Rating: 
Summary: A Critical View of "The Haunted Wood"
Review: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Critical View of "The Haunted Wood"The thesis of this book is that KGB documents prove many New Deal and other US government officials were spies for the Soviet Union. The documentation in the book, however, does not support the thesis, in my opinion. The co-authors state that one of them, a former KGB agent named Alexander Vassiliev, saw the KGB documents in Moscow on an exclusive basis, in exchange for payments by the publisher, Random House, to an association of former KGB agents. There is no way to verify the authenticity of the KGB documents; no way to check the accuracy of the excerpts and paraphrases printed in the book; no way to study their context, such as the rest of the file from which a particular document came, which every historian and student knows can be crucial to a correct reading and interpretation. We do not even know whether the documents Vassiliev saw are in the Russian language and, if they are, who translated them and how accurately. The book contains 1099 numbered footnotes, of which 1049 are citations to those off-limits KGB documents. Readers may well ask why those footnotes are there at all. Another frustrating puzzle for readers is the way the co-authors purport to quote KGB documents that contain code names (which the Soviet intelligence agencies routinely assigned to spies and occasionally to non-spies such as Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, and lesser figures): the co-authors delete the code names and replace them with real names in square brackets -- but often without disclosing what code names they have deleted, and without citing any KGB document or otherwise explaining how or where they got the real names. Compounding the confusion, they state that the Soviets sometimes assigned the same code name to more than one person and sometimes assigned two or three code names to the same person. For instance, the co-authors assert that the American diplomat Alger Hiss had two code names, "Ales" and "Lawyer", while the US Treasury official Harry Dexter White had three code names, "Lawyer", "Richard", and "Reed". In The Haunted Wood, the co-authors do not explain why they cite no authority or source for ascribing "Lawyer" as a code name for Hiss. For their assertion that "Ales" was another code name for Hiss, they do not cite any KGB documentary source, but they reproduce (and misquote) a so-called "Venona" document, released in 1996 by the US National Security Agency and said to bear a translation of a partially decrypted 1945 KGB cablegram about "Ales". In 1950, an FBI agent tentatively identified Ales as Hiss and said the FBI would attempt to verify the identification; but it never did so, nor could it have done so. The Venona-KGB cablegram itself, reproduced with the photographs in the book, shows that Ales could not have been Hiss. Ales was a military intelligence (GRU) agent who obtained only military information. Hiss, however, was charged with obtaining only non-military State Department materials; the papers that were used to convict him were copies of State Department documents. Ales was the leader of a group of GRU agents, whereas Hiss was accused of acting alone (except for his wife and his accuser, Whittaker Chambers). Ales conducted espionage throughout the eleven years 1935-45, whereas Hiss was accused of having conducted espionage not later than 1938, etc. etc. But The Haunted Wood does not mention, let alone attempt to explain away, any of those discrepancies that preclude Ales as having been Hiss. Furthermore, there is an earlier Venona document that tends to exonerate Hiss, but I can not find any mention of it in the book. It contains a fragment of a GRU message that, in the original, included the name "Hiss" spelled out in the Latin alphabet, rather than the Cyrillic. For the GRU to use the Latin alphabet just for the name strongly suggests that the GRU had never before heard of Hiss and wanted to be sure to get the name right. (No first name is given, so we can not tell whether "Hiss" was Alger or his brother Donald, who was also in the State Department.) Moreover, for the GRU to use Hiss's real name suggests that he had no code name and was not an espionage agent, because Soviet intelligence agencies, for reasons of security, normally assigned code names to their agents and referred to them only by their code names. Given the many pages that The Haunted Wood devotes to Hiss, Ales, the GRU, and Venona, it is a serious lapse, in my view, for the co-authors not to tell their readers about this GRU message and not to discuss its implications. The lack of verifiable documentation in The Haunted Wood, its plethora of errors, and its strategic omissions leave it demonstrably untrustworthy. In my opinion, the book falls too far below minimal standards of scholarly or journalistic rigor for any serious consideration.
Rating: 
Summary: A positive review of the book's content.
Review: A little dry, but an important book. It shows that there was a cold war long before the Cold War, a war of subversion declared by the Soviet Union. It also shows (as if anybody ever had any doubts) that the Communist Party USA was no more than an appendage of the Soviet government. American communists used to insist they were just 'liberals in a hurry'. Where were they going in such a hurry? Now we know.
