The Past Is Out There: Communist Spies, Informants, Archives, and the Culture Wars in the US and Romania Liviu Andreescu (published in East-European Cultural Space from Post-Communism to Post-EU Accession: Transatlantic Perspectives and History in the Making, ed. R. Oltean & R. Mihaila, Bucharest: Bucharest University Press, 2011; please quote the published version) The fall of Central and Eastern European totalitarian regimes in 1989 and the collapse of Russian communism two years thereafter sparked in post-communist states a frantic search for and fascination with historical truth. As Ruti Teitel notes, transitions from totalitarianism “are vivid instances of conscious historical production” heightened by political context and “driven by political purposes” (70). As far as the wider society is concerned, history is no longer an agent of conscious social reproduction (to borrow a term from the philosophy of education), but a key player in the process of societal reconstruction after regime change. In such battles over the recent past history-making is a collective effort, unreservedly entangled in political and legal processes. The past is usable again, no longer shackled by ideology and censorship. Moreover, it is up for grabs, making itself available to be molded by competing actors with diverse political agendas. Last but not least, the past is perceived as having a general, democratic stake: everybody should be interested in it and involved in making it, because everybody‟s future hangs on the (re)construction of the past. This view of the past is, I believe, very similar to the logic and rhetoric of fin-desiècle culture wars. Here, too, there is a sense that the past is immediately relevant to the present, politically and ideologically. This sense is accompanied by an available-for-thetaking attitude, which invites political and social activists to partake in history-making. This perception opens up the shaping of the past to democratic participation and imparts it a sense of urgency, familiar from the sometimes shrill overtones of culture-wars debates. In what follows, I discuss a foundational issue in contemporary US culture wars – the matter of American communism – by drawing on the experience of the so-called “trial of communism” in post-totalitarian Romania. In this pursuit I am not directly informed by the substantial recent output on the cultural entanglements of East and West and, more specifically, of Romania and the US; or by the wealth of resources on the communist idea. Rather, I draw on a small contingent of the rich (comparative) literature on transitional justice. In other words, I am primarily concerned with questions of representation not so much of cultural or political others, but of the past of one‟s own community. My interest is the so-called ethics and politics of memory – the struggle over contested pasts and historical truths and their ethical reinscription or resignification. Specifically, I look into some of the questions raised by recent archival revelations concerning American communists‟ collaboration with Soviet intelligence agencies, 1 focusing on several relevant similarities with the Romanian attempts to come to terms with Securitate informants. I elaborate on the nature of these similarities as well as on the significant differences and the possible pitfalls of a comparative approach in the second section below. The third and fourth sections of the article explore in further detail some of the questions which a comparative discussion could enrich with valuable insights. In the next section I offer an outline of the debate on US communism. An American Historikerstreit The issue of the “true meaning” of American communism emerged as early as the 1930s, when the American Communist Party (CPUSA) became a subject of arguments involving various leftist groups, ranging from the radical to the liberal. It then exploded into the mainstream in the 1940s and 1950s with the Smith Act (1940) criminalizing advocacy of the forceful overthrow of government, the shift in the agenda of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to communist radicals, and the various witch hunts culminating in McCarthyism. These developments – and, in the all too visible background, those in the communist world – eventually changed the face of the Old Left and, ultimately, of ideology in postwar America. Many public intellectuals moved in those years firmly to the right to forge the neoconservative movement; others staked out a liberal “vital center” from within which they kept alive some of the spirit of the New Deal in American government and culture; while a few occupied a less characteristic liberal left-wing position. With the publication of several landmark volumes on US communism by Theodore Draper, Irving Howe, and Lewis Coser in the late fifties and the founding of the radical journal Dissent, this period cemented the socalled “traditionalist” view of American communism. According to this perspective, the CPUSA was an internally authoritarian organization and a Moscow puppet closely following Comintern directives through all the many shifts and reversals of Kremlin policy. The youthful revolts of the 1960s and 1970s, which in a sense marked the proper beginnings of today‟s culture wars, brought about a reversal in the historiography on American communism. The “tenured radicals” in history departments, dubbed “new historians” or “revisionists”, revisited communism in light of McCarthyism and substituted “social history” for the traditionalist account. Essentially, these historians focused not on the Communist Party core but on the periphery – whether the personal experiences of various communists or specific aspects such as labor organizing, the fight against racism etc. “Individual Communists working in particular settings were discussed in detail, while the Communist party itself remained in the background as only a vague presence.” (Haynes, “Cold War” 86-7) The point was to separate the question of obedience to Moscow, which the new revisionist trend attributed to the party‟s leaders, from the efforts of the average communist taking part in protests, disseminating oppositional leaflets, organizing unions, or defending rural farmers. This was a highly selective history of communism not merely because it looked at specific communist groups and areas, but also in concentrating on particular periods of communist activism (especially the Popular Front days), rather than on the entire pre-Cold-War history of the movement. 