In the 1930's, Armand Hammer had Stalin's "franchise" selling (or should we say, "fencing") the remains of the contents of seized Russian property in New York City as "treasures of the czarist nobility". Treasures they weren't, more like kitsch and picked-over garage-sale remains, but that is how Hammer supported himself in those days.
We know the code names of those involved but not their actual identities (a good guess however would be some of the founders of the ACLU which had been created as a reaction to the so-called “Red Scare)".
Well, that's a new one on me -- the ACLU was an early Soviet front? Figures. It would be provable if some of that seized Russian property and funds came to the founders of the ACLU.
Working out who those code names actually were using old bank records would seem to be worth a book -- and a fresh, unvarnished history of the ACLU by someone who isn't a member or fellow-traveler.
Cato Institute? Heritage? American Enterprise Institute? Hudson Institute? Anybody listening?
The information on the millions give to 5 Americans around 1920 is in documents uncovered by researchers working on Yale's annals of communism series. Photocopies of the chekisty documents are in Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov's The Secret World of American Communism. They reached a dead end identifying who got the money. Same thing with Venona. Many agents were never identified.
Just remembered a direct link between ACLU founder Roger Baldwin and Soviet espionage. He toured the country with Michael Whitney Straight, the only American in the Cambridge spy ring. Straight’s handlers put him in contact with Baldwin.