If James Bamford is right in “Ideology, not cash new lure for spies” (OpEd. BDN, May 9), should we simply forget about the anxiety in post-World War II America and Britain about alleged spies like Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the Cambridge Five, the last one “outed” being Anthony Blunt, Queen Elizabeth’s principal art adviser?

Maybe the Pentagon’s study of espionage from 1947 to 2007 is correct in its basic analysis of changing motivations among its 173 espionage cases. But Bamford and the Pentagon apparently don’t grasp the elementary fact that the critical instances of Cold War spying were based upon a greater love for Communism and of the Soviet Union than of Western democracy. Did Sen. Joseph McCarthy, for instance, generate hysteria and blacklisting by claiming the Department of State was overrun with spies in it for the money? How ignorant can one be?

Contrary to Bamford, it is precisely the lure of money, not ideology, that represents a genuine change in spying in the past 20 or so years.

Howard Segal

Professor of History

University of Maine

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