During the Cold War, the greatest threat to American security sometimes came not from outside the country, but from within it. The video below tells the story of Americans who sold secrets to the Soviet Union, passing on military plans, intelligence files and the names of agents, and it follows the investigators who uncovered them. The stories are told with archive footage and interviews, and they read like a thriller, except that the stakes were real. For a site devoted to understanding socialism, the film matters because it shows the Cold War as a contest of ideas as well as of armies, and as a contest in which loyalty, belief and money were all weapons. This chapter follows the video through the men and women who betrayed their country, what drove them to do it, what damage they did, and how, in the end, most of them were caught.
The first thing the history of American spies for Moscow teaches is that there was never a single kind of traitor. Some were true believers, people who had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, when the Depression had made capitalism look broken and the Soviet Union had seemed, to some, like a country that had found an answer. Some were in it for money, and very often for a great deal of money, paid in cash by a case officer in a car park or a hotel room. Some were motivated by resentment, by a sense that they had been passed over, underpaid or unappreciated, and that selling secrets was a way of getting even. And some were motivated by ego, by the thrill of leading a double life and of knowing things that no one else knew. The investigators who hunted them learned to look for all of these motives, because a spy is rarely driven by one thing alone.
Walk-Ins and Recruited Agents
There were, broadly, two ways to become a Soviet agent in America. One was to be recruited, often slowly and carefully, by an officer of the KGB or, earlier, of its predecessors. The other was to walk in, to offer one’s services to the other side, usually through a Soviet embassy or a contact abroad. The walk-in was, in many ways, the more dangerous kind of agent, because he arrived with access already in place. John Walker, a chief warrant officer in the United States Navy, is one of the best known examples. From the late 1960s until his arrest in 1985, Walker passed the Soviet Union information about American naval communications, and he recruited members of his own family to help him. He was, by the account of the damage assessments that followed his arrest, one of the most damaging spies in American history, and he had come to Moscow, not the other way round.
Recruited agents, by contrast, were often cultivated over years. A young official, a scientist or an engineer would be befriended, encouraged, and then, when the time was right, asked for a small favour, and then for a larger one. The KGB was skilled at this slow work, and it understood that an agent who had been recruited gradually was, in some ways, more reliable than one who had arrived of his own accord. The video follows both kinds of case, and it shows how the investigators had to understand the difference. A walk-in might leave traces in the form of money, of travel, of a sudden change in lifestyle. A recruited agent might leave almost none, and might go on working for years before anything looked wrong. That is why the hunt for traitors within was so often a matter of patience, of sifting through files, and of waiting for a spy to make a mistake.
Money, Ideology and Ego
Money was, for most of the later Cold War, the most common motive, and the cases that did the most damage were very often cases in which money was at the centre. Aldrich Ames, a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, was arrested in 1994 after it was discovered that he had been passing secrets to the Soviet Union, and then to Russia, for years. He had been paid large sums, and he had lived well beyond his salary, buying a house and a car and spending money in ways that drew attention. Robert Hanssen, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was arrested in 2001, after a career of spying that had lasted more than two decades. He, too, had been paid, and he, too, had led a life that was, in its details, carefully compartmentalised, a devout family man by day and a spy by night.
But money alone does not explain why a man like Ames or Hanssen, who had taken an oath, who had a career and who had, in many ways, a good life, would risk everything to betray his country. The investigators who studied these cases found a mixture of motives: a sense of grievance, a belief that the system they served did not value them, a taste for the secret life itself, and, in some cases, a kind of intellectual contempt for the people they worked with. Ideology, which had been the dominant motive in the 1930s and 1940s, when the atomic spies and the early networks were recruited, became less important as the century went on. What remained, in case after case, was a man who believed that he was cleverer than the system that employed him, and who discovered, too late, that the system, in the end, caught up with him.
The Damage Done
When a spy is caught, the first question the intelligence services ask is not only what he took, but what it cost. The damage assessment is a formal process, and it can take years. In the case of Walker, the assessment concluded that the Soviet Union had been able to read American naval communications for much of the time he was active, and that it had learned how American submarines and ships operated. In the cases of Ames and Hanssen, the assessments were even more sobering, because both men had access to the names of sources, the people the United States had recruited inside the Soviet Union, and some of those sources were arrested and, in a number of cases, executed after they were betrayed. The damage, in other words, was not only measured in documents. It was measured in lives.
There is a reason the video returns, again and again, to the idea of damage. A spy’s work is invisible while it is happening, and its consequences often become clear only years later, when a source disappears, when an operation fails, or when a piece of information that should have been secret is found in the hands of the other side. The investigators who worked these cases understood that they were not only trying to catch a criminal, but to understand what had been lost, and to prevent it from happening again. That work, the slow, meticulous reconstruction of what a spy had taken and to whom he had given it, was often more important than the arrest itself, because it was the only way to know how much had been compromised, and how much could still be saved.
The Hunters
The men and women who hunted the traitors within were, in many ways, the mirror image of the spies they pursued. They worked in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the Central Intelligence Agency’s own counterintelligence staff, and in military counterintelligence, and their work was, for most of its course, invisible. A counterintelligence investigation can last for years, and it can involve thousands of hours of work, of surveillance, of reading files, of testing hypotheses, and of waiting, before it produces a single arrest. The investigators learned to look for the small things: the bank deposit that did not match a salary, the unexplained trip, the document that had been copied and returned, the polygraph that was failed and then passed. They also learned to live with uncertainty, because for a long time they might have a suspicion but no proof, and a suspicion, in a free society, is not enough.
The breakthrough, when it came, was often the result of a defector, or of a source inside the other side, or of a single mistake. Walker was caught because his former wife reported him. Ames was caught after a long investigation in which his spending was matched against his income and a Soviet source confirmed that the KGB had a mole in the CIA. Hanssen was caught in the act, in a park, after a lengthy surveillance operation that had tracked him for months. Each case was different, and each took its own path, but the pattern was the same: a slow accumulation of evidence, a narrowing of the possibilities, and then, at the end, a careful arrest, designed to preserve the evidence and to protect the sources who had helped to find him. The video follows that pattern, and it gives the hunters their due, because their work, unlike the spies’, was rarely celebrated, and it was, in the end, what kept the damage from becoming worse.
What Betrayal Leaves Behind
The question that lingers after these stories is not only how the spies were caught, but what their betrayal did to the country they betrayed. In the short term, it gave the Soviet Union information it should not have had, and it cost the United States sources, operations and, in some cases, lives. In the longer term, it created a climate of suspicion inside the intelligence services themselves, and that suspicion, in turn, made it harder for those services to trust their own people. The hunt for a mole can become, in the wrong hands, a witch hunt, and the history of American counterintelligence includes episodes in which innocent officers were wrongly suspected, in which careers were ruined and in which the search for a traitor did more damage than the traitor himself. The video does not ignore that cost, and it is to its credit that it does not.
But the lasting lesson of these cases is simpler, and it is one that the Cold War, for all its remoteness, still has to teach. A free society is vulnerable to betrayal from within, because it depends on trust, on the belief that the people who hold its secrets will keep them. That trust is not naive, and it is not unconditional, but it is necessary, and when it is broken, the damage is not only to the secrets that are lost, but to the trust itself. The men and women in this video broke that trust for money, for ideology, for ego and for resentment, and they were, in the end, caught. The investigators who caught them did so by being patient, by being careful and by refusing to give up, even when the trail seemed to have gone cold. That, in the end, is the story the video tells: not only the story of the traitors within, but the story of the people who found them.