Putin's Spies in America

[American Patriot]

:ttiwwp:

[Ryan Ruck]

The article doesn't state Russia was involved but, given this occurred in Alaska it seems like a pretty good guess.

U.S. Army Soldier Arrested On Suspicion Of Espionage

November 1, 2011

A U.S. Army specialist who was serving as a military policeman has been arrested at an Alaska military base on suspicion of spying, an Army spokesman said on Tuesday.

Specialist William Colton Millay, 22, was taken into custody at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on October 28 following a joint espionage investigation by the FBI and Army Counterintelligence special agents, Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bill Coppernoll said.

"We do expect to prefer charges sometime this week," Coppernoll told Reuters. He said the charges would be brought under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the FBI said the case would be tried in military courts.

Coppernoll did not say who Millay, of Owensboro, Kentucky, was suspected of spying for or what sensitive information he may have had access to. He said the investigation was ongoing.

FBI spokesman Special Agent Eric Gonzalez said the arrest was not related to the WikiLeaks case, in which U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning is charged with downloading more than 150,000 diplomatic cables and passing some of them to WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.

"It's unrelated, forget WikiLeaks," Gonzalez told Reuters.

Millay is assigned to the 164th Military Police Company, 793rd Military Police Battalion, 2nd Engineer Brigade.

Coppernoll said the 164th Military Police Company, known as the "Arctic Enforcers," was deployed to Afghanistan earlier this year but that Millay did not go.

"He was part of the rear detachment," Coppernoll said. "I don't know why in his particular case he was part of that (rear deployment) but that's not unusual."

A spokesman for the Anchorage Correctional Complex said Millay was being held there on a federal charge.

"Today's arrest was the result of a close working relationship between the FBI and its military partners in Alaska," Mary Rook, special agent in charge of the FBI in Alaska, said in a statement.

"Through this ongoing partnership, we are better able to protect our nation," Rook said.

Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson is a combined Army and U.S. Air Force facility near Anchorage.

[American Patriot]

Wow... Owensboro!!!! man very close to home for me

[Ryan Ruck]

FBI Says Russian Spies Got Close To Cabinet

October 31, 2011

The FBI rounded up a network of deep-cover Russian spies last year after the group came close to placing an agent near a Cabinet official in the Obama administration, a senior FBI counterspy said Monday as the bureau released once-secret documents on the case.

Frank Figliuzzi, assistant FBI director for counterintelligence, did not identify the Cabinet official, but other U.S. officials said it was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Figliuzzi said in an interview that the FBI decided to end its more than 10-year-long counterspy investigation of the network because of concerns that the spies were “getting very close to their objective.”

“These 10 Russian officers were sent to the U.S. on a specific mission to get close to U.S. policymakers and leaders in our government,” he said, noting that one had developed a friendship with someone close to a Cabinet official.

Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman at the time the case broke, P.J. Crowley, sought to distance her from the case, but did not deny that she was the person mentioned in court papers. “There is no reason to believe that the Secretary of State was a special target of this spy ring,” Mr. Crowley said in an email.

The spy who triggered concerns about high-level infiltration was Cynthia Murphy, later identified as Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) officer Lydia Guryev. Court papers say she met several times with a prominent New York-based financier active in political fundraising and described as a “personal friend” of a Cabinet official.

It was later disclosed that the financier was Alan Patricof, director of the venture capital firm Greycroft LLC and a donor to Democratic candidates, including Mrs. Clinton when she was a U.S. senator from New York.

Mr. Patricof said last year that he met Gureyev, whom he knew only as Cindy Murphy, several times and that she had been hired to do personal bookkeeping.

Additionally, the spy ring’s reports to Moscow revealed that the group was providing important data on the international gold markets, U.S. foreign policy toward Russia and Asia, and the identities of people applying for positions at the CIA, Mr. Figliuzzi said.

“We said they were getting too close to their objective. We’ve made the case on 10 of them. We identified all 10 of them, we can take it down,” Mr. Figliuzzi said.

He said a key break in the case developed in the mid-2000s after the FBI was able to decipher coded electronic communications between Moscow and the deep-cover spies. The communications were used to unravel the network, ending the FBI probe that began more than a decade ago.

Breaking the electronic codes used by the “illegals,” as the Moscow spies are called, was a milestone in the case that allowed FBI agents to pose as the spies’ handlers and identify the spies.

“Ultimately, at the end of the case, we were able to become the Russians,” Mr. Figliuzzi said. “The point where we decrypted the communications allows us to basically own the network.”

FBI agents posing as Russians fooled spies Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko into giving up valuable information about the ring. They were the last two people in the ring to be confirmed as SVR officers, Mr. Figliuzzi said.

“They finally confirmed to us that, yup, they were engaged in a spy ring,” he said.

Chapman, a red-haired beauty who became a focus of news coverage of the case, at one point gave an FBI undercover agent the computer she used for clandestine communications with Moscow to repair, saying she had problems with it. The FBI agent took the computer, which technicians likely used to break the codes.

Ten of the Russian agents were arrested on June 27, 2010. An 11th, the group’s spymaster Christopher R. Metsos, escaped arrest while in Cyprus.

The agents had been sent by Moscow to the United States to obtain government secrets and to influence the U.S. government while posing as Americans or other foreign nationals in Washington, New York and Boston.

Twelve days after the arrests, the 10 agents were exchanged for four Russians who had been imprisoned in Russia as foreign spies in a prisoner swap not seen since the Cold War.

The FBI’s release of documents, photographs and videos used in the probe code-named Ghost Stories is “unprecedented,” coming as it did so close to the end of the case, Mr. Figliuzzi said. It was released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, he said.

The documents and videos reveal how the FBI conducted the investigation and show the spies meeting with undercover FBI agents posing as Russians and the signals used before meetings.

One black-and-white photograph taken from a surveillance video shows a “brush pass” of a bag between a Russian intelligence officer and one of the female agents. Another shows an empty brown glass bottle used as a signal marker and a duct-taped package left in a “dead drop.”

The case shows “the absolute resolve of a foreign intelligence service to penetrate,” Mr. Figliuzzi said. “You can see the degree to which [the Russians] were starting to do it and the even greater resolve of the FBI to stop that from happening.”

The breaking of the communications took place about halfway through the case, around 2004 or 2006. “This allowed us to get complete transparency into the network,” Mr. Figliuzzi said.

He declined to comment on how the FBI first learned of the network.

Other intelligence officials said the spies were uncovered with the help of a defector from Russia’s SVR, Col. Alexander Poteyev, who worked secretly for the United States in Moscow.

Col. Poteyev was sentenced to 25 years in prison in absentia by a Moscow court in June.

The verdict stated that Col. Poteyev told his wife on June 25, 2010 — two days before the FBI arrested the Russian spies — that he was going on a business trip to Minsk, Izvestia newspaper reported.

The next day, he sent a text message to his wife stating: “Treat this news calmly. I have gone away not on a business trip but forever. Don’t turn the children against me. I will help them as far as I can. I will try to start my life over again.”

Mr. Figliuzzi said the case was significant but that rounding up one network does not mean there is no longer a foreign intelligence threat.

“To think that, just because we took down one network, that there are no more, or to think that we’ve seen everything there is to see would be foolhardy,” he said. “The bottom line is spying has been around with us since the Old Testament. It’s with us now and it will be with into the foreseeable future as long as the United States has what other nations want.”

David Major, a former FBI counterintelligence agent, said the case was an extraordinary success for the FBI. “This is perfect CI,” he said in an interview, referring to the acronym for counterintelligence.

“The release of the FBI documents, photographs and surveillance video today by the FBI on the Russian illegals arrested in June 2010 code-named Ghost Stories illustrates once again the how serious the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service is to maintain a robust intelligence collections capability in the USA,” Mr. Major said.

[American Patriot]

Mr. Figliuzzi said the case was significant but that rounding up one network does not mean there is no longer a foreign intelligence threat.

Oh, come on, there's no threat from the Russians, they are our friends. Even Obama says so....

[vector7]

Spies from China, Russia and Iran infect American universities to steal government and corporate secrets

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 15:48 EST, 9 April 2012 | UPDATED: 17:14 EST, 9 April 2012


Sleeper agent: Lidiya Guryeva aka Cynthia Murphy, a Russian spy, was told to get close to university professors who had access to secrets

American universities have become infected with foreign spies posing as humble students and researchers, who are working to steal government secrets and new technologies to take back to their own countries.

Untold numbers of foreign agents are hidden among the thousands of legitimate international students who are studying science, technology and engineering in the US.

China, Russia and Iran are among the nations who are attempting to exploit the culture of openness and transparency in American higher education.

Attempts by China and other East Asian countries to use academic channels to get their hands on classified information or corporate secrets rose eight-fold between 2009 and 2010, alone, Bloomberg reports

Similar attempts by Middle Eastern governments rose by two-fold last year.

'We have intelligence and cases indicating that U.S. universities are indeed a target of foreign intelligence services,' Frank Figliuzzi, the assistant director for counterintelligence for the FBI, told Bloomberg.

More...