2 This is the background against which the debate was rekindled in the early nineties and then nourished up to this day by the fall of communism in Europe. Among others, the fall of the USSR enabled historians‟ access to selected communist archives. First came those of the Communist International and of the CPUSA itself, which were part of a large Comintern fund made available during the early nineties thaw to interested American researchers. Then in the mid-1990s the US authorities declassified the socalled Venona project documents, a set of around 3,000 decrypted cables between the KGB‟s (actually, its predecessor‟s) stations in the United States and the Kremlin that had been intercepted starting with the early 1940s. Another historian‟s trove was a KGB archive opened for a couple of years to American historian Allen Weinstein and Russian journalist and ex-KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev. Vassiliev was allowed to take handwritten notes from over 1,100 KGB files on intelligence operations in the US. The files were selectively made available by Russian intelligence, and the copies were translated and then examined by Weinstein (and eventually returned to a KGB safe). This source dried up in the mid-1990s. (It eventually found its mysterious way to the West.)1 These KGB documents generated, starting in the mid-nineties, a succession of remarkable and revelatory books, among which the series authored by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr,2 and Weinstein and Vassiliev‟s much-cited The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – The Stalin Era (1999). No less important were a number of more or less definitive biographies of such iconic figures as communist defectors Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, cause célèbre Alger Hiss, or American Communist Party leader Earl Browder. What these volumes proved, essentially, was that the CPUSA was substantially funded from Kremlin, which controlled the party‟s internal hierarchy and its positions on a variety of American social and political issues; and that the party acted for a long while as a recruiter of agents and spies for the Soviets. Most of the narratives in these books are framed as “spy stories”, a move that has secured considerable mainstream popularity. They have succeeded in settling some arguably outstanding cases such as the guilt of Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie or Harry Dexter White, all of them prominent New Deal / Roosevelt administration officials. They have also sparked an occasionally strident strife among traditionalists and a variety of revisionists ranging from unrelenting justificationists to concessive critics of the way the spy narratives were put together. Archives, archives, everywhere The archival revelations on American communism are, in the United States, a matter of interest mainly for historians and selected cultural warriors, usually those 1 Another cache of relevant documents, though not with a US focus, is the so-called Mitrokhin archive, consisting of notes secretly made by Soviet intelligence officer Vasili Mitrokhin in his decade-long capacity as KGB archivist. The notes were subsequently smuggled into the UK. Ironically, the stories of the Vassiliev notebooks and the Mitrokhin archives are, in themselves, almost as startling as the revelations they hold in store. 2 The Secret World of American Communism (1996, co-authored with F.I. Firsov), The Soviet World of American Communism (1998, co-authored with Kyrill Anderson), Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999), and most recently Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2009, co-authored with Vassiliev). 3 grouped around media bastions of the left (such as The Nation) or of the cultural right (Commentary, The New Criterion). Outside the US, they are relevant especially for historians of communism striving to understand the magnetism of communist ideology in the first half of the 20th century. Placed against the global map of communist history, the case of the CPUSA and of the Soviet spies in America holds no major surprises and calls for no substantial re-evaluations of what is known about Soviets‟ attempted takeover of other countries. Perhaps the most visible contribution of the American case to the story of world communism is the success of Soviet atomic espionage. While the recent exposés of American communists do not offer any considerable surprises if viewed against a worldwide background, they do raise a series of essential questions related to the ethics of memory. It is in this respect that I find the story of Romania‟s Securitate archives relevant, not least in connection with the way archives have been used in the process of establishing matters of guilt and symbolic responsibility (rather than simply of historical truth). The cases of many individual American communists, but also of Eastern bloc informants, dramatically illustrate the rich spectrum and the sheer complexity of shades of guilt and complicity with criminal totalitarian regimes. There are, of course, crucial differences between the two cases. In postcommunist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the archives of the former repressive authorities were opened as part of a wider process of transitional justice. This process has had a number of goals. Historical truth is one of them, but it is complemented – not to the same extent everywhere within the CEE – by the redressing of past injustice through retribution, rehabilitation, and material and symbolic reparations; and by the goal of assisting in the process of democratization through a variety of mechanisms, ranging from outright purges from government of former apparatchiks to formal bans aimed at the same effect (lustration) or to exposure of tainted individuals in the hope that they will be temporarily or permanently excluded from political life by voters. The centrality to these goals of historical research, and of archival research in particular, has led to the perception in post-communist countries that “historical truth in and of