Soviet Intelligence Operation in America during the Cold War - Assignment Example

SOVIET INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS IN AMERICA DURING COLD WAR 1 The Cold War refers to the intense hostilities between democratic, capitalistic United States and communist Soviet Union. This tension which was rooted in the political rivalry between the superpowers and the clash of opposing ideologies lasted for more than 40 years, specifically from 1947 to 1989. In between,the threat of a nuclear war was forever hanging like Damocles' sword and came almost to a head when the Soviets positioned missiles across Florida in Cuba and in retaliation US blockaded Atlantic Ocean to prevent the Russians from bringing in more missiles to the Fidel Castro-controlled Cuba (Ask.Com1). It is called Cold War because the relations were icy at the least and never reached boiling point to bring on a shooting war. It is also 'cold' because each try to undermine each other's political power. There were several zones where potentially both were at loggerheads and where another WW III could have ensued had hotter heads prevailed. In West Berlin, Russia blockaded this US,UK and France-controlled zone with a wall that made the latter construe that they were intentionally entrapped. A dtente ensued when US did a massive airlifting of supplies instead of using force. In the Iron Curtain, Stalin convinced these Slav and Balkan countries to accept communism as form of government because Russia needed them as buffer states against Germany but the Allies construed this as an intense drive by the Communists to dominate the world and stamp it with 2 its brand of government. In Greece and Turkey, Russia frowned upon when there the Truman Doctrine was applied i.e. US provided funds and massive aid so that both may be able to resist communist attempts to subjugate them. In Western Europe, the US came up with the Marshall Plan, which was a multi-billion aid program to reconstruct the almost bankrupt nations ravaged by WW II. Russia reacted with consternation because that would make it difficult for them to foment dissension and discontent. Then the NATO, composed of USA, Britain, Canada and Western Europe including West Germany was established for the purpose of mutually securing themselves from possible communist military aggression. Despite the overweening tension and intensified hostilities, no full-scale war emanated. And this was because USA had invented the atomic bomb and displayed how it can resolve conflicts with dire consequences. It is because of the development of these atomic and hydrogen bombs, missiles and other arsenals of war and because of the complexity of plans involved in upsetting the rival that espionage became a necessary tool to outwit the rival. As early as the 1920's, USSR through its NKVD and OGPU intelligence agents, had already penetrated the State and the War Departments and other government agencies by recruiting left-leaning Americans, foreign-born Americans and Russians as spies to obtain classified and confidential secrets and transmit 3 them to Moscow as microfilms or as encrypted cables. Then, the interest of the Russian spy ring was the industrial and military secrets of USA and the first target for infiltration was the FAECT(Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians) and with satisfying results (Usdin 28). In one case, it was discovered that espionage had reached the top echelon of the State Department with Alger Hiss, one of its top officials caught flatfooted when Time Magazine editor Whittaker Chambers, himself a confessed Soviet agent, showed and testified that Hiss passed on to him a microfilm of State Department documents. Even the film industry was not spared as the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), alarmed by the trend of left-leaning films, interrogated directors (such as Elia Kazan), actors and scriptwriters resulting to the jailing of some and the blacklisting of others. This 'red scare' culminated with McCarthyism. Senator Joseph McCarthy was successful in letting out a 'red herring' that scares many Americans out of their wits' end because the HUAC discovered that even the FBI was not exempt from the Soviet spy ring's tentacles. A British physicist, Klaus Fuchs, who was one of those who worked on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, NM in 1944-1945 was nabbed and confessed to delivering atomic bomb information to Soviet agents (Nuclear Weapon Archive 1). Even prior to that, radical 4 Americans had been recruited by the CPUSA (Community Party of the USA) to spy in behalf of USSR. Its General Secretary Earl Browder, compelled by the desire to subvert American political life and implant Soviet policies in its stead, was an untiring and zealous recruiter and financier of subversive, pro-Soviet activities (Sudoplatov 43). He financed World Tourists a purported travel agency that faked passports of Soviet agents and facilitated the entry and exit of CPUSA members and Soviet spies. Jacob Golos ran World Tourists as a clandestine society organization that did pro-Soviet intelligence network. As such, he orchestrated other Soviet spies such as HKVD agent Bernard Schuster and 'The Puppetmaster' Gaik Ovakimian who in reality was the head of the NKVD's American desk. Golos was also behind the kidnaping and assassination of an American agent, Juliet Poyntz (Hyde 1). When Browder was incarcerated, Golos took on the spying reins and immediately established the US Shipping and Service Corporation in 1941 which was a covert company used for espionage (Haynes 136). Golos also orchestrated agents who worked in the US government in Washington, DC. These spies were given the monicker Perlo Group. The Venona Project was a secret American intelligence project that bared the fact that US Reds stole secrets from various US agencies and transmitted them to the Soviets. It justified McCarthy's assertion that there were "205 communists 5 in the State Department" and proved it by naming 6 Soviet spies in that department and 8 in the Treasury and that several prominent scientists had infiltrated the Manhattan Project and that the CIA had one officer who was a spy and that even the White House had an assistant who was so willing to do anything that Stalin demanded. This project revealed that most of these Americans sent encrypted cables that held valuable information to Russia and that the NSA (National Security Agency) decrypted nearly 3,000 Soviet cables which took them 30 years to do so. It added that NSA was able to track down the leads and finally identified who sent which cable. This codebreaking led to the production of hard evidence against Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, David Greenglas, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and many others. As to the Rosenbergs, the codebreaking sent them to the electric chair in 1953 for the crime of treason. Both were convicted of the charge of transmitting atomic secrets to the USSR (Washington Monthly 1). According to a former KGB agent, Yuri Shvets, Russian spies were recruited by "the foreign ministry, the trade mission or the news agencies like Tass" and the KGB used a "network of undercover agents in America to gather classified information about sensitive technologies, including military projects under development and high-tech research" (The Sunday Times). Soviet spies were sent to NACA (National Advisory Committee for 6 Aeronautics) and they were able to photocopy or steal thousands of documents there "including a complete set of design and production drawings for Lockheed Aircraft's new P-80 Shooting Star fighter jet (Feklisov & Kostin). These were then sent to Russia through encrypted cables or secreted in the form of microfilms. Chambers, himself, confessed that he was assigned to steal J. Walter Christie's new tank invention and that the Russians used this to develop the Soviet T-34 tank (Chambers). But what really sent the KGB bosses agog with lustful expectations was the acquisition of the formula of the atomic bomb. Evidences were rife that the Rosenbergs were able to forward this formula to the KGB. Thus, USSR was able to test its own atomic bomb in 4 years' time after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing by USA in 1945. While McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon warned the nation of Reds in their midst, President Truman was cold to the idea of communist subversion and even denounced HUAC's witchhunts as designed to sidetrack his domestic program. But the confession of Elizabeth Bentley, Golos' lover who inherited his spy machine after his death, again proved to the public that McCarthy was right all along. Bentley, fearful of a possible KGB assassination, blew the lid on the Silvermaster spy ring and named Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, an official of the War Production Board, as the leader of a clandestine communist group 7 composed of highly placed government officials. Also implicated were the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White,FDR's administrative assistant Lauchlin Currie, War Production Board's Aviation Chief Victor Perlo, the UN Charter Conference secretary general Alger Hiss and several others. The Bentley expose caused KGB to stop down its operations temporarily. But even then, the KGB had been uncovered as vicious in its attempts to spy on US confidential information and using highly-placed officials in government. KGB had been unmasked as masters of dirty tricks ranging from assassination (Poyntz and Leon Trotsky et al) to disinformation and to brainwashing. This was never more brilliantly illustrated than in the brainwashing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim fundamentalists who assassinated Anwar Sadat. They turned the trick by printing leaflets attacking President Sadat as American puppet and traitor to the nation. KGB also financed US radical organizations such as the CPUSA and the Weathermen, with the ultimate goal of toppling democracy in USA and supplanting it with communist form of government. KGB did this with the intervention of Cuban intermediaries(Intelligence