Title: Early Cold War spies : the espionage trials that shaped American politics /
Authors: Haynes, John Earl.; Klehr, Harvey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press,
Year: 2006
Subjects: Spies Soviet Union History; Espionage, Soviet History; Trials (Espionage) United States History; Communism Soviet Union History; Anti-communist movements United States History; United States Politics and government
Abstract: "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 U.S. State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book 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" -- publisher website (November 2007).
Contents: Early Cold War spy cases -- The precursors -- Elizabeth Bentley: the case of the blond spy queen -- The Alger Hiss--Whittaker Chambers case -- The atomic espionage cases -- Judith Coplon: the spy who got away with it -- The Soble-Soblen case: last of the early Cold War spy trials -- The decline of the ideological spy.