Booknotes

Mr. ALLEN WEINSTEIN, AUTHOR, "THE HAUNTED WOOD": A poem of W.H. Auden. It's called "September 1, 1939." The lines are, `Lost in a haunted wood, children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good,' seem to apply to many characters.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: The book is about Soviet espionage in America during the Stalin era by which we start in the 1930s -- early 1930s and we go through the early '50s.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: A good deal. We had access for the first time to the records of the KGB through an agreement made with my publisher for this book, Random House. And many of the stories, including many of the agents that emerge in this book, are being described for the first time.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Couple years. Well, you can do a lot of work in a couple years, and my collaborator and I did a great deal of work before they finally shut down the files.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: From late '93, early '94 through mid-to late '95.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Money. They -- the Retired Agents Association, which negotiated the deal with the American publisher, wanted to receive a payment, which they did--which the publisher gave, in exchange for which they let four Western authors go into the files for four different books with four Russian authors.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: One of the four Western authors.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Yeah. The other three were Tim Naftali, who did a book on the Cuban missile crisis called "One Hell of a Gamble," excellent book, came out last year. Second was John Costello, who died and then another author replaced him in doing a book on the British side of this intelligence thing, the Cambridge -- Philby, Burgess, Maclean and the others -- the documents they stole. The third book was on Berlin as a battleground--Cold War battleground with a former CIA station chief and former KGB station chief as co-authors. And I have...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: OK.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Right.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: His name was Samuel Dickstein. I should say, Brian, that that story surprised even the folks at the Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency when it came out, because they--no one there had looked these files for 30, 40 years, and when we dug that one out, they were amazed. This is a man named Samuel Dickstein who was best known for having started the committee that was the forerunner of the House committee on Un-American activities in the 1930s. And he went to work for the Russians--the Soviets at a time when most of the agents in the United States or Britain or elsewhere who worked for them were ideologically motivated. They were anti-fascist. They were members of the Communist Party or they had--they were people of the left. Dickstein, who undoubtedly was an anti-fascist, also demanded money. And he was one of the few agents during this period who worked as more modern agents in the post--in the Cold War years worked like Ames or Walker, it's primarily for money. Made a lot of it, too.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: New York City, the lower East Side, Russian immigrant family and he worked in the late '30s for a few years for them. They were very disappointed with him. In fact, they were so angry at the business of being done by him that they gave him a very unusual code name. They called him Crook.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, by the equivalent of 1999 standards, almost $200,000.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: He was in Congress for, I believe--I'd have to go back and check--about 20 years or more. And then he...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Never, never. American counterintelligence was virtually non-existent in the 1930s. The FBI was focused, if it was focused at all, on Nazis and on fascists. They weren't really looking for this kind of espionage at that time.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: First time we ever heard about it. Another first in this regard is the whole story of a woman named Martha Dodd, fascinating story, daughter of the American ambassador to Nazi Germany, very important listening post for the Nazis, beautiful woman. She fell in love with a Soviet diplomat. He recruited her for Soviet espionage. That's a picture of her flying off to Moscow. And she actually worked--took documents from the embassy and elsewhere, but was involved in one fashion or another for about a decade and a half with him. Her lover was killed. She married an American Communist and eventually fled the country with him when she was threatened with indictment.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: They were from the South. She was --her father was a very famous American historian named William Dodd who was a close friend of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, extraordinary ambassador to Germany, tough anti-Nazi figure. And Martha Dodd, who led a very wild personal life during this period, was always troubling the Soviets, who were very prim and unhappy with the fact that she was emotionally prone to have one love affair after another, even while she had her Soviet lover.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: William Dodd.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Ambassador to Nazi Germany from 1933 to about 1937.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: She operated in Berlin at the embassy. She was able to provide lots of documents and other materials from the embassy to the Soviets during this period.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, her material turned out not to have been significant enough to go into great detail about. She was--you know, embassy reports to the United States on what was happening in Germany. They could pick a lot of that up in the newspapers and the like, but the Soviets kept thinking she could do more. She never turned out to be a successful agent from their point of view. She never had that kind of access, particularly when her father left Germany, she fades from the scene.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: She married an American Communist there. I believe you have his picture, Mr. Stern, and he was known as the red millionaire because--Alfred Stern, because he had a certain amount of wealth. At one point, he went into partnership with another Soviet agent named Boris Morros who was a minor Hollywood producer. His story was known to some extent, but told here in full for the first time. He worked for the Soviets for two decades and the last decade of which he was a counter--he was a double agent for the FBI. But what interested him most was making money, making money so he could do films, making money for other purposes in Hollywood. The KGB actually helped put together a partnership between Alfred Stern and Boris Morros to start a record company--a music publishing company, the first time, I think, and the last time that Soviet intelligence went into that business.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Right.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, we were in the middle of the depression decade. Millions and millions were unemployed. There was a very significant reform current, some of which was liberal and went into the New Deal to achieve reforms through government. There were a number of Democratic Socialists who opposed from the left, but there were--also were a number of members of the Communist Party during this decade, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Americans who went in and out of the Communist Party, some of whom became fodder for recruiting by the Soviet espionage networks.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Almost none. Almost none of it was known in the '30s.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Very--very--very little in the '30s. When it did, it would--it tended to be discounted as the ravings and rantings of anti-Soviet Americans. After all, we had not recognized the Soviet Union for a good long period, from the 1917 Revolution until Roosevelt recognized them in 1933. So all of this really opens up in the early to mid-'30s. And we were also not their enemy at the time. That's another point that has to be kept in mind. We were, from their point of view, a listening post. They could get terrific information from our State Department or other government agencies and people they had there about Nazi Germany, about Japan, about countries that they did feel threatened them.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Who were...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: ...their agents. We did not go looking for--there are very few that are alive. The ones that we went--one of those whom we--I did meet was a very interesting man named Morris Cohen, whom I found--well, who was alive in Russia, in retirement.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: That's the picture of Morris Cohen.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: The one in the middle. The one on the end is--the one on the right is General Vadim Kirpichenko, who is the head of the Old Boys Advisory Group. They have a more formal title, of course, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. That was taken in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Hospital. He died about a year later. And he told some fascinating stories about life, becoming a Communist in the 1920s in the United States. He would not talk about his intelligence work. Although the Russians did roll him out to give credence to his story that did not turn out to be true about a master spy in the atomic energy program who was not--frankly, didn't exist.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: That is a new stamp that was printed in Russia just about two years ago after he died honoring Morris Cohen.