of the Soviet’s largely successful efforts to get Allied nuclear secrets, passing across detailed plans of the process on which he and his team were engaged, until his arrest in 1950. The material which he, and others, funnelled out to the KGB allowed the Soviet Union to develop a bomb much more rapidly than it otherwise would. As the authors say, this “changed history ... espionage ­enabled rapid acquisition of the atomic bomb emboldened Stalin’s policies in the early cold war and contributed to his decision to authorise North Korea’s invasion of South Korea”.

The authors also single out the traitors’ traitors, who had the nerve to turn against the god they came to believe had failed, and to reveal vast numbers of names and operations to the US Government. Above all, they point to Whittaker Chambers, a communist journalist and Elizabeth Bentley, once an expert spy handler for the KGB. Bentley’s decision, in 1945, to turn herself in to the FBI and tell all she knew was, according to the authors, “the single most disastrous event in the history of Soviet intelligence in America”.

The authors make clear that Bentley and Chambers were heroes for what they did. Their revelations, together with the anticommunist campaigns and the growing realisation of what Soviet society was really like, decimated the Communist Party USA: membership had been at 60,000 in 1919 – by the mid-1950s, it was down to 5,000. This massively researched, telling book features dozens of men and women willing to live in tension and fear for years to serve a cause in which only a very few would continue to believe.

John Lloyd is an FT contributing editor