Helen Barrett Tenney worked for the Comintern apparatus in the 1930s and funnelled information to the Soviet Union on behalf of the SpanishCommunists where she learned espionage tradecraft.
In 1942, Tenney worked for the New York City-based Short Wave Research, a company contracted to the Office of War Information to recruit persons knowledgeable in foreign languages.
In late summer of 1943, Tenney moved from New York to Washington, D.C. at the suggestion of Jacob Golos to obtain employment with the Spanish section of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). She moved into Mary Price's former apartment which was used as a meeting point for government employees engaged in espionage and their Soviet case handlers and couriers.
Tenny began supplying reports and memoranda from OSS. This information included a considerable quantity of data on activities of OSS personnel in virtually all sections and all countries around the world. Tenney also supplied information concerning a monitoring station on Long Island.
Beginning in 1944, Tenney was being paid a regular stipend of $50 per month — considerable for the times — which had been arranged through Joseph Katz. In December 1944, Joseph Gregg became Tenney's handler, however Tenney complained about his technique and Gregg was replaced by Inez Munoz.
Tenney resigned from the OSS in June 1946 and transferred to the United States Department of State. By then the FBI had Tenney under surveillance. The State Department eased her out of her position and revoked her passport. In January 1947, Tenney had a nervous breakdown. She was confined to a psychiatric hospital for observation after a deadly combination of alcohol and phenobarbital which was regarded as a suicide attempt. Tenney remained unconscious for five days and upon regaining consciousness, was in a delirium and regarded as in a severe hallucinatory psychotic state. Her observers overheard Tenney mumbling about being followed, having her telephone tapped, having her friends under surveillance, and being a Russian spy. She then appeared to have a violent phobia against everything Russian, even the mention of the word "Russian", and was watched closely for another suicide attempt. Doctors, citing patient confidentiality, refused to discuss the case with FBI investigators.
By February 1946, unbeknownst to Tenney, her contact with Soviet intelligence Elizabeth Bentley, had defected and was cooperating with the counterintelligence investigation. Bentley visited with Tenney and concluded that her suicide attempt was genuine; Tenney felt alone and isolated not knowing the larger Soviet espionage operation had been compromised and that the Soviet controllers had broken off contact with their American agents. Tenney was unremorseful and appeared to wish to reestablish contact with Soviet handlers, dashing the FBI's hopes to gain her cooperation.
In June 1947, the FBI interviewed Tenney and determined she was in frail mental and physical health.
In 1998, Tenney was identified in the Venona project transcripts as code name "Muse", based on her transfer from the dismantled OSS to the Department of State.
Robert Philip Hanssen is an American former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history." Hanssen is currently serving fifteen consecutive life sentences without parole at ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado.
Earl Edwin Pitts is a former FBI special agent who was convicted of espionage for selling information to Soviet and Russian intelligence services.
Harry Dexter White was a senior U.S. Treasury department official. Working closely with the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he helped set American financial policy toward the Allies of World War II. He was later accused of espionage by passing information to the Soviet Union.
Judith Coplon Socolov was a spy for the Soviet Union whose trials, convictions, and successful constitutional appeals had a profound influence on espionage prosecutions during the Cold War.
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American spy and member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). She served the Soviet Union from 1938 to 1945 until she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence by contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and admitting her own activities.
Jane Foster Zlatovski (1912–1979) allegedly engaged, with her husband, George Zlatovski, in covert activities on behalf of the Soviet Union while employed in sensitive U.S. Government wartime agencies during World War II. They were indicted in 1957. Their case was never tried and both Zlatovskis denied the accusations.
Lt. Col. Duncan Chaplin Lee (1913–1988) was confidential assistant to Maj. Gen. William Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), World War II-era predecessor of the CIA, during 1942–46. Lee is identified in the Venona project as the Soviet double agent operating inside OSS under the cover name "Koch," making him the most senior alleged source the Soviet Union ever had inside American intelligence.
As early as the 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB intelligence agencies, used Russian and foreign-born nationals, as well as Communists of American origin, to perform espionage activities in the United States, forming various spy rings. Particularly during the 1940s, some of these espionage networks had contact with various U.S. government agencies. These Soviet espionage networks illegally transmitted confidential information to Moscow, such as information on the development of the atomic bomb. Soviet spies also participated in propaganda and disinformation operations, known as active measures, and attempted to sabotage diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and its allies.
Maurice Hyman Halperin (1906–1995) was an American writer, professor, diplomat, and accused Soviet spy.
Mary Wolfe Price (1909–1980) was an American who was accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union.
Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.
William Walter Remington (1917–1954) was an economist employed in various federal government positions until his career was interrupted by accusations of espionage made by the Soviet spy and defector Elizabeth Bentley. He was convicted of perjury in connection with these charges in 1953, and murdered in prison in 1954.
Harry Magdoff was accused by a number of authors as having been complicit in Soviet espionage activity during his time in US government. He was accused of passing information to Soviet intelligence networks in the United States, primarily through what the FBI called the "Perlo Group." Magdoff was never indicted, but after the end of the Cold War, a number of scholars have inspected declassified documents from U.S. and Soviet archives. They cite these documents to support the claim that Magdoff was involved in espionage. Other authors have taken issue with some of the broader interpretations of such materials which implicate many Americans in espionage for the Soviet Union, and the allegation that Harry Magdoff was an information source for the Soviets is disputed by several academics and historians asserting that Magdoff probably had no malicious intentions and committed no crimes.
Anatoly Veniaminovich Gorsky, was a Soviet spy who, under cover as First Secretary "Anatoly Borisovich Gromov" of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, was secretly rezident in the United States at the end of World War II.
The Gouzenko Affair was the name given to events in Canada surrounding the defection of Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Union in 1945 and his subsequent allegations regarding the existence of a Soviet spy ring of Canadian communists. Gouzenko's defection and revelations are considered by historians to have marked the beginning of the Cold War in Canada, as well as potentially setting the stage for the "Red Scare" of the 1950s.
Mikhail Tkach, also Michal Tkacz, Michael J. Tkach, and M. Nastivsky, born in Mastisiw, Poland, of Ukrainian parents, and arrived in the United States at New York City on November 25, 1909, under the name Michal Tkacz. Tkach's wife, Yeroslava, was born in Slatchev, Poland, and entered the U.S. in 1913. The Tkachs lived in New York City from 1922 onwards. Tkach became a naturalized U. S. citizen in New York City on December 8, 1936.
Robert Talbott Miller III was an American citizen who worked in the United States Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during World War II. He was alleged to be part of the Soviet espionage group known as the "Golos ring" in the 1940s.
The Silvermaster File of the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation is a 162-volume compendium totalling 26,000 pages of documents relating to the FBI's investigation of GRU and NKVD moles inside the U.S. federal government both before and during the Cold War.
Arthur Aleksandrovich Adams, was a Soviet spy, and Hero of the Russian Federation, who passed critical information to the Soviet Union about the American Manhattan Project.
John Anthony Walker Jr. was a United States Navy chief warrant officer and communications specialist convicted of spying for the Soviet Union from 1967 to 1985 and sentenced to life in prison.
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