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: He was a courier more often than not. He worked in the United States. His wife worked with one of our leading Soviet agents in the atomic energy area, Ted--Theodore Hall, who was exposed first by the so-called Venona files when they came out a few years ago, the intercepts of Soviet intelligence cables that had taken place during the Second World War and finally were released 50 years later. But he himself was not a primary figure going into any government agency or elsewhere. He worked as a courier for other networks.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, in Morris Cohen's case, he described at great length his experiences in the Spanish Civil War to me. He had become a Communist in the 1920s, he said, after he heard John Reed, the famous author --"Ten Days That Shook the World"-- give a speech. And so he was an old-time Communist and from his point of view, it was not a great leap to assist the Soviet Union. He believed in the Soviet Union. It was his Valhalla.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Buried in the Kremlin wall, famous author, passionate supporter...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: American. Passionate supporter of Soviet communism in its early years. And he inspired a number of these younger people like Morris Cohen. In the 1930s, of course, you have the additional threat of Nazi Germany, of fascism, and certainly a small cadre of Americans believe that the best way to fight fascism was to assist the Soviet Union. And if they had to assist them by taking documents and engaging in espionage, at least some were willing to do that.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: We published "Perjury"--I wrote it in the mid-'70s, published it in 1978. Then went back and, to a very substantial extent, rewrote it and added some materials from the Soviet archives and some other materials in 1996 and '97 and published it last year in '98, again.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, the premise of the book was that Alger Hiss was guilty of the crimes for which he was charged at his trial, he was convicted of perjury. The book is called "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case." And I began by thinking Hiss may very well have been innocent. That's a picture of Alger Hiss. And after a great deal of research, including the FBI files which I sued with support from the American Civil Liberties Union, and we opened those files under the Freedom of Information Act to all researchers, the files did not have any conspiracy against Hiss. I discovered a lot of material in his own defense files and elsewhere, plus all of my interviews which suggested that, frankly, I'd been wrong in my initial premise, which was that he might have been innocent.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: I'm an historian. I've been a professional historian most of my adult life. I taught at Smith College for 15 or 16 years, at Georgetown for a period of time, at Boston University and elsewhere. I was teaching, raising a family and I was doing research on another book which I'm now coming back to actually. I was doing research on a larger study of the so-called McCarthy period, which I call “Generation in Turmoil: America During the Second Red Scare.” The Hiss case was a small portion of that, but I became fascinated with it and then ended up suing for the files and writing a book on it.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Hiss on half a dozen occasions to interview him. I first got interested in him in the late '60s. I read a paper at the American Historical Association meeting here in Washington and said that there were many questions about this case which could only be resolved if the FBI files were released. The following day, as I discovered when I received my FBI file years and years later, Mr. Hoover scrolled in the margin of a Washington Post story about that paper, `What do we know about Weinstein?' They proceeded to open an old file on me and they didn't find out very much. There wasn't much to find out. But I published an article in The American Scholar in which I talked about my view that you had to have the FBI files in order to have a full view of the case. And about a year or two later, we sued, in 1972, in fact.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Not happy with it. I'd met with him at the office of my then publisher Alfred Knopf to explain to him that I changed my mind about the case and it was not a--it was an angry discussion. And that was the last time I saw him. But we'd had very courteous relations before that as he answered questions related to the case that I used in my research for the book.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Correct.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, there's always doubt in...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: ...in a historian's mind. I mean, you always--if you're not open to new evidence, then you're not the kind of historian that I necessarily respect. But there's very little doubt in my mind. I've seen no persuasive exculpatory evidence. And what emerged from the files--not simply the materials that had been discussed earlier that came from the so-called Venona files about an agent called--code named A-L-E-S, who was probably Alger Hiss, as the NSA and CIA indicated, but there were files from the 1930s in which Hiss, who worked for the military intelligence people, stumbles into--inadvertently into relationships with agents who worked for the NKVD at the time, the predecessor agency of the KGB. And these files--these memos go on at great length about the fact of Hiss trying to recruit agents from other networks. And I publish all of these memos in the book.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Yes.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: That's correct.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: A lot, but I don't have any idea how much. I would hesitate to venture a guess, but it was enough to at least--and this is--remember the year is 1993, and these were not good times in Moscow --particularly not for agents because many of their own agents were recalled home, were jobless, needed money. But this negotiation went between Random House and an organization called the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers of the KGB. The agreement was made. The authors were not privy to the agreement, and soon afterwards I was asked to do this book with a Russian co-author who himself had been a young KGB officer named Alexander Vassiliev.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: He lives near London now. He's moved West and he now writes for a Moscow newspaper and has launched a writing career.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, Albert Vitale is the person who signed off on the agreement. The editor of the series initially at Crown Books, which is a division of Random House, was Jim Wade--James Wade, who was an intelligence specialist himself and who, I think, brought the project to Random House. Albert Vitale signed off on the project and apparently, he would probably have to be credited with the person who brought this.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Correct.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: They republished "Perjury" last year, 1998.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, actually, it may seem that way but it wasn't. It was--at the time, Harold Evans was the head of the Random House component of the House and he became interested in the book and asked if it was in print. And I said, `No, it had gone out of print.' And he offered me an opportunity to revise it, add materials and bring it back into print.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: It did OK. It's still used--it's used in a number of courses in law schools and in universities on the Cold War era because there's a lot of cultural history in the book and how things changed from the 1930s into the McCarthy period and I bring the case up through the death of Mr. Hiss so that--the iconography of the case, if you will, the battles back and forth between supporters and opponents. The book was well received when it came out and so I'm pleased. Was it a best-seller? No.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, I, for the last 14 years of my life, have been president of a small center here in Washington called the Center for Democracy, which I helped found, which is a bipartisan organization, which has been assisting newer democracies in central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and elsewhere. So I was writing articles--smaller things, but I was between books, shall we say, for a fairly long period of time. And this gave me the incentive to get back into the research and writing business, working in off hours, mornings, evenings, weekends and whatever.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, what happened is that one of our projects was to bring together the heads of all the intelligence agencies in Eastern Europe, which we did with the support of President Zhelev of Bulgaria--then President Zhelev. We did this in Sofia. While there, I met several of the heads of Russian intelligence and invited them to the United States. Bill Colby, the former director of the CIA, was at that conference. We hosted them here in this country. And that's a photograph of them--of these Russian generals and Wild Bill Donovan, the head--the offices of the head of the first foreign intelligence agency we had during the World War--during World War II.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: I'm there on the left.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: In the middle and there's General Vadim Kirpichenko, General Yuri Kobaladze and General Gueyvandov, who's head of the--actually, head of the retired agents group, plus the head of the OSS retired agents group, all looking through Donovan's memorabilia. And as a result of that, I met Jim Wade at Random House who immediately said, `Look, we're working on this project. I think you would be the right person to do it. Would you be willing to?' And I thought about it for about three seconds, and I said, `Yes.'

