Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics

Cambridge Essential Histories

by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr

Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of American anticommunism varied from passive disdain in the 1920s to fervent hostility in the early years of the Cold War. Nothing so stimulated the white hot anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had co-operated with Soviet espionage against the United States and had assisted in stealing the technical secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the US State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book, first published in 2006, reviews the major spy cases of the early Cold War (Hiss-Chambers, Rosenberg, Bentley, Gouzenko, Coplon, Amerasia and others) and the often-frustrating clashes between the exacting rules of the American criminal justice system and the requirements of effective counter-espionage.

Genres: American History, Espionage, Nonfiction, American

264 pages, Hardcover

First published August 28, 2006

About the author

John Earl Haynes was Modern Political Historian, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, for twenty-five years.

Reviews

[Ronnie Cramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haynes and Klehr are the acknowledged experts on this subject; they've written a number of books about the Cold War and they're all terrific. I recently decided to re-read them, and started with this one. It gives the reader a good sense of how difficult it is to strike "the proper balance between security and liberty."

[Anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be going over some of the same material for you as it was for me, but it was worth it for me. Well written and rounded out my knowledge of the era. I was sort of there. I was a little kid, and my parents had many fellow traveling friends. I was all ears; found the grownup talk seductive. Today I see Red Diaper babies in influential places in our culture and have to watch my tongue for fear of being labeled a McCarthyite. Not that I'm important enough to be labeled anything, but, youknowwhatImean.