The clash would give rise to another great irony in the life of J. Edgar Hoover. In the late 1940s, legal overreach by his bureau had prevented the prosecution of a vast and very real Soviet spy ring; among the scores of bona fide spies identified by Bentley, only two would ever face trial, and on charges that had nothing to do with spying. On the heels of that fiasco, Hoover had redirected the Red Scare to focus on domestic communist party members, almost none of whom would ever be linked to actual espionage. That’s because the KGB had taken the obvious precaution of ordering its actual spies
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