Julij Nickolaevich Kobjakov (1937-2006), known in the United States as Julius Kobyakov, was KGB Major General who from 1957 to 1997 served with the KGB foreign intelligence and later Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) as one of its “American hands,” including two New York postings for a few years from 1965 and again from late 1970s to 1982. Later in Moscow he was for some time assistant chief and acting chief of the American department of his service. In the final years of his career, Kobyakov was part of a group of advisers to the SVR director and was one of the ‘public faces’ of the service.

In his retirement, Kobyakov worked as book translator and was writing a book he planned to publish. In 2003, two chapters – ‘Jacob Golos’ and ‘The Paper Mill’ were published as part of the 6-volume semi-official history of the Russian foreign intelligence. The first was the first ever story of Jacob Golos, the key asset of the Soviet foreign intelligence in the USA from 1930s to 1943, based on his Moscow operational file. The second was the first ever story of Soviet espionage career of Ludwig Lore (although, at the time, obscured under his cover names of ‘Leo‘ and ‘10th‘), a former American communist and left-wing journalist, who was a mercenary agent-group leader for the Soviet intelligence from 1933 to 1937. ¹ Kobyakov also published a magazine story of Alexei Isidorovich Kulak, a foreign intelligence officer, who was a double agent recruited by the FBI under the cover name, ‘Fedora’, and a two-part magazine story of Vitaly Yurchenko, whose double defection made some stir in 1985 – both chapters based on Kobyakov’s personal experience with the two men and Western literature. ² Kobyakov translated into Russian the memoirs of Alexander Barmine, a pre-WWII Soviet defector; Cold Warrior by Tom Mangold, the biography of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, and a few other books.

I met Julius Kobyakov for the first time in early 2004, while researching for my future Russian documentary series on the history of Russian-US espionage wars of the 20^th century, and was struck with his command of that complicated history and, particularly, his knowledge of the historical archives of his service. General Kobyakov explained that he had a keen interest in the history of operations in the United States, particularly from the 1930s – 1940s period, which he described at the time as “purely academic.”

In early 2000s, Kobyakov shared his grasp of history with US scholars and students: his posts appeared at H-NET and H-HOAC discussion networks. As I learned later, he was also in correspondence with a few western scholars, two of whom shared some of Kobyakov’s letters with me.

In a December 22, 2003 letter to Roger Sandilands, Professor of Economics at Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK, Kobyakov shed some light on his archival experience and, particularly, on his reading of the KGB files on two US New Deal economists, Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White.

… Back in the late 80s I did an extensive research on the archive materials related to our intelligence work in the U.S. in the 30s and the 40s. From the scientific/historical point of view that was virtual “terra incognita”, but my interest was not purely academic. At that time as the deputy head of the American department I was interested in utilizing whatever positive experience could be gained from studying those archives. At the top of my list were, naturally, cases of our “penetration” of the White House, the State, the Treasury, etc. In this connection I examined the files on Currie (PAGE) and White (LAWER/YURIST) and was disappointed.

There was nothing in the PAGE file to suggest that he had ever wittingly collaborated with the Soviet intelligence. The file itself was put together in the late 40s when the damage, wrought by defections of Bentley and Chambers, was being assessed.

In fact, Currie was no more than a sub-source (if my memory serves me right – in the orbit of Nathan Silvermaster). However, in the spirit of machismo, many people claimed that we had an “agent” in the White House. I believe, Akhmerov like anybody else was prone to that weakness. Hence, Gordievsky’s reference to his conversations with Akhmerov on that subject should be taken with a spade of salt.

Equally unimpressive was a file on White. There was no record that someone had pitched or otherwise recruited him and set the terms of his cooperation with the Soviet intelligence. There was nothing in the way of clandestine communications arrangements, etc. White for all practical purposes might be categorized as a sub-source, which not necessarily denigrates the quality and value of the information that was attributed to him.

But to categorize an individual as an agent or a spy we need to prove that he “wittingly” cooperated with the “foreign intelligence service”, and “fulfilled the tasks”, assigned to him. That’s how the Soviet intelligence defines its agents, and, I believe, that American intelligence works along the same lines.

Among the members of my profession there is a sacramental question: “Does he know that he is our agent?” There is very strong indication that neither Currie nor White knew that. … ³

In this dossier you may find discussion of problems with some of the cover names that appear in Vassiliev’s notebooks and as well of their treatment in the “Vassiliev Notebooks Concordance” file. For the convenience of potential users the cover names appear in alphabetical order – as they appear in the “Concordance.” The entries from the Concordance file are given in block quotes.

“Andi” (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): See “Andy”.

“Andy” [Andi] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Unidentified outgoing GRU station chief 1945.

A likely candidate for this NKGB “operational correspondence” cover name is Lev Alexandrovich Sergeev, the GRU station head (“resident”) in Washington, D.C. from 1940 through 1945. Less likely, Pavel Melkishev (Vice-Consul in NYC, Pavel Mikhailov), the GRU station chief in New York. Both were “outgoing” as of late 1945.

Anthony (Given name used as a cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Likely Anthony Blunt. U.K. cover name of KGB agent/contact with relationship to Michael Straight, 1937-1939.

