![]() Of the approximately 50,000 party members in the war years, only about 300 were involved in spying. Spying and Communist Party membership were not identical categories. ![]() Some departed under suspicion and pressure. The defection of Elizabeth Bentley, the notorious "spy queen" who gathered information for transmission to Moscow from dozens of Federal employees, was a critical blow. With the end of World War II, the Soviet Union's most valuable sources within the U.S. Robert Oppenheimer, and the journalist I.F. Recently declassified government files indicate that Alger Hiss was involved in passing on government documents while others, who had been accused of links with the K.G.B., including the head of the Manhattan Project, J. agents with information ranging from well-informed political comments to purloined classified documents. Pro-Soviet Americans, many of them secret members of the Communist Party working within such sensitive agencies as the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA), provided K.G.B. From small beginnings in the 1930s, Soviet espionage efforts in the United States increased exponentially during the war years. Perhaps as many as 300 American Communists were accomplices of Soviet espionage during World War II. But during World War II, Soviet intelligence agents successfully penetrated the Manhattan Project, the top-secret program to develop an atomic bomb. Communist Party’s involvement in espionage was ad hoc, amateurish, and sporadic, and mainly involved pilfered State Department documents. In a California case, a young woman was sentenced to ten years in prison for raising the Communist banner on a flagpole at a children's camp.ĭuring the 1930s, the U.S. In the early 1930s, some 35 states had criminal syndicalism laws, and foreign-born Communists (a large proportion of party membership in the 1920s and early 1930s) were in danger of deportation. The party also received a constant stream of Soviet political directives that it implemented without question. In January 1920, the Communist International (or Comintern) supplied the Communist journalist John Reed with approximately $2 million dollars worth of gold, silver, and jewelry to foster Communism in America. Within the Communist Party, these individuals had found comradeship, acceptance, and a sense of mission.įrom its earliest days, the American Communist Party received substantial funding from the Soviet government. In the 1930s, the Communist Party and associated organizations attracted the support of a glittering array of novelists, screenwriters, critics, and artists. Digital History Printable Version Domestic Communism
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