The FBI-KGB War

The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story, by Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman. Published in 1986 by Random House in New York. Judith Coplon, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were among the most significant Soviet spies to emerge in the first decade of the Cold War. Their names are known, but not until now has the full, authoritative story of how they were caught been revealed. After World War II, FBI agent Robert J. Lamphere took on a challenge: to use secret Russian messages intercepted during the war but not yet decoded to break into the American networks of the KGB. The FBI-KGB War is a meticulous account of how these messages led to crucial arrests. Of course the messages were not always clear at first. Code names and descriptions of meetings in the past did not necessarily identify an a gent immediately, but as more and more became known and interconnected, a vast spy network was exposed. The FBI-KGB War is the inside report of how the FBI first learned about the Rosenbergs’ operation (before knowing their identities), and why the Soviet Union–not the FBI–wanted them dead; why Judith Coplon is still under indictment; how and why Burgess, Maclean and Philby were exposed as spies and what was Philby’s true role in compromising what the FBI had discovered; how Fuchs finally identified Harry Gold to Lamphere–and not to the British, who had Fuchs under arrest. The FBI-KGB War is a dramatic and important chapter in the life-and-death struggle between East and West.