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government official that he had served as a courier for a group of communists working in Washington in the 1930s, naming more than a dozen people, the most prominent of whom was Alger Hiss. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, Chambers, a defector from Soviet intelligence in 1938, feared the information stolen by Soviet spies would now be shared with the Nazis. To buttress Bentley, HUAC subpoenaed Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine. The most prominent figure among those she named, Harry Dexter White, former undersecretary of the Treasury, died of a heart attack shortly after indignantly denying he had spied. Virtually everyone she named took the Fifth Amendment (a handful also denied her claims) and, stymied by lack of evidence beyond her word, the government could not initiate prosecutions. No one was ever convicted of espionage on the basis of Bentley’s information.īentley’s charges became public knowledge in 1948 when the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began hearings about Soviet espionage. Ironically, the KGB quickly learned about Venona from its own spies and changed its coding procedures. Although the Venona Project, a top-secret program to decrypt Soviet cables between Moscow and KGB stations in the United States, confirmed Bentley’s claims, that evidence could not be used in court lest it alert the Soviets that their codes were not secure.
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Learning about her actions from moles (i.e., planted spies) in British intelligence, the KGB immediately shut down its operations and withdrew most of its officers from the United States. However, she had no documentary evidence. In 1945, Elizabeth Bentley had gone to the FBI and confessed to serving as a courier for a ring of spies passing secrets to the Russian KGB. American counterintelligence officials had been investigating Soviet espionage for years, gathering evidence they were unable to use in court that hundreds more Americans had been recruited by Soviet intelligence agencies. The convictions of Alger Hiss in 1950 and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 were, however, only the tip of an iceberg. Two dramatic trials in New York convinced most Americans that Cold War concerns about Soviet espionage and subversion were fully justified. This Narrative can also be used with The Postwar Red Scare Narrative and the McCarthyism DBQ Lesson. X”), “Sources of Soviet Conduct,” July 1947 Primary Source to discuss the proliferation of anti-communist sentiment in the United States after World War II. Use this narrative with the George Kennan (“Mr.