[Marxism] The KGB in America

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Red Harvest: The KGB in America
By D.D. Guttenplan

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
     by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev

Alger Hiss and the Battle for History
     by Susan Jacoby

The last time I saw Alexander Vassiliev he was slumped in a seat at the 
Royal Courts of Justice in London. A small, fair-haired man wearing a 
dark suit and a black shirt, Vassiliev was an ex-KGB officer who had 
helped Allen Weinstein, an American historian whose Perjury (1978) 
convinced most Americans that Alger Hiss had indeed been a Soviet spy, 
to write another book. The fruit of their collaboration, The Haunted 
Wood (1999), was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a small arsenal of 
smoking guns." In The New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers declared 
that "anyone who wants to know what Hiss and his friends were up to can 
find a rich, convincing, and vivid report in The Haunted Wood." Hiss, 
who'd died in 1996 still protesting his innocence, was already beyond 
redemption. For Weinstein, the acclaim merely accelerated his rise from 
the comparative obscurity of the Smith College history department, via 
the National Endowment for Democracy, to his appointment by President 
George W. Bush in April 2004 as archivist of the United States. The 
project seemed to have brought Vassiliev only grief.

Not only did Weinstein, who couldn't even read Russian, claim top 
billing; he used Vassiliev's findings on Hiss in a 1997 reissue of 
Perjury without permission. Vassiliev was so angry that he wanted to 
sue, and turned for advice to The Nation's Victor Navasky, well known 
both as a defender of Alger Hiss and as a critic of Weinstein's 
scholarship and ethics. Navasky replied that he was "reluctant to 
collaborate in any legal actions vis-à-vis Weinstein" but was curious 
about Vassiliev's grievance. "In my universe," Vassiliev replied in an 
e-mail, "the thing he did to me is called theft, and thieves get 
punished. I spent 2 years in the KGB archives, doing the research for 
The Haunted Wood. I gave up my career as a TV presenter and newspaper 
columnist for it. I smuggled from Russia hundreds of top secret 
non-declassified KGB documents, and therefore I can't return there now." 
But soon enough, still living in exile in London, beached by the tides 
of history, Vassiliev would find a new outlet for his anger.

In the fall of 2000 John Lowenthal, a retired Rutgers law professor who 
had worked as a volunteer on the Hiss defense team, published a lengthy 
analysis of the latest evidence regarding Hiss in Intelligence and 
National Security, an obscure British quarterly. After Lowenthal posted 
on Amazon the portion of his review dealing with The Haunted Wood, 
Vassiliev decided to sue--not Lowenthal but the quarterly's British 
publisher, Frank Cass, and Amazon. British courts are notoriously 
friendly to libel plaintiffs; for one thing, the burden of proof is on 
the defendant. (In the United States, Vassiliev would have had to prove 
that Lowenthal's criticisms were untrue.) Vassiliev was so confident of 
an easy victory over Cass--followed by a lucrative settlement from 
Amazon--that he rejected repeated offers of four-figure sums (but no 
apology) from Cass's lawyers. The trial began on June 9, 2003.

When Lowenthal called me and asked if I'd be interested in reporting on 
the dispute, I resisted. I'd always thought there was something vaguely 
comical about our elders' obsession with Alger Hiss. And after many 
years of working on a biography of I.F. Stone, I'd learned a great deal 
about the ambiguous history of American Communism. My stubbornly 
uninformed view was that Hiss was probably at the very least a secret 
Communist--I'd come across enough of those myself, including Nathaniel 
Weyl, who claimed to have been in the same group as Hiss in the 1930s. 
So why was I there in court, studying Vassiliev's posture while sitting 
next to Victor Navasky, who'd flown to London to testify for the 
defense? Because there was something deeply compelling about John 
Lowenthal, who informed me during a series of telephone calls that he 
had stopped his chemotherapy for terminal throat cancer so he could 
concentrate on the case. I felt I owed it to John at least to witness 
his day in court.

full: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090525/guttenplan

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