Blunt, Anthony: Soviet intelligence source/agent. Cambridge don, art expert, and British intelligence officer during WWII who was a Soviet agent from the mid-1930s onward, one of the “Cambridge Five”. Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Anthony” (given name used as a cover name, 1937-1939), “Tony” (1940-42), & “Johnson” (1946).

“Johnson” [Dzhonson] (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): Anthony Blunt in 1946. “Johnson” appeared in the Venona decryptions as an unidentified Soviet intelligence source/agent in the U.K.

In Alexander Vassiliev’s notes Anthony appears simply as Anthony Blunt’s first name and not as his cover name. In his draft chapter from mid-1990s, “The Washington Sources,” Vassiliev wrote, “…Straight communicated that he had received a letter from Anthony in London, apparently meaning Anthony Blunt…” ² It is the basics of tradecraft that operational cover names are not disclosed to other sources or contacts, but known only to the service’s operatives concerned.

According to an authoritative Russian account of Blunt’s Soviet service, his first cover name was “Tony.” The book, published in 2005, was written by Professor Victor Popov, formerly, the Soviet ambassador in London, and based on Blunt’s case file, which was exclusively released to the author. The book’s cover displays a photo copy of the cover of Blunt’s file with the file’s number and Blunt’s three cover names: FILE N 10676: “TONY” (a.k.a. “Johnson” and “Jan”) [ДЕЛО № 10676: «ТОНИ» (он же «Джонсон» и «Ян»]. ³

“Beam” [Luch] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soviet intelligence officer, 1933-1934. Described as a medical doctor working under Red Cross cover. Likely Dr. Grigory Rabinovich, a KGB officer operating under Red Cross cover who arrived in the U.S. in 1933.

In this case, “likely” may be dropped: the identification of “Beam” as Grigoij Rabinovich is firm. However, Rabinovich was not an officer of the NKVD foreign intelligence”: he was a healthcare administrator (official), who was sent by the INO OGPU to the USA as a substitute to the then head of Red Cross Soviet representative with the purpose of his additional use as their operative. Back to Moscow in 1939, Rabinovich resumed his work as a healthcare official.

“Belka” (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): See “Squirrel”.

“Belka” was mentioned by Alexander Feklissov in his interviews with me in 1995 as a woman who in the spring of 1945 was scheduled to go to Los Alamos as a courier for David Greenglass, but later could not.

“Ben” (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Unidentified, known to Alexander Koral in the 1930s, possibly associate of Rosenbliett network.

This could only be a “street name,” since Koral would not know an operational cover name.

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

“Big House” ["Bol'shoi Dom"] was also a common Soviet euphemism for the OGPU-NKVD lubyanka building and later KGB buildings in Moscow (in Lubyanka Square] and in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, in Liteinyi prospect.)

Bill” (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Unidentifed KGB officer/agent. References to in 1935.

“Bill” was one of the “street names” used by the Soviet “illegal” operative and station chief in the USA, Iskhak Akhmerov during his two U.S. postings in 1930s and 1940s. In his interviews with me in 1998 and 2002, KGB General Vitaly Pavlov referred to Akhmerov as “Bill” discussing the period of 1939-1940.

“Callistratus” (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.

Feklissov gave his cover name as simply “Callistrat” (Каллистрат) – a Russian name meaning “good warrior,” and not “Callistratus” – the name associated with Callistratus (Καλλιστράτος) of Aphidnae who was an Athenian orator and general in the 4th century BC. “Fomin” was a so-called “passport name,” that is, a fictitious name in the diplomatic passports of intelligence officers with a diplomatic cover - the term that appears in Soviet official documentation.

“Claude” [Klod] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soviet intelligence officer, NY station, 1948. “Claude” is described as directly supervising Morris and Lona Cohen. Yury Sokolov is identified as the KGB officer directly supervising the Cohens in this period in Albright and Kunstel’s Bombshell and, consequently Sokolov is a candidate for “Claude”.

Since early 1990s, Yury Sokolov has been identified in Russian publications as “Claude” ⁴

“Erna” (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): Soviet intelligence contact. Described as traveling with “Betty”/Zarubin in 1935 to the U.S. to get passports renewed. Very likely Vasily Zarubin’s wife, Elizabeth Zarubin.

This identification may be upgraded to positive. In Russian publications “Erna” is mentioned as one of Elizaveta Zarubina’s cover names.

Frankfurter, Gerda: Soviet intelligence source/agent. Candidate for the circa-1937 cover names “Rita” or “Valet”.

In the semi-official history of the Russian foreign intelligence “Rita” amd “Valet” are described as agents who “handed over information” “on the political and economic situtation in the country and maintained liaison between Akhmerov and “legal” stations in Washington and New York.” More likely alternative cover names of Hede and Paul Massing. ⁵

“Gapon” (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Unidentified Soviet intelligence source/agent.

Likely an allusion to the name of a Russian Orthodox priest in St. Petersburg, who became notorious as a secret police provocateur and the leader of a peaceful mass workers demonstration on January 9, 1905, to the Russian Imperial residence, the Winter Palace, which was dispersed by troops, killing many participants. The day went down in Russian history as a “bloody Sunday” and is considered as a trigger for the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907.