• Mubarak spy chief nominated for presidency in ‘insult’ to Egypt
• The spy who loved me: High flying lawyer's steamy affair with Anna Chapman

Several recent arrests and discoveries illustrate the point. Even the high-profile network of Russian sleeper agents that was dismantled in 2010 had ties to spying at American universities.

Lidiya Guryeva aka Cynthia Murphy, who lived a suburban life in Montclair, New Jersey, held multiple degrees from prestigious colleges like Columbia University and NYU.


Consultation: Michigan State University President Lou Anna K. Simon consulted the CIA before killing a deal with a company that might have been a front for the Iranian government

According to Bloomberg, Guryeva received instructions from her Russian handlers to form 'ties w. classmates on daily basis incl. professors who can help in job search and who will have (or already have) access to secret info.' She was also told the look for potential targets 'to be recruited by Service.'

Iran also plays a role in academic spying. Michigan State University was struggling to keep its campus in Dubai open in 2009 when an Arab company stepped forward and promised to provide students and funding.

However, when MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon reached out to the CIA, agents said there was a possibility the company, which had Iranian investors, was really a front for the Iranian government.

Simon killed the deal and shut down part of the Dubai campus, costing the university $3.7 million.

However, on the academic spying front, China seems to be the biggest player of them all.

China employs up to 3,000 shell companies that it uses to try to acquire us technology secrets, Bloomberg reports.

It also has an army of student spies. Some of them are merely students who are coerced into spying. Others are plants posing as students -- trained foreign operatives with ulterior motives.

Professor Daniel J. Scheeres, who studies aerospace engineering, took on a student named Yu Xiaohong to study with him at the University of Michigan.

Scheeres, who studies the movement and control of spacecraft and objects in space, told Bloomberg Xiaohong listed a Chinese civilian university as her research background.

He never suspected she had ties to the Chinese military. However, on her American university documents, she listed her home as the Academy of Equipment Command & Technology -- a college for young Chinese military officers and cadets.

She had also written a lengthy article on upgrading the accuracy of Chinese anti-satellite weapons.

As Yu pressured him to reveal secrets about his research, Scheeres soon realized that her interests who not merely of a civilian nature.
'It was pretty clear to me that the stuff she was interested in probably had some military satellite-orbit applications,' he told Bloomberg.

Foreign intelligence services, especially the ones in China, are also looking to exploit American study-abroad programs as an opportunity to find and turn American students.

Such is the case of Glenn Duffie Shriver, a former student at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, who studied at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

After he graduated, Chinese intelligence service agents hooked up with him and paid him, more than $70,000 and sent him back to the US, where he applied to work for the CIA.
If accepted for a job, he admitted in 2011, he planned to sell secrets to the Chinese. He was sentenced to four years in federal prison.

'Study-abroad programs are an attractive target. Foreign security services find young, bright U.S. kids in science or politics, it’s worth winning them over,' Figliuzzi, the FBI counterintelligence director, told Bloomberg.


1960 Soviet Spy School Training - Small Town Espionage and Surveillance

Published on May 23, 2012

In a 1983 Time magazine article it was stated that the KGB has been the world's most effective information-gathering organization. It operated legal and illegal espionage residencies in target countries where the legal resident spied from the Soviet embassy, and, if caught, was protected with diplomatic immunity from prosecution; at best, the compromised spy either returned to the Soviet Union or was expelled by the target country government. The illegal resident spied unprotected by diplomatic immunity and worked independently of the Soviet diplomatic and trade missions, (cf. the non-official cover CIA agent). In its early history, the KGB valued illegal spies more than legal spies, because illegals penetrated their targets more easily. The KGB residency executed four types of espionage: (i) political, (ii) economic, (iii) military-strategic, and (iv) disinformation, effected with "active measures" (PR Line), counter-intelligence and security (KR Line), and scientific--technologic intelligence (X Line); quotidian duties included SIGINT (RP Line) and illegal support (N Line).

At first, using the romantic and intellectual allure of "The First Worker--Peasant State" (1917), "The Fight Against Fascism" (1936--39), and the "Anti-Nazi Great Patriotic War" (1941--45) the Soviets recruited many idealistic, high-level Westerners as ideological agents ... but the Russo--German Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939) and the suppressed Hungarian Uprising (1956) and Prague Spring (1968) mostly ended ideological recruitment.

The KGB classified its spies as agents (intelligence providers) and controllers (intelligence relayers). The false-identity legend assumed by a USSR-born illegal spy was elaborate, the life of either a "live double" (participant to the fabrication) or a "dead double" (whose identity is tailored to the spy). The agent then substantiated his or her legend by living it in a foreign country, before emigrating to the target country; thus the sending of US-bound illegal residents via the Soviet residency in Ottawa, Canada. Tradecraft included stealing and photographing documents, code-names, contacts, targets, and dead letter boxes, and working as "friend of the cause" agents provocateur who infiltrate the target's group to sow dissension, influence policy, and arrange kidnappings and assassinations.

The Cheka was established to defend the October Revolution and the nascent Bolshevik state from its enemies—principally the monarchist White Army. To ensure the Bolshevik régime's survival, it suppressed counter-revolution with domestic terror and international deception. The scope of foreign intelligence operations prompted Lenin to authorise the Cheka's creation of the INO (Innostranyi Otdel -- Foreign-intelligence Department)—the precursor to the First Chief Directorate (FCD) of the KGB. In 1922, Lenin's régime re-named the Cheka as the State Political Directorate (OGPU).

The OGPU expanded Soviet espionage nationally and internationally, and provided to Stalin the head personal bodyguard Nikolai Vlasik. The vagaries of Stalin's paranoia influenced the OGPU's performance and direction in the 1930s, i.e. fantastic Trotskyist conspiracies, etc. Acting as his own analyst, Stalin unwisely subordinated intelligence analysis to collecting it; eventually, reports pandered to his conspiracy fantasies. The middle history of the KGB culminates in the Great Purge (1936--38) killings of civil, military, and government people deemed politically unreliable—among them, chairmen Genrikh Yagoda (1938) and Nikolai Yezhov (1940); later, Lavrentiy Beria (1953) followed suit. Ironically, Yezhov denounced Yagoda for executing the Great Terror, which from 1937 to 1938 is called Yezhovshchina, the especially cruel "Yezhov era."

In 1941, under Chairman Lavrentiy Beria, the OGPU became the NKGB (People's Commissariat for State Security, integral to the NKVD) and recovered from the Great Purge of the thirties. Yet, the NKGB unwisely continued pandering to Stalin's conspiracy fantasies—whilst simultaneously achieving its deepest penetrations of the West. Next, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov centralised the intelligence agencies, re-organising the NKGB as the KI (Komitet Informatsii -- Committee of Information), composed (1947--51) of the MGB (Ministry for State Security) and the GRU (Foreign military Intelligence Directorate). In practice making an ambassador head of the MGB and GRU legal residencies in his embassy; intelligence operations are under political control; the KI ended when Molotov incurred Stalin's disfavor. Despite its political end, the KI's contribution to Soviet Intelligence was reliant upon illegal residents- spies able to establish a more secure base of operations in the target country.

[Ryan Ruck]

FBI Raids Houston Business Accused Of Exporting High-Tech Equipment To Russia

October 4, 2012

Agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Wednesday raided a company in the Texas city of Houston accused of illegally exporting high-tech equipment to Russian military and intelligence officials, local media reported.

Eight people were taken into custody at Arc Electronics, Inc., according to KHOU, a CBS-affiliated television station in Houston.

The owner of the company, Alexander Fishenko, was charged with operating as an unregistered agent of the Russian government, the report said.

Fishenko was charged of obtaining microelectronics on behalf of Russia and allegedly exported the technology despite strict government controls.

The U.S. Department of Justice said the equipment may be used in a "wide range of military systems, including radar and surveillance systems, weapons guidance systems, and detonation triggers." The U.S. Department of Justice reportedly unsealed an indictment charging 11 members of a "Russian military procurement network."

Wednesday's raid was part of a search warrant issued for a total of seven residences and business locations associated with the suspects, according to reports.

[American Patriot]

Good GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[vector7]

Interesting view points against Obama. Wish he would ask his friend Putin why he's rebuilding the Red Army with ties to China, 5th gen fighters, silent subs with more powerful long range nuclear missiles with increasing numbers of MIRVs, plus 5,000 fallout shelters for a strategic nuclear strike against Moscow.

Steven Seagal Speaks on Russia, His Friend Putin, Obama and America

Posted by Rick Wells On November 12, 2013 0 Comment


Steven Seagal believes Russia and America “should be best friends.” He and his friend Vladimir Putin share many common interests, including a martial arts background, and he describes him as loving Russia more than anyone.

Seagal says there are certain financial interests at work to keep America and Russia at odds with each other and that these are playing off of cold-war fears. He describes the cold-war as a fantasy and a hoax. He describes his mission in life as being to help create a situation where America and Russia become “brothers and best friends.”

He describes regimes in American politics and expresses his disapproval for the Obama regime and their actions. He details how the Obama regime controls the press and names CNN in particular, saying he thinks they have an agenda which is “bought and paid for.”

He calls out CNN on what he describes as a “smear campaign” and also speaks in favor of the right to bear arms and a right to self-defense.

It’s a very interesting interview and well worth taking a look.

