| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterin-telligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years. By Athan Theoharis. (Chicago: Dee, 2002. x, 307 pp. $27.50, ISBN 1-56663-420-2.)

This is a book about spy hunting. It is not one about spy catching. That is precisely Athan Theoharis's point: the counterintelligence operation that the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) mounted during World War II and the early years of the Cold War, although massive, led to few successful prosecutions of Soviet espionage agents. Instead, the FBI's spy chasing served mainly to promote the politics of McCarthyism.

Theoharis and his students have been accusing the FBI of doing that for years. While he once seemed quite skeptical of whether there really were any Communist spies to catch, that is no longer the case. Theoharis acknowledges that the Venona Project messages (encoded dispatches from Russian diplomatic installations in the United States to Moscow that U.S. military intelligence intercepted and eventually deciphered)

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