“Glan” (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Unidentified KGB officer, London, who met with “Eric”/Broda in 1943. Both Andrew and Mitrokhin and West and Tsarev have KGB officer Vladimir Barkovsky meeting with “K”, an unidentified Soviet source who appears to be identical with “Eric”/Broda. Barkovsky, then, is a candidate for “Glan”. It is not clear that “Glan” in Britain in 1943 is the same as “Glan” the unidentified KGB officer at the New York Station in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Barkovsky is a strong candidate for “Glan” in Britain, but not for “Glan” in New York, since Barkovsky did not work in New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

To be continued

In this dossier you will find corrections of some of the confusing translations. For the convenience of potential users the items appear in alphabetical order – as they appear in the “Vassiliev Notebooks Concordance,” posted on WWC website. The items in the “Concordance” is given in block quotes.

“Akademich” (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): See “Academic”.

In Russian, “Akademich” does not make sense as a noun, which is “Academic” (Академик), that is, the highest academic rank. The adjective is “academicheskii.”

AOMOS or A.O.M.O.S.: Administrative Department of the Militia of Moscow Oblast.

This is an insignia of the Worker-Peasant Militia (RKM), that was established in September, 1924. AO stands for Administrative-Economic staff, MOS – for Moscow gubernia (Russian name of the large territorial regions), hence, the insignia should be translated as Administrative-Economic Staff of Moscow Gubernia. ²

“Back Street” [Zakoulok] (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): British Foreign Office.

“Zakoulok” is rather a “dark alley,” sometimes translated as “blind alley”. “Back street” in Russian is rather “otdalennaya ulitsa,” “ulochka.”]

“Ballona” (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): See “Balloon”.

 “Balloon” [Ballona] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Atomic bomb. A partially decoded cover name, “Bal…”, appeared in the Venona decryptions that NSA/FBI judged from the context to likely be “Balloon” and atomic bomb.

 In Russian, there is no word “Ballona”: looks like some garble.

Book (KGB tradecraft term): A passport or other travel and identification documentation.

“Book” looks like some garble for “boots” [“sapogi”] which is a known jargon word for passports and other identification documentation. Also “obuvka”, “obuvat’”, literally, to equip with boots, — that is, to supply with documents.

“Brothers” [Bratsky] (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): See “Fraternal”.

 “Fraternal” [Bratsky] (cover name): Refers to a local Communist party, such as the CPUSA, or used broadly to refer to other local Communist-aligned institutions. “Fraternal” was identified in the Venona decryptions as the CPUSA.

In Russian documentation of the period, the word is used in feminine gender, “bratskaja”, implying “bratskaja partiia” [a brother party] – an euphemism for a foreign Communist Party that appears in the Soviet Communist Party files. To avoid confusion, the translation should be “brother organization” or “fraternal organization.”

Chief Administration on the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy: Soviet nuclear research agency.

The transliteration of the name of this agency is “Glavnoe upravlenie po ispol’zovaniju atomnoi energii.” In the hierarchy of Soviet government agencies the word “upravlenie” is commonly translated as “directorate,” like, for instance, in the name of the KGB foreign intelligence service, The First Chief Directorate. ³ Similarly, the name of this agency is translated as The Chief Directorate on the Use of Atomic Energy.

Chief Department of the Civil Air Fleet, USSR: GUGVF

Similarly, the translation of the Russian name of this agency [Glavnoe upravlenie Grazhdanskogo vozdushnogo flota] is The Chief Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet, USSR: GUGVF.

Communist, Communists: Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Fellowcountryman”, “Fellowcountrymen”.

In Vassiliev’s notebooks the Russian cover name for Communist, Communists is “Zemlyak/Zemlyaki,” which would be more proper to translate as “Compatriot/Compatriots,” as it appears in Alexander Vassiliev’s translation of his draft chapters, which he made for his first American co-author, Allen Weinstein, in 1990s.

“Cranberry” [Klyukva] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): U.S. Army Security Agency, 1948. 

In this cover name, the Russian word “klyukva” is used in its perjorative meaning of “cock-and-bull” story.

Foreign Economic Administration, U.S. (FEA): Cover names in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Villa” (1942 to November 1944, “Farm” (December 1944-)

In Vassiliev’s Russian original the second cover name appears as “khutor,”  which is not a “farm,” but a “farmstead.” In the Russian tradition, “khutor” was a single farm [Russian "dvor"] (later multy-farm) peasant settlement in the process of cultivating new territories. Likely, the cover name implies this meaning.

Foreign Office, U.K.: Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Back Street”.

In Vassiliev’s Russian original this cover name appears as “zakoulok,” which is rather a “back alley”, “blind alley.” The Russian for “back street” would be “otdalennaia ulitsa,” “ulochka,” which is a “remote street” or an “off street.”

“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.

In Russian, “khata” is not “a generic peasant’s hut,” but “a peasant house in a Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Southern Russian village,” when “izba” stands for “a wooden peasant house.” ⁴ In Russian “khata” is also used in prison jargon (for a prison cell) and with a perjorative meaning. Likely, the cover name implies this meaning.