[American Patriot]

Seagal says there are certain financial interests at work to keep America and Russia at odds with each other and that these are playing off of cold-war fears. He describes the cold-war as a fantasy and a hoax. He describes his mission in life as being to help create a situation where America and Russia become “brothers and best friends.”

Yes, Steven.. it's called the economic systems of "Communism" and "Capitalism".

Idiot.

[Ryan Ruck]

Russian Man Pleads Guilty In Wyoming To Trying To Illegally Export Military-Grade Weapons Scopes

January 24, 2014



A citizen of Russia was sentenced Friday to almost five months in federal prison (time served) for conspiracy to illegally export military-grade thermal imaging scopes to his home country.

This case was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS).

Roman Georgiyevich Kvinikadze, 32, had contacted an HSI undercover agent, and between Dec. 20, 2012 and Feb. 12, 2013 he tried to purchase and export to Russia military grade AN/PAS-13D(V) thermal imaging scopes manufactured in the United States by various defense manufacturers. Kvinikadze was first directed by the undercover agent to apply for an export license through the Department of State.

Kvinikadze met with the undercover agent at a Las Vegas, Nev., convention Jan. 15, 2013 to discuss the details of purchasing and shipping the military scopes. Kvinikadze emphasized that he didn’t care how he received the items, but he suggested they be transshipped to a friendly third country, such as the United Kingdom for further shipment to Russia.

On Feb. 5, 2013, Kvinikadze specified his request to purchase five Thor-320 1X Thermal Imaging Weapon Sights, and five Tactical Thermal Weapons Sights, TTWS-320 1X (30Hz), both manufactured by American Technologies Network (ATN). The scopes retail for about $5,000 each.

Kvinikadze was indicted in the District of Wyoming July 25, 2013 on one count of conspiracy to violate the Arms Export Control Act, and one count of knowingly and willfully attempting to export defense articles listed on the U.S. Munitions List to Russia, without having first obtained the required export license from the Department of State’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls.

HSI special agents from Denver, Colo., Salt Lake City, Utah, and Cheyenne, Wyo., with the assistance of USMS, arrested Kvinikadze in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Aug. 29. He has been in custody since his arrest. As part of his sentence, Kvinikadze will return to Russia on the earliest flight.

“The U.S. export laws and restrictions help ensure that our own weapons and technologies won’t be used against us or against our military members fighting overseas,” said Kumar C. Kibble, special agent in charge of HSI Denver, which includes Wyoming. “Enforcing these export laws is a priority mission for our HSI special agents.”

In addition to his 147-day prison sentence, Kvinikadze was also fined $7,500.

The Arms Export Control Act prohibits the export of defense articles and defense services without first obtaining a license from the U.S. Department of State; it is one of the principal export control laws in the United States.

[vector7]

Mickey Rourke buys Putin T-shirt as sales start in Moscow

Non-political

August 11, 16:22 UTC+4
Rourke, visiting the capital at the invitation of the Russian Boxing Federation, chose a grey T-shirt showing Putin in a cap


© ITAR-TASS/Mikhail Metzel



© ITAR-TASS/Mikhail Metzel



© ITAR-TASS/Mikhail Metzel



© ITAR-TASS/Mikhail Metzel






© ITAR-TASS/Mikhail Metzel
MOSCOW, August 11. /ITAR-TASS/. US movie star Mickey Rourke bought a T-shirt bearing a print of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a new collection of the item went on sale in Moscow on Monday, T-shirt designers said.

Rourke, visiting the capital at the invitation of the Russian Boxing Federation, chose a grey T-shirt showing Putin in a cap.

Anna Trifonova and Ivan Yershov, known as the Anyavanya design duo, said their collection was inspired by Russia's numerous victories on the international stage, such as the Sochi Olympics triumph, the world ice hockey championship and reunification with Crimea.

Gallery 12 photo




T-shirts with picture of Putin drew crowds at Moscow GUM department store

Their stall at Moscow's prestigious GUM department store gathered crowds as some 7,000 new T-shirts went on sale. They sell for 1,200 roubles ($33). Putin fans can also buy an iPhone case for 600 rubles ($17). In early June, some 5,000 Putin T-shirts sold out in one day.

The collection has 15 T-shirt prints, including Putin wearing military camouflage with the slogan “The politest of people,” and Putin on horseback, with the slogan “They’re not gonna get us”.

Trifonova said Rourke was not their only star customer. "We often receive phone calls from secretaries of stars asking to send them a T-shirt of their choice," she said.

The duo plans to release new T-shirts for pariotic fashionistas in the autumn.

[vector7]

May have to get one of these imported from Russia though, not sure its safe gear for Missouri now.

[American Patriot]

/chuckles

[Ryan Ruck]

Wow, the Russians must really be trying to smuggle night vision and thermal tech. Here's another in addition to the one I posted above.

Wonder how many haven't been caught.

Russian Sentenced To 18 Months In Prison For Plot To Export U.S. Military Equipment

October 9, 2014

A Russian who pleaded guilty to trying to export high-tech U.S. military equipment was sentenced to 18 months in prison by U.S. District Court.

Dmitry Ustinov admitted he was trying to smuggle D-740 night-vision scopes, Flir Tau 640 thermal-imaging cameras and Insight Mini Thermal Monoculars to Russia, between July 2010 and April 2013, The Blaze reported. The 640s can be affixed to vehicles and aircraft, including surveillance drones.

“First, Ustinov worked closely with a United States-based straw purchaser to conceal his involvement at the point of sale,” said Charles Oberly III, the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware. “Second, once a specific defense article was identified for purchase, Ustinov wired money to the straw purchaser to buy the defense article from front companies located in off-shore accounts in Cyprus.”

Ustinov then falsely labeled the packages so they would fall under customs’ radar, The Blaze reported.

Ustinov, 53, pleaded guilty in July 2013 but denied wrongdoing when he was later extradited from Lithuania. Russia fought the extradition and criticized the United States for its handling of the case.

“[We’re] outraged by the fact that American special services and law enforcement agencies are still trying to legitimize the practice of arresting and detaining Russian nationals in third countries on frivolous grounds,” Konstantin Dolgov, a Russian Foreign Ministry’s human rights representative, said in 2013, The Blaze reported.

Ustinov was also sentenced to three years of supervised release, but he will be deported after his federal prison sentence is finished.

[vector7]

Who is Leading and Financing the Orc Army of the Left in America?

By Jeffrey T. Brown

December 5, 2014

When I was in college, I was treated to a fascinating display of hypnosis. At a large university, in an enormous theater, a hypnotist first determined those attendees who were susceptible to hypnosis. Those of us who were not then watched as the hypnotist introduced a trigger word into the subconscious of those under his influence, at the mention of which they would engage in whatever activity he directed. He woke them up, and each time he used the word, they went under the spell, he told them what they would do when they woke up, and we watched as they did it. I have no doubt that had the hypnotist told his subjects to punch the person next to them because that person had just offended them, the hypnotized would have done it just as surely as they danced like ballerinas on a stage in front of hundreds of strangers.

Humans are emotionally and mentally pliable. That they can be so easily programmed to react to a cue is alarming, but that there are people among us who recognize this and exploit it toward malicious ends is disturbing. The species homo sapiens can behave like herd beasts under the influence of conditioning and suggestion.

Most people have not even begun to understand the coldness and depravity of those who are dismantling our society and the legal and cultural foundations that have sustained it until now. Justice has nothing whatsoever to do with their actions, since none of those actions are calculated to achieve true justice. They are calculated to inflict chaos, uncertainty, fear and danger for the gain of some at the expense of others, all of which is antithetical to justice. Justice actually occurred in Ferguson, and the programmers and their trained surrogates reacted as if they had been branded like cattle.

With events such as Ferguson and before that Trayvon Martin and the Occupy hysteria, and now with the reaction to the grand jury convened to consider Eric Garner’s death, we are occasionally treated to a brief glimpse of the left’s Orc army, standing by for its cues, ready to march at a moment’s notice to destroy all in its path, especially truth. When they do arise from the muck, it also becomes clear that they have been so conditioned to pre-programmed cues that it is impossible to penetrate their psyches and engage them on facts. Their conditioning does not allow them to think independently of their indoctrination and training. They do not want to know the truth, having been similarly conditioned to find it grossly offensive. Still, they will tell you that they are not mindless drones serving a master or self-appointed master class, and that they have chosen for themselves to behave as would a herd of conscienceless animals.

Despite their false claim of autonomy, at the cue or direction of others they are prepared to instantly engage in mob tactics that are not acceptable in a civilized, lawful society, becoming full-throated vandals, arsonists and murderers who are convinced of their own righteousness. Whether destroying the businesses of a town, or murdering an innocent passerby with hammers for the affront of his whiteness, the behavior is triggered by false cues that have been implanted by those who need others to do their dirty work. Such “protesters” are the left’s army, ready and willing to detect the cue and instantly attack whomever they are brainwashed to believe is their enemy. They neither want nor need evidence, or a logical connection between the alleged affront and the target of their rage. There is injustice afoot, and they must avenge it with violence.


