Soviet espionage in the United States

As early as the 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB intelligence agencies, used Russian and foreign-born nationals (resident spies), as well as Communists of American origin, to perform espionage activities in the United States, forming various spy rings. Particularly during the 1940s, some of these espionage networks had contact with various U.S. government agencies. These Soviet espionage networks illegally transmitted confidential information to Moscow, such as information on the development of the atomic bomb (see atomic spies). Soviet spies also participated in propaganda and disinformation operations, known as active measures, and attempted to sabotage diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and its allies. During the 1920s Soviet intelligence focused on military and industrial espionage in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, specifically in the aircraft and munitions industries, in order to industrialize and compete with Western powers, as well as strengthening the Soviet armed forces. The United States opened diplomatic ties to the Soviet Union in 1933, normalizing relations, but also opening the door to a number of spies which initially focused on technological espionage. One early Soviet spy was Jones Orin York who was recruited by the KGB's predecessors in 1935. The Soviets' Amtorg Trading Corporation established in 1924 would become a nexus of espionage. Historian Harvey Klehr describes that the American businessman Armand Hammer "met Lenin in 1921 and, in return for a concession to manufacture pencils, agreed to launder Soviet money to benefit communist parties in Europe and America." Historian Edward Jay Epstein noted that "Hammer received extraordinary treatment from Moscow in many ways. He was permitted by the Soviet Government to take millions of dollars worth of czarist art out of the country when he returned to the United States in 1932." According to journalist Alan Farnham, "Over the decades Hammer continued traveling to Russia, hobnobbing with its leaders to the point that both the CIA and the FBI suspected him of being a full-fledged agent.