Gumpertz, Hedwiga: Variant of Hedda Gumpertz. See Hede Massing.

Gumperz, Hedda: See Hede Massing.

Hede Massing spelled her name as “Hedwig” when signing under her German correspondence or filling the Comintern forms in 1930. Her name is spelled as “Hedwig Gumpertz” in the correspondence between the German Communist Party and the Comintern officials in 1930-1932. The title of her Comintern personal file is “Gumpertz, Hedwig.” ⁵ The occasional spelling of her name as “Hedda” by some historians derives from its spelling as “Hedda Gomperz” in the so-called “Berle list,” – the notes made by Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle on his conversation with Whittaker Chambers on September 2, 1939.

The old German name Hedwig has eight variants: Hadvig, Hadwig, Hedvig, Hedviga, Hedvige, Hedwiga, Hedwige and Hedy. “Hedda” was an old German hypocoristic of “Hedwig,” but more recently it has become an anglicized variant of Hedwig.

“Khal” (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): Unidentified Soviet intelligence source/agent described as a contact of Elizabeth Bentley in 1944. (Khal is Russian for a plaited bread.)

The Russian for plaited bread is “khala,” [ha-la] which comes from the Jewish Peisakh bread (Hebrew חלה‎)]

To Be Continued.

In this dossier you may find corrections of some of the factual mistakes that appear in the “Concordanсe,” as well as in Alexander Vassiliev’s notes themselves. For the convenience of potential users the names appear in alphabetical order – as they appear in the Concordance file posted on WWC website. The citations from the “Vassiliev Notebooks Concordance” are given in block quotes.

Agranov, Yakov Samuilovich: Senior KGB officer who supervised key parts of Stalin’s Terror who was himself executed in 1938.

Agranov’s patronymic was not Samuilovich (from the name of Samuil), but Saulovich – deriving from the name Saul.

Agricultural Commission in NY: Likely a reference to a CPUSA committee that dealt with agricultural policy matters.

According to CPUSA files, the name of the CPUSA body that dealt with agricultural policy was not Agricultural, but Agrarian Commission. ²

Bukov, Boris: Soviet intelligence officer/agent. GRU illegal officer. In 1939 Walter Krivitsky, a senior KGB defector, identified as Boris Bykov of GRU as a Soviet control officer known to Whittaker Chambers as Peter. In his 1939 autobiography, Krivitsky, who had been a GRU officer before shifting to the KGB in the mid-1930s, also identified Bykov as the chief of GRU operations in the U.S. in 1936-1939. Am entry in GRU: Dela i Liudi [GRU: Cases and People] for “Bukov (Altman) Boris Yakovlevich”, lists Bukov as “Illegal station chief of Razvedupr [GRU] in the U.S.A. (1936-1939)”. Likely Altman was a Jewish birth name with Bukov as a Russianized replacement. The Chambers’ “Bykov” and GRU’s “Bukov” are the same person is made even clearer when it is understood that Chambers told the FBI that Krivitsky had pronounced “Bykov” as “boo-koff”. One should also note that the Russian Cyrillic letter “y” is pronounced with a Latin alphabet “u” sound. What is unclear is why Krivitsky (or his translator/editor in 1939) would transliterate the name as Bykov, usually pronounced “bi-koff”, rather than Bukov. Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Jerome”.

This entry has a number of factual mistakes and misstatements:

First, here and elsewhere, in the Soviet system an agent is not synonymous with an intelligence officer, since the first not in the employ of an intelligence agency, but is rather recruited to spy for the agency by its officers, who are employees of an intelligence service.

Second, Krivitsky changed his affiliation from the GRU [then RU] to OGPU in 1931 and not in “mid-1930s”.

Third, Boris Yakovlevich Bukov had never been “the chief of  GRU operations in the U.S. in 1936-1939”: there was simply no such “chief” at that time. Following the Soviet Politburo decision of May, 1934, the stations operated autonomously, in order to avoid a chain reaction in case of a failure. ³

Fourth, there was no such thing as “the Chambers’ “Bykov”: Chambers knew his Russian contact only as “Peter” – until Krivitsky identified that “Peter” for him as “Bykov” – an officer of the military intelligence whom he remembered from his own time in Germany in 1920s.

Fifth, the Russian Cyrillic letter “y” is not pronounced with a Latin alphabet “u” sound: it is pronounced with a Russian sound [ы], which is commonly transliterated into English with the letter “y”.

Click here to read more about “Colonel Bykov” story

Click here to read more about the man whom Chambers knew in 1936-1938 as “Peter”

Far Eastern Republic: Soviet republic established in former Russian Far East and Siberia in 1920, fully absorbed into the USSR in 1922.

The Far Eastern Republic (DVR) (April 6, 1920 – November 15, 1922) was not “Soviet,” but on the surface an independent democratic republic with a capitalist economy. De facto, it was a “buffer” state between Soviet Russia and Japan. In 1921-22 the delegates of DVR took part in the Washington Conference (also known as the Washington Conference on Naval Limitation), called by the USA to limit the naval arms race and to work out security agreements in the Pacific area. After the defeat of White armies in 1922, in November of the same year Soviet power was established and the republic applied for joining the RSFSR, which was granted and the former republic became a Far Eastern Region of the RSFSR, later the USSR.

