Case Closed

Some of our most familiar assumptions about the Cold War are mutating, and books like “The Haunted Wood” are partly responsible. The mask has fallen from the corpse of Soviet totalitarianism; much of what we have learned since 1991 surpasses even bleak Cold War suspicions of the regime that Lenin and Stalin created. The old ‘60s rhetoric that portrayed democracy and totalitarianism as equivalent evils, locked in morally content-less confrontation, stands exposed as a shameful absurdity. The Cold War was certainly not a black-and-white confrontation, but neither was it some paranoid delusion. Democracy really was under attack, and it really deserved to be defended. The Marxist-Leninist state really was a tyranny, and its aggressions deserved real, no-fooling resistance.

And now, with “The Haunted Wood,” we are moving toward a new understanding of Stalinism’s long reach into the West. The key time is the ‘30s. It’s a curious psychological twist that precisely when Stalin’s regime was at its most malevolent, admirable people everywhere were most bewitched by its crime-cloaking utopian rhetoric. The same may be said for Mao in the ‘60s: Sympathy crested at the height of evil.

From sympathy to service was a short step. Many sympathizers of the 1930s became spies. Some--the Hisses, the Rosenbergs--later became icons in the national imagination. Their stories have been told and retold in a vast body of literature of vastly diverse quality. Near the peak stands Allen Weinstein’s “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,” which, in its 1997 revision, incorporates material also found in “The Haunted Wood” and joins Sam Tanenhaus’ splendid “Whittaker Chambers” as the last word on the most politically momentous American trial in this century.

Until recently, almost the whole story has been learned from defectors or non-Soviet sources. “The Haunted Wood” changes that. In 1994, Weinstein and his Russian collaborator, Alexander Vassiliev, were granted “substantial and exclusive access to Stalin-era operational files of the KGB.” This was the result of a financial arrangement: Random House made payments to the KGB’s association of retired officers; in return, Weinstein and Vassiliev were given wide access to the files of many famous American cases. “The Haunted Wood” is their report, buttressed by secrets from the intercepted Soviet cable traffic known as the “Venona decryptions.”

“The Haunted Wood” may not be the most comprehensive book on this subject--”Perjury” makes a better read--but it is indispensable. Here is definitive evidence, a small arsenal of once-smoking guns, documenting the clandestine work of 58 American agents, including Hiss and the Rosenbergs, who worked for the NKVD (later the KGB) or its sister services. The evidence presented in “The Haunted Wood” ends the old did-they-or-didn’t-they debate; until recently, the most basic issues about some of these people’s guilt were still being argued in an endless, mind-numbing back-and-forth of denial and invective. We have left that kindergarten. A new history has begun.

This history will compel some new moral conclusions that will make many people uncomfortable. Very understandably. That these spies were unjustly persecuted was nothing less than an article of faith for a great many Americans. For almost three generations, the demagogy of Joseph McCarthy has stared down the national conscience, a kind of death’s-head, warning against irresponsible accusation. Rightly so. Yet that same death’s-head has sometimes been invoked to stifle scholarship and silence inquiry. By demeaning any but the most timid anti-communism, it has muffled one of the greatest moral causes of the era. Even during the great age of dissidence, a double standard prevailed. It was fine--it was noble--for an American to admire Andrei Sakharov or Vaclav Havel. But it was slimy for that same American to say what they were saying--that the evil empire was, in fact, evil. If an American was a real anti-communist, wasn’t that a little, well, McCarthyite?

Perfect nonsense, of course, which Weinstein and Vassiliev demolish. The material on Hiss and the Rosenbergs clinches what has long been near-absolute certainty. There is crucial new material on Stalin’s atomic espionage and Soviet penetrations of the Manhattan Project throughout its entire existence and equally crucial information on the NKVD’s extensive placement of agents throughout the Washington establishment until World War II. The specialist will find something new in every chapter. And what will the general reader find? The death of illusions.

One of the most startling chapters is “The Reluctant Laurence Duggan.” Duggan was a brilliant young Roosevelt-era diplomat in the State Department whose real story is told here for the first time. For the Soviets, Duggan was a great catch: a potential Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent. Or a Hiss. Imagine that Henry Wallace, FDR’s vice president from ’41 to ‘45, had become president: a perfectly possible scenario. As a leading figure in the left wing of the Washington diplomatic world, close to Wallace, Duggan could easily have been his secretary of State.

