ABSTRACT
The Venona documents have sparked a renewed interest in issues of espionage, although in truth there has hardly been a time in the past fifty years that espionage has not generated public fascination, not only in the United States but also in Great Britain. A historian of ancient Greek espionage notes that spies who betray their fellow citizens "have always been perceived in the Western tradition as corrupt and corrupting. Justifying espionage directed against democracies is not easy, and the recent attempts to do so have not been successful. For almost as long as there have been spies there has been debate about the morality of espionage. In the wake of the Venona revelations other commentators have adduced variety of additional justifications for the espionage committed by American citizens during this era. The Soviet Union's American spies did not provide information to some mythical transcendent authority or some nonexistent world government but to the intelligence services of a foreign country.