Fedichkin, D.G.: Soviet intelligence officer, Moscow Center.

The description is not quite correct: throughout his long career in the Soviet state security agencies, Dmitry Grigorievich Fedichkin (1902-1991) served mostly outside of Moscow. Having begun his army service in the Far East, Fedichkin joined state security in 1922 – to be soon appointed a Counterintelligence Department’s (KRO) operative in the Far East, where he worked until 1930. In 1931, he was sent to Moscow, where he first taught at the OGPU Central School and later at the intelligence headquarters. However, in 1932 he was posted in Tallinn as station chief and returned to Moscow in 1934 – only to be sent to Warsaw as assistant station chief. Arrested in 1936, he was exchanged  for a Polish spy. In the same year, Fedichkin was sent to Europe again, this time as an assistant station chief and later station chief in Germany, where he stayed until 1940.

After his return to Moscow in 1940, Fedichkin worked in Moscow at the NKVD counterintelligence directorate until early 1942, when he was transferred as a department head to the 4^th directorate of NKVD, where he was organizing saboteur operations behind the Nazi frontline. From 1943 to 1944, Fedichkin was posted as station chief in Bulgaria. Upon his return, he briefly worked at Moscow headquarters – until he was sent to Rumania as station chief in 1945. Fedichkin returned to Moscow in 1947 and became assistant head of a directorate at the Committee of Information (KI) – a short-lived umbrella intelligence agency – until 1951, when he was posted in Italy as station chief. Having returned to Moscow in 1955, Fedichkin was assigned to the reserve of the KGB foreign intelligence, and from 1955 to 1977 he taught at its school, then known as the Red Banner Institute. ⁴

Grafpen, Grigory: Senior KGB officer. Executed in Stalin’s purge of his security services in the late 1930s.

Grafpen, Grigorij Borisovich (1891 – ?) survived the purges of the late 1930s. Arrested on December 29, 1938, he was sentenced to five years in a prison labor camp and was imprisoned until 1943; afterwards  he worked in various managerial jobs in the Russian North until he was rehabilitated in September 1956. Grafpen then retired and moved to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg. ) [[ 5. Vadim Abramov, Evrei v KGB. Palachi i zhertvy. Moskva: “Jauza” “Eksmo,” 2005, s. 170-171. (Vadim Abramov, The Jews ain the KGB. The Executioners and the Victims, Moscow: “Yauza”/”Eksmo,” 2005, pp. 170-171.]]

Grimeril’: Birth name of Grigory Markovich Kheifets.

Grimeril’ was not the birth name of Heifets (correct spelling.) Grigorij Markovich (Mendelevich) Heifets was the son of Mendel’ Ya. Heifets , who was a prominent figure in the Russian and European Social Democratic movement and an active member of the Jewish “Bund.” “Grimeril’” was the name, which Grogorij Heifets used in 1927-1929 during his “special missions” in China, Germany and other countries for the Department of International Communication (OMS) of the Comintern. At that time, he was giving himself for a refugee student from India. A reference on Grigorij Heifets from July 1938 in Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks is misleading. It says that “Heifets (Grimeril’) Grigorij Markovich, 1899, was born in Riga. His father had an office (sic – “kontora”) that manufactured woolen cloth and used hired labor (5 people.)” ⁵

Guchkov, N. I.: Described as former mayor of Moscow and figure in the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, 1924.

Guchkov, Nickolai Ivanovich (1860-1935) was a Russian entreprenuere, politician, public figure and a long-time organizer of Moscow self-government. From 1905 to 1912, he served as an elected head [“golova”, verbatim, “head”] of Moscow. From 1912 to 1916, Guchkov was an elected member (“glasnyi”) of the Moscow city Duma. From 1913 to 1917, Guchkov was chairman of the board of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. After emigration from Russia in 1920, he lived and died in Paris. ⁶

Ilichev, Ivan Ivanovich: Chief of GRU, 1942-1943. Executed in 1943.

Both descriptions are wrong. Ivan Ilichev was chief of GRU (strategic intelligence) until late 1945, when he was removed from this position and discharged from the army in the aftermath of the defection of Igor Gouzenko, the cipher clerk of the GRU resident in Ottawa. In 1948, Ilichev began his long diplomatic career. From 1949 to 1952, he was an official at the Soviet Control Commission in Germany, and in 1952-53, he was the head of the Soviet mission in the German Democratic Republic. From 1953 to 1956, he was the Higher Commissar and later the Soviet Ambassador in Austria. From 1956 to 1966, he served in Moscow as head of the Scandinavian Department and then of the 3^rd European Department at the Foreign Ministry, and from 1966 to 1968, he was the Soviet Ambassador in Denmark. From 1968 until his retirement in 1975, Ilichev was an official at the Foreign Ministry. ⁷

INFO: KGB Information Department

There has never been an “information department” – neither in the KGB, nor in its predecessor agencies. The first information division was organized in 1943 as Information and Analytical Service [Informatsionno-analiticheskaia sluzhba], which would later be restructured as KGB Information and Analytical Directorate [Informatsionno-analiticheskoe upravlenie].

