Vanguard News Network
VNN Media
VNN Digital Library
VNN Reader Mail
VNN Broadcasts

Old June 3rd, 2009 #1
Alex Linder
Administrator
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 45,756
Blog Entries: 34
Default Jews are Spies, Traitors and Apologists

[Jews routinely steal information from goy nations and pass it back to Israel. Their jewish friends and relatives in media and politics cover up their actions, and, in the rare cases they're caught, squirt lies to obfuscate the treachery. In this typical example, virtually uncovered in AmeriKwan media, a kike is given a tap on the wrist, decades after the fact, for betraying the goyish nation he served.]



U.S. man evades jail time in 'mysterious' case of spying for Israel
No surprise here.

30/05/2009
U.S. man evades jail time in 'mysterious' case of spying for Israel
By Reuters

An 85-year-old former civilian employee of the U.S. Army was fined but avoided prison time on Friday after earlier pleading guilty to giving classified documents to Israel in the 1980s, in a case the sentencing judge said was "shrouded in mystery."

Court documents showed that Ben-Ami Kadish, who was fined $50,000 but spared prison time, reported to the same handler as Jonathan Pollard, an American who spied for Israel in the 1980s and triggered a scandal that rocked U.S.-Israeli relations.

"Why it took the government 23 years to charge Mr. Kadish is shrouded in mystery," U.S. District Judge William Pauley said during the sentencing hearing in Manhattan federal court. "It is clear the [U.S.] government could have charged Mr. Kadish with far more serious crimes."

Kadish pleaded guilty in December to acting as an unregistered agent of Israel. He was arrested in April 2008 on four counts of conspiracy and espionage. The spying charge, dropped under a plea deal, had carried a possible death sentence.

"I am sorry I made a mistake," a frail-looking Kadish said during the sentencing hearing. "I thought I was helping the state of Israel without harming the United States."

The judge said he gave a lenient sentence due to Kadish's age and infirmity, but said Kadish had committed "a grave offense" and had "abused the trust" of the United States. For much of the hearing, Kadish sat slumped in his chair with heavy eyelids. At one stage, he had to be shaken awake by his lawyer.

Prosecutors had recommended no prison time as part of the plea deal. They said between 1980 and 1985 Kadish provided classified documents, including some relating to U.S. missile defense systems, to an Israeli agent, Yosef Yagur, who photographed the documents at Kadish's residence.

Yagur also was Pollard's main Israeli contact. Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to spying for Israel in 1986. Israel gave Pollard citizenship in 1996 and acknowledged he was one of its spies in 1998.

During the hearing, the judge questioned a prosecutor as to why it took so long to charge Kadish when the telephone records on which the case was based were available in the mid-1980s.

"There is no mystery behind it, it's just what happened," said prosecutor Iris Lan, who explained she understood it took the FBI that amount of time to assemble the evidence.

The judge also questioned Kadish's lawyer about how Kadish was able to earn $104,000 in 2007 when he does not work. His lawyer said it was from investments.

Kadish was born in the United States but grew up on a farm in Palestine before the founding of the modern state of Israel. He served in the British and U.S. armies in World War II.

From 1980 to 1985, Yagur asked Kadish to obtain classified documents, which Kadish retrieved from the U.S. Army's Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey, according to a sworn statement by Kadish. Kadish said he kept up a friendship with Yagur after 1985.

"While Kadish knew he was aiding Israel, an ally to the United States, he also knew his crime compromised the national security," the judge said.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1088991.html
 
Old June 6th, 2009 #2
Nick Apleece
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2008
Posts: 643
Default More Jew spies arrested

Couple indicted on charges of spying for Cuba
U.S. says pair passed secrets to communist nation over 30 years

updated 6:04 p.m. PT, Fri., June 5, 2009
WASHINGTON - A retired State Department worker and his wife have been arrested on charges of spying for Cuba for three decades, using grocery carts among their array of tools to pass U.S. secrets to the communist government in a security breach one official described as "incredibly serious."

An indictment unsealed Friday said Walter Kendall Myers worked his way into higher and higher U.S. security clearances while secretly partnering with his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, as clandestine agents so valued by the Cuban government that they once had a private four-hour meeting with President Fidel Castro.

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said that the arrest culminated a three-year investigation. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered a "comprehensive damage assessment" to determine what he may have passed to the Cubans.

David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, described the couple's alleged spying for the communist government as "incredibly serious."

The Myerses' arrest could affect congressional support for easing tensions with Cuba dating back to the Cold War. Two months ago, the Obama administration took steps to relax a trade embargo imposed on the island nation in 1962.

A senior State Department official described the potential for damage as great and the timing unfortunate, noting that it could affect congressional support for the administration's recent attempts to engage Cuba. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.

Cuba is notorious for not paying its agents, said a former intelligence official speaking anonymously because of the highly sensitive matter. Indeed, court documents indicate the couple received little money for their efforts, but instead professed a deep love for Cuba, Castro and the country's system of government.

Spying methods over time
The court papers describe the couple's spying methods changing with the times, beginning with old-fashioned tools of Cold War spying: Morse-code messages over a short-wave radio and notes taken on water-soluble paper. By the time they retired from the work in 2007, they allegedly were sending encrypted e-mails from Internet cafes.

The criminal complaint says changing technology also persuaded Gwendolyn Myers to abandon what she considered an easy way of passing information, by changing shopping carts in a grocery store. The document quoted her as saying she "wouldn't do it now. Now they have cameras, but they didn't then."

Authorities say her comments came during a series of meetings with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban spy in April. The Myerses fell for the ruse, authorities say, sharing with the agent their views of Obama administration officials who recently had taken over responsibility for Latin American policy and accepting a device to encrypt future e-mail.

The Myerses are charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Cuban government and to communicate classified information to the Cuban government. Each is also charged with acting as an illegal agent of the Cuban government and with wire fraud.

The couple pleaded not guilty Friday in U.S. District Court. They were ordered held in jail until a detention hearing scheduled for Wednesday. Their attorney, Thomas Green, would not comment. A call to their home telephone was not answered.

Life of luxury?
The Myerses live in a luxury co-op complex in Northwest Washington that over the years was home to Cabinet members, judges, congressmen and senators, including the late Barry Goldwater, a former presidential candidate.

William Simpson, a security guard at the co-op, said the Myerses regularly asked him to clean their windows and would offer him something to eat or drink. "They treated me nice; they treated me real nice," he said. "It shocked me when I heard" the news, Simpson said.

Gail Prensky, a resident of the apartment complex, was taken aback by news that neighbors had been arrested. "It's intriguing on the one hand," she said. "It's a sense of you never know who your neighbors are in a place like this, where it's so safe and pristine. And there's espionage going on?"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31129203

No 100% confirmation of their jewishness as of yet, but the story reeks of gefilte fish. If they're not jews, I'll lay a kosher rose on the grave of the Rosenbergs as penance.

*Edit* I've been researching yet can still not confirm their Jewishness. It would be appreciated if anyone could confirm or deny it.
 
Old July 25th, 2009 #3
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

Name ROTHSCHILD, Lord (Nathaniel Mayer Victor)

Nationality British
Occupation Banker
Born 1910
Died 1990

Activity

The startling accusations against Rothschild is that he is the 'Fifth Man', not John Cairncross. According to Roland Perry's book 'The Fifth Man' published in 1994. That he is the dominant member of the Cambridge Spy Ring, not Philby, Blunt, Burgess of Maclean. That he is possibly the most important Soviet Spy of all. Soviet intelligence officer, Yuri Modin added. 'Just as the Three Musketeers were four, so the Cambridge five were six.'

Rothschild was the British head of the famous banking dynasty, which apart from prolific achievements in art, science, wine and charity. It had shaped recent history by such acts as the financing of the British army at the Battle of Waterloo and the purchasing of the Suez Canal for Great Britain and Prime Minister Disraeli. He was on intimate terms with many of the most senior members of the intelligence and security services Guy Liddell, Roger Hollis, Dick White, Stewart Menzies Maurice Oldfield, Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under-secretary of State in the Foreign Office and many others.

It's largely accepted among MI5 officers that during the 1945 to 1963 period, the Soviets were receiving vital information which enabled them to thwart British operations run against the Soviet Embassy and the Intelligence service. MI5 had apparently been penetrated by someone. The inference was always that it had to be an insider. However, one of the leading Soviet double agents working for SIS (MI6), Oleg Gordievsky, who defected to Britain in 1985, denied that the Soviets had anyone of importance on the inside of M15 in the contentious years from around 1950 to 1963.

Rothschild had been in MI5 during World War Two and had been awarded a medal for outstanding bravery for disfusing a new type of German explosive munitions. The argument is that he was recruited for the Soviet cause in pre-war years by playing on his undoubted commitment to a future homeland for the Jews and his anti-Nazi beliefs. Later the fact that he had spied for the Soviets would have been used to blackmail him into continuing to do so, long after it became obvious that Jews were little better treated in the USSR as Nazi Germany. Fear of publicity was to be perhaps the driving force behind his supposed treachery and his later involvement in the Spycatcher affair.

In 1958, Rothschild's fostering of Peter Wright turned quickly to patronage on the basis that they were scientists who understood each other. Wright could have been an easy prey for the sophisticated peer. Although talented, Wright was not Oxbridge educated and therefore an outsider in a service which was run by the old-school ties. For the first time in his professional life, Wright felt wanted, understood and appreciated. In this atmosphere, Wright may have spilled everything of importance in his section of MI5. Rothschild offered help. He was in the oil group Shell overseeing scientific development. He seconded staff to MI5. Wright told him about every piece of espionage technology under development. Rothschild offered ideas of his own and actually devised some new technology himself. He made introductions to heads of major British organizations like the AWRE (Atomic Weapons Research Establishment), which led to further expansion of MI5's R & D.

Later when Wright was deeply involved in 'mole' hunting there were two Soviet code names, which in particular interested him: DAVID and ROSA. The messages decoded indicated that they had worked together, most likely as a married couple. The Soviet defector Golitsyn asked for the files of all MI5 officers who had been working for British Intelligence at the time of the Venona traffic. He studied the files and after a week asked Wright to come and see him in Brighton. Golitsyn pointed to two files on the desk in the study. 'I've discovered DAVID and ROSA,' he said 'My methodology has uncovered them.' Wright knew the names on the files well. They belonged to Victor and Tess Rothschild., both of whom had served in MI5. Wright told him not to be absurd, Rothschild, he informed the Russian, was one of the best friends this Service ever had. Golitsyn, however, was emphatic

Fortunately for Rothschild, his close companion and confidant, Wright had been the one informed and there was no further investigation.. Golitsyn had earlier informed Wright about a file marked 'Technics' in a safe at the Moscow Centre. It was basically a file on all the MI5 technical operations which Wright and his team had initiated. This proved to him that a mole had indeed been spying directly upon him and his activities. Wright never discussed with Golitsyn what he had told Rothschild. If he had, the Russian would have realized that his 'methodology' might have been accurate. According to an MI5 source, Rothschild was later fed information, which ended up 'in the wrong place' However, just as Philby had survived for so long, because his colleagues and the establishment simply couldn't accept his treachery, so the argument goes, Rothschilds charmed life continued.

Later, when Rothschild feared that journalists might link him to his close friend Anthony Blunt, he put a by now retired Wright and journalist Chapman Pincher in touch. The resulting series of collaborative books, 'Their Trade is Treachery;' and 'Too Secret Too Long' neatly deflected suspicion onto Roger Hollis and away from Rothschild. Wright's own book 'Spycatcher' would later reinforce the image that Hollis was the damaging 'mole'. Rothschild apparently quite alarmed about being implicated begged Wright to "write down every single point he could recall of the ways Rothschild had helped MI5" he added, "Things are starting to get rough" Rothschild also secretly channelled cash to Wright via a Swiss bank.

Rothschild was thought by many to be more loyal to his Jewish heritage than anything English. According to both CIA and Mossad sources, Rothschild was very useful to the Israelis in 'mending fences' with some neighbours in the Middle East after the disruption of the Six-Day conflict. For instance, he called on his old friend the Shah of Iran and suggested several 'crop breeding' ventures, which had been perfected in Israel and elsewhere. Some were adapted in Iran. To many observers Rothschild may have been an unwilling Soviet asset after the war until 1963, but their can be no doubt that he would have willingly spied for Israel. In fact Philby claims that on leaving MI5 in 1947, Rothschild had seized or copied all the six by four file cards listing known or supposed Soviet agents in Europe and elsewhere.

Rothschild must have certainly come under suspicion for it is believed that he was investigated and interviewed no less than eleven times by MI5, and when in 1986 he wrote a very public letter avowing his innocence, Mrs Thatcher's response was the famously terse "we have no evidence he was ever a Soviet agent". As a clearance it was less than fulsome. Though when Rothschild died in 1990, Thatcher attended the memorial. The publication of 'The Fifth Man' was greeted in dignified silence by Rothschilds family.

Rothschilds role in MI5 and within the scientific community is considerable, his role with Shell and later as Head of Prime Minister Edward Heath's 'Think Tank' in the early seventies makes him an important player in post war history. If eventually sufficient information became available to prove beyond doubt Roland Perry's belief in his treachery, then Rothschild will certainly have created history for himself, as the most important Soviet Spy in history.

Comments

The original 2000 and 2002 Workbooks for Spy School were based on the information in "Spy Book, The Encyclopedia of Espionage, by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen." and "Espionage, An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets by Richard Bennett ".

http://www.spyschool.com/spybios/rothschild.htm
 
Old January 9th, 2010 #4
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default


Interview with George Blake
British KGB Spy

Interviewer: Tell me a little bit about your own personal family background.

George Blake: I come from rather an international, or in other words, a cosmopolitan background. My father was a Spanish Jew who came from the Middle East or the Near East. He fought in the British Army during the First World War and was very seriously wounded. He received high decorations, the Military Cross and the French. Immediately after the war he was in Holland, where he met my mother. Now my mother came from a Dutch middle-class, Protestant background. My father had a business in Holland which wasn't very successful, and he died in 1934, when I was twelve, from the results of his wounds during the war, and I got a Dutch Protestant upbringing. Dutch is my native tongue. After the death of my father, my mother was left in rather strange circumstances. My father had a sister in Cairo, who was a wife of a very rich banker. They said they would take me and look after my education, give me a good education, and that would relieve my mother as I also had two sisters. At the age of thirteen I went to Cairo, and lived with my uncle and aunt, in a very large house, and there I met my two cousins, who were ten years older than I was. Both of them had very decided left wing views; they didn't want to succeed their father in a banking business. Especially the younger of my two cousins who had a great influence on me. He was, by that time, a Communist and he talked a lot with me. Of course his views had a great influence on me, but I resisted them, because I was a very religious boy. It was my intention to become a minister in the Dutch Reform Church, but later on, in life, things changed. Many of his views acted as a time bomb, and the results under the affect of events shaped my further views.

Interviewer: You worked in the Dutch resistance. How did that influence you?

George Blake: It is very hot in Cairo, and they were very rich. In the summer they went to Europe, and in the summer I went to Holland to be with my mother and sisters. I was just about to return to Egypt when the war broke out in September of 1939. My mother decided that we should stay together in such a dangerous period. So I remained in Holland. I was staying with my grandmother in Rotterdam, on the 10th of May, when the Germans invaded Holland and they advanced around the dam and bombed it. I couldn't leave. After about a week things settled down, the German's occupied the whole of Holland and there was no longer any fighting. I returned home to the Hague, where we lived, and found that my mother and my sisters had been evacuated to England, as they were British subjects as a result of my father having served in the British army.

So I was stranded in Holland. I didn't know they'd gone. They thought I would have been evacuated from Rotterdam, but that was quite impossible. So we were separated. I was then interned for a short time, by the Germans in Holland, but they were absolutely certain that by September they would also invade England and occupy it. France had just surrendered, so they released all the French people and English people who were under military age, and over military age. I was seventeen then, so I was released. By November, when I was eighteen, the War hadn't finished, and they hadn't occupied Britain. I then ran the danger of being again interned, and so I had to go underground. With the help of my Dutch relatives I got false papers and I lived an illegal existence that made it possible for me to join the underground. The first groups had been formed, and I was, of course, against the Germans, against Nazis because of my background. I was a British subject; I was half Jewish, so there was every reason for me, and the country of my mother had been occupied, brutally occupied. I was very anti-German and had every incentive to do everything I could to resist them. I was very young looking, although I was by then eighteen, I looked more, maybe like a boy of fourteen or something. Therefore I was very suitable to act as a courier, and I traveled through Holland with illegal newspapers and also with messages -- intelligence messages on the German Army, which the underground collected to be sent to England. That's how I lived for nearly two years. Then I decided that I wanted to do more active work, and I wanted to join the forces in Great Britain. I decided to try and escape to Britain, and I succeeded in that. It took me six months to travel from Holland, through Belgium, France, and Spain. In Spain I was arrested and put in prison for three months, but then the bleak situation in North Africa changed, and the attitude of Spanish government towards the Allies changed. I was released with others and sent to Gibraltar and from there by convoy to Britain.

Interviewer: And you joined the British forces?

George Blake: In Britain I found, in the first place, my mother and sisters. After several months I wasn't called up. I thought I was going to be called up, so I decided to volunteer. I volunteered for the Royal Naval, you know, the Voluntary Reserve, then I was called up. I was given officers training.

Interviewer: How did you get involved in British intelligence?

George Blake: I was just coming to that. The officers course ended. Someone came down from the Admiralty and said well, now, you know, there's various kinds of arms you serve in, cruisers, submarines, high speed boats and so on. Then at the end of it, he said there is also something which you can join called Special Service. I can't tell you what it is, and we don't hear from those people anymore, but if we do hear from them, they usually have high decorations.

I thought -- well that would be an agent. That's what I wanted to do. I thought I'd be a trained agent, and I would be able to join the underground and do some very useful work. So I put my name down for that. We were sent on a short leave, and to my horror, I got a letter to say that I had to report at submarine headquarters in Portsmouth. It was Special Service. I was not being dropped as an agent, but working in a two-man submarine, training in a two-man submarine. I had no choice. I started training, but fortunately, after a while, it turned out that I wasn't quite suitable for that, because at certain depths people suffer from oxygen poisoning, certain people, because they breath oxygen all the time. I fainted, and I was hauled up from Portsmouth Harbour, and that was the end of my training for two-man submarines.

Interviewer: So tell me, briefly, how you came to join British intelligence?

George Blake: Well, after my training in two-man submarines, I asked for a short-time officer of the watch at submarine headquarters. The commander, who obviously rather liked me, must have communicated with certain people in London. Anyway, I suddenly got a call to report to an office in London, which I thought was the Admiralty. I was interviewed there, and then I was sent back to Portsmouth. A week later I was interviewed again, and then I was called for commission. When I was told to report the following Monday at this particular building in Broadway, I didn't know what it was. I thought it was the Admiralty. On the first morning, the man who was going to be my boss, a Colonel in the Royal Marines, who informed me that I had been accepted for the British Secret Service, saw me. I felt very honoured and very excited, and I thought, well, now I'm going to be sent to Holland as an agent, which is what I so much wanted. It turned out I wasn't, because they only sent Dutch subjects to Holland, not British subjects.

Interviewer: So what did you do?

George Blake: For internal political reasons in Holland, I became what was called a conducting officer. I had to accompany Dutch agents in their training. Very soon they realised that I spoke Dutch very, very well, the language, so I was kept in the office working on the material which we received from Holland by telegram. Which was very often encoded, very often mutilated, and you had to know Dutch very well to make out what was in the telegram. We also worked very closely with the Dutch Secret Service, and I did a certain amount of liaison work with them. Until the end of the war, when I was sent to Holland first when we sort of liquidated the Dutch agent network which had been created with the help of people who were recommended for decorations -- I worked in that. In September of 1945, I returned for a short time to England, to London, and then I was sent to Germany to start spying on the Soviet forces in East Germany.

Interviewer: You were gathering military intelligence there?

George Blake: Any intelligence we could get on the situation in East Germany, on the Soviet forces. I was in the Navy; I had Navy cover, and we tried to use former German naval officers who were in difficult situation after the war and were glad to earn some extra money, and use their men, their contacts in East Germany to establish a network. I did this very well apparently, because I was then selected to be sent to Cambridge to learn Russian. That's what I did, and, in a way, shaped another stage in my development towards Communism, towards my desire to work for the Soviet Union.

The professor there was an English woman, but her mother was Russian, and she came from what was known as Petersburg, English who lived in Petersburg, before the revolution. Her mother was Russian, and she was Orthodox; she had a great love for Russia, not for Communism, but for Russia. She inspired her students with that love for Russia and Russian things. She took us to the services in the Orthodox Church, and I happened to be one of her favourite pupils. Her influence in that respect was of great importance, because it changed my attitude towards Russia, and Russian things. Inspired me with a great attraction towards Russia. Maybe I was a little bit naïve, or a little bit romantic, but still, there it was.

Interviewer: The next major assignment with British intelligence, you were sent to Korea, during the Korean War?

George Blake: As soon as I finished the Russian course, I was sent to Korea with the task of trying to establish an agent network, a network in the so called maritime provinces. It was a very unrealistic task, because there was no direct communication between that area and South Korea. The only thing on the map was Seoul; it was nearest to the area. In Seoul there was the British Consulate, a Nato British Embassy, that was the obvious place from which to try and penetrate the Soviet Union from the east. In fact it wasn't, as I say, because there's absolutely no connection. Still I tried to. It took me time to find all that out and I tried to also to penetrate into North Korea. Of course, I got to know the political situation in the South. The Korean President was really in my view kind of a Fascist and people he had around him were, in my view, Fascist. So, I had a certain sympathy for the North, knowing very little about things -- knowing very little about it.

