The KGB in the USA

Pre-Cold War

As the Soviet regime had viewed the United States as a lower priority target than Britain and other European countries, the KGB had been slow to establish an agent network there. Responsibilities for infiltration thus fell to the GRU, which recruited Julian Wadleigh and probably Alger Hiss, who began providing documents from the State Department.

The KGB, at that time called the NKVD, first made its presence known in 1935 with the establishment of a legal residency under Boris Bazarov and an illegal residency under Iskhak Akhmerov. The CPUSA and its general secretary Earl Browder assisted with recruitment efforts, and soon the KGB’s network was providing high-grade intelligence from within the United States government and defense and technology firms.

Among the most important agents gathering political intelligence recruited during this time period were Laurence Duggan and Michael Straight, who passed classified State Department documents, Harry Dexter White, who performed a similar role in the Treasury Department, and Lauchlin Currie, an economic adviser to Roosevelt. A notorious spy ring, the Silvermaster group run by Greg Silvermaster, also operated at this time, though it was somewhat detached from the KGB itself. The KGB thus succeeded in penetrating major branches of the United States government at a time when the US had no significant countervailing espionage operations in the Soviet Union. When Whittaker Chambers, a former courier for Hiss and others, approached Roosevelt with information fingering Duggan, White, and others as Soviet spies, his claims were dismissed as nonsense. At the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, Stalin was vastly better informed about what cards the United States held in its bargaining deck than Roosevelt or Truman was about Stalin.

In scientific intelligence the KGB achieved an even more spectacular success. British physicist Klaus Fuchs, recruited by the GRU in 1941, was part of the British team collaborating with the United States in the Manhattan Project. Fuchs was the most prominent agent handled by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in their spy ring. The New York residency also infiltrated Los Alamos with its recruitment of then nineteen-year-old Harvard physicist Theodore Hall in 1944; Lona Cohen served as his courier. The stealing of the secrets to the atomic bomb was only the capstone of the Soviet espionage effort in the scientific community. Soviet agents reported back information on advancements in the fields of jet propulsion, radar, and encryption, among others.

The unraveling of the KGB’s network came about as a result of some key defections, like that of Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko, and the VENONA decrypts. Bentley, a courier to the Silvermaster group, had fallen out with Akhmerov and started informing on her former spies to the FBI in 1945. Her efforts, and the resulting “spy mania” in the United States, led to the recall of most of the senior staff, leaving the spy network temporarily headless. Information on VENONA, which threatened to compromise the entire spy network, caused shock and panic within KGB headquarters. However, damage was minimized as KGB agent William Weisband and then SIS Washington Kim Philby passed on information about VENONA and agents it identified from 1947 onwards, 5 years before the CIA was informed. Still, the KGB had to rebuild most of its operations from scratch, and never again would achieve such thorough penetration of a foreign power.

Cold War

The KGB attempted, largely without success, to rebuild its illegal residencies in the United States during the Cold War. The residue effects of the Red Scare and McCarthyism and the evisceration of the CPUSA severely damaged KGB efforts at recruitment. The last major illegal, “Willie” Vilyam Fisher, better known as Rudolf Abel, was betrayed by his assistant Reino Häyhänen in 1957, in all likelihood leaving the KGB without a single illegal residency in the United States, at least for a major span of time.

Legal residencies were more successful. The KGB’s recruitment efforts turned towards mercenary agents recruited because of monetary, not ideological, reasons. It was particularly successful in gathering scientific intelligence, as firms such as IBM retained lax security while security within the government tightened. By the 1980’s though, intelligence was at a low ebb. It was at this time that the KGB scored its most important intelligence coup of the Cold War with the walk-ins of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, who compromised dozens of undercover Soviet agents, including Gordievsky, who was now on the verge of being appointed as head of the British legal residency. Ames and Hanssen were paid millions of dollars for their effort.