Jew Mark Zborowski - Cheka/NKVD agent becomes US Academic

Started by CrackSmokeRepublican, June 20, 2012, 10:52:37 PM

Previous topic - Next topic
Print
Go Down Pages1
User actions

CrackSmokeRepublican

June 20, 2012, 10:52:37 PM
Mark Zborowski   <$>



Mark Zborowski (January 27, 1908 – April 30, 1990) (AKA "Marc" Zborowski) was an anthropologist and an NKVD agent (Venona codenames TULIP and KANT). He was the NKVD's most valuable mole inside the Trotskyist organization in Paris during the 1930s and in New York during the 1940s.[1][2][3]


Childhood in Uman

Zborowski was one of four children born into a Jewish family in Uman, near Cherkasy,  <:^0  in 1908. According to the story Zborowski told friends, his conservative parents moved to Poland in 1921 to escape the October Revolution in Russia. While he was a student, Zborowski disobeyed his parents and joined the Polish Communist Party. His political activity led to imprisonment and he fled to Berlin where he was unsuccessful in finding employment. He moved to France and attended the University of Grenoble, studying anthropology and working as a waiter.

Early life in Paris

In 1933 the penniless Zborowski turned up in Paris with his wife and was recruited as an NKVD agent by the Leningrad émigré Alexander Adler. He provided the NKVD with a written background and revealed that his sister and two brothers lived in the Soviet Union. According to historian John J. Dziak,[4] the NKVD had recruited him into a special group who murdered special enemies of Joseph Stalin. Those assassinated included Ignace Reiss (1937), Andrés Nin (1937), and Walter Krivitsky (1941). Members of the group are said to have included Leonid Eitingon, Nikolai Vasilyevich Skoblin, Sergei Efron and his wife Marina Tsvetayeva, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and perhaps the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon.[5][6]

Embedding with Lev Sedov

The NKVD took steps to infiltrate him into the Paris organization run by Leon Trotsky's son Lev Sedov. Known as Etienne, Zborowski befriended Sedov's wife, Jeanne Martin, and she recommended him for the position of Sedov's secretary. Because of his obsequious nature and untiring work, and because he was also a Russian speaker in what was essentially a French group, Etienne soon became indispensable to Sedov. He served as a member of the group's Central Committee, read and answered Sedov's mail, edited the Russian language version of the Bulletin of the Opposition, stored part of the Trotsky archive at his home, and served as Sedov's deputy in his absence. All the while Etienne reported on the activity of Trotsky (codename OLD MAN), Sedov (codename SONNY), and the Trotskyists (codename POLECATS) to his NKVD handlers.

Death of Lev Sedov

On February 8, 1938 the overworked Sedov suffered a severe attack of appendicitis. Etienne convinced him to have the operation secretly at a small private clinic run by Russian emigres in Paris, the location of which Etienne immediately revealed to the NKVD. Sedov was operated on the same evening and appeared, over the next few days, to have a normal recovery. Suddenly he became violently ill and despite repeated blood transfusions he died in great pain on February 16 at the age of thirty-two. Historians differ as to whether or not Sedov was murdered by the NKVD and there is considerable evidence to support either scenario.

Internal investigation by Trotskyists

After Sedov's death, Trotsky initiated an investigation of Etienne and entrusted the matter to Rudolf Klement, his one-time aide and organizer of Trotsky's Fourth International. Before Klement could complete the investigation an NKVD agent named Ale Taubman lured him to an apartment on the Left Bank and murdered him with the help of two other agents, the "Turk" and Alexander Korotkov. They cut off Klement's head and legs and stuffed the body parts in a trunk and threw it into the Seine. Several days later the Trotskyists received a typewritten letter from Klement accusing Trotsky of collaboration with Adolf Hitler. The letter, clearly an NKVD fabrication, was no doubt meant to explain Klement's disappearance and to denounce Trotsky at the same time. However, Klement's headless corpse washed ashore in August 1938 and was identified, from a scar on one hand, by two Trotskyists.

Death of Trotsky

Etienne now became the leader of the beheaded Trotskyist organization in Paris and continued to edit the Bulletin of the Opposition, along with Lilia Estrin Dallin (codename NEIGHBOR). He used his skills to play upon the vanities of the remaining Trotskyists and create internal divisions within the faction, especially isolating Victor Serge. In 1939 the defector Alexander Orlov sent Trotsky an unsigned letter warning him that an NKVD agent named "Mark", fitting the description of Zborowski, had infiltrated the Paris organization. Much to her later regret, Dallin convinced Trotsky that the letter was NKVD disinformation meant to create fear within the Trotskyist faction. Meanwhile, Etienne played a small but significant role in the plot to assassinate Trotsky. At the founding conference of the Fourth International in Paris in September 1938, Etienne introduced his friend Sylvia Ageloff, an American Trotskyist and interpreter, to Ramón Mercader, the future assassin of Trotsky. The passionate Mercader seduced the unattractive twenty-eight year old woman. She blindly followed him to Mexico and infiltrated him into Trotsky's household. Mercader murdered Trotsky by striking him in the skull with an ice-axe on August 20, 1940.

Later life in New York

Tracking of Kravchenko

Zborowski fled to the United States following the Nazi invasion of France. The American Trotskyists David and Lilia Dallin assisted in his emigration and helped him obtain employment at a screw factory in Brooklyn. With money from an unknown source, he rented a fashionable Manhattan apartment in the Dallin's building and once again resumed his former occupation, spying on Trotskyists. His codenames TULIP and KANT appear in nearly two dozen Venona decrypts. He reported to the Soviet controller Jack Soble. Zborowski spied on the Dallins and helped the NKVD search for Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet engineer and mid-level bureaucrat who defected from a trade mission in 1944. Kravchenko published a book, I Chose Freedom (1946), which described the repressions in the Soviet Union, the purges, the collectivizations, and the slave labor camps.

Academia

By 1945 Zborowski's usefulness as an agent had come to an end. He turned his attention to his academic career and found employment, with the aid of Margaret Mead, as a research assistant at Harvard University. In 1952 he published Life is with People (coauthored with Elizabeth Herzog), a groundbreaking study of Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe before the Second World War. The book received critical acclaim and has been reprinted numerous times. From 1951-1954 he conducted research at Cornell University. He became an American citizen in 1947.
Senate investigation and conviction

The defector Alexander Orlov unmasked Zborowski before a hearing of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in September 1955. The FBI already knew that Zborowski was an NKVD agent from information they had obtained from their double-agent Boris Morros. Zborowski appeared before the Senate Subcommittee in February 1956. Since he was free from prosecution for his activities in France, Zborowski admitted to being an NKVD agent in Paris but he denied working as an agent in America. In his testimony he claimed that the NKVD had tried to enlist him as an agent in New York but he had refused: "At that time, I became almost--I became hysterical and I remember well, I hit my fist on the table and said, 'I will not do anything with you anymore.' And I walked out. Since then, I have not seen anyone." As the Venona decrypts clearly prove, Zborowski lied about this and other parts of his testimony. Zborowski was convicted of perjury and after an appeal and retrial he received a four-year prison sentence in 1962.

Return to academia

Following his release he resumed his academic career and published People in Pain (1969), a study of responses to pain by people of different cultures. He moved to San Francisco where, in time, he rose to the position of Director of the Pain Institute at the Mount Zion Hospital.

Death

Zborowski died in 1990 at the age of eighty-two.   <$>

Confessions

Confession to Elisabeth Poretsky

When they were both living in the States, Zborowski came twice to the home of Elisabeth Poretsky one day—in the spring of 1955, she believed, according to her memoirs. This followed visits by the FBI, who came to her and inquired about "Etienne" (as she refers to him). During their second visit, the FBI informed her that they believed Zborowski to be an NKVD agent. When she next saw him, Zborowski barged into her home once the door opened.[7]

About his overall activities, he confessed:

    "I came to tell you that it is all true. I have been an N.K.V.D. agent for more than twenty years"... He did not wait for me to ask him anything, however, but began to tell me how he had been recruited by a fellow worker, a Russian, in Grenoble, who had suggested he go to Paris, where he could find friends and "be useful to the Soviet Union." The story of how Etienne had infiltraded the Trotskyite organizaiton—where, in fact, very little that was of interest to the N.K.V.D. was going on—contained nothing unexpected...[7]

About the murder of Trotsky's son, he said:

    I asked about Sedov who, according to Etienne, had been the main target of his spying. "Do you remember, when I saw you a few days after Sedov's death, what you told me then and how defeated you were?... That was the happiest day of my life... I did not have to spy on him anymore, I did not have to denounce him. My job was finished, or so I thought..."[7]

About his role in the assassination of Poretsky's husband Ludwik (AKA Ignace Poretsky), he said:

    I asked him outright whether it was he who had informed the N.K.V.D. of the contents of Krivitsky's "Krusia" letter to me. "Did Serge [Sedov] show you that letter?" A wry, pitiful smile on his distorted face and a shrug of the shoulders were his only reply. It was neither a confirmation nor a denial, just that helpless smile of his. It as the same with all the questions I asked about Ludwick's murder. Only a shrug of the shoulders. I knew then without a doubt who had informed the N.K.V.D.[7]

Confession in Margaret Mead papers

According to Dr. Steven Zipperstein of Stanford University:

QuoteZborowski was not given to self-revelation. But amidst the huge body of material about Jews collected for Mead's project... 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.[2]

He tells of his childhood in Uman and the social downfall of his middle-class parents. His family left Russia for Poland(first Lvov, then Łódź), then how he himself left for France in 1928 with wife Regina. Communists recruited him while he worked as a busboy in Grenoble. In Paris, his quietude and acquiescence won him constant use and confidence among new Lev Sedov and Trotskyist comrades in Paris.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zborowski
After the Revolution of 1905, the Czar had prudently prepared for further outbreaks by transferring some $400 million in cash to the New York banks, Chase, National City, Guaranty Trust, J.P.Morgan Co., and Hanover Trust. In 1914, these same banks bought the controlling number of shares in the newly organized Federal Reserve Bank of New York, paying for the stock with the Czar\'s sequestered funds. In November 1917,  Red Guards drove a truck to the Imperial Bank and removed the Romanoff gold and jewels. The gold was later shipped directly to Kuhn, Loeb Co. in New York.-- Curse of Canaan

CrackSmokeRepublican

#1
June 20, 2012, 10:56:55 PM
Communist sympathizer's long story on the Criminal Jew Zborowski :

---------------

[quote]The story of Mark Zborowski: Stalin's spy in the Fourth International

Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International

Mark Zborowski was the most notorious and deadly agent of the Soviet secret police (the GPU) inside the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. He played a central role in setting up leading members of the Fourth International, including Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov, for assassination. Zborowski survived his victims by many decades. Arriving in the United States in 1941, he made the transition from Stalin's leading anti-Trotskyist agent to a highly successful academic in prestigious American universities. Zborowski's eventual exposure as a Stalinist agent in the 1950s only temporarily derailed his academic career. But in 1975, as a result of the International Committee of the Fourth International's investigation into the events leading up to the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, Zborowski's crimes were brought to public attention. The GPU assassin was photographed in August 1975 in San Francisco outside his home by David North, a leading member of the Workers League (predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party). During the decade that followed, the International Committee's investigation into the crimes of the GPU against the Trotskyist movement—whose findings were published under the title "Security and the Fourth International"—produced a wealth of new information about Zborowski's activities.

In June 1990, two months after Zborowski's death, the International Committee published an obituary which reviewed the murderous career of this Stalinist agent. This obituary is republished below.

* * *

On April 30, 1990, the notorious Stalinist police agent Mark Zborowski, known as "Etienne," died of heart disease in San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital at the age of 82. During the 1930s, the activities of Zborowski led directly to the murders of at least four leading figures in the Fourth International, including the eldest son of Leon Trotsky, Leon Sedov. The information provided by Zborowski to the GPU, as the Stalinist secret police was then known, contributed to the assassination of Leon Trotsky 50 years ago, on August 20, 1940.

Zborowski was never punished for his crimes against the working class. Even after his exposure as a GPU agent, the US government treated Zborowski with kid gloves. This was hardly surprising, for the victims of Zborowski's crimes were the most irreconcilable enemies of capitalism. Thus, after Zborowski's initial legal problems were ironed out, the US government provided Zborowski with a prestigious academic post from which he derived a comfortable income. He spent the final decades of his life in a fashionable section of San Francisco.

Nevertheless, even if Zborowski escaped physical retribution for his vile activities, his fate is a wretched one. He will be remembered only as an example of the dregs of humanity—the informer who served the counterrevolution for money.

Leon Sedov with Trotsky in Barbizon, France
in 1933

Zborowski was a key operative within the vast network of GPU agents which spearheaded the destruction of the leadership of the Marxist opposition to the totalitarian dictatorship of the Stalinist bureaucracy. When the Trotskyist movement was headquartered in Paris during the crucial years leading to the founding of the Fourth International in September 1938, Zborowski wormed his way into the confidence of Trotsky's son and most important political collaborator, Leon Sedov. His reports were so important that Stalin reviewed them personally. Zborowski's information and inside maneuvering were indispensable in setting up the GPU assassinations of leading Trotskyists, including Erwin Wolf and Rudolf Klement, GPU defector Ignace Reiss, Leon Sedov and, ultimately, Trotsky himself.

The brutal assassinations of the leaders of the Fourth International by the GPU in Europe and Mexico were the climax of the physical liquidation of all of Lenin's and Trotsky's closest collaborators during the infamous Moscow Trials and the purges which followed. Beginning in 1936, Old Bolsheviks such as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Radek, Sokolnikov and Rykov, to name but a few, were framed as fascist "spies and wreckers," compelled to make false confessions that they had worked for decades as agents of imperialism, and then executed. The Moscow Trials and the assassination of Trotskyists by the GPU marked the culmination of the drive by the Stalinist bureaucracy to liquidate the Bolshevik Party and its leadership.

Mark Zborowski and Ramon Mercader, the assassin of Trotsky, were the embodiment of this murderous counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism: one the professional spy and informer, who arranged the murder of his closest associates; the other the cold-blooded assassin, who plunged an ice pick into the brain of the greatest revolutionary Marxist of the twentieth century.

At a time when the disintegration of the Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China is trumpeted by the world bourgeoisie as proof of the "failure of Marxism," it is vital to recall the actual historical role of the parasitic bureaucracy which usurped power from the Soviet working class after the October Revolution. Stalinism is not Marxism, but its most vicious enemy. The Stalinist bureaucracy cemented its rule in the Soviet Union through the most massive extermination of Marxists and genuine communists ever carried out in history.

