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Several historians and researchers have come to the conclusion that Harry Magdoff was among a number of persons inside the U.S. government used as an information source by Soviet intelligence. What is disputed about this is the extent to which the available evidence indicates that Magdoff (and scores of other people so named) were aware of or complicit in espionage activities.

The FBI reports that Magdoff and others were probed as part of "a major espionage investigation spanning the years 1945 through 1959" into an alleged "Soviet spy ring which supposedly had 27 individuals gathering information from at least six Federal agencies. However, none of the subjects were indicted by the Grand Jury.".

A mass of previously unremarked materials collectively known as the VENONA project was declassified by the U.S. government in 1995. Among these were Army decryptions of Soviet cables which revealed there to be some number of American citizens involved in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Several sources indicate Magdoff was investigated as a member of what was called the Perlo group.

The public accusation that Magdoff was working for Soviet intelligence was itself not new; it had originated with defector Elizabeth Bentley who provided this information to the FBI and later testified to that same effect during McCarthy era hearings :

On the date specified I went to the apartment of John Abt, was admitted by him to his apartment and there met four individuals, none of whom I had ever seen before. They were introduced to me as Victor Perlo, Charlie Kramer, Henry Magdoff and Edward Fitzgerald. They seemed to know, at least, generally that they could talk freely in my presence and I recall some conversation about their paying Communist Party dues to me, as well as my furnishing them with Communist Party literature. There followed then a general discussion among all of us as to the type of information which these people, excepting Abt, would be able to furnish. It was obvious to me that these people, including Abt, had been associated for some time and that they had been engaged in some sort of espionage for Earl Browder.

Victor Perlo, leader of the group, asked if the material was going to "Uncle Joe" (Josef Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).

The Army Signals Intelligence Corp and the FBI conducted a thirty-eight year investigation into communist espionage with mixed results. According to Rafalko, the Venona project confirms the accuracy of much of Bentley's testimony. Critics of Bentley point out that some of her claims were disputed at the time, and that the testimony of Bentley and others before various Congressional committees during the McCarthy period was sometimes exagerated or involved guilt by associations assertions.

Decrypted cables

Rafalko repeats the Bentley claim that Magdoff was a member of the Perlo group of Soviet agents. Magdoff was identified by Arlington Hall cryptographers in the VENONA cables and by FBI counterintelligence investigators as being a Soviet information source described using the cover name "KANT" as of 1944. The name "KANT" appears in declassified decrypts of cables from New York to Moscow, dated May 5, May 13, and May 30, 1944. The first is described by the decrypters as being sent from Pavel Ivanovich Fedosimov in which he requests a "telegraph a reply to No. 139 and advise about the posibility of a meeting with KANT."

On the May 13 cable, "MAYOR", according to Arlington Hall counterintelligence is Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov, reports on a meeting in which Elizabeth Bentley was placed in contact with the Perlo group for the purposes of obtaining secret government information to transmit to the Soviet Union. Magdoff's surname was transmitted in the clear.

On HELMSMAN'S instructions GOOD GIRL contracted through AMT a new group:

MAGDOFF - "KANT". GOOD GIRL's impressions: They are reliable FELLOWCOUNTRYMEN , politically highly mature; they want to help with information. They said that they had been neglected and no one had taken any interest in their potentialities.

Magdoff at the time was ending a prolonged leave of absence due to a gall bladder operation, and the Soviets were unsure of the type of material he might be asked to deliver. As a person targeted by Soviet intelligence as a potential recruit, or "probationer" in Soviet parlance, "KANT" was subject to a background check and a request was made for more information. The May 30 cable transmits personal histories for several persons.

2. "KANT" became a member of the CPUSA a long time ago, being , works in the Machine Tool Division of the DEPOT.

A number of U.S. government agencies (as well as locations within the U.S.) were also given cover names. In this case, "DEPOT" is said by some analysts to be code for the War Production Board, where Magdoff worked in the Statistics and Tools Divisions.

Moscow Archives

In Moscow the request was processed. Evidence was unearthed in the Comintern Archives in the late 1980s, Lt. General Pavel Fitin, the head of KGB foreign intelligence operations in Moscow, requested of Secretary General of the Comintern Georgi Dimitrov information to pursue Magdoff's recruitment. This document was published in a book by historians Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov , and also in the memoirs of Alexandre Feklisov (the Soviet Case Officer for Julius Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs), published in 2001.

