The Silvermaster File of the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...

is a 162-volume compendium totalling 26,000 pages of documents relating to the FBI's investigation of GRU and

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) se ...

moles inside the U.S. federal government both before and during the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

. Beginning in 1945 with the allegations of defector and former

courier Elizabeth Bentley ( Venona cover names "Myrna"; ''Umnitsa'', "Clever Girl"), the file is also known as the Bentley file or Gregory file ("Gregory" was the FBI code name for Bentley). The file takes its name from

Nathan Gregory Silvermaster Nathan Gregory Silvermaster (November 27, 1898 – October 7, 1964) was an economist with the United States War Production Board (WPB) during World War II, was the head of a large ring of Communist Espionage, spies in the U.S. government. It is f ...

(Venona cover names Pel, Pal, "Paul"; "Robert") of the War Production Board, whom Bentley named as head of an underground Communist network known as the Silvermaster Group. Among the people named in the file in connection with this group are President Franklin Roosevelt's Administrative Assistant Lauchlin Currie (Venona cover name "Page")Robert J. Hanyok
''Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust'', 1939-1945
(Washington, DC: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2005, 2nd Ed.), p. 119 and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White (Venona cover names "Lawyer"; "Jurist"; "Richard"). Also named in the file are Victor Perlo (Venona cover name "Raider"), chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board, and contacts of his Perlo group, including Alger Hiss (Venona cover name "Ales"), secretary general of the United Nations Charter Conference. (Like several others identified by Bentley, Hiss had been identified independently by another defecting Soviet courier, Whittaker Chambers, to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in 1939.) Among dozens of others named by Bentley in this file in connection with this network is Duncan Lee (Venona cover name "Koch"), confidential assistant to William Donovan, founder and director of the

Office of Strategic Services The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the first intelligence agency of the United States, formed during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines ...

(OSS), wartime predecessor of the CIA.

Prosecutions

Original plans for Bentley to serve as a double agent and gather sufficient evidence to prosecute the Soviet agents identified in the Silvermaster files were ruined when her identity was inadvertently leaked and the USSR quickly shut down its operations. The Silvermaster file in combination with other secret proofs such as the Venona intercepts gave US intelligence the identity of many Soviet agents without the practical means to secure convictions. Also, the statute of limitations for an espionage prosecution was quite short. This was a significant part of the backstory of

McCarthyism McCarthyism is a political practice defined by the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a Fear mongering, campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage i ...

. Bentley's double agent career would have enabled the US to expose the spies without compromising Venona and losing that as an ongoing intelligence source.FBI Silvermanster file, Memorandum for the Attorney General, January 27, 1947.

Notes

References

* FBI Report, ''Underground Soviet Espionage Organization (NKVD) in Agencies of the United States Government''], October 21, 1946
FBI Silvermaster file, Volume 82)

External links

The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP)
has the full text of former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks, containing new evidence on Soviet espionage in the United States during the Cold War * The Education and Research Institute has poste

* The FBI Silvermaster File on the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:FBI Silvermaster file Espionage in the United States Espionage scandals and incidents Venona project Spy rings Communist Party USA 1945 establishments in the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation

Prosecutions

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links