Of course, armies must be led. They draw validation from those implanting the cues and triggering their actions. Certainly the president has his fingerprints all over this, having met personally with Al Sharpton and the “organizers” of the Ferguson protests, telling them to stay on track the day after the midterms. And Eric Holder, always pursuing that honest conversation while spreading lies, is playing his part. But who are these organizers on the ground? Who is it who trains and conditions the Orcs for their lords and masters, and toward what ends? Certainly the media provides the propaganda and withholds the truth that keeps the hordes ignorant; but someone is directing what the hypnotized will do when they are told to wake up.



One such person may be Lisa Fithian. She is, like our president, an “organizer” for social chaos and upheaval. She is an anti-capitalist who organized the 1999 violent protests at the WTO conference in Seattle, and was behind the national “Occupy” protests, that were neither grassroots nor authentic. She had been in Ferguson for weeks before the non-indictment occurred, fomenting and orchestrating protests in the interim, and planning the highly coordinated mayhem that came after. Ms. Fithian appears to be, quite simply, a Marxist anarchist for hire. One can find plenty about her online, but her presence in Ferguson has not been widely publicized for some reason that perhaps the Democrat media can explain.



In addition to Ms. Fithian, it was noted by Lee Cary that many other communist and Marxist players are involved in the turmoil, repeating and relying on the lies that all police are racist and all black teens are saints, to justify protests that have nothing to do with the reality of what occurred in Ferguson, but have everything to do with the next opportunistic step they can take to destabilize our economic and cultural frameworks. The chaos caused by the professional agitators has little to do with the original “injustice”.

The injustice is often itself a falsehood, debunked by the evidence. Nevertheless, the lie is pushed by the anarchist to cause chaos that is not calculated to solve anything.

Chaos is the goal, not the cure. It is about forcibly converting a capitalist nation on the lie that it is in need of wholesale conversion into the false utopia of Marxism.



So, who is footing the bill for all of the “protests”? Who is paying Ms. Fithian’s fees and expenses, and those of her surrogates? Who is bankrolling these efforts to push the races in our country farther apart in order to facilitate even greater social instability? Who is behind the apparent coordination of the message, so that all of the community organizers, agitators, anarchists and racists on the left are all spontaneously singing from the same hymnal? The money has to come from somewhere. Someone is sponsoring our progressive overthrow.

Even if there is no clear financial tie to the White House, it is curious that the president is one of the foremost promoters of the lie of racism upon which the upheaval is supposedly based. There is an undeniable philosophical and ideological affinity on the president’s part for the lie, as there is with Eric Holder, who discordantly introduced racial profiling into a discussion that had nothing to do with that issue. These two men are enthusiastically dedicated to widening the racial divides they have largely created.

Much is happening behind the curtain, not only in Ferguson but everywhere that protests suddenly materialize, involving dozens or hundreds of “spontaneous” protesters who are coordinated and directed in what they will do, where they will do it, and how it will all go down. We need to understand that the chaos we see now is not spontaneous, nor even a protest of what occurred with a grand jury. It has to do with a larger, more organized, well-funded crusade to wreck America, to train and drill the left’s psychopathic volunteer army, and to transform our society into the anti-capitalist, egalitarian, Socialist/Communist utopia that empowers the left forever. We need to know who is footing the bill for our demise, especially if he or she works or lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

[Ryan Ruck]

Yep. The same questions were asked about the anti-war protestors when they were all showing up in droves with professionally made signs and other materials.

[American Patriot]

Orc Army?

[American Patriot]

Meet Professor Occupy

Lisa Fithian is the streetwise radical who's teaching kids who want to be badass to be smart.

—By Josh Harkinson
| March/April 2012 Issue





Jeffery Salter/Redux



In her makeshift classroom in lower Manhattan, Lisa Fithian turns to a group of several dozen students, squares her shoulders, and issues a challenge: "Does someone want to be a cop and come get me?" A tall redhead abruptly breaks out and lunges at her, but Fithian, a petite, den-motherish 50-year-old, head fakes and bolts away. Cheers erupt from her pupils, Occupy Wall Street protesters intent on shutting down the New York Stock Exchange the following morning. Another pretend cop moves in, and this time she drops to the ground, flopping like a rag doll as the officer struggles to drag her away. Fithian stands to deliver her lesson. "Of the two choices, running away or going limp, what does running away communicate?" she asks.


"Guilt," several people say.


She smiles and nods. "Guilt."


When it comes to civil disobedience, there's often a right and wrong way to break the law, and one of Fithian's jobs is to teach the right way to hundreds of newly minted Occupy activists. Call her Professor Occupy. With somewhere between 80 and 100 arrests under her belt (she's lost count) over nearly four decades of rabble-rousing, Fithian may be the nation's best-known protest consultant. Unions and activist groups pay her $300 a day to run demonstrations and teach their members tactics for taking over the streets. But for much of the past six months Fithian has been dispensing free wisdom to the young radicals who took over parks from New York City to Los Angeles last fall, everything from proper tear gas attire to long-term protest strategies. "When there is some conflict, or things aren't going the way that we want them to go, or people don't have a good long-term plan," says 27-year-old Jason Ahmadi, an early arrival at Zuccotti Park, "I have heard others and myself say, 'Dammit, where is Lisa Fithian?'"





Fithian, who lives in Austin, Texas, but spends most of her time on the road, dresses like Mark Zuckerberg and swears like Tony Soprano. She grew up in Hawthorne, New York, a Big Apple bedroom community where she developed a reputation for trouble—police might knock on her door to inquire about, say, a suspicious fire in a neighbor's front yard. In middle school, she once got busted for bringing a knife to class. But she was smart and earnest, and as a high school sophomore she founded The Free Thinker, an underground newspaper that tackled subjects like littering in the cafeteria. Her classmates voted her "Most likely to do things for the school." They also voted her "Most likely to do things to the school."


In 1983, after graduating from Skidmore College, Fithian spent a year following Abbie Hoffman, founder of the anti-war Youth International Party (a.k.a. the Yippies), tending his garden and "picking his brain." Three years later, a coalition of activists outraged by the CIA's covert wars in Central America hired her to organize a blockade of the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters that ended with 600 arrests. She hit the streets with fellow protesters—including the black-clad anarchist kids she calls "the smashy smashies"—to disrupt the World Trade Organization's 1999 meeting in Seattle. And in 2005, she teamed up with fellow radicals and former Black Panthers to launch Common Ground Relief, a group that rebuilt houses while clashing with police in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward of post-Katrina New Orleans. "When people ask me, 'What do you do?' I say, 'I create crisis,'" Fithian told me. "Because crisis is the leading edge where change is possible."


"When people ask me, 'What do you do?' I say, 'I create crisis,'" Fithian says. "Because crisis is the leading edge where change is possible."


Fithian's résumé has made her a target for people hoping to discredit the nascent Occupy movement. In a single week this past October, conservative activist Andrew Breitbart ran nine stories on his website painting her as an anarchist bent on "the total annihilation of the American political and economic system." In fact, Fithian has a long history working with mainstream groups such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). But Max Berger, an organizer of Occupy's moderate wing who cut his teeth working for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, sees her credibility with young radicals as crucial. "Nobody is going to say that what Lisa does is not badass," he says, "so she is in a very strategically important position of teaching kids who want to be badass to be smart."


Case in point: On September 17, the first day of Occupy Wall Street, police told the protesters they couldn't affix their cardboard "Liberty Plaza" street signs to utility poles around Zuccotti Park. Many people wanted to give the cops the middle finger, but Fithian offered a compromise: They would take down the signs and find new ways to display them. The important thing, she stressed, was to keep occupying.


On Day Two of Occupy, Fithian left New York to coordinate anti-bank protests in multiple cities on behalf of a coalition of religious and community groups. The overlap of her consulting gig with the birth of the Occupy movement was sheer coincidence, but Fithian made the most of it. She shuttled around to the encampments popping up in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, schooling the fledglings in protest tactics and enlisting them to help her occupy banks or defend foreclosed homes. "It showed a lot of us how it is important to connect the larger message of inequality and corporate control of politics to more local issues," says Kelvin Ho, an organizer with Occupy Chicago.


In late October, Fithian was called back to Manhattan to help the movement catch its stride. While Occupy Wall Street was succeeding beyond its organizers' wildest dreams, its internal politics were a mess, and meetings of its quasi-governing body, the Spokes Council, often devolved into shouting matches. Fithian, an old pro in dealing with nonhierarchical groups, agreed to help facilitate. "We are not going to be making tons of decisions but streamlining our work, making this a more functional process," she announced, kicking off a Spokes Council meeting a few days after police razed the protesters' encampment in Zuccotti Park. As each of the committees known as "working groups" voiced their needs and concerns, Fithian took notes on a sheet of construction paper, but she stopped writing when Sage, a homeless occupier in fatigues, began rambling. When she tried to cut him short, Sage protested loudly about "a line between the haves and have-nots of language." Fithian cut him off again, holding out her palms as though blocking a pit bull and offering a quick summation: "How about, 'Respect for diversity of expression'?" With Sage appeased, the meeting could proceed. "I heard a ton of people mention afterwards, 'Oh my God, I wish that we had a facilitator like that before,'" recalls Logan Price, a movement organizer. "She helped the Spokes Council get to the point where people felt comfortable about continuing it."