itself is justice” (Teitel 69) – in Romania, for instance, the notion that historical truth about communism constitutes a matter of public interest was established as a matter of law in the 1999 Act on Access to Files and Exposure of Securitate as Political Police (Andreescu, “Deconspirarea”). Nonetheless, the experience of dealing with archival information has proven beyond any doubt that the assessment of direct and indirect responsibility for communist crimes is an extremely intricate and multifaceted matter for which facts are essential but hardly sufficient. Compared to the post-communist scenario, the American Communism debate is of much more limited local import. The historical record has been the paramount goal of research made possible by newly available archives and, nagging questions notwithstanding, remarkable and compelling advances have been made in this direction. However, just as historical truth has come to stand in CEE countries for historical justice itself, so in the United States the truth about the American Communist Party has come to serve as a proxy for the ethics of memory in the culture-wars quarrels which followed the new revelations. Questions about responsibility have often been asked as if the simple 4 (substantiated) charge of espionage for the Soviet Union instantly provided the relevant moral answers. Another important difference between the American and the Romanian cases of collaboration concerns the fundamentally different position of the sources. The Americans who collaborated with Soviet intelligence (not all of them spied properly speaking), did so freely, whatever their reasons. They were free citizens in a free country, and many of them – the so-called Romantic spies – collaborated out of pure ideological conviction and were treated as such by the Russian side (for instance, offering money in exchange for information was often treated as a faux pas). In the totalitarian regimes of the Eastern bloc, on the other hand, collaboration was frequently the result of a choice that was less than free. Some scholars have noted that the “assumption that spying was executed under duress is only partly true” (Stan, “Vanishing” 401). Stan refers specifically to cases of misguided patriotism, personal revenge, material and intangible advantages for oneself or one‟s relatives etc. “Certainly, in these latter cases the informers used the system as much as the system used them” (402). Yet the question of moral guilt seems to be more complex than these categories make allowance for. Threat is, to a considerable extent, a subjective matter. In cases in which prospective informants were physically harmed or blackmailed with past transgressions the decision to cooperate was clearly forced (which is not to say it was morally unproblematic). But even in cases where the Securitate did not explicitly engage in blackmail, one could often justifiably assume that refusal would lead to repercussions. It was part and parcel of the communist culture of Big-Brother oppression and secrecy to magnify this impression, precisely because it was an efficient way of delivering results, as few had the strength to test the system in order to expose its limits. The degree of oppressiveness of the political regime (in the case of Romania, the first roughly two decades of Soviet-controlled Stalinism, as opposed to the final two decades of communism) is a relevant factor in assessing the extent of freedom in the choice to collaborate (Turcu), and thus the degree of responsibility. As a result, the “myth” that many and perhaps most informants were also, to various degrees, victims contains more than a kernel of truth, and creates a moral dilemma the way out of which can only reside in the careful reading of individual cases. This is, I submit, one of the major lessons to be drawn from the saga of post-communist archival research. With freedom comes responsibility, so – speaking in general terms – the Americans who collaborated with the Soviet regime in the 1930s and 1940s have a burden of freedom on their shoulders which informants inside the totalitarian regimes in Europe do not share to the same extent. But in other respects the picture is less clear. Fellow-travelers and communists in the West may, reasonably up to a point, invoke in their defense their lack of awareness of what was going on in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and even 1930s. Though some news of Soviet crimes did make their way into the West, they were sometimes arguably difficult to disentangle from anti-Bolshevik propaganda. The connection between cheerleading for Stalin in the US and Stalin‟s victims in the USSR was also rather abstract (and the connection between cheering for Trotsky or Bukharin and Stalin‟s victims was even more so). In totalitarian countries, on the other hand, informants were fully aware of the oppressive and even criminal nature of the regime. It was also easier for them to identify the effects of their informing on others. 5 Such comparative musings are certainly not the subject of the recent spy narratives referred to in this article. Yet the newly available archival documents have been hailed as requiring a radical re-examination of American communism. As far as the facts are concerned, the wealth of new information represents a major advance. Nonetheless, there has been a striking disparity between the achievements of spy stories in setting the historical record straight and those in the ethics of memory department. I try to illustrate this gap with a couple of examples in what follows, and to suggest the relevance of post-communist archives in this connection. Patriotic spies? Thanks to the spy books, we now know a lot more about what US communists did and how. Yet the new books on American communism tell us disappointingly little about why they acted as they did. In effect, the traditionalists unwittingly concede this ground to the older revisionist histories, which remain more helpful in understanding the human subjects of this historians‟ quarrel, while obfuscating the issue of responsibility with celebratory rationalizations of fellow-traveling and even espionage. While the traditionalist side has been occasionally outspoken on the question of moral responsibility (for example, in Haynes and Klehr‟s In Denial), it