The Spying Game.

Mr. Rodman, an NR senior editor, is director of national-security programs at the Nixon Center.

The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America-The Stalin Era, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (Random House, 382 pp., $30)

Inundated by new Cold War scholarship based on liberated Soviet-bloc archives, the informed reader is entitled to ask what each new example of the genre adds that is truly interesting. Yale University Press is sponsoring a series of books on such topics as Soviet manipulation of the American Communist Party, and the Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project has provided continuing revelations on Soviet foreign policy. What Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev have to offer here that is truly extraordinary is their unprecedented (and probably never to be repeated) access to NKVD (now KGB) files.

Weinstein is a brilliant historian whose masterwork is Perjury, the definitive account of the Hiss-Chambers case, and who now heads the Center for Democracy. His pro-democracy activism made him a close associate of Russian reformers in the early 1990s. These associations enabled him to persuade reform-minded officials in the Russian intelligence services in 1993 to open up their files. (The window closed abruptly in 1995.) His co-author, Vassiliev, is a retired Soviet intelligence official turned journalist. Their book also benefited from the CIA's release in 1995-96 of thousands of intercepted NKVD messages between the U.S. and Moscow during World War II (the VENONA cables)-and they have been able to match up dozens of the CIA's transcripts (sometimes incomplete) with the NKVD originals.

These unique records tell the inside story of the espionage networks that Moscow created in the United States, especially after Franklin Roosevelt's establishment of diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1934. From then until 1945, the Soviets amassed a great volume of information from agents and sources in a range of U.S. government agencies, from the State, Treasury, and Justice Departments to the War Production Board and the U.S. Army Signal Security Agency (precursor of the National Security Agency)-even in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA. The information included diplomatic secrets and planning for the postwar period (particularly policy toward Germany and the USSR), U.S. industrial and military production, and, of course, the atom-bomb project.

The usual cast of characters is here, their espionage traced in excruciating detail in the messages to and from Moscow, erasing any lingering doubt in the minds of any but the most obtuse or willful-Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Julius being the leader of a Party cell collecting scientific information on the atom bomb); Nathan Gregory Silvermaster (leader of a group of agents in the Treasury Department); Harry Dexter White (a senior Treasury official in the Silvermaster group); Klaus Fuchs (the key Soviet agent in the atom-bomb project); Lauchlin Currie (an aide to FDR and a source for the New York espionage station in the 1940s); and others. Henry A. Wallace, then Truman's commerce secretary, makes a brief and embarrassing appearance, confiding to the Soviet intelligence chief in Washington in 1945 the Truman administration's plans to maintain U.S. military control over nuclear energy, and his own disagreements with that policy.

Alger Hiss is not a major figure in the book-mainly because he was a source for Soviet military intelligence (GRU), a rival agency. But Hiss is the subject of an amusing flurry of NKVD cables in 1936, when he tried to recruit a State Department colleague (Noel Field) for the GRU, only to be delicately told that he (Field) was already working for the NKVD. But Hiss wouldn't let up, alarming higher-ups in both organizations who were concerned not only about bureaucratic turf but about the risk of security breaches if this kind of meddling persisted.

There are other screw-ups, and much evidence in the messages that Soviet intelligence was never immune to bureaucratic incompetence or wackiness. During the Hiss-Chambers affair in 1948, the Soviet intelligence chief in Washington came up with the bright idea of spreading disinformation that Whittaker Chambers was a former Gestapo agent. Moscow demurred, in part because of the demoralization it might spread among loyal agents whom Chambers had recruited when he was working for Moscow.

In fact, by the end of World War II, the Soviet spy network in the United States was in bad shape. Its eager recruits in the 1930s and '40s had been ideologically motivated, bewitched by the utopian claims of Communism during the Depression and the rise of Nazism. With Nazism defeated, the world economy recovering, and Stalin's Cold War beginning, there were few new recruits. Indeed, major defections-notably those of Igor Gouzenko, Chambers, and Elizabeth Bentley-enabled the FBI to start breaking up the spy rings. Klaus Fuchs was caught and confessed, which led to the Rosenbergs. Weinstein and Vassiliev refer to 1933-45 as Soviet espionage's "golden age." Thereafter, there was no real American Communist underground anymore, despite Moscow's determined efforts to rebuild one.

Weinstein and Vassiliev therefore condemn the "Red Scare" of the late 1940s and early '50s not only for its excesses but for its untimeliness: the country was hysterical about espionage just as the problem dissipated. Excesses there were, but it is quite a lot to ask of a democracy that it suppress its alarm upon learning the extent of the espionage and treason of which it has lately been the victim. The big spy stories, after all, were all true. And if the Soviets in the 1950s couldn't match their earlier successes, it was not for lack of trying.

In any case, The Haunted Wood deserves an honored place in the literature.