Interviewer: Sort of like what you saw in the South?

George Blake: Well, I did like what I thought I saw in South Korea, and then the war broke out, quite suddenly. Now, the point is that we had been sent to North Korea, and my men who assisted me and the Minister himself, Captain Hoo, had been sent to see me with the idea that very likely a war would be break out between the North and South, that it was confidently expected that the North would win and occupy the whole country. Therefore, the legation in Seoul would be a very suitable observation post from which to see what was going to develop. Our instructions were to remain in place if the war broke out. So when it did break out, the American's offered to evacuate us, but we didn't because we had the instruction not to go. The French were in the same position. The French consulate also stayed, and a number of British missionaries, including an Anglican Bishop stayed, because they didn't want to leave their flocks. When the North Koreans occupied Seoul, we were interred, because, in the meantime, the Americans had organised the United Nations, and all the western European countries joined them. Apart from the Soviet Union, which had no voice, because they had excluded themselves from the Security Council. They were able to pass this resolution and British, French, Turkish, and all kinds of military contingencies were sent to Korea. We, for being neutral, were sent into villages and interred by the North Korean authorities.

Interviewer: It's often been said that it's while you were a captive of the North Koreans that you were brain-washed into working for the Russians.

George Blake: No, I was never brain-washed at all. Well, you see we were then a small group of diplomats, and at first we were together with the missionaries. There were many missionaries: French missionaries, Irish nuns, and all kinds of people. At a certain point we were, the diplomats, were separated from them. It would have been very difficult for the North Koreans, in the situation they were in, to find people who were sufficiently, what should I say, intelligent? But, to influence people like us, I mean they might have influence with a young American soldier, but people like us, that would be very difficult.

Interviewer: Is there one incident that triggered your decision to effectively change sides?

George Blake: No, nothing acted on me as a catalyst. It was what I saw happening in North Korea. The relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous, em, American flying fortresses. People, women and children, and old people, because the young men were in the army. I saw this from my eyes, and we might have been victims ourselves. It made me feel ashamed. Made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technical superior countries fighting against what seemed to me quite defenseless people.

Interviewer: Any particular incident that sticks in your mind?

George Blake: Well, the bombing took place continually, and they happened all the time. I had seen the devastation in Germany after the war, but it was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could assure you, compared with the devastation in North Korea. That act, that feeling of shame, together with all the other things, which I have already spoken about, and the other stages of my development made me decide -- made me feel that I was fighting on the wrong side, because I wasn't a neutral person. I was engaged in intelligence work against the Communist world, against the Socialist world. I was engaged I was committed, and I felt I was committed on the wrong side. And that's what made me decide to -- to change sides. I felt that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war, to wars. I didn't go too much into the rights and wrongs of the beginning of the Korean War. It was very difficult from the position I was in to decide exactly what started it, but now I realise that it was the North who started it. Still it was the experience of that war, which acted as a catalyst, and made me decide to join the other side.

Interviewer: How did you approach them?

George Blake: It was done, in a way, quite easily. I wrote a little note in Russian -- you must remember that we had been in a small group of diplomats, French and British, and I used my Russian. We had been writing constantly to the Soviet Embassy in Pen Yang, asking them, telling them that we had considered our captivity was unjust and against international law, and protesting. The Soviet Embassy sent us books, including Marx's Capital, which we read in Russian many times. That was also an influence on me. So there had been a certain amount of correspondence with the Soviet Embassy in Phenyang, which was conducted by giving a letter to the chief guard, of the men who guarded us.

Interviewer: So you wrote them a note?

George Blake: I wrote them a note. That's right.

Interviewer: How -- how did they respond?

George Blake: They responded about a month later, I don't remember exactly the time. Months later, I was called up to go to this nearby town, which was absolutely in ruins, only two houses standing. In one of those houses I met this Russian man; I talked to him and explained the situation. Then I said, if he wanted to continue to work, he would have to call up the other people as well, because we were three British and four French. If I, alone, was called up; that would cause suspicion, and this would be very strange. So they then organized it very well. Every person in turn was called up; there were discussions about the rights and wrongs of the Korean War. There was then the Stockholm Appeal, which they were asked to sign. They were just kept talking, as it were, to fill the day. Then every time my turn came, I talked to this person, who turned out to be a colonel in the KGB, and with whom I made arrangements for my further work. I think that at first they must have been very suspicious of me. I think they suspected that it was a put up job by the Minister, Captain Hoo, but still they continued with it, or they realised that it wasn't.

Interviewer: Did you take an oath or anything of allegiance, or did they make any promises to you about how they'd look after you?

George Blake: No, I made myself four stipulations. I think, if I remember well. One was that I should not accept any money and shouldn't be offered any money. The other was that I shouldn't receive any privileges, while I was in captivity with the others. One reason -- the question of security, another was I felt a comradeship to my fellow captives. The third was that I shouldn't be released before the others which, again, was elementary security. I think that -- that those were the three conditions. Then they naturally agreed to that.

Interviewer: So they never said anything to you like, you're one of us, we're gonna look after you?

George Blake: No, they didn't say anything like that, and I didn't expect them to say anything.

Interviewer: So you moved back to England, and you had your first meeting with your case officer. Can you describe that meeting?

George Blake: Yes, I can. The point is that I had lived in Holland, I had worked with the underground before, and I felt of course, the first meeting is a rather dangerous experience. Well, you think it is a dangerous experience. I felt somehow that I would feel more at ease in the Hague, in my surroundings to which I was used. I could feel the atmosphere better there than I could in London. After all, I'd been five years away from London. I asked if the first meeting could be arranged in Holland. I was given leave when I arrived in England, three months leave, and I was staying with my relatives in Holland. One day I went to the Hague. The day had been appointed and there we met in a small square in the Hague. He was sitting on a bench, we discussed our further meetings. I first thought that we would continue to meet in Holland, but he pointed out to me that if I continually went to Holland that would also be strange, that it'd be easier for all of us if we met in London. So we met; we made the arrangement for our first meeting. I think it was in October. I knew by then that I had been given a new appointment in Section Y, as a deputy head of that section, which was a special section working on processing of the material obtained by telephone tapping operations in Vienna.

Interviewer: So what was the first meeting with Sergei?

George Blake: I had, I think, one or two meetings with someone else, and then Sergei turned up. He was then, as I was, much younger. But he hasn't changed all that much. We usually met after office hours in one of the London suburbs. We met each other, came from different directions, and we walked for about half an hour through the crowded streets, and we discussed operation material. He gave me new films. I gave him the films which I had taken, so we met regularly, every month or every three weeks.

Interviewer: Can you tell me about the Vienna operation?

George Blake: Now, I must make it clear that for several years these Vienna operations have been going, and the material obtained from those taps, which was being processed in London, was then analyzed and compiled into monthly intelligence reports of about fifty pages, sometimes thirty, sometimes sixty. This report had been regularly sent to Washington as barter material. Know that intelligence services amongst themselves barter material. And of course, through my offices, it had also been sent to Moscow. So Washington and Moscow were aware of the possibility of what these kind of tapping operations could produce. Of course the great advantage of tapping operations is that the material is absolutely genuine. You don't have to question your source. What happened then was the occupation of Europe, of Austria finished. The two sides withdrew their forces from Austria. So there was nobody left to tap. The man who had been responsible for thinking up and organising these Vienna taps was Peter Land, who was a very experienced and very skillful intelligence officer, for whom I have the greatest admiration. He was a man you wouldn't notice him in a crowd. He was very slight and talked with a lisp. But he was extremely effective and he was from Vienna when this operation goes down. He was sent as head of the station to Berlin. Naturally, having so successfully operated telephone taps in Vienna, his first thought was how can we find a place where we can tap either the East German telephone lines the official lines or the Soviet lines? Through his sources in the Berlin telephone office, he discovered these three cables which went along at a distance of about twelve hundred feet from the American sector boundary. So it was clear. He knew that these cables, of which there were twelve hundred communications, were used by the Soviet forces in East Germany, by the Soviet administration and Embassy in East Berlin. So it was a very -- would be a very promising target. But of course, the British couldn't just start digging a tunnel from the American sector. They had to bring the Americans in, which had a very further advantage because the Americans had lots of money. The British didn't have adequate funds, so they made an arrangement with the Americans if they agreed to pay for most of it. Well, as the Americans had been receiving this material from Vienna and realised how useful and important it was. Then a high level delegation came to London, and there was a meeting. I was the secretary, as it were, the one who was taking the minutes of the meeting. As a result I knew about the plan, and how it was going to be done. I realized, of course, how important this was. When I meet Sergei the next time, a routine meeting, I handed him a copy of the minutes from that meeting and a very small sketch, which I drew myself, of how that cable would run -- how a tunnel would run and which cables it would carry.

Interviewer: How did you make the copy of those minutes?

George Blake: As I was the secretary of the meeting and -- and I had to make a certain number of copies anyway. It wasn't very difficult to make an additional copy.

Interviewer: An additional carbon copy?

George Blake: An additional carbon copy.

Interviewer: Do you remember Sergei's reaction when you handed him the document?

George Blake: No, I don't remember, but I think he was very interested. I mean, maybe that it was a short meeting. The usual length of them was about half an hour or maybe a bit longer. I don't think I realised at that particular moment the full implication of the information I handed to him, but he was obviously very interested. Only later, when he got back to the Embassy, he would have read it, and then he realised how important it was.

Interviewer: Were you in any way privy to the decision by the KGB to, as it were, disclose the tunnel and shut it down?

George Blake: No, I wasn't. The tunnel operated for exactly eleven months and, I think, fifteen days. That is quite a long period. I wasn't asked about whether it should be discovered or not discovered, but I was told that it would be discovered within the near future. So I was warned. It didn't come as a surprise for me. Of course, I was apprehensive, naturally. Because the first question when the tunnel is discovered will be how did the Soviets discover it? Why? Now I must say that it was done extremely skillfully. Apart from the political considerations, the tap was discovered after several days of very heavy rainfall. It was discovered by, apparently, ordinary Soviet troops, who were looking for faults in the cable, which was perfectly natural thing for them to do. Because the Americans were watching all the time as they had a watchtower, what was going on in the Soviet sector, in the Soviet zone or in the vicinity of the cables. When the cable was discovered and a whole scandal blew up quite naturally, the Americans and the British set up a commission to study why the cable had been discovered. After about a month, I learned that they'd unanimously come to the conclusion that it was a technical fault in the line caused by the heavy rain. So I felt very relieved, obviously, and from then on, I just continued to work, and I was not under suspicion.

Interviewer: Well after the tunnel operation, were you able to provide a lot more information to the Soviets? Or was it more counter intelligence information you were giving, or more active intelligence?

George Blake: I gave a lot of information first on the Secret Service. What they wanted to know, politically, militarily, economically, about East Germany, about the Soviet Union as a whole. That was very important information for them, so that they could protect these targets. Em, and then of course, I could get information on the Service. They got a good inside view how it operated, and of course, very important from their point of view, was to know the targets which the Soviets proposed to attack. Not only in Germany, all over the world, and particularly in the Soviet Union. Though I must say, that, at that time, it was extremely difficult, both for the British Secret Service and for the American Secret Service to get access to Soviet information in Russia.

Interviewer: Now, after a few years you were arrested. The operation crumbled. What was it that led to the collapse of your operation and another operation in the UK?

George Blake: Mainly what led to the collapse was the defection of a man, I think his name was Konyevski. A Polish official, who was, either head or deputy head of the Polish secret service, with his mistress, fled to Berlin, where he presented himself to the Americans and brought with him a great deal of information. Now among that information was a particular document, which originated from Berlin -- he knew that, and which affected Polish-Soviet relations as far as I remember, and also Polish economic situation, and which was a very highly secret document which had very restricted circulation. With a result that the British Secret Service became aware of the fact that someone in the Berlin station, or had been in the Berlin station, had given secrets away. It was then, their principle aim to discover who, and they set up a small commission which worked for several months, and that was one result of the defection of Konyevski. The other one was that he knew that the Soviets had recruited the clerk of the British Naval Attaché in Warsaw, a petty officer in the Navy, called Holton. Holton had been recruited by the Soviets, and after that word came in Portsmouth he was in Portland, this experimental station, and who provided very important information about technical developments in the Royal Navy.

Interviewer: What kind of developments? Submarine developments?

George Blake: I think it was connected to submarine developments, mainly, yes. I think it was also maybe mines, maybe torpedoes, that sort of thing.

Interviewer: So one defector led to the arrest, not only of yourself, but also of the Krogers?

George Blake: Yes, it led in the first place to the arrest of course of Holton. Holton was followed to a meeting which he had with Lonsdale, who was an illegal resident in London. After that, they followed Lonsdale, and they came to the Krogers who lived in Ruislip, in a cottage there and then they were arrested too. First Lonsdale was arrested, then they were arrested. They discovered radio equipment in the cellar of or in the kitchen -- the cellar under the kitchen of their house. The Krogers were then arrested, and they were sentenced. Lonsdale was sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment and Kroger and his wife, let's say Morris Cohen and Lona, were sentenced to twenty years.

Interviewer: Tell me about your own sentence.

George Blake: I still was then living in Lebanon, studying Arabic. They were sentenced sometime in January or February. In April, the following April, I was recalled to London. I decided to go, but I wasn't altogether sure of the reasons why I was recalled. However, I was recalled, and at once presented with the accusation that I had been working for the Soviets.

Interviewer: And you stood trial?

George Blake: I stood trial, and I thought I would get fourteen years, which was the highest sentence for passing official secrets in peace time. The British Secret Service and the British government obviously thought that wasn't enough for what I had done, and they simply took various periods of my service in different countries, in London, Germany and Milan, and gave me fourteen years for each of these periods. That added up to forty-two years. Now as I've said, I had been expecting fourteen years. I had been hoping it might be less, but fourteen years is a very long period, if you can visualise it. When the Judge said forty-two years, it didn't really mean anything. I mean it had no affect on me, because it sounded so fantastic. It was so unreal. Nobody would know what might happen in forty-two years. I must say now, that, in a way, I'm grateful to the judge, when he gave me such a long sentence, because it made my position in prison very much easier. I became a rather unusual person, let's say.

Interviewer: Did people feel sorry for you?

George Blake: I think there were a lot of people who felt sorry for me.

Interviewer: And wanted to help you?

George Blake: As a result I found people who were willing to help me. For the reason that they thought that it was inhuman -- that kind of sentence was inhuman and unusual. And they did help me, and I did get out. There were both people inside prison who helped me and people outside the prison, and without their help of course, that couldn't have happened. If I had been given fourteen years, I'm quite sure I would have had to serve the full sentence.

Interviewer: Instead of you escaped.

George Blake: Instead of which I escaped.

Interviewer: Which prison was it by the way?

George Blake: Wormwood Scrubbs.

Interviewer: Whom did you meet in Wormwood Scrubbs?

George Blake: In Wormwood Scrubbs I met, of course, many people; one of them was Morris Cohen. In the first place, I met Lonsdale. I met Cohen only twice, on the occasion that he was in Wormwood Scrubbs to have an operation. He was in fact, detained in another prison, but I don't remember the name just now.

Interviewer: Could we maybe do the two meetings separately, so they don't get muddled up? So first of all, tell me about meeting Lonsdale. What did you say to each other?

George Blake: I met Lonsdale very early on in my sentence, one of the first days that I was in Wormwood Scrubbs, due to a bureaucratic mix up. Usually, of course, spies shouldn't meet each other and shouldn't be able to communicate with each other. Such an instruction was given by the MI5 to the prison administration, which is a different department of the Home Office. The instruction was that we should be put on special watch. Now, in MI5, they probably didn't realise that special watch in prison means that you are put only on what they call the escape list. This is for people who had escaped from prison and had been caught again, or people who are suspected of wanting to escape. And then you get a large patch, several uniforms, and you have to change cells every night, and you are kept together as a small group. As a result of these instructions, instead of keeping us apart, we were put together in this small group of people. When we exercised in the yard, all the prisoners would go around in one big circle, and we were in a small inner circle going in the other direction. A group of about eight people who were on special watch, and so we had every opportunity of talking together for twenty minutes or half an hour, as long as the exercise lasted.

Interviewer: What did you talk about?

George Blake: We talked about life in general we didn't give details about each others work. We felt great sympathy for each other, and we struck up a friendship. He was a very easy person to get on with. He was very cheerful. He was always full of anecdotes and laughing, we often laughed out very loudly and people, the other prisoners came round to circle and they thought, well what have these people to laugh about. One of them has just got twenty-five years and the other forty-two years. Still that's how it was. One of the things he said to me, he was very optimistic person and I didn't believe in him, was 'you know, George that on the fiftieth anniversary of the October revolution, which will be in sixty-seven,' it was then sixty-one, 'you and I will be in Red Square in Moscow, celebrating'. I replied 'well I hope so, but I doubt it very much'. The funny thing is that he turned out to be right. We were both in Moscow in May in 1967, the anniversary of the October revolution, and we did celebrate.

Interviewer: Now you also met Morris Cohen at the jail.

George Blake: I also met Morris Cohen, but I didn't have so much opportunity then of getting to know him, because he was in Wormwood Scrubbs for an operation. You probably know that Wormwood Scrubbs is situated immediately next to Hammersmith Hospital. Any persons in prison in England who are suffering from an ailment which required an operation are often sent to Wormwood Scrubbs prison, Wormwood Scrubbs prison hospital, and then transferred to the Hammersmith Hospital. Morris had trouble with his hands they were going together. I don't know exactly what they cramped and then he couldn't open them, and they had to be operated on. These operations were done in two parts, first on one hand and then some months later on the other, and so I met him on two occasions.

Interviewer: Were you able to talk?

George Blake: We were able to talk, but not very much, just in passing.

Interviewer: What kind of things did you say?

George Blake: Well we just exchanged friendly remarks but there was no detailed conversation like I had with Lonsdale, there simply wasn't the opportunity.

Interviewer: What kind of remarks, because you were both fellow agents.

George Blake: Yes, we just felt sympathy for each other being in the same position, there wasn't that contact then which there had been with Lonsdale. Simply because it wasn't possible.

Interviewer: How did you come to meet Morris Cohen again?

George Blake: When I went to Gloucester, in 1966, I met him by accident. My mother had come by then to live near Moscow for a short while. I was married and she stayed with me, this is sometime 1967, I think. They had just been released, or maybe it was even later. I don't quite remember.

Interviewer: Just tell me how you met.

George Blake: I just met him in the street. Which turned out later to be quite near where he lived, and he'd been shopping. It was summer and he was walking with his shopping bag and I was walking with my mother we saw each other, and recognised each other. It was very nice to see each other. For reasons which I can guess, it wasn't at that time thought desirable that we should continue our contact, and so I didn't see him again, he didn't contact me, I gave him my telephone number. I did see him again for it must have been, nearly ten years. I was asked by somebody in the service if I would make contact with Morris and Lona, so that they could have a friend. They had many friends, but some people had very much in common with them, who'd been in British prison with them. I was asked to because I had adapted myself very easily, although the first years were difficult, to Soviet life. Perhaps they thought in the service that I could be of assistance in helping people who had a harder time. I would say that Morris and Lona didn't find it easy, but they were much older, they were at least ten years older than I and they had no children. So it was thought that it might be a good thing if we met and if we established a friendship, and that's what happened. I first went to see them, and we got on very well together and of course, we had shared memories, about our prison life mainly. And of course a very important thing was, and that shows what kind people they were, that my escape had a very detrimental affect on them. Before they were kept in you know prison, Lona was in an open women's prison, and Morris was in closed prison, but a normal prison. After my escape, on the very night of my escape, they were both transferred to closed prison and Morris was taken to the Isle of White. He was put in a high security wing, with train robbers and all the other very dangerous and serious criminals. The conditions of his detention became very much stricter and more severe, and a very important thing from that point of view was, they were people that had no children, and they were very much in love with each other. That their love was strengthened by the fact that they were both serving a cause in which they very much believed and that cemented their love, perhaps the hardest thing for them was their separation. Under the prison rules, as man and wife they were able to meet once a month. That's quite an operation from the British point of view, because they had to be taken each to a prison which was somewhere in the middle between where they prisons were. They met then in a separate room and were given tea and biscuits and of course for them those meetings were great events. After my escape, they had new conditions, they were only allowed to meet once every three months, because it was such an operation to, to bring them together from a security point of view. That of course hit them rather hard.

Interviewer: The thing is you got to know them

George Blake: They never complained to me and they never resented it. That I had been the reason for the, for the very serious change in their condition.

Interviewer: As you got to know them, you must have learnt a little bit about their passed lives and their careers. Did Morris ever talk about the Spanish civil war and why that?

George Blake: Yes indeed, very often he did, very often. That was one of the high moments of his life.

Interviewer: What influence did the Spanish civil war have on Morris Cohen?

George Blake: I think it had very great influence, because Morris was in this anti-fascist, anti-nazi movement in America, and there of course were many people with Communist views and socialist views, and anarchist views indeed. When the war in Spain broke out, they felt tha he was a young man, to go and fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the International Brigade, what we called the American part of it was called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, so he volunteered. They went to Spain and he told me an interesting story how they had been passed on from Paris to the Pyenese. Then they marched through the mountains to the point where they crossed the Spanish frontier. There, before their eyes, spread Spain and without any prior agreement, they stood there and they all sang the international and that was a very moving moment in their lives. Then he fought in Spain and he was wounded and in hospitalised. That was the end of his fight in the Spanish War and it was also the end of the Spanish War. Then he returned to America.

Interviewer: Did he ever say when he started to work for the KGB?

George Blake: He never told me exactly the circumstances of his recruitment, but, I think Morris started working actively for the Soviet Union after his return to America from Spain.

