testimony of other eyewitnesses and eventually by the Venona files. Venona Project and Soviet Archives The Venona project decrypts that refer to Koch only confirm that Bentley passed on to Moscow the information she claimed to have received from Lee and do not in themselves provide independent evidence to corroborate Bentley's accusation that Lee was the source of that information. A 1944 Venona decrypt confirms that Lee tipped off Bentley about Donovan sending him on a secret mission to China. According to the Moynihan Commission, "It would ... appear from the Venona messages that Duncan Chaplin Lee, Special Assistant to OSS Director William J. Donovan, was a Soviet agent." In a review of Mark A. Bradley's 2014 book A Very Principled Boy, Pete Finn, national security editor at The Washington Post, noted that Lee's insistence on passing on intelligence only orally helped him escape prosecution, "But the 1995 declassification of decrypted wartime Soviet cables and the release of the notebooks of a former KGB officer who copied sections of Lee’s file in Moscow left little doubt that the blue-blooded Virginian had betrayed his country." After OSS Lee went on to have a successful career as a lawyer in the private sector. Lee continued to represent clients such as Claire Chennault and Whiting Willaurer. In 1949, following the fall of China to the communists, Lee represented a CIA-front company in the Hong Kong and UK courts in a successful effort to keep a large fleet of transport aircraft in Hong Kong, once owned by the Nationalist Chinese government, from being seized by the new communist Chinese regime after its recognition by the British. Lee joined insurance giant American International Group in 1953, rising to serve as AIG's chief in-house lawyer in New York City prior to his retirement in 1974. Personal life and death Lee subsequently moved to Toronto with his Canadian wife, Frances Lee Smith, where he died in 1988. See also Elizabeth Bentley Donald Niven Wheeler William Joseph Donovan Venona project References External sources Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (Random House, 1998) Testimony of Duncan C. Lee, U.S. Congress. House. "Hearings Regarding Communist Espionage in the U.S. Government", 80th Congress, August 10, 1948. FBI Venona FOIA The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) has the full text of former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks 1913 births 1988 deaths American spies