As the representatives of imperialism noted with satisfaction at the time, Stalin killed more communists than Hitler and Mussolini combined.

These crimes had a double significance for the international working class. The murder of millions of Old Bolsheviks, the entire revolutionary generation which had prepared and led the October Revolution and fought the Civil War, beheaded the Soviet working class and robbed the international proletariat of its most experienced and farsighted cadres. At the same time, the propaganda machine of the Kremlin incessantly proclaimed that the purges were carried out in the interests of socialism. This grotesque lie—equating Marxism with mass terror against the working class—defiled socialism and did enormous damage to the class consciousness of millions of workers.

The Stalinist chieftains of today—Gorbachev, Yeltsin and their equivalents throughout Eastern Europe, who are all the heirs of the bloody work of Stalin and the GPU—seek to complete the counterrevolutionary work which was begun by the parasitic bureaucracy in the 1920s and 1930s. They are smashing whatever remains of the conquests of the October Revolution and the extension of planned and nationalized economics into Eastern Europe, and restoring capitalist property relations and capitalist exploitation of the Soviet and East European working class.

Fifty years ago the bureaucracy defended its mass murder of Bolsheviks, culminating in the assassination of Trotsky, by claiming that its revolutionary opponents were undermining socialism. Now the bureaucracy has dropped any pretense of defending socialism, and comes forward openly as the spearhead of capitalist counterrevolution inside the USSR. It seeks to provide a secure anchor for its privileged position by transforming itself into a comprador capitalist class operating as the agency of world imperialism inside the Soviet Union.

The pressures of world imperialism on the first workers' state—manifested in the encirclement of the USSR, the backwardness of the Soviet economy which had been devastated by three years of civil war, and the defeats of the working class in Europe during the early 1920s—created the material conditions for the growth of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

Despite the nationalization of the productive forces, the Soviet Union remained a land of "generalized want," generating the growth of bureaucracy as the "policeman of inequality." Stalin rose to power as the representative of the Thermidorian reaction against 1917 and the historical demands of the world revolution, which conflicted with the increasingly narrow caste interests of a bureaucracy preoccupied with assuring for itself the lion's share of the national wealth. The slogan of "socialism in one country," the ideological essence of Stalinism, expressed the growing recognition by the bureaucracy in the party and state apparatus that its material interests were distinct from and hostile to those of the Soviet and international working class. As Trotsky explained, gathered beneath the official Stalinist slogan of "socialism in one country" were all those who were thinking: "Not everything for the world revolution... why not something for me too?"

The Left Opposition was formed in 1923 under the leadership of Trotsky to counter the growth of bureaucratism within the party. As the huge bureaucratic state apparatus was the product of objective economic problems within the USSR created by world imperialism, it was through this apparatus that the pressures of world imperialism were transmitted into the Bolshevik Party. The degeneration of a large section of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party was the product of this pressure.

While fighting for a correct policy within the USSR to develop its industrial base and prepare the foundations for economic planning, Trotsky recognized that the objective conditions which had given rise to bureaucracy and the related problem of the political degeneration of the Bolshevik Party could only be successfully resolved at the level of the international class struggle. The prolonged isolation of the USSR, the often-frustrated hopes for direct material assistance from the workers of Western Europe, the terrible hardships endured for so many years: all these elements combined to produce a mood of discouragement which aided the bureaucracy as it usurped political power from the Soviet working class. Trotsky understood that it would require the victory of the working class in Asia and Western Europe to rekindle the smoldering fires of Bolshevism in the consciousness of the Russian proletariat.

But it was precisely against the international struggles of the working class and the oppressed masses that the Stalinist faction delivered the worst blows. Its policy of bureaucratic centrism produced defeats in Britain (1926) and China (1927). These defeats, in turn, accelerated the process of degeneration of the Bolshevik Party. The Left Opposition was proscribed and its leaders expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, after the defeat of the Chinese Revolution (due to Stalin's policy of subordinating the Chinese Communist Party to the bourgeois Kuomintang) dashed the hopes of the Soviet working class in a new revolutionary dawn in the East. Trotsky was expelled from the party and banished to the steppes of Central Asia, where he spent more than a year in exile in Alma Ata, and then, in 1929, was exiled from the Soviet Union altogether. He lived in Turkey, France, Norway and, finally, Mexico, the only country on the planet which would grant him political asylum.
Trotsky in his study at Coyocan, Mexico

Despite unimaginable personal and political hardships, including the disappearances and murders of virtually all of his family and his political co-thinkers inside the USSR, Trotsky continued tirelessly to expose the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy and to build the political and organizational foundations for its revolutionary overthrow by the working class.

In the first years of exile, Trotsky fought for the reform of the Communist Party and the Third International, maintaining that these could be regenerated if the Stalinist faction was defeated and driven out. At the center of this was the fight to mobilize the unified strength of the German working class in a revolutionary struggle to smash the growing threat of Hitlerite fascism and take power. Trotsky was convinced that the victory of the socialist revolution in Germany would transform the position of the proletariat on a world scale, not least of all because it would decisively end the isolation of the Soviet regime, provide vast material resources for the economic development of the USSR and create conditions for the rapid liquidation of the bureaucratic deformities. The combination of a triumphant proletarian revolution in Germany and a resurgent Soviet Union would, Trotsky believed, transform socialism into an irresistible force. Thus, he referred to Germany as "the key to the international situation."

But the Kremlin bureaucracy's policies systematically destroyed the prospects of a victory in Germany. The ultra-left line of the "Third Period" proclaimed by Stalin following the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928 (initially with the support of Bukharin) repudiated the strategy and tactics developed by the first four congresses of the Communist International under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky.

As the Stalinists implemented the brutal and disastrous adventurism of the collectivization policy within the USSR, they imposed upon the sections of the Comintern a line which decreed that revolutionary policies were incompatible with any form of political collaboration with the mass social democratic parties, even in the interests of mutual defense against the bourgeois state and fascism. According to Stalin, social democracy was merely the left wing of the bourgeois state and therefore (!) the "twin" of fascism. In Germany, the impact of this line was catastrophic. Despite the ever-greater threat of fascism, the Stalinists opposed any form of united front action by the combined forces of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party against Hitler. Rather, the Stalinists went so far as to claim that the victory of Hitler was a lesser evil than collaboration with the "social fascists," because, according to the Kremlin theoreticians, a Nazi regime would quickly collapse and then the path would be clear for the victory of the Communist Party.

Trotsky fought with all his might against this insane and defeatist policy. From his exile in faraway Prinkipo, he analyzed the ruinous implications of the Stalinist line and appealed for the immediate formation of a united front of all working class organizations in Germany against the fascist threat. He explained that the Stalinist line played into the hands of the Social Democratic leaders, for it deprived the communist workers of a tactic which would demonstrate to the millions of workers who remained inside the reformist organizations that their leaders had no intention of fighting fascism. Works of unparalleled polemical brilliance flowed from Trotsky's pen and his writings were widely circulated throughout Germany by the cadre of the Left Opposition. But it was not possible to change the line of the Communist Party. On January 30, 1933, Hitler came to power without a shot being fired and the international working class suffered the greatest defeat in its history.

The defeat of the German proletariat completed the transformation of the bureaucracy into a counterrevolutionary force within the USSR and international workers' movement. After the Stalinized Comintern issued a statement proclaiming that the policies pursued by the German Communist Party had been entirely correct, Trotsky issued the call for the formation of a Fourth International. He explained that it was impossible to reform a party which congratulated itself on policies which had led to an unprecedented political disaster. For the next five years, Trotsky labored to organize and educate a new international revolutionary cadre.

In the wake of the German catastrophe, which had brought to power a regime which proclaimed as its chief goal the destruction of the USSR, the Stalinist bureaucracy concluded that the defense of its material interests within the Soviet Union required the formation of political alliances with the "democratic" imperialist powers. These alliances were to be secured by utilizing the labor movements outside the USSR as "bargaining chips" in reactionary Soviet diplomacy. The Stalinist parties were directed by the Kremlin to subordinate the interests of the working class within their countries to the needs of the Kremlin's foreign policy. The Stalinist parties were not to mobilize the working class to overthrow the national bourgeoisie, but to ally themselves with those "democratic" bourgeois parties which were willing to sign treaties with the Soviet bureaucracy. This reactionary line, which betrayed every principle of Marxism, was concretized in the policy of "popular frontism."

Stalin's pursuit of diplomatic alliances with imperialism required the eradication of every surviving trace of Bolshevism within the Soviet Union. The Moscow Trials and the blood purges were carried out by the bureaucracy to terrorize the Russian proletariat, eradicate the revolutionary traditions of Lenin and Trotsky within the USSR, and assure world imperialism that Stalinism had broken all connections with Bolshevism and its program of international socialist revolution. The representatives of imperialist democracy, in their turn, hailed the Moscow Trials as models of judicial fairness: what could be more "democratic" than the systematic extermination of the flower of Bolshevism!

The foreign policy of the Soviet Union, determined by the objective interests of the bureaucracy as a privileged caste, was transformed by Stalinism into the defense of the international imperialist status quo. The immediate consequence of the popular front was the bloodbath in Spain, where the Stalinists suppressed the revolutionary uprising of the workers in Catalonia and GPU agents established prison camps and torture chambers to destroy all revolutionary working class leadership. Stalin delivered the Spanish proletariat to three decades of fascism in order to curry favor with British and French imperialism.

Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy as, in essence, a counterrevolutionary agency of imperialism within the international workers' movement, was the point of departure in his struggle against Stalinism. In his monumental work of Marxist analysis of the degeneration of the Soviet Union, The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky warned that either the working class would overthrow the bureaucracy in a political revolution, returning the Soviet Union to the road of world socialist revolution, or the bureaucracy would overthrow the property relations and planned economy created by the October Revolution, restore capitalism and transform itself into a new possessing class.

The founding of the Fourth International in 1938 was the political expression of the irreconcilable social antagonism between the parasitic bureaucratic caste and the Soviet proletariat, between the needs of the planned Soviet economy and the corrupt privileges embezzled by the bureaucracy, between international "permanent revolution" and "socialism and one country." Trotsky summoned the Soviet masses to political revolution as an essential component of the world socialist revolution.

World imperialism was not indifferent to the outcome of the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin. It unerringly identified Stalin as the representative of a conservative tendency within the USSR. In Trotsky and the Left Opposition, it recognized an implacable enemy. In the late 1920s, one leading British Tory—the political ancestor of Margaret Thatcher—publicly called upon Stalin to place Trotsky and other Left Opposition leaders in front of firing squads. It would not be long before Stalin would adopt this policy.

In December 1929, Jacob Blumkin, a former secretary of Trotsky who had helped edit his writings on the Civil War, How the Revolution Armed, was shot by the GPU. He had been the first Russian supporter of the Left Opposition to visit Trotsky in Turkey, in the summer of that year, and his execution was intended by Stalin as a warning against any contact with the exiled leader. This killing was a milestone in the degeneration of the party regime. For the first time, a Bolshevik had been murdered for opposing the leadership of the party. It was the precursor of the mass killings of 1936-38.

Blumkin was turned over to the GPU by Karl Radek, a former leader of the Left Opposition who capitulated and became an apologist for Stalin. Trotsky wrote bitterly: "The immediate reason for the death of this revolutionist—so exceptional for his devotion and courage—lies in two circumstances: his own idealistic confidence in people and the complete degeneration of the man to whom he turned. It is also possible that Radek himself did not sufficiently appreciate the consequences of his own actions because he, in his turn, idealized—Stalin" (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1929, Pathfinder Press, p. 412).
Stalin

In late 1931, the German Stalinist daily, Die Rote Fahne, published a report that an exiled White Guard officer was preparing a terrorist attack against Trotsky. Since this report was not carried in the Soviet press, Trotsky diagnosed it as an attempt by Stalin to escape responsibility before world public opinion for a crime which he had been planning for some time. In a letter to the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on January 4,1932, he revealed that Stalin had discussed his assassination as long ago as 1924-25, a fact disclosed to him by Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were then Stalin's allies in the ruling triumvirate. Trotsky wrote:

"Stalin has come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to have exiled Trotsky from the Soviet Union. He had hoped, as is known from his statement in the Politburo at that time—which is on record—that Trotsky, deprived of a 'secretariat,' and without resources, would become a helpless victim of the worldwide bureaucratic slander campaign. This apparatus man miscalculated. Contrary to his expectations it turned out that ideas have a power of their own, even without an apparatus and without resources. The Comintern is a grandiose structure that has been left a hollow shell both theoretically and politically. The future of revolutionary Marxism, which is to say of Leninism as well, is inseparably bound up from now on with the international cadres of the Left Opposition. No amount of falsification can change that" (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1932, pp. 19-20).

At the heart of the preparation of the political revolution lay the struggle to expose the crimes of the GPU before the international workers' movement. Its crimes were not aberrations of Stalinism, but the inevitable product of the social position of the bureaucracy within the USSR and its objective role as an agency of world imperialism within the working class. Trotsky was particularly vigilant over the attempts of the GPU to infiltrate the sections of the International Left Opposition.

Several GPU agents played prominent roles in the German section of the Left Opposition, where Sedov established international headquarters after Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union and exile to Prinkipo, Turkey. These included the Lithuanian-born brothers Sobolevicius, known by their party names "Senin" and "Well" and later by their "American" names, Jack Soble and Robert Soblen. Through Sedov, Soble met with Trotsky himself in Prinkipo and, later, Copenhagen. Soble and Soblen revealed themselves as agents when, on the eve of Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, they broke with the line of the Left Opposition, which sought to forge a united front among all working class parties against the fascists, by publishing the Stalinist program equating the social democrats with fascism.

After the German debacle, Trotsky publicly identified Soble and Soblen as GPU plants. He wrote to the various sections of the Trotskyist movement: "It stands to reason that no agent can destroy a historically progressive tendency embodied in the tradition of revolutionary Marxism. But it would be an unpardonable frivolity to ignore the actions of the Stalinist agents for the introduction of confusion and disintegration as well as direct corruption. We must be attentive and watch out!" (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1932-33, p. 94).
Trotsky (center) at the Dewey Commission inquiry

After Trotsky's arrival in Mexico in January 1937, he energetically undertook his own defense against the slanders of the Moscow frame-up trials. A commission under the leadership of the American philosopher and educator John Dewey was convened in the villa of the famous muralist Diego Rivera to review the charges and evidence against Trotsky and his son, Leon Sedov. Rather than simply rest on his impeccable revolutionary credentials, Trotsky answered all the charges and allegations against him and subjected Stalin's "proof" to a savage critique, exposing it publicly as a flimsy frame-up.