Mr. WEINSTEIN: The Office of Strategic Services.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: During the period of American entry into the Second World War from about 1940 or '41 when Roosevelt asked his old friend General Donovan to organize this foreign intelligence entity. It lasted until about a year after the Second World War and was disbanded when it became clear that President Truman wanted to take another tact with intelligence.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Not very well. Not very well. J. Edgar Hoover's nemesis in the American government was General Donovan, because General Donovan had the right to engage in foreign intelligence work all over the world except Latin America. The FBI retained Latin America. And Hoover and Donovan fought especially when Donovan came to an agreement with the head of Soviet intelligence, General Fitin to exchange information during the war. That drove Hoover up the wall. He lobbied the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They opposed the agreement. Roosevelt basically compelled Donovan to back away from any formal agreement with the NKVD. But during the war, there was a lot of informal cooperation, and what Donovan did not know is that his agency was heavily infiltrated by Soviet agents during this period, heavily infiltrated.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, there were allegations and charges during the war and after the war. But really the first major, I suppose, batch of materials with credible evidence of this came out when the Venona, well, when the Soviet archives were opened and when the Venona archives were opened.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: They were deciphered in a period from the end of the Second World War at a place called Arlington Hall in suburban Virginia, near Washington, and a number of very talented code breakers worked on them over a period of over 20 years.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: They were intercepts done by the Army Signal Corps during the Second World War of thousands upon thousands of documents, cables sent by Soviet officials in this country back to Moscow, including about 3,000 intelligence cables. And many of these cables have never been deciphered, but the ones that were deciphered showed significant evidence about a number of Soviet agents in this country. They remained a secret--apparently, according to Senator Moynihan's new book, "Secrecy," they remained a secret even from President Truman during his presidency. We didn't know about the Venona program. And finally, Senator Moynihan and others on this commission on government secrecy that finished its work a few years ago persuaded the CIA and the National Security Agency to release the materials and they came out in--most of them came out in 1996.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Right.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Right. He was a State Department official--a middle-ranked State Department official during the 1930s and he was a person who had--would--was--had leanings toward the Communist Party. And he was...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Let me see.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Yes. And Duggan became a Soviet agent during this period and remained one after a fashion until the Second World War. But very reluctantly. He had great doubts about communism after the Moscow purge trials in which millions were killed by Stalin and his henchman in the late 1930s. He certainly was uneasy about--very troubled by the Nazi Soviet pact of 1939 in which Stalin and Hitler sort of agreed not to attack one another, which lasted a couple of years. And Duggan kept those troubles to himself, finally resigned from the State Department during World War II, took a private sector position and kept being harassed, if you will, by the Communists, by Soviet agents, operatives who came to him asking him to work for them, and then in 1948, also by the FBI, which wanted him to testify against Alger Hiss or to testify in other cases. And for whatever reason, we don't know whether he jumped to his death or he killed himself, but he fell from a building in New York City to his death in the--late 1948.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Yes.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Leon Trotsky was probably the most important leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, of the Russian Revolution, who emerged after Lenin's death in opposition to Joseph Stalin. Trotsky had a huge following. He was a great military figure during the revolution itself, in fighting against its enemies. And Stalin eventually outmaneuvered him and forced most of his supporters out of the Soviet government and forced Trotsky into exile. And Trotsky eventually, in the middle to late 1930s, settled in Mexico where Stalin's agents assassinated him. But Stalin was obsessed with Trotsky, obsessed with him. And he sent agent after agent in the United States when they could have been doing other things, out to infiltrate Trotskyist groups. He was also obsessed with residual remnants of supporters of the monarchy--of the Romanov monarchy. And he sent agent after agent to infiltrate these groups and much of Stalin's foreign intelligence operation during the 1930s was generated by this type of interest.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He was an extraordinarily brilliant man. He's published some remarkable memoirs of the Russian Revolution and other books right up to his death, he had a following in a number of different countries of people who felt that this was an individual who ought to be leading the Soviet Union, not Stalin.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: In my book, as you've noticed, the word Trotskyite, which is a pejorative term used by Stalin and--and his supporters, is used to imply a variety of heinous sins, virtually none of which can really be charged against the Trotskyists. The Trotskyist is a term which--at least I try to be very precise about because these were radicals just as others were radicals. There's a wonderful comment that Arthur Koestler makes, Brian, in "Darkness at Noon," when he's describing one of these old Bolsheviks like Trotsky who's been caught in Stalin's prison and he talks about all of them and he says, `They were all guilty but not of the crimes for which they were charged.'

