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

"the words complained of are true in substance and
in fact insofar as they meant and were understood to mean that the presentation of the case against Hiss in The Haunted Wood (of which the
Claimant was a co-author) was unsound, defective and partisan, and that
accordingly the Claimant was an unreliable author." (Those who are interested in the details can find all the documents in the archives of the
High Court of Justice in London, Queen's Bench Division.)
    In January 2003 Frank Cass's lawyers offered to settle the monetary
claim for a little more than £2,000 and promised not to republish the
Lowenthal article. Overconfident about winning the case, I rejected the
offer. I also wanted an official apology, and Frank Cass wasn't offering
that. Plus I wanted to see John Lowenthal face-to-face in court, first as a
witness and later as a defendant, and I thought that a settlement would
undermine my chances to sue him personally. In addition, I wasn't sure
how a settlement in this case would affect my case against Amazon.com.
I also turned down a request from Cass for a meeting and a May 2003
offer upping the proposed settlement to £7,500 but still without an apology.
    What I should have then done was to ask the court for another preliminary hearing on the subject of malice on the part of Frank Cass. Originally it was part of my claim, but it had been tossed out in a preliminary
hearing. With new documentary evidence provided after that earlier
hearing, such a claim would, if accepted, require Frank Cass to base its
defense solely on justification, making qualified privilege and fair comment moot. The problem was money. By that time I was heavily in debt
and didn't know where to get £7,000 or £8,ooo, which I would have
needed to pay the defendant's legal costs if I had lost the hearing again.
In any case, buoyed by the two offers of settlement, I believed I could
vin.
    The trial started on 9 June 2003 before judge David Eady, who specialized in defamation cases, and a jury that consisted of seven women and five men. Unfortunately, I had no right to tell them that Frank Cass
had offered to settle twice. I presented my case first, laying out my arguments and being cross-examined by Cass's lawyer, Andrew Monson. I
thought I acquitted myself well, explaining the development of the book
project, my role, and my research methods. Then, for two days I crossexamined the defense witnesses, including Butler, who admitted that she
had praised The Haunted Wood in order to "disarm" me and had misquoted me in her article in The Nation. John Lowenthal said it had never
crossed his mind that Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service in the person
of Boris Labusov could have lied to him. That came from a man who in
the Intelligence and National Security article had written, "The professional involvement of intelligence agencies in deception and disinformation, character assassination and murder, lies, forgeries, and burglaries
pervades their institutional culture and dictates their policies of secrecy."

    To demonstrate that he had tried to contact me, Lowenthal offered a
fax he had sent in 2000 to an address where I had not lived since 1997. I
asked him why he hadn't tried to find me through other channels, such
as Allen Weinstein or Random House, before writing defamatory statements about me. Lowenthal, who claimed he had written his article over
a four-year period from 1996 to 2000, said he was very busy. He admitted that he had written inaccurately when he claimed to have done research in KGB files. Since he did not speak Russian, that was plainly a lie.
Moreover, his claim that he had relied on someone else to do the research
was also inaccurate; there was no evidence of that.
    On the final day of the trial, Friday, 13 June 2003, judge Eady
summed up the case for the jury and instructed it about the procedure for
reaching a verdict. It was a long speech, and somewhere in the middle of
it I started realizing