Encyclopedia). That KGB was the supreme master of brainwashing was best displayed when it made highly intelligent scholars like Maurice Hyman Halperin do its bidding like a puppet on a string. An American professor, diplomat, writer with a PhD in Sorbonne to 8 boot, Halperin was recruited to join the CPUSA and was compelled to infiltrate the OSS, which was the former CIA. As a covert NKVD spy wiith access to the OSS cable room, he was able to dispatch to the Soviets highly sensitive US diplomatic information including US secrets and plans; US government instructions to its ambassadors all over the world;the US embassies' reports to the State Department in Washington and confidential discussions between the US government and other allied governments. Until his encrypted cables were decrypted by the NSA, he was virtually a solo wrecking machine (Kirschner). The Cold War would be incomplete and would be outright frozen were it not for the race to invent the atomic bomb. Although USSR was replete with scientific talents and know-how yet physicists were being manipulated to believe that in order to bolster USSR industry and economy, the line of research should not be too impractical or theoretical. Thus nuclear physics lagged behind compared to USA and Britain. It is further undermined by the Soviets' involvement with the war against Germany. Thus, to keep itself on par with the Americans and Britons, it resorted to espionage to extract information. The first victim was Britain, where USSR was able to extricate the MAUD report and other important documents via the espionage work of Klaus Fuchs and John Cairncross (Rhodes 53,58). Dissatisfied, Soviet espionage was rerouted to USA to infiltrate 9 and steal the formula to the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project, which was the project to develop the first atomic bomb for use in World War II. This was a joint project of USA, Britain and Canada and had its operations in Los Alamos, NM, Oakridge, Tenn and Richland, Wash. and was under the control of the X-Y Line of Engineers or the US Army Corps of Engineers (Hakim 295). The Soviet espionage to steal atomic bomb secrets from the Manhattan Project was termed Project Enormoz, which dispatched its 'Atomic Spies' i.e Klaus Fuchs, Julius and Ethel Riosenberg, Theodore Hall and Allan Nunn May, who successfully secreted and gathered information and sent it to Lavrentiy Beria, the director of Enormoz. After the historic Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Beria directed nuclear physicists such as Andrei Sakharov and Igor Kurchatov to copy as closely as possible the purloined American formula. Thus in August 29, 1949, USSR was able to detonate its first atomic bomb (Holloway). The above facts proved that USSR espionage was a real danger and that Presidents Roosevelt and Truman downplayed it and possibly their cynical stance to the danger of communist subversion encouraged the Soviet espionage on American soil. McCarthy may have been a 'no-good senator' as his Senate career was said to be undistinguished but had he been taken seriously, such espionage should have been contained in pronto. 10 BIBLIOGRAPHY Ask.com. The Cold War.www.historylearningsite.co.uk/coldwar.htm. Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. New York: Random House. Feliksov, Aleksandr & Kosten,Sergei. The Man Behind The Rosenbergs. Enigma Books, 2001. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. Penguin Press, 2005. Hakim, Joy. A History of US: War, Peace and All That Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Haynes, John Earl & Klehr, Harvey. Venona:Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale University Press, 2000. Atomic Energy 1939-1956. Yale University Press, 1994. Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939-1956. Yale University Press, 1994. Hyde, Earl. Still Perplexed About Krivitsky. International Journal Of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. Routledge, 2002. Intelligence Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security. The Gale Group, 2004. Kirschner, Don. The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin. University of Missouri Press, 1995. Nuclear Weapon Archive. Klaus Fuchs. nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/Fuchs.html-3k. Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Simon and Schuster,1995. 11 Sudoplatov, Pavel & Schecter, Jerrold. Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness- A Soviet Spymaster. Boston:Little Brown, 1994. The Sunday Times. Report: Russian Spy Operations on US Reach Cold War Levels. Saturday, May 19, 2007. Usdin, Steven. Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied For Stalin and Founded The Soviet Silicon Valley. New Haven Yale University Press, 2005. Washington Monthly. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Hhtp://findarticles.com/p/articles/m_199_July/ai_ 55215065/print. Weinstein, Allen & Vassiliev, Alexander. The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America. The Stalin Era. New York: Random House, 1999. Read More