Kamensky, ?: Soviet intelligence officer. Executed in Stalin’s purge of his security services in the late 1930s.

In fact, Kaminsky (the correct transliteration of the Russian name), Ivan Nickolaevich (1896-1944), who served as NKVD foreign intelligence officer from 1922, survived Stalin’s purges and died a heroic death in 1944, when taking part in an intelligence operation behind the frontline. Betrayed by a traitor, Kaminsky committed suicide when the Abwher (German military intelligence) tried to arrest him in Zhytomir.

Karoly, ?: Described as someone denied a visa to enter the United States at the request of the Horthy government.

In fact, Count Mihaly Karolyi (1875-1955), a former Hungarian leader (1918-1919) and exile in France, was not denied a visa to enter the United States, but was only forbidden by the U.S. Department of State to speak publicly on his trip to the USA in late 1934 to visit his sick wife. (Count Karoly planned to use the trip to testify at the Senate Munitions Inquiry – hearings of the Special Committee to Investigate the Munitions Industry, commonly known as the Nye Committee – that the loans made by American bankers to certain foreign governments were to be used in financing the war.) ⁸

Keldysh, Mstislav Vsevolodovich: President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, 1961 – 1978.

Keldysh was the President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences until  May, 1975. ⁹

Khrushchev, Nikita S.: Chief of the CPSU and leader of the USSR, 1953-1964.

Khrushchev was the First Secretary of CPSU from 1953 to 1964, but he was the head of the Soviet Government (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR) only from 1958 to 1964. ¹⁰

Kisilev, Evgeni: Soviet diplomat. Soviet consul general in New York, 1942-1944. Known in the American press at the time Eugene Kisselev.

Kisselev (contemporary English spelling of the consul’s name; the correct transliteration of his Russian name is Kiselev [Киселёв]), Evgenij Dmitrievich (1908-1963), was Consul General in New York from 1943 to 1945, when he was transferred to Austria. ¹¹

“Klim” (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): Soviet intelligence officer in Rome or Vienna, 1950, likely Vitaly Pavlov.

“Klim” was the operational pseudonym of Vitaly Grigorievich Pavlov (1914–2005), one of the leaders of KGB foreign intelligence. From mid-1949 to 1961, he was a senior operative at the Moscow Center (“illegal intelligence” department), where since early 1950 he supervised the work of William Fischer, known in the USA as Rudolph Abel. In early 1950s, Pavlov made a brief trip to Europe. He was posted as station chief in Vienna from 1966 to the end of 1970.

Kobulov, Bogdan: Senior aide to Lavrenty Beria.

Konoe, Fumimaro: Japanese Prime Minister, January-August 1939. Kopoe, ?: Described in 1941 as former Japanese Prime Minister, likely an error for Fumimaro Konoe, Japanese Prime Minister, January-August 1939.

Prince Fumimaro Konoe was the 34^th (June, 1937 – January, 1939), 38^th (July, 1940 – July, 1941) and 39^th (July, 1941 – October, 1941) Prime Minister of Japan. But he did not hold this position from January to August, 1939. From January, 1939 to July 1940, Konoe was chairman of the Privy Council of Japan (a body that advised the Emperor.)

Krivitsky, Walter: Senior GRU officer who shifted to the KGB in the mid-1930s, defected in 1937. His autobiography, In Stalin’s Secret Service, had considerable impact on public opinion in the U.S. Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Enemy”. 

In this dossier you may find identification of some of the uncertain names that appear in Alexander Vassiliev’s notes with brief background information. For the convenience of potential users the names appear in alphabetical order – as they appear in the Concordance file posted on WWC website. The entries from the Concordance file are given in block quotes.

Abel’ ?: KGB agent slated for infiltration into Germany via the battle front, late 1941.

Abel, Rudolf Ivanovich (Johannovich) (1900-1955) was an officer of OGPU/ NKVD foreign intelligence since 1927. In late 1941 he became part of NKVD Fourth directorate that was organizing guerilla warfare behind the Soviet-Nazi frontlines. There is no information that Abel was sent to Germany: in late 1941 – early 1942 he was repeatedly sent with special intelligence missions behind the Soviet-Nazi frontline, which at that time was not far from Moscow. From August 1942 to January 1943 he was at the front in the Caucasus. Rudolf Abel was a good friend of William Fischer, the famous Soviet “illegal” station chief in the United States from 1948 to 1957, who at the time of his arrest in 1957 assumed the name of his friend, Rudolf Abel, who died in 1955. ²

Abramov, ?: Described as Comintern official and an “enemy of the people”. Likely Jacob Mirov-Abramov, former chief of Comintern OMS executed in 1937 in Stalin’s Terror. Abramov-Mirov, Jacob: Variant name in the literature for Jacob Mirov-Abramov. [In Russia, The name is given as Abramov-Mirov]

