The last decade of the 20th century revealed a string of sacred secrets that changed history as we know it. These were the secrets of nations that the participants had sworn to carry with them to their graves, and had now decided to bring into the open. Motives are always hard to pinpoint with certainty, but in the cases where we met and interviewed the secret keepers the clear and present purpose was self justification. With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 restraints on secrecy eased briefly and access to former Soviet archives proved to be a catalyst for a flow of personal revelations. There appeared to be a desire for purification at the end of the millennium, a raising of secrets up to an altar for the Almighty and history to see and judge.

      From memoirs published in the 1990s, from secret U.S. government intercepts of Soviet cable traffic released after half a century, from interviews, articles in the Russian military press and revelations on television, and from documents in Russian government archives, a new clarity emerges showing the effect of Soviet espionage on American foreign policy.

      The next step was to match the newly revealed intelligence operations with memoirs long available but little understood and for the most part not believed. When Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, Hede Massing and Boris Morros, four Americans who worked for the Soviet Union and later denounced their communist controllers, first told their stories, only anti-communists believed them. Within the Roosevelt and Truman administrations there was disbelief and in some cases a call to test the mental health of the former Soviet agents who named prominent Americans among their former communist colleagues. This denial by the liberal left and an excessive Red Panic on the right left little room for calmly seeking the truth of the extent of Soviet intelligence on American soil. American domestic politics and cultural life remain riven and scarred by a sixty year old controversy over communists in government.

      The secrets in KGB memoirs, Soviet archival records and translations and National Security Agency decryptions of Soviet wartime cable traffic, code named VENONA, reveal:

• Soviet intelligence operations to draw Japan and America into war, leading to Pearl Harbor.
• The cooperation of J. Robert Oppenheimer in atomic espionage from 1942 to 1944.
• Albert Einstein's love affair with a Soviet agent.
• Three separate lines of Soviet intelligence activity in the United States: political, scientific and Operation Corridor, which utilized Soviet emigres and members of the White Russian community.
• The Star and Satellite System, surrounding the President and top government officials with Soviet agents.
• Harry Dexter White, a willing asset of Soviet military intelligence (GRU and later the NKVD, providing American printing plates to the Soviet Union for postwar German occupation currency, which led to the Berlin Crisis of 1948.
• Alger Hiss, a longtime asset of Soviet military intelligence, supplying his control officer with the American negotiating positions at the Yalta Conference.
• The origins of the Korean War.
• Colonel Rudolf Abel's preparations for World War III, the Special Period.

      From interviews with former American and Soviet government officials we learned:

• President Truman was kept informed on revelations from VENONA but kept it a sacred secret and left no paper trail of his knowledge about it.
• The effect of SDI on the fall of the Soviet Union.

      From the authors' personal trove of secrets comes the first public account of how Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs reached the West.

      The coming chapters, one through five, examine the successes of Soviet intelligence operations in fending off a Japanese attack on Siberia in 1941, in atomic espionage, and in securing Stalin's hold on Eastern Europe and East Germany at the end of World War II. The next chapters, six through nine, probe the center of American politics, the split that was formed in the postwar period between denial and panic over the effect of Soviet intelligence operations against American government and culture, attempting to define which accusations were founded in truth, which were excessive. Chapters ten and eleven describe the first breaks in the wall of secrecy that isolated the Soviet Union from the west. The final chapters, twelve and thirteen, record America's success in covert operations and in fighting back with overhead satellite technology that preserved western freedom, avoided a third world war, and created an information revolution. The conclusions examine the challenges facing American intelligence in the war against catastrophic terrorism.

      Despite American fears of the Soviet Union during the Cold War its best experts remained unaware of the disintegration that was taking place in their enemy's economy, military might and civic society. The final demise of the Soviet Union and its break up into independent states came as a surprise. The instability that followed poses both to the former Soviet republics and to their long time Cold War enemies, the problem of reconstructing a viable global relationship.

      This book follows from our work with Soviet spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov in writing his oral history, Special Tasks, which first appeared in English in 1994. Sudoplatov's disclosure of the Manhattan Project officials involved in atomic espionage and the ensuing controversy contributed to the public release of the VENONA files in 1995. Using the VENONA messages as a starting point we searched for the complete originals in Russian Intelligence Archives. In some cases, such as Harry Dexter White's plan for post-war Germany, mentioned in VENONA, the entire document exists in the Russian archives. Messages from Russian intelligence archives also amplify and clarify VENONA messages and help place them in context. Russian Intelligence documents are cited in the footnotes without specific details. Copies of these documents, in the authors' possession, have been presented to the Hoover Library where they will be available to scholars and researchers in ten years. The names of Confidential Sources listed in the footnotes have been withheld at the request of the sources.