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Elizabeth Bentley was a graduate of Vassar. The Soviet operatives were very pleased with her when she joined their networks because they didn't have too many American-born operatives. Many of the ones who worked for them were immigrants. And she became the lover of a Soviet station chief in New York named Jacob Golos who died during World War II. Golos ran a number of networks in New York City, but especially in Washington, once the war began. And given the sloppiness of trade craft, Elizabeth Bentley knew most of these people. They were not compartmented into different segments. And so she had a very restless few years after Golos died. One of the operatives even tried to persuade Moscow to find her another lover so that she would be happy again. They never did that. And she eventually went to the FBI in 1945 and told them what she knew, named a huge number of names. The word got back in late 1945 from New York, Washington to Moscow via London where Harold "Kim" Philby, who had heard about this from American intelligence--he was then in British intelligence--sent the word back and Russian intelligence--Soviet intelligence actually instructed their American networks to close down, fearful that many of their agents and operatives were threatened with exposure. They recalled the Soviet operatives, most of them went back to Moscow. The American agents, most of them, basically were put on--as they would say, I suppose, on the West Coast, on hiatus for the moment.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: She became a government witness at a number of trials. She--and a number of hearings. She took on a new name in the media. They called her the Red Spy Queen. She sort of started a new life as a lecturer. She wrote a memoir. But Soviet intelligence was essentially --fatally crippled for that period in the United States by Bentley's revelations.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Right.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Why go pursue Soviet agents and Soviet operatives and American agents if there are virtually none left? The first difference would have been, as I've said, that the so-called McCarthy period was late. It was too late to actually catch any of these folks. Most of them had scattered. Secondly, there was no real knowledge of the troubles of being a Soviet operative in this country. As I point out in the book, one of the post-World War II Soviet station chiefs in Washington spoke no English. See, he writes back to Moscow saying how wonderful it is. He's learned so much English in the last year.

