This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account.Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, "Spies" resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. "Spies" also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted - for American nuclear spies.
Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.
- ISBN10 0300123906
- ISBN13 9780300123906
- Publish Date 26 May 2009
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 27 May 2010
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 640
- Language English