In fact, Alexander Lazarevich Abramov-Mirov (variant, Mirov-Abramov), who was also known under pseudonyms of Alexandrov, Mirov, Lazarev, was head of Comintern’s Department of International Communication (OMS – Otdel mezhdunarodnoi svyazi) from 1926 to 1936; assistant head of the Red Army Intelligence Department [RU], from October 1936 to May 1937 and the organizer of the Red Army intelligence during the Civil War in Spain. ³

Akhmerova,?: See Lowry, Helen.” “Lowry, Helen: Soviet intelligence agent. Also known as Akhmerova, wife of Iskhak Akhmerov. Kansas born American and the niece of CPUSA chief Earl Browder. Identified by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her KGB contacts under the pseudonym Catherine. Identified in the Venona decryptions as a Soviet source/agent. Cover names in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Madeline” in 1937-39, Nelly” (late 1939?/1940-August 1944), “Stella” (August 1944 to mid-1945), “Emma” (proposed change by New York station in September 1944, but this does not appear to have been implemented), and “Elsa” (mid-1945).

In Russia, Helen Lowry (1910-1981) assumed the name Elena Ivanovna Akhmerova. She entered into Soviet citizenship and taught American English to future intelligence officers. ⁴

Akulov, Ivan: KGB officer, Moscow Center.

Akulov, Ivan Alexeevich (1988-1937) was a leading official of Soviet state security. In 1931-32, he was the first deputy head of OGPU; in 1933-35, the Prosecutor of the USSR (with Andrey Vyshinski as his deputy). In 1935-37, Akulov was the Secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. ⁵

Aralov, Simon I. : Senior GRU officer, 1920s, 1930s.

Aralov, Semen (his first name was a Russian name Semen and not its French variant, Simon) Ivanovich (1880-1969) was a Russian military officer (in the military service since 1902, fought in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 and in the WWI; Staff-Captain), who fought on the side of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921. From November 1918 to July 1919 he was head of the Registration Office of the Field Staff of the Revolutionary Armed Forces – the name of the predecessor agency of the GRU. Together with Leon Trotsky Aralov is considered to be an organizer of the Soviet military intelligence service, commonly known as the GRU. However, his tenure as the head of the nascent military intelligence was short-lived. Soon after, he took part in the organization of the Ukrainian military region and served as its deputy commander. In 1921, Aralov was shifted to diplomatic service, reportedly on the recommendation of Vladimir Lenin. In the same year, he briefly served as the Soviet envoy in Lithuania and from December 1921 to April 1923 he was an envoy in Turkey. From May 1923 to November 1925 Aralov served as a Soviet envoy in Latvia.

On his return to Moscow, he served as the head of the oriental department of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID) and simultaneously as the Soviet envoy at the nationalist government of China. From October 1927 to October 1929, Aralov was member of the Collegium of NKID, and from October 1929 to December 1930 he briefly served as member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of Peoples Economy  (VSNH). From 1930, he served as member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Financial Affairs. But in 1937 or 1938 he was demoted to the position of a deputy director of the State Literary Museum, which likely saved him from purges. After the Nazi attack of June 22, 1941, the 61-year old Aralov volunteered into the people’s volunteer corps. He fought in the Battle of Moscow as a common soldier and finished the war in Berlin as a commander of an anti-tank brigade in the rank of a colonel. After the war and until his retirement in 1957 Aralov was a Communist Party functionary. ⁶

Avinavitsky, ?: Red Army general, chief of the War Academy of Chemical Defense in the 1930s, executed in Stalin’s Terror.

The general’s name was Yakov L. Avinavitsky; in 1930s, the name of the academy was Military-Chemical Academy of RKKA (Voenno-Khimicheskaya Akademiya RKKA.)

Berger, Stanley: Soviet intelligence officer/agent, 1940.

In Alexander Vassiliev’s notes this foreign-sounding name does not appear as a name of a Russian. Moreover, in the Russian original it appears in Russian with its English spelling in brackets – a clear indication that its bearer was an American [... Стенли Бергер (Berger).] ⁷ Needless to say that this name does not appear in any known Russian records or accounts as the name of a Soviet intelligence officer.

Berlin, ?: Soviet intelligence officer/agent known to Jacob Golos and later arrested in the purge of the security services. Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Stark”.

Berlin is likely a garble for Berman. Probably, Berman, Boris Davydovich (1901-1939) who in 1934-35 was one of the deputy heads of the INO. Berman was arrested in September 1938 and executed in February, 1939.

Bochkovsky, ?: Described as a Ukrainian nationalist leader in exile.

Bochkovsky, Olgerd (Olgerd-Ippolit) (1885-1939), was an outstanding sociologist, educationist, writer and public figure of Ukrainian descent; the founder of the school of nation genesis and ethno-national policy. He worked in Prague after his immigration in 1905 and is often considered to be a Czech scholar of Ukrainian descent. ⁸

Bordovsky, ?: Soviet official involved in advanced technology.

Likely, Bordovskij [Bordovsky] Stephan Vassilievich (1894-1937), Division Engineer (a Soviet military rank until 1940, which was an equivalent of a 2-star general), who served as the head of the Engineering [“Tekhnicheskogo”, verbatim Technical or Technological; an English equivalent may be Engineering] Office of the RKKA. Arrested on May 25, 1937, he was sentenced to death on charges of “participation in a terrorist organization” on March 19, 1938, and executed on the same day; rehabilitated in October, 1957. ⁹

Boyarsky, ?: Lieutenant Colonel of State Security.