Another one doubled as the Soviet ambassador. So during the day, he had all of these responsibilities aboveboard, and then during the evening, he was a station chief. They had about two people left of the Soviet operatives whom Bentley didn't know. They let them stay at the station in Washington. And they assigned them, at one point, for a period of a year or more to simply clip items from the newspaper. So they stumbled across that wonderful discovery that you could get an extraordinary amount of important information from the transparent American media.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Right. Right.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Right. I think you probably had most Americans working for Soviet networks during the Second World War. They wanted everything. They wanted materials on the different war weapons of one sort or another, everything from airplanes to radar to other things. They wanted information on government policies all through the government. We take the trouble at one point to simply cite what one agent--a man named Harold Glasser and what he stole from the US government and sent over by their own catalog, the materials that came in. And obviously, it would be much too boring a book, which we tried to keep it from being, if we had simply quoted at great length from each and every one of these documents. But it's just--they accumulated a stunning array of material during the Second World War from their American agents in Washington.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, Harry Dexter White, leading official in the Treasury Department, helping to shape post-war plans for Germany, helping to shape post-war plans of US assistance to the Soviet Union and other things. Alger Hiss certainly was another one. And probably if Hiss had not been dogged by these accusations of Communist involvement because of Whittaker Chamber's defection back in the late '30s, which finally got some serious attention from the FBI beginning in 1945, Hiss might very well have gone on to be secretary of state in another administration. Lauchlin Currie in the White House, a chief aide to Franklin Roosevelt, and he...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: I can't see. Let me...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: He's on this side here, the left.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: He worked for Franklin Roosevelt in the White House.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Directly, directly. He was a presidential aide.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Was a spy. In fact, some of these networks--I described the so-called Silvermaster network, run by a man named Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, who was not a major figure himself but who had a significant number of agents working for him in the OSS and Treasury, at State and elsewhere. And Silverman--master, again, drove our puritanical Soviet friends up the wall because he was living at home in a ménage à trois. He and his wife and another agent in his network all lived together, apparently quite comfortably and happily. And at the end of the war when things got a little pressured and he thought it might be time to leave this, he persuaded the Soviets to give him the down payment on a farm.

Now what Soviet intelligence ran up against over and over and over is what I call the stubborn--what I think of as the stubborn individualism of American realities. Their agents were simply not very disciplined during most of this period.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: It came out from both the Venona materials and these materials.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, he'd been accused of this, but when we published this material, this was the first time it actually emerged with--from the Soviet archives. And from American intelligence, it emerged from the Venona files, which also were the transcriptions in the United States from Soviet files. In fact, we were able to match up so many of these, my publisher finally persuaded me to stop--my editor finally persuaded me to stop putting in all these footnotes of the same cable from Moscow and from the Venona files.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: No, I'm not in here.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: I was this photograph, but it's the first time it's been seen. It's an interesting one, though.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: It's a photograph of the first meeting between a Russian foreign intelligence head, Yevgeny Primakov, now the prime minister of Russia, and American foreign--American CIA s--chief, and that's Bob--Robert Gates on the right. That photograph was taken in Moscow, and you had a period when the two services seemed to be cooperating on things like counterterrorism, dealing with narco trafficking, items of that sort.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: '92, yeah, right, '92.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: ...let's see.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: He's now the prime minister.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, when I was there, he was the head of Russian foreign intelligence. I'd actually met him first in 1990, when I went over with an historian's group.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: I mentioned it. He then became foreign minister and--replacing Andrei Kozyrev of--a more nationalist foreign minister in Primakov's case and now, of course, is Yeltsin's prime minister.

