The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

Five years on, the final charges of perjury against Lattimore were dismissed, and he left America to take up an academic post in England. Unlike the remorseful Wallace, Owen Lattimore never apologized for his portrayal of their visit to Kolyma. Instead, he attacked the veracity of Elinor Lipper’s account, accusing her of being a McCarthyite pawn.30 IN 1995, IT was publicly disclosed that the FBI had secretly collected coded telegrams sent from the Soviet consulate in New York during the Second World War. The so-called Venona Project only began decoding these cables in 1946, when resources became available. The messages revealed not only the extent of the Soviet spies’ penetration of the Manhattan Project, but also the Soviet recruitment of American espionage agents from the very highest reaches of government. Less than half of the Soviet code names were ever discovered as named individuals, but among them, 349 American agents were revealed to be working for Stalin. Given that only a small percentage of the Soviet cables were ever decoded, the actual number of agents was likely to be higher.