page_title: Alexander Vassiliev
section_title: Wikipedia and new research
hierarchical_section_title: Alexander Vassiliev / Biography / Wikipedia and new research
caption_attribution_description: Alger Hiss, American statesman accused of espionage
context_page_description: Alexander Vassiliev is a Russian journalist, writer, and espionage historian living in London who is a subject matter expert in the Soviet KGB and Russian SVR. A former officer in the Soviet Committee for State Security, he is known for his two books based upon KGB archival documents: Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, co-authored with John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, and The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America: the Stalin Era, co-authored with Allen Weinstein.
context_section_description: Then in 2005 he became interested in Wikipedia and decided to check the article for Alger Hiss to see how accurate it was. At the end of the article was an external link to the website of historian John Earl Haynes, on which Vassiliev found a document in his own handwriting which he had introduced at his London trial, along with some comments questioning the accuracy of the document. Vassiliev wrote a letter to Haynes attempting to set the matter straight — and a book collaboration project was born.
  Vassiliev managed to recover his original notebooks with transcriptions and summaries of secret Soviet foreign intelligence archival documents and these served as the core of a second publication. In May 2009, Yale University Press published Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, co-authored by Haynes, Vassiliev, and Harvey Klehr of Emory University, another widely recognized scholar in the field of American communist history.
  Upon completion of the project, Vassiliev donated his original notebooks to the U.S. Library of Congress. The contents of these were scanned in original film, transcribed into Russian, and translated into English, and are now available online in all three forms through the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
caption: Alger Hiss circa 1948
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