Author: By Lynnley Browning, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 14, 1999

Page: E1

Section: Books

The Haunted Wood
Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era
By Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. Random House. 402 pp. Illustrated. $30.

Many of the dozens of Americans who passed secrets to the Soviet Union before World War II apparently did so for ideological and philosophical reasons, not monetary ones. Often drawn from the ranks of privileged intellectuals, American informants in the 1930s and '40s trafficked in heady infatuation with Moscow's communist experiment.

Samuel Dickstein was an exception. A New York Democrat in Congress who worked early on to root out Nazi sympathizers, Dickstein ran a lucrative trade in illegal visas for Soviet operatives before brashly offering to spy for the NKVD, the KGB's precursor, in return for cash. To wheeler-dealer Dickstein, to whom the Soviets assigned the code name ``Crook,'' green, not red, was the motivating factor.

Dickstein's tale, new in the literature on Americans who spied for the Soviet Union, is among the shortest and most startling in ``The Haunted Wood,'' a new investigation by American historian Allen Weinstein and Russian spy-turned-journalist Alexander Vassiliev. Over 1993-'95, the authors had unparalleled access to selected, never-before-seen KGB files. Based on that research, they have compiled a selective account of what they term ``the golden age'' of Soviet espionage in the United States, casting new light upon Moscow's intelligence machine from 1933 to 1945.

Fresh elements of cloak-and-dagger make cameo appearances throughout this highly detailed, dense narrative. Martha Dodd Stern, the comely and capricious daughter of President Roosevelt's ambassador to Hitler's Germany, launches a love affair with a Soviet diplomat in Berlin right under her father's eyes, becoming ``courtesan, agent, and student of communism.'' Years later she and her husband, the financier Alfred Stern, flee suspicious US officials for permanent exile in Prague.

There are others. Hollywood con artist Boris Morros, a fast-talking film producer-director who strings the Soviets along by name-dropping Washington connections while two-timing as an FBI double agent, played a melodramatic, flamboyant role that exceeded his bit part in the film industry. His achievements -- installing a Russian spy in Paramount's Berlin office, for example -- seem small. One wonders why this windbag so interested his handlers, until one recalls the central role played by film in the Soviet propaganda machine, a cultural feature that may have led Moscow to keep up ties with Morros.

Better-known American spies -- Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and Laurence Duggan among them -- are detailed, with fresh light cast on their evident guilt. At the same time, the authors saw NKVD documents suggesting that Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist, was a ``secret member of the compatriot organization (the American Communist Party)'' -- and nothing more. Weinstein and Vassiliev note that despite vigorous efforts by Moscow to infiltrate America's bomb-making program, there is no evidence to suggest that the father of the Manhattan Project spied for the Soviet Union.

Though not the first to do so, the two authors describe how the NKVD, which carried out Stalin's purges, managed to contribute to its own demise. Many of the organization's US-based Russian operatives were recalled to Moscow and then exiled or shot, the victims of a highly paranoid organization that saw traitors everywhere. The suspicion extended to American operatives, too -- and sometimes justifiably so. By 1945, Elizabeth Bentley, a Vassar graduate, had shifted her allegiance from the NKVD to the FBI, so scaring the Soviets that they immediately shut down virtually all of their underground US operations.

The irony is obvious: In Weinstein's and Vassiliev's hands, much of what has been alleged or suspected about Americans working for the Soviets becomes highly probable. Yet by the time of the McCarthy-era trials in the early 1950s, the Soviet spying machine was in shambles.

Readers should not expect elegantly written, well-paced narrative in ``The Haunted Wood.'' While the book is essential, pathbreaking reading for anyone interested in Soviet espionage, it is a trove of data and direct quotation from KGB files, and not a fluid, readerly text.

Although the authors gained access to certain Venona cables -- US intelligence decryptions of coded Soviet diplomatic telegrams -- that in some cases corroborate the KGB files, lacunae abound. How complete and unvarnished a tale do the files selected by the cash-strapped SVR for Weinstein and Vassiliev's perusal actually tell? The men write that ``Russian intelligence agencies received substantial and sometimes critical information (including many classified documents) concerning US government policies, its confidential negotiating strategies and secret weapons developments.'' Yet for all the detail in ``The Haunted Wood,'' it is often unclear how much damage some of its characters actually did. One exception is Harold Glasser, a US Treasury Department official (code-named Ruble) who passed scores of key State Department and Treasury policy documents to Soviet intelligence.

Vassiliev and Weinstein (who probed some of these issues in his ``Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case'') do not claim to have closed the book on the nature and extent of Soviet spy operations. Until more US and Russian intelligence files are opened and examined, ``The Haunted Wood'' will stand as a new and important chapter in the literature of Soviet espionage, and not a final account.