Book Review | Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2005

Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War

Katherine A. S. Sibley. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 370 pages, endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

Katherine Sibley holds the history chair at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Her book is about domestic counterintelligence in America from the 1930s to the present. Three points are worth noting at the outset. First, it is well documented, including FBI and Soviet material only recently released. Second, it is well written. Third, all of the cases have been written about in other books, but Sibley looks at them from a new perspective.

To provide background, Sibley begins with a survey of Soviet espionage from the end of World War I to the late 1930s. She concludes with a chapter on Soviet spying in America since World War II. The four chapters in between deal with Soviet espionage in the period from the late 1930s to the end of the war. Most other books that study US counterintelligence during this same period focus on the Cold War aspects of the cases since that is when they came to public attention and, in certain instances, to trial. This approach has left an impression that FBI counterintelligence did not really attack the Soviet espionage threat until after World War II. The reality, as Sibley sees it, is otherwise. In her words, the FBI “recognized the growing infiltration of Soviet spies before the Cold War and made limited, but nevertheless pioneering efforts to stop them.”

To substantiate this position, she reviews selected prewar and wartime cases of military industrial espionage, the initial indications of atomic espionage, the role of the American communist party, the congressional involvement, the political circumstances that contributed to the Soviet successes, and how the FBI dealt with the unanticipated threat during wartime. A key issue is how the cases came to the attention of the Bureau. She explains that some leads came from informants in the communist party and surveillance of its members. Other cases grew out of investigations into the personnel of the Soviet purchasing organization in America (AMTORG), based on leads from a foreign intelligence service. Still others developed after a disgruntled NKGB officer sent Director J. Edgar Hoover an anonymous letter identifying the personnel in the New York and Washington residencies. Where cases could have been handled better—for example, the failure to act on Walter Krivitsky’s and Whittaker Chambers’s attempts to expose Soviet espionage prior to the war— she says so candidly. But a key aspect of the FBI counterintelligence program is omitted: The FBI was in a reactive mode. As Red Spies In America perhaps unintentionally shows, when espionage cases did turn up, little was done until after the war. In short, the Soviet espionage networks worked without major disruption during the war and were only shut down after it ended. Professor Sibley’s thesis is not proved.