On November 2, 1937, Trotsky issued an open letter to all workers' organizations. It began: "The world socialist movement is being consumed by a terrible disease. The source of contagion is the Comintern, or to put it more correctly, the GPU, for whom the apparatus of the Comintern serves only as a legal cover. The events of the last few months in Spain have shown what crimes the unbridled and completely degenerate Moscow bureaucracy and its hirelings from among the declassed international scum are capable of. It is not a case of 'incidental' murders or 'incidental' frame-ups. It is a case of a conspiracy against the world labor movement'' (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1937-38, p. 28).

Despite the smallness of its ranks, lack of material resources and isolation, the Trotskyist movement and the brilliant theoretical work of its leader terrified Stalin. The Bulletin of the Opposition maintained a significant clandestine circulation in the Soviet Union, and Trotsky's views were carefully followed, even by those in Stalin's entourage. Though incapable in the sphere of Marxist theory himself, Stalin, as a veteran of the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party, well understood the power of ideas and the ability of even a small revolutionary cadre to become a decisive force under the right conditions. He was determined to destroy any trace of Marxist opposition to his regime.

Trotsky issued repeated warnings about the murderous activities of the Stalinist GPU, which acted as nothing less than contract killers on behalf of world imperialism. He noted the parallel between the assassinations of Jean Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht at the beginning and the end of the First World War and the murder of Rudolf Klement on the eve of the Second. He wrote:

"The work of exterminating the internationalists has already commenced on a world scale prior to the outbreak of the war. Imperialism no longer has to depend on a 'happy accident.' In the Stalinist mafia it has a ready-made international agency for the systematic extermination of revolutionists. Jaurès, Liebknecht, Luxemburg enjoyed world fame as socialist leaders. Rudolf Klement was a young and as yet little known revolutionist. Nevertheless, the assassination of Klement because he was the secretary of the Fourth International is of profound symbolic significance. Through its Stalinist gangsters imperialism indicates beforehand from what side mortal danger will threaten it in time of war" (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938- 39, pp. 76-77).

The GPU's efforts to destroy the Marxist opposition to the Stalinist bureaucracy culminated on August 20, 1940, in Coyoacan, Mexico, when Mercader drove an ice pick into the top of Leon Trotsky's head. This act was the political crime of the century because it deprived the working class of its greatest Marxist leader during the high point of Stalinist counterrevolution.

Trotsky's assassination was prepared by a network of GPU agents planted in the main centers of the Fourth International. These included Mark Zborowski, working in Paris, where Sedov had moved the center of the International Left Opposition after the Nazi victory in 1933; Sylvia Caldwell, the personal secretary to US Socialist Workers Party leader James P. Cannon, working in the SWP center in New York City; and Joseph Hansen, a personal secretary to Trotsky in Mexico, who returned to the United States after the assassination and remained a prominent leader of the SWP until his death in 1979.

Zborowski was born January 21, 1908, in Uman, Russia, to petty-bourgeois parents. His family emigrated to Poland in 1921. Zborowski obtained a degree from the University of Paris in 1928, attended graduate classes in Rouen, France, studied philosophy at the University of Grenoble, and returned to the University of Paris in 1933, where he obtained his "Licencie es Lettres" in 1937 and "Diplome in Ethnology" in 1938.

The records presently available do not indicate exactly why or when Zborowski began regular GPU activities. There is no question, however, that sometime after his return to Paris in 1933, Zborowski began meeting his GPU contact on a weekly basis, exchanging 200 to 300 francs each time for information on the Parisian Trotskyists. He signed his receipts "Mark" or "Etienne."
Leon Sedov

By 1935, Zborowski had established relations within the circle of European Trotskyists which included Jean van Heijenoort, a secretary to Trotsky, Henryk Sneevliet, a Dutch Trotskyist, French Trotskyists Raymond Molinier and Pierre Naville, and Jeanne Martin, Leon Sedov's female companion. Through them, Zborowski eventually met Sedov, and he became one of Sedov's closest confidants, making his considerable language skills available for the research and publication of the Russian Bulletin of the Left Opposition.

Zborowski worked closely with Lola Dallin, then known as Lola Estrine, a fellow Russian émigré who referred to Zborowski as her "Siamese twin." Dallin, who died in 1980, has long been suspected of GPU activities, but definitive proof of her role has not yet emerged.

In 1936-37, Sedov saw all those he admired from his days as a youthful revolutionary in the Soviet Union framed up and murdered by the Stalinists. Both his sisters had died, one of tuberculosis, the other of suicide, and his politically inactive brother, an engineer who chose to remain in the USSR, had disappeared without a trace. His parents lived in exile, hounded from country to country, isolated, gagged, and hunted by the GPU. Nevertheless, Sedov worked tirelessly, providing his father with the information needed for The Revolution Betrayed and his other epic works on the crimes and political trajectory of Stalinism, while publishing the Russian Bulletin.

Zborowski kept stirring the pot around Sedov. By subtle actions, he kept factionalism brewing among the European comrades. His role aroused suspicions, and Molinier, Naville and Sneevliet openly began expressing concerns about him. Zborowski set up the theft on November 6, 1936 of a portion of Trotsky's archives from an apartment on the Rue Michelet in Paris, the quarters of the Nicolaevsky Institute. That was only an omen of far more serious crimes to come.

During July 1937, Erwin Wolf, a leading Trotskyist secretary, was dispatched to Spain in the midst of the civil war to intervene against the popular front tactics of the Stalinists. Zborowski informed the GPU, which intercepted Wolf at the border and murdered him.

Two months later, Ignace Reiss, a high-level GPU agent who had joined the Communist Party when it was still a revolutionary organization, defected. In an open letter to the central committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, he stated: "The working class must defeat Stalin and Stalinism so that the USSR and the international workers' movement do not succumb to fascism and counterrevolution. This mixture of the worst of opportunism, devoid of principles, and of lies and blood threatens to poison the world and the last forces of the working class.

"What is needed today is a fight without mercy against Stalinism! The class struggle and not the popular front... Down with the lie of socialism in one country! Return to Lenin's international!" (Elizabeth Poretsky, Our Own People, University of Michigan Press, p. 2).

Reiss contacted the Dutch centrist Henryk Sneevliet, who at that time maintained political relations with the Trotskyist movement. Sneevliet arranged a meeting with Sedov in Reims, France. As a member of the inner circle, Zborowski was one of the few who knew Reiss's movements. He informed the GPU. On September 4, 1937, Reiss was machine-gunned by GPU thugs outside a train depot near Lausanne, Switzerland, with a ticket to Reims in his pocket.

Elizabeth Poretsky, Reiss's widow, escaped the GPU and joined the circle of exiles around Sedov, which included Zborowski. In her memoir, Our Own People, she describes how the man who organized her husband's assassination would conduct himself, posing as Sedov's devoted follower: "I rather liked Etienne as a person, and was glad to talk with him about events in the Soviet Union; he readily agreed with me about the dreadful things that were happening there. He was a devoted family man, and once or twice brought his child to my place. He obviously adored this little boy and would tell me, in his obsequious, flattering way, that he hoped he would grow up to be like my son" (Ibid., p. 263).

Suspicions of Zborowski mounted. Sneevliet told Elizabeth Poretsky, "There is an agent and it is that little Polish Jew, Etienne... I say and I repeat that this secretary and right-hand man of Sedov's is a GPU agent." Pierre Naville was so suspicious of Zborowski that he "made a point of fetching him in a car at the very last minute, so that Etienne never knew in advance where the meeting was being held," according to Poretsky. Raymond Molinier followed Zborowski, but never caught him with his GPU controller.

In February 1938, Leon Sedov was stricken with intestinal pains. Zborowski made two calls, one for an ambulance, another to the GPU. Zborowski and Lola Estrine arranged for Sedov to be transported to the Clinic Mirabeau in Paris, a facility known as a haven for Russian émigrés and, therefore, GPU agents. Estrine's sister-in-law, Dr. Fanny Ginsburg, assisted with the operation. After four days of apparent recovery, Sedov suddenly relapsed and died an agonizing death.

There is little doubt that this was a medical murder instigated by the GPU, which was informed of Sedov's location by Zborowski. Both Jack Soble and Mercader, Trotsky's assassin, admitted that the GPU murdered Sedov. After he was unmasked, Zborowski said that the death of Sedov "was the happiest day of my life."

The following July, Rudolf Klement, a Trotskyist secretary who was preparing the founding conference of the Fourth International, disappeared in Paris. His decapitated corpse was retrieved from the Seine river weeks later. Rumors have persisted that Klement was gathering information to expose Zborowski when he disappeared.

Despite the butchering of its leading cadre, the founding conference of the Fourth International was held in Paris during September 1938. Zborowski attended, representing Trotsky and the Russian section in exile, and addressed the convention. It was during this conference that the GPU arranged for a peripheral young American Trotskyist, Sylvia Ageloff, to meet "Jacques Mornard," one of several aliases used by Mercader, the son of a Spanish GPU agent, who used his relationship with Ageloff to infiltrate the group of Americans around Trotsky.

Zborowski himself was never able to penetrate the Trotsky household in Mexico, in part because further suspicions were raised about his role in an anonymous letter which Trotsky received on January 1, 1939, in Coyoacan. This letter, which gave precise details of the operations of the GPU agent but without giving his full name, was sent by Alexander Orlov, a high-level GPU official who had defected and sought to warn Trotsky about the plans of the Stalinist secret police to assassinate him.

Because of Orlov's fears for his own security, he did not sign the letter with his real name and presented it as a message from a former sympathizer of Trotsky's who had discovered the identity of the agent from his conversations with a defecting Red Army general, whom he gave the name Lushkov. Despite the complicated cover story, Orlov's information was specific and damning. He wrote:

"This agent provocateur had for a long time assisted your son L. Sedov in editing your Russian Bulletin of Opposition, in Paris, and collaborated with him until the very death of Sedov. Lushkov is almost sure that the provocateur's name is 'Mark.' He was literally the shadow of L. Sedov; he informed the Cheka about every step of Sedov, even his activities and personal correspondence with you which the provocateur read with the knowledge of L. Sedov.

"This provocateur wormed himself into the complete confidence of your son and knew as much about the activities of your organization as Sedov himself. Thanks to this provocateur several of the Cheka have received decorations...

"This agent provocateur is about 32-35 years old. He is a Jew, originally from the Russian part of Poland, writes well in Russian... This provocateur wears glasses. He is married and has a baby... Ask your trusted comrades in Paris... to check on his past and to see whom he meets. There is no doubt that before long your comrades will see him meet officers from the Soviet Embassy" (How the GPU Murdered Trotsky, New Park Publications, pp. 100-101).

Orlov concluded by proposing a procedure for confirming that his message had been received: "In order that I may know that you have received this letter I should like you to publish a notice in the newspaper Socialist Appeal in New York that the editorial office has received the letter from Stein; please, have the notice appear in the newspaper for January and February" (Ibid., p. 101).
Marc Zborowski under arrest in the
late 1950s

Trotsky's response was immediate. He sent a letter to the SWP reading: "Extremely confidential, extremely important, and extremely urgent.—I have received extremely important information from a source that is unidentified but claims to be in contact with senior GPU agents, to the effect that a long-standing collaborator of the Biulleten Oppozitsii is allegedly an agent provocateur: Mark."

Trotsky instructed the European comrades to form a commission "for the task of shadowing" Zborowski-Etienne. He declared, "If the information is confirmed, the opportunity must be arranged to denounce him to the French police as the robber of the archives under conditions that won't permit his escape" (Writings of Leon Trotsky, Supplement (1934-1940), Pathfinder Press, 1979, p. 818).

The next day, Trotsky wrote to one of his most trusted comrades in the SWP, John G. Wright: "In the next issue of the Socialist Appeal it is absolutely necessary to publish an announcement on the following order... 'Letter from STEIN received. We insist upon your meeting an absolutely trustworthy comrade. Address the Socialist Appeal ATTENTION MARTIN.'

"If such a letter is received then you personally should meet the man. The issue can become very important."

Orlov described the events which followed the letter to Trotsky in his 1957 testimony to a United States congressional subcommittee: "Soon enough, a month later, I received his frantic ad: 'I insist Mr. Stein, I insist that you go immediately to the editorial offices of the Socialist Appeal and talk to Comrade Martin.'

"I went there without disclosing my identity. I took just a side look at that Martin, and he did not inspire too much confidence in me, so that was all."

If Orlov suspected that GPU agents were planted inside the headquarters of the SWP, he was correct. The principal office secretary was Sylvia Callen/Franklin/Caldwell (see [1]), who was later exposed as a GPU plant. The extremely cautious Orlov escaped the fate of a second top GPU official who had also defected at about the same time, General Walter Krivitsky. He was murdered in 1941 in his Washington hotel room, undoubtedly silenced by GPU assassins before he could reveal what he knew of Stalin's crimes.

Trotsky, unaware at that time of the defection of Orlov, believed that Krivitsky was the author of the letter implicating "Etienne," and he continued his efforts to make contact. The documentary record indicates that Trotsky gave one of his American secretaries, Joseph Hansen, a copy of the partially completed manuscript on the life of Stalin to take back to the United States for use as a credential with the anonymous writer. Despite Trotsky's almost frantic hope for the success of this mission, Hansen failed to make contact. This probably saved Orlov's life, since Hansen too was a GPU agent and would have made sure that Orlov suffered the fate of Krivitsky.

One person who jumped to Zborowski's defense after Orlov's letter was his coworker and self-styled "Siamese twin," Lola Estrine. She referred to discussing the Orlov letter with Trotsky during her 1956 testimony before a congressional hearing on the activities of Soviet agents in the United States:

"The first rumor that I heard about it [that Zborowski was an agent], was in the summer of 1939, when I visited Mr. Leon Trotsky in Mexico. He had received an unsigned letter from a man who told him that the closest friend of his son, not mentioning his name, saying only 'Mark,' is an agent of the NKVD. The letter was rather unpleasant because it has too many details, and it was stated in the letter, as far as I remember, that, 'You tell somebody of your friends in Paris to follow the man, and you will see where he reports, with whom he meets, what he is doing.'

"And when Mr. Trotsky showed me this letter and asked my opinion about him, I felt a little bit uncomfortable, because the details were very unpleasant. Too many of them were in the letter. And then I thought it over and I talked it over with him, and I said, 'That is certainly a definitely dirty job of the NKVD, who wants to deprive you of your few collaborators that you have in France.'

"And, at the same time, he had another letter from another unnamed agent, telling him that a woman, meaning me, is coming to visit him, and will poison him.

