Tim Tzouliadis
REDS UNDER THE BEDS
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev (Yale University Press 650pp £25)

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Revisionist history is often a bitter pill to swallow, especially when the consensus has permeated the very language of the debate. In the early 1950s, one crucial issue divided American public opinion, and continued to do so for decades. The question centred on the nature of Soviet communism, and the internal threat posed by American agents working for the KGB in the United States. Was the 'Konspiratsia' real, or were the accusers simply political fantasists seeking 'Reds under the beds'? The answer lies within the pages of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's remarkable book.

In the early 1990s, their co-author Alexander Vassiliev was given rare access to the KGB archives, where he worked for two years transcribing handwritten notes into coloured volumes. Using this material, corroborated by existing documentary evidence, the authors have pieced together a landscape of political subterfuge and treachery seen from both sides of the ideological divide.

Shockingly proven here is what the accusers had long asserted - that from the early 1930s, for the next decade and a half, the KGB had successfully inveigled its agents into the very heart of American democracy: the high echelons of the State Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the OSS, the National Security Agency, Los Alamos, Congress, and even the Presidential office. All were tasked with delivering a flow of secret information to Joseph Stalin.

In the late 1940s, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers cooperated with the FBI, and named dozens of US government officials as Soviet agents. At the time Bentley and Chambers were called liars and far worse, and were disbelieved by large sections of society. But the evidence proves that not only were such contemporary witnesses telling the truth, but the real picture was far worse. Taking advantage of the laxity of the FBI, and a willing pool of between 50,000 and 60,000 members of the Communist Party of the USA, the KGB had honeycombed the US government.

Some American spies were recruited for the money. Small fortunes were handed to men such as David Salmon, the chief of the State Department Division of Communication and Records, a genial man in late middle age over whose desk passed the decoded cables of American diplomacy. Agent 'Willy' was paid between $6,000 and $15,000 dollars annually for his information.

Many spies, however, were ideologically motivated, and refused even the smallest gifts. To these the KGB awarded the high honours of the Soviet state, showing their American agents the medals that for secrecy's sake they could not keep. Working in the State Department, Laurence Duggan delivered sheaves of secret documents to be filmed and sent to the Kremlin. When the KGB offered Duggan a birthday gift of a crocodile handbag monogrammed with his initials, Agent '19' politely declined and - in the words of his Russian handler - 'declared that he is working for the common idea, and indicated that he is not helping us out of any material incentive'.

In September 1939, Duggan was first named by Whittaker Chambers as one of seven Soviet agents working in the State Department. Amazingly he was allowed to carry on working in the Department for another five years. What protected the KGB's spies was that no one actually believed the evidence of their accusers. The notion that someone like Alger Hiss, for example, educated at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, could be working for the overthrow of the American government, seemed too fantastical. And so Hiss was chosen to advise an ailing Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference - the most important peace conference of the Second World War - while his real boss looked on from the other side of the table.

When confronted the American spies were instructed to deny all knowledge of their espionage, and attack the motives of their ex-Communist accusers. Invariably their trump card was to claim they were the victims of political persecution, witch-hunted simply for holding New Deal liberal beliefs in the Cold War age. A former KGB mole in the Justice Department, Abraham Glasser, had subsequently gained tenure at Rutgers Law. Subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Glasser pleaded the Fifth Amendment before lambasting the proceedings as an attempt 'to terrorize college teachers'. The journalist Izzy Stone defended him publicly as someone of 'liberal or progressive outlook who to the best of my knowledge had never been charged with being a Communist'. It would have made a deft and righteous defence had it only been true: both Glasser and Stone had been recruited by the KGB.

There were at least three confirmed KGB agents working at Los Alamos, and another two working at the Oak Ridge atomic facility - including Russell McNutt, an engineer from Kansas, a married man with a family. He is named for the first time in this book. Protected by Julius Rosenberg's refusal to confess, McNutt lived peacefully in retirement in a Lee Trevino-designed golf resort in North Carolina, where he died in 2008. Through these atomic spies, the Soviet Union saved the ten billion dollars that the Americans spent on research to detonate their first nuclear device, an exact copy of 'Fat Man'. Months later Stalin personally instructed Kim Il-Sung to begin the invasion of South Korea. The ensuing war killed between five and six million Koreans and Chinese, and 35,000 American servicemen.

According to Haynes and Klehr's meticulously researched investigation, the total number of Americans working for Soviet intelligence numbered over 500. They ranged from high-level spies passing secret documents from their government offices, to couriers who facilitated the transfer of information, to simple talent-spotters who gathered the names of new recruits. The spies came from all walks of life. Some had illustrious ancestors who had signed the Declaration of Independence, while others were recently naturalised citizens. Ultimately all were guilty of aiding and abetting Stalin's criminal regime.

The 'witch hunts' of the early 1950s and the anti-communist 'hysteria' characterised an era whose descriptive language was both revelatory and deeply politicised. How could history be so inconvenient as to reveal that the witch hunt was after real spies, or that the hysteria was a response to a systemic failure in American counterintelligence, or that the cost was to be measured in millions of innocent victims of the Cold War? The damage done was incalculable, and all that remains are some fragile skeins of dark humour left buried in the archives. In their internal communications in the late 1940s, KGB officers vehemently complained to Moscow that the 'spy mania' of the McCarthy period was interfering with their ability to manage their networks of - pause for irony - spies.

As magisterial and exhaustive as the machinations of this dark netherworld can allow, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Spies is a quiet triumph of scholarship.

TIM TZOULIADIS is the author of 'The Forsaken', published by Little, Brown.