I had occasion--I probably saw Primakov as much as any American did during those years--if not more than--those years when I was doing research in the Russian foreign intelligence archives, and we would occasionally have dinner or lunch or just a conversation. And he's a remarkably knowledgeable figure. He follows American events very, very carefully. He speaks English fluently, though I'm not sure--I'm pretty sure he probably doesn't do it when he's meeting with our secretary of state all the time. And plainly, even then, was determined to move Russia into a more nationalist posture that was less allied with the United State on various issues than his predecessor.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: He supported the project. He supported the project. I left a book for him. When I went to Moscow last month, I gave copies of the book out to the people at the foreign intelligence service. After all, it came from their files. Mr. Primakov was in India, so I just left a copy.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: It's a unique occasion. I can't think of an occasion when--well, first of all, I can't think of an occasion when we would have negotiated an agreement of the sort that was negotiated between the Retired Agents Organization of the former Soviet KGB and American publishers. There's no comparable situation.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: To their press bureau, which was downtown -- in downtown Moscow near Dzerzhinsky Square, which was the famous square that--named after Felix Dzerzhinsky where the Lubyanka is, where the headquarters of the old KGB was. And right near there...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Lubyanka was the prisons and the headquarters, also, of the KGB in the old days.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: That's General Yuri Kobaladze, who was head of the press bureau, well known to Western television viewers because he gets on the television set whenever they'd had to discuss Aldrich Ames or some other situation. He has just been appointed by Mr. Primakov the head of the Tass agency. And that--so plainly, Mr. Primakov is using his intelligence agency relationships in his larger chores in Russian government.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: He was there. I was introduced to him, and--actually, I first met Kobaladze in the United States when he was here. But the first time I met my co-author was with Kobaladze at the foreign press bureau. What would happen is that they would deliver the files from the archives to the press bureau. The archives was at the--archives in the main Russian intelligence headquarters is outside of Moscow. They'd deliver the files to the press bureau and we would work on them there.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: A mess, in the sense that until very recently, a number of these files were sewn so that you would have--in these great folio volumes, you would have anything from stray letters to Stalin that people had sent in to the Russian Embassy in America to detailed case reports from agents to systematic documents that were taken by one or another of their agents. You never quite knew what you were gonna find when you looked at a lot of this material.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, this is the other point that I--the process was “Tinkers to Evers to Chance.” The agreement that Random House made with the Soviets was that only the Russian authors would be allowed--after the research design was created, the Russian authors would actually be allowed to see the files and make detailed transcriptions--in fact, verbatim transcriptions with file numbers and identifiers. And occasionally, documents--actual documents would come out. But the Western authors could then work in the same place, but not, in effect, with the files themselves. There was this almost theological distinction between letting us do more than observe it.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Oh, hundreds in the press bureau working on these matters. I was in Moscow a few dozens times. I sort of lost track.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: I stay at the Savoy Hotel, which is a wonderful hotel. It was the first modern hotel built by the Finns and refurbished by the Yugoslavs--not built, but refurbished by them. It began as a hotel back in the 19th century. It's small; it's cozy. It's right across the street from the Metropol and it's a two-block walk from Red Square.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, that depends on how many viewers will go out to the bookstore. It was for a time number nine in one of the--Amazon.com, and it has gone into its third printing at this point. I don't have the exact number of copies. So it seems to be doing well.

Will it pay off in that sense? For me, Brian, it's paid off already. It's given me--it's been an incredible education, and not simply in connection with the espionage elements of the book but just in connection with the extraordinary figures that I've met on both sides of the Atlantic as a result.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, one thing is, I suppose, that one must take these people in their own terms. We tried--this is an unjudgmental book. Jokingly, I describe it as a sort of modest "Canterbury Tales" of Soviet espionage. You have murders, suicides, love affairs, people with flaws like the rest of us who are struggling to fulfill what they consider to be their commitments or ideas. If they were Americans working against our government, then obviously, they were traitors. And that--and the word has to be used. But if they were Russians or Soviets, the Soviets came here and they fell in love with this country, many of them. What you learn is to budget for the unexpected, which is something that, as an historian, I tend to be very--very attuned to.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Translated them, right.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Yes, after a while. He has shown, for example, by his commitment to the project. He followed it through. We even--once, when opinion in the Soviet Union--the former Soviet Union and Russia turned against the United States in terms of a number of these things, my co-author retained his commitment. And we also received materials from others who were committed to the project who--I can't really go into on this show.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, they haven't turned against this country, but I think they--that there is a much--there is a resurgent Russian nationalism. There's a resentment, for one thing, of the fact that we don't really necessarily view them as a comparable superpower any longer. There is a sense somehow that the United States never devoted the degree of commitment, resources that it might have with this extraordinary event, this historic event, the collapse of Soviet communism. And after that, our aid was perhaps 10 percent or 20 percent of what the Western Europeans did in Russia and in the other countries.

But there are a variety of reasons for resentment, and yet, at the same time, we are incredibly popular, particularly amongst the younger people, the intelligentsia and the like. We're a model for them. Still, many Russians will tell you that they measure themselves against the United States in a variety of areas, and our trouble, perhaps as much as anything else, by our neglect.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: I'd say it's been-- it continues to be tuned up.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Oh, they're undoubtedly here now, and in various capacities. A lot of it may be sort of matter-of-fact efforts in various industries, economic intelligence of one sort of another, if that interests them. I don't know.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, they tried and they failed. No--I think the answer is no, they couldn't. That was a historical moment, and that's passed.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: It passed, really, in the--I suppose the milestone was the Nazi-Soviet pact. Just a number of individuals recognized the cynicism of Stalin and those around him and aligning with their worst enemy simply in order to preclude an immediate attack. For many, it passed because of the purge trials, which killed millions and millions, including a number of these intelligence officers. One of the fascinating stories for me is the number who went back to the Soviet Union knowing they would probably be arrested and tortured and executed.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Ignatz Reiss, Peter Gutzeit, the New York station chief who sent probably the most interesting memo--unacted-upon memo ever sent by a Soviet intelligence operative. He was the one who handled, among other people, our congressman, Mr. Dickstein. At one point, he sends a long memo back to Moscow saying, `Why are we simply wasting our time bribing congressmen like this fellow?' whom he didn't like. He said, `Why don't we take after a deeper influence in American--try to achieve a deeper influence in American politics by financing political campaigns, by purchasing newspapers, by funding journalists, by doing things in a systematic way to enhance Soviet influence throughout the country?'

