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.

Although I don't underestimate the value code-breaking can play in wartime, I tend to agree with I.F. Stone, who told an interviewer in 1984 that

secrets play a very small part in human history. You don't come to understand what's happening by peeping through keyholes.... In writing history or journalism you get to understand by looking at the fundamental struggles, the interests, the classes, the ideas that become facts and you try to make sense of all that.
      The virtue of a free society is that it doesn't have to depend on spies and secret police.... These people are all paranoid, trained to look for plots, but history is not made of conspiracies, history is made by fundamental forces.

"Espionage" is one of those words that is often out of context when applied to what went on in US left circles in the years leading up to and including World War II. There were a lot of exchanges of information among people of good will, many of whom were Marxists, some of whom were Communists, some of whom were critical of US government policy and most of whom were patriots. Most of these exchanges were innocent and were within the law. Some were innocent but nevertheless were in technical violation of the law. And there undoubtedly were bona fide espionage agents--on both sides. Even as in the 1980s, when our State Department was in high dudgeon over Soviet attempts to bug our embassy in Moscow at the very moment, we now learn, that the United States was building a tunnel to try to eavesdrop on their embassy in Washington. So it goes. For me, the political scientist Michael Rogin captured the essence of the McCarthy era when he wrote of the notion that "some kind of alien external force had entered the body politic and threatensto destroy it from within." During the 1940s and '50s the alien force was Communism, and the countersubversive tradition expressed itself by demonizing the American Communist Party (and by extension fellow travelers and pinkos and eventually liberals), making Communism an evil caricature of itself. The most frightening image of the cold war culture was the atom spy, linking the atomic bomb (which stood for ultimate destruction) and spy (which stood for ultimate betrayal). The fact is that whatever espionage went on--even if it were to turnout that Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Harry Dexter White et al. were all guilty as charged--there was no serious internal Red Menace. Communists undoubtedly used undemocratic methods to "infiltrate," "penetrate" and otherwise influence politics, the trade union movement and the culture; but they never really jeopardized the country's security.

McCarthyism was but a particularly virulent and nasty example of the countersubversive theme that has been the dark side of the American tradition since the beginning of the Republic--a force that has usually done more damage to our values than the subversion it was mounted to oppose. After the Revolutionary War we had the Alien and Sedition Acts. Before, during and after World War I we had the prosecution of 10,000 people under the Espionage Act, we had the Palmer Raids, and after World War II we had the great red scare, whose legacy is still with us.

Now that the cold war is no more, one would think the old images would lose their power. But no. The same mix of resentment (by Republicans, who had lost five consecutive presidential elections from 1932 to 1948) and triumphalism (by the world's one and only nuclear power) that informed and fueled America's domestic cold war may be at work again today: Republican resentment against their exclusion from power during the Clinton years and American exaltation over the meltdown of the former Soviet Union. Back in the 1940s, as Jessica Wang pointed out at the Eisenhower Center Conference, "the widespread presumption of the Atomic bomb as the cornerstone of American national security and the concomitant fear that Soviet-sponsored atomic espionage posed the gravest possible threat to the safety of the US lent an added sense of urgency to the anti-Communist quest for absolute security against the enemy within." This mentality of the vital secret and a misplaced faith in official secrecy as the best way to ward off the dangers of nuclear proliferation has apparently survived into the present day.

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