"So we both decided, 'See how they work? They want that you shall break with the only people that are left over in France, Russians, let us say, in France, in Paris.' And we decided that it isn't to be taken seriously, but it was a hoax of NKVD" (Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States, US Government Printing Office, 1956, p. 137).

Her interrogator then asked, "And you so advised him?"

Mrs. Dallin replied, "And when I came back to Paris, the first thing I did, I told Mr. Zborowski" (Ibid).

The second letter, to which Estrine refers, was not from another "unnamed agent," but was again from Orlov, repeating his warning about Zborowski and including the new information that Lola Estrine herself was an agent of the GPU. The existence of the letter is known through various references to it, but its contents have been suppressed by the SWP, which possesses the original.

The growing suspicions, fueled by the Orlov letters, neutralized Zborowski's activities within the Fourth International, at least while Trotsky was alive. But the main thrust of the GPU conspiracy, the preparation of the physical elimination of Trotsky, continued. On May 24, 1940, a group of Stalinist thugs under the leadership of the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros were let into the Trotsky compound by a young American guard, Robert Sheldon Harte. Although they blasted Trotsky's bedroom with automatic weapons and threw incendiary devices, miraculously, Trotsky and his family emerged unscathed. Harte disappeared with the raiders. His body was found one month later.

Trotsky summed up the political lessons of this assassination attempt in his final finished article, the powerful statement published under the title "Stalin Seeks My Death." He wrote:

"The movement to which I belong is a young movement which arose under unprecedented persecutions on the part of the Moscow oligarchy and its agencies in all countries of the world. Generally speaking, it is hardly possible to find in history another movement which has suffered so many victims in so short a time as has the movement of the Fourth International. My personal and profound conviction is that in our epoch of wars, seizures, rapine, destruction, and all sorts of bestialities, the Fourth International is destined to fulfill a great historical role. But this is the future. In the past it has known only blows and persecutions. No one could have hoped during the last twelve years to make a career with the help of the Fourth International. For this reason the movement was joined by people selfless, convinced, and ready to renounce not only material boons, but if necessary, to sacrifice their lives. Without any desire of falling into idealization, I shall nevertheless permit myself to say that it is hardly possible to find in any other organization such a selection of people devoted to their banner and alien to personal pretensions as in the Fourth International" (Stalin's Gangsters, New Park Publications, pp. 8-9).

He concluded:

"To justify their persecution of me, and to cover up the assaults of the GPU, the agents of the Kremlin talk about my 'counterrevolutionary' tendency. It all depends on what one understands as revolution and counterrevolution. The most powerful force of the counterrevolution in our epoch is imperialism, both in its fascist form as well as in its quasi-democratic cover. Not one of the imperialist countries wishes to permit me inside its territories. As regards the oppressed and semi-independent countries, they refuse to accept me under the pressure of imperialist governments or of the Moscow bureaucracy, which now plays an extremely reactionary role in the entire world. Mexico extended hospitality to me because Mexico is not an imperialist country; and for this reason its government proved to be, as a rare exception, sufficiently independent of external pressure to guide itself in accordance with its own principles. I can therefore state that I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule but as an exception to the rule.

"In a reactionary epoch such as ours, a revolutionist is compelled to swim against the stream. I am doing this to the best of my ability. The pressure of world reaction has expressed itself perhaps most implacably in my personal fate and the fate of those close to me. I do not at all see in this any merit of mine: this is the result of the interlacing of historical circumstances" (Ibid., p. 12).

Trotsky knew that the GPU circle of death was pulling tighter around him, that it was only a matter of time before the conspiracy would achieve its objective. Only days before his death, he told a Mexican journalist, "I will be killed either by one of them in here or by one of my friends from outside, by someone who has access to the house. Because Stalin cannot spare my life." Trotsky's prognosis was tragically accurate. On August 20, 1940, Ramon Mercader was admitted to Trotsky's study, where he plunged an ice pick deep into the great Bolshevik leader's skull. Trotsky struggled with his assassin, preventing any escape, but soon lapsed into a coma. He died the next day.

Mercader was tried, convicted and served 20 years in a Mexican prison, without ever admitting his role as a GPU assassin. However, the noted Mexican criminologist, Dr. Quiroz-Cuaron, definitively established Mercader's identity in 1949. As soon as he was released in 1960, Mercader traveled to Cuba, where he was warmly welcomed by Fidel Castro. He continued on to the Soviet Union, where the murderer of Trotsky was decorated as a hero by the Stalinist bureaucracy under Khrushchev. According to press reports, he died in 1978.

Mark Zborowski resumed his career as a GPU spy against the Trotskyist movement, this time in the United States. When the German fascists overran France in June 1940, Zborowski fled to the south of the country, winding up in a Vichy concentration camp. Lola Estrine came to his rescue, traveling to Vichy to arrange Zborowski's release and his immigration to the United States through Lisbon, Portugal. He arrived in Philadelphia on December 29, 1941.

Zborowski moved to New York and resumed his GPU activities by spying on Trotskyists and other opponents of the Stalinist bureaucracy in New York City. Meetings of the leadership of the Fourth International—which had been forced to move to New York in order to maintain international communications under wartime conditions—were held in Zborowski's living room, even though Joseph Hansen was familiar with the suspicions raised by the Orlov letter.
Zborowski in 1975 seeking to evade camera

Zborowski worked in the network of anti-Trotskyist agents under the direction of Jack Soble, who had immigrated to the United States, along with his brother Dr. Robert Soblen, to continue working for the GPU. He regularly passed along information gleaned from his discussions with leaders of the Fourth International and his contacts throughout the émigré community in New York City, no doubt aiding the GPU to locate and exterminate members of the Trotskyist underground in Europe.

The real political views of this GPU agent were revealed in one conversation related by the former correspondence secretary of the Fourth International, Jean van Heijenoort, which he recalled took place in 1943 or 1944.

"At the time, the extent of the Russian concentration camps had become known. There were about 20 million people in camps. That had been known for the first time in the whole extent and everybody was thinking seriously about that, and myself, I was revising my ideas about Russia. So I had a discussion with Zborowski about Russia, the Russian state, Stalinists and so forth, and we came to talk about the concentration camps, and the extent to which they are spread over Russia. I mentioned the extent of the concentration camps and what he said at that time was that there were always concentration camps in Russia, so what, it doesn't change anything. At that time I got quite angry, I broke off the discussion, and that was about the last time I had a serious talk with him" (How the GPU Murdered Trotsky, p. 167).

Meanwhile, Zborowski built up his public career in anthropology at Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell Medical College and developed close professional associations with such leading anthropologists as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. He held staff positions with the Yiddish Scientific Institute in New York and the American-Jewish Committee and a teaching position at Harvard University. He published a book about growing up in Uman entitled Life Is With People.

Zborowski's quiet life as a respected anthropologist exploded when Alexander Orlov surfaced, again, after the death of Stalin in 1953, and published his revelations about Stalin's crimes. In December 1954, Orlov discovered that Zborowski was in the United States, and immediately turned him over to the United States Attorney and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who questioned him repeatedly over the next several years.

Orlov later described Zborowski's importance in congressional testimony: "He was so highly valued that even Stalin knew about him. His value, as I understood then, was that he would become the organizer of the assassination of Trotsky or Trotsky's son any time, because in view of the great trust Trotsky and Trotsky's son had in him, that Mark could always recommend secretaries to Trotsky, guards to Trotsky, and in that way could help to infiltrate an assassin into Trotsky's household in Mexico." (Testimony of Alexander Orlov before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws, of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, December 28, 1955, US Government Printing Office, 1962, p. 2).

Orlov's revelation that Sedov's right-hand man in Paris, the ever-present Etienne, was a GPU agent caused a far greater reaction from the FBI than the SWP. The FBI questioned Zborowski repeatedly and in 1956 he testified publicly before the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee. During this same period, the FBI picked up Soble, the leader of the ring. Twice Zborowski testified before the 1957 United States Grand Jury for the Southern District of New York, which carried out an extensive investigation of GPU activities.

On April 21, 1958, the grand jury indicted Zborowski for perjury for denying under oath that he knew Soble. Zborowski's arrest was reported on the front page of the New York Times the next day. Zborowski was tried, convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment, the maximum. Both his conviction and sentence were heavily publicized in the bourgeois press. His conviction was subsequently overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, however. Zborowski was tried a second time, convicted again in 1962 and sentenced to three years and eleven months in federal prison. He served only a small portion of the sentence, however; upon his release in 1964, he was permitted to resume his career in anthropology in the San Francisco Bay area.

The fact that Zborowski was allowed to return to a comfortable life as an academic demonstrates how imperialism, despite its squabbles with the Kremlin bureaucracy, appreciated the contribution of GPU agents to its own maintenance of power. Certainly, while slapping Zborowski on the wrists for illegal espionage activity in the United States, the American bourgeoisie was not at all bothered by his role in murdering Trotskyists. Indeed, the liberal intelligentsia—which had in its vast majority endorsed the Moscow Trials and supported Stalin against Trotsky—treated Zborowski with special sympathy. Elizabeth Poretsky, the widow of Ignace Reiss and also an anthropologist who knew Zborowski, wrote about the trial: "Many of Etienne's fellow anthropologists attended the trial and gathered round him during the recesses, ostentatiously demonstrating their friendship and faith in him. They knew nothing of agents or secret police, or of Soviet political matters; to them a Soviet agent and a perjurer was merely an innocent victim of political persecution. They were determined to apply their methodology of primitive cultures to modern terror, as I realized when a prominent American anthropologist said to me after the trial: 'In this country we are against human sacrifice'" (Our Own People, p. 274).

Jack Soble pled guilty to espionage charges and spent four years in prison. Dr. Robert Soblen was arrested for espionage on November 29, 1960—by this time, Soble's brother was a prominent New York psychiatrist. The SWP's office secretary of the late 1930s and 1940s, Sylvia Franklin, was named on the indictment as one of his co-conspirators. [1] Soblen was convicted of espionage and given a life sentence. He committed suicide on September 6, 1962, in London's Heathrow Airport while under heavy guard en route to the United States from Israel, where he had fled while on bail.

Though the revelations about Zborowski, Soble and Soblen and their legal travails were widely publicized by the capitalist press, the Socialist Workers Party, which was then in a condition of serious political decline and degeneration, remained strangely silent. Even though the trials of Zborowski and Soblen took place in the United States Courthouse in Foley Square—mere blocks from the SWP's national headquarters—nothing at all appeared in the SWP's press about the Soble trial, the Soblen trial or either of Zborowski's two trials. The only article about Zborowski published at all was a superficial report under Joseph Hansen's byline which appeared in the April 9, 1956 issue, largely plagiarized from two articles written by David Dallin, the husband of Lola Estrine, for the March 19 and 26, 1956 issues of the magazine The New Leader.

The silence of the SWP—duplicated by the revisionist International Secretariat, headed by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel—appeared all the more perplexing because others in the Trotskyist movement were demanding clarification. Most notable was Georges Vereeken, a Belgian revolutionary who knew Zborowski during his Paris days. In his book The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement, Vereeken described the interest aroused by the initial revelations from the congressional hearings.

The French Pabloite Pierre Frank commented, according to Vereeken, "Zborowski has been questioned by a subcommittee of the American Senate. We can't expect much more about his activity in our ranks to come out from that direction. The American groups ... ought to get together on it and try to make this Etienne speak. Unfortunately we get the impression that they are not very keen on the whole business" (Georges Vereeken, The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement, New Park Publications, pp. 4-5).

At a Pabloite congress during April 1964, Vereeken later wrote, he "explained the whole Zborowski affair in detail, as well as the ravages caused by the GPU in our movement. Three times Mandel tried to stop me reading out my statement. But another leading member who had been part of our tendency before and during the war intervened energetically to enable me to read it through to the end" (Ibid., p. 351).

Mandel and Pablo had very definite political considerations for their refusal to engage in the kind of systematic exposure of the crimes of the GPU on which Trotsky had always insisted. [2] They had developed, from 1949 on, a political perspective which held that the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union had demonstrated, through the overturn of capitalist property relations in Eastern Europe, that it could play a revolutionary role. They claimed that Stalin's death in 1953 had opened the way to a process of "self-reform" of the bureaucracy which made Trotsky's perspective of the violent overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy outdated. The exposure of the bloody work of the Stalinist secret police against the Trotskyist movement—a record covered up then by Khrushchev and still suppressed today by Gorbachev—was politically inconvenient.

Moreover, it is likely that GPU agents, including some of those involved in the GPU network which organized the assassination of Trotsky, were still on active service within the Fourth International. These agents certainly did not want an investigation into the role of Zborowski which could raise uncomfortable questions which might lead to their own exposure.

In 1961, Gerry Healy, the leader of the Socialist Labour League, the British section of the International Committee, wrote to Joseph Hansen about "Etienne," after reading The Mind of an Assassin, a book on the Trotsky assassination by Isaac Don Levine which summarized part of the Zborowski story. After the Second World War, Healy had met a European Trotskyist who used the name "Etienne." He wanted to know whether this "Etienne" was the Zborowski to whom the Levine book referred. Moreover, Healy stressed the importance of conducting a full investigation into the role of the GPU inside the Fourth International. Healy wrote, "I think, Joe, we need a full discussion on the whole matter and I will be glad of your observations. Is Levine right on the question of Etienne?

"If he is, then it is necessary for us in the not-too-distant future to have a very real examination of the whole international ramifications of the Trotskyist movement" (The Indictment Stands, Labor Publications, p. 10).

Hansen and his Pabloite allies were not interested in any "very real examination" of the GPU in the Trotskyist movement. Hansen did not explain to Healy that the "Etienne" with whom Healy had worked was an entirely different individual from Mark Zborowski.

Instead, after lamely claiming that the SWP could not cover "Etienne's" hearings because of "our personnel problem," Hansen wrote: "One of our primary concerns was not to give the slightest encouragement to the view Levine seeks to implant—that our organizations are loaded with spies. Such a view is deadly poisonous and can do incomparably greater harm than the occasional stool pigeon that turns up in any organization" (Ibid., p. 11).

At its Sixth World Congress in May 1975, the International Committee of the Fourth International launched Security and the Fourth International, the first systematic investigation into the GPU penetration of the Trotskyist movement. All available information on the machinations of the Sobolevicius brothers, Zborowski and Mercader, and the assassinations of Reiss, Wolf, Klement, Sedov and Trotsky was assembled and analyzed.