has dealt with it simplistically and, ironically in view of the factological approach practiced in several of the recent spy stories, ahistorically. Crucial questions were bypassed. Is spying for the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s the same as spying for any other foreign country at any other time? Was spying for world communism – which is how many Romantic spies understood themselves, especially when they provided information not to the Kremlin, but to the CPUSA – the same as spying directly for the KGB or Kremlin‟s other intelligence agencies? When does sharing information – and what type of information – for the purpose of assisting a foreign country become an act of espionage? In the recent spy books these questions are not specifically engaged, so much so that historical truth strictly understood (archival truth, if you will) often seems to be a convenient way to elude such nagging elaborations before inferring, most often obliquely but sometimes directly, guilt without nuance. On the other side of the divide, the hopeless parochialism of most revisionists, who judge everything as an all-American affair (with the USSR as a remote, abstract, perhaps misunderstood ideal), is hardly more helpful in responding to these dilemmas. One issue that is persistently eschewed in most of the recent spy narratives, despite its centrality to both the culture wars in general and to espionage in particular, is the meaning of patriotism. The term has been engaged, in the context of Romanian postcommunist debates, especially in connection with such matters as using patriotism as a justification for collaboration with the political police; the notion that sections of the Securitate might have also served legitimate state interests (counter-intelligence, economic espionage etc.); or intellectuals‟ involvement in the regime‟s nationalistic projects (e.g., bringing Mircea Eliade to Romania). The central problem, in the Romanian context, is under what circumstances patriotism may justify advancing the self-interested designs of totalitarian rulers. 6 The relevance of patriotism to the predicament of American communists is rather different: to what extent is it compatible with assisting another country, whose interests were known to be often at odds with those of one‟s own? (A similar matter has been debated in the Romanian context in conjunction with high-ranking defectors, such as general Mihai Pacepa.) Europe‟s two nationalistic world wars, the USSR‟s advertised internationalism, its “Rooseveltianism” during the days of the Popular Front and its wartime status as military ally, but also the willfully ignored news of Soviet crimes, the frequent reversals of Kremlin policy abroad, the conflicting reports of Soviet friends and foes and of Western propagandists, and the American communists‟ direct experience of an authoritarian CPUSA – all this vastly complicates the question of patriotism. Which is why the spy books‟ failure to approach the matter seems to be a failure of nerve, especially since the issue is always right around the corner. Take the case of State Department source Lawrence Duggan. An NKVD/KGB officer stationed in the US commented thus on Duggan‟s personality: “He is a sincerely progressive American, sympathizes with us, understands our role in this war, and, at the same time, is a 100 percent American patriot” (Weinstein and Vassiliev 18). While the authors seem content to file such cases under “Romantic spies”, the issues raised by the KGB officer‟s characterization are genuine. In fact, one problem of the historians‟ quarrel is that both the traditionalist and the revisionist side have tended to steer clear of the complexity of the moral case and to concentrate on either the complete submissiveness of communists to the Kremlin or, respectively, on the anti-communists‟ witch hunts or their rationalizations of reprisals. But the stubborn question of patriotism cannot be avoided without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes, as with Haynes and Klehr‟s Venona, attempts to avoid open controversy resulted in the sidestepping of these difficult moral questions, at the expense of understanding why intelligent, well-educated, talented, and even arguably patriotic Americans collaborated with the Soviets. This has provided ammunition, first, to the camp of radical traditionalists now finding excuses for McCarthyism by citing “plain facts”. Secondly, the “factological” approach has catalyzed the revisionist hardliners, who have a hard time reconciling their admiration of leftist politics with the Old Left‟s illicit activities in the service of the USSR – as if “the moral and historical credibility of American progressivism depend[ed] upon the exculpation of [...] philo-Communism” (Judt 307-8). What seems to be missing from the American spy books is an account not only of the personal dramas that propelled the politics of that age – one remarkable exception are several recent biographies –, but also of the complex moral conundrums raised by (licit or illicit) support for the USSR and, more broadly, for the communist ideal. Unsurprisingly, these questions did play out in individual destinies, such as those of Duggan and other “Romantic” spies, but also of defectors like Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and of anti-communist liberals. As the Haunted Wood exposé clarifies, Duggan had been extremely anguished, starting in 1937, about what was going on in Russia and kept complaining that “he [did] not want to work for a country where something happens that he [did] not understand” (13). His break with the Soviet intelligence apparatus was a protracted affair, punctured by pleas, reversals, concessions, and inner turmoil. Some historians have not failed to spot the essential questions: 7 Soviet operatives often had to go to elaborate deceptive lengths in order to draw even the most committed Communists and fellow-travelers into cooperation. [They] struggled constantly to isolate their KGB superiors from their Washington sources, fearing that direct contact with the Russians would alert their more skittish contacts that their materials were going directly to Moscow instead of to Communist Party headquarters in New York. The distinction may seem naïve or disingenuous in retrospect. But it mattered