Mr. WEINSTEIN: And the Russians liked the idea, but then they brought him back and killed him.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: The top two are David and Ruth Greenglass. The bottom two are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: That's right.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: It was new for me.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: That Ethel Rosenberg was not significantly involved, to the extent that the Soviet documents show, in the espionage activities of her husband. Her husband was a very active agent, mostly on non-atomic matters. The point at which the Rosenbergs entered the universe of people who were engaged in atomic espionage was one basic, important element, namely that Julius Rosenberg persuaded David Greenglass' wife, Ruth, to bring to David Greenglass, who was a machinist, and Ethel Rosenberg's brother, who was a machinist at Los Alamos at the Los Alamos Project--to bring to him a proposal that he begin to work for Soviet intelligence. And he agreed for the Soviet networks.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: When the trail led from Klaus Fuchs, the British physicist arrested--or German physicist arrested in Britain for atomic espionage--very important figure--the trail led from him to a courier in America named Harry Gold.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: That's Klaus Fuchs right there. Next to Klaus Fuchs is another Soviet agent at Los Alamos, Theodore Hall, who was exposed by the Venona documents and by these materials from the KGB files.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Below them is Harry Gold, a courier who met Fuchs and also met Greenglass. And the trail led from Harry Gold to David Greenglass. Greenglass had provided the Soviets with sketches of the lens mold of the bomb and other things. And Greenglass was arrested. In order to preserve--to save his wife from arrest, he basically told the FBI all they wanted to know about Julius Rosenberg, his brother-in-law, and how he had been--and how Greenglass had been recruited. The FBI arrested Julius and Ethel Rosenberg both. They were tried and they were convicted. They were sentenced to death and they were put to death in 1953 despite enormous protests, not only from Communists but from many, many non-Communist figures, at the fact that--of their death sentence--not so much of the fact of convicting them, but of their death sentence.

And what emerges from the files is that Ethel Rosenberg, who does not even have a code name--and Julius Rosenberg, matter of fact; he was engaged in espionage, mostly non-atomic--Ethel Rosenberg appears to have known what her husband was doing, appears to have maybe met a Soviet agent or two--Soviet operative or two. But there was no dispositive proof that she had done even as much, for example, as Priscilla Hiss probably did in connection with Alger Hiss. And Priscilla Hiss was never indicted. And in this time--in this day and age, Brian, I doubt very seriously that they would have been executed. I think Rosenberg would have gotten a sentence comparable to Ames or Pollard or the Walkers, or whatever. And I doubt very seriously that Ethel would have been even indicted.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: We did not see, I mean, a significant number of files in the KGB files that concerned Chambers because he was working with Alger Hiss in the military intelligence files. And what I did in the book was to reconstruct the story, making it clear that I was using the information that had previously been published in my book and in Sam Tanenhaus' excellent biography of Whittaker Chambers. I included the new Hiss cables, the new cables that concerned Hiss in the 1930s. But I can't say that there was a significant amount of new information about Chambers, as such, in this book.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: He was close to people who were, and that was known.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Pardon?

Mr. WEINSTEIN: J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientist who was the chief organizer of scientists at the time of the atomic bomb, the Los Alamos Project, during the Second World--Berkeley physicist, a brilliant figure. And he was accused in some recent books of--particularly one by a retired KGB general named Sudoplatov, of having been involved, however wittingly or unwittingly, in espionage for the Soviets. We turned up no evidence of that and, in fact, most of the material we turned up suggests that they did try to recruit him on several occasions, unsuccessfully. But there's one cable, and it--there's no verification for that and we just included it because it was there, that said--that described him as a secret member of the Compatriots, as they called it, of the American Communist Party. There's no proof that that's necessarily--could have been a misjudgment. It could have been an error on the part of the person sending the cable. But there it is. But as far as espionage is concerned, there's no reason that we found, at least, to question the loyalty of Oppenheimer.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: House Un-American Activities Committee. Begun in the late 1930s, initially under the chairmanship of a Texas--conservative Texas Democrat named Martin Dies.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: No, not in the way it performed. It performed for the galleries. It was much more concerned with making--sort of publicizing what it could do by bringing people into open hearings before--often before private hearings had established whether there was a need for open hearings. So it significantly damaged the range of reputations. Did it deal with some people who were members of the Communist Party? Sure, but did it add anything to what the FBI was already doing? Not to any significant extent that I've been able to find.

