THE HAUNTED WOOD: Soviet Espionage in America–The Stalin Era. By Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. Random House. 402 pp. $30

VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Yale Univ. Press. 487 pp. $30

One of the peculiarities of the Cold War was that the battle over its causes and consequences began even as it was being waged. On the one side were the orthodox historians who maintained that Soviet aggression was to blame. On the other were the revisionists who argued that the United States was the culprit: our hysterical fear of communism turned the Soviet Union into an enemy and provoked a witch-hunt of innocent Americans at home.

With the collapse of the Soviet empire and the opening of the archives, the revisionist line, never very persuasive, has been given a fresh pasting. These two new books go some way toward clearing up the question of Soviet espionage in the United States. Both show that Stalin and company were treating the United States as an enemy long before the Cold War began.

Weinstein is no stranger to Cold War controversies: his earlier work, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, enraged the American Left by demonstrating that Alger Hiss was in fact a Soviet agent. Vassiliev is a former KGB agent. Based on thousands of classified Soviet documents, their book suggests that New Deal Washington was riddled with Americans spying for the Soviet Union. Congressman Samuel Dickstein, Treasury official Harry Dexter White, State Department official Laurence Duggan, FDR’s personal assistant Laurence Lauchlin—these are just a few of the dramatis personae who figure in Weinstein and Vassiliev’s narrative. The American Left, foremost among its champions the Nation magazine, long maintained the innocence of suspects such as Duggan. But by drawing on Soviet documents, the authors are able to show definitively that Duggan and other spies delivered numerous secret government documents to their Soviet handlers, thereby giving Stalin a window into the workings of official Washington.

While Weinstein and Vassiliev’s book is solid fare, Haynes and Klehr’s is better. Haynes, a historian in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, and Klehr, a professor at Emory University, Atlanta, offer a superbly detailed and scholarly examination of Soviet espionage. The authors focus on American decryptions of Soviet cables during World War II. These cables, only recently declassified, indicate that the Communist Party of America did not, as revisionist historians maintain, act independently of Moscow, focusing on social work. Instead, according to Haynes and Klehr, the Venona transcripts "expose beyond cavil the American Communist party as an auxiliary of the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union."

Defenders of Hiss and other spies argue that the Soviet cables cannot be trusted. They say that the agents, trying to impress their bosses back home, embellished or downright invented sources. Haynes and Klehr say this is bunk. They detail the intricate recruiting process and note that "a faked or exaggerated source would show up quickly and might entail severe consequences for the offending officer. In most cases Moscow expected the delivery of actual or filmed documents of reports written personally by the source."

The implications of these findings are not trivial. Had American spies not handed over atomic secrets, Haynes and Klehr argue, Stalin would not have been able to build the bomb so quickly and might have hesitated before authorizing North Korea’s incursion into the South. What is more, the authors contend, President Harry S. Truman’s efforts to ferret out spies during the late 1940s were no overreaction, but a necessary corrective to years of indulgence toward Soviet skullduggery.

Neither of the books succeeds in plumbing the motivations of Moscow’s American spies. Surely one reason for the readiness of Americans to betray their country was the naive belief that the Soviet Union was the only power in the 1930s standing up to fascist Germany. Nevertheless, these two books shatter the fable of communist innocence in America.

—Jacob Heilbrunn