Writing History When the Crime Is Stranger Than Fiction ‹ CrimeReads

How difficult it seems, gazing back just seventy years to the late 1940s and 50s, to truly appreciate what a confusing and fraught era it was for our grandparents. The Soviet Union, recently an ally in the Second World War, was increasingly viewed as a threat with Stalin's imposition of the Iron Curtain and acquisition of an atomic bomb. While on the home front, and quite suddenly-or so it seemed at the time-congressional inquiries and headline grabbing confessions of ex-Soviet spies were turning up KGB agents everywhere. Spy fever, it was called, especially after the "Red Spy Queen" Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945 and named nearly 150 agents working for the Soviet Union, 37 of them in the federal government, including Alger Hiss. Many, like Hiss, were Washington insiders, high ranking officials in the State Department, Treasury, and even the White House. Soon, another ex-Soviet spy, Whitaker Chambers (then an editor at Time Magazine) would be debriefed by the FBI and add his own names to Bentley's list, including Alger Hiss and his brother. Understandably, the American public was shocked. Could these ex-Soviet agents be believed? Had Communist subversion reached into the Roosevelt White House? And so the scene was set for the divisive McCarthy era and the "Red Scare" of the mid-1950s.