For example, one of the frequent complainers and critics of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, as he was of McCarthy's efforts on the Senate side, was J. Edgar Hoover, because real investigative work is private work. It is quiet work. It is work that needs cooperation from a maximal number of sources. And that's not--normally not done in front of television lights.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Right. Well, Nixon turns out to have been remarkably dogged and stubborn in the Hiss case. And I describe some of this in “Perjury,” where he stuck to the case at a time when other committee members were willing to drop it because they really saw no way of dealing with the conflicting testimony by Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Nixon, on the other hand, wanted to continue pursuing this.

What's so interesting about our--my research on Nixon was that I discovered that there were times during this case when, despite what he wrote about himself in his memoir "Six Crises," he was not calm, cool and collected. He panicked whenever it appeared that Hiss had an advantage on something or Chambers may have lied about one--the date of the microfilm. Nixon, you know, hit the ceiling. But by and large, he stayed with this case. And I suppose to the extent that the case helped make his reputation in California, that was understandable.

But he refused to see me. There's a little story that goes with that. He refused to be interviewed. I went out to see him in San Clemente after--or tried to see him, at least. I met with his chief of staff out there at the time, and...

Mr. WEINSTEIN: A man named Frank Gannon, and his assistant, a young woman named Diane Sawyer, whom I think has gone on to do one or two other things. And we spent a nice evening chatting about their boss, who had just recently left the White House. I wrote an article in Esquire about that encounter. I sent Nixon a copy of the book. I'm sure he wasn't happy with parts of it about him or some parts of it about him. Never heard anything about it.

Now flash forward to the 15th anniversary of the Shanghai--of the signing of the Shanghai Communiqué. I happened to be at a reception at the Chinese Embassy here in Washington, and who was the guest speaker but Richard Nixon? And I'd come in--frankly, in part just out of curiosity. And the then-ambassador moving Nixon through the crowds brings him over to me, and Nixon grabs my hand, throws his arm around me and says to the ambassador, `This is a brave young fellow, wrote a very fine book about the Hiss-Chambers case.' And I couldn't resist smiling and saying, `Does that mean, Mr. President, that you'll talk to me about it now?' And he said, `Of course. Just call me.' I called; I never got a meeting.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: There's a wonderful woman named--a wonderful poet named Marianne Moore, Brian, who once wrote about the craft of writing poetry, that it's the craft of creating imaginary gardens with real toads in them. The gardens-- the gardens of subversion that McCarthy pursued were by and large imaginary. There weren't 205 or however many Communists here and there. But there were some real agents. There were some people who, in fact, worked for the Soviets. It was McCarthy's political good fortune at the time to seize upon the Alger Hiss case because that--his first speech, his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, came only days after Hiss' conviction in early 1950. But McCarthy did, in retrospect, McCarthy added little except mayhem to that process.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Michael Straight was a very bright young American student at Cambridge in the 1930s, a friend of other bright British students who had already joined Communist underground, including Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, in particular. Straight was recruited by Burgess and Blunt for involvement in Communist espionage in part because he was a person who knew Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. His parents were close friends of both the Roosevelts. They were the founders of The New Republic magazine. And Straight came back to the United States and went to work briefly at the State Department and had what might be called almost a fling with Soviet espionage. It did not last very long. Straight, unlike, for example, Laurence Duggan, was so troubled and deeply troubled by the purge trials and the Nazi-Soviet pact that he broke decisively with the Soviets at that point.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Went on and--in the 1950s and '60s and became--actually, in the Nixon administration, became involved in the National Endowment for the Arts. He was one of the leading designers of the National Endowment for the Arts. And, in fact, interestingly enough, from what I read in a letter he wrote in connection with a review in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, he feels that my account of his career confirmed his efforts. I spoke to him for the first time last week.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Absolutely. The top half of the cover is Washington in the 1930s. You can't quite see it, but there's a trolley line. It looks like a bus, but it's really an overhead thing with wires and the rest. But that's the Capitol, and looking down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol in Washington in the '30s. The bottom is, of course, Red Square and the Kremlin in any period. And "The Haunted Wood" is a book which concerns Soviet espionage in America during the Stalin era which, of course, was the '30s and '40s. And I love the cover. I just love it.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, if they open the files again, I'd like to go on to the '50s and '60s and '70s, but I don't expect that to happen for some time. I got it all in. I got what I wanted to get in.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Well, I hope they feel the book has been fair, because if they feel the book has been fair, then the chances of them allowing, if not me, at least some other historians, whether Russian or Russian and American or Russian and Western, in might be better. And in fairness to the Russian foreign intelligence people, the British have just made a very big deal--British intelligence--of opening up their World War I files. So they're a bit behind.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Depended on which side of the grand concourse you came from, but Weinstein (pronounced wine-stine) will do.

Mr. WEINSTEIN: Thank you very much for having me, Brian.