Oppenheimer Really Wasn't a Spy ...

... but Hiss really was, and other Cold War espionage news in an upcoming new book based on notes taken by Alexander Vassiliev, a former Soviet espionage agent, from secret KGB files. The book will be out in May. His co-authors, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr are very reputable experts, and if they are willing to trust Vassiliev's notes without the customary option to review the files themselves, so am I. Still, it would be nice if more Cold War era files became accessible in Moscow. We'd avoid reviews like Michael Dobbs' piece on Fursenko's and Naftali's Khrushchev's Cold War, a few years ago (the second review here). Nice, but not very likely.