Scope and Content Note
The papers of Alexander Vassiliev (b. 1962) span the years 1895-2011, with the bulk of the material dating from the 1930s to the early 1950s. The papers are in Russian and English and consist of original notebooks, summary narratives, documents pertaining to Vassiliev v. Frank Cass & Co., and material relating to the VENONA project. The papers are organized into two series: Paper File and Digital File.
With the exception of the original notebooks, the Paper File series consists entirely of printouts of the scanned and born-digital material found in the Digital File. The notebooks were created during Vassiliev's work on a book project supported by the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia (SVR). For this project, he partnered with Allen Weinstein to write a book on KGB operations in the United States. Vassiliev was a former operative in the KGB and the SVR gave him access to KGB files relating to its espionage activity in the United States during the 1930s through the early 1950s. The notebooks, handwritten in Russian, contain Vassiliev's direct transcriptions from these files as well as his margin notes. When Vassiliev left Russia in 1996, he left the notebooks behind and did not retrieve them until 2001. The original notebooks were used in writing Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2009), coauthored by Vassiliev, John Earl Haynes, and Harvey Klehr. Included with the original notebooks are a file guide, a file concordance, transcripts, and English translations of the notebooks. The transcribed and translated versions duplicate the pagination and page layout of the original handwritten notebooks.
The summary narratives consist of material Vassiliev wrote to comply with restrictions set forth by the SVR. These restrictions prohibited Vassiliev from sharing the original notebooks with Allen Weinstein. Vassiliev, therefore, prepared SVR-screened summary narratives of the notebooks. These sanitized summary narratives in English were used as the basis for the book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America–The Stalin Era (1999), coauthored with Weinstein. Although the summary narratives are based on the KGB files transcribed in the notebooks, the span dates reflect the events chronicled in the narrative text, not the dates of the transcribed files.
The documents relating to the lawsuit Vassiliev v. Frank Cass & Co. include copies of legal documents, correspondence, and trial notes. The libel suit stemmed from an article, "Venona & Alger Hiss" by John Lowenthal, published in 2000 in the journal Intelligence and National Security.
An addition to the Paper File consists of material printed out from digital files donated by John Haynes in 2012 and primarily relates to the VENONA project.
The Digital File series contains born-digital summary narratives, scans of the original notebooks, file guide, transcriptions and translations of the notebooks, and material relating to the lawsuit Vassiliev v. Frank Cass & Co. The addition contains scans of the VENONA cables, an index and concordance to the VENONA materials, as well as scans and translations of the original Vassiliev notebooks. The "Index and Concordance to Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks and Soviet Cables Deciphered by the National Security Agency's VENONA Project" by John Haynes indexes proper names, cover names, organizational titles, events, and subjects. The digital version of the translated notebooks in the addition are an updated version of the translation files that appear in the Notebooks folder and have revised footnotes as well as other editorial changes.