Weinstein, Allen, and Alexander Vassiliev. The Haunted Wood:
Soviet Espionage in America -- the Stalin Era. New York: Random House,
1999. Weinstein, Allen, and Alexander Vassiliev. The Haunted Wood:
Soviet Espionage in America -- the Stalin Era. New York: Random House,
1999.
Clark
comment: This is an exceptional addition to intelligence
literature. Although little of the book's content is truly new in the sense
of not being previously known, the marriage of KGB documents to Venona materials
rounds out -- or, perhaps, makes real -- stories of Soviet spies which previously
were less solidly supported. My biggest complaint about the book is a repetitious
presentation of essentially the same material in discussing the often overlapping
cases. I reacted too frequently with a slightly annoyed, "Yes, I already
know that," to material that had been developed previously in the book.
But, then, the authors may well have decided that repeating core events
or relationships were necessary to the narrative -- to prevent the reader
from becoming lost in The Haunted
Wood.
Powers, NYRB (11 May 2000) and Intelligence Wars (2004), 91, says 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." Gerber,
CIRA Newsletter 23.2, believes that the authors "have made an
important contribution" toward helping Americans understand the Soviet
espionage efforts. What they provide is "not the whole story, but it's
a major part of the story."
Both Macartney, AFIO WIN 1-99 (4 Jan. 1999), and Beichman, WTNWE, 11-17 Jan
1999, comment that few new names of Soviet spies surface in this book. Most
of the names that populate the Russian documents -- Alger Hiss, Laurence
Duggan, Michael Straight, Lauchlin Currie, and Duncan Lee -- have been basically
known for some time. But, as Beichman, notes, this work is important because
"we now have a documented glimpse of the day-to-day operations of the
Stalinist spy machine in its heyday."
Peake,
NWCR 53.3 and Intelligencer 11.2, notes that the authors' method of citing their documentary evidence "in endnotes by KGB file number, volume number, and page number ... [has] raised concerns among reviewers, scholars, and people named as agents, because there is no way to check such citations." Haynes, Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 2 (1999), declares that “The Haunted Wood is a major addition to scholarly knowledge, featuring information that cannot be found elsewhere.”
For Geracimos, Publishers Weekly, 18 Jan. 1999, Haunted
Wood "lays out the scope of Soviet operations in human and compelling terms." The authors avoid ideology, producing "[n]o judgments and few conclusions ... [in] a heavily footnoted narrative." While noting that "[u]ndoubtedly there is still much to uncover about this period," Cohen, FA 78.3, suggests that, nevertheless,
"this engaging book will hold the ground for some time to come."
Weiner, NYT, 31
Jan. 1999, calls this a "staggering account of sloppiness and stupidity
among the Soviets and their American agents." Even though the files
show that the Soviets had an agent in Congress, "Rep. Samuel Dickstein,
who represented a swath of Manhattan's Lower East Side," he "was
generally useless to his Soviet paymasters.... Most of the Americans working
for the Soviets in the United States eventually were done in by their own
clumsiness or betrayed by their colleagues. The main reason they survived
as long as they did was incompetent (or nonexistent) American counterintelligence
before Pearl Harbor."
To Persico, NYT, 3 Jan. 1999, the "hardest part
... to accept" of the revelations in Haunted Wood, "at
least for those of us who deplored the overzealous Red-hunting of the late
40's and early 50's, is that the hunt rested on more substance than we cared
to admit.... The work of Weinstein, Vassiliev and their colleagues mining
the Soviet lode begins to approach the significance of an Ultra."
Malevannyy, Nezavisimoye
Voyennoye Obozreniye (Moscow), 19-25 Feb. 1999 [from FBIS translation],
says that The Haunted Wood "is the latest propaganda act of
the Americans or even of a well thought-out active operation of 'historians
in civilian clothes' from the CIA.... The pages of the book resurrect the
spirit of spy-mania that reigned in America after the Second World War in
the period of McCarthyism."
Old counterintelligence
hand James E. Nolan, Jr., IJI&C 12.2, comments that "for
those of us with professional knowledge of espionage activities and a continuing
special interest in them, the book is an extremely valuable contribution
to our knowledge of the period." However, he adds an important caveat:
"for the uninitiated, the task of keeping the material in focus may
prove too daunting."
Nolte, Studies 50.2 (2006), declares that this book "is an almost numbing account of the details ... that point" to the fact that "Soviet espionage happened, on a large scale, and did so through the active involvement of American citizens, a disturbing number of whom held positions of public trust within the Federal government."
Writing on the Hiss case, Ehrman, Studies, Winter-Spring 2001, faults the authors for telling "so many stories, several of which are already well known, that the book sometimes has an unfocused and sensational feel to it and the reader wonders why they seem compelled to go over old ground."
See also, Christian Caryl, "A Spy in Congress: The KGB Archives Yield Tantalizing Nuggests about American Linked to Soviet Espionage," U.S. News & World
Report, 18 Jan. 1999, 36.
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