Moscow then responded to New York KGB headquarters on February 25, 1945 in Venona decrypt #179,180. According to the authors of Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America, researchers Allen Weinstein (currently Archivist of the United States), and ex-KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev, the cover name of "KANT" was replaced with "TAN". Moscow expressed concern that knowledge of some persons being recruited was widely known among other CPUSA members, so it was not uncommon for code names to change. The code name "TAN" appears in a memo of Anatoly Gorsky’s, dated December 1948, a document from the KGB archives analyzed by Alexander Vassiliev. Gorsky was then a senior official of the Committee of Information (KI), the Soviet agency at the time supervising Soviet foreign intelligence.

A top secret internal FBI memo dated February 1, 1956 from Assistant Alan H. Belmont to the Director and head of the FBI's Internal Security Section, L. V. Boardman, discussed the advantages and disadvantages of using Venona project materials to prosecute suspects. In that memorandum, which remained classified forty-one years until the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy obtained its release to the public in 1997, Boardman quotes the May 13, 1944 Venona transcript, which named several members of the Perlo group, including Magdoff. Though Belmont was of the opinion that the VENONA evidence could lead to successful convictions, it was ultimately decided, in consideration of compromising the Army Signals Intelligence efforts, that there would not be prosecutions. The memo also raises questions about the difficulty of actually confirming the identity of persons based on assumptions about their being linked to specific code names.

Significance of Venona

The Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, the first Commission to be authorized by statutory law in forty years, and only the second ever to do so, which won the release of the Venona transcripts, says in its Final Report:

"A balanced history of this period is now beginning to appear; the VENONA messages will surely supply a great cache of facts to bring the matter to some closure. But at the time, the American Government, much less the American public, was confronted with possibilities and charges, at once baffling and terrifying."

Nigel West, a noted writer on intelligence subjects, wrote: "VENONA remain an irrefutable resouce, far more reliable than the mercurial recollections of KGB defectors and the dubious conclusions drawn by paranoid analysts mesmerized by Machiavellian plots."

Skeptical Views

Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation, has written an editorial highly critical of the interpretation of recent work on the subject of Soviet espionage.

In Appendix A to their book on Venona, Haynes and Klehr list 349 names (and code names) of people who they say "had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence that is confirmed in the Venona traffic." They do not qualify the list, which includes everyone from Alger Hiss to Harry Magdoff, the former New Deal economist and Marxist editor of Monthly Review, and Walter Bernstein, the lefty screenwriter who reported on Tito for Yank magazine. It occurs to Haynes and Klehr to reprint ambiguous Venona material related to Magdoff and Bernstein but not to call up either of them (or any other living person on their list) to get their version of what did or didn't happen.

The reader is left with the implication--unfair and unproven--that every name on the list was involved in espionage, and as a result, otherwise careful historians and mainstream journalists now routinely refer to Venona as proof that many hundreds of Americans were part of the red spy network.

My own view is that thus far Venona has been used as much to distort as to expand our understanding of the cold war--not just because some researchers have misinterpreted these files but also because in the absence of hard supporting evidence, partially decrypted files in this world of espionage, where deception is the rule, are by definition potential time bombs of misinformation.

Ellen Schrecker agrees: "Because they offer insights into the world of the secret police on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it is tempting to treat the FBI and Venona materials less critically than documents from more accessible sources. But there are too many gaps in the record to use these matrerials with complete confidence."