at the time to the individuals drawn into Soviet espionage networks in Washington, and thus should matter to contemporary historians trying to make sense of their betrayal. (Isserman 218) Duggan was, in this respect, not very different from communist defectors such as Chambers and Bentley; or, for that matter, from many of the anti-communist liberals struggling to reconcile their liberal leftism with what they correctly perceived as the evil of communism and the Soviet Union. Both occasionally had to put up with unsavory bedfellows, but, as Arthur Koestler noted in defense of his own anti-communism, “You can‟t help people being right for the wrong reasons. [… ] This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of selfconfidence” (quoted in Judt 303). In retrospect, it is obvious that communists were wrong and anti-communists were right in their assessment of who they lay with. But to the historian hindsight may be a benefit in disguise – to the extent that it simplifies the past and brings premature closure to worthwhile questions, it can also be a hindrance. One such question is that of American patriotism in the context of Soviet espionage, a chapter closed all too quickly (or, rather, never truly opened) in the spy books. Scoring points with archives Tony Judt aptly captured the touchiness of the issue of American communism in the US with the following comparative insight: Between them [the Cambridge Five spy ring] did far more damage to Western interests than any American spy until Aldrich Ames. Yet the serial revelation of their treason […] aroused remarkably little public anxiety. It certainly never provoked in Britain collective paranoia and political conformism on the scale that seized the US in these same years. (376) As a result of this charged history, the recent archival revelations have been instantly framed, by their authors as well as by their critics, in the urgent language of the culture wars. This prompted an outsider such as journalist and historian Nicholas Lemann to quip that the “enduring fascination with what is, rationally, a small part of the history of Soviet-American relations can‟t be explained by whatever material the spies produced. The fascination is with the spies themselves” (75). Indeed, the traditionalist historians‟ recent spy stories have given prime time to the “usual suspects”, that is to say to the iconic spies who troubled the first part of the Cold War. The spotlight in Venona, In Denial or The Haunted Wood is put on the major names – on scattered haunting trees rather than the haunted forest. The fascination with spies is present in the Romanian case as well. The “underground, hidden character of their work could provide a plausible explanation” (Stan “Vanishing” 399) for the fact that the public opinion has been relatively silent on the obligation of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (CNSAS) to investigate the collaboration of high-ranking party members rather than merely of secret informants (Andreescu “Deconspirarea”). 8 As a matter of fact, the culture-wars roots of the present querelle are nowhere as evident and problematic as in the way individual cases are dealt with – another feature shared with the Romanian case, in which it often seems that the past is revealed not through meticulous study of thousands of cases but through arguments concerning public intellectuals or prominent politicians. Consider, in the American context, the case of celebrated radical journalist IF Stone, eventually accused by Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev of being “plainly” a “Soviet spy” (“IF Stone” 44), despite the fact that the former admittedly had no secrets to pass on (Holland). Stone has become a focus of the debate over Soviet communism because he has been an icon to left-of-center intellectuals. He was wrong about many things in his life and reporting, including most notably the Soviet Union (but also the Korean War), and he was right about many others, though both his mistakes and his achievements are, in themselves, less significant for his reputation than the fact that he was a fiercely independent journalist whose self-published weekly was a chief venue for his work over several decades. It is clearly Stone‟s enduring popularity with the left, rather than his interwar communism, that has recently made him into a most wanted subject of scrutiny.3 Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev announced the publication of their new book Spies (2009) in the conservative magazine Commentary with an article (a book chapter) devoted to Stone exclusively. The title (“IF Stone, Soviet Agent – Case Closed”) is quite telling, because it blends an uncompromising “guilty” verdict with a term (“agent”) that, in Stone‟s context, turns out to be quite ambiguous. For “agent” here could mean “spy” (an accusation that the three authors eventually hazard); but also someone who wittingly or unwittingly assisted a foreign power without transferring secret information, which Stone did not have access to. While the latter was accused of being a spy soon after 1992, an accusation that was later retracted, Venona decrypts did not shed additional light on Stone‟s status, except to the extent that he was contacted by an operative of the KGB‟s predecessor but expressed his qualms about collaboration. Nonetheless, the accusations poured from conservatives such as Ann Coulter and Robert Novak. Then, after some vacillation (as with Radosh) and new archival research, the two professional historians and their Russian collaborator conceded the verdict. There are two issues which the spy books evade in the Stone case (and in some other similar cases) which are strongly reminiscent of the Romanian debates on collaboration. The first is the more general problem of acknowledging the moral reconversion of communists and fellow-travelers. Stone became critical of the Soviet Union after the Nazi-Soviet Pact and then (scathingly) after Khrushchev‟s 1956 revelations about Stalin. Nonetheless, the benefit of reconversion was not granted him, clearly not because of his former communist sympathies (many neocons had similar commitments), but because he remained a leftist and an icon to the left. As one of the In one of his famous dispatches from Russia in 1996, Stone wrote: “I hate the morass into which one wanders when one begins to withhold the truth because the consequences might be bad – this is, indeed, the morass on which the Russian Communist State is built.” (130) And in another installment: “Nor will we help ourselves, and our power to fight for a better world and a better society, by joining hands with the poor deluded housebroken Communist parties of the West. They remain Russian puppets; they will jump back through the hoops as soon as they get new orders. Their members cannot be freed from intellectual bondage until the parties themselves have disintegrated” (137). 