Next Page: "It's not about getting our elected officials to do something. Shit. They ain't gonna do shit."

A new problem arose in November when a spate of graffiti and window smashing at a march in Oakland, California, fueled notions that the movement's tent cities were full of thugs. Some Occupy protesters supported the mayhem, citing the need for "diversity of tactics." But Fithian countered in an open letter that "diversity of tactics becomes a code for 'anything goes,' and makes it impossible for our movements to hold anyone accountable for their actions." Stephen Lerner, an SEIU executive board member who has worked with her for 18 years, believes Fithian's widely read statement helped cement the movement's nonviolent culture: "When she says it, I think it has a different kind of credibility because of her own history."


As Occupy marches on, perhaps its greatest internal tension is between the reformers—pragmatists with concrete goals—and the revolutionaries.


Even criticism from Fithian's peers is tempered with admiration. "She has a reputation for taking things over by accusing other people of taking things over," one prominent occupier told me, but "I think she has stuck with it and is a smart person and has done great work building bridges."


As Occupy marches on, perhaps its greatest internal tension is between the reformers—pragmatists with concrete goals—and the revolutionaries, idealists who feel that asking anything of a corrupt system only marginalizes the movement. "This isn't a protest movement, because protest movements are to address issues that the power structure could conceivably be willing to give up," a black-clad occupier named Max Bean told Fithian over lunch in early December. "We are asking to dissolve the power structure. And you can't ask for that. You can't protest for it. All you can do is grow until we are so big that we are everything."


Fithian weighed her response carefully. "Movements build because people have some sense of hope and victory and accomplishment," she replied, setting aside her plate of steamed kale. "We might win on the millionaires' tax in the next six months. That's gonna be fucking huge." She smiled as Max gave her "twinkle fingers," the Occupy hand signal for approval. "So it's the balance between reforming and revolutionary things. And that's why this movement is so beautiful, because it holds both."


The SEIU sent Fithian to Washington three days later to coordinate Take Back the Capitol, an Occupy-style assault on corporate lobbyists. Bona fide occupiers were flown in to help union members blockade K Street and take over congressional offices—part of a labor strategy to forge alliances with Occupy—but some occupiers chafed at the union's unwillingness to risk more than a few symbolic arrests. Fresh out of jail and gumming a wad of Copenhagen, Joe Carriveau of Occupy Milwaukee told me he was "done with this Democratic coalition crap. We are supposed to be down here for some radical action."


The following day, in a tent on the Mall, Fithian helped run a session aimed at easing tension between the two factions. She let almost everyone else speak before taking the floor. "One of the problems is when people are doing different shit, we are starting to disrespect each other because we are thinking that your way is not as rad as our way," Fithian said. "We are bringing in all these judgments, and it's very destructive. We have to accept what each movement's gifts are, and where we can be in alignment."


Union members and occupiers can work together to "interrupt the space between corporate America and democracy," she went on, to murmurs of assent. "It's not about getting our elected officials to do something. Shit. They ain't gonna do shit."


She spoke faster and faster, running her words together, before stopping abruptly 90 seconds later. "Sorry, I talked a lot," she said sheepishly. But no one seemed to mind. For once, the crowd abandoned its twinkle fingers for applause.

[vector7]

Venona
Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

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By JOHN EARL HAYNES and HARVEY KLEHR
Yale University Press

The collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991 led to the opening of Soviet archives that had never been examined by independent scholars. The historically rich documentation first made available in Moscow's archives in 1992 has resulted in an outpouring of new historical writing, as these records allow a far more complete and accurate understanding of central events of the twentieth century. But many archives in Russia are open only in part, and some are still closed. In particular, the archives of the foreign intelligence operations of Soviet military intelligence and those of the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB are not open to researchers. Given the institutional continuity between the former Soviet intelligence agencies and their current Russian successors, the opening of these archives is not anticipated anytime soon. However, Soviet intelligence agencies had cooperated with other Soviet institutions, whose newly opened archives therefore hold some intelligence-related material and provide a back door into the still-closed intelligence archives.

But the most significant source of fresh insight into Soviet espionage in the United States comes from the decoded messages produced by the Venona Project. These documents, after all, constitute a portion of the materials that are still locked up in Russian intelligence archives. Not only do the Venona files supply information in their own right, but because of their inherent reliability they also provide a touchstone for judging the credibility of other sources, such as defectors' testimony and FBI investigative files.


Stalin's Espionage Assault on the United States


Through most of the twentieth century, governments of powerful nations have conducted intelligence operations of some sort during both peace and war. None, however, used espionage as an instrument of state policy as extensively as did the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Stalin directed most of the resources of Soviet intelligence at nearby targets in Europe and Asia. America was still distant from Stalin's immediate concerns, the threat to Soviet goals posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. This perception changed, however, after the United States entered the world war in December 1941. Stalin realized that once Germany and Japan were defeated, the world would be left with only three powers able to project their influence across the globe: the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States. And of these, the strongest would be the United States. With that in mind, Stalin's intelligence agencies shifted their focus toward America.

The Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States formed a military alliance in early 1942 to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies. The Soviet Union quickly became a major recipient of American military (Lend-Lease) aid, second only to Great Britain; it eventually received more than nine billion dollars. As part of the aid arrangements, the United States invited the Soviets to greatly expand their diplomatic staffs and to establish special offices to facilitate aid arrangements. Thousands of Soviet military officers, engineers, and technicians entered the United States to review what aid was available and choose which machinery, weapons, vehicles (nearly 400,000 American trucks went to the Soviet Union), aircraft, and other materiel would most assist the Soviet war effort. Soviet personnel had to be trained to maintain the American equipment, manuals had to be translated into Russian, shipments to the Soviet Union had to be inspected to ensure that what was ordered had been delivered, properly loaded, and dispatched on the right ships. Entire Soviet naval crews arrived for training to take over American combat and cargo ships to be handed over to the Soviet Union.

Scores of Soviet intelligence officers of the KGB (the chief Soviet foreign intelligence and security agency), the GRU (the Soviet military intelligence agency), and the Naval GRU (the Soviet naval intelligence agency) were among the Soviet personnel arriving in America. These intelligence officers pursued two missions. One, security, was only indirectly connected with the United States. The internal security arm of the KGB employed several hundred thousand full-time personnel, assisted by several million part-time informants, to ensure the political loyalty of Soviet citizens. When the Soviets sent thousands of their citizens to the United States to assist with the Lend-Lease arrangement, they sent this internal security apparatus as well. A significant portion of the Venona messages deciphered by American code-breakers reported on this task. The messages show that every Soviet cargo ship that arrived at an American port to pick up Lend-Lease supplies had in its crew at least one, often two, and sometimes three informants who reported either to the KGB or to the Naval GRU. Their task was not to spy on Americans but to watch the Soviet merchant seamen for signs of political dissidence and potential defection. Some of the messages show Soviet security officers tracking down merchant seamen who had jumped ship, kidnapping them, and spiriting them back aboard Soviet ships in disregard of American law. Similarly, other messages discuss informants, recruited or planted by the KGB in every Soviet office in the United States, whose task was to report signs of ideological deviation or potential defection among Soviet personnel.

A second mission of these Soviet intelligence officers, however, was espionage against the United States, the size and scope of which is the principal subject of this book. The deciphered Venona cables do more than reveal the remarkable success that the Soviet Union had in recruiting spies and gaining access to many important U.S. government agencies and laboratories dealing with secret information. They expose beyond cavil the American Communist party as an auxiliary of the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. While not every Soviet spy was a Communist, most were. And while not every American Communist was a spy, hundreds were. The CPUSA itself worked closely with Soviet intelligence agencies to facilitate their espionage. Party leaders were not only aware of the liaison; they actively worked to assist the relationship.

Information from the Venona decryptions underlay the policies of U.S. government officials in their approach to the issue of domestic communism. The investigations and prosecutions of American Communists undertaken by the federal government in the late 1940s and early 1950s were premised on an assumption that the CPUSA had assisted Soviet espionage. This view contributed to the Truman administration's executive order in 1947, reinforced in the early 1950s under the Eisenhower administration, that U.S. government employees be subjected to loyalty and security investigations. The understanding also lay behind the 1948 decision by Truman's attorney general to prosecute the leaders of the CPUSA under the sedition sections of the Smith Act. It was an explicit assumption behind congressional investigations of domestic communism in the late 1940s and 1950s, and it permeated public attitudes toward domestic communism.

The Soviet Union's unrestrained espionage against the United States from 1942 to 1945 was of the type that a nation directs at an enemy state. By the late 1940s the evidence provided by Venona of the massive size and intense hostility of Soviet intelligence operations caused both American counterintelligence professionals and high-level policy-makers to conclude that Stalin had already launched a covert attack on the United States. In their minds, the Soviet espionage offensive indicated that the Cold War had begun not after World War II but many years earlier.