QuoteMark Zborowski takes a swing at the camera when the
Workers League traced him to his home in San Francisco
in 1975

During August of that year, David North of the Workers League located Zborowski outside his home in the fashionable San Francisco neighborhood where he lived in comfortable semiretirement. North photographed Zborowski with his wife Regina. Zborowski attacked North while Regina threatened, "You can do nothing with these pictures if you know what's good for you." [3]

The International Committee published the photographs with documentation of the activities of Zborowski, Jack Soble, Robert Soblen and Mercader in How the GPU Murdered Trotsky and other works of Security and the Fourth International. As a result, cadre and politically advanced workers around the world were educated on the bloody, counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism and the burning necessity for security within the revolutionary movement. The ICFI also reviewed the overwhelming evidence that Cannon's secretary, Sylvia Franklin, was an agent of the GPU.

The ICFI investigation uncovered documents which showed that Joseph Hansen had maintained previously secret relationships, first with the Stalinist GPU in the period before Trotsky's assassination, then with the American FBI in the period afterward. [4] These relationships were entered into without the knowledge of the SWP leadership, and culminated in Hansen sending a letter to the State Department seeking the name of a government official "to whom confidential information can be imparted with impunity." He was referred to the FBI bureau chief in New York City, B.E. Sackett. Just as Zborowski's reports were reviewed by Stalin, Hansen's relationship with the FBI received the personal attention of J. Edgar Hoover. Hansen himself labeled the International Committee's work on Zborowski a "dry well" and defended Sylvia Franklin as an "exemplary comrade." [5]

QuoteZborowski's wife warns the photographer, "You
can do nothing with these pictures if you know what's
good for you!"

Aside from the International Committee, no organization in the world supported the work of Security and the Fourth International or published its findings. Instead, the investigation was denounced by the SWP and its Pabloite revisionist allies, such as Ernest Mandel, around the globe. [6] Their campaign of vilification reached a crescendo in January 1977, when Mandel, George Novack, Tariq Ali and Pierre Lambert joined forces at the notorious London meeting in defense of Hansen, which the ICFI aptly dubbed "The Platform of Shame."

A statement issued by the International Committee at the time declared, "Those acquainted with the history of the struggle against revisionism will find difficulty in suppressing a spontaneous desire to retch at the temerity of the organizers who defend the criminal activities of the GPU and their accomplices under the banner of a bogus 'workers democracy'... the exposure of Stalin's crimes and complicity of the revisionists in the cover-up of these crimes is central to this preparation of a new cadre of revolutionaries. Those who oppose this task in whatever form are serving the interests of counterrevolutionary Stalinism. We have been warned."

The campaign begun by the ICFI on Security and the Fourth International culminated in the charge that SWP leader Joseph Hansen had deliberately covered up for and protected Stalinist GPU agents. Within a few years, Hansen's heirs in the SWP leadership would explicitly and publicly vindicate this charge in practice, as they joined forces with the GPU agent Zborowski to prevent him from being compelled to testify about his crimes against the Trotskyist movement.

The International Committee supported a lawsuit brought against the US government and the SWP by a member, Alan Gelfand, who had been expelled from the SWP for raising ques
After the Revolution of 1905, the Czar had prudently prepared for further outbreaks by transferring some $400 million in cash to the New York banks, Chase, National City, Guaranty Trust, J.P.Morgan Co., and Hanover Trust. In 1914, these same banks bought the controlling number of shares in the newly organized Federal Reserve Bank of New York, paying for the stock with the Czar\'s sequestered funds. In November 1917,  Red Guards drove a truck to the Imperial Bank and removed the Romanoff gold and jewels. The gold was later shipped directly to Kuhn, Loeb Co. in New York.-- Curse of Canaan

CrackSmokeRepublican

#2
June 20, 2012, 11:00:40 PM
Quote"Polecats" was the KGB cover term for Trotskyists, while "Rats" was its code name for Zionists.
After the Revolution of 1905, the Czar had prudently prepared for further outbreaks by transferring some $400 million in cash to the New York banks, Chase, National City, Guaranty Trust, J.P.Morgan Co., and Hanover Trust. In 1914, these same banks bought the controlling number of shares in the newly organized Federal Reserve Bank of New York, paying for the stock with the Czar\'s sequestered funds. In November 1917,  Red Guards drove a truck to the Imperial Bank and removed the Romanoff gold and jewels. The gold was later shipped directly to Kuhn, Loeb Co. in New York.-- Curse of Canaan

CrackSmokeRepublican

#3
June 20, 2012, 11:02:37 PM
QuoteKnowledge

2010-10-26
What is a shtetl?   <:^0

The word 'shtetl' means 'town' in yiddish. It is a diminutive of 'shtot' ('city'). The term is used to describe the places inhabited by Jews of Central-Easter Europe. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska wrote in her commentary to 'The Village' by Sholem Asch: 'In Yiddish historic literature shtetl is an idealized image of a small Polish – Jewish town. 'The Village' was written while it was trendy to be interested in province and regionalism (...) During this time [at the beginning of 20th century] many Yiddish writers described small towns in a naturalistic, realistic or satirical way, criticizing them and focusing on their poverty.'

Fifty years after publishing Asch's book, when Jewish estates in Central-Eastern Europe had been destroyed as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Holocaust, a new concept of 'shtetl' appeared. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, the authors of the book 'Life is with people. The Culture of the Shtetl' published in 1952, argued that 'a shtetl is not a place, but a state of mind'.

Ilustracja

The wedding of tzaddik's daughter    

The shtetl was a personification and a microcosm of the Jewish cultural area. The word 'shtetl' as the ancient Greek word 'polis' meant not only 'town' but also 'community'. However, the shtetl could not be identified with kehilla. It was not an institution. In addition, Zborowski argued that shtetl was to be defined in terms of 'espirit', not in terms of any geographical, demographic, economic, or administrative features. It was not material. The shtetl was created by people who cultivated the same rituals and shared the same way of thinking. Therefore, a word 'shtetl' referred to a specific spirit.

What was this spirit? In the introduction to the issue of 'Life is with people. The Culture of the Shtetl 'published in 1995, Barbara Kirshnblatt-Gimblett pointed out that the shtetl is associated with such words as: isolation, self-containment and homogeneity, but it was a space of meeting and exchanging of ideas. The Shtetl was not isolated since the Jewish community had contact not only with Jews from other towns and countries but also with Christians. There were many religious groups (Hassidic, Orthodox, Progressive Jews) and political parties (Agudat, Bund, Zionists). Contrary to stereotypes, a shtetl was not a source of provincialism and obscurantism. It was influenced by various trends such as enlightenment, assimilation, socialism or Zionism. It was rather a lens, in which the focus was upon Jewish life in all its forms...

Sources:

Mark Zborowski, Elizabeth Herzog, 'Life is with people. The Culture of the Shtetl', foreword by Margaret Mead, introduction by Barbara Kirshnblatt-Gimblett, New York 1995.

Szalom Asz, Miasteczko, posłowie: Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Janowiec 2003

http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/cms/knowled ... -/?print=1
After the Revolution of 1905, the Czar had prudently prepared for further outbreaks by transferring some $400 million in cash to the New York banks, Chase, National City, Guaranty Trust, J.P.Morgan Co., and Hanover Trust. In 1914, these same banks bought the controlling number of shares in the newly organized Federal Reserve Bank of New York, paying for the stock with the Czar\'s sequestered funds. In November 1917,  Red Guards drove a truck to the Imperial Bank and removed the Romanoff gold and jewels. The gold was later shipped directly to Kuhn, Loeb Co. in New York.-- Curse of Canaan

CrackSmokeRepublican

#4
June 20, 2012, 11:13:28 PM
Vassiliev's Notebooks indicate that Soviets were by all accounts "Kosher" by the sheer number of J-Tribe undercover spys running around in the US/UK and Europe before, during and after WWII. -- CSR
------------------

QuoteVenona and Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks: Confirming and Correcting Identified Venona Cover Names and Revealing the Unidentified

2009 Symposium on Cryptologic History

By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

 

            In March 2009 former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev gave nine notebooks with 1,115 pages of detailed notes on KGB archival documents to the Library of Congress.  He had written the notebooks during an authorized SVR research project in the early 1990s.  Along with the original notebooks, hand-written in Russian, came transcriptions into word-processed Russian and translations into English as well as a concordance cross-indexing cover names and real names.  All three versions of the notebooks, with identical pagination, were also made available on the web for examination and downloading.  At the same time Yale University Press released Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America authored by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Vassiliev.  The provenance of the notebooks is discussed at length in the preface (by Haynes and Klehr) and the introduction (by Vassiliev) to Spies.

            Vassiliev's notebooks focus on archival records of the activities of the KGB's predecessor agencies in the United States in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s with some material on espionage in Britain during World War II related to the ties between the British and American atomic bomb programs.  The notes include both summaries and lengthy quotations complete with archival file and page citations, document titles, document authorship, and dating.  A good deal of Vassiliev's material overlaps the period covered by the decrypted messages of the Venona project.  They offer an excellent opportunity to review and examine the reliability of the work done by American code-breakers and to fill in some of missing information from the Venona decryptions.  In this talk we will largely concentrate on the second point but make a few observations about the first.

            The Venona decryptions contain many cover names.  Sometimes the real name behind the cover name is stated in plain text.  More often, NSA and FBI analysts had to use the information in the messages to identify the real name.  In many cases the information provided was sufficiently detailed and ample that identification of the real name was easy.  In other cases it required extensive field investigation by FBI agents.  Hundreds of Venona cover names were thus identified, mostly with confidence, some less so.  Additionally, there remained hundreds of other cover names where the information was insufficient to make even a tentative identification of the real name.

            Vassiliev's notebooks also contain hundreds of cover names.  The notebooks provide the real name in plain text for many of these cover names.  In other cases the real name is not given but the details about that person are sufficient to make a confident identification.  There are also cover names that remain entirely unidentified.  Based on our earlier work on Venona and our examination over the past three years of Vassiliev's notebooks, we were able to provide corroboration for the real names identified by the Venona project for 177 cover names.  These are listed in Appendix 1.    

            Significantly, we discovered only four cases where Venona analysts made incorrect identifications.  These are the subject of Appendix 2.  The most notable correction is that Venona's "Veksel" appears to be a decoding error in constructing the Soviet code book and the correct cover name was "Vector."  More importantly, "Vector" wasn't Robert Oppenheimer as asserted but Enrico Fermi.  The notebooks also show that KGB attempts to contact Fermi failed (as did its attempts to contact Oppenheimer).  Oppenheimer's cover names in the notebooks, by the way, were  "Chester" (early 1944 to mid-1945), "Chemist" (September 1944), and "Yew" (late 1944-1945), none of which occur in the deciphered Venona cables The other significant misidentification is that in Venona "Arena" was identified as Mary Price, when in fact it is clearly linked to Gerald Graze in the notebooks.  Only four errors in identification out of hundreds of correct ones is impressive and reflects well on the care and thoroughness of NSA/FBI analysts.

            What is, of course, of special interest are the real names that Vassiliev's notebooks attach to cover names that are unidentified in Venona.  These are the subject of Appendix 3, and there are sixty-three of these.  Some of these cover names unidentified in Venona appeared to be important sources and were the subject of much speculation as to the real names hidden behind the cover names.  Vassiliev's notebooks allow us to attach real names to these 'high-profile' unidentified cover names in Venona.
Quote"19":  In Venona 812, KGB New York to Moscow, 29 May 1943, KGB illegal station chief Iskhak Akhmerov told Moscow that agent "19" had provided information from a conversation in which he took part that included President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and a senior American with the cover name "Deputy" whom NSA/FBI analysts thought might have been Vice-President Wallace or, less likely, presidential aide Harry Hopkins.  (The conversation would have been in connection with the "Trident" conference of 12-27 May 1943 in Washington that brought together top British and American military and diplomatic policy makers.)  This message was, however, only partially deciphered and provides little information about the identity of "19," and this is also the only Venona message in which "19" appears.

            The identity of "19" is intriguing because he was sufficiently senior to take part in a conversation that involved FDR and Churchill, and it prompted considerable speculation.  The late Eduard Mark argued in "Venona's Source 19 and the Trident Conference of May 1943: Diplomacy or Espionage?" that an analysis of a variety of records of meetings at the Trident conference suggest that "19" probably was Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's right-hand man.  Further, Mark argued that it was likely, but not a certainty, that the message was a report of "back-channel" diplomacy rather than espionage.  Vassiliev's notebooks show that Venona 812 was reporting espionage, not back-channel diplomacy, but that "19" was not Harry Hopkins, but Laurence Duggan, then advisor to the Secretary of State on inter-American affairs.  The KGB had recruited Duggan the mid-1930s, and he had cooperated with Soviet intelligence KGB until he left the State Department in the spring of 1944.

            "Fogel"/"Persian": Another much-discussed unidentified cover name in Venona was "Fogel," later renamed "Persian."  "Fogel"/"Persian" commanded attention because he was clearly an atomic source, reporting information about the Manhattan Project's facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  But, as with "19," there was almost no identifying information in the four deciphered messages about him, "and NSA/FBI analysts left him unidentified.  After the release of Venona, however, various researchers offered candidates, including the American physicist Philip Morrison and the refugee German, naturalized British physicist Rudolph Peierls.  Neither was correct.  He was Russell McNutt, a civil engineer who was part of the design team for Kellex, the contractor that built the massive K-25 gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge.  McNutt's name barely shows up in the massive literature on atomic espionage, but his recruiter, Julius Rosenberg, is another matter.  The notebooks show that McNutt was another of the young Communist engineers whom Rosenberg persuaded to assist Soviet intelligence, giving Julius Rosenberg the distinction of recruiting two Soviet atomic spies: one at Los Alamos (his long-known brother-in-law, David Greenglass) and one source on Oak Ridge (the hitherto unknown McNutt).  Escaping public involvement in the postwar revelations of Soviet atomic espionage, McNutt enjoyed a distinguished career as senior engineer for Gulf Oil and one of the developers of the planned community of Reston, Virginia. Interestingly, the FBI interviewed him after Rosenberg's arrest, in part because David Greenglass gave his name to the Bureau.  Although agents knew he had worked at Kellex and thought he was probably a Communist, there is nothing in his FBI file to indicate that the bureau ever considered him as a candidate for "Fogel/"Persian.

            "Nil"/"Tu...": While identifying McNutt as a previously unknown member of the Rosenberg ring, Vassiliev's notebooks also provide the name of one of its sources left unidentified in Venona.  The Venona project decrypted only part of the code-name of one of Julius Rosenberg's sources- "Tu...", later changed to "Nil."  Documents in the notebooks show the full code-name was "Tuk" and it was Nathan Sussman, a college friends of Julius, who specialized in aviation radar at Western Electric.  The FBI extensively questioned Sussman; after first lying, he eventually admitted being a Communist, but denied spying.  He agreed to testify that Julius was also a Communist, but was not used at the trial when the Rosenbergs' defense chose not to contest the point.  Sussman later was a cooperative witness before Senator McCarthy's investigation into communist activities at Fort Monmouth; while he named a number of other engineers as fellow party members, he was never asked if he himself had been a spy and he escaped prosecution.

