The hunt for Communists in the United States clearly reached the point of hysteria by the early 1950s, but what is often overlooked is that it had its origins in a very real phenomenon. The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s, and the declassification of certain intercepted Soviet messages from the late 1940s, indicates that Soviet agents had penetrated the U.S. government before and during World War II, in some cases at very high levels, including the Office of Secret Services, the Los Alamos nuclear lab, the State Department and the U.S. Congress. Now evidence gleaned from declassified secret Russian cables and newly opened KGB files shows that Soviet penetration indeed ran deep; even the Congressman who set up House Un-American Activities Committee was on the KGB payroll!
