Review of troubling book on WW2 Soviet espionage in America

Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy

Bombshell, by Cox Newspapers Moscow correspondents Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, is a very well researched and written. But it is troubling on two levels. First, that it describes an atomic espionage case which may well have been more significant in its value to the Soviets than either Klaus Fuchs or the David Greenglass-Julius and Ethel Rosenberg cases and yet no one was ever prosecuted. On another level, it is a troubling read because the authors go to such great lengths to sympathetically portray their subject's motivations for betraying our country in time of war.

One supposes a certain amount of sympathy is needed to convince the subject - who is theoretically still liable for prosecution and the death penalty - to consent to a series of interviews. But the authors seem entirely too ready to join in their subject's defense of naivete, mistake and idealism. He was naive about the nature of the Soviet state - it wasn't as wonderful as he thought; he was mistaken about the post-war situation in the US - it did not become mired in depression and turn to fascism and imperialism; and he shared the honest belief of many that assuring post-war parity between the US and USSR would be conducive to world peace.
Where I most fault the authors is their choice to end the main body of the text with their subject's own two-page excuse written in 1997 during his comfortable retirement in England. This is an interesting document, but it deserves some critical commentary.

The excuse rambles over a lot of territory from the Chinese civil war to the Cuban missile crisis, but always in such a way as to cast the US in the worst possible light, and is most revealing for what it does not say as for what it does. For example, he worries that, but for his and others' betrayal of nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union which led to its first bomb test in 1949, the US might have dropped bomb on China in "the early fifties."

For the benefit of younger readers, I will point out that he is referring to the Korean War (1950-53) during which about three million Chinese troops were engaged in a war against the United Nations led by the US under General Douglas MacArthur - a war which cost the lives of over fifty thousand US servicemen and many thousands more from the Republic of Korea, the UK, Australia, even Turkey. Maybe if only one side, our side, had the bomb at that time, China would have stayed out of the war and it would have ended in 1951 with less than half the casualties and the whole of Korea free.

After admitting that he "might" have foreseen a postwar boom rather than a depression, he says that "the dangers have not really abated: automation and globalization are generating an intractable world-wide crisis of unemployment, and this has led to an unholy alliance between the weapons industry and the military, some of whom have been quite prepared to blow up the world in their Messianic zeal (General Thomas Power, former head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, has been quoted as saying that he would regard it as a victory if two Americans and one Russian survived World War III)." He doesn't mention that Gen. Power, a hero among rightwingers in the 60s, had been retired in 1964 and died in 1970.

He goes on the claim that SAC conducted operations over the Soviet Union and prepared war plans for "all-out nuclear war" against the orders without the knowledge of civilian authorities. He says these "perpetrators ... were not punished but were awarded medals and retired with honor. I refrain from spelling out comparisons and conclusions which are all too obvious." In other words, he shouldn't be prosecuted for pursuing peace when those men weren't who pursued nuclear war - what rot!

In the next paragraph, in which he evaluates his actions in his late teens and twenties from the perspective of a 71-year old, he concludes, "I still think that brash youth had the right end of the stick." But he can't leave things there.

He devotes his final paragraph to an attack on the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and his supporters: "Those who have used revelations of espionage to support their view that McCarthy was right are a real danger to American democracy."After making the ludicrous assertion that all anti-communists of that day were being to trade unionism, civil rights, etc. (This would certainly have been news to the leaders of the AFL and leading politicians like Hubert Humphrey and "Scoop" Jackson.), he concludes by saying, "It would be terrible if that cycle of repression happened all over again."

If you are interested in the history of Soviet espionage in America, you must read Bombshell.