LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Soviet Espionage: Soviet Union
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After the 1950s the Soviets no longer had as large a cadre of “Soviet patriots”-Western Communists-on hand for espionage. Western counterintelligence operations, the discrediting of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin combined to dry up the pool of espionage talent that had proliferated during the 1930s and 1940s. In the Cold War period (1946 to 1991) the Soviets were forced to rely on less trustworthy and less dedicated mercenary agents. The loss of most of their ideological agents-one of their most valuable assets-was a blow to the Soviets.
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Information about Soviet espionage generally comes from Soviet defectors via western intelligence agencies. Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin are two defectors who have collaborated with Christopher Andrew in writing a number of books which purport to expose the secrets of Soviet foreign intelligence operations. Christopher Andrew appears to be closely connected with British intelligence. Vasili Mitrokhin was an KGB archivist who defected after the collapse of the Soviet Union with cases of notes on Soviet secrets.
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The Soviet Union’s espionage advantage turned on a unique historical circumstance: Never before had a hostile foreign power enjoyed the unadulterated loyalty of tens of thousands of Americans, many of them intellectuals, some holding senior government posts. The Venona files demonstrate the Communist Party USA’s central role in achieving this loyalty. But the code breakers working on Venona helped impede the Party’s achievement.
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Third, Venona and The Haunted Wood show that espionage at the behest of the Soviet Union was much more extensive than previously recognized. To dismiss it as the handiwork of a few misguided souls is to understate the problem by an order of magnitude. The existence of a network on such a vast scale effectively demolishes the notion of "McCarthyism before McCarthy"-the thesis advanced by some scholars that internal security reforms instituted by the Truman Administration after World War II were irrational, unnecessary, and motivated by political expediency. The gist of this argument is that Truman ignited the anti-Communist mania that McCarthy himself exploited shortly thereafter. In fact, Truman was responding to a serious threat that his predecessor had allowed to fester. That response was prudent and necessary, just as the larger American effort to contain the Soviet Union was prudent and necessary.
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Likewise, Prof. Johnson is doubtful that members of the Communist Party of Canada were widely involved in Soviet espionage and sabotage during the Cold War. The Party operated on two distinct levels, he says: the infiltration of trade unions, peace organizations and the like to mobilize public opinion in favour of the Soviet Union and its goals; and, secondly, a much smaller circle engaging in espionage to collect top secret information, including military secrets and nuclear preparations. The wider, grassroots membership of the Canadian Communist party did not share the same subversive intent as the smaller circle of agents, he argues.
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