Free Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by Harvey Klehr;John Earl Haynes;Alexander Vassiliev Page A

more difficult if they had given me a
chance to respond to Labusov's and Lowenthal's statements in the same
publications, but they hadn't. The journal had never gotten in touch with
me, and as far as I could tell from Lowenthal's article, it hadn't talked to
Allen Weinstein either.
    I started two separate proceedings against Frank Cass and Amazon
.com in July 2001. Intelligence and National Security then offered me a
chance to respond to Lowenthal by writing my own article for it, but I refused because I believed that playing tit for tat with someone like Lowenthal was futile.

    I realized I would need my notebooks as evidence during the trial. I
asked a person in Moscow I could trust to send them to me by DHL, and
I received all eight of them. The litigation took almost two years. At pre-
liminaiy hearings the defendants managed to get rid of important paragraphs in my particulars of claims, and each hearing I lost cost me several
thousand pounds because I had to pay the defendants' legal costs. They
were wearing me down financially. All our savings evaporated, and I had
to borrow money from my bank.
    During the litigation Frank Cass presented a number of documents
as evidence, including my correspondence with Susan Butler; correspondence among Alger Hiss, John Lowenthal, Dmitri Volkogonov, and
the SVR; and some papers prepared in the process of reviewing John
Lowenthal's article for publication in Intelligence and National Security.
I found useful comments about the journal's partisan and polemical tone
and a warning that it "needs to be less pejorative when dealing with its opponents." Several commentators had suggested that Weinstein be asked
to respond. Rather late in the proceedings, in August zooz, I received
under discovery a transcription of the interview between Lowenthal and
Labusov; it showed that the latter's comments were not in fact as straightforward as they looked in the article: Lowenthal was pushing and trying
to put words into Labusov's mouth, while Labusov was trying to avoid direct answers, saying "No comment," and constantly recommending that
Lowenthal get in touch with me in London. Some answers were unintelligible, at least one was misquoted in the article, and about twenty seconds of the interview were "accidentally erased." The interview was
substantially distorted in the article.
    At one point Labusov protested to Lowenthal, "You know, you push
me to some criminal deed," a comment reminiscent of what General
Volkogonov had told the New York Times in 1992: "His attorney, Lowenthal, pushed me hard to say things of which I was not fully convinced."
    Not surprisingly, John Lowenthal described in his article only the first
part of the Volkogonov story, in which Volkogonov "enjoyed unrestricted
access to Russia's archives"; he had examined not only the KGB and presidential archives but also the GRU archives and reported that "there, too,
no traces of Alger Hiss have been found." The second part of the story,
in which the general admitted he had lied because he wanted to be
Mother Teresa to Alger Hiss, was omitted.
    My strategy was clear: to demonstrate to the jury that the defendant
Frank Cass had defamed me and in effect called me a liar by publishing
an article written by a fanatical Hiss defender and personal friend rely ing on distorted comments from the Russian Intelligence Service. Cass
had been warned several times by reviewers and editors to tread carefully but had not and had uncritically relied on the word of an employee
(Labusov) of an espionage agency whose own principles precluded an
honest response, as even Lowenthal had acknowledged in the article.

    Frank Cass based its defense on three points. First, it argued "qualified privilege": it "had a moral or social duty" to publish Lowenthal's
piece. Second, it asserted that the statements about which I was complaining were "fair comment upon a matter of public interest." Finally, it
claimed justification: