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John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Vale University Press, 1999 [1"61),556 pp., illustrations, $48.80 (cloth).
In the event that anyone still believes that "[t]here is no documentation in the public record of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period"( 17), Haynes and Klehr have made profitable use of Soviet cables decrypted by the VENONA project as well as documents from recently opened Russian archives to provide some insight into the scope of Soviet espionage activities in the United States dating back to 1943. At the point when the Soviet-American wartime "Grand Alliance" was ostensibly at its "grandest," the Kremlin was conducting espionage operations against the U.S. with the fervor customarily reserved for the penetration of enemy nations.
The authors do not pretend to provide a complete picture of Soviet espionage@ the VENONA program only decrypted a small portion of the Soviet cable traffic. That the evidence currently available leaves some questions unanswered, however. does not obscure the fact that Soviet espionage penetrated...