"Witches Everywhere"
The Witch Hunt That Found Real Witches

Most Americans first encounter the word McCarthyism as a synonym for reckless accusation — a cautionary tale about demagoguery, fear, and the abuse of political power. Senator Joseph McCarthy is remembered as a bully who destroyed innocent lives with unsubstantiated charges, and his era is routinely compared to the Salem witch trials of 1692: hysteria mistaken for evidence, accusation substituted for proof.

But what if the witch hunt found real witches?

In this capstone project, you will go beyond the textbook narrative and examine the actual archival evidence: declassified Soviet intelligence cables from the Venona Project and internal KGB records from the Vassiliev Notebooks — documents that were hidden behind the Iron Curtain until the 1990s. These records name names, describe operations, and identify U.S. government officials who supplied the Soviet Union with intelligence during the 1940s.

Your task is to evaluate McCarthy's specific accusations against the archival record, assess the strength of the evidence, and construct an evidence-based historical argument about what the declassified archives actually reveal.

This is where your research begins — and where the standard narrative may begin to break down. You will decide what the evidence shows.