This book describes Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. It concentrates on operations during World War II, the most aggressive and effective phase of Soviet activity. It also shows how the success of the wartime espionage offensive rested on the extensive base prepared in the 1930s by the Communist International and the American Communist party. Separate chapters deal with the role of American Communists in Soviet espionage, Elizabeth Bentley's extensive spy rings, the lesser but still significant American activities of Soviet military intelligence (GRU and Naval GRU) compared with that of the larger KGB, the broad scope of Soviet industrial and scientific espionage, and the Soviet Union's waging of a secret war on American soil against its ideological enemies: Trotskyists, Zionists, defectors, and Russian exiles of various types. The Venona decryptions are central to documenting this activity, and the next chapter details the history of that highly successful and long-secret project.

(C) 1999 Yale University


Venona
Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

---

By JOHN EARL HAYNES and HARVEY KLEHR
Yale University Press Read the Review

VENONA AND THE COLD WAR


The Venona Project began because Carter Clarke did not trust Joseph Stalin. Colonel Clarke was chief of the U.S. Army's Special Branch, part of the War Department's Military Intelligence Division, and in 1943 its officers heard vague rumors of secret German-Soviet peace negotiations. With the vivid example of the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact in mind, Clarke feared that a separate peace between Moscow and Berlin would allow Nazi Germany to concentrate its formidable war machine against the United States and Great Britain. Clarke thought he had a way to find out whether such negotiations were under way.


Clarke's Special Branch supervised the Signal Intelligence Service, the Army's elite group of code-breakers and the predecessor of the National Security Agency. In February 1943 Clarke ordered the service to establish a small program to examine ciphered Soviet diplomatic cablegrams. Since the beginning of World War II in 1939, the federal government had collected copies of international cables leaving and entering the United States. If the cipher used in the Soviet cables could be broken, Clarke believed, the private exchanges between Soviet diplomats in the United States and their superiors in Moscow would show whether Stalin was seriously pursuing a separate peace.


The coded Soviet cables, however, proved to be far more difficult to read than Clarke had expected. American code-breakers discovered that the Soviet Union was using a complex two-part ciphering system involving a "one-time pad" code that in theory was unbreakable. The Venona code-breakers, however, combined acute intellectual analysis with painstaking examination of thousands of coded telegraphic cables to spot a Soviet procedural error that opened the cipher to attack. But by the time they had rendered the first messages into readable text in 1946, the war was over and Clarke's initial goal was moot. Nor did the messages show evidence of a Soviet quest for a separate peace. What they did demonstrate, however, stunned American officials. Messages thought to be between Soviet diplomats at the Soviet consulate in New York and the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in Moscow turned out to be cables between professional intelligence field officers and Gen. Pavel Fitin, head of the foreign intelligence directorate of the KGB in Moscow. Espionage, not diplomacy, was the subject of these cables. One of the first cables rendered into coherent text was a 1944 message from KGB officers in New York showing that the Soviet Union had infiltrated America's most secret enterprise, the atomic bomb project.


By 1948 the accumulating evidence from other decoded Venona cables showed that the Soviets had recruited spies in virtually every major American government agency of military or diplomatic importance. American authorities learned that since 1942 the United States had been the target of a Soviet espionage onslaught involving dozens of professional Soviet intelligence officers and hundreds of Americans, many of whom were members of the American Communist party (CPUSA). The deciphered cables of the Venona Project identify 349 citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States who had had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence agencies (see appendix A). Further, American cryptanalysts in the Venona Project deciphered only a fraction of the Soviet intelligence traffic, so it was only logical to conclude that many additional agents were discussed in the thousands of unread messages. Some were identified from other sources, such as defectors' testimony and the confessions of Soviet spies (see appendix B).


The deciphered Venona messages also showed that a disturbing number of high-ranking U.S. government officials consciously maintained a clandestine relationship with Soviet intelligence agencies and had passed extraordinarily sensitive information to the Soviet Union that had seriously damaged American interests. Harry White--the second most powerful official in the U.S. Treasury Department, one of the most influential officials in the government, and part of the American delegation at the founding of the United Nations--had advised the KGB about how American diplomatic strategy could be frustrated. A trusted personal assistant to President Franklin Roosevelt, Lauchlin Currie, warned the KGB that the FBI had started an investigation of one of the Soviets' key American agents, Gregory Silvermaster. This warning allowed Silvermaster, who headed a highly productive espionage ring, to escape detection and continue spying. Maurice Halperin, the head of a research section of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), then America's chief intelligence arm, turned over hundreds of pages of secret American diplomatic cables to the KGB. William Perl, a brilliant young government aeronautical scientist, provided the Soviets with the results of the highly secret tests and design experiments for American jet engines and jet aircraft. His betrayal assisted the Soviet Union in quickly overcoming the American technological lead in the development of jets. In the Korean War, U.S. military leaders expected the Air Force to dominate the skies, on the assumption that the Soviet aircraft used by North Korea and Communist China would be no match for American aircraft. They were shocked when Soviet MiG-15 jet fighters not only flew rings around U.S. propeller-driven aircraft but were conspicuously superior to the first generation of American jets as well. Only the hurried deployment of America's newest jet fighter, the F-86 Saber, allowed the United States to match the technological capabilities of the MiG-15. The Air Force prevailed, owing more to the skill of American pilots than to the design of American aircraft.


And then there were the atomic spies. From within the Manhattan Project two physicists, Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, and one technician, David Greenglass, transmitted the complex formula for extracting bomb-grade uranium from ordinary uranium, the technical plans for production facilities, and the engineering principles for the "implosion" technique. The latter process made possible an atomic bomb using plutonium, a substance much easier to manufacture than bomb-grade uranium.


The betrayal of American atomic secrets to the Soviets allowed the Soviet Union to develop atomic weapons several years sooner and at a substantially lower cost than it otherwise would have. Joseph Stalin's knowledge that espionage assured the Soviet Union of quickly breaking the American atomic monopoly emboldened his diplomatic strategy in his early Cold War clashes with the United States. It is doubtful that Stalin, rarely a risk-taker, would have supplied the military wherewithal and authorized North Korea to invade South Korea in 1950 had the Soviet Union not exploded an atomic bomb in 1949. Otherwise Stalin might have feared that President Harry Truman would stanch any North Korean invasion by threatening to use atomic weapons. After all, as soon as the atomic bomb had been developed, Truman had not hesitated to use it twice to end the war with Japan. But in 1950, with Stalin in possession of the atomic bomb, Truman was deterred from using atomic weapons in Korea, even in the late summer when initially unprepared American forces were driven back into the tip of Korea and in danger of being pushed into the sea, and then again in the winter when Communist Chinese forces entered the war in massive numbers. The killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians on both sides of the war in Korea might have been averted had the Soviets not been able to parry the American atomic threat.


Early Soviet possession of the atomic bomb had an important psychological consequence. When the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear device in 1949, ordinary Americans as well as the nation's leaders realized that a cruel despot, Joseph Stalin, had just gained the power to destroy cities at will. This perception colored the early Cold War with the hues of apocalypse. Though the Cold War never lost the potential of becoming a civilization-destroying conflict, Stalin's death in March 1953 noticeably relaxed Soviet-American tensions. With less successful espionage, the Soviet Union might not have developed the bomb until after Stalin's death, and the early Cold War might have proceeded on a far less frightening path.
Venona decryptions identified most of the Soviet spies uncovered by American counterintelligence between 1948 and the mid-1950s. The skill and perseverance of the Venona code-breakers led the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and British counterintelligence (MI5) to the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs. Venona documents unmistakably identified Julius Rosenberg as the head of a Soviet spy ring and David Greenglass, his brother-in-law, as a Soviet source at the secret atomic bomb facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Leads from decrypted telegrams exposed the senior British diplomat Donald Maclean as a major spy in the British embassy in Washington and precipitated his flight to the Soviet Union, along with his fellow diplomat and spy Guy Burgess. The arrest and prosecution of such spies as Judith Coplon, Robert Soblen, and Jack Soble was possible because American intelligence was able to read Soviet reports about their activities. The charges by the former Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley that several dozen mid-level government officials, mostly secret Communists, had assisted Soviet intelligence were corroborated in Venona documents and assured American authorities of her veracity.


With the advent of the Cold War, however, the spies clearly identified in the Venona decryptions were the least of the problem. Coplon, Rosenberg, Greenglass, Fuchs, Soble, and Soblen were prosecuted, and the rest were eased out of the government or otherwise neutralized as threats to national security. But that still left a security nightmare. Of the 349 Americans the deciphered Venona cables revealed as having covert ties to Soviet intelligence agencies, less than half could be identified by their real names and nearly two hundred remained hidden behind cover names. American officials assumed that some of the latter surely were still working in sensitive positions. Had they been promoted and moved into policy-making jobs? Had Muse, the unidentified female agent in the OSS, succeeded in transferring to the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the successor to the OSS? What of Source No. 19, who had been senior enough to meet privately with Churchill and Roosevelt at the Trident Conference? Was the unidentified KGB source Bibi working for one of America's foreign assistance agencies? Was Donald, the unidentified Navy captain who was a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) source, still in uniform, perhaps by this time holding the rank of admiral? And what of the two unidentified atomic spies Quantum and Pers? They had given Stalin the secrets of the uranium and plutonium bomb: were they now passing on the secrets of the even more destructive hydrogen bomb? And how about Dodger, Godmother, and Fakir? Deciphered Venona messages showed that all three had provided the KGB with information on American diplomats who specialized in Soviet matters. Fakir was himself being considered for an assignment representing the United States in Moscow. Which of the American foreign service officers who were also Soviet specialists were traitors? How could Americans successfully negotiate with the Soviet Union when the American negotiating team included someone working for the other side? Western Europe, clearly, would be the chief battleground of the Cold War. To lose there was to lose all: the task of rebuilding stable democracies in postwar Europe and forging the NATO military alliance was America's chief diplomatic challenge. Yet Venona showed that the KGB had Mole, the appropriate cover name of a Soviet source inside the Washington establishment who had passed on to Moscow high-level American diplomatic policy guidance on Europe. When American officials met to discuss sensitive matters dealing with France, Britain, Italy, or Germany, was Mole present and working to frustrate American goals? Stalin's espionage offensive had not only uncovered American secrets, it had also undermined the mutual trust that American officials had for each other.


