KGB Material Released By Cold War Project, Available Online

pha7boy writes "The Cold War International History Project just released the 'Vassiliev Notebooks.' The notebooks are an important new source of information on Soviet intelligence operations in the United States from 1930 to 1950. Though the KGB's archive remains closed, former KGB officer turned journalist Alexander Vassiliev was given the unique opportunity to spend two years poring over materials from the KGB archive taking detailed notes — including extended verbatim quotes — on some of the KGB's most sensitive files. Though Vassiliev's access was not unfettered, the 1,115 pages of densely handwritten notes that he was able to take shed new and important light on such critical individuals and topics as Alger Hiss, the Rosenberg case, and 'Enormous,' the massive Soviet effort to gather intelligence on the Anglo-American atomic bomb project. Alexander Vassiliev has donated his original copies of the handwritten notebooks to the Library of Congress with no restriction on access. They are available to researchers in the Manuscript Division."

Comments

Re:Yes but...

[anaesthetica]

The Venona project, only declassified toward the end of the Cold War, contains a large amount of information vindicating the position that the U.S. government was indeed riddled with Soviet assets. McCarthy didn't have access to Venona, and in all probability his lists of communists working in the government were a wild goose chase. It's unfortunate that his tactics and fervor discredited his larger objective, however, because it turns out that there were quite a number of spies in the U.S. government and other key institutions of American society.