In John le Carre’s Cold War spy thriller, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Russian mole in the British intelligence service says to the spy hunter who caught him, “I had to pick a side, George. It was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one. The West has grown so very ugly, don’t you think?” A similar line surfaced when a West Point Cadet, Spenser Rapone, was photographed in 2018 with the phrase “Communism will win” in his cap.
(The Venona intercepts were not used at the time to prosecute Lee because of the need to keep the nature and success of the surveillance a secret from the Soviets.)
“The sad truth,” notes researcher Mark LaRochelle, “is that Lee was just one of many identified Soviet agents in the OSS. Others, as we now know from numerous impeccable sources, included Maurice Halperin, Carl Marzani, Franz Neumann, Helen Tenney, Julius, and Bella Joseph and Lee’s Oxford classmate, Donald Niven Wheeler.”
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