Notes

^1 "The Sage of Imperialism" Susan Green, Seven Days, May 3, 2003.
^2 FBI Silvermaster group file, Part 2c, p. 182 (p. 3 in PDF format).
^3 A Counterintelligence Reader: Post-World War II to Closing the 20th Century, Rafalko, Frank J., ed., (Washington, DC: NACIC, 1998), vol.3 chap.1, pg.31, citing claims of Elizabeth Bentley: "The following were members of the Victor Perlo group....Harry Magdoff: Statistical Division of WPB and Office of Emergency Management; Bureau of Research and Statistics, WTB; Tools Division, War Production Board; Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Commerce Department."
^4 Venona 629 KGB New York to Moscow, 5 May 1944.
^5 Venona 687 KGB New York to Moscow, 13 May 1944.
^6 Wikisource:Fitin to Dimitrov, 29 September 1944.
^7 The Secret World of American Communism, Yale University Press, 1995.
^8 "A NKVD/NKGB Report to Stalin: A Glimpse into Soviet Intelligence in the United States in the 1940's" Vladimir Pozniakov, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Cold War History Project Virtual Archive: "Feklisov, pp. 65-105; M. Vorontsov, Capt. 1st rank, Chief Navy Main Staff, Intelligence Directorate, and Petrov, Military Commissar, NMS, ID to G. Dimitrov, 15 August 1942, No. 49253ss, typewritten original; G. Dimitrov to Pavel M. Fitin, 20 November 1942, No. 663, t/w copy; P. M. Fitin to G. Dimitrov, 14 July 1944, No. 1/3/10987, t/w copy; P. M. Fitin to G. Dimitrov, 29 September 1944, No. 1/3/16895, t/w copy. All these documents are NMS ID and FCD Chiefs' requests for information related to Americans and naturalized American citizens working in various US Government agencies and private corporations, some of whom had been CPUSA members. The last two are related to a certain Donald Wheeler (an OSS official), Charles Floto or Flato (who in 1943 worked for the "...Dept. of Economic Warfare"), and Harry Magdoff (War Production Board)-the request dated 29 Sept. 1944-and to Judith Coplon who according to the FCD information worked for the Dept. of Justice.-RTsKhIDNI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 478, l. 7; d. 484, l. 34; d. 485, l. 10, 14, 17, 31, 44."
^9 "Alexander Vassiliev’s Notes on Anatoly Gorsky’s December 1948 Memo on Compromised American Sources and Networks (Annotated)," John Earl Haynes: "3. "Tan" – Harry Magdoff, former employee of the Commerce Department."
^10 Ibid.
^11 "VENONA: FBI Documents of Historic Interest Re VENONA That Are Referenced In Daniel P. Moynihan's Book, 'Secrecy,'" pgs. 68-71
^12 "Cold War Ghosts" Victor Navasky, The Nation, July 16, 2001
^13 Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, 1998, pp. xvii-xviii
^14 West, Venona, pp. 330

References

Print

• Elizabeth Bentley, Out of Bondage: The Story of Elizabeth Bentley (New York: Ivy Books, 1988) ISBN 0804101647
• Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980)
• Alexandre Feklisov, The Man Behind the Rosenbergs: Memoirs of the KGB Spymaster Who Also Controlled Klaus Fuchs and Helped Resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Enigma, 2001) ISBN 1929631081
• Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) ISBN 0300077718
• Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); p. 312 (Document 90) reproduces a copy of the September 29, 1944 Fitin to Dimitrov memo (RTsKhIDNI 495-74-485) ISBN 0300068557
• Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) ISBN 0300071507
• Herbert Romerstein, Stanislav Levchenko, The KGB Against the "Main Enemy": How the Soviet Intelligence Service Operates Against the United States (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989) ISBN 0669112283
• Ellen Schrecker, The Age Of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1994)
• Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1998)
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999) ISBN 0788164228
• Nigel West, Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (London: HarperCollins, 1999) ISBN 0006530710

Online

• FBI memo, Belmont to Boardman, February 1, 1956
• FBI Silvermaster group file, Part 2c, pgs. 182-188 (pgs. 3-9 in PDF format). Magdoff described in the context of Elizabeth Bentley's testimony pertaining to the Perlo group.
• FBI Silvermaster group file, Part 5b, pgs. 170-178 (pgs. 86-94 in PDF format).
• Victor Navasky, "Cold War Ghosts," The Nation, July 16, 2001.
• A Counterintelligence Reader: Post-World War II to Closing the 20th Century, Rafalko, Frank J., ed., (Washington, DC: NACIC, 1998), Official History, vol.3 chap.1, p. 31.
• Vladimir Pozniakov, A NKVD/NKGB Report to Stalin: A Glimpse into Soviet Intelligence in the United States in the 1940's
• Wikisource:Fitin to Dimitrov, 29 September 1944
• Wikisource:Venona 687 KGB New York to Moscow, 13 May 1944, Perlo group

Images of VENONA decrypts pertaining to "KANT" and "TAN"

• Venona 629 KGB New York to Moscow, 5 May 1944.
• Venona 687 KGB New York to Moscow, 13 May 1944.
• Venona 769, 771 KGB New York to Moscow, 30 May 1944, p. 1.
• Venona 769, 771 KGB New York to Moscow, 30 May 1944, p. 2.
• Venona 769, 771 KGB New York to Moscow, 30 May 1944, p. 3.
• Venona 179, 180 KGB Moscow to New York, 25 February 1945.

1. Testimony
2. ONCIX
3. KANT
4. MAYOR
5. Dimitrov
6. Haynes
7. Feklisov
8. Vassiliev
9. Gorsky
10. Memo
11. West
12. TheNation
13. Schrecker

• Venona