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During the Second World War, Stalin deployed more spies against his allies, the United States and the United Kingdom, than he did against his enemy, Nazi Germany. There were as many as 300 agents within the US government by 1945, actively targeting American military, diplomatic scientific, and technological secrets, including at least five at the Los Alamos atomic bomb project, while the highly placed members of the Cambridge Five spy ring were conveying thousands of classified British documents annually to their Soviet handlers during the war. The results: Stalin was able to attend wartime and postwar conferences with his allies knowing their negotiating positions in advance and was emboldened to take the risks that would initiate both the Cold War and the Korean War. Although postwar defectors facilitated the exposure and arrest of some of the most damaging spies, the intelligence war between East and West would be asymmetrical for decades to come.
Bruce Thompson, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Departments of History and Literature and the Associate Director of Jewish Studies at U.C.-Santa Cruz, and also teaches at the Institute. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford; his areas of scholarly research include European intellectual and cultural history, French history, British Isles history, American Jewish intellectual and cultural history, the history of cinema, and the history of espionage.
