Discovering the One, True Path Amid the Illusions of the Hall of Mirrors : Spies: Now that the Kremlin archives are being opened, just who was and who was not a Soviet agent can at last be answered.

It is time to tear up the history books. The Cold War was not what we thought, and the heroes and villains are changing places with each new revelation from the Kremlin’s dusty archives.

Alger Hiss was innocent, and the young California congressman, Richard M. Nixon, built his anti-communist credentials on the good name of a guiltless man. Meanwhile, Donald Maclean, the British super-spy who was Josef Stalin’s man at the heart of the Anglo-American alliance and the ultrasecret Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb, died in Moscow as a dissident.

Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, biographer of Stalin and the authorized Kremlin historian of the post- glasnost era, has searched all relevant Soviet intelligence archives, and now says he can find no evidence that Hiss ever spied for Moscow.

So the Republic was never in danger from the elegant diplomat so perfectly cast as a traitor to his own class and nation. A product of Yale Law School and the State Department, a clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court and member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s staff at the Yalta Summit of 1945, Hiss seemed the epitome of treason in high places. There is justice in happy longevity--Hiss is still alive to enjoy this belated restoration of his reputation, even though he went to prison for perjury because he denied being in a Soviet spy ring.

Suddenly, it is springtime for historians as the Kremlin reveals its secrets and hoary assumptions give way to new facts. How hauntingly they rattle their chains again, those ancient ghosts who were once the stuff of passions and headlines, martyrs and paladins of the Cold War.

History, Karl Marx used to say, takes some funny turns. It can also extract an exquisite revenge, even on the reputations of those Cold War traitors whose guilt is beyond question. For in another revelation from the Soviet archives, we now learn that the most important spy the KGB ever recruited died in Moscow as an advocate for human rights.

Maclean, the KGB spy in the British Foreign Office who defected to the Soviet Union in 1951, died in Moscow in 1983 as a rebel against the system he had served, campaigning for political dissidents and against the “irrational” introduction of Soviet SS-20 missiles into Europe.

According to a long memorandum written by Maclean in 1981, and just released by IMEMO, Moscow’s Institute of World Economics and International Affairs where Maclean worked in exile, he predicted the coming of perestroika and the democratization of Soviet society.

“The present authoritarian and oligarchical political superstructure bears little relation, in peacetime at any rate, to the needs of an advanced industrial society,” Maclean wrote. “The next five years, owing to favorable changes at the top, will see an improvement in the political, cultural and moral climate in the Soviet Union and the introduction of a complex of reforms affecting most major aspects of the life of the Soviet people,” he forecast.

Maclean was right. Within five years, Mikhail S. Gorbachev was in office, and launching perestroika. Identifying himself as a Communist, but of the Italian Euro-Communist variety, and as a supporter of Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” in the Prague Spring of 1968, Maclean energetically promoted his reformist views within the Soviet system.

The IMEMO editors who have just unveiled Maclean’s last document, “Some Reflections of a Communist,” reveal that he wrote “numerous appeals to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and to the KGB” on behalf of imprisoned dissidents. He campaigned on behalf of the anti-Stalinist historian Zhores A. Medvedev and the dissident scientist Vladimir K. Bukovsky, complaining of their mistreatment in psychiatric prisons.

Maclean’s memorandum of 1981 reads like many other dissident documents of the day, and adds to the growing evidence that the frustrations of the Brezhnev era saw the emergence of a loyal opposition within the Communist Party elite. Maclean attacked both the stagnant domestic politics and what he saw as a self-defeating militarization of foreign policy.

“It is . . . rather doubtful whether there is now anyone at the top level who combines a sufficiently profound understanding of the dialectics of world politics with the necessary political authority (and courage) to ensure that the leadership has been and is offered an informed choice between differing priorities,” Maclean argued.

“The record of the present leadership (Leonid I. Brezhnev) and its penumbra shows a persistent, regressive tendency to substitute the aim of preserving its own power for the aim of finding ways of realizing the energy of the society which they rule,” Maclean went on, in the essay that he bravely circulated among the Soviet elite. “What has fallen into discredit is not the socialist mode of production on which the entire Soviet structure rests, but the the political apex of that structure, the small group of men who make all the decisions on how Soviet society is run.”

This is more than footnote to history. Maclean was the most important spy the Soviet Union ever ran in the West. He was recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s, part of that famous spy ring with Harold (Kim) Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Philby and Blunt only went into British intelligence later, with the coming of World War II.

But like Burgess, Maclean went straight from the university into the Foreign Office, where he felt he could serve his Soviet masters best. In the late 1930s, Maclean photographed and provided top-secret Cabinet minutes to Moscow on British plans for rearmament and appeasement policy. He sent the best-kept secrets of all, decoded cables known as “Black Jumbos,” the British Intelligence de-crypts of Soviet secret cables.

After 1945, from his post at the Washington Embassy as liaison on the Manhattan Project, he was “Homer,” the chief conduit for atom-bomb secrets.

Since his defection with the flamboyantly gay and alcoholic diplomat Burgess, on the eve of arrest in May, 1951, little has been known of Maclean’s role in Moscow. He was clearly important enough to make open criticisms with impunity. And he was not only well-connected in that elite group he called “the top hundred thousand” to perceive the underlying trends leading to reform, but was an influential campaigner among them.

This Maclean document appears in the forthcoming “Memo 3,” the third yearbook from IMEMO, published jointly in the West through the Washington-based Bureau of National Affairs. In the pre- perestroika period, IMEMO was one of the Soviet think-tanks that developed the reform strategy.

Its director was Alexander N. Yakovlev, the intellectual godfather of perestroika, who was later brought into the Politburo by Gorbachev as the bulwark of reform. There the irony of history turns full circle. Yakovlev learned to doubt the Soviet system, and learned something of the seductions of freedom, from his own time in New York as an exchange student at Columbia University in the 1950s, when the arguments over Hiss’s guilt or innocence raged.

Yakovlev’s scholarship may have been one of the best investments U.S. taxpayers ever made. But even Marx might enjoy the irony that brought together the upper-class Brit from 1930s Cambridge, and the burly young Russian from 1950s Columbia, to first serve the Soviet state and then seek to transform it. The blame, the ignominy and the prison term for betrayal were all endured by that innocent victim of the Cold War, the hapless Hiss, who never spied at all.