Wood Suzanne, Wiskoff Martin F. Americans Who Spied Against Their Country Since World War II

Monterey: Defense Personnel Security Research Center, 1992. — 116 p.The gathering of information by intelligence agents, especially in wartime, is an ageold strategy for gaining superiority over enemies. Intelligence officers, those individuals working for government intelligence agencies, are trained to serve their country by gathering information. This report concerns a different group-American spies who betrayed their country by providing (or attempting to provide) classified information to foreign powers. Specifically, we were concerned with American citizens who have been involved with espionage against the United States since 1945. Our knowledge of Soviet espionage in the Cold War era began with the defection of Igor Sergeievitch Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. In September 1945 he defected to the Canadians with documents that eventually led to the arrest of Klaus Fuchs and, from there, to the apprehension of the Rosenbergs and their accomplices. The conviction of Harry Gold in 1950, the Rosenberg/Sobell trial of 1951,
the perjury convictions of Alger Hiss and William Remington, and the two trials of Judith Coplon helped set the climate for Senator Joseph McCarthy's campaign to root out all Communist sympathizers in government and nongovernment arenas alike. Only 12 American citizens were convicted of espionage during the 1950s. While the incidence of espionage convictions increased gradually during the 1960s and 1970s, it was
during the 1980s that the pace of espionage against America grew to what Allen and Polmar (1988) term an espionage plague. This decade became known popularly as the decade of the spy. Ideology was supplanted by financial motivation and by other reasons such as disgruntlement, revenge, to please others, or thrills.