            Incidentally, the Vassiliev notebooks also provide Morton Sobell's cover name, "Senya," which does not occur in Venona.  Some of you may recall that at a previous conference on Venona, Sobell dramatically stood up and rolled up his pant leg to demonstrate that he could not have been "Serb" whom analysts had suggested was possibly Sobell.  "Serb" had an artificial leg.  He too is identified in the notebooks as Joseph Chmilevski, a Philadelphia engineer who had lost his leg fighting in Spain.

            "Quantum": Another unidentified atomic source was "Quantum."  Only three deciphered Venona cables mentioned "Quantum." All three dealt with his meeting with a senior Soviet diplomat and two KGB officers at the Soviet Embassy in Washington in June 1943. Thereafter "Quantum" disappeared from sight.  What made "Quantum" interesting was that the messages showed he had handed over information on the diffusion method for separating bomb-grade U-235 from unwanted U-238.  "Quantum" appeared to be a scientist or engineer of some sort and senior enough to warrant a meeting with a high-ranking Soviet diplomat.  But beyond that and the fact he was in Washington in June 1943, there were no clues to his identity.  NSA/FBI footnotes to the "Quantum" messages simply stated "unidentified."  Candidates for "Quantum" have ranged from George Gamow and Louis Slotin (a Canadian physicist with Communist ties in his youth who died in a plutonium accident at Los Alamos in 1946), to Bruno Pontecorvo (an Italian physicist who worked at the atomic research laboratory at Chalk River during World War II and defected to the USSR in 1950).

            All of the speculation was wrong.  Vassiliev's notebooks identify "Quantum as Boris Podolsky, a scientist never suspected of any association with Soviet intelligence. Born in Russia in 1896, Podolsky had immigrated to the United States in 1911.  After receiving his PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology, he returned to the USSR from 1930 to 1933, working as director of theoretical physics at the Ukrainian Physio-Technical Institute. Back in America in 1933, he took a post at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.  In 1935 with Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, Podolsky co-authored one of the most famous theoretical articles ever written on quantum mechanics. After a quarrel with Einstein, Podolsky left Princeton to become a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cincinnati.  After some initial meetings, however, the KGB dropped Podolsky.  He was a theoretical physicist and sought a senior position in the Soviet academic world.  The KGB, however, took the view that the USSR had plenty of theoretical physicists; what it wanted was someone working directly on the Manhattan project, and cut contact when Podolsky failed to get a position in the bomb program.

            "Huron": Another unidentified source in Venona was "Huron,"  who appeared in five deciphered cables that indicated he was a scientist and had some connection with Soviet atomic intelligence. Like "Quantum," however, he was not identified by American counterintelligence.  And just as in "Quantum's" case, the connection to atomic espionage encouraged widespread speculation.  Candidates suggested included Bruno Pontecorvo (also suggested for "Quantum") and Ernest Lawrence.  Again, the speculation was wrong. "Huron" was Byron Darling, who had received a PhD at the University of Michigan in 1939 and had taken a position as a research physicist at the U.S. Rubber Company in Detroit in 1941. He had become a secret member of the CPUSA probably in the late 1930s and had begun assisting the KGB in 1942.  In addition to his ready access to research on synthetic rubber, the KGB wanted to use him to contact some of the physicist he knew who worked directly on the Manhattan project, such as Enrico Fermi.  The notebooks suggest, however, that Darling was never successful at his recruiter role.

            "Eric": Yet another unidentified atomic source in Venona was "Eric," a major source in England reporting on the British atomic program and also passing along information on the Manhattan Project that was shared with the British program.  Again, there was speculation on "Eric's" identity, including suggestions he was Sir Eric Rideal, a prominent British scientist.  But the notebooks show that "Eric" was Engelbert Broda, a refugee Austrian physicist and secret Communist who worked on the British atomic program at the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge.  Recently released MI-5 files show that British intelligence was suspicious of Broda and concluded after Allen Nunn May was released from prison in 1952 and married Broda's ex-wife that Broda had been a Soviet spy and had recruited May into espionage.            

            "Ramsay":  The final Venona atomic-related unidentified cover name is "Ramsay."  Again there was little information in the deciphered messages to enable analysts to identify him, although there were some suggestions it might be the physicist Norman F. Ramsey.  However, the notebooks show "Ramsay" was Clarence Hiskey, a Manhattan Project physicist who worked first at its facilities at Columbia University and then at the University of Chicago.  (The KGB never recruited Hiskey; unaware he was already working for the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence.  The FBI, however, spotted Hiskey meeting with a GRU agent.  Hiskey held an Army reserve commission, and the U.S. Army removed him from the Manhattan Project by lifting his exemption from military service and sending him to a remote Army base in northern Canada.)

            "Reed"/"Solid": A source code-named "Solid," changed to "Reed" in 1944 resisted the efforts of Venona investigators.  Although he is not named in Vassiliev's notebooks, there is enough information about him to establish his identity with certainty.  A 1943 memo describes him as "chief of the Chem. Division of the U.S. Tariff Commission," a position held by James Hibben from 1939 until his death in 1959.  His older brother Paxton was a one-time State Department employee turned radical, whom the Soviets buried in a Moscow cemetery reserved for leading Bolsheviks and friends of the Bolshevik revolution.  James began working for the KGB in 1935 and was paid a regular stipend.  The KGB broke off contact with him in 1939 and it was not reestablished until 1943.  Although he was briefly investigated when the FBI's surveillance of those named by Bentley showed he was friendly with several of them, he escaped serious scrutiny.      

            "Vick": Although "Vick" appeared in only one decrypted Venona cable from 1943, indicating some connection with the State Department, his story, revealed by Vassiliev's notebooks, is fascinating.  He was Henry Ware, the son and grandson of presidents of Atlanta University, a college founded for freed slaves by radical abolitionists.  Henry studied in Russia in the mid-1930s and was recruited in 1935 to spy on other Americans in Moscow.  After receiving his doctorate in economics at Columbia University, he became a high-ranking staffer in the Commerce Department and was re-recruited by the KGB in 1942; he recommended the KGB approach two of his Columbia friends, Bela Gold and William Remington, both of whom were recruited.  In October 1944 Ware was in Moscow, where he was serving as an interpreter for the American Military Mission to Russia.  Although the KGB tried to contact him, he apparently refused to help.  He went on to translate at Yalta and Potsdam before returning to the Commerce Department.  Although he was the subject of a cursory investigation when a wiretap indicated he was in contact with William Remington and another Bentley source, he avoided trouble.  Ware went into business in Arlington, establishing a bartering service in Fairfax emulated around the world; he died in 1999.

            "Pol": The famous "Ales" message of March 30, 1945, decrypted by the Venona project, mentioned that "Ales," whom analysts believed was Alger Hiss, had worked in recent years with "Pol," whom neither the NSA, FBI, or scores of scholars was able to identify.  Pol', with the Cyrillic soft sign, is one of the two ways the Latin alphabet name Paul is rendered into Russian.  Vassiliev's notebooks have more information about "Pol."  Harold Glasser, for example, sent in a report to the KGB that "Pol" had contacted Glasser after Chambers' disappearance.  And Chambers noted in Witness that "Paul" was the covert name used by his long-time friend and fellow underground agent working with the GRU, Maxim Lieber, the well-known literary agent.  In our view there is now sufficient information to be confidant that "Pol" was Lieber.

            Vassiliev's notebooks also provide us with insight into names redacted when the Venona material was released to the public.  Although the full explanation for why some material was blacked out has never been made public, one of the logical explanations is that some, perhaps most, were people who, after being identified, cooperated with American government investigators.  Appendixes 4 and 5 deal with redacted names.  Appendix 4 lists eight cover names where NSA/FBI analysts made an identification, but NSA redacted the real names when it released Venona. None are prominent or previously known people; several were involved with the ring of aircraft engineers assembled by Andrey Shevchenko in upstate New York.  A few of his recruits became public witnesses; others apparently quietly cooperated.

Appendix 5 is a special case of redaction not involving cover names.  When NSA released Venona 1354, KGB New York to Moscow, 22 September 1944, it redacted all but a single name of a list of eighteen OSS employees identified by OSS security as suspected secret Communists.  Duncan Lee, a Soviet source in the OSS supplied the list to the KGB.  The list NSA redacted, however, is provided in one of Vassiliev's notebooks, and you can see the names in Appendix 4.  Of these names a number assuredly were covert Communists, including Irving Goff, Manual and Michael Jiminez, David Zablodowsky, and Donald Wheeler, the latter the one name NSA did not redact.  But OSS's security's suspicion about the most prominent name on the list, Arthur Goldberg, later a Cabinet Secretary, Supreme Court Justice and Ambassador to the United Nations, was mistaken.  We know of no significant evidence suggesting Goldberg was a covert Communist and throughout his career as a labor lawyer and leading liberal political activist he was a vocal and very effective anti-Communist activist.

            Finally, attaching real names to unidentified cover names does not work just one way.  Vassiliev's notebooks also have many cover names to which no real name was attached.  In a number of cases the description of the person involved was sufficient to attach a real name, but not all.  And, in any case, as we see in Appendix 6, there are twenty-eight unidentified cover names in Vassiliev's notebooks where Venona supplies a real name.

                        Vassiliev's notebooks go a long way to filling in the blanks in the history of Soviet espionage in the United States.  But while the broad outlines and many of the details are known, there are still holes and gaps in the picture.  A number of cover names, including some active sources that provided important information to the KGB, remain unidentified both in Venona and in Vassiliev's notebooks.  More importantly, we still know relatively little about GRU operations in the United States after Whittaker Chambers' defection, other than that Maxim Lieber stepped in for him.  Recent revelations about the role of George Koval, a GRU atomic spy, make it clear that the GRU remained active in running agents during World War II and we know little about them.  There are other details we do not know and there may be some surprises left to be found, but between Venona and Vassiliev's notebooks, likely we have a grasp of the main contours of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

 

Appendix 1

Cover Names Similarly Identified in Venona and Vassiliev's Notebooks.

 

            Following the convention used in Vassiliev's notebooks, cover names are within double quote marks.

 

            Transliterated Russian cover names and titles are in Bold using the BGN/PCGN system for transliterating Russian from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. The BGN/PCGN system is relatively intuitive for anglophones to read and pronounce and is familiar to many American readers because it is used by major publications. In many publications a simplified form of the system is used to render English versions of Russian names, typically converting ë to yo and simplifying -iy and -yy endings to -y.  That convention will be used here.  The Cyrillic soft sign ь is represented by a single straight quote mark, ' and the soft sign ъ by a double straight quote mark, ".  To avoid confusion, some names and titles that have well established Latin alphabet spellings under different transliteration systems are spelled in accordance with the their predominance in the literature.  For example, "Grigory Kheifets" rather than "Grigory Kheyfets" as called for by BGN/PCGN.  Over its several decades of existence translators for the Venona project used several different transliteration systems.

 

1 .  "Abram" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soble, Jack.  Soble appears in Venona under the cover name "Abram."

2 .  "Acorn"  [Zholud'] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Bela (William) Gold.  "Acorn" was identified in Venona as Gold.

3 .  "Adam" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Eva Getzov  in 1948.  (Alternative translation Getsov, Getzoff)   "Adam" was was identified in Venona for 1944 and 1945 messages as Rebecca Getzoff.  While it seems likely, it is not firmly established that Eva Getzov and Rebecca Getzoff are the same person.  "Adam" as a cover name for 'Eva' Getzov looks like a KGB play on words (Adam and Eve).

4 .  "Aileron" [Eleron] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Abraham George Silverman.  "Aileron" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Abraham George Silverman.

5 .  "Albert"  [Al'bert] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov.  "Albert" was identified in Venona as Akhmerov.

6 .  "Aleksey" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Anatoly Antonovich Yatskov (also used the pseudonym Anatoly Antonovich Yakovlev).  (Alternative translation: Aleksej, Alexey, Alexsei)   "Aleksey" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Yatskov/Yakovlev.

7 .  "Ales" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soviet intelligence source/agent, 1945.  Identified in a marginal note by Vassiliev as likely Alger Hiss.  "Ales" was identified in Venona as likely Alger Hiss.

8 .  "Announcer" [Diktor] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): William Donovan. "Announcer" as "Radio Announcer" was identified as Donovan in the Venona decryptions.

9 .  "Ant" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Mrs. Kristal Fuchs Heineman.  "Ant" was identified in Venona as Kristal Fuchs Heineman.

10 .  "Antenna" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Julius Rosenberg.  "Antenna" was identified in Venona as Julius Rosenberg.

11 .  "Anton" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Leonid Kvasnikov, KGB officer.  "Anton" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Kvasnikov.

12 .  "Arno" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Harry Gold.  "Arno" was identified in Venona as Harry Gold.

13 .  "Arsenal" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): U.S. War Department.  "Arsenal" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the U.S. War Department.

14 .  "Arseny" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soviet intelligence officer working on aviation intelligence in upstate New York.  "Arseny" was identified in the Venona decryptions as KGB officer Andrey Ivanovich Shevchenko who worked on aviation intelligence in upstate New York.  Shevchenko may be the pseudonym used the in the U.S. by KGB officer Andrey Ivanovich Raina.

15 .  "Art" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Helen Koral beginning in September 1944.  "Art" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Helen Koral.

16 .  "Artem" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): A. Slavyagin, KGB officer.  "Artem" was identified in the Venona decryptions as likely the cover name of either G. N. Ogloblin or M.N. Khvostov, two young Soviet diplomatic staff.  Those latter two names may be pseudonyms, and A. Slavyagin identified in Vassiliev's notebooks as "Artem" may be the real name of one of the former.

17 .  "Author" [Avtor] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Vladimir Borisovich Morkovin in 1945.  "Author" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Morkovin.

18 .  "Babylon" [Vavilon] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): San Francisco.  "Babylon" was identified in the Venona decryptions as San Francisco.

19 .  "Bank" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): U.S. State Department, 1941-.  "Bank" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the State Department.

20 .  "Bear Cubs" [Medvezhata] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Republicans and Republican Party, circa 1944.

21 .  "Beck" [Bek] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Sergey Kurnakov starting in September 1944.  "Beck" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Kurnakov.

22 .  "Big House" [Bol'shoy Dom] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Communist International. "Big House" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the Communist International.