Interviewer: Do we know what he was doing?

George Blake: I don't know.

Interviewer: How did he meet Lona?

George Blake: He met Lona in the same circumstances, very much in the same circumstances. He was a member of the Communist party and she was a member of the Communist party and they met at a meeting. Then he asked her to come and have a cup coffee with him. He liked her very much and she liked him, and he thought that she would be a supper wife for him, because he had to consider that he needed a wife who would help him and assist him and who would agree with his views and activities. He soon discovered that she was that kind of person, and so he proposed to her and she accepted and at the same time, she accepted to become his assistant, as it were.

Interviewer: As, as a spy?

George Blake: As a spy. But later on, who was the assistant? And who was the main actor? It was a bit more difficult to decide, because she was a very, very resolute woman, very determined and he was a rather retiring person. Very kind with a very good heart, good-hearted and not in the least aggressive.

Interviewer: So, in a way she became the more dominant of the two?

George Blake: I sometimes suspect that certain periods of their career she was sort of the leading person.

Interviewer: Did she ever talk to you about her work, her espionage work at Los Alamos?

George Blake: No, they never talked about that. No.

Interviewer: Did she ever talk about what she felt they'd achieved by helping their small part in helping the Soviet Union build the bomb?

George Blake: I think they felt proud.

Interviewer: Did they ever say this to you themselves?

George Blake: Yes.

Interviewer: What did they actually say to you?

George Blake: What did they actually say to me? I don't think they said anything specifically, which I could say well this sentence expresses their, their views. I think they felt what many of us felt, and what Donald McClain felt who was more open about his part in the passing of secrets on the atomic bomb. By helping the Soviet Union to achieve the manufacture of the bomb more quickly, because of course, I think they would have manufactured it anyway, but it would have taken much longer. By helping them, they were re-establishing the balance and they were saving the World from an atomic catastrophe. Although they didn't put it so, as I say it, I think that was the thought behind it, and that they helped the World, to save the World from an atomic war, and I fully shared their views in that respect.

Interviewer: Now, did Lona ever talk to you about missing her family and not having children?

George Blake: They missed their family and they had no contact with their family, or very little. Just before she died in hospital of cancer, the Russian intelligence service made it possible for her sister, with whom she'd been very close, to come to Moscow and to see her in hospital. She was here for a week I think and shortly after her sisters visit, Lona died. I never asked them the question directly. It was a delicate question to ask, I'm almost sure that they very much missed not having children, and they both were very, very fond of children. They had many friends and neighbours, both in Britain and in Russia, with whom they had close contact with, because they were people who had the gift of friendship, they always were very interested in these peoples children. I think the great sacrifice they made for the cause in which they believed, was not having children, because they felt that it wouldn't be right to bring up children in the conditions in which they had to live.

Interviewer: How about yourself. I mean, you lived all these years under, what must have been extraordinary pressure. What did it do to your first marriage?

George Blake: Well it didn't do any harm to my marriage as such, I mean to my relations with my wife, but I feel guilt towards my wife and my children. I was already committed to working for the Soviet Union before I met her. I was put before the dilemma, I either had to tell her about it, or to deceive her, or to find some reason why I shouldn't marry her. Well I realised that I couldn't tell her about it, because that would make her, an accessory to the crime. I also realised that I would be putting a very, very heavy burden on her, because she was a person of conservative views, who had a conventional English upbringing and all this would have been completely alien to her, so I realised I couldn't tell her about it. At the same time, I couldn't give her a good reason why I shouldn't marry her, because our relationship was developing in such a way that the natural result of it would be marriage. I tried various ways to put her off, but I couldn't and so I married her, and I think I shouldn't have done that. I should have, in fact, not have married anybody, not only her, but nobody, and I shouldn't have had any children, but, I had them. In a way I have been extraordinarily lucky because I have not lost contact with my children, I have three sons in England and they come a visit me regularly, I have very good contact with them. I didn't see them for nearly twenty years, but when they were grown up, they expressed a wish to get to know me. My wife didn't put any obstacles in the way, as she could have done and they came, and of course it was a very emotional. In a way, it was a very difficult moment, because I had to explain to them my whole story.

Interviewer: You said that you'd felt guilty that you'd married. How did you feel when you discovered your wife was pregnant?

George Blake: The point is that once you're in that situation, which I found myself, I had by then been working for the KGB for several years, one just had to go on with it. I couldn't retire, that wouldn't have been any help to anybody, and one always hopes for the best. And I hoped that I would be able to go on working for a long time, even though that might be improbable. Perhaps I hoped somewhere that I, one day, would be able to explain the situation to her. As time went along, I realised that was not possible.

Interviewer: How could you live this life?

George Blake: You have to have a split mind, one part of your mind has the ordinary life, everyday life which everybody leads, and the other part of your mind is the mind which works as the agent for the Soviet Union, or rather any other country, but you have to have somewhere inside you that separation. Otherwise, you couldn't possibly do it. That is my explanation.

Interviewer: Did you sometimes almost forget you were a KGB agent?

George Blake: Yes, I think I forgot it. I mean in the beginning, when I started work, of course one is apprehensive. I was apprehensive at the first meeting. One is apprehensive when one takes the first photographs, but gradually, like all things, one gets used to it. It just becomes routine and you don't even think about it anymore. Unless there are any signs of danger, you just go on normally.

Interviewer: How frightened did you get at times?

George Blake: Well I can't remember any time that I was that I would call frightened. Nothing happened that gave me reason to be frightened over those years, except the very last moment when I realised that the British knew about it. That was of course a very unpleasant moment.

Interviewer: I bet. Now you've lived long enough to ask yourself I would imagine fairly fundamental questions. The World's changed a lot since then. What did you believe you were doing? How did you justify what you were doing in your mind at the time?

George Blake: I justified it in my mind by believing that I was helping, in a small way, in building a new society. In which there would be equality, social justice, no longer any War, no longer any national conflict, that was my dream as it were.

Interviewer: And do you still believe in that new society?

George Blake: I believe that sometime in the very far future, humanity will live that way. That nations will come together, I see it already happening coming more and more together. When you think of the Wars between France and Britain and the Wars between France and Germany and now they've almost forming one state and nobody thinks of the possibility of a War. I think it's quite conceivable that in time, all nations will live in that kind of World. I believe then that what was going on in the Soviet Union was a positive step in that direction, and that was not to the detriment of Britain, not to the detriment of any country, but on the contrary, would in the end be beneficial to them all.

Interviewer: Do you believe that the political doctrine you serve, you know faithfully, has succeeded or failed?

George Blake: Well, obviously it has failed. It has not been possible to build that society. It set very high standards, because not only would life in the Soviet Union or in any other country which adopted that system, have to be just as good as in the Capitalist world, it would have to be better. So that other peoples, other nations would want to join it, and obviously we have failed in that. There can be no question about it.

The reason I have worked out for myself is that a Communist society is in a way a perfect society, and we are not perfect people. And imperfect people cannot build a perfect society. People have to change a great deal still and it will take many, many, many generations and perhaps thousands and thousands of years before we can build such a society. I also think that it is a very noble experience, which deserves experiment, which deserved to be successful. But which wasn't successful, because of human frailty.

Interviewer: But does that make you wonder whether your giving your life to this cause was worthwhile?

George Blake: Yes, because I think it is never wrong to give your life to a noble ideal, and to a noble experiment, even if it doesn't succeed.

Interviewer: Is that how the Cohen's felt.

George Blake: I'm sure that's how they felt. That's how Donald Maclean felt. That's how Philby felt. That's how we all felt. That's how many, I think, Soviet people feel, it wasn't wrong, the idea was very noble, is still very noble, but at this stage in human history, unattainable.

http://www.pbs.org/redfiles/kgb/deep...orge_blake.htm
 
Old January 18th, 2010 #5
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

[Philby and the Cambridge 5 are often cited to the effect that the British "establishment" self-destructed in the 1930's. They had outside help.]

Spies and lovers

The Cambridge spy ring is thought of as an all-male affair. The two women who linked Kim Philby and Donald Maclean to Moscow, acting as their minders and motivators, as well as their intimates, have been ignored or given little importance. And Melinda Maclean is generally dismissed as a dupe in her husband's double life. But it was not so. Natasha Walter pieces together their story

The Guardian, Saturday 10 May 2003

In 1933, Kim Philby, the future spy, was an idealistic young man who had just finished at Cambridge. He set out for Austria, keen to witness the fight against fascism first hand, and a communist friend gave him an introduction to a leftwing Viennese family who were prepared to let out rooms to sympathisers. When Philby went to the house, it was the daughter of the family, Litzi Friedman, who answered the door.

For the rest of his life, Philby remembered her sparkiness that afternoon. "A frank and direct person, Litzi, came out and asked me how much money I had," Philby said later. "I replied, one hundred pounds, which I hoped would last me about a year in Vienna. She made some calculations and announced, 'That will leave you an excess of £25. You can give that to the International Organisation for Aid for Revolutionaries. We need it desperately.' I liked her determination."

Philby went on liking Litzi's determination, to such an extent that he went on to work with her, to fall in love with her, and then to marry her and take her to London. It was also Litzi who provided him with an introduction that would shape the rest of his life. This obscure Jewish woman from Vienna became the vital link between the idealistic men of Cambridge and the dark world of Soviet espionage.

Litzi Friedman's story has often been lost or distorted in histories of the Cambridge spies, who are usually seen as a purely masculine elite. All the spies were men, two of them were homosexual, and whether you imagine Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess arguing with one another in smoke-filled rooms in Cambridge, buttering up naive diplomats in the Foreign Office, or sitting with grey-faced Russians on park benches, you are unlikely to imagine any women by their side.

Yet the two most successful spies, Maclean and Philby, were inspired and supported by extraordinary women. Until archives in Moscow were opened after the end of the cold war, we knew very little about them, and many of the biographical sources are bafflingly contradictory. I have pieced together their stories from the sources that had the most access to Soviet archives, but it is still tough trying to work out where certainty lies.

Litzi Friedman stands very far from the usual image we have of the Cambridge spies. A photograph of her in her youth shows a woman who looks as if she is living in the 1960s, rather than the 1930s, with her thick, cropped hair, sleeveless dress and bare legs. The energetic pose she has taken up, turning to look out of the picture, as if listening to someone, is utterly unselfconscious, the pose of an intelligent young woman at ease with herself.

When Friedman and Philby met, she had the emotional and political experience that he signally lacked. She was first married at 18, but was divorced after just 14 months, then joined the Communist party. In Austria at the time, the government was cracking down on all leftwing activity, and in 1932 Friedman was imprisoned for a couple of weeks.

For her, the young Englishman who presented himself at her door in 1933 was, at first, a potentially useful helper and source of funds. But physical desire soon flowered between them. They first made love in the snow on a side street in freezing Vienna, heated by the touch of flesh on flesh. "I know it sounds impossible, but it was actually quite warm once you got used to it," Philby said to a later girlfriend. Male friends have also said that this was Philby's first sexual experience. First physical love, first political involvement; no wonder the affair fired him up as no other relationship in his life was to do.

Philby had already been intellectually convinced by communism, but Friedman radicalised him. He began to work with her - begging people for money, acting as a courier for underground organisations, helping hunted militants to get out of Vienna, and seeing what the fight against fascism meant for people risking their lives because of it. As he himself said later, these experiences crystallised his faith.

In February 1934, the political tensions in Vienna flared into armed conflict. As socialist leaders were arrested and executed, the rank-and-file blundered around in confusion. Philby and Friedman were at home when the revolt began, and the first they knew about it was when the lights went out, a result of a strike by the power workers. Then the telephone rang and a communist leader asked them to go and wait for him in a cafe. They went. Two hours later, he arrived and asked if they were prepared to set up a machine-gun post within the city. They agreed, and were told to wait for further orders. They spent that day at the cafe, waiting. At night they went home through a city full of patrols and roadblocks, which they passed by relying on Philby's British passport. The next day they waited at the cafe again, but the arms never materialised. In the end, they helped the revolt by collecting clothes and food for the strikers, and enabling some of the leaders to get into hiding.

Given her previous brush with the authorities, once a crackdown on known revolutionaries began, Friedman was in real danger. At first, Philby tried to find her new sanctuaries, but eventually he took the only sure way to protect her. On February 24, in the Vienna town hall, he married her, and then took her with him to London. "Even though the basis of our relationship was political to some extent, I truly loved her and she loved me," he said later.

It was at this point that Friedman played her most important role, as far as the history of 20th-century espionage is concerned. She had a friend in London already working for Soviet intelligence, a woman called Edith Tudor-Hart, a photographer and communist who was born in Vienna. According to Genrikh Borovik, a biographer of Philby's who gained access to the Soviet archives, Tudor-Hart recommended Friedman and Philby to the KGB for recruitment in 1934. Yuri Modin, a Soviet agent who handled the Cambridge spies throughout their careers, agrees that Friedman was undoubtedly the catalyst. "Contrary to received opinion, it was neither Burgess nor one of our own agents who lured Philby into the toils of the Soviet espionage apparatus," he has said. "It was Litzi." Since Philby then recommended his other Cambridge friends for recruitment, Friedman's relationship with Philby was a tipping point not only for him, but for the whole group.

Before Philby could begin his new career, which was to work for British intelligence on behalf of his Soviet controllers, he had to get rid of all his obvious communist affiliations. He did so partly by working as a journalist for the Times, writing reports from Spain that were diligently pro-Franco. But he also had to put distance between himself and Friedman. It has only recently become clear that the two remained in touch for some years after this separation, not as lovers, but as fellow spies.

It was Friedman who, during the purges of the late 1930s, when Philby's handlers were constantly being recalled to Moscow, kept contact going for the Soviets with their precious new recruit. She moved to Paris in the late 1930s, and until at least 1940 was paid by the KGB to maintain this contact with her husband. Although Philby started an affair with another woman in Spain, according to the Russian files, by then "she saw their relationship more as an espionage agreement than a love relationship".

We are accustomed to seeing Philby as he presented himself - unswerving in his dedication to his cause. But in August 1939, the faith of many communists in Europe was shaken when the Soviet Union signed its pact of non-aggression with Nazi Germany. Given Philby's experiences in Austria, where he had seen the terror of facism first hand, it is hardly surprising that he found this move hard to take. One entry in his files reads, "According to Mary [Litzi's codename], to whom he complained in conversations, he was beginning to experience a certain disillusionment with us. He has never said this to us directly... The signing of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact caused Söhnchen [Philby's codename] to ask puzzled questions such as 'Why was this necessary?' However, after several talks on this subject, Söhnchen seemed to grasp the significance of this pact." So it was Friedman who enabled Philby to remain on board during those dark days at the beginning of the war, when the Soviet Union lost many of its friends in the west.

By odd coincidence, Donald Maclean's faith in the Soviet Union was supported at exactly the same time and in the same place by a secret female companion. In August 1939, he was working at the British embassy in Paris. The KGB officer who was looking after him at the time was a woman called Kitty Harris, with whom he was also having a passionate affair. Just as with Friedman and Philby, Kitty Harris was way more experienced in both her political and personal life than Donald Maclean. For a start, she was 13 years older, and when they met she had already been working for the Soviet Union for 16 years.

Harris was born in the East End of London, in a working-class Jewish family, but grew up in Canada and then Chicago, where the harsh lives of the workers made her receptive to the arguments of communists - including the man who was to become her husband, a charismatic party organiser called Earl Browder. She spent a couple of years with him in Shanghai, trying to organise the underground Communist party, before leaving him and moving to Europe, where she began to work for Soviet intelligence.

Harris seems to have been a headstrong woman who passionately believed in her cause, but who also found it hard to keep up the life prescribed by the KGB, with its fixed protocols and minimal freedom. No wonder that, when the chance came for an intimate relationship within these constraints, she seized on it. And she obviously felt deeply for Maclean. At the time - before drink and misery ruined his looks - he was a striking man, blond, 6ft tall, absolutely the upper-class diplomat.

In 1937, when one spy ring had been broken by British intelligence, Maclean had been put "on ice" by his Russian contact, and had been turning up to meeting after meeting without finding anyone there. And then, one day, he turned up as usual to find not his usual handler but Kitty Harris, who swiftly gave him the recognition phrase. "You hadn't expected to see a lady, had you?" she said. "No, but it's a pleasant surprise," he replied quickly.

When she was given the task of becoming Maclean's go-between, Harris was told he was the most important spy they had. Cherish him as the apple of your eye, she was told by Moscow. She did. Maclean would visit Harris in her flat in Bayswater twice a week, late in the evening, bringing papers for her to photograph that he had sneaked out of the Foreign Office for the night. From the start, he'd bring flowers and chocolates with those papers, and after a few months they agreed to have a special dinner to celebrate their birthdays, which fell within a few days of each other. One evening in May 1938, Maclean turned up at her flat carrying a huge bunch of roses, a bottle of wine and a box holding a locket on a thin gold chain. Harris wore it for the rest of her life; when she died in 1966, it was still among her paltry possessions. He had ordered dinner from a local restaurant, and they sat eating it and listening to Glenn Miller on the radio. That was the first night they made love, and true to her training she reported the event to her controller, Grigoriy Grafpen, next day.

Harris went on being entirely open in her reports, even telling her controllers that she and Maclean began and ended every meeting with sex. Sometimes this had adverse effects on their work. Telegrams from Moscow complained: "The material in the last two pouches turned out to contain only half of each image. What was the problem? Moreover in the last batch, many of the pages were almost out of focus..." It is rather wonderful to imagine the apparatchiks scratching their heads over photographs that had become blurred in the heat of Harris's passion.

After Maclean was posted to the British embassy in Paris in 1938, he was so crazy about Harris that he asked Moscow if she could come, too; to their surprise, the lovers' request was granted. They went on working together until June 1940, when the Germans broke through the Maginot line and invaded France. In her final report on Maclean, Harris summed up his character for Moscow. "He is politically weak," she wrote, "but there is something fundamentally good and strong in him that I value. He understands and hates the rotten capitalist system and has enormous confidence in the Soviet Union and the working class. Bearing in mind his origins and his past... he is a good and brave comrade."

The Cambridge spies are so often presented to us as loners fuelled only by cold ideology, but the sexual passion and political solidarity that flared between this working-class Jewish woman and the young British diplomat clearly sustained them both.

Kitty Harris wrote such a positive final report on Maclean, even though she knew that, by this time, his sexual interest in her was waning: a friend of Maclean's, Mark Culme-Seymour, had introduced him to a young American woman, Melinda Marling, in a cafe on the Left Bank in January 1940, and he had fallen for her immediately. Until recently, it was assumed that their marriage was founded on Maclean's talent for duplicity, and that Melinda knew nothing about her husband's links to Russia until his defection 11 years later.

But there is another layer to the story of Melinda Maclean. The friend who introduced the couple in the Cafe de Flore in 1940 was not particularly impressed by her then. "She was quite pretty and vivacious, but rather reserved," said Culme-Seymour. "I thought she was a bit prim." That is how many observers saw her - attractive, but also prim and spoiled. She was delicately good-looking, and carefully groomed - her lipstick glossy, her hair always waved, a double row of pearls usually clasped around her neck. She seemed to most people to have little interest in the world beyond family, friends, clothes and Hollywood movies. The success of the blandly conventional veneer she wore in public meant that, when Donald defected, she was easily able to pretend to everyone, even to MI5 and to her mother, that she had no idea that she had been married to a spy for more than a decade.

But in the 1950s, Culme-Seymour tracked down the exiled Macleans in Moscow, and another Melinda emerged. She told him that she knew she would be going to Russia right from the beginning, even before Maclean defected. By this time, he looked terrible and was obviously drinking heavily, but she seemed just fine. And when he said something that implied faint criticism of the Soviet Union, she "jumped down his throat".

Recent revelations from the Soviet archives confirm the existence of this other Melinda, a woman who was the greatest dissembler of them all. From the start, she and Donald had a relationship founded not on duplicity, but on trust. As Donald told Kitty Harris, on the very first evening he met Melinda, he saw another side to the prim American from the one his friends saw. "I was very taken by her views," he told Harris. "She's a liberal, she's in favour of the Popular Front and doesn't mind mixing with communists even though her parents are well-off. There was a White Russian girl, one of her friends, who attacked the Soviet Union and Melinda went for her. We found we spoke the same language."

Soon after they started dating, Melinda broke off the whole thing, apparently bored by the correct English diplomat. It was in order to get her back that Maclean told her the full truth: that he was not only a diplomat, but also a communist and a spy. It was an outrageous risk, one quite out of character for him at that time, but he reassured Harris that Melinda not only reacted positively, but "actually promised to help me to the extent that she can - and she is well connected in the American community".

There is no evidence that Melinda worked alongside Maclean, but it has been revealed that she supported him in his dangerous double life throughout their marriage. It was never an easy relationship: Maclean drank heavily, he expressed homosexual desires, they were often on the verge of splitting up and on one occasion he physically attacked her in public. But they stuck together, even beyond his defection.

They married in June 1940, days before the Germans marched into Paris, and spent the rest of the war being bombed out of one flat after another in London. Then they moved to Washington where, from the Soviet point of view, Maclean did his most valuable spying work in the position of first secretary at the British embassy. In 1948, he was appointed head of the chancery at the British embassy in Cairo. As soon as he arrived, however, Maclean had problems with his KGB contact, who arranged their meetings in the Arab quarter. Yuri Modin, a Soviet agent who has published his reminiscences of the Cambridge spies, says that the tall, blond Briton in immaculate suit and tie felt as inconspicuous "as a swan among geese". Maclean suggested that, instead of these absurdly dangerous games, Melinda should simply pass the information to the wife of the Soviet resident at the hairdresser. "Melinda was quite prepared to do this," Modin reports.

