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as sources from which she received espionage data. The memos show that
the NKVD considered these people Party members, had a particular in–
terest in them, and that this interest "coincided with the period in which
Bentley said the NVKD was taking over and revetting the Golos espi–
onage networks." True, it is not definite proof that these seven were
agents, but if one puts two and two together, the conclusion is rather
inescapable.
Moreover, the documents reveal that the American CP had a secret
organ, the "Brother-Son" network whose main task was to ferret out
the American A-bomb secret. Documents reveal that a New Yorker who
fought in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, Morris Cohen,
was the main contact between Soviet intelligence and a still unnamed
Los Alamos physicist - "Perseus" - who gave the U.S.S.R. the top
American nuclear secrets. While many up to now have admitted that in–
dividual Communists, like the self-confessed Cohen, may have engaged in
espionage for ideological reasons, it has been customary to separate the
CPUSA itself from this work. But as Klehr and Haynes note, the
Brother-Son network, headed by Rudy Baker, who also led the Party's
domestic secret apparatus, had a direct link with the NKVD, all of
which serves to demonstrate the CPUSA's "direct connection to Soviet
atomic espionage against the United States."
When the Party was not engaged in intelligence and espionage work
for the Soviets, it spent a great deal of time and energy on the purging
and even execution in Spain of anti-fascists whom it accused of devia–
tion, especially "Trotskyism." Indeed, uncovered documents show that
some who had been listed as killed in battle during the Spanish Civil
War had actually been executed after purge trials. Some were found
guilty of ideological sins; others were accused of being spies; still others
simply wanted to return home as promised after serving in particularly
brutal campaigns. The members of this group were to be shot as desert–
ers. The documentation on the Lincoln battalion alone suggests that few
will any longer be able to indulge in romanticism about the role of the
Communists in the Spanish Civil War.
Whatever their task, it is now obvious that the American Commu–
nists were Russian patriots first, Americans second. A case in point is that
of Janet Weaver Ross, the American Communist
Daily
Worker
corre–
spondent in Moscow during the war. Ross did much more than report
for the party organ. "She used her access to the American embassy,"
Klehr and Haynes write, "to prepare secret reports for the Comintern
about what she heard in the embassy." Her communications were
deemed so important that Dimitrov regularly forwarded them to Molo-