23 .  "Black" [Cherny] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Thomas Black prior to October 1944. "Black" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Thomas Black.

24 .  "Blerio" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Stanislav Shumovsky, KGB officer, aviation espionage.  "Blerio" as "Bleriot" was identified as Shumovsky in the Venona decryptions.

25 .  "Boar" [Kaban] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Winston Churchill.  "Boar" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Churchill.

26 .  "Bob" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Boris Krotov, Soviet intelligence officer in the U.S., 1947-1950 NY.  "Bob" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Boris Krotov on the London-Moscow channel in 1945.

27 . "Bumblebee" [Shmel'] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): David Greenglass in October 1944, paired with the cover name "Wasp" for his wife.  "Bumblebee" was identified in the Venona decryptions as David Greenglass in November 1944   By December 1944 Greenglass's cover name in the Venona decryptions appeared as "Caliber," likely changed when KGB noticed that it was already using "Bumblebee" as the cover name for the journalist Walter Lippmann.

28 .  "Cabaret" [Kabare] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks):  Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (Rockerfeller committee).

29 .  "Cabin" [Izba] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Office of Strategic Services, OSS starting in 1942.  KGB cover name for OSS was "Izba", in Vassiliev's notebooks translated as "Cabin".  KGB cover name for FBI was "Khata", in Vassiliev's notebooks translated as "Hut".  Izba and Khata have overlapping meanings in Russian (with Khata as a generic peasant's hut) and one could reverse the chosen translation.  "Izba" was identified in the Venona decryptions as OSS starting in 1942.

30 .  "Caliber" [Kalibr] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): David Greenglass, December 1944-March 1950.  "Caliber" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Greenglass.

31 .  "Callistratus" [Kalistrat] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Alexander Feklisov.  "Callistratus" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Aleksandr Fomin, pseudonym used in the U.S. by KGB officer Alexander Feklisov when under diplomatic cover.

32 . "Camp 1" [Lager' 1] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Oak Ridge Manhattan atomic project facility.  "Camp 1" appeared in the Venona decryptions as unidentified Manhattan atomic project facility and in a context that suggests Oak Ridge.

33 . "Camp 2" [Lager' 2] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Los Alamos Manhattan atomic project facility.  "Camp 2" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the Los Alamos Manhattan atomic project facility.

34 . "Captain" [Kapitan] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Franklin D. Roosevelt.  "Captain" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Roosevelt.

35 .  "Carmen" [Karmen] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Helen Koral prior to August 1944.  "Carmen" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Helen Koral.

36 .  "Carthage" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Washington, DC.  Carthage was identified in Venona as Washington.

37 . "Carthage" [Karfagen] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Washington, DC.  "Carthage" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Washington.

38 .  "Chap" [Chep] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Zalmond David Franklin.  "Chap"/"Chep" was identified in the Venona decryptions [translated as "Chap" and "Chen"] as Salmond Franklin, a variant spelling of Zalmond Franklin.

39 .  "Charles" [Charl'z] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Klaus Fuchs starting in October 1944. "Charles" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Fuchs.

40 . "Charon" [Kharon] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): KGB officer Grigory Kheifets. "Charon" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Kheifets.

41 .  "Chester" (party name used as a cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Bernard Schuster.  "Chester" was Schuster prior to June 1943 when KGB replaced "Chester" with "Echo," but "Chester" occasionally was still used later, likely because "Chester" remained Schuster's party name.  "Chester" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Schuster.

42 .  "Clever Girl" [Umnitsa] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Elizabeth Bentley, circa 1940 until August 1944. (Alternative translations Miss Wise, Smart Girl, Good Girl)  "Clever Girl" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Bentley.

43 .  "Constructor" [Konstruktor] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Abraham Brothman prior to October 1944. "Constructor" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Brothman.

44 .  "Corporal" [Kapral] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Edward Stettinius, Jr.  "Corporal" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Stettinius.

45 .  "Country" [Strana] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): the United States of America.  "Country" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the USA.

46 .  "Czech" [Chekh] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Jack Soble starting in September 1944.  "Czech" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Jack Soble.

47 .  "Decree" [Dekret] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): U.S. Lend Lease program and agency, circa 1944.  "Decree" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Lend Lease.

48 .  "Depot" [Depo] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): War Production Board, U.S.  "Depot" was identified in Venona as the WPB.

49 .  "Dir" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Mary Price from late 1941 to August 1944.  (Alternative translations: Dear, Deer).  "Dir" appeared in the Venona decryptions as Mary Price.

50 .  "Dock" [Dok] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): U.S. Department of the Navy.  "Dock" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the Navy department

51 .  "Donald" [Donal'd] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): William Ludwig Ullmann begining in August 1944 (after "Polo"), changed to "Pilot" in September 1944. "Donald" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Ullmann.

52 .  "Dora" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Helen Silvermaster.  "Dora" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Helen Silvermaster.

53 .  "Douglas" [Duglas] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Joseph Katz beginning in August 1944, changed to "X" in September 1944.  "Douglas" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Katz.

54 .  "Echo" [Ekho] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Bernard Schuster beginning in June 1943.  "Echo" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Schuster.

55 .  "Editorial Office" [Redaktsiya] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): TASS ( Telegraf-noye agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza —Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union).  "Editorial Office" was identified in the Venona decryptions as TASS.

56 .  "Elsa" [El'za] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Helen Lowry (mid-1945)  (Alternative translation: Elza).  "Elsa" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Lowry.

57 .  "Enormous" [Enormoz] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): cover name given to the intelligence project targeting the Anglo-American atomic bomb development and the Manhattan atomic project. "Enormous" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the Manhattan project.

58 .  "Express Messenger" [Gonets] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Richard Setaro.  "Express Messenger" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Setaro.

59 .  "Factory" [Fabrika] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Amtorg.  "Factory" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Amtorg.

60 .  "Farm" [Khutor] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): U.S. Foreign Economic Administration (FEA), December 1944.  "Farm" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the Foreign Economic Administration.

61 .  "Fellowcountryman" and "Fellowcontrymen" [Zemlyak, Zemlyaki] (cover names in Vassiliev's notebooks): Local Communists, members of the CPUSA or other fraternal Communist party/organization.  "Fellowcountryman" was identified in the Venona decryptions as a member of the CPUSA.

62 .  "Ferro" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Alexander N. Petroff after October 1944.  "Ferro" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Petroff.

63 .  "Frank" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Laurence Duggan's designation in reports of "Mer" in 1942-1943.  "Frank" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Duggan.

64 .  "Fraternal" [Bratsky] (cover name): Refers to a local Communist party, such as the CPUSA, or other local Communist-aligned institution.  "Fraternal" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the CPUSA.

65 .  "Frost" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Boris Morros.  Morros anglicized his Russian family name of "Moroz" as Morros.  Moroz is also the Russian work for frost.  His cover name, then, is a play on his Russian family name.  "Frost" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Morros.

66 .  "Gennady" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): KGB officer Gayk Badalovich Ovakimyan.  (Alternate transliteration Guennady). "Gennady" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Ovakimyan.

67 .  "Gift" [Dar] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): KGB station chief San Francisco, 1944.  Likely Grigory Kasparov.  "Gift" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Kasparov, chief of the San Francisco station.

68 .  "Gnome" [Gnom] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): William Perl prior to September 1944.  "Gnome" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Perl.

69 .  "Goose" [Gus'] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Harry Gold prior to October 1944. "Goose" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Harry Gold.

70 .  "Grandfather" [Ded] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): USSR Consul Genenal in New York or the USSR's ambassador.  "Grandfather" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the Soviet Consul General in New York and also as possibly the USSR's ambassador. At places in Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks, "Grandfather" is clearly designated as the Soviet consul general in New York, but other occurrences place "Grandfather" at the embassy in Washington, suggesting the ambassador.

71 .  "Gymnasts" [Fizkul'turniki] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Young Communist League and YCL members and circa 1944.  "Gymnasts" were identified in the Venona decryptions as YCL members.

72 . "Hare" [Zayats] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Maurice Halperin.  "Hare" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Halperin.

73 .  "Helmsman" [Rulevoy] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Earl Browder.  "Helmsman" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Browder.  "Helmsman" was identified in Andrew and Mitrokhin as Browder.

74 .  "Hicks" [Khiks] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Guy Burgess.  "Hicks" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Burgess.

75 .  "Homer" [Gomer] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Donald Maclean.  "Homer" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Maclean.

76 . "Hughes" [Kh'yuz] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Alfred Epaminondas Sarant.  "Hughes" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Sarant.

77 .  "Hut" [Khata] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).  KGB cover name for FBI was "Khata", in Vassiliev's notebooks translated as "Hut".  KGB cover name for OSS was "Izba", in Vassiliev's notebooks translated as "Cabin".  Izba and Khata have overlapping meanings (with Khata as a generic peasant's hut) and one could reverse the chosen translation.  There is at least one instance in Alexander Vassiliev notebooks when "Hut" in context appears to refer to British counter-intelligence (MI5) rather than FBI.

78 .  "Ide" [Yaz'] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Samuel Krafsur.  The Ide is a type of fish found in Europe and Asia.  "Ide" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Krafsur.

79 .  "Imperialist" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Walter Lippmann.  "Imperialist" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Lippmann.

80 .  "Informer" [Stukach] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Joseph Katz prior to August 1944.    "Informer" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Joseph Katz.

81 .  "Island" [Ostrov] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Great Britain.  "Island" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Great Britain.

82 .  "Izra" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Donald Wheeler.  "Izra" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Wheeler.

83 .  "Julia" [Yuliya] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): O. V. Shimmel, KGB officer/agent, 1945.  "Julia" occured in the Venona decryptions in a number of messages as the cover name of Olga Khlopkova, a Soviet consulate staff member and KGB operative.  Khlopkova likely is the pseudonym used in the U.S. by O. V. Shimmel.

84 .  "Jurist" [Yurist] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Harry Dexter White, 1941-August 1944. "Jurist" was identified in the Venona decryptions as White.

85 .  "Kant" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Harry Magdoff prior to 29 December 1944 (when changed to "Tan").  "Kant" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Magdoff in May 1944 messages.   Note September-December 1944 overlap with "Kant"/Zborowski.

86 .  "Kant" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Mark Zborowski starting in September 1944.  "Kant" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Zborowski in September 1944 - April 1945 messages.  Note September-December 1944 overlap with "Kant"/Magdoff.

87 .  "Kinsman" (Rodstevennik) (cover name in the Venona decryptions): Very likely James H. Hibben.  "Kinsman" does not appear in Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks.  But in the Venona decryptions, "Solid" appeared in the Venona decryptions as an unidentified technical source in 1943 and 1944 that was name changed to "Kinsman" in October 1944.  And "Solid" is identified in Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks as Hibben, thus "Kinsman" is Hibben.  However, the "Kinsman" cover name may not have been implemented or was used only briefly because "Solid" had become "Reed" in Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks by 1945.  See "Solid."

88 .  "Klo" (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Soviet intelligence source/agent, after September 1944.  Likely Esther Trebach Rand.  "Klo" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Rand.

89 .  "Koch" [Kokh] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Duncan Lee.  "Koch" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Lee.

90 .  "Kulak" (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Thomas Dewey, crica 1944.  "Kulak" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Dewey.

91 .  "Lawyer" [Loyer] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Harry Dexter White in August 1944.

92 .  "League" [Liga]  (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): U.S. government.  "League" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the U.S. government.

93 .  "Leonid" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks):  Soviet intelligence officer/agent, New York, early 1940s.  First name Aleksey.   Likely Aleksey N. Prokhorov.  "Leonid" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Aleksey N. Prokhorov.

94 .  "Liberal" (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Julius Rosenberg (September 1944-1950).   "Liberal" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Rosenberg.

95 .  "Liza" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Martha Dodd Stern (1936-1950s).   "Liza" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Martha Dodd Stern.

96 .  "Louis" [Lui] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Alfred Stern.  "Louis" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Stern.

97 .  "Luka" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Pavel Panteleimovich Pastelnyak who used the pseudonym Pavel P. Klarin in the U.S.  "Luka" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Pavel P. Klarin.

98 .  "Matchmaker" [Svat] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Chairman of Amtorg.  "Matchmaker" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the chairman of Amtorg.

99 .  "Maxim" [Maksim] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Vasily Mikhailovich Zarubin, early 1940s.  "Maxim" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Vasily Zubilin, the pseudonym Zarubin used in the U.S.

100 .  "Men" (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Averell Harriman, beginning in December 1944. "Men" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Harriman.

101 . "Mer" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Iskhak Akhmerov, 1942-1944.  KGB illegal officer Iskhak Akhmerov was referred to in Vassiliev's notebooks in Russian Cyrillic as both "Мер" and "Мэр", words so phonetically close that both are transliterated under the BGN/PCGN transliterations system identically as "Mer".  Мер means nothing in Russian while Мэр means "Mayor"   Whether this use of two phonetically close cryptonyms for the same person was a product of confusion on the part of KGB cipher clerks, an artifact of the ciphering system, or two distinct cryptonyms for the same person is unclear.  To reduce confusion, in the Vassiliev notebooks the transliteration "Mer" will be used for both.  "Мер"/"Mer" and "Мэр"/"Mayor" both occur in the Venona decryptions as cover-names for Akhmerov.

102 .  "Meter" [Metr] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Joel Barr starting in September 1944.  "Meter" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Barr.

103 .  "Miranda" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Helen Koral begining in August 1944.  "Miranda" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Helen Koral.

104 .  "Mlad" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Theodor Hall.  (Alternative translation: Young).  "Mlad"/ Hall as a cover name is pared with "Star" (Saville Sax) as in the Russian expression "y star, y mlad" (old and young people).  Hall, a physics prodigy and Harvard graduate at age 18, offered his services to the KGB at age 19, assisted by his friend Saville Sax, only a few years older.  The KGB deemed them "Mlad" and "Star".  "Mlad" sometimes translated as "Young" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Hall.

105 .  "Myrna" [Mirna] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Elizabeth Bentley after August 1944.  "Myrna" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Bentley.

106 .  "Nabob" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Henry Morgenthau, jr.  "Nabob" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Morgenthau.

107 .  "Nazar" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soviet intelligence officer/agent.  Likely Stepan Nikolaevich Shudenko.  "Nazar" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Shudenko.

108 .  "Needle" [Igla] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Jones York.  "Needle" was identified in the Venona decryptions as York.

109 .  "Nemo" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): William Pinsly, starting in October 1944.  "Nemo" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Pinsly.

110 .  "Old Man  [Starik] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Leon Trotsky, 1937-1942.  "Old Man" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Trotsky.