By now, the game of duplicity was telling on Maclean. He began drinking, brawling and even telling acquaintances about his life as a spy - confessions that they discounted as the talk of a dreamer. Cyril Connolly described him vividly as he struck him in London in 1951. "He had lost his serenity, his hands would tremble, his face was usually a livid yellow ... he was miserable and in a very bad way. In conversation, a kind of shutter would fall as if he had returned to some basic and incommunicable anxiety."

At this point, Philby, who was then based in Washington, discovered that MI5 had broken Maclean's cover and was planning to interrogate him. Philby passed this information to the Soviets, and they were desperate for Maclean to get out, fearful that, in his current state, he would crack immediately under interrogation. Maclean shilly shallied, afraid of staying, afraid of going, until he sounded out Melinda about the defection. According to Modin, she responded: "They're quite right - go as soon as you can, don't waste a single moment."

The day eventually earmarked for Maclean to make his escape happened to be his 38th birthday: May 25 1951. He came home by train from the Foreign Office to their house in Kent as usual that evening, and soon after Guy Burgess, who had just been persuaded to get out, too, turned up. After eating the birthday supper that Melinda had prepared, Maclean said goodbye to his wife and children, got into Burgess's car and left. They drove to Southampton, took a ferry to France, then disappeared from view, sparking a media and intelligence furore. It was all of five years before Krushchev finally admitted that they were in the Soviet Union.

The following Monday, Melinda Maclean telephoned the Foreign Office to ask coolly if her husband was around. Her pose of total ignorance convinced them; MI5 put off interviewing her for nearly a week, and the Maclean house was never searched. No doubt their readiness to see her merely as the ignorant wife was enhanced by the fact that she was heavily pregnant at the time - three weeks after Donald left, she gave birth to a daughter, their third child.

The evening of his defection, Donald had taken a cliché straight from an Eric Ambler novel, tearing a postcard in two, giving Melinda half, and telling her not to trust anyone who did not produce the other half as a sign. He later passed his half to Modin. More than a year later, Modin intercepted Melinda on her way home from school, just after she had dropped off the boys. He followed her Rover, then passed her and pulled up, signalling her to do likewise. "This she did, but not quite in the way we had expected. She burst out of the car like a deer breaking cover, yelling abuse at us for our bad driving." When Modin had recovered, he drew the half postcard from his pocket. Melinda immediately fell silent, reached across for her bag in the car, and produced the other half.

It was another year before Melinda finally slipped the net of British intelligence and press interest. Her secret life during that last year in the west must have become a terrible burden. She knew the dangers if she had been implicated in her husband's treachery; two months before she left, an American couple, the Rosenbergs, were sent to the electric chair for spying for the Soviet Union. But, unlike her husband, Melinda always hid her feelings under a bland veneer that people often read as stupidity. "I will not admit that my husband, the father of my children, is a traitor to his country," she told everyone in outraged tones. She seemed to be settling into a directionless but comfortable life, wandering with her mother and children as the seasons changed from beach villa in Majorca to skiing holiday in the Alps. But in Geneva on the evening of September 10 1953, she told her mother that she was going to stay with friends for the weekend, got into her black Chevrolet car with her three children, drove to Lausanne and disappeared.

She prepared for her great flight in the way you might expect of a bourgeois American, rather than a closet Red. The day before, she spent hours at a salon having her hair and nails done. That morning she had gone shopping, then returned to tell her mother that she had bumped into an old friend who had invited her to spend the weekend with the children at his villa at Territet. After lunch, at which she seemed no more than preoccupied, she got the children and herself ready, throwing an electric blue Schiaparelli coat over a black skirt and white blouse.

When Melinda did not return on Monday morning, her mother telephoned the British embassy. Intelligence agents tracked reports of a woman with a bright coat and three pretty children on the train to Austria, where the trail went cold. Weeks later, Melinda's mother received a letter, postmarked Cairo. In it, Melinda said, "Please believe, darling, in my heart I could not have done otherwise than I have done." Later, it transpired that Melinda had been met by KGB officials in Austria and flown to Moscow.

In the late 1960s, Eleanor Philby, Kim's third wife, brought a rare glimpse of the Macleans back to the west. Melinda hadn't quite accepted the Soviet way of life: she and her children cut incongruously elegant figures in Moscow, dressed out of the parcels of American clothes sent by her mother and sister. But when the Philbys and Macleans sat in their Moscow apartments of an evening, getting toweringly drunk on Soviet champagne, Melinda joined in the dreaming. "In moments of nostalgia," Eleanor said, "Donald and Melinda would talk of the good times they would have in Italy and Paris 'when the revolution comes'. I found this world of fantasy slightly unnerving."

Melinda's marriage did not long survive the constraints of life in Moscow, and when it broke down she began a brief affair with Philby, who had arrived there in 1963. Given their practised secrecy, it's not surprising that their relationship remains rather obscure. After that relationship, too, broke down, it seems that the day-to-day reality of life in the Soviet Union told on Melinda. Finally, in 1979, she returned to the west, to be with her mother and sisters, and her children soon followed her. She is still alive in New York, but she has never said a single word to the press.

One thing is for sure: all three of these women who were close to the Cambridge spies were just as good as the men at keeping secrets. Litzi Friedman never spoke of how Kim Philby had been recruited through her; the archives spoke for her. She settled in East Germany, marrying again and making a decent career for herself in the film industry. Phillip Knightley, the last journalist to speak to her, said that she seemed entirely satisfied with her life.

Kitty Harris had a very different end. She had spent the rest of the war continuing her career as a successful intelligence agent in Mexico, and in 1946 was brought to the Soviet Union, where she stayed until her death in 1966. But once she reached Russia, she found that the society for which she had worked so tirelessly and at such risk to her own safety fell far short of her dreams. "The only thing I know is that I am terribly lonely," she wrote in her diary during her last years. "My life is in pieces."

Melinda Maclean, still preserving her glacial silence, is the most mysterious of them all. Some experts believe her final return to the US was allowed by western intelligence only on the grounds that she did not reveal anything about her husband's (amazingly successful) career as a spy. She may indeed be living under such a constraint. Or she may have chosen to remain silent for her own reasons; perhaps she cannot bear to revisit Donald's descent into disillusion, and her own corroded ideals. Her secrets remain, finally, her own

· Acknowledgment is particularly due to The Philby Files: The Secret Life Of The Master Spy, by Genrikh Borovik and Phillip Knightley; A Divided Life, by Robert Cecil; Kitty Harris: The Spy With Seventeen Names, by Igor Damaskin with Geoffrey Elliott; The Missing Macleans, by Geoffrey Hoare; Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed A Generation, by David Leitch, Bruce Page and Phillip Knightley; Kim Philby: The Life And Views Of The KGB Masterspy, by Phillip Knightley; My Five Cambridge Friends, by Yuri Modin; Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved, by Eleanor Philby.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardia...kend7.weekend2
 
Old January 22nd, 2010 #6
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

21/01/2010

U.S. Jew indicted as possible Israel spy



By Yossi Melman

New documents presented in federal court in Washington, D.C. reveal deep ties (more than was known) between Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Dr. Stewart David Nozette, an American astronomer accused of spying for Israel.

The media here covered his arrest on October 19, 2009 and then interest waned, though the American media are still monitoring the case.

Two attorneys in the counterespionage unit of the U.S. Department's of Justice National Security division, Deborah Curtis and Heather Schmidt, presented documents found on the scientist's computer. One document, titled "Proposed Operations for 2005-2006," referred to the need to carry out "a penetration of NASA," the U.S. space agency.

Another document, according to the prosecution, shows Nozette attempted to obtain highly confidential material by using his high-level security clearance and infiltrating other people's computers.

Other documents mention the names of Yossi Weiss and Yossi Fishman. Weiss is a former project manager and today the deputy CEO of IAI and head of the company's missile and space division. Fishman was the IAI's representative in the U.S. and is today the CEO of ODF Optronics.

Fishman told Haaretz he knew Nozette the way he knew other Americans employed by the IAI at the time as consultants. "We did not engage in any kind of spying activity or information gathering, perish the thought. The relationship was business as usual."

The IAI is not mentioned specifically by name in the documents. It is referred to as a foreign company or as a space company owned by the Israeli government." Background talks with administration officials indicate the references are indeed to IAI.

Unreported visits

The indictment and the documents indicate that Nozette was employed for nine years as an IAI consultant. Versions vary as to how much he was paid, from $170,000 to $225,000. His direct superior was Israel Aircraft Industries International, a U.S.-registered company.

The FBI searched Nozette's home and computer and found additional proof of his connection to Israel. He visited here several times, but did not report this - as is required by his high security clearance. The FBI confiscated letters he wrote to Israelis, reports he forwarded to the IAI, a map of Israel, photos of assorted places in Israel, a Hebrew-language catalog of archaeological artifacts and other items.

Nozette, 52, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, was arrested after FBI surveillance that included wiretapping and undercover photography. The operation followed the former astronomer's interrogation on suspicion of tax evasion and defrauding the U.S. government. Nozette worked out plea bargain with the Justice Department; he admitted to fraud and accepted a sentence of up to three years in jail, plus a fine of $265,000. His jail term would have started in November, but he was arrested on the new and more serious charge of espionage.

Nozette, who was born in Chicago, has Jewish parents but there is no evidence he ever went to synagogue or Jewish community centers. His neighbors said he was "a Zionist" but without evidence attesting to this. From a young age, his interest was science. He studied at the University of Arizona and earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Immediately, in 1983, he went to work for U.S. agencies, including NASA, the Pentagon and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, which focuses on nuclear weapons. By virtue of these positions, he enjoyed a very high security clearance. One of the important studies he participated in found water at the Moon's southern pole. Nozette subsequently left government work and set up a private company as a consultant to firms in India and the IAI. The latter continues to refuse, vehemently, to address this embarrassing episode, which apparently has not done damage to the company.

Nozette was not the only person employed by the company as a consultant. Over the years, the IAI as well as other Israeli defense-related industries operating in the U.S., such as Elbit and Rafael, hired as consultants dozens of Americans, mainly retired former army officers and senior officials.

Today as well, the IAI and its subsidiaries in the U.S. continue to do business there and to cultivate ties. It is rather clear to them, and this is indeed fairly routine business practice, that to obtain contracts and win grants from the U.S. administration, doors must be opened. For that, people with connections are needed to open those doors. This was one of Nozette's assignments. Against this backdrop he apparently tried (among other things) to help the "penetration" of NASA. IAI, which produces space missile launchers, satellites and other space technologies, hoped to win contracts and development grants and enter joint ventures.

While he was being investigated for fraud, Nozette told a friend he would be willing to work for the Mossad. This information, along with the fact that he was a consultant to the IAI, led the FBI to suspect Nozette of being a Mossad agent, or at least psychologically ready to be one. So a sting operation was set up. An FBI agent pretending to be a Mossad agent met with Nozette and asked him for information. Nozette reportedly agreed, supplied information and received $11,000. These contacts were documented.

The indictment does not mention Israel nor has the administration made any complaints. Nevertheless Israel since its establishment systematically conducted spying missions on U.S. soil - for around a quarter of a century. Primarily, it was nuclear and technological-military spying.

The Jonathan Pollard case brought an end to all spying activities; there is a clear directive from prime ministers, defense ministers, Military Intelligence chiefs and the Mossad on this matter. But the U.S. media and the administration officials have a hard time believing Israel on this subject, and the Nozette case does not contribute to clearing the atmosphere of suspicion regarding future intentions.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1144093.html
 
Old April 28th, 2011 #7
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

Morris Cohen, 84, Soviet Spy Who Passed Atom Plans in 40's

Published: July 05, 1995

Morris Cohen, an American who spied for the Soviet Union and was instrumental in relaying atomic bomb secrets to the Kremlin in the 1940's, has died, Russian newspapers reported today.

Mr. Cohen, best known in the West as Peter Kroger, died of heart failure in a Moscow hospital on June 23 at age 84, according to news reports.

"Thanks to Cohen, designers of the Soviet atomic bomb got piles of technical documentation straight from the secret laboratory in Los Alamos," the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said. It noted that he had died without revealing the name of the American scientist who helped pass vital information about the United States atomic bomb project.

Mr. Cohen, the son of Russian immigrants, was born and raised in New York. He joined the American Communist Party in 1935 and later went to Spain to fight for the left-wing Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. While recovering from wounds, he was recruited by Soviet intelligence to spy for Moscow in America.

In July 1945, during the first test of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Mr. Cohen and his wife, Lona, recruited a Los Alamos scientist to obtain detailed blueprints of the weapon. The information was passed to Moscow 12 days before the American test.

Stalin ordered a crash program and exploded a similar atomic device four years later.

According to news reports in the 1990's, the information Mr. Cohen got from his still-unidentified source, code-named Percy by the F.B.I., was probably more important than data passed on by Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who was arrested in Britain in 1950.

Mr. Cohen and his wife, tipped about their imminent arrest, fled to Moscow through Mexico. Four years later, they moved to New Zealand and changed their names to Peter and Helen Kroger.

Using the new names, they moved to London in 1954 and started a new intelligence network posing as rare book dealers. The network existed for seven years before it was exposed by British intelligence.

They were arrested in 1961 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. They were exchanged in 1969 for a British teacher, Gerald Brooke, who was arrested in Moscow by the K.G.B. for distributing anti-Communist propaganda.

Mr. Cohen's wife died in 1992. He was buried on June 27 in a ceremony closed to the public so friends in the Russian intelligence community could attend.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/05/ob...s-in-40-s.html

Name KROGER, Peter
Aliases Cohen, Morrris
Born 1910
Died 1995

Activity Born Morris Cohen in the Bronx in 1910 of Russian-Jewish parents he married Leona or Lona Petka of Adams, Massachusetts. Both became Communists at that time. Kroger fought for the Communist brigade against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, using the name of Israel Altman. Later he worked for the Russian-sponsored Amtorg Trading Co in New York until 1942, before serving in the US Army in World War II.

The Cohens were part of the NKVD espionage networks in New York City which include those run by the Rosenberg and Colonel Abel. Warned that the Rosenbergs were about to be arrested by the FBI in 1950, the Cohens hurriedly fled to London where they reappeared as the Krogers in 1954. They had taken the name of a couple, Peter & Helen who had died much earlier in New Zealand; a long used identity-change tactic employed by the NKVD. It was not until November 1960 that MI5 picked up the trail of the Krogers in London, identifying them with the Soviet network operated by Gordon Lonsdale. Lonsdale delivered secret information he had obtained from the British traitors Houghton and Gee who worked at the Admiralty UWE in Portland, England.

MI5 agents kept the Krogers under surveillance until the other members of the Portland Spy Ring were arrested in early January 1961. Police Officers then arrested the Kroger's at their West London home. A search yielded a mother-lode of espionage equipment, including cipher pads on quick-burning flash paper, ciphers, code books, sophisticated photo equipment, a device for reading microdots, a specially-built Ronson lighter containing a coded message inside, and numerous other items. After a week the MI5 officers found a powerful transmitter capable of sending in rapid bursts. There could be no doubt that the Kroger's Bungalow was the communications centre for sending information to Moscow and some twenty years later, the new occupants of the Kroger's home dug up a second high-speed Soviet radio transmitter in the back garden. Fingerprints taken from the Krogers were sent to Washington where the FBI identified them as belonging to Cohens who were still wanted in the Rosenberg case. Instead of returning the Krogers to the US the British authorities tried and convicted them of espionage. They were sent to prison for twenty years.

The KGB went out of its way to secure the release of the couple by engineering the arrest of British lecturer Gerald Brooke who was visiting Moscow and who was accused of distributing subversive literature. The KGB offered to exchange the Brooke for the Krogers. The US authorities stepped in, stating that the Krogers were US citizens and could not be bartered for a British subject and that if they were to be released, they had to be extradited to the US for their part in the Rosenberg conspiracy. The Soviet Union claimed that the Krogers were in fact Polish citizens, not Americans, and the British, more eager to regain Brooke than to appease the United States, accepted the claim. The Krogers were exchanged for Brooke in October 1969. They vanished a few years later. Peter Kroger takes to the grave the name of the mole codenamed 'Percy' within the Manhattan Project who helped him pull off the century's espionage coup

http://www.spyschool.com/spybios/krogerp.htm
 
Old April 29th, 2011 #8
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default



Ignatz Reiss

Ignace Poretsky, AKA "Ignace Reiss," 1 "Ignatz Reiss," 2 "Ludwig," 3 "Ludwik", 1 "Hans Eberhardt," 4 "Steff Brandt," 5 and Nathan Poreckij 6 1899 1937 was one of the "Great Illegals" or Soviet spies who worked in third party countries where they weren't nationals in the late 1920s and 1930s. 7 An NKVD team assassinated him in September 1937 near Lausanne, Switzerland, a few weeks after he declared his defection in a letter addressed to Joseph Stalin. 7 8 He was a lifelong friend of Walter Krivitsky his assassination influenced the timing and method of Whittaker Chambers' defection a few months later.

Poretsky was born Nathan Markovic Poreckij 6 in 1899 into a Jewish family in Podwo oczyska Pidvolochysk , 9 10 then in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, just across the river from Volochysk, then in Podolia, Tsarist Russia now both in Ukraine . His mother was "Russian" from "across the river." His father had his elder brother and him educated in Lwow modern Lviv , the provincial capital. There, he formed lifelong friendships with several other boys, all of whom would become committed Communist spies. These boys included Kalyniak, Willy Stahl, Berchtold Umansky "Brun" , his brother Mikhail Umansky "Misha," later "Ilk" , Fedia later "Fedin" , and the young Walter Krivitsky born Samuel Ginsberg . During World War I, the friends traveled when they could to Vienna, where they gathered around Fedia and his girlfriend Krusia. The name Krusia also "Kruzia" became a codename between these friends in later years. Poretsky also visited Leipzig, Germany, to meet German Socialists there, he met Gertrude Schildbach, later involved in his assassination. He earned a degree from the Faculty of Law, University of Vienna. 6 In 1918, he returned to his hometown, where he worked for the railway. His older brother was killed during the Polish-Soviet War in 1920.

In early 1919, Poretsky joined the newly formed Polish Communist Party the Communist Workers' Party of Poland or KPRP , since his hometown had become part of the Second Polish Republic. The KPRP adhered closely to the policies of Rosa Luxemburg. Julian Marchlewski AKA "Karski" represented the KPRP at the Third International in March 1919.

By the summer of 1919, he had received a summons to Vienna, Austria, where he moved quickly from work with agencies of the newly formed Comintern to "Fourth Department of the General Staff" which became the Soviet GRU. He then conducted party work in Poland. There he met Joseph Krasny-Rotstadt, a friend of both Rosa Luxemburg already dead and more importantly of fellow Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. Having fought in the Bolshevik Revolution, Krasny was already directing propaganda for Eastern Europe. During this time, Poretsky published a few articles as "Ludwig" in one of Krasny's publications, called The Civil War.

In early 1920, Poretsky was in Moscow, where he met and married his wife, Elisabeth also called "Elsa" . During the Russian-Polish War in 1920, Willy Stahl and he received their first assignment, Lwow, where they distributed illegal Bolshevik literature. By 1921, as he took on the alias "Ludwig" or "Ludwik" in his wife's memoirs , Poretsky had become a Soviet spy. In 1922, he was again working in Lwow, this time with another friend of Fedia and Krusnia's from Vienna, Jacob Locker. Elisabeth was in Lwow, too. Poretsky was arrested and charged with espionage, which carried a maximum five-year sentence. En route to prison, Poretsky escaped his train in Cracow, never to return to Poland.

http://www.medical-answers.org/hd/in...t=Ignatz+Reiss

Ignace Poretsky

Ignace Poretsky, AKA "Ignace Reiss,"[1] "Ignatz Reiss,"[2] "Ludwig,"[3] "Ludwik",[1] "Hans Eberhardt,"[4] "Steff Brandt,"[5] and Nathan Poreckij[6] (1899–1937) was one of the "Great Illegals" or Soviet spies who worked in third party countries where they weren't nationals in the late 1920s and 1930s.[7] An NKVD team assassinated him in September 1937 near Lausanne, Switzerland, a few weeks after he declared his defection in a letter addressed to Joseph Stalin.[7][8] He was a lifelong friend of Walter Krivitsky; his assassination influenced the timing and method of Whittaker Chambers' defection a few months later.

Career

Early life

Poretsky was born Nathan Markovic Poreckij[6] in 1899 into a Jewish family in Podwołoczyska (Pidvolochysk),[9][10] then in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, just across the river from Volochysk, then in Podolia, Tsarist Russia (now both in Ukraine). His mother was "Russian" from "across the river." His father had his elder brother and him educated in Lwow (modern Lviv), the provincial capital. There, he formed lifelong friendships with several other boys, all of whom would become committed Communist spies. These boys included Kalyniak, Willy Stahl, Berchtold Umansky ("Brun"), his brother Mikhail Umansky ("Misha," later "Ilk"), Fedia (later "Fedin"), and the young Walter Krivitsky (born Samuel Ginsberg). During World War I, the friends traveled when they could to Vienna, where they gathered around Fedia and his girlfriend Krusia. The name Krusia (also "Kruzia") became a codename between these friends in later years. Poretsky also visited Leipzig, Germany, to meet German Socialists: there, he met Gertrude Schildbach, later involved in his assassination. He earned a degree from the Faculty of Law, University of Vienna.[6] In 1918, he returned to his hometown, where he worked for the railway. (His older brother was killed during the Polish-Soviet War in 1920.)[1]

Fourth Department: "Ludwig"

In early 1919, Poretsky joined the newly formed Polish Communist Party (the Communist Workers' Party of Poland or KPRP), since his hometown had become part of the Second Polish Republic. The KPRP adhered closely to the policies of Rosa Luxemburg. Julian Marchlewski (AKA "Karski") represented the KPRP at the Third International in March 1919.[1]

By the summer of 1919, he had received a summons to Vienna, Austria, where he moved quickly from work with agencies of the newly formed Comintern to "Fourth Department of the General Staff"—which became the Soviet GRU. He then conducted party work in Poland. There he met Joseph Krasny-Rotstadt, a friend of both Rosa Luxemburg (already dead) and (more importantly) of fellow Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. Having fought in the Bolshevik Revolution, Krasny was already directing propaganda for Eastern Europe. During this time, Poretsky published a few articles as "Ludwig" in one of Krasny's publications, called The Civil War.

