as to the type of information which these people, excepting Abt, would be able to furnish. It was obvious to me that these people, including Abt, had been associated for some time and that they had been engaged in some sort of espionage for Earl Browder. Victor Perlo, leader of the group, asked if the material was going to "Uncle Joe" (Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). The Army Signals Intelligence Corp and the FBI conducted a thirty-eight-year investigation into communist espionage with mixed results. According to Counterintelligence Reader, the Venona project confirms the accuracy of much of Bentley's testimony. Critics of Bentley point out that some of her claims were disputed at the time, and that the testimony of Bentley and others before various Congressional committees during the Red Scare was sometimes exaggerated or involved guilt by association assertions. Decrypted cables According to A Counterintelligence Reader, Magdoff was a member of the Perlo group. Magdoff was identified by Arlington Hall cryptographers in the Venona cables and by FBI counterintelligence investigators as being a possible Soviet information source using the cover name "KANT" as of 1944. The name "KANT" appears in declassified decryptions from New York to Moscow, dated 5, 13 and 30 May 1944. The first is described by the decrypters as being sent from Pavel Ivanovich Fedosimov in which he requests to "telegraph a reply to No. 139 and advise about the possibility of a meeting with KANT." On 13 May cable, "MAYOR", according to Arlington Hall counterintelligence Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov, reports on the first meeting Elizabeth Bentley had with the Perlo group for the purposes of obtaining secret government information to transmit to the Soviet Union. Magdoff's surname was transmitted in the clear. On HELMSMAN'S instructions GOOD GIRL contracted through AMT a new group: [53 groups unrecoverable] MAGDOFF – "KANT". GOOD GIRL's impressions: They are reliable FELLOWCOUNTRYMEN ["members of a Communist Party"], politically highly mature; they want to help with information. They said that they had been neglected and no one had taken any interest in their potentialities. Magdoff at the time was ending a prolonged leave of absence due to a gall bladder operation was unsure of the type of material he could deliver. As a person targeted by Soviet intelligence as a potential recruit, or "probationer" in Soviet parlance, "KANT" was subject to a background check and a request