The Truman administration had expected the end of World War II to allow the dismantling of the massive military machine created to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The government slashed military budgets, turned weapons factories over to civilian production, ended conscription, and returned millions of soldiers to civilian life. So, too, the wartime intelligence and security apparatus was demobilized. Anticipating only limited need for foreign intelligence and stating that he wanted no American Gestapo, President Truman abolished America's chief intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services. With the coming of peace, emergency wartime rules for security vetting of many government employees lapsed or were ignored.


In late 1945 and in 1946, the White House had reacted with a mixture of indifference and skepticism to FBI reports indicating significant Soviet espionage activity in the United States. Truman administration officials even whitewashed evidence pointing to the theft of American classified documents in the 1945 Amerasia case (see chapter 6) because they did not wish to put at risk the continuation of the wartime Soviet-American alliance and wanted to avoid the political embarrassment of a security scandal. By early 1947, however, this indifference ended. The accumulation of information from defectors such as Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko, along with the Venona decryptions, made senior Truman administration officials realize that reports of Soviet spying constituted more than FBI paranoia. No government could operate successfully if it ignored the challenge to its integrity that Stalin's espionage offensive represented. In addition, the White House sensed that there was sufficient substance to the emerging picture of a massive Soviet espionage campaign, one assisted by American Communists, that the Truman administration was vulnerable to Republican charges of having ignored a serious threat to American security.

President Truman reversed course and in March 1947 issued a sweeping executive order establishing a comprehensive security vetting program for U.S. government employees. He also created the Central Intelligence Agency, a stronger and larger version of the OSS, which he had abolished just two years earlier. In 1948 the Truman administration followed up these acts by indicting the leaders of the CPUSA under the sedition sections of the 1940 Smith Act. While the Venona Project and the decrypted messages themselves remained secret, the substance of the messages with the names of scores of Americans who had assisted Soviet espionage circulated among American military and civilian security officials. From the security officials the information went to senior executive-branch political appointees and members of Congress. They, in turn, passed it on to journalists and commentators, who conveyed the alarming news to the general public.



Americans' Understanding of Soviet and Communist Espionage


During the early Cold War, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, every few months newspaper headlines trumpeted the exposure of yet another network of Communists who had infiltrated an American laboratory, labor union, or government agency. Americans worried that a Communist fifth column, more loyal to the Soviet Union than to the United States, had moved into their institutions. By the mid-1950s, following the trials and convictions for espionage-related crimes of Alger Hiss, a senior diplomat, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for atomic spying, there was a widespread public consensus on three points: that Soviet espionage was serious, that American Communists assisted the Soviets, and that several senior government officials had betrayed the United States. The deciphered Venona messages provide a solid factual basis for this consensus. But the government did not release the Venona decryptions to the public, and it successfully disguised the source of its information about Soviet espionage. This decision denied the public the incontestable evidence afforded by the messages of the Soviet Union's own spies. Since the information about Soviet espionage and American Communist participation derived largely from the testimony of defectors and a mass of circumstantial evidence, the public's belief in those reports rested on faith in the integrity of government security officials. These sources are inherently more ambiguous than the hard evidence of the Venona messages, and this ambiguity had unfortunate consequences for American politics and Americans' understanding of their own history.


The decision to keep Venona secret from the public, and to restrict knowledge of it even within the government, was made essentially by senior Army officers in consultation with the FBI and the CIA. Aside from the Venona code-breakers, only a limited number of military intelligence officers, FBI agents, and CIA officials knew of the project. The CIA in fact was not made an active partner in Venona until 1952 and did not receive copies of the deciphered messages until 1953. The evidence is not entirely clear, but it appears that Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, mindful of the White House's tendency to leak politically sensitive information, decided to deny President Truman direct knowledge of the Venona Project. The president was informed about the substance of the Venona messages as it came to him through FBI and Justice Department memorandums on espionage investigations and CIA reports on intelligence matters. He was not told that much of this information derived from reading Soviet cable traffic. This omission is important because Truman was mistrustful of J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, and suspected that the reports of Soviet espionage were exaggerated for political purposes. Had he been aware of Venona, and known that Soviet cables confirmed the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, it is unlikely that his aides would have considered undertaking a campaign to discredit Bentley and indict Chambers for perjury, or would have allowed themselves to be taken in by the disinformation being spread by the American Communist party and Alger Hiss's partisans that Chambers had at one time been committed to an insane asylum.


There were sensible reasons (discussed in chapter 2) for the decision to keep Venona a highly compartmentalized secret within the government. In retrospect, however, the negative consequences of this policy are glaring. Had Venona been made public, it is unlikely there would have been a forty-year campaign to prove that the Rosenbergs were innocent. The Venona messages clearly display Julius Rosenberg's role as the leader of a productive ring of Soviet spies. Nor would there have been any basis for doubting his involvement in atomic espionage, because the deciphered messages document his recruitment of his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, as a spy. It is also unlikely, had the messages been made public or even circulated more widely within the government than they did, that Ethel Rosenberg would have been executed. The Venona messages do not throw her guilt in doubt; indeed, they confirm that she was a participant in her husband's espionage and in the recruitment of her brother for atomic espionage. But they suggest that she was essentially an accessory to her husband's activity, having knowledge of it and assisting him but not acting as a principal. Had they been introduced at the Rosenberg trial, the Venona messages would have confirmed Ethel's guilt but also reduced the importance of her role.


Further, the Venona messages, if made public, would have made Julius Rosenberg's execution less likely. When Julius Rosenberg faced trial, only two Soviet atomic spies were known: David Greenglass, whom Rosenberg had recruited and run as a source, and Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs, however, was in England, so Greenglass was the only Soviet atomic spy in the media spotlight in the United States. Greenglass's confession left Julius Rosenberg as the target of public outrage at atomic espionage. That prosecutors would ask for and get the death penalty under those circumstances is not surprising.


In addition to Fuchs and Greenglass, however, the Venona messages identify three other Soviet sources within the Manhattan Project. The messages show that Theodore Hall, a young physicist at Los Alamos, was a far more valuable source than Greenglass, a machinist. Hall withstood FBI interrogation, and the government had no direct evidence of his crimes except the Venona messages, which because of their secrecy could not be used in court; he therefore escaped prosecution. The real identities of the sources Fogel and Quantum are not known, but the information they turned over to the Soviets suggests that Quantum was a scientist of some standing and that Fogel was either a scientist or an engineer. Both were probably more valuable sources than David Greenglass. Had Venona been made public, Greenglass would have shared the stage with three other atomic spies and not just with Fuchs, and all three would have appeared to have done more damage to American security than he. With Greenglass's role diminished, that of his recruiter, Julius Rosenberg, would have been reduced as well. Rosenberg would assuredly have been convicted, but his penalty might well have been life in prison rather than execution.


There were broader consequences, as well, of the decision to keep Venona secret. The overlapping issues of Communists in government, Soviet espionage, and the loyalty of American Communists quickly became a partisan battleground. Led by Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, some conservatives and partisan Republicans launched a comprehensive attack on the loyalties of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Some painted the entire New Deal as a disguised Communist plot and depicted Dean Acheson, Truman's secretary of state, and George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff under Roosevelt and secretary of state and secretary of defense under Truman, as participants, in Senator McCarthy's words, in "a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men." There is no basis in Venona for implicating Acheson or Marshall in a Communist conspiracy, but because the deciphered Venona messages were classified and unknown to the public, demagogues such as McCarthy had the opportunity to mix together accurate information about betrayal by men such as Harry White and Alger Hiss with falsehoods about Acheson and Marshall that served partisan political goals.


A number of liberals and radicals pointed to the excesses of McCarthy's charges as justification for rejecting the allegations altogether. Anticommunism further lost credibility in the late 1960s when critics of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War blamed it for America's ill-fated participation. By the 1980s many commentators, and perhaps most academic historians, had concluded that Soviet espionage had been minor, that few American Communists had assisted the Soviets, and that no high officials had betrayed the United States.

Many history texts depicted America in the late 1940s and 1950s as a "nightmare in red" during which Americans were "sweat-drenched in fear" of a figment of their own paranoid imaginations. As for American Communists, they were widely portrayed as having no connection with espionage. One influential book asserted emphatically, "There is no documentation in the public record of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period."


Consequently, Communists were depicted as innocent victims of an irrational and oppressive American government. In this sinister but widely accepted portrait of America in the 1940s and 1950s, an idealistic New Dealer (Alger Hiss) was thrown into prison on the perjured testimony of a mentally sick anti-Communist fanatic (Whittaker Chambers), innocent progressives (the Rosenbergs) were sent to the electric chair on trumped-up charges of espionage laced with anti-Semitism, and dozens of blameless civil servants had their careers ruined by the smears of a professional anti-Communist (Elizabeth Bentley). According to this version of events, one government official (Harry White) was killed by a heart attack brought on by Bentley's lies, and another (Laurence Duggan, a senior diplomat) was driven to suicide by more of Chambers's malignant falsehoods. Similarly, in many textbooks President Truman's executive order denying government employment to those who posed security risks, and other laws aimed at espionage and Communist subversion, were and still are described not as having been motivated by a real concern for American security (since the existence of any serious espionage or subversion was denied) but instead as consciously anti-democratic attacks on basic freedoms. As one commentator wrote, "The statute books groaned under several seasons of legislation designed to outlaw dissent."


Despite its central role in the history of American counterintelligence, the Venona Project remained among the most tightly held government secrets. By the time the project shut down, it had decrypted nearly three thousand messages sent between the Soviet Union and its embassies and consulates around the world. Remarkably, although rumors and a few snippets of information about the project had become public in the 1980s, the actual texts and the enormous import of the messages remained secret until 1995. The U.S. government often has been successful in keeping secrets in the short term, but over a longer period secrets, particularly newsworthy ones, have proven to be very difficult for the government to keep. It is all the more amazing, then, how little got out about the Venona Project in the fifty-three years before it was made public.


Unfortunately, the success of government secrecy in this case has seriously distorted our understanding of post-World War II history. Hundreds of books and thousands of essays on McCarthyism, the federal loyalty security program, Soviet espionage, American communism, and the early Cold War have perpetuated many myths that have given Americans a warped view of the nation's history in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The information that these messages reveal substantially revises the basis for understanding the early history of the Cold War and of America's concern with Soviet espionage and Communist subversion.


In the late 1970s the FBI began releasing material from its hitherto secret files as a consequence of the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Although this act opened some files to public scrutiny, it has not as yet provided access to the full range of FBI investigative records. The enormous backlog of FOIA requests has led to lengthy delays in releasing documents; it is not uncommon to wait more than five years to receive material. Capricious and zealous enforcement of regulations exempting some material from release frequently has elicited useless documents consisting of occasional phrases interspersed with long sections of redacted (blacked-out) text. And, of course, even the unexpurgated FBI files show only what the FBI learned about Soviet espionage and are only part of the story. Even given these hindrances, however, each year more files are opened, and the growing body of FBI documentation has significantly enhanced the opportunity for a reconstruction of what actually happened.


The collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991 led to the opening of Soviet archives that had never been examined by independent scholars. The historically rich documentation first made available in Moscow's archives in 1992 has resulted in an outpouring of new historical writing, as these records allow a far more complete and accurate understanding of central events of the twentieth century. But many archives in Russia are open only in part, and some are still closed. In particular, the archives of the foreign intelligence operations of Soviet military intelligence and those of the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB are not open to researchers. Given the institutional continuity between the former Soviet intelligence agencies and their current Russian successors, the opening of these archives is not anticipated anytime soon. However, Soviet intelligence agencies had cooperated with other Soviet institutions, whose newly opened archives therefore hold some intelligence-related material and provide a back door into the still-closed intelligence archives.


But the most significant source of fresh insight into Soviet espionage in the United States comes from the decoded messages produced by the Venona Project. These documents, after all, constitute a portion of the materials that are still locked up in Russian intelligence archives. Not only do the Venona files supply information in their own right, but because of their inherent reliability they also provide a touchstone for judging the credibility of other sources, such as defectors' testimony and FBI investigative files.


Stalin's Espionage Assault on the United States


Through most of the twentieth century, governments of powerful nations have conducted intelligence operations of some sort during both peace and war. None, however, used espionage as an instrument of state policy as extensively as did the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Stalin directed most of the resources of Soviet intelligence at nearby targets in Europe and Asia. America was still distant from Stalin's immediate concerns, the threat to Soviet goals posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

This perception changed, however, after the United States entered the world war in December 1941. Stalin realized that once Germany and Japan were defeated, the world would be left with only three powers able to project their influence across the globe: the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States. And of these, the strongest would be the United States. With that in mind, Stalin's intelligence agencies shifted their focus toward America.


The Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States formed a military alliance in early 1942 to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies. The Soviet Union quickly became a major recipient of American military (Lend-Lease) aid, second only to Great Britain; it eventually received more than nine billion dollars. As part of the aid arrangements, the United States invited the Soviets to greatly expand their diplomatic staffs and to establish special offices to facilitate aid arrangements. Thousands of Soviet military officers, engineers, and technicians entered the United States to review what aid was available and choose which machinery, weapons, vehicles (nearly 400,000 American trucks went to the Soviet Union), aircraft, and other materiel would most assist the Soviet war effort. Soviet personnel had to be trained to maintain the American equipment, manuals had to be translated into Russian, shipments to the Soviet Union had to be inspected to ensure that what was ordered had been delivered, properly loaded, and dispatched on the right ships. Entire Soviet naval crews arrived for training to take over American combat and cargo ships to be handed over to the Soviet Union.


Scores of Soviet intelligence officers of the KGB (the chief Soviet foreign intelligence and security agency), the GRU (the Soviet military intelligence agency), and the Naval GRU (the Soviet naval intelligence agency) were among the Soviet personnel arriving in America. These intelligence officers pursued two missions. One, security, was only indirectly connected with the United States. The internal security arm of the KGB employed several hundred thousand full-time personnel, assisted by several million part-time informants, to ensure the political loyalty of Soviet citizens. When the Soviets sent thousands of their citizens to the United States to assist with the Lend-Lease arrangement, they sent this internal security apparatus as well. A significant portion of the Venona messages deciphered by American code-breakers reported on this task. The messages show that every Soviet cargo ship that arrived at an American port to pick up Lend-Lease supplies had in its crew at least one, often two, and sometimes three informants who reported either to the KGB or to the Naval GRU. Their task was not to spy on Americans but to watch the Soviet merchant seamen for signs of political dissidence and potential defection. Some of the messages show Soviet security officers tracking down merchant seamen who had jumped ship, kidnapping them, and spiriting them back aboard Soviet ships in disregard of American law.

Similarly, other messages discuss informants, recruited or planted by the KGB in every Soviet office in the United States, whose task was to report signs of ideological deviation or potential defection among Soviet personnel.


A second mission of these Soviet intelligence officers, however, was espionage against the United States, the size and scope of which is the principal subject of this book. The deciphered Venona cables do more than reveal the remarkable success that the Soviet Union had in recruiting spies and gaining access to many important U.S. government agencies and laboratories dealing with secret information. They expose beyond cavil the American Communist party as an auxiliary of the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. While not every Soviet spy was a Communist, most were. And while not every American Communist was a spy, hundreds were. The CPUSA itself worked closely with Soviet intelligence agencies to facilitate their espionage. Party leaders were not only aware of the liaison; they actively worked to assist the relationship.


Information from the Venona decryptions underlay the policies of U.S. government officials in their approach to the issue of domestic communism. The investigations and prosecutions of American Communists undertaken by the federal government in the late 1940s and early 1950s were premised on an assumption that the CPUSA had assisted Soviet espionage. This view contributed to the Truman administration's executive order in 1947, reinforced in the early 1950s under the Eisenhower administration, that U.S. government employees be subjected to loyalty and security investigations. The understanding also lay behind the 1948 decision by Truman's attorney general to prosecute the leaders of the CPUSA under the sedition sections of the Smith Act. It was an explicit assumption behind congressional investigations of domestic communism in the late 1940s and 1950s, and it permeated public attitudes toward domestic communism.


The Soviet Union's unrestrained espionage against the United States from 1942 to 1945 was of the type that a nation directs at an enemy state. By the late 1940s the evidence provided by Venona of the massive size and intense hostility of Soviet intelligence operations caused both American counterintelligence professionals and high-level policy-makers to conclude that Stalin had already launched a covert attack on the United States. In their minds, the Soviet espionage offensive indicated that the Cold War had begun not after World War II but many years earlier.


This book describes Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. It concentrates on operations during World War II, the most aggressive and effective phase of Soviet activity. It also shows how the success of the wartime espionage offensive rested on the extensive base prepared in the 1930s by the Communist International and the American Communist party. Separate chapters deal with the role of American Communists in Soviet espionage, Elizabeth Bentley's extensive spy rings, the lesser but still significant American activities of Soviet military intelligence (GRU and Naval GRU) compared with that of the larger KGB, the broad scope of Soviet industrial and scientific espionage, and the Soviet Union's waging of a secret war on American soil against its ideological enemies: Trotskyists, Zionists, defectors, and Russian exiles of various types. The Venona decryptions are central to documenting this activity, and the next chapter details the history of that highly successful and long-secret project.