In early 1920, Poretsky was in Moscow, where he met and married his wife, Elisabeth (also called "Elsa"). During the Russian-Polish War in 1920, Willy Stahl and he received their first assignment, Lwow, where they distributed illegal Bolshevik literature. By 1921, as he took on the alias "Ludwig" (or "Ludwik" in his wife's memoirs), Poretsky had become a Soviet spy. In 1922, he was again working in Lwow, this time with another friend of Fedia and Krusnia's from Vienna, Jacob Locker. Elisabeth was in Lwow, too. Poretsky was arrested and charged with espionage, which carried a maximum five-year sentence. En route to prison, Poretsky escaped his train in Cracow, never to return to Poland.[1]

From 1921 to 1929, Poretsky served in Western Europe, particularly Berlin and Vienna. In Berlin, the Poretskys' house guests included Karl Radek and Larissa Reisner, ex- wife of Fedor Raskolnikov (a Naval officer who chronicled the Kronstadt rebellion).[11] In Vienna, friends included Yuriy Kotsiubynsky, Alexander Schlichter, Angelica Balabanov, Paul Ruegg, Ivan Zaporozhets, Alexander Lykov, and Emil Maurer. In Amsterdam, the Poretsky's knew Henriette Roland-Holst, Hildo Krop, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, "Professor Carvalho" (Ricardo Carvalho Calero), "H. C. Pieck" (Henri Pieck), and most importantly "Henricus" or "Henryk Sneevliet" (Henk Sneevliet).[1] In this same period, Richard Sorge brought Hede Massing to Poretsky for training.[3]

In 1927, he returned briefly to Moscow, where he received the Order of the Red Banner. From 1929 to 1932, Poretsky served in Moscow, where he worked in a nominal post of the Polish section of the Comintern—already sidelined as a "foreign" (non-Russian). Among the people whom the Poretskys knew at that time were Richard Sorge (AKA "Ika"), Sorge's his superior, Alexander Borovich, Felix Gorski, Otto Braun, Max Maximov-Friedman, Franz Fischer, Pavlo Ladan, and Theodore Maly. Valentin Markin reported to Poretsky in Moscow, who in turn reported to Abram Slutsky.[1]

Defection and death (1937)

From 1932 to 1937, Poretsky was stationed in Paris. There, the Poretskys met Egon Erwin Kisch, Alexander Rado, Noel Field, Vasily Zarubin ("Vasia"), Yakov Blumkin, Boris Bazarov, J. K. Berzin (Jānis Bērziņš), and Arthur Stavchevsky.[1] By 1936, their friends were returning to Moscow one after the other, most of whom were shot or disappeared during the Great Purge. Poretsky received a summons back to Moscow: his wife went in his stead in late 1936, staying into early 1937. In early 1937, Krivitsky was recalled but managed to finagle his way out again on foreign assignment.[1]

Upon Krivitsky's return, Poretsky composed a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, addressed to Stalin and dated July 17, 1937. He returned the Order of the Red Banner with his letter. (The letter forms part of the opening of his wife's memoirs.)[1]

Then, Poretsky fled with his wife and child to the remote village of Finhaut, Valais canton, Switzerland, to hide. After they had been hiding for a month, Gertrude Schildbach got back in touch with them. On September 4, they decided to meet Schildbach in Lausanne. Wife and son boarded a train for Territet, Vaud canton, Switzerland. Poretsky stayed with Schildbach before he was to board a train for Rheims to meet Sneevliet, who was to publish Poretsky's letter and news of his defection. Then he would rejoin his family in Territet. He never made his train to Rheims.[1]

As Poretsky's wife relates in her memoirs, she went to Vevey to meet Schildbach again on September 5, but the woman never showed up. On September 6, she saw a small article in a Lausanne newspaper about a man with a Czech passport for "Hans Eberhardt" found dead on the night of September 4 on the road from Lausanne to Chamblandes. He was killed, then riddled with machine gun bullets. In his hands were long strands of a woman's hair.[1]

On the first anniversary of Poretsky's assassination, his wife (as "Elsa Reiss") described their situation:

He would wait no longer, he had made up his mind. And now I tried to dissuade him from being over-impulsive, to talk things over with other comrades. I was justifiably afraid for his life. I pleaded with him not to walk out alone, to make the break along with other comrades but he only said: “One can count on nobody. One must act alone and openly. One cannot trick history, there is no point in delay.” He was correct – one is alone. It was a release for him but also a break with everything that had hitherto counted with him, with his youth, his past, his comrades. Now we were completely alone. In those few weeks Reiss aged very rapidly, his hair became snow-white. He who loved nature and cherished life looked about him with empty eyes. He was surrounded by corpses. His soul was in the cellars of the Lubianka. In his sleep-torn nights he saw an execution or a suicide.[12]

Family

Between 1920 and 1922, Poretsky married Elsa Bernaut (AKA "Else Bernaut" AKA "Elisabeth K. Poretsky," AKA "Elsa Reiss") (1898-1976[13]) in Moscow; at times, Reiss used her maiden name as another alias.[1][14] (In French, her book received the title Les nôtres by "Elisabeth K. Poretski" in the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris[15] and by "Elizaveta Poretskaya" in The Black Book of Communism.[16])

They had one child, a boy named Roman, born around 1926.[13]

Influence

1952: Witness, by Whittaker Chambers

Poretsky appears in the 1952 memoirs of Whittaker Chambers, Witness: his assassination in July 1937 was perhaps the last straw that caused him not only to defect but to make careful preparations when doing so.

Suddenly, revolutionists with a lifetime of devoted activity would pop out, like rabbits from a burrow, with the G.P.U. close on their heels—Barmine from the Soviet legation in Athens, Raskolnikoff from the Soviet legation in Sofia, Krivitsky from Amsterdam, Reiss from Switzerland. Not that Reiss fled. Instead, a brave and a lonely man, he sent his single-handed defiance to Stalin: Murderer of the Kremlin cellars, I herewith return my decorations and resume my freedom of action. But defiance is not enough; cunning is needed to fight cunning. It was foredoomed that sooner or later the door of a G.P.U limousine would swing open and Reiss's body with the bullets in the defiant brain would tumble out—as happened shortly after he deserted. Of the four I have named, only Barmine outran the hunters. Reiss's death moved me deeply.[2]

Compared to Reiss/Poretsky, Chambers considered far more carefully how to elude the Soviets when he defected in April 1938, as described in Witness.

1995: Ignace Reiss, by Daniel Kunzi

Swiss filmmaker Daniel Kunzi made a 53-minute documentary film called Ignace Reiss: Vie et mort d'un révolutionnaire about Poretsky's life and death, following several years of research. The film includes testimonials, historical footage, a reconstruction of his assassination, all narrated by readings from his wife's memoirs.[17][18]

Participating in the film are:

Vanessa Redgrave, who reads from adaptations of Elisabeth Poretsky's memoirs

Gerard Rosenthal, who recounts his services as lawyer to both Leon Trotsky and Elisabeth Poretsky[19][20]

1998: Fear of Mirrors, by Tariq Ali

"Ludwik" forms the background history of Tariq Ali's 1998 novel Fear of Mirrors, set during German reunification in 1990. Ali was fascinated by the story of Ignace Reiss: "Ludwik became an obsession with me."[13]

Ignace_Poretsky Ignace_Poretsky
 
Old April 30th, 2011 #9
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default



Samuel Dickstein

Samuel Dickstein (February 5, 1885 - April 22, 1954) was a Democratic Congressional Representative from New York, a New York State Supreme Court Justice, and a Soviet agent. He played a key role in establishing the committee that would become the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Early life and career

Dickstein was born near Vilnius in present-day Lithuania, and immigrated to the United States in 1887 with his parents, who settled in New York City. There he attended public and private schools in New York City, the College of the City of New York, and graduated from the New York City Law School in 1906. He was admitted to the bar in 1908 and commenced law practice in New York City. He served as special deputy attorney general of the State of New York from 1911-1914, member of the board of aldermen in 1917, member of the State Assembly 1919-1922. He served as a member of the Democratic County Committee and was elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-eighth Congress and was reelected eleven times. He resigned from Congress on December 30, 1945. He served as Chairman on the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization (Seventy-second through Seventy-ninth Congresses).

Soviet agent

In 1934, Dickstein introduced the "Dickstein Resolution" (H.R. 198) calling for the establishment of a special committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate "un-American activities."[1] Under the pretext of investigating U.S. fascists,[2] he used the so-called "McCormack-Dickstein committee" to launch a series of "witch hunts" or inquisitions, persecuting and smearing anti-Communist American businessmen,[3] Soviet refugees[4] and Trotskyites[5] (whom Stalin had labeled "agents of fascism").[6] Dickstein was a Soviet agent at the time,[7] code-named "Crook."[8] For his services, the NKVD paid him more than $12,000[9] in the depths of the Great Depression—equivalent to more than $180,000 today.[10]

Further material

Dickstein was a spy for the Soviet Union while a sitting member of Congress. The Soviet NKVD case handlers code-named him “Crook” due to his greedy compensation demands. Dickstein gave Moscow information on fascist groups in the U.S. and war budget materials. He is the only Congressman known to have spied for the Soviet Union while a member of Congress. He was instrumental in establishing and serving as vice chairman of the temporary Select Committee on Un-American Activities (the Dies Committee) in 1938 to investigate fascist and Nazi groups in the United States. After the Nazi-Soviet pact, the same committee was made into a permanent committee of the House, renamed the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and expanded its attention to include Communist organizations. Dickstein was paid $1250 a month from 1937 to early 1940 by the Soviet spy agency the KGB, which hoped to get secret Congressional information of anti-Communist and pro-fascist forces. When Dickstein left the Committee the KGB dropped him from the payroll. [11]

Dickstein later served as a Justice on the New York State Supreme Court until his death in New York City.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Samuel_Dickstein

Samuel Dickstein (congressman)

Samuel Dickstein (February 5, 1885 – April 22, 1954) was a Democratic Congressional Representative from New York and a New York State Supreme Court Justice. He played a key role in establishing the committee that would become the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which he used to attack fascists, including Nazi sympathizers, and suspected communists.

Early life and career

Dickstein was born into a Jewish family living near Vilnius in present-day Lithuania. He emigrated to the United States in 1887 with his parents, who settled in New York City. There he attended public and private schools in New York City, the College of the City of New York, and graduated from the New York City Law School in 1906. He was admitted to the bar in 1908 and commenced law practice in New York City. He served as special deputy attorney general of the State of New York from 1911–1914, member of the board of aldermen in 1917, member of the State Assembly 1919–1922. He served as a member of the Democratic County Committee and was elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-eighth Congress and was reelected eleven times. He resigned from Congress on December 30, 1945. He served as Chairman on the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization (Seventy-second through Seventy-ninth Congresses).

During his tenure as Chairman of the Committee on Naturalization and Immigration, Dickstein became aware of the substantial number of foreigners legally and illegally entering and residing in the US, and the growing Anti-Semitism along with vast amounts of anti-Semitic literature being distributed in the country. This led him to investigate independently the activities of Nazi and other fascist groups in the U.S. This investigation proved to be of such significance that on January 3, 1934, the opening day of the second session of the 73rd Congress, Dickstein introduced a resolution calling for the formation of a special committee to probe un-American activities in the United States. The "Dickstein Resolution" (H.R. #198) was passed in March 1934, with John William McCormack named Chairman and Samuel Dickstein Vice-Chairman. Dickstein had refused the chairmanship of the Committee, feeling that his Jewish ancestry might have an adverse effect on the proceedings.

Throughout the rest of 1934, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities conducted hearings, bringing before it most of the major figures in the U.S. fascist movement. Dickstein, who proclaimed as his aim the eradication of all traces of Nazism in the U.S.[1], personally questioned each witness. His flair for dramatics and sensationalism, along with his sometimes exaggerated claims, continually captured headlines across the nation and won him much public recognition.

He was instrumental in establishing the temporary Select Committee on Un-American Activities (the 'Dies Committee') with Martin Dies, Jr. as chairman, in 1938 to investigate fascist and Communist groups in the United States.

Later the same committee was renamed the House Committee on Un-American Activities when it shifted attention to Communist organizations and was made a standing committee in 1945.

Following the 1938 Anschluss, Dickstein attempted to introduce legislation that would allow unused refugee quotas to be allocated to those fleeing Hitler.[2]

Dickstein later served as a Justice on the New York State Supreme Court until his death in New York City.

In his 2000 book The Haunted Wood, writer Allen Weinstein claimed that documents discovered in 1990s in the Moscow archives showed Dickstein was paid $1250 a month from 1937 to early 1940 by the NKVD, the Soviet spy agency, which hoped to get secret Congressional information on anti-Communist and pro-fascist forces. According to Weinstein, whether Dickstein provided any intelligence is not certain; when he left the Committee the Soviets dropped him from the payroll.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_...n_(congressman)
 
Old April 30th, 2011 #10
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

Judith Coplon, Haunted by Espionage Case, Dies at 89

By SAM ROBERTS
Published: March 1, 2011

Judith Socolov, who as a diminutive Barnard graduate named Judith Coplon was convicted of espionage more than 60 years ago after embracing a utopian vision of communism and falling in love with a Soviet agent, died Saturday in Manhattan. She was 89.


Judith Coplon won a good-citizenship award in high school and a full scholarship to Barnard, where she majored in history and was a member of the Young Communist League.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Emily Socolov. A longtime Brooklyn resident, the elder Ms. Socolov had been living in the Bronx.

Judith Coplon was a 5-foot-tall, 27-year-old political analyst for the Justice Department when she was arrested by the F.B.I. in 1949 with the Soviet agent Valentin A. Gubitchev on a Manhattan street corner. She had been identified from intercepted Soviet cables.

But her convictions for espionage in 1949 and for conspiracy (with Mr. Gubitchev) in 1950 were overturned — in one case because federal agents overheard conversations with her lawyer, and in the other because she was arrested on probable cause but without a warrant.

Still, the United States Court of Appeals concluded that “her guilt is plain,” and Soviet documents released years later supported that conclusion.

“She was a very high priority to the F.B.I.,” John Earl Haynes, a cold war historian at the Library of Congress, said on Monday, “because she was clearly in a Justice Department office, the Foreign Agents Registration Section, that was receiving the F.B.I.’s own counterespionage reports.”

While her appeals were pending, Ms. Coplon (pronounced COPE-lon) married one of her lawyers, Albert Socolov, a decorated D-Day veteran. The court restricted their honeymoon to within 100 miles of New York City.

After the verdicts were reversed, Ms. Coplon — now Ms. Socolov — lived in obscurity, raising four children, earning a master’s degree in education, publishing bilingual books, tutoring women in prison in creative writing, and, with her husband, running two Mexican restaurants in Manhattan (the Beach House in TriBeCa and Alameda on the Upper West Side).

Ms. Socolov refused to discuss her relationship with Mr. Gubitchev, a Russian working at the United Nations, or her legal ordeal. “The subject of her innocence or guilt was something that she would strictly not address,” Emily Socolov said.

“It’s very hair-raising to read about your mother being given a code name and moved around like a chess piece,” the daughter added. “Was she a spy? I think it’s another question that I ask: Was she part of a community that felt that they were going to bring, by their actions, an age of peace and justice and an equal share for all and the abolishing of color lines and class lines?”

“If these were things that she actually did, she was not defining them as espionage,” Ms. Socolov continued. “If you feel that what you’re doing answers to a higher ideal, it’s not treason.”

Judith Coplon was born in Brooklyn on May 17, 1921, the daughter of Samuel and Rebecca Moroh Coplon, a toy manufacturer and milliner, respectively. Her great-grandfather, a peddler who had emigrated from Prussia, was a prisoner during the Civil War at Andersonville, the infamous Confederate prison camp.

Ms. Coplon won a good-citizenship award in high school and a full scholarship to Barnard, where she majored in history and was a member of the Young Communist League. She graduated cum laude in 1943, joined the Justice Department in 1944 and, according to the government, was recruited by Soviet intelligence later that year.

In 1948, after intercepting a secret three-year-old Soviet cable, the Venona project, which monitored and decoded Soviet diplomatic communications, identified Ms. Coplon as an agent code-named Sima. She “will be able to carry out important work for us in throwing light” on United States counterintelligence, the Soviet cable said.

To snare her, the F.B.I. fed her a false memorandum about atomic power, then followed her in Manhattan on March 30, 1949, with 30 agents and a fleet of radio cars. After she made a series of evasive maneuvers by subway and bus, she and Mr. Gubitchev were arrested under the Third Avenue elevated line in Midtown. Several secret documents, including the faked memo, were confiscated.

“I was never and am not a Communist,” Ms. Coplon later declared. “The only crime I can be said to be guilty of is that I knew a Russian.”

She said she had met Mr. Gubitchev at the Museum of Modern Art and fallen in love with him, only to learn he was married. “I will always say that I’m innocent and that I’m being framed,” she testified.

In 1952, after winning the right to a new trial, she remained free on $40,000 bail. The bail money was not returned until 1967, when the Justice Department formally dropped the case.

For years, though, the charges haunted her. “If she felt somebody was looking at her askance or treating her disparagingly,” Emily Socolov said, “she thought about that case.”

Ms. Socolov emerged in 1981 to defend her husband against accusations that money he had invested for a client was drug-related. He was acquitted.

Mr. Socolov survives her. Besides her daughter, Ms. Coplon is also survived by three sons, Benjamin, William and Daniel; and four grandchildren.

In their book about the case, “The Spy Who Seduced America,” Marcia and Thomas Mitchell wrote that in 1994 Albert Socolov continued to insist that his wife was innocent. But for 60 years the couple shunned publicity.

“We’ve had all kinds of requests for interviews, for books, but it has been our steady policy to refuse,” Mr. Socolov told The New York Times a decade ago. “Other people are interested in posterity. We’re not.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/us/02coplon.html?_r=1

Judith Coplon

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1922. Daughter of a prominent to manufacturer.

Graduated Cum Laude from Barnhard College in 1943, having focused on Russian History and Culture. Employed by the United States Department of Justice, first in New York and later in Washington D.C. after being promoted to the foreign agents registration division. Had access to FBI documents with lists of foreign diplomats and suspected foreign spies.Was highly praised for her analysis on Soviet political and cultural issues. Received promotions.

Began supplying information to the Soviets sometime between 1945 and 1947. Was assigned a special Soviet contact, an Intelligence Officer named Valentin Gubitchev. Gubitchev was a former member of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations. At the time he began meeting with Coplon, he was an employee for the United Nations.

In 1948, an unidentified informant passed information along to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover, reporting that a woman, formerly employed in the New York branch but then working at the Washington offices of the Department of Justices was passing secrets that were making their way to the Russian Embassy in New York.

Was placed under intense surveillance. FBI agents placed taps on her telephone line, monitored her mail and followed her as she traveled. Neighbors claimed that Coplon was quiet and did not entertain male guest in her apartment. Surveillance, however, indicated that she engaged in sexual affairs with several men, presumably for the purpose of obtaining classified information.

Often traveled to New York City on the weekends, often asking to leave from work early on Fridays. Took classified documents home with her and retyped them. Gave the retyped documents to Gubitchev when she visited him in New York.

Requested a special document containing a list of suspected Soviet spies. Director Hoover personally delivered a fake version of the document to Coplon's supervisor, who immediately provided it to her. Coplon, upon receiving the document requested the rest of the day off and then traveled to New York for the weekend (followed by FBI agents - January 14, 1949).

Was trailed by FBI agents around Manhattan until she finally met with Gubitchen in a restaurant. After exchanging documents, the couple left and boarded a subway train. As the doors to the train were closing, Gubitchev bolted from the train and evaded the trailing FBI agents.

Having been observed passing documents, Coplon was transferred to another division of the Department of Justice, in order to keep her away from sensitive documents. Coplon continued to seek access to such documents, volunteering to aid her replacement in getting up to speed.

Requested additional classified information that her supervisor had recently obtained (fake information received from Hoover). Her supervisor left the information in Coplon's view and left the room. Coplon left the room and caught a train to New York (March 6, 1949).

After meeting Gubitchev, Coplon and her Soviet handler were confronted by FBI agents. After trying to flee, both were apprehended and arrested. Coplon had numerous top-secret documents on her person, including the one provided by Hoover. Coplon was charged with treason and espionage and Gubitchev was charged with espionage.

Coplon faced two trials, one in Washington and one in New York. She was convicted in both. Gubitchev was convicted and deported. Coplon convictions were overturned, as an Appeals Court ruled that the FBI had illegally recorded conversations between Coplon and her attorney and further that the FBI had arrested her without an arrest warrant.

