Harry Magdoff and Espionage - Moscow Archives

Moscow Archives

In Moscow the request was processed. Evidence was unearthed in the Comintern Archives in the late 1980s has Lt. General Pavel Fitin, head of KGB foreign intelligence operations, requesting of Comintern Secretary General Georgi Dimitrov, information to pursue Magdoff's recruitment. 7 This document was published in a book by historians Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov 8, and also in the memoirs of the Soviet Case Officer for Julius Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs), Alexandre Feklisov, 9 published in 2001.

The Moscow Center then responded to New York KGB headquarters on 25 February 1945 in Venona decrypt #179,180. The authors of Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America, researchers Allen Weinstein, currently Archivist of the United States, and ex-KGB Officer Alexander Vassiliev say cover name "KANT" was replaced with "TAN". Moscow Center expressed concern that knowledge of some persons being recruited was widely known among other CPUSA members, so it was not uncommon for code names to change. The code name "TAN" appears Anatoly Gorsky’s Memo dated December 1948, a document from the KGB archives analyzed by Alexander Vassiliev. 10 Gorsky was then a senior official of the Committee of Information (KI), the Soviet agency at the time supervising Soviet foreign intelligence. 11

A top secret internal FBI memo dated 1 February 1956 from Assistant Alan H. Belmont to the Director and head of the FBI's Internal Security Section, L. V. Boardman, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using Venona materials to prosecute suspects. In this memorandum, which remained classified forty-one years until the Moynihan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy obtained its release to the public in 1997, Boardman quotes the 13 May 1944 Venona transcript, which named several members of the Perlo group, including Magdoff. Though Belmont was of the opinion that VENONA evidence could lead to successful convictions, it was ultimately decided, in consideration of compromising the Army Signals Intelligence efforts, that there would not be prosecutions. The memo also raises questions about the disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons based upon an exception to the hearsay rule requiring expert testimony of cryptographers revealing their practices and techniques to identify specific code names. 12