3 9 traditionalist historians involved in the argument admitted to a journalist, “„For [today‟s] right [this revelation] is a source of glee” (Bass). Admissions to having been wrong in one‟s political views usually suffice for rehabilitation (though they do not erase moral responsibility), especially if they are honest and appear consistent with one‟s actions and values. The universal roster of anticommunism is filled with apostates of the “God that failed”, from Silone and Sperber to Bertram Wolfe and François Furet (who only recanted in 1956, not so much over the “Secret Speech” as over Hungary) and to Mihai Şora, who was still a communist as he returned to Romania in the late 1940s. Yet in the spy narratives the vital questions are ignored. When is it too little too late for apologies? Should 1936-38 (the years of the Great Purges) or 1939 (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) be considered the limit? Is 1956, the year of Khrushchev‟s revelations, still acceptable?4 Is it the case that it is never too late? Finally, does having spied for the USSR in the 1940s, rather than having merely rooted for Stalin throughout the same period, automatically forfeit any future change of mind? The moral conundrum of the Stone case is that, while he remained consistently committed to the liberal values of freedom and equality, he never donned the mantle of a staunch anti-communist and remained a critic of the US government. Like the patriotic American who spied for the Soviets, the liberal leftist who refused the lure of anticommunism is a category which, unfortunately, the spy books do little to illuminate. The second issue which the recent communist espionage literature avoids, and to which the CEE experience is directly relevant, is the possible occasional unreliability of the new archival sources. This is an especially sensitive matter because, in Romania, selective access to Securitate archives has been used to score points against political opponents (Andreescu, “Necesitatea”; Stan, “Spies”) and even against intellectual enemies (Andreescu, “Marino”). The Vassiliev and Mitrokhin archives consist of handwritten or typed summaries and copies of files produced by ex-KGB officers. As regards the former, access was open to a few researchers for just about two years and only selected documents were made available by a committee supervising their temporary release. Many documents were denied. More importantly, the information in the archives depends on the questionable candor of Soviet intelligence operatives‟ reports to Moscow. In fact, one of the things missing from the spy books is a discussion of the relations within the KGB (and its predecessors), specifically between Moscow and its operatives. In the absence of a clear picture of how the KGB operated abroad, it is difficult to judge the veracity of information that cannot be corroborated through other channels. This is exactly the situation of IF Stone. The authors of In Denial seem to believe that 1956 is too late. They explain Eric Foner‟s belated disenchantment with Soviet-style communism in that year in essentially psychological terms: “to be a Communist was to be part of a rigid mental world tightly sealed from outside influences…” (38-39), so disillusionment could only be inspired by Moscow. This does little to explain how or why many Western communists gradually lost faith in the Communist party and the Soviet experiment, but it does enable the authors to recast disenchantment as one more instance of toeing the party line – 1956 was the year of Khrushchev‟s “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin and his personality cult, so disillusionment itself was a Kremlin-sanctioned mental state. By adding that the leaders of the CPUSA also reacted in dismay to Khrushchev‟s revelations, Haynes and Klehr seem to imply that any break from Communism in 1956 was not really a break with Communism. 4 10 The case against Stone, which even some quite sympathetic reviewers of Spies admitted does not provide closure (Applebaum), relies on a few pieces of inconclusive evidence – namely several reports to Moscow by KGB operatives in the US. The earliest two documents available report Soviet intelligence attempts by an undercover agent to recruit Stone and the latter‟s refusal to meet or “not reacting” at all; and subsequently meeting but refusing to cooperate citing fear of consequences. Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev‟s comments seem biased towards the view that at this point Stone would have collaborated.5 A later report however notes that “Relations with Pancake [Stone‟s cryptonym] have entered the channel of normal operational work.” (Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev “IF Stone” 43) The three authors take this as a clear indication that Stone was at the time a KGB agent. Essentially, the verdict against Stone depends on this isolated statement. When confronted with the point that this might be a fanciful report by a KGB agent in the US eager to please his masters in Moscow or to hide his incompetence, Haynes and Klehr offer their view as to why such reports cannot lie: The KGB had mechanisms ensuring that no one officer could recruit and run a source exclusively. Moreover, in the late 1930s, with a Stalinist purge of its stations underway, KGB officers were reporting on supposed mistakes and violations of proper tradecraft by their colleagues. In this atmosphere, any KGB officer creating a fictitious agent was likely signing his death warrant. (“True Story” 100-1) The “institutionalized anxiety” of the KGB in the Stalin era would have meant “not merely recall and discipline, but … execution” (Haynes & Klehr “In Denial” 92). This