Married one of her attorneys and moved to New York where she settled down as a housewife.

http://www.spymuseum.com/pages/agent-coplon-judith.html

jewish:

http://books.google.com/books?id=tFJ...jewish&f=false
 
Old April 30th, 2011 #11
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

Bruno Pontecorvo

Bruno Pontecorvo (Russian: Бру́но Макси́мович Понтеко́рво, Bruno Maksimovich Pontekorvo; Marina di Pisa, Italy, August 22, 1913 – Dubna, Russia, September 24, 1993) was an Italian-born atomic physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and then the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. According to Oleg Gordievsky (the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect)[1] and Pavel Sudoplatov (former deputy director of Foreign Intelligence for the USSR),[2] Pontecorvo was also a Soviet agent.[3] He defected to the USSR in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.

Early life and education

Pontecorvo was born in Pisa into a wealthy non-observant Italian Jewish family. At only 18 he was admitted to the Course of Physics held by Enrico Fermi at the University of Rome La Sapienza, becoming one of the closest (and the youngest) assistants of Fermi and one of the so-called Via Panisperna boys (as Fermi's group of scientists is often called, after the name of the street where their laboratory was situated).

In 1934 he contributed to Fermi's famous experiment showing the properties of slow neutrons that led the way to the discovery of nuclear fission.

Early career

In 1936 he moved to Paris to work in the laboratory of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie on the effects of collisions of neutrons with protons and on the electromagnetic transitions among isomers. During this period he was influenced by the ideas of socialism to which he remained loyal for the rest of his life. In Paris, in 1938, he formed a relationship with Marianne Nordblom, a young student of French Literature, and their first son was born during that year.

Pontecorvo was unable to return to Italy because of the fascist regime's racial discrimination against the Jews. He remained in Paris until the Nazis entered the city, then fled with his family to Spain and shortly after to the USA, where he had found employment with an oil company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While at the oil company he developed a technology and an instrument for well logging, based on the properties of neutrons. This technology may be considered the first practical application of the Via Panisperna boys' discovery of slow neutrons.

He was not called upon to participate in the Manhattan Project in the USA for the construction of the atomic bomb, possibly because of his committed socialist beliefs. But in 1943 he was invited to join the associated Montreal Laboratory in Canada, where he concentrated on reactor design, cosmic rays, neutrinos and the decay of muons.

In 1948, after he obtained British citizenship, he was invited by John Cockcroft to contribute to the British atomic bomb project at AERE, Harwell where he joined the Nuclear Physics Division under Egon Bretscher. In 1950 he was appointed to the chair of physics at the University of Liverpool which he was due to take up in January, 1951.

Defection

However, on August 31, 1950, in the middle of a holiday in Italy, he abruptly left Rome for Stockholm with his wife and three sons without informing friends or relatives. The next day he was helped by Soviet agents to enter the USSR from Finland. His abrupt disappearance caused much concern to many of the western intelligence services, especially those of Britain and the USA who were worried about the escape of atomic secrets to the Soviet Union after the then recent case of Klaus Fuchs. But as was pointed out immediately, Pontecorvo had had only limited access to "secret subjects" and even later no allegation of spying or of transferring of secrets to the Soviets has ever been made against him.

In the USSR Pontecorvo was welcomed with honor and given a number of privileges reserved only to the Soviet nomenklatura. He worked until his death in what is now the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, concentrating entirely on theoretical studies of high energy particles and continuing his research on neutrinos and decay of muons. In recognition of his research he was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1953, membership of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1958 and two Orders of Lenin. In 1955 he appeared to the world in public at a press conference where he explained to the world the motivations of his choice to leave the West and work in the USSR. Pontecorvo did not leave the Soviet Union for many years, the first trip being in 1978 when he travelled to Italy.

Personal life

Bruno Pontecorvo was brother of film director Gillo Pontecorvo and geneticist Guido Pontecorvo. He was a great-uncle of Flavio Pontecorvo, the electronics engineer. He had two wives: Marianna Nordblom (born in Sweden) and Rodam Amiredzhibi (born in Georgia, Soviet Union) and three children.

Death

He died in Dubna in 1993, afflicted by Parkinson's disease. Half of his ashes is now buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and another half in Dubna, Russia, according to his will.

Legacy

In 1995, in recognition of his scientific merits, the prestigious Pontecorvo Prize has been instituted by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. The prize, awarded annually to an individual scientist, recognizes "the most significant investigations in elementary particle physics", as acknowledged by the international scientific community.

The scientific work of Bruno Pontecorvo is full of formidable intuitions, some of which have represented milestones in modern physics. These include:

the intuition of how to detect anti-neutrinos generated in nuclear reactors (methodology used by Frederick Reines who was awarded for this with the Nobel prize in 1995);

the prediction that neutrinos associated with electrons are different from those associated with muons (for experimental verification of this another Nobel prize was awarded to J. Steinberger, L. Lederman and M. Schwartz in 1988);

the idea that neutrinos may convert into other type of neutrinos, a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillation.

This last idea was proposed in 1957 and developed in the subsequent years by Pontecorvo, till 1967 where it was given the modern form. This phenomenon was first seen with solar neutrinos in 1968 and was recently confirmed by several other experiments, but it is not recognized by a Nobel prize yet (the prize awarded to Masatoshi Koshiba and Ray Davis in 2002 regards neutrino astronomy).

Selected publications

"Neutron Well Logging - A New Geological Method Based on Nuclear Physics". Oil and Gas Journal 40: 32–33. 1941.
Pages in the Development of Neutrino Physics, Usp.Fiz.Nauk 141, 1983, 675 [English ed. Sov.Phys.Usp.26, 1983, 1087]
B. Pontecorvo,"Mesonium and anti-mesonium", Sov.Phys.JETP 6 429 (1957)

Bruno_Pontecorvo Bruno_Pontecorvo
 
Old May 2nd, 2011 #12
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

Krivitsky, Walter (1899-1941)



Soviet intelligence operative in Europe and defector. Born Samuel Gershevich Ginsberg in the Ternopol region of western Ukraine (then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire), Krivitsky joined the Communist Party in 1919 and later became a Captain of the GB. He studied at a gymnasium (high school) in Lviv. From 1918 to 1921, he worked as a Comintern “illegal” in Austria and Poland. From 1921 to 1931, he was an operative of the Soviet military intelligence (then the Fourth Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army, or GRU.) In 1923, he graduated from the Academy of the Red Army and was posted to Germany to take part in the organization of an agent network. From November 1925 to May 1926, he worked at the Moscow headquarters of Soviet military intelligence as a writer and mid-level operative. In 1926, Krivitsky was again posted to Germany, as an “illegal.” In later years, he was head of an intelligence school in Moscow and was awarded honorary weapons in 1928 and the Order of the Red Banner in 1931. That same year, Krivitsky changed his affiliation to the OGPU foreign intelligence. In this capacity, he worked as an “illegal” in Germany and other European countries. In April 1933, however, he was sent on a “long-term leave of absence.” In October 1935, Krivitsky was sent to Holland as head of an “illegal” residency of the OGPU foreign intelligence, with liaison functions in several other European countries.

In October 1937, Krivitsky defected in France, following the assassination of his friend and fellow operative Ignacii Poretsky (also known as Ignace Reiss) the previous month. Krivitsky sought political asylum in France and later in the United States. At the end of 1938, he sailed to the United States, where, with the assistance of a journalist named Isaac Don Levine, he produced a series of articles and a book, In Stalin’s Secret Service, published in 1939. That same year, he testified before the Dies Committee (later to become the House Un-American Activities Committee) and was debriefed by the Department of State. In January 1940, he sailed to Great Britain to be debriefed by the British Security Service, more commonly known as MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5), where he named more than 100 names as agents of Soviet intelligence. Krivitsky soon departed for Canada and returned to the United States later in the year.

On February 10, 1941, Krivitsky was found dead in the Bellevue Hotel in Washington, D.C. Although his death was officially declared a suicide, there were allegations that he might have been killed by the Soviets. However, no information was ever uncovered to prove these allegations. 1 The publication in 2009 of the notes on KGB foreign intelligence file taken in early 1990s by a former KGB officer and journalist Alexander Vassiliev, seems to have ended the decades-long controversy over Krivitsky’s mysterious death. According to Vassiliev’s excerpted notes on an April, 1941 report prepared at the NKVD foreign intelligence Moscow headquarters, an operation for the “Cultivation of ‘Enemy’ – the defector Krivitsky” – was over because “’Enemy’ took his own life.” [[2. State Security Sr. Lieutenant Butkov to the Chief of the 3rd Department of the 1st Directorate of the NKGB State Security Major Prudnikov, April 11, 1941, Alexander Vassiliev Black Notebook, p. 174, posted at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cf...up_id=511603]]

http://www.documentstalk.com/wp/kriv...ebruary-2-1941

jewish:

List_of_Ukrainian_Jews List_of_Ukrainian_Jews
 
Old May 2nd, 2011 #13
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

Underground Man: The Curious Case of Mark Zborowski and the Writing of a Modern Jewish Classic

by STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN

The most influential of all popular renderings of Eastern European Jewry in the English language and, arguably, the book that Jewish historians of the region loathe more than any other, is Life is with People. Few books written in the last half-century have more resolutely enveloped the Eastern European Jewish past in nostalgic amber. It was, to be sure, only one of a cascade of books, some of them translated from Yiddish, that sought to do much the same thing in the midst or the immediate wake of Hitler's war, among them Maurice Samuel's The World of Shalom Aleichem, Bella Chagall's memoir Burning Lights, Abraham Joshua Heschel's elegy The Earth is the Lord's, and Roman Vishniac's book of photographs Polish Jews. But Life is with People was the most ambitious of the lot. Published in 1952, it sought to capture an entire civilization from cradle to grave in 400-odd pages of accessible, even buoyant prose. The world it explored was, it insisted, continuous with—but also distinct from—everything around it, not quite part of Russia or Poland yet inside both, a kind of island of unadulterated Yiddishkayt before it was diluted, then destroyed.

The book—originally subtitled "The Jewish Little-Town in Eastern Europe" and altered once it appeared in paperback in the early 1960s to "The Culture of the Shtetl"—concentrates on the essence of this culture, which, as it sees it, was the "shtetl." Shtetl is Yiddish for small market-town, and Life is with People examines shtetls not in their considerable variety but as instances of a single ideal type presented in the present tense, as if it still existed.

The book's enduring appeal (it went through several editions, sold more than 100,000 copies, and is out of print now for the first time in almost 60 years) can probably be traced to its sweetness; its blend of collective genealogy and ethnographic Jewish lore. It is the rare commemoration that leaves the reader feeling good, even though the world it depicts has been obliterated. Its tone is conversational, and it takes the reader through the rhythms, the sounds of the Jewish week starting with the Sabbath, and on to schooldays, workdays (depicted, despite the pervasive poverty of Eastern European Jewry, mostly in cheery tones), marriages, circumcisions, and deaths. It is an ethnography that is also a "how-to" book ("Prayers are accompanied by a rocking movement, from the waist to the toes"), and yet one that understands how to satisfy its readers by doing little more than nudge them toward an unobtrusive voyeurism.

When Tevye sings the famous lines "If I were a rich man, I'd have the time I lack / To sit in the synagogue and pray / And maybe have a seat by the Eastern Wall," in Fiddler on the Roof, he is actually versifying a passage from the second chapter of Life is with People: "the men who sit along the Eastern Wall are pre-eminently the learned and the rabbi . . ." Later editions of the Schocken paperback featured a blurb from Fiddler's lyricist Sheldon Harnick. "Life Is with People told us about the life in Jewish villages as no other book." Indeed, Schocken also marketed it as part of a box-set of a half-dozen books that were necessary reading for every literate Jew. Bernard Malamud consulted the book when he was writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1967 novel about a blood libel case in Tsarist Russia, The Fixer.

The study that culminated in Life is with People was part of the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures project, headed up by the two leading cultural anthropologists of the period, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and funded, oddly enough, by the Office of Naval Research. But its co-author and central intellectual figure was Mark Zborowski. Mead appears to have thought of Zborowski as the perfect insider-outsider: someone "who combined . . . the living experience of shtetl culture . . . and the disciplines of history and anthropology." The book, she added in the Preface, was "the realization of a plan [he had] cherished for many years." This was true, or almost true, but it also omitted a great deal, most of which Mead didn't know. Zborowski was not really from a shtetl but from Uman, a Ukranian town of 28,000, and though he might, conceivably, have cherished the idea of writing an ethnology of Eastern European Jewry, it was not a culture that he himself held dear. In fact, he had been estranged from it since adolescence, and his most significant professional experience was not as an anthropologist (he never really received a doctorate, as he sometimes claimed, from the Sorbonne), but as a Soviet spy.

Zborowski, whose GPU codenames included Mack, Max, Tulip, Kant, and Etienne, infiltrated the Trotskyist circle in Paris in the 1930s, and—though he probably never murdered anyone personally—several of his anti-Stalinist acquaintances died sudden, violent, and mysterious deaths. Indeed, when Zborowoski's work was done in Paris and Leon Trotsky's son, Lev, along with many others, was dead, his GPU handlers tried to get him to Trotsky's lair in Coyoacan, Mexico in order "to get to the OLD MAN." Zborowski, however, appears to have preferred to continue his anthropological studies at the Sorbonne, and contrived to remain in Paris. In Richard Lourie's 1999 The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A Novel, Stalin muses about his gratitude to Zborowski whose reports, he says, are "concise, to the point without a wasted word." In the 1956 Senate subcommittee hearing which would eventually lead to his conviction and imprisonment for perjury, Zborowski acknowledged that he was aware that Stalin took special interest in his work: "I heard about it, yes," he admitted, laconically.

What, if anything, does Zborowski's biography imply with regard to how one now reads his reassuring account of the Jewish past in Life is with People? True, books should not be conflated with the biographies of their authors, and it would be a mistake simply to collapse the activities of Zborowski as spy and anthropologist, even if their skill-sets overlap. Nonetheless, it remains striking how similar his "field-reports" to both Stalin and Trotsky (often giving drastically different accounts of the very same events) are in texture to his ethnographic work on the shtetl.

Scholars, most prominently anthropologist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, have written insightfully about the evolution of Life is with People, its ethnographic failures and its place in mid-century American anthropology. But when the book is reread with an eye fixed on Zborowski's own life, it emerges as a different, more intriguing text, a work infused with not inconsiderable feeling and occasionally startling insight, indeed with insights that cut against the grain of the book.

Much of Zborowski's life was conducted behind curtains. Yet, it can now be described in some detail, despite major gaps, because of newly accessible Russian sources, declassified FBI data, and Margaret Mead's papers, housed in the Library of Congress. Mead's project, Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures, was launched in 1946 to examine cultures touched, in one way or another, by the Second World War (Russian, Polish, Czech, Chinese, Japanese, and so on). Jews were added to the mix rather late, and the transcripts of the researchers' meetings on the "Jewish Book" involve leading anthropologists, including Mead, Conrad Arensberg, and Ruth Landes, and offer a vivid glimpse into Zborowski's central role in the project.

Unsurprisingly, Zborowski was not given to self-revelation. But amidst the huge body of material about Jews collected for Mead's project—more than 100 transcripts of interviews with Eastern European Jews, summaries of memoirs and works of Yiddish literature, translated bits and pieces from contemporaneous memorial books (yizker bikher) published by survivors, meticulously sketched maps of towns, transcripts of jokes, depictions of local deviants, saints, and others—is an interview with Zborowski about his childhood and youth that is probably the most honest statement he ever recorded. He provided the information in 1947, just before anti-communism surfaced as a major post-war preoccupation, two years after his espionage work had ended, and almost a decade before he was unmasked. He seems to have felt safer from detection, freer to talk, than ever before or afterwards.

His childhood, as he tells it, was spent in Uman, where he was born in 1908, and which he insisted on calling a shtetl. His family was solidly middle-class, (wealthy by Bolshevik standards, as he later put it), and he was the youngest of seven siblings. His father was a shopkeeper, a mildly devout Hasid who was nonetheless open to reading modern literature, in which his mother also indulged. Still, this wasn't an intellectually flexible or free-spirited home. Zborowski's recollections range from cool to hostile. He recalls little about his siblings except for the fights he had with them. As the youngest, he had no room, or even bed, of his own, and had to "wander around" nightly in search of a place to sleep.

One of his most vivid boyhood memories is of harassing the local Bratslav Hasidim, known as the "Dead Hasidim" due to their refusal to select a successor to their founding leader, Rabbi Nachman, who had died in Uman a century earlier. The Bratslavers were ecstatic even by hasidic standards and known to attract the poorest and most marginal members of Jewish society. "We boys were standing in the doors and windows of the [synagogue], pulling them by their clothes, spitting in their faces, and throwing stones and dirt, while they were dancing and singing their prayers."

After the revolution, Zborowski volunteered at a communist library, and when his father learned of his work, he beat him with his mother watching closely, insisting only that he not be hit on the head. Of Sabbath and festivals—the subject of glowing depictions in Life is with People ("Sabbath brings joy of the future into the shtetl. . . . On no point is there more unanimity . . .")—he describes only countless, oppressive rules, and warnings that "if we weren't good we would be torn to pieces by the devil."

At fourteen, Zborowski left the Soviet Union with his family for Poland, first Lvov, then Lodz, where it is unclear how his father earned a living. "Before, he was a very important member of the community. Then, they took his store, they took everything away. They took his honor. After that, he stopped paying attention to me." At least part of what Zborowski meant was that his father gave up monitoring his son's behavior. He remembers himself as a radical young adolescent walking around Uman with grenades in his pockets.

Zborowski's recollections of the revolution and its aftermath are permeated with loss: "In my case, everything was undermined." With the disappearance of his father's money, the "foundations" of their life as a family were gone. Zborowski insists that the reason for his father's fury over his communist activity—the beating over his library work was the worst he'd ever undergone—was because of the cost to his communal stature. Elsewhere in the transcripts, Zborowski muses, "My parents despised people who cursed. They called them ‘proste [Y]idn,' crass Jews." No beliefs, certainly not those picked up from Marxism, weighed quite so heavily on Zborowski as did his preoccupation with the gap separating high-class sheyne Yidn, from such lower-class Jews.

Zborowski left Poland for France in 1928, probably to avoid imprisonment. He and his wife, Regina, were already married and both were communists. However, he later told friends, it was only in Grenoble, where he was working his way through university as a busboy, that he came to understand Marxism. He was stunned at the indifference of bourgeois women at his hotel who "looked right passed him," not even bothering to cover themselves when he delivered breakfast to their rooms. He was approached by a Soviet agent staying at the hotel who pushed the right buttons. The recruiting agent dangled the possibility of tuition-free study in Russia, and told him that reparation would be easier if he cleansed himself of his bourgeois taint as the son of a storeowner by monitoring the activities of anti-Soviet Trotskyists. In 1933, he moved to Paris and was so successful that plans to return to Russia were put aside.

To most of his new Trotskyist comrades—the group was small, factionalized, and hungry for new members—he seemed unimpressive, little more than a willing volunteer at its Parisian library. "Colorless . . . rather like a mouse" and "not conspicuous in any way . . . There was nothing you could grapple with, except for his insignificance." Such comments were typical, while others (like the characterization of him by one leading member of the group as "that dirty, Polish Jew") were more vicious. However, he contrived to bump into Lev Sedov, Trotsky's son and the movement's European head, in a hallway at the Sorbonne, and befriend him. Soon he was adopted as Sedov's right-hand man, working with him almost daily as an unpaid, all-but full-time assistant. The movement had few native Russians (most had been jailed, or silenced by Stalin), and Zborowski showed himself willing to perform any chore, however trivial, in a group where nearly everyone argued about quite nearly everything. (Sedov's own wife belonged to a different faction from that of her husband.)

When questioned at a Senate subcommittee hearing as to whether or not he "was given an assignment to lure [Sedov to] . . . where Soviet agents would assassinate him," Zborowski admitted that "At a very later time, I was given such an assignment," but added that he failed to carry it out. Crucial to his easy access to Sedov was his capacity to remain obscure, an uncharacteristically mild, acquiescent Trotskyist. So invisible was he that when Victor Serge—a large-hearted, generous man close to the Trotskyists—speaks in his memoirs, which appeared before Zborowski was unmasked, of experiences they had together, he doesn't bother mentioning his name.

The story of his relationship with Sedov is chilling. For some three years, Zborowski rendered himself indispensable, and although he was suspected of being a spy, nearly everyone in this circle was accused of sedition at one time or another. There was certainly mounting evidence that some member of the inner circle was a mole. Trotsky's papers were stolen. Then, one after another of the communists prepared to go over to Trotsky's side was murdered: one beheaded, another shot, the body of an activist was found floating in the Seine. Ignace Reiss, who had run the network of Soviet spies in Europe and then decided to defect to the Trotskyists, was found dead, his body riddled with bullets on a Swiss road outside Lausanne. In his Senate testimony, Zborowski admitted engineering the theft of Trotsky's papers and informing the Soviets about the whereabouts of several of these men, but denied complicity in the killings. (He insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that he hadn't informed on Reiss.)

Soon after these deaths, Sedov took suddenly ill. He was hospitalized and died shortly thereafter at the age of 31. There were rumors of a poisoned orange, but nothing was ever proven. It is certainly the case that Zborowski had found him a Russian-run, almost certainly Soviet-infiltrated hospital, and informed his Soviet handlers of the location while hiding it from his fellow Trotskyists. Trotsky was warned in an anonymous letter from a former spy that a Jew named Mark with excellent Russian and a young family (Zborowski sometimes brought his son George with him to his clandestine meetings) had infiltrated his Paris headquarters and was responsible for its decimation. Moreover, the letter-writer warned, Trotsky himself was to be this Mark's next victim. Trotsky dismissed the note as Stalinist meddling. In fact, the letter was written by Alexander Orlov, a GPU agent who had helped recruit the infamous Cambridge spies, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess, but was now on the run from Stalin, and the letter appears to have been sincere.