Duggan’s story overflows with pity and terror. Here was an exceptionally decent man, luminous with promise, drawn by his own ideals into a kind of agonized corruption. Weinstein and Vassiliev have unearthed the electrifying fact that Stalin ordered the murder of the NKVD defector Ignace Reiss, perhaps the greatest Soviet spymaster of the era, in Switzerland explicitly to prevent him from exposing Duggan. His Soviet contacts liked him; Duggan was hard to dislike. Touchingly, one Soviet control praised him as a “100% American patriot.” (Moscow was not amused: “Let him understand that he is really our agent.”)

As Duggan grew increasingly terrified of exposure, Moscow debated blackmail to enforce Duggan’s subservience. The Moscow Terror of the ‘30s, when Stalin purged and killed cadre after cadre of leading Bolsheviks and millions in the rank and file, rocked him. He was sure that some doomed apparatchik in the docks would blurt out the truth. As his fear mounted, Duggan’s bewilderment deepened. During World War II, he tried to pull back, struggling to retrieve his soul. With the Hiss case, his panic over exposure became more certain.

In late 1948, the FBI and the Soviets paid calls on him within a week of each other. A few nights before Christmas, the wretched man plunged into the snow-blown darkness outside his 17th-floor office window. The cause of his death was once hotly debated, and the authors leave me almost convinced that it was a suicide. Of the Soviet’s most highly placed moles, Duggan’s life is perhaps the most plainly gripped by tragedy.

Government files do not generally make for irresistible reading, and Weinstein and Vassiliev’s just-the-facts style has a price. While their narrative is perfectly coherent, it is everywhere short on context. Take Martha Dodd, the dicey daughter of Roosevelt’s first ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd. Martha was a Soviet agent by March 1934, recruited by her Soviet boyfriend, an exceptionally interesting character named Boris Vinogradov, whom the apparatus dubbed “Romeo,” snidely designating Martha “Juliet #2” to distinguish her from “Romeo’s” unnamed “Juliet #1.” When not reading Daddy’s mail, Martha was busy seducing an impressively large number of Nazis. One known to me (but not mentioned here) was Rudolf Diels, a founding father of the Gestapo. Hers was obviously passion with a purpose. But what purpose? Clearly, Dodd had something to do with the rich and troubling subject of early Nazi-Soviet relations. We are not told what.

Then there were the defectors. Despite, or perhaps because of, their fear of Stalin’s revenge, many defectors wrote books. The best is Whittaker Chambers’ magisterial “Witness.” Hede Massing wrote “This Deception,” Elizabeth Bentley wrote “Out of Bondage,” Michael Straight wrote “After Long Silence”--all ferociously controversial. Do the files confirm or contradict these confessions? Weinstein and Vassiliev rarely say. How does the new information change our understanding of the atom bomb in the Cold War? How can we assess the penetrations of the American government by the large network of agents managed by Victor Perlo, Nathan Silvermaster and Bentley’s lover, Jacob Golos? There are a lot of unanswered questions here. “The Haunted Wood” is filled with new data but not much new thought about meaning and consequence.

But then the book does not claim to be more than a partial picture. The NKVD was only one of several Soviet services. Hiss worked for Red Army Intelligence or, as the NKVD coyly called it, “the neighbors.” The Comintern had its own secret service and propaganda networks, usually connected to the American Communist Party--”the compatriots.” An NKVD focus doubtless explains why the book tells us so little about such questions as the Stalinist propaganda and fund-raising networks in Hollywood, even though they were, in their way, as important in Cold War mythology as Hiss and the Rosenbergs. The unendingly controversial subject of Stalinism in the film industry is addressed at length in Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley’s new book, “Hollywood Party: The Rise and Fall of Communism in the American Film Industry” (Prima Publishing).

As our sense of political morality mutates, the role of these events in our imagination, our sense of heroism and tragedy, will change with it. The old image of persecuted innocence will flicker and die. What will replace it? Duggan’s terrible story is perhaps a place to start. In his eloquent introduction to the revised “Perjury,” Weinstein speaks of the Hiss-Chambers story as the great unwritten American novel of its era. He cites George Santayana, as saying that once the time for “arguing or proving or criticizing” is past, there comes a time for fiction, for the imagination to integrate old betrayals and suspicions into a new and persuasive moral perspective. We Americans have finished a long, very ugly quarrel. It is time for a new history. That new history will need to be amplified by a new art with the vision it takes to tell us what is truer than true about this fearsome saga of faith and deception.