Introduction
Seventy-four years of a secret war, and thirty of revelations
At the time, most Americans had to choose between believing the accusers and believing the accused. The cables, notebooks and party files released since 1991 let us check. Much of what was dismissed as paranoia turns out to have been true, and some of what was believed turns out to have been false.
Our argument is that Moscow worked on America through three channels at once. The first was espionage: Soviet intelligence, with the help of the Communist Party's secret apparatus, recruited sources in the State Department, the Treasury, the White House, the OSS and the Manhattan Project. The second was the party and its fronts: a Communist Party founded on the Comintern's orders and paid with Soviet money, with front groups, unions, writers' leagues and Hollywood committees that drew in many people who never joined. The third was influence and disinformation: friendly journalists and visiting dignitaries, the peace movements, and the KGB's forgeries and planted stories.
Opinion and fact are kept separate. Every entry gives the documented record with linked sources, a status label, and a Then vs. Now box contrasting what was known at the time with what we know today. People carry a role label showing what the evidence now says they were. Our interpretation appears only in clearly marked Our Take boxes. Being anti-communist also means being exact. Most American Communists were never spies, many people named in the 1950s were innocent, and the guide says so where the record does.
Central Theme
Venona & the Archives
For forty years Americans argued about whether Soviet espionage was a real threat or a right-wing fantasy. The answer was sitting in an Army vault in Virginia, in 3,000 partly decrypted cables, and later in Moscow's own files.
The Timeline
Choose an era
Themes
Threads that run through the eras
Pick a theme to see every related entry, from 1917 to now, in the search section below. Venona & the Archives comes first because the secret record is what changed the story. Named Spies groups every documented Soviet agent by network; Then vs. Now collects the cases where hindsight overturned what people believed. Red marks the Soviet state, the Comintern, Soviet intelligence and the party's secret apparatus; steel blue marks the American counter-intelligence and codebreaking side; everything else stays neutral.
Search
Search & filter all entries
The Roster
Every named person, sorted by what the record shows
The Roster lists every person in the research file: people, from the Comintern's first couriers to the 2010 illegals. Each person has a cover name, network, years, a one-line role, the evidence and the sources. Labels mean exactly what they say. A documented agent is named as a source by Soviet records, Venona, a conviction or a confession. CPUSA underground / party leader covers the party's secret apparatus and its open leaders, and party membership alone is not espionage. Fellow travelers and dupes are listed for influence, not spying. Accused, unproven and wrongly accused are kept apart and are never to be read as guilt. Cases still argued by historians carry a debated tag with both readings.
Sources & Method
How this guide was built
Entries were researched in October 2026 from the declassified record (the NSA's Venona releases, FBI files in the Vault, the 1997 Moynihan Commission report, CIA's Studies in Intelligence and its Venona monograph, congressional hearings and court records), the Soviet archives as published (the Library of Congress's Revelations from the Russian Archives, Yale's Annals of Communism series, the Vassiliev notebooks and the Mitrokhin archive at the Wilson Center Digital Archive), the work of historians including John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Allen Weinstein, Christopher Andrew, Ronald Radosh, Kathryn Olmsted and Ellen Schrecker, Britannica, and Wikipedia overview articles that cite them.
Quotations appear only where the wording was found in a primary or cited source. Elsewhere the guide paraphrases. Famous lines that cannot be traced, or whose wording is disputed, are marked as such.
Point of view. This guide has an editorial position: it is anti-communist. That position appears only in boxes labeled Our Take and in the central essay. The sections labeled The Record contain only sourced statements of fact.
Labels. A documented agent is someone whom Soviet intelligence records, decrypts, a conviction or a confession identify as a source. CPUSA underground means a secret party member working in the apparatus that served Soviet intelligence. Fellow travelers supported Soviet causes without joining; dupes were misled or used. Accused, unproven and wrongly accused mean exactly that. Where historians still disagree, as over some cover names in Venona, the entry is marked debated and both readings are given.
Limits. Venona decrypted only a small fraction of Soviet cables, many cover names were never identified, and the Russian intelligence archives remain largely closed. Some identifications rest on a single source. The guide says so where that is the case.
Status labels
Role labels
Key overview sources
Image Credits
Pictures & licenses
All images come from Wikimedia Commons and are public domain or under the licenses shown. They were downloaded and resized for this guide. When no free photo of the person or event itself was available, the entry uses an image of a related place, document, or institution, and the caption marks it as illustrative.