111 .  "Oleg" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Mikhail Sergeevich Vavilov.  "Oleg" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Vavilov.

112 .  "Page" [Pazh] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Lauchlin Currie, 1942-1948.  [Page as in a knight's pageboy].  "Page" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Currie.

113 .  "Pal" [Pel] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, 1942 until August 1944.   "Pal" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Silvermaster.

114 .  "Pancake" [Blin] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): I.F. Stone, 1936-1945.  "Pancake" was identified as Stone in the Venona decryptions.

115 .  "Peak" [Pik] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Frank Coe.  "Peak" appeared in the Venona messages as Coe.

116 .  "Peer" [Per] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Winston Churchill, circa 1944. "Peer" was identified as Churchill in the Venona decryptions.

117 .  "Peter" [Piter] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Thomas Black starting in October 1944. "Peter" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Black.

118 .  "Petrov" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Very senior offical at Moscow Center, 1944, cited as highly interested in "Enormous."  Likely Lavrenty Beria.  "Petrov" was identified in the Venona decryptions on the U.S.-Moscow line as a senior official at Moscow Center and on the Mexico City line as Lavrenty Beria.  Beria also supervised the Soviet atomic bomb program.

119 .  "Photon" [Foton] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Ivan Kamenev.  In the Venona decryptions "Photon" was identified as the cover name of Leonid G. Pritomanov, likely Kamenev's diplomatic pseudonym.

120 .  "Pilot" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Ludwig Ullmann after September 1944.   "Pilot" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Ullmann.

121 .  "Plumb" [Lot] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Charles Kramer, 1944.  "Plumb" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Kramer.

122 .  "Polecats" [Khor'ki] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Trotskyists. "Polecats" were identified in the Venona decryptions as Trotskyists.

123 .  "Polo" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Ludwig Ullmann until August 1944.  "Polo" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Ullmann.

124 .  "Preserve" [Zapovednik]  (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Los Alamos Manhattan atomic project facility in February 1945. "Preserve" was identified in the Venona decryptions as an unidentified Manhattan atomic project facility but possibly Los Alamos.

125 .  "Prince" [Knyaz'] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Laurence Duggan, after September 1944.  "Prince" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Duggan.

126 .  "Provinces" [Provintsiya] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Latin America / South America. "Provinces" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Latin America.

127 .  "Radio Station" [Ratsiya] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Initially "Donovan's Committee," i.e., the Office of the Coordinator of Information, in late 1941 and the first half of 1942.  After the Office of the Coordinator of Information was split into OSS and OWI in June 1942, "Radio Station" became the cover name for OWI while "Cabin" became the cover name for OSS.  "Radio Station" was identified in the Venona decryptions as OWI.

128 .  "Raid" [Reyd] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Victor Perlo.  "Raid" (as "Raider" rather than "Raid") was identified in the Venona decryptions as Perlo.  The difference between Venona's "Raider" and "Raid" given in Vassiliev's notebooks is likely a matter of Venona code breakers making a minor error in reconstructing the KGB code book.

129 .  "Ras" (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Charles de Gaulle.  "Ras" was identified in the Venona decryptions as de Gaulle.

130 .  "Rasists" [Rasisty] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Gaullists. "Rasists" were identified in the Venona decryptions as Gaullists.

131 .  "Rats" [Krysy]  (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Zionists in particular but applied broadly to Jewish ethnic organizations and their adherents that were not under Communist leadership.  "Rats" were identified in the Venona decryptions as Zionists and Jews.

132 .  "Rest" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Klaus Fuchs prior to October 1944.  "Rest" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Fuchs.

133 .  "Richard" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Harry Dexter White starting in September 1944.  "Richard" was identified in the Venona decryptions as White.

134 .  "Rio" (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Argentina crica 1944.  "Rio" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Argentina.

135 .  "Robert" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Nathan Gregory Silvermaster beginning in August 1944.  "Robert" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Silvermaster.

136 .  "Ruble" [Rubl'] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Harold Glasser.  "Ruble" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Harold Glasser.

137 . "S-1" ["C-1"] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Herman Jacobson.  "S-1" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Jacobson. [Venona supplies Herman Jacobson, notebooks only Jacobson]

138 .  "S-2"  ["C-2"] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Unidentified Soviet intelligence source/agent.  Female secretary in the Aviation Division of the Department of the Navy, source from early 30s through WWII.  Also appears as "S-II" and "S/2".   "S-2" appeared in the Venona decryptions as a Soviet intelligence source/agent, female, age 45 in 1944 whose name was redacted.

139 .  "Sailor" [Matros](cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Harry Truman.  "Sailor" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Truman.

140 .  "Satyr" [Satir] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Sylvia Callen prior to August 1944.  "Satyr" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Callen.

141 .  "Scout" [Skaut] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Joel Barr prior to September 1944.  "Scout" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Barr.

142 .  "Seal" [Tyulen'] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Konstantin Umansky.  "Seal" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Umansky.

143 .  "Sergey" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Vladimir Pravdin.  "Sergey" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Pravdin.

144 .  "Shah" [Shakh] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Konstantine. A. Chugunov.  "Shah" occured in the Venona decryptions as the cover name of Soviet diplomat and KGB officer Konstantin A. Shabanov or Chabanov.  Likely Shabanov was Chugunov's pseudonym.

145 .  "Shelter" [Priyut] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, UNRRA.  "Shelter" was identified in the Venona decryptions as UNRRA.

146 .  "Sherwood" [Shervud] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Laurence Duggan beginning in August 1944, changed to "Prince" in September 1944.  "Sherwood" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Duggan.

147 .  "Shore" [Bereg] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): North Africa.  "Shore" was identified in the Venona decryptions as North Africa.

148 .  "Si" (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Manager of the Soviet Consulate in New York, circa 1944.  "Si" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the cover name used for the third secretary of Soviet NY consulate.

149 .  "Sidon" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): London, U.K.  "Sidon" was identified in the Venona decryptions as London.

150 .  "Slang" [Sleng] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Jane Foster.  Also known as Jane Foster Zlatowski (married name).

151 .  "Slava" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Ilya Elliott Wolston.  "Slava" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Wolston.  Slava translates as Glory, but Wolston was know to Jack Soble and Boris Morris, two of his KGB contacts, by the untranslated "Slava."

152 .  "Smyrna" [Smirna] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Moscow.  "Smyrna" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Moscow.

153 .  "Sound" [Zvuk] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Jacob Golos.  "Sound" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Golos.

154 .  "Spa" [Kurort] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): broadly, U.S. military intelligence, the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department and Army G-2.  "Spa" was also identified as U.S. military intelligence in the Venona decryptions.

155 .  "Star" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Saville Sax, 1944-1945.  "Star" (Saville Sax) as a cover name was pared with "Mlad" (Theodore Hall) as in the Russian expression "y star, y mlad" (old and young people).  Hall, a physics prodigy and Harvard graduate at age 18, offered his services to the KGB at age 19, assisted by his friend Saville Sax, only a few years older.  The KGB deemed them "Mlad" and "Star".  "Star" sometimes rendered as "Old" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Sax.

156 .  "Stepan" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soviet intelligence officer and acting chief of the New York station 1947-1948.  Likely Pavel I. Fedosimov.  "Stepan" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Pavel Ivanovich Fedosimov, arriving at the New York station in 1944.  It is likely but not certain that Venona's "Stepan"/Fedosimov is the "Stepan" of Vassiliev's notebooks

157 .  "Stepfather" [Otchim] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soviet Ambassador to the U.S.  "Stepfather" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Soviet Ambassador Gromyko.

158 .  "Stock" [Shtok] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Mikhail A. Shalyapin. "Stock" was identified in Venona as Shalyapin.

159 .  "Store" [Magazin] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soviet Government Purchasing Commission  "Store" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission.

160 .  "Tea Shop" [Chaynaya] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): U.S. Department of Commerce, circa 1944.  "Tea Shop" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the Commerce Department.

161 .  "Ted" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Edward Fitzgerald.  References to in 1944.  "Ted" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Fitzgerald.

162 .  "Temple" [Khram] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): White House circa 1944.  "Temple" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the White House.

163 .  "Territory" [Kray] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Canada. "Kray" translated as "Land" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Canada.

164 .  "Townsman" [Gorozhanin] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): An American, circa 1944. "Townsman" was identified in the Venona decryptions as an Amererican

165 .  "Trust" [Trest] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Embassy of the USSR. "Trust" was identified in the Venona decryptions as the Soviet embassy.

166 .  "Tulip" [Tyul'pan] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Mark Zborovsky prior to September 1944.  "Tulip" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Zborovsky.

167 .  "Twain" [Tven] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): KGB officer Semen Markovich Semenov.  "Twain" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Semenov.

168 .  "Tyre" [Tir] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): New York City.  "Tyre" was identified in the Venona decryptions as New York City.

169 .  "Vadim" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Anatoly Gorsky.  "Vadim" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Gorsky under his diplomatic pseudonym of Anatoly Gromov.

170 .  "Vardo" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Elizabeth Zarubin, early 1940s. Also known as Yelizaveta Zarubina.  (Vardo means Rose in Georgian.) "Vardo" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Elizaveta Zarubin.

171 .  "Victor" [Viktor] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Pavel Fitin.  "Victor" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Fitin.

172 .  "Wasp" [Osa] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Ruth Greenglass, beginning October 1944-1950.  "Wasp" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Ruth Greenglass.

173 .  "X" [Iks] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Joseph Katz.  (The cover name in Russian is "Iks", not the Cyrillic letter "X".)  "X" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Katz.

174 .  "Yakov" (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): William Perl starting in September 1944.  "Yakov" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Perl.

175 .  "Yun" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Stephen Laird.  References to in 1942.  "Yun" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Laird.

176 .  "Zero" [Nul']: Soviet intelligence source/agent.  Leona Oliver Franey until October 1944.  Alternative translation "Null".  This "Zero", spelled Nul' in Russian, is not the same cover name as "Zero", spelled Zero in Russian.  "Nul'" was translated as "Zero" in the Venona decryptions and to avoid confusion that translation is used here.  "Zero" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Franey.

177 .   "Zhenya" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Sonia Steinman Gold.  "Zhenya" was identified in the Venona decryptions as Sonia Gold.

 

Return to Text

 

 

 

Appendix 2

Cover Names where Vassiliev's Notebooks Correct an Identification of Real Names in Venona

 

 

1 .   "Arena" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Gerald Graze.  "Arena" appeared in Venona and was identified by NSA/FBI as the cover name of Mary Price in messages of April and May 1944 and as unidentified in a message of June 1943. In light of the detail supplied in the Vassiliev notebooks, the identification of "Arena" in the Venona cables as Mary Price appeared to be incorrect.

2 .  "Salt" [Solt] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence. In Venona, "Salt" was identified as "Possibly Counter Intelligence Corps, G-2."

3 .  "Squirrel" [Belka] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Unidentified Soviet intelligence source/agent, 1945, 1947, 1950.  Wife of "Hudson".  "Squirrel" was identified in a single 1945 Venona message as "may possibly be Ann Sodorovich," a message that also discussed "Lens"/Michael Sidorovich.  Based on Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks, this suggestion was mistaken.  Instead, "Squirrel" was a courier who serviced a safe house hosted by "Lens" and "Objective" (Michael and Ann Sidorovich).

4 .  "Veksel" [Veksel'] (cover name in Venona] and "Vector" [Vektor] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks).  In Venona "Veksel" is identified as Robert Oppenheimer.  In Vassiliev's notebooks Enrico Fermi unambiguously has the cover name "Vector."  In view of what the notebooks say of "Vector"/Fermi, and what the two Venona messages that mention "Veksel" say, Venona's "Veksel" was likely a decoding garble for "Vector".  See particularly  Venona 259 Moscow to New York, 21 March 1945, about "Veksel" and compare with the reference in the notebooks to KGB attempts to fin and approach to "Vector"/Fermi.  Venona's identification of "Veksel" as Oppenheimer was based on Venona 799 KGB New York to Moscow, 26 May 1945, which had indicated that "Veksel" headed work at Los Alamos. At that time Fermi had moved to Los Alamos for the final phases of the project, and the KGB officer sending Venona 799 apparently made the mistake of assuming Fermi was in charge of the New Mexico facility. Since Oppenheimer directed Los Alamos, that misled NSA/FBI analysts into identifying "Veksel" as Oppenheimer. Arnold Kramish, a physicist who had worked in the Manhattan Project, suggested in 1997 that "Veksel" was not Oppenheimer but Enrico Fermi. Arnold Kramish, "The Manhattan Project and Venona," paper presented at 1997 Cryptologic History Symposium, 29–31 October 1997, Fort George Meade, Maryland.

Return to Text

Appendix 3

Unidentified Cover Names in Venona where Vassiliev's Notebooks Supply a Real Name.

 

 

1 .   "19" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Laurence Duggan starting in 1935, and appearing as Duggan as late as August 1944.  In the Venona decryptions "19" appears as an unidentified source of diplomatic information in a 1943 report from Iskhak Akhmerov.

2 .  "Alan" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Mikhail Korneev, KGB officer.  "Alan" is an unidentified KGB officer meeting with an American agent in London in 1945 (enona 68 KGB Moscow to London, 15 September 1945).

3 .  "Alexander" [Aleksandr] (cover name in Vassiliev's notebooks): Leopol Arenal.  "Alexander" appears in the Venona decryptions as an unidentified cover name associated with Central and South American matters.

4 .  "Arnold" [Arnol'd] (cover name in the Venona decryptions):  Andrew Steiger.  "Arnold" does not appear in Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks but "Fakir" appears and is identified as Andrew Steiger.  In the Venona decryptions "Fakir" was unidentified but indicated that the cover name was changed to "Arnold" in October 1944.

5 .  "Berg" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Alexander Koral.  "Berg" appeared in the Venona decryptions as unidentified but in a context that suggests Alexander Koral.

6 .  "Bir" (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Alfred Slack starting in October 1944.  (Alternative translation: Beer)  "Bir" (translated as "Beer") appeared in the Venona decryption
After the Revolution of 1905, the Czar had prudently prepared for further outbreaks by transferring some $400 million in cash to the New York banks, Chase, National City, Guaranty Trust, J.P.Morgan Co., and Hanover Trust. In 1914, these same banks bought the controlling number of shares in the newly organized Federal Reserve Bank of New York, paying for the stock with the Czar\'s sequestered funds. In November 1917,  Red Guards drove a truck to the Imperial Bank and removed the Romanoff gold and jewels. The gold was later shipped directly to Kuhn, Loeb Co. in New York.-- Curse of Canaan
Print
Go Up Pages1
User actions