seems a wildly exaggerated supposition. It is not my claim here that the mechanics of the Romanian Securitate are completely similar to those of 1940s Soviet intelligence, especially since the KGB operatives involved in American espionage were well-trained spymasters who operated overseas. It is likely that not many Securitate officers were as well-trained as their Soviet counterparts of yore, and the former operated in a definitely more secure (for themselves) environment. But if the story of the Securitate files is a relevant guide in this respect, the Romanian experience suggests considerably more caution with respect to the truthfulness of reports sent home by KGB operatives. Securitate files demonstrate beyond any doubt that rank-and-file members of the secret police sometimes exaggerated their personal achievements before their superiors, often by putting a positive spin on what were actually failures to elicit any useful information or commitment from purported “informers”. In one case, for example, the Securitate officer reported the recruitment of an informant as well as details about the latter‟s formal agreement and various instructions. A subsequent report drafted two years later and requesting that the informant be dropped acknowledged the latter had no idea he was an informant, never provided any information, and finally recommended that he be instead monitored by the political police for his irredentist views (Andreescu “Cazul”). In the American espionage stories, the possible fabrications and likely exaggerations and other misrepresentations in the reports are not practically considered “Another implication was that Stone feared a connection with the KGB could attract FBI attention and jeopardize his career – but that otherwise, he was not averse to a relationship.” (42) The (evidently faulty) reasoning is that when somebody cites a real cause for a refusal, absence of the cause would have meant acceptance. 5 11 by the traditionalist historians who investigated the correspondence among Soviet intelligence officers. In the preface to Spies, commenting on a credulous press‟s inflation of the success of a theretofore unknown Soviet atomic spy, Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev note “some of the dilemmas faced by anyone attempting to write a factual account of Soviet espionage” (ix). But they seem to do so in order to contrast boasting or romanticizing accounts by ex-KGB autobiographies and Soviet officials to their (KGBsanitized) archival sources. Nor does the authors‟ debunking of the myth of KGB‟s “superhuman” powers, which they characterize in the aforementioned book‟s final chapter as a “tabloid version of espionage history” (483), shake their trust in the reliability of any operative report home. What would prevent a KGB operative from embellishing his activities in order to enhance his portfolio? As Guttenplan aptly points out, these authors never properly explain why we should believe KGB officers, pushed to justify their existence (and expense accounts), when they claim information comes from an elaborately recruited „agent‟ rather than merely a source or contact. (27) Indeed, the real status of the informant is often less than clear in the espionage narratives. Had these books‟ goal been merely to document the extent of communists‟ and radicals‟ witting or unwitting collaboration in one form or another with the USSR, this would have been less of a problem. But the framing of these histories as factual spy stories – and occasionally as morality tales – renders such omissions questionable. Ironically, Weinstein and Vassiliev themselves provide examples of the length to which agents were able to stretch their deception, as well as of the occasional permissiveness of the Kremlin and its US-stationed spymasters. An agent theoretically handling three paid State Department sources fabricated two of them in order to keep the money for himself. “Despite this creative concoction of nonexistent agents, however, Soviet intelligence continued to rely on „Leo‟ for several more years as a paid agent handling the genuine [source]…” (35). Biographies of spies are especially relevant on this point, as they reveal, beneath the spies‟ veneer of robot-like coolness and calculation, an all-too-human foundation. Jacob Golos, the tutor-lover of KGB agent and subsequently FBI informer Elizabeth Bentley, as well as the chief liaison of the CPUSA to Soviet intelligence, was a man who “scorned much of the standards of the underground” (Olmsted 31). Bentley, for her part, although she had been virtually living with Golos and spying for him for more than a year, was unaware that he was the head of the CPUSA‟s Central Control Commission, the director of Soviet travel agency World Tourists, and even an agent of Soviet intelligence (Olmsted 32). Another major omission is relevant in this context: the spy stories only very infrequently discuss explicitly what the spies / agents / sources knew about the relationship between what they were doing and the Soviet intelligence apparatus (rather than, for instance, the CPUSA or its underground). Neither are these books more explicit about the ethical implications of what often appear to be mere terminological differences (that is, the difference between being an “agent”, a “spy” or a “source”). Does exchanging information with a homespun communist qualify as spying if such info reaches the KGB? How about with a Soviet journalist or diplomat? What if the “source” knew – or is reasonably expected to have known – that the journalist or diplomat in 12 question was an undercover operative? Is there a difference between “spying” for the CPUSA rather than for the Soviets? What about the nature of the information relayed in these various circumstances (publicly accessible, private gossip, classified but accessed through journalistic channels, stolen top secret data etc.)