Despite these rumors and with Sedov gone, Zborowski's star in the now-decimated movement began to rise. At the inaugural meeting of the Fourth International, held outside Paris in 1938, he was elected a member of its Central Committee, and its only Russian representative (Trotsky couldn't attend). It was there that he might have introduced a New York comrade, Sylvia Ageloff, to Jacques Mornard, alias Ramon Mercader, who used his relationship with Ageloff to get access to Trotsky and kill him two years later.

Soon afterwards, Europe was torn asunder. Zborowski and his wife managed to escape to the United States in 1941, with the help of one of Zborowski's few remaining Trotskyist friends, Lila Dallin, wife of David Dallin, a leading expert on Soviet espionage. Still a spy, Zborowski now reported on the anti-Soviet Russians he met at the Dallin's New York apartment. It was at the Dallin's that he managed to meet Victor Kravchenko—much as he had first managed to meet Sedov—and befriend him. Zborowski ended up helping Kravchenko edit his anti-Stalinist memoir, I Choose Freedom, all the while sending copies to Moscow, where Stalin himself annotated some of the pages.

Zborowski's first American job was at a factory but he was soon hired by Max Weinreich as a librarian at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and then brought under the benevolent wings of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Now he started to win grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, research stints at Cornell, Harvard, and the American Jewish Committee. He worked with Marshall Sklare, compiling a reader of Jewish ethnography, and they collaborated on the Riverton Study, a highly regarded examination of post-war American Jewish life. Norman Podhoretz recalls dining with him during this period of his life, shortly before news of his espionage surfaced, and he gave the impression of a man of confidence and self-assurance.

It was much the same self-assurance that he brought to Mead's project, where, from the start, he exerted a decisive influence. It was, in fact, Zborowski who had persuaded Benedict to add Jews as a subject. At their weekly meetings, usually held at Mead's Greenwich Village house, they sat for hours at a time patching together a consensual understanding of some of the most elusive features of Judaism. Few, except for Zborowski, had more than a sketchy knowledge of Jewish life. A notation at the close of the session held on December 7, 1947 reads, "A discussion then ensued concerning ‘authority' [in Jewish communal life] and . . . whether or not it meant respect or fear. The general consensus . . . was that it was respect, rather than fear." By mid-1949, support from the Navy had dried up and the group was still unclear about how to construct the book's argument. "I just don't trust our impressions give a valid picture," stated Elizabeth Herzog, who would become Zborowski's co-author, at a meeting in mid-1949. Half-jokingly, Herzog proposed that the book be entitled "Now I Understand My Mother."

Confusion remained as to how to weigh the significance of modern versus traditional trends, or whether to discuss the many dozens of towns and cities mentioned in the interviews they'd conducted. By the late 19th-century, Jews in the region were increasingly clustered in large cities like Warsaw, Kiev, Minsk, and Odessa, or middle-sized towns, like Zborowski's Uman, as well as shtetls. It was Zborowski who put an end to this confusion by imposing a definitive, if spurious, structure on their study. This was done most decisively in an otherwise rambling session in the summer of 1949, devoted, as it happens, mostly to prostitution, which unsurprisingly did not make its way into the book. ("Did prostitutes," asked someone, "observe ritual rites [and go] to the mikvah?") The following exchange would set the book on its course:

Mark Zborowski: I vaguely remember streets reserved for Jewish prostitutes and
others for non-Jewish prostitutes in Lemberg.
Ruth Landes: But Lemberg is not a shtetl.
Naomi Chaitman: Yes.
Natalie F. Joffe: In Chortkov.
Margaret Mead: How big is Chortkov?
Zborowski: Population of about 15,000.
Mead: That's a city!
Zborowski: The shtetl can be any size, if it's big there can be sub-groups. But there
is only the Jewish community. It's not a place, it's a state of mind. The problem of size
s so different. You can't use words ‘smaller' and ‘bigger.'
Joffe: It's interesting how informants time and again talk about the shtetl.
Elizabeth Herzog: Did people living there call it a ‘shtetl'?
Zborowski: No, ‘shtot.' But the esprit was shtetl and the organization was shtetl. It's not size at all.

Chortkov was, in fact, much smaller than Zborowski said it was. He often spoke at the meetings with more authority than knowledge. (Scholarly reviews of Life is with People would later note many such errors, some of them howlers.)

Still, Zborowski exerted decisive influence on all aspects of the book, none more than on its emphasis on social status. On rereading Life is with People, it is striking how pivotal this theme is to its portrait of Jewish life. Social stratification is, of course, a central theme in the social sciences, but it was Zborowski who thrust the issue into the heart of the group's deliberations with an interest that seemed anything but dispassionate. At nearly every meeting of the group there was close analysis of the impact on religious and cultural life of "sheyne" and "proste" yidn. The index heading in Life is with People for "social stratification" lists sixteen subheadings, and the book lavishes no fewer than seven pages on who sits closest to the Eastern Wall in the synagogue (no wonder it was picked up on by the writers of Fiddler on the Roof).

Hence, we find close analysis of how sheyne yidn walk, pray, raise their voices, curse (they don't), divorce (not often), why they prefer commerce to manual labor, how they clean their homes. "To call a house ‘sheyn' means, not that its outward aspect is pleasing, but that the household is orderly, dignified, harmonious. . . . Obscene language, on the other hand, is referred to as ‘ugly' words." Status is born of a medley of factors that include money, of course, but also pedigree, learning, and comportment. Self-restraint is a commodity known best to the sheyne; the bad, unrestrained behavior of the proste can come perilously close to that of gentiles.

In the midst of this tepid, even cloying, book, then, is a surprisingly perceptive view of social gradations in Jewish culture, a difficult topic to pin-down yet one of critical importance, as one of the more original historians of Eastern European and American Jewish life has recently reminded us. Eli Lederhendler's new book, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism: From Caste to Class, makes a persuasive case for the impact of mounting uncertainty about social stratification as one of the community's most pressing, debilitating concerns. Its importance as an influence in the migration of millions of Jews from Eastern Europe has, as Lederhendler argues, been underestimated:

The social crisis in east European Jewry was the result of a protracted process going
back at least to the 1850s, and entailed a gradual weakening of economic and social
distinctions between petty trades and small artisans, and between artisans and laborers.
Simultaneously, there was a widening gap between a very small, favored minority at the
top and, below them, a population of several million of the underemployed, underfed, and
under-statused. If the last years of the nineteenth century seem qualitatively different from
what had come before, it is because of cumulative effects of decades of social dislocation
capped by newly imposed government restrictions . . . brought about the loss of class itself.

Lederhendler's insight is the product of hard historical labor, and keen analytical skill. Zborowski's insights were, it seems, mostly intuitive.

True, much of Life is with People is an exercise in avoidance in its portrait of a way of life that Zborowski knew to be darker and more complex than the bright, Chagall-like hues in which he painted it. The book's title is drawn from a chapter on the pleasures of community in a world where all knew everything about everyone else—"there are no secrets in the shtetl"—which was just the sort of place Zborowski would have deplored. Yet, embedded inside the book, too, is a story about class and status, sheyne and proste Yiden, that is probably as sincere as he would ever tell.

When Norman Podhoretz first heard that Zborowski was a spy he dismissed it as nonsense because at their meal Zborowski sounded like a Stalinist. Why, he asked himself, would he express such views openly if he was a spy? Disentangling truth from falsehood in the life of someone like Zborowski can never be done with anything close to certainty. His espionage career became known only because of the testimony of Alexander Orlov—the same informant who had contacted Trotsky years earlier. At first, Zborowski denied the charges, but once he learned of the evidence against him he admitted only to what the government already knew. He lied under oath before a Senate subcommittee, saying that his spying had come to an end in 1937—long before he came to the States. Later he claimed he couldn't recognize a Soviet agent with whom he met at least fifty times because he was, as Zborowski put it, "too insignificant" to remember. He lied to Margaret Mead, a stalwart friend to the end, telling her he was forced to work for the Soviets because they threatened his Russian relatives. Years later, Mead's daughter, Catherine Bateson, repeated the same story to me, which she had continued to believe. Much of the anthropological community supported him. One prominent anthropologist confronted Ignace Reiss' wife at one of Zborowski's trials and declared piously to her, "In this country we are against human sacrifice." (Reiss was the would-be GPU defector who was gunned down on a country road outside Lausanne in 1937.) Charged with perjury, Zborowski was eventually convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, in 1963. He was released after less than two for good behavior.

Soon after his release from Danbury prison in 1965, Mark Zborowski had already become a figure to be reckoned with in San Francisco's eager, messy world of experimental medicine, a patchwork of clinics and institutes marked by vast aspiration, and spotty oversight. Especially then, San Francisco was a place for new beginnings. Zborowski, Sorbonne-trained, a friend of the fabled anthropologist Margaret Mead, and the author of the by-then standard work on Eastern European Jewish life, stood out as a man of solidity and learning, a well-credentialed European refugee. With Mead's support, he had been hired as a medical anthropologist by Mt. Zion Hospital, a well-regarded private institution in the city's Fillmore district. Eventually, he became the co-director of its new Pain Center and wrote a book entitled People in Pain, a study of the intersection of medicine and culture in the lives of patients from different ethnic backgrounds (its chapter on Jews describes a people with unquenchable passion for complaint). The book solidified his clinical standing despite reviews, which ranged from equivocal to awful.

Zborowski remained something of an exotic, cosmopolitan presence: his Russian accent retained its thickness, he smoked incessantly, starting a new cigarette before the old one burned out, and nearly every evening he and Regina would begin their scotch. Although his son George had moved to Israel as an adult, he rarely visited him, complaining that the cuisine was terrible and that it was impossible to find a good drink. He tended to be known affectionately but also distantly as Dr. Z, and left the inaccurate impression that he had earned a doctorate in France. He and Regina resisted putting down permanent roots, rented and never bought, describing themselves as "Wandering Jews" though they lived in San Francisco for the last two and a half decades of their lives.

A graduate student who had worked closely with him, Kitty Corbett, now an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University, told me of a conversation they had late in his life and after she'd learned that he quit smoking. She asked if this was hard, given the extent of his habit. Zborowski replied that his doctor had ordered him to do so because of heart problems and he had stopped the same day. She prodded him a bit more—hadn't it been difficult? He stared at her with the searching, fierce look he adopted when forced to say more about himself than he cared to reveal and then answered, "I have a self-image as a hero. And with a self-image as a hero, you can do what you do, and you never look back. You just move forward."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven J. Zipperstein is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. His most recent book is Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (Yale University Press), and he is at work on a cultural history of Russian Jewry in the 19th- and 20th-centuries.

http://www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/p...jewish-classic
 
Old May 3rd, 2011 #14
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default


Morton Sobell (left) at a visit in East Germany in 1976

Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits to Soviet Spying

By SAM ROBERTS
Published: September 11, 2008

In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, traveled to Cuba and Vietnam after his release in 1969 and became an advocate for progressive causes.

Through it all, he maintained his innocence.

But on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself, shedding new light on a case that still fans smoldering political passions. In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy.

And he implicated his fellow defendant Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.

In the interview with The New York Times, Mr. Sobell, who lives in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, was asked whether, as an electrical engineer, he turned over military secrets to the Soviets during World War II when they were considered allies of the United States and were bearing the brunt of Nazi brutality. Was he, in fact, a spy?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he replied. “I never thought of it as that in those terms.”

Mr. Sobell also concurred in what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband, was aware of Julius’s espionage, but did not actively participate. “She knew what he was doing,” he said, “but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.”

Mr. Sobell made his revelations on Thursday as the National Archives, in response to a lawsuit from the nonprofit National Security Archive, historians and journalists, released most of the grand jury testimony in the espionage conspiracy case against him and the Rosenbergs.

Coupled with some of that grand jury testimony, Mr. Sobell’s admission bolsters what has become a widely held view among scholars: that Mr. Rosenberg was, indeed, guilty of spying, but that his wife was at most a bit player in the conspiracy and may have been framed by complicit prosecutors.

The revelations on Thursday “teach us what people will do to get a conviction,” said Bruce Craig, a historian and the former director of the National Coalition for History, a nonprofit educational organization. “They took somebody who they basically felt was guilty and by hook or crook they were going to get a jury to find him guilty.”

The Rosenbergs’ younger son, Robert Meeropol, described Mr. Sobell’s confession Thursday as “powerful,” but said he wanted to hear it firsthand. “I’ve always said that was a possibility,” Mr. Meeropol said, referring to the question of his father’s guilt. “This is certainly evidence that would corroborate that possibility as a reality.”

In the interview, Mr. Sobell drew a distinction between atomic espionage and the details of radar and artillery devices that he said he stole for the Russians. “What I did was simply defensive, an aircraft gun,” he said. “This was defensive. You cannot plead that what you did was only defensive stuff, but there’s a big difference between giving that and stuff that could be used to attack our country.”

(One device mentioned specifically by Mr. Sobell, however, the SCR 584 radar, is believed by military experts to have been used against American aircraft in Korea and Vietnam.)

Echoing a consensus among scientists, Mr. Sobell also maintained that the sketches and other atomic bomb details that the government said were passed along to Julius Rosenberg by Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, were of little value to the Soviets, except to corroborate what they had already gleaned from other moles. Mr. Greenglass was an Army machinist at Los Alamos, N.M., where the weapon was being built.

“What he gave them was junk,” Mr. Sobell said of Julius Rosenberg, his classmate at City College of New York in the 1930s.

The charge was conspiracy, though, which meant that the government had to prove only that the Rosenbergs were intent on delivering military secrets to a foreign power. “His intentions might have been to be a spy,” Mr. Sobell added.

After David Greenglass was arrested, Mr. Sobell fled to Mexico and lived under false names until he was captured — kidnapped, he maintained — and returned to the United States in August 1950. He said he was innocent, but his lawyer advised him not to testify at his trial. He was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment and was released in 1969. The Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1953 after President Dwight D. Eisenhower turned down an appeal for clemency.

In an interview for a 2001 book by this reporter, “The Brother,” Mr. Greenglass acknowledged that he had lied when he testified that his sister had typed his notes about the bomb — the single most incriminating evidence against her. His allegation emerged months after Mr. Greenglass and his wife testified before the grand jury and only weeks before the 1951 trial.

Government prosecutors later acknowledged that they had hoped that a conviction and the possibility of a death sentence against Ethel Rosenberg would persuade her husband to confess and implicate others, including some agents known to investigators through secretly intercepted Soviet cables.

That strategy failed, said William P. Rogers, who was the deputy attorney general at the time. “She called our bluff,” he said in “The Brother.”

The grand jury testimony released on Thursday by the National Archives appeared to poke even more holes in the case against Ethel Rosenberg, who was 34 and the mother of two young sons when she appeared before the grand jury and was arrested on the courthouse steps after her testimony.

Bowing to David Greenglass’s objections, a federal judge declined to release his testimony. But the transcripts released on Thursday reveal that his wife, Ruth, in her grand jury appearance, never mentioned typing by Ethel Rosenberg, said she transcribed Mr. Greenglass’s notes in longhand on at least one occasion herself and placed Ethel Rosenberg out of earshot during several important conversations.

“It means the grand jury testimony by Ruth Greenglass directly contradicts the charge against Ethel Rosenberg that put her in the electric chair,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group based at George Washington University that challenges government secrecy.

Ronald Radosh, a scholar of the case and a plaintiff in the suit to release the grand jury minutes, said the testimony “confirms what we always suspected, that they manufactured the typing story at the last minute.”

Still, the grand jury transcripts indicate that Mrs. Rosenberg was aware of the conspiracy. Spying was broached the first time by her husband in 1944 at the Rosenbergs’ Knickerbocker Village apartment in Lower Manhattan, Mrs. Greenglass testified. “I was horrified,” she said, but added that Mrs. Rosenberg “urged me to talk to David. She felt that even if I was against it, I should at least discuss it with him and hear what he had to say.”

Mrs. Greenglass, who died earlier this year, said her sister-in-law also was in the kitchen when Julius bisected the side of a Jell-O box that a courier would use as a signal to retrieve atomic secrets from David Greenglass.

But David C. Vladeck, the lawyer who argued for the grand jury transcripts to be released, said they had inconsistencies with the trial testimony that might have been used to undermine prosecution witnesses.

“Imagine if the Rosenbergs had a good lawyer,” he said.

Among other things, Harry Gold, a confessed courier for the spy ring, told the grand jury that “everything I have done for the past 15 years, practically all of my adult life, was based on lies and deceptions.” He said he had met Julius Rosenberg, which contradicted his other accounts. And he does not invoke before the grand jury the damning password, “I come from Julius,” that he mentioned during the trial.

The nearly 1,000 pages of grand jury transcripts are peppered with aggressive, sometimes belligerent jousting by prosecutors with witnesses, insights into how they defended themselves, and factoids that aficionados of the case are likely to parse for years.

James Kilsheimer, the only surviving prosecutor of the Rosenberg-Sobell case, said on Thursday, “We always thought Sobell was guilty, and we knew that Julius was.” He said that the trial testimony about Ethel’s typing was not inconsistent with what Ruth Greenglass told the grand jury but was developed by him “during the pretrial process.”

Mr. Sobell, who was never implicated in atomic espionage, has been ailing, but says his long-term memory is sound. He was interviewed a number of times over the summer by Walter and Miriam Schneir, who wrote a damning indictment of the Rosenberg prosecution years ago, but who, on the basis of decoded Soviet cables and other information, have since reconsidered their verdict that Julius was completely innocent. In those interviews, Mr. Sobell has implicated himself in espionage.

“Do I believe Morty? Yes,” Mr. Schneir, who is writing a magazine article about Mr. Sobell, said on Thursday. “The details that he’s given us so far we’ve been able to check the peripheral parts, and they check out.”

Most of the protagonists in the case, Mr. Sobell included, were committed Communists at the time they spied for the Soviets. “Now, I know it was an illusion,” Mr. Sobell said. “I was taken in.”

Robert Meeropol, the Rosenbergs’ son, said that even if he were to accept Mr. Sobell’s verdict, “It’s not the end of what happened to my mother and it’s not the end of understanding what happened to due process.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/ny...pagewanted=all

Morton Sobell

Morton Sobell (born April 11, 1917) is a former spy for the Soviet Union. Sobell was an American engineer working for General Electric and Reeves Electronics on military and government contracts. He was found guilty of spying for the Soviets (along with Julius Rosenberg at his 1951 espionage trial), and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was released in 1969 after spending 17 years and 9 months in Alcatraz and other high security prisons.

After proclaiming his innocence for over half a century, Sobell admitted spying for the Soviets, and implicated Julius Rosenberg, in an interview with the New York Times published on September 11, 2008.[1]

Biography

Morton Sobell was born into a Jewish family in New York City. He attended the City College of New York where he received a degree in engineering[2] and later married Helen Levitov (1918–2002).[3] He worked in Washington, D.C. for the Navy Bureau of Ordnance and in Schenectady, New York, for the General Electric Company.

After being accused of espionage, he and his family fled to Mexico on June 22, 1950. He fled with his wife Helen, infant son Mark Sobell, and Helen's daughter from her previous marriage, Sydney. Sobell tried to travel to Europe, but without proper papers he was not able to leave. On August 16, 1950, Sobell and his family were abducted by armed men, taken to the United States border and turned over to the FBI.[3] The FBI arrested him for conspiring with Julius Rosenberg to violate espionage laws. He was found guilty along with the Rosenbergs, and sentenced to 30 years. He was initially sent to Alcatraz, until the prison closed in 1963. He was released in 1969 after serving 17 years and 9 months.[4]

Sobell as a political cause

Sobell's supposed innocence became a cause among progressive intellectuals who organized a Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell.[5][6][7] In 1978 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting produced a television special maintaining Sobell's innocence.[8] The Monthly Review maintained that the government had presented "absolutely no proof" of Sobell's guilt, but had tried him merely "to give the impression that an extensive spy ring had been in operation."[9] Bertrand Russell campaigned to overturn Sobell's conviction saying that his prison sentence was a grave miscarriage of justice against an innocent man.[10][11]

In 1974 Sobell published a book, On Doing Time in which he maintained that he was innocent and that his conviction was a case of justice being subverted to serve political goals.[12][13] After his release from prison, Sobell went on the speaker circuit, regaling audiences with his account of being falsely prosecuted and convicted by the federal government.[14]

In September 2008, at age 91, he told The New York Times that he did turn over non-nuclear military secrets to the Soviets during World War II. This was the first time he publicly admitted guilt.[15]

Morton_Sobell Morton_Sobell
 
Old May 3rd, 2011 #15
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

A Virtual Spy : DOSSIER: The Secret History of Armand Hammer. By Edward J. Epstein (Random House: $30, 418 pp.)

October 27, 1996|BILL BOYARSKY | Bill Boyarsky is a Times columnist and author of two biographies of Ronald Reagan published by Random House

Nowhere in America are life and artifice intertwined as they are in Los Angeles. Wealth--and the ostentatious spending of it--assure entree into a transient high society created by early 20th century economic pirates and now dominated by Hollywood. Our history is marked by stories of the newly rich who quickly rose to political and economic power, then ended up in prison. When Dr. Armand Hammer moved here in the '50s, marrying his third wife, Frances, and moving into her Holmby Hills home, upper-crust Angelenos didn't look beyond the color of his money and his tall tales. Even though he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for his part in the Watergate scandal for illegally contributing $54,000 to Richard M. Nixon's political funds, his influence continued to grow.

Armand Hammer and Los Angeles were a perfect match. For money and smooth talk are the passports to this city, a place, like the old frontier, where the newly rich discard their old lives and reinvent themselves.

In "Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer," Edward Jay Epstein's fascinating, painstakingly researched book, Hammer's old life is revealed in fascinating detail, exposing him as the liar and conniver that he was.