Rating:
Summary: I do not recommend this book
Review: I bought this book with high expectations after reading Sam Tanenhaus' wonderful biography of Whittaker Chambers, expecting to get the full story on Soviet espionage in America in the 30s and 40s, since the latter book, of necessity, could not give the complete picture of Soviet espionage. I found The Haunted Wood, however, to be a mild disappointment. There is no narrative flow; it reads more like the notes for a book than a finished work. The authors do little more than describe the information revealed by the secret KGB archives to which they obtained access and by the U.S. government's declassified VENONA transcriptions. The almost exclusive reliance on the secret communications between Soviet spies and their superiors create a distortion, because, as one might expect, those communications are dominated by discussions of problems. The coded messages flew across the Atlantic when there were crises, not when things were going smoothly. There is also understandably little explicit discussion in the messages of the goods that were obtained by the spy rings. It is therefore easy to get the (very false) impression that the Soviets' espionage efforts were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, this book is worthwhile reading and one day should serve as the sturdy foundation on which a more comprehensive history of Soviet espionage and its consequences can be built.
Rating: 
Summary: Very informative. One of the best. But it is a boring read
Review: I have read many books on the issue of intelligence. The insight provided by this book is excellent. In particular, the nature and history of America's volunteer ideological spies is the very best I have ever read. But I have found it a hard read. It is possible to be too through. Honest, it is. I had an easier time with Mitrokhin.
Rating:
Summary: Very informative. One of the best. But it is a boring read
Review: I have read many books on the issue of intelligence. The insight provided by this book is excellent. In particular, the nature and history of America's volunteer ideological spies is the very best I have ever read. But I have found it a hard read. It is possible to be too through. Honest, it is. I had an easier time with Mitrokhin.
Rating:
Summary: Second thoughts
Review: I reviewed this book in 1999, and gave it three stars. Over time, I've decided it was better than I first thought, and came back here to up it to four...
Rating:
Summary: Second thoughts
Review: I reviewed this book in 1999, and gave it three stars. Over time, I've decided it was better than I first thought, and came back here to up it to four...
Rating:
Summary: Just the facts ...
Review: The Haunted Wood provides documentation to settle some arguments, but not enough to settle others. However, the authors' decision not to try and provide the last word on the actions of many individuals demonstrates a good combination of fair play for the reader and those they wrote.
Many US supporters of Stalin, did little substantive work to help the Former Soviet Union, despite genuine efforts on their parts. The authors point out that so often efforts taken at great personal risk often produced no great gain for the Soviets. Furthermore, many others did some work for the Soviets, but then chose to walk away from that nation. While it is not always clear if it was the result of critical rethinking of past actions, or merely fear of being caught as Soviet espionage in the US began to unravel, the book's authors do not attempt to judge why some left the Soviet fold. They simply state evidence of further activity by a particular party halted.
Limiting its story to the actions of people only while they were conducting espionage creates a very choppy presentation. But the fact is few of the spies are worth more than a chapter or two in a book. This is almost a collected work, with a few headliners (beyond Hiss and Rosenberg).
The sad part of this story is that during WWII, so many Americans and some British citizens were convinced not only of socialism's virtues, but also that the Soviet Union was mankind's best hope. It was the kind of naivete usually limited to academicians, and indeed so many of these people came from such backgrounds.
Most reviews of the book have focused on the books heaping even more evidence supporting the guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg (sp?) as spies. Frankly, neither of these unfortunate traitors' stories would be worth this much focus if they still did not have so many defenders inspired by political fashion rather than evidence.
Of course, only the most jaded political acolyte of the socialist left in the US continues to defend Alger Hiss or Julious Rosenberg as victims of false allegations, but The Haunted Wood helps the debate by combining the available reports of their deeds and their motivations in one place. The source material, of course, is from Soviet and US archives.
Rating: 
Summary: Difficult Truths for the Left Wing and Fellow Travelers
Review: This book should be required reading for the left wing sympathizers who still maintain the fiction of: a. Alger Hiss was innocent, b. Elia Kazan is a bad guy, c. The Rosenbergs were innocent, d.the Communist Party of the United States was not affiliated with the Kremlin, e. Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley were lying. This history, illuminated by KGB files, uncovers the lies and deceit of the fellow travelers and communists who claimed their innocence. They committed treason and should be ashamed of it.
Rating:
Summary: partially an advertisement for two Soviet Agent's talent
Review: This book was written with the help of several present and former Soviet Intelligence officers. Be aware that that colored the book with favorable views of these people's talent level and Soviet Intelligence in general. The book does contain valuable information along with important omission and advertising style hot air. I would suggest that you consider Venona by John Earl Haynes or The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors by Herbert Romerstein. The former is an academic description of the 450+ Soviet agents disclosed by the US breaking Soviet codes used during the war. The latter is an inside story by two US espionage agents and experts. One of the gems it reveals is that President FDR was gullible and had several advisors who were Soviet agents. Stalin was afraid of a two front war in Europe and with Japan in the Pacific. He composed an insulting message for his agents to present to FDR who sent as is it to the Japanese government. This provoked the war in the Pacific. Had this not been done, The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would have been done much later or not at all.
|