? Such matters, as noted previously, are crucial questions for disentangling the ethical implications of “spying” for the Soviets in the thirties and forties and, sadly, are only vaguely tackled in Venona, The Haunted Wood, In Denial and even Spies. These questions also show that in some respects – though certainly not in others – the question of collaboration is more complex in the American context that in the post-communist one, where the nature of the political police was clearly understood and the damage done by cooperating was palpable. It is appropriate to call attention, at this juncture, to one more lapse in the espionage literature referred to herein. While it offers a glimpse, and occasionally some insight, into the structures of American spy networks, it often provides little on the mechanics of the Soviet intelligence apparatus (recruitment procedures, officer management, protocols, relationships). One has to connect dots and read between the lines in order to understand how these networks operated, or what was known, assumed, or reasonably expected to be understood by the various parties in an intelligence ring. This oversight is somewhat remedied in Spies, the most recent take on Soviet espionage in the US, as the volume devotes its final chapter to a welcome history of “The KGB in America” from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. But besides the fact that the chapter is misplaced (it should have been the opening section of the book, so as to inform the stories therein), it is instructive that the authors nowhere draw the implications of this brief chronicle of successes and failures on the reliability of the information in archival documents. Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev‟s history of the KGB in America abounds in instances of infighting, bickering and misunderstanding between the three important Soviet intelligence agencies operating in the US at the time (the KGB‟s predecessors, and army and naval intelligence), and sometimes also between these and the CPUSA underground. This is a story of difficult and even unmanageable agents, personal agendas, jealousies, and baseless recriminations. Some spies “sought to inflate their own importance and status” (539) and engaged in various misrepresentations. Some American agents rebuffed KGB orders, and were consequently scolded for their antagonism to KGB actions, which were characterized as “reflect[ing] a petit-bourgeois, proprietorial ideology, which, combined with a purely American anarchism, is one of the most typical traits of a very large number of local [communists]” (508). To sum up, the books discussed herein offer many furtive glimpses at the intricacies of American communists‟ collaboration with the Soviet Union, but remain frugal in explaining the significance of this complexity both in terms of the historical picture and, at least as relevantly for a historian‟s task, in terms of the reliability of archival materials. Conclusion There are, I believe, several ways in which the recent experiences with archival research on communist informants in the US and, respectively, in Romania inform each 13 other. In the most basic sense, they augment historical knowledge about communism, so that while the individual histories rarely intersect properly,6 they enhance our understanding of the relevant context and background. In a more direct way, these experiences both shed light – in ways which are partly different and overlap partly– on the complexities involved in rendering ethical judgments about political behavior and political commitments based on archival material. The many disputes over Romanian archives in general and, more importantly, over individual cases serve as powerful cautionary tales. They remind one that archives “made in communism” can be unreliable and need to be sifted through cautiously and with an in-depth understanding of the cultural and organizational context in which they were produced. Last but not least, the American and Romanian archival experiences illuminate the way in which historical truth is a politically inflected collective effort only partly subject to expert or institutional arbitration. Works cited Andreescu, Gabriel. “Legea 187/1999 şi primul an de activitate a Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii.” Revista Română de Drepturile Omului 20 (2001): 36-56. ---. “„Cazul Vasile Vetişanu‟ şi aplicarea Legii 187/1999.” Revista Română de Drepturile Omului 25 (2003): 63-84. ---. “Deconspirarea poliţiei politice comuniste: evoluţii.” Noua Revistă de Drepturile Omului 3 (2006): 34-55. ---. “Cazul Adrian Marino.” Timpul 5 mai 2010. Applebaum, Anne. “Now We Know.” The New Republic June 2009. Bass, Paul. “Say It Ain‟t So, Izzy.” The New Haven Independent 18 May 2009. Guttenplan, D.D. “Red Harvest: The KGB in America.” The Nation 6 May 2009. Haynes, John Earl. “The Cold War Debate Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism.” Journal of Cold War Studies 2.1 (2000): 76-115. Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999. Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter, 2003. Haynes, John Earl, Harvey Klehr & Alexander Vassiliev. “I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent – Case Closed.” Commentary May 2009. Haynes, John Earl, Harvey Klehr & Alexander Vassiliev. Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009. Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. “The True Story of Izzy: An Exchange.” The New York Review of Books 17 December 2009. Holland, Max. “I.F. Stone: Encounters with Soviet Intelligence.” Journal of Cold War Studies 11.3 (2009): 144-205. 6 I am referring specifically to the individual histories in the American spy books and those of Romanian communist informants. 14 Isserman, Maurice. “Open Archives and Open Minds: „Traditionalists‟ versus „Revisionists‟ after Venona.” American Communist History 4.2 (2005): 215-223. Judt, Tony. Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin, 2008. Olmsted, Kathryn S. Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Radosh, Ronald. “Romancing I.F. Stone.” The New Criterion November 2006. Stan, Lavinia. “Spies, Files and Lies: Explaining the Failure of Access to Securitate Files.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 37 (2004): 341-359. ---. “The Vanishing Truth? Politics and Memory in Post-Communist Europe.” East European Quarterly 40.4 (2006): 383-408. Teitel, Ruti. Transitional Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Turcu, Liviu. “Colaboraţionismul la români.” Revista Română de Drepturile Omului 29 (2005): 26-39. Weinstein, Allen and Alexander Vassiliev. The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – The Stalin Era. New York: Random House, 1999. 15