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In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage. By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. (San Francisco: Encounter, 2003. 316 pp. $25.95, ISBN 1-893554-72-4.)
The opening of Soviet archives in the early 1990s together with the declassification of the so-called Venona papers-translations of some three thousand messages sent between Moscow and Soviet intelligence stations in the 1940s-led to the publication in the late 1990s of major works on Soviet espionage that proved without question that the Kremlin was running a good many spies in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, that it recruited them from the ranks of the Left, that it ran them to steal secrets, and that when they got caught they went to ground and waited for a better day. In Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999), John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr painted a golden age of Soviet...