Crudup character--then and now

That's true. Neither us nor the Brits saw the Russians as a real threat until after WWII. But they do have some form of covert agency during and after the war. Remember Edward Sr. meets his counterpart, Ulysses in Berlin right after the war.

Billy Crudup's character is partially based on Kim Philby, who was attached to a communist front group in the late 1920's, he later moved from the Comintern to more direct espionage around 1933.

The spying on both sides began in right after the first world war. After the communists took over, the americans, british and the other allies created a blockade to attempt to choke the revolution in russia. When the blockade didn't work, Wilson pulled the troops out of Siberia and went to a straight containment policy using more subversive tactics, however US intelligence during that period was widely scattered across the different military corps as well as the State Department (and they did not share information easily).

The russians OGPU organization began counter-espionage in the early 1920's which was highly successful since most western countries security apparatus was pretty lax. However, the russian's main goal during that period was merely to keep an eye on the anti-soviet Russian exiles, who were based in foreign countries who were sympathetic with their cause. Many exiles were based in London, so during that period leading up to WWII they focused on converting British intelligence to get a better idea of what the exiles were doing as well as the support from their foreign supporters.

The US Manhattan project (atom bomb program), was already pretty compromised during WWII by the Soviets, but the more useful data came from compromising the british nuclear research program.


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eurosceptic

Philby was recruited to work by the Soviets when he was working as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's. So he was defenitely working for them before WWII.

Another spy who did damage was Klaus Fuchs. He was a German Physicist who fled Germany because he was a jew and he and his family were known communist sympathiesers. He was then vetted several times by the British before being sent to Los Alamos with his mentor during the war. Fuchs and his mentor were responsible for developing the the implosion trigger for the plutonium bomb. He reported to a handler while visiting his sister at Harvard. After the war he wen't back to England and worked on their version of "the bomb", passing information.

During this time the CIA traced the leak to Fuchs via communication intercepts but they couldn't arrest him w/o blowing the cryptology secret. A British operative basically began acting as his friend. His mentor's wife was from Russia and after seeing what Stalin was doing to Russia, he became disillusioned and turned himself into his British operative friend. He was sentanced to 14 years and returned to Germany upon his release.