Among Epstein's more shocking revelations is that Hammer acted as a virtual spy for the Soviet Union, a conduit for money that financed Communist espionage operations. This will no doubt come as a shock to the Angeleno pooh-bahs--some of them rock-ribbed, Joe McCarthy-loving right wingers--who bowed and scraped before Hammer, hoping for an invitation or, more likely, a donation to a favorite cause.

The whole story is laid out in "Dossier." Epstein's sources are rock solid: the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Trade; a top official's report to Lenin; the archives of the Comintern, the Kremlin organization in charge of the international communist conspiracy; various American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which kept Hammer and his family under surveillance from the early part of the century until almost up to his death in 1990.

From these sources, Epstein discovered that in 1921 the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, gave Hammer "$75,000 to secretly take back with him to New York. This money, which would be the equivalent of $600,000 today, was to be distributed to underground agents of the Comintern. . . . [Hammer] departed Russia with a new burden of secrets--his commitment to using his family's company to help finance Soviet espionage in America."

When I used to write about Occidental Petroleum Corp., I always figured Hammer, who headed the international oil company, was some kind of a Soviet spy.

It was an improbable theory. Hammer was the leading light of the stuffy conservative Los Angeles cultural and philanthropic scene. I remember interviewing him when he was trying to drill for oil off Pacific Palisades, a project violently opposed by residents, environmentalists and just about everyone who enjoyed the beach. So desperate was he for favorable publicity that he even consented to talk to me, a reporter from City Hall. I found him to be a crafty old charmer who reminisced entertainingly about his friendship with Lenin and other leaders of what then-President Ronald Reagan termed the "evil empire."

The Lenin connection made me suspicious, as did Doc Hammer's past. His father was an old Bolshevik who had come to the United States from his native Russia. Armand Hammer was feted whenever he visited Moscow. He was even tight with the Stalin crowd, the evil empire's most evil rulers. The Russians cut him in on big business deals. What explanation was there except that Hammer was playing for the other team?

From that connection flowed other business deals, some profitable for Hammer, others not, but all of them of great use to the Soviet Union. When workers at Hammer's Russian asbestos mine went on strike in 1922 over poor working conditions, he called in the Cheka, which suppressed the strike. When a railroad station boss demanded a bribe to move food to the mine, the Cheka stepped in again and, as Hammer liked to boast, the station commandant was shot.

His relationship with the Soviet secret police is just one--and for me the most interesting--revelation in a book that is a model of biographical research. Sometimes, "Dossier" is overweight with detail, but that can't be avoided. Hammer's life was built on layers of deceit, and Epstein uncovers them, one by one. When finished, he has provided a painful look at the corruptibility of government and the gullibility of the business, economic and social elite.

Deception came easy to Hammer, Epstein reveals, and there were so many lies they can't be listed in the space allocated to this review. But I have some favorites:

* Hammer insisted that his mistress, the art consultant to the Armand Hammer Foundation, change her name, appearance and voice so that Hammer's wife, Frances, who was suspicious of the relationship, would not recognize her.

* Although Hammer, who studied at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons as a youth, reveled in the title of doctor, he left unsaid the fact that a woman died after he performed an illegal abortion on her in 1919. His father, in whose office Hammer was working, took the fall for him and went to prison.

* Hammer was Jewish but denied his heritage most of his life. Dealing with the Soviets, he was an atheist. When developing oil fields in Muslim Libya, he was a Unitarian. Only when death neared did Hammer return to Judaism and, in fact, schedule a lavish bar mitzvah ceremony, but he died before it took place.

* The doctor portrayed himself as a great art connoisseur and financed the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Westwood to house his art collection. But Epstein reveals Hammer's "cynical manipulation of the authenticity of works of arts," including the faking of supposed originals from the Faberge workshops in Russia. "To him," writes Epstein, "collecting was a confidence game in which he supplied the necessary authentication, which took the form of a label, genuine or fake."

Hammer loved talking about himself as an international businessman, above politics. When I interviewed him about his Palisades drilling scheme, he spoke in sweeping terms of the global oil shortage. What I didn't know but learned from reading Epstein's book was that the FBI was investigating Hammer at the time for engaging in "a conspiracy to bribe members of the Los Angeles City Council" to support drilling. The investigators, however, couldn't dig up enough evidence to present the case to the grand jury.

Above politics? Hammer was a master manipulator of politicians. Albert Gore Sr., father of the vice president, was made a partner in a Hammer cattle-breeding business while in the House of Representatives and "made a substantial profit," Epstein writes. He tells how the senior Gore went to work for Occidental Petroleum when he left the Senate after a congressional career marked by several helpful moves on behalf of Hammer.

Another helper was Rep. Jimmy Roosevelt (D-California). Hammer was a silent partner in Roosevelt's insurance business, Epstein said, and he offered to steer corporate business Roosevelt's way. But all this was subtle compared to what Hammer did overseas, bribing his way into the Libyan oil concessions that vaulted Occidental into the big time of the international oil trade and, possibly, giving payoffs to some of his Russian pals, according to Epstein.

Master spies have master cover stories, and Hammer's was the best. He hired journalists, including the legendary Walter Duranty of the New York Times and Bob Considine of Hearst, to write puff biographies. Occidental's public relations department sent the books to journalists who were writing about Hammer, Epstein reveals, and "his assertions thus passed into the clip files and archives of credible publications and, through repetition, attained the status of quasi-fact. Eventually, life, as it often does, imitated artifice. As people came to believe the Hammer legend, they treated the man with deference and sought his favor."

Probably nowhere was Hammer treated with more deference than in Los Angeles. All the rich and powerful, the politicians and cultural leaders and the rest who humbled themselves before him should read this book. They will learn an old frontier lesson that I am sure Hammer knew: Beware of smooth-talking strangers, flashing big bills and promising wonderful gifts.

http://articles.latimes.com/print/19..._armand-hammer
 
Old January 15th, 2012 #16
SlagMaster
Senior Member
 
SlagMaster's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Posts: 1,081
Default

Jew behavior must be rationalized within the reality and limits of their
attributes of existence.
Jews have no country that is earned as their own, they are truly the
vagabonds of a innately parasitic collection. They have no national
alliance or patriotism to a nation, all in The Jews path is analogized as
germ nutrient. The Jew is incapable of shame or fortitude, you are
dealing with a collective network of wealth hungry insects.
 
Old January 15th, 2012 #17
Donald E. Pauly
Banned
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Las Vegas
Posts: 4,130
Smile Disk Size Warning

This thread is going to be a big one. Are we sure that the VNN hard drive can hold the data? I expect to see [out of memory] error.
 
Old January 24th, 2012 #18
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

Lost in the gulag

A new book uncovers the fate of a forgotten American who spied, and died, for Stalin

By Ann Blackman
August 10, 2008

The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service
By Andrew Meier
Norton, 402 pp., illustrated, $25.95

On a snowy night in Moscow in February 1939, three men wearing badges that identified them as members of Josef Stalin's secret police walked through the double doors of the Moskva Hotel, overlooking Red Square, took an elevator to the top floor, and knocked on a door. They knew that the man they had come for carried a Czech passport - fabricated for him by someone in their organization - and that he spoke fluent French and German, though little Russian. They also knew the name on his passport was an alias.

The man's real name was Isaiah Oggins, and he was one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviet Union. Born in 1898 to a family of Russian Jews who had immigrated to New York from Lithuania, Cy Oggins, as he called himself, spent more than a decade gathering intelligence for the Soviets across three continents, North America, Europe, and Asia. He was arrested as part of Stalin's paranoid purge of suspected anti-Stalinists and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp in Siberia. In 1947, when his sentence was up and the United States was seeking his return, Stalin ordered Oggins put to death.

In a new book, "The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service," journalist Andrew Meier tells the tragic tale of this brilliant and idealistic Columbia University graduate, a Jewish intellectual who felt ostracized by the Ivy League's WASP world and sought solace with young Communists in New York City. With them, he dreamed of a "world revolution" that would spread from the Soviet Union through Europe to the United States. Oggins and his wife, a radical Soviet emigrée named Nerma Berman, ran a safe house in Berlin for Soviet agents and spied on the Romanovs in Paris and the Japanese in Manchuria. "He envisioned a utopia on earth," Meier writes, "a realm of harmony and justice, not a world ruled, as he and his comrades saw it, by the lust for profit and violence. He imagined himself an American Robin Hood among the Bolsheviks, and he risked all for the good fight."

Oggins's story was barely a footnote in the history of the Cold War until Boris Yeltsin handed his censored dossier to US diplomats in September 1992. Yeltsin explained that although Oggins had been found innocent of charges trumped up against him, he had been "liquidated" because Stalin feared that if the spy were repatriated to the United States, as the US government had requested, he would spill Soviet secrets about the gulag and perhaps name other spies. "The Kremlin had spy networks - in America, Europe and Asia - to protect," Meier writes. Yeltsin, then the first president of a democratic Russia, wanted a case he could show his new friends in America to demonstrate he was determined to air past sins of the Communist Party.

Meier, a former Time correspondent in Moscow, spent six years digging through FBI and KGB archives to piece together the puzzle of Oggins's life. He describes a bright young man growing up in the early 1900s in Willimantic, Conn., a New England mill town rocked by labor strife. After enrolling in Columbia University just before the United States entered World War I, Oggins got caught up in the world of New York's radical left and joined the American Communist movement about seven years after the Russian Revolution, which brought the Communists to power in 1917. Living in Greenwich Village, the heart of Bohemia, he became friendly with other young intellectuals who believed that workers around the world would unite and overthrow capitalism. He broke all ties with his increasingly bourgeois family in Connecticut.

Unlike FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who many years later fed US secrets to the Soviets for a quarter-century, Oggins turned out to be a rather insignificant agent with no access to any government's secrets and little training in the art of spycraft. As a result, this exhaustive biography is more a curiosity than exposé of a long-hidden scandal.

Meier is a diligent researcher, but instead of letting Oggins's tale spin out in a straightforward manner, the author has a maddening way of jumping back and forth in time, sometimes describing the spy's travels or his life in the gulag, then skipping ahead to insert the reactions and observations of Oggins's only child, Robin, now a retired professor in his 70s. The son had known little about his father's life until Meier approached him a few years ago with his findings. As a result, the book is an interesting but disjointed narrative. Ironically, Cy Oggins, who sacrificed everything, including his family, for "the cause," died a lonely man in the country his parents had fled in order to provide a better life for their children.

Ann Blackman, a former Time correspondent in Moscow, is the author of biographies of former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Confederate spy Rose Greenhow. She is co-author of "The Spy Next Door," a biography of turncoat FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/artic...lag/?page=full
 
Old May 3rd, 2011 #19
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

Andrew Roth

Andrew Roth is known mainly as the US-born compiler of Parliamentary Profiles, the journal on British MPs' interests and voting traits. Roth is also a contributing obituary editor for The Guardian, and a confidant of leftwing activists, in particular Guardian journalists David Leigh & Mark Hollingsworth, and former Labour MP (now Lord) Dale Campbell-Savours.

Apart from all of the above having key roles in The Guardian's 'cash for questions' affair, over the years Roth, Leigh, Hollingsworth and Campbell-Savours have also demonstrated an abiding common interest in matters relating to the British and American intelligence services.

In his 1999 book Venona: the greatest secret of the cold war author Nigel West (aka former Conservative MP Rupert Allason) reveals that Roth is actually the former U.S. Naval Intelligence officer Lieutenant Andrew Roth, who fled a Grand Jury indictment issued in August 1948 after he was caught by the FBI passing classified documents to a Russian spy named Philip Jaffe, who edited a magazine entitled Amerasia based in offices on 225 Fifth Avenue, New York. Roth only escaped immediate incarceration because the FBI had used illicit surveillance methods.

In 1948 Roth fled the US Navy after being caught passing secrets to the Russians, whereupon he settled in England to work for The Guardian. He subsequently became a confidant of Left-wing journalists and Labour MP Dale Campbell-Savours.

Shortly after settling in England Roth was taken on by The Guardian as the parliamentary correspondent for its sister paper The Manchester Evening News. In tandem Roth published a political newsletter entitled "Westminster Confidential", which in 1963 broke the sensational story that the Conservative Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, had shared the favours of a prostitute with a Russian Naval Intelligence officer by the name of Eugene Ivanov. Given his own contacts with the Soviets it is open to speculation as to how Roth came by the story.

But of all his activities Andrew Roth is most famous for producing Parliamentary Profiles, listing all MPs' registered interests, political hobby-horses, and tittle-tattle. In this regard Roth also compiles and supplies detailed dossiers on MPs for clients to special order as a sideline. Most interestingly, research undertaken during 1994 of the KGB's archives in Lubyanka Square, Moscow, revealed that Roth had supplied the KGB during the 1960s with at least one such dossier on a British MP -- a 9,000 word profile of the Labour MP and publisher Robert Maxwell. Though Roth later admitted supplying the dossier, he denied knowing his client's identity.

Roth's crucial involvement in The Guardian's 'cash for questions' campaign began following the publication of Adam Raphael's Observer article of April 1989 implying that lobbyist Ian Greer paid MPs to table questions at £200 a time. This prompted Roth to make inquiries, whereupon he discovered that Greer had given commission payments to the chairman of the Conservative backbench trade and industry committee, Michael Grylls MP, for introducing new clients to his lobbying company. Roth subsequently developed the hypothesis that Greer's commission payments were a cover for passing bribes to Tory MPs to reward them for delivering parliamentary services, such as tabling parliamentary questions, in support of his clients.

Accordingly, in the next issue of Parliamentary Profiles published in November 1989, Roth insinuated that Michael Grylls's commission payments from Ian Greer were really bribes to support the very clients whom Grylls had introduced to Greer. According to Roth's letter to Sir Gordon Downey, following publication Dale Campbell-Savours visited him, whereupon Roth convinced him of his theory, following which the Labour MP then persuaded his fellow members of the Members' Interests' Committee that Ian Greer's commission payments to Grylls should be investigated.

On 3 April 1990 Ian Greer appeared before the committee to answer questions whereupon Dale Campbell-Savours immediately suggested that his commission payments were actually to reward MPs for 'delivering parliamentary services'. Greer denied the insinuation but acknowledged giving introductory commissions to two other MPs besides Grylls. Campbell-Savours then barracked Greer with a stream of questions in an attempt to elicit the names of the two other MPs, but Greer refused to provide them on the grounds that it was not his position to do so.

Roth's theory that Greer's commissions were bribes subsequently became the bedrock of The Guardian's original 'cash for questions' article of 20 October 1994, accusing Greer of paying MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, and provided the theme for the book on the affair written by David Leigh, Sleaze: the corruption of Parliament.

Most tellingly, after Tim Smith resigned his ministerial post as a consequence of The Guardian's article, in the next issue of the New Statesman Roth boasted that Smith's resignation proved that he was one of the two unnamed MPs whom Greer had acknowledged giving commissions. In other words, Roth had surmised that Smith's resignation was confirmation that a) Smith had received a commission from Greer and b) the commission was really a bribe to table questions.

In fact, Tim Smith had not received a commission payment from Ian Greer. However, Roth and The Guardian did not discover this until two years later, just ten days before the first due day of Neil Hamilton's and Ian Greer's libel actions. The news caused mayhem with The Guardian's planned defence for the trial, and prompted the last-minute coercion of three close employees of Mohamed Al Fayed into testifying to a new allegation that they had processed 'cash in envelopes' for the lobbyist and the MP [see "The concise true story of the 'cash for questions' affair" and "The brainwashing of a democratic state", both in Section Two].

http://www.guardianlies.com/section%203/page3.html

jewish:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...-roth-obituary
 
Old May 3rd, 2011 #20
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default

Solomon Adler

Solomon Adler (or Sol Adler) was born in Britain and became a U.S. citizen in 1936, when he obtained employment in the United States Department of the Treasury. Adler also was a Soviet spy who supplied information to the Silvermaster espionage ring.

Adler served in China and shared a house with Chi Ch’ao ting and "China hand" John Service. From China, Adler sent back reports opposing President Franklin Roosevelt's gold loan program of $200 million to help the Nationalist Chinese Government stabilize its currency in 1943. Secretary Harry Dexter White and Frank Coe supported this view (to de-stabilize the anti-Communist government of Chiang Kai-Shek). Hyperinflation in China amounted to more than 1000% per year between 1943 and 1945, weakening the standing of the Nationalist government domestically in China. This helped the Communists eventually to come to power in China, delivering hundreds of millions of people into their hands.

Adler is referenced in Venona decrypts #14, 14 January 1945, New York to Moscow. His code name in Soviet intelligence and in the Venona papers is "Sachs", and directly relates to the delivery of information about China.

By 1950, Adler was the subject of a Loyalty of Government Employee investigation. Adler resigned just prior to a decision by the Civil Service Commission and Treasury Department. Thereafter, Adler returned to Britain, and when his passport expired in three years, he was denaturalized and lost his American citizenship.

At some point in the 1950's Adler emigrated to the People's Republic of China. Adler, Frank Coe, and Sydney Rittenberg worked together in China translating Chairman Mao's works into English. He worked for twenty years for the Chinese Communist Party's Central External Liaison Department, an agency involved in foreign espionage. A photograph shows him with Henshen Chen, a senior Maoist official who had been an intelligence operative in the United States from the late 1930s till 1949. Chen wrote in his memoirs that he used the cover as an editor for the journal Pacific Affairs and worked as a researcher at the Institute of Pacific Relations, and had covert liaisons with the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).

Adler died in China on August 4th, 1994.

Works

Solomon Adler: The Chinese Economy (London, Routledge & Paul 1957)
Joan Robinson, Sol Adler: China: an economic perspective (Foreword by Harold Wilson; London, Fabian International Bureau 1958)
Sol Adler: A Talk to Comrades of the English Section for the Translation of Volume V of Chairman Mao's Selected Works (Guānyú "Máo xuǎn" dì-wǔ juǎn fānyì wèntí de bàogào 关于《毛选》第五卷翻译问题的报告; Beijing, Foreign Languages Press 1978).

http://www.conservapedia.com/Solomon_Adler

Solomon Adler

Solomon Adler (August 6, 1909 — August 4, 1994) was an economist who worked in the U. S. Treasury Department, serving as Treasury representative in China during World War II. He was identified by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley as a Soviet intelligence source and resigned from the Treasury Department in 1950. After several years teaching at Cambridge University in England, he returned to China in the 1950s and was a resident there from the 1960s until his death, working as a translator, economic advisor, and possibly with the Central External Liaison Department, a Chinese intelligence agency.

Biography

Solomon Adler was born on 6 August 1909 in Leeds, England. The Adler family was originally from Karelitz, Byelorussia, moving to Leeds in 1900. Solomon Adler was the fifth of ten children; the oldest was Saul Adler, who became a well-known Israeli parasitologist.[1] Adler studied economics at Oxford and University College, London. He came to the United States in 1935 to do research. In 1936 he was hired at the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, but soon moved to the Treasury Department's Division of Monetary Research and Statistics, where he worked with Harry Dexter White for the next several years.[2]

He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1940. In 1941 he was posted to China, where he remained as Treasury representative until 1948. His reports from China to Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau during the war years were widely circulated and played an important role in shaping American wartime economic policy toward China.[3]

In 1949, Adler was the subject of a Loyalty of Government Employees investigation. He resigned before the case was resolved and returned to Britain, where he taught for several years at Cambridge University. When his American passport expired after three years, he was denaturalized and lost his American citizenship.[4] Adler moved to China by 1960.[5] In addition to his work on economics, Adler was a member of the group translating Mao Zedong's works into English.[6]

When the United States reestablished diplomatic contacts with China in 1971, Adler renewed his American citizenship. He died in Beijing on August 4, 1994, two days before his 85th birthday.

Espionage claims

In 1939, Whittaker Chambers identified Adler to then-Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle as a member of an underground Communist group in Washington, D.C., the Ware group. Chambers correctly identified Adler as then serving in the General Counsel's Office at the Treasury Department, from which, Chambers said, Adler supplied weekly reports to the American Communist party.[7][8] In 1945, Elizabeth Bentley identified Adler as a member of the Silvermaster group.[9] A 1948 memo written by Anatoly Gorsky, a former NKVD rezident in Washington D.C., identified Adler as a Soviet agent designated "Sax."[10] This agent, transliterated "Sachs (Saks)" appears in the Venona decrypts supplying information about the Chinese Communist through both Gorsky and American Communist Party head Earl Browder.

In addition to his contacts with U.S. espionage groups, while serving as Treasury attache in China in 1944, Adler shared a house with Chinese Communist secret agent Chi Ch'ao-ting[11] and State Department officer John Stewart Service, who was arrested the following year in the Amerasia case.

Together with Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and V. Frank Coe, Director of the Treasury's Division of Monetary Research, Adler strongly opposed a gold loan program of $200 million to help the Nationalist Chinese Government control the inflation that took hold in unoccupied China during World War II. Inflation in China between 1943 and 1945 was more than 1,000% per year, weakening the Nationalist government in China. This inflation helped the Communists eventually come to power in China, and in later years White, Coe, and Adler were accused of having deliberately fostered the Chinese inflation by obstructing the stabilization loan.[12]

According to a Chinese work published in 1983, from at least 1963 on Adler worked for China's Central External Liaison Department, an agency involved in foreign espionage.[13]. Adler's apartment in Beijing was also provided to Adler by the Liaison Department, which would indicate that the Department was Adler's work unit.[14]

Solomon_Adler Solomon_Adler
 
Reply

Tags
dual loyalty, every jew a spy, jewish spies

Share


Thread
Display Modes


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 05:03 AM.
Page generated in 1.90581 seconds.