Likely Vladimir Boyarsky, an NKVD/MGB/KGB counterintelligence officer, who was in the rank of a major as of March, 1943, when he was responsible for delivering the crew of the US plane piloted by Edward York, that made a forced landing in the USSR. ¹⁰ In the summer of 1950, Colonel Boyarsky became the MGB advisor in Czechoslovakia with a free hand to uncover “anti-government” conspiracy among the Czech Communist leadership. In 1951, Boyarsky was demoted and shifted to the MGB of Lithuania; later promoted to the rank of Major-General.

Boyev, ?: Senior Soviet official, 1933. Boyev, Ivan V.: Chairman of Amtorg, mid-1930s.

Boyev, Ivan Vassilievich (1892-1938) was chairman of Amtorg in 1936-1937. Prior to it, from 1934 to 1936, he was trade representative in the USA. Arrested on December 31, 1937, he was sentenced to death on April 8, 1938 and executed on the same day. Rehabilitated in 1956. ¹¹

Bredis, ?: Officer in the OO OGPU in 1930.

The only discovered candidate may be Bredis, R.I., who was acting head of the NKVD office for the Karachajevskaya Autonomous Region.

Butberg,? (real name), and Baron Butberg’s White Guard group.

Baron Alexei Butberg was a high-ranking (Lt.-General) officer of the Russian Imperial General Staff, who served as one of the ideologues of the White movement and wrote a famous memoire ; he also left a valuable archive, known as Baron Butberg archive.

Butkov, ?: KGB officer, Moscow Center.

Likely Budkov, Fedor Alexeevich, as of 1939, was the head of the US section at the Moscow Center of the NKVD foreign intelligence. Budkov appears in Alexander Vassiliev’s notes as an officer at the Moscow Center. He is also described in the well-known memoirs of KGB veterans from late 1930s, Alexander Feklissov and Vitaly Pavlov.

Butosov, ?: Official of the People’s Commissariat of the Defense Industry.

Likely Butusov, Victor P., a high class expert in aviation engine building, who in 1937 was sent to the USA by the People’s Commissariat of Defense. During WWII, he was head engineer of factory #19 of the People’s Commissariat of Aviation Industry.

Butz, ? (real name), and the “Butz affair”: Unknown.

The name of Butz is associated with a scandal during the Ford Presidency that was associated with H.E. Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture. ¹²

Chertok, ?: Described as a Zionist leader in 1939.

“Chertok” was likely the future Israeli statesman Moshe Sharett (1894-1965), who was originally named Shertok. Born in Russia, he immigrated to Palestine in 1906, later to become David Ben-Gurion’s closest associate in the struggle for an independent Jewish state. In 1948, he became the Foreign Minister of Israel and from 1953 to 1955 served as its Prime Minister, retiring in 1956. ¹³

D.B. (initials): Described as a representative of the Department of the Treasury sent to Moscow in 1945.

Likely, Josiah E. Dubois, Jr., Treasury Department official who was a member of the Allied Reparation Commission in Moscow in May-June, 1945.

Devyatkin, Boris: GRU officer in the US. in the late 1920s, early 1930s using the pseudonym Dick Murzin.

“Boris Devyatkin” is not listed as a GRU officer in any of the available Russian publications. According to Russian espionage writer, Alexander Kolpakidi, Boris Devyatkin was born in Russia in 1888, arrived in the USA in 1923 and was naturalized in 1929. In late 1920s-early 1930s he assisted Soviet military intelligence “illegal” officer Moishe Stern and used the name Dick Murzin. However, this information is unreliable since Kolpakidi does not cite any source for this assertion. ¹⁴

Dunts, ?: KGB agent slated for infiltration into Germany via the battle front, late 1941. Dunts, Karl: KGB officer or agent, worked with Harry Gold, 1936-38. Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Achilles”.

The first description is unlikely. Dunts, Karl Adamovich was born in 1890 in Riga in the family of a Lettish worker and joined Cheka in 1918. After his posting in Hamburg, Germany, from 1926 to 1933, he was posted in New York from 1936 to 1938, and retired in 1939. Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Dunts volunteered into the Red Army, took part in combat operations, but was badly wounded, resulting in amputation of a  leg. ¹⁵

Ellinger, ?: Described as BEW official.

Likely Tage Ellinger, who, for instance, appears in the Papers of Henry A. Wallace in the correspondence about some controversy around the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW). ¹⁶

“El’man” (cover name or possible real name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): See “Elman”. “Elman” (cover name or possible real name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): Described as a traitor by KGB in 1938.

Likely El’man, Boris Shevelevich (1900-26.02.1939), a Bessarabian-born Jew who arrived in Soviet Russia in 1920. In 1924, after graduation from the Moscow State University, he joined the INO OGPU and initially worked in Eastern European countries. From 1928 to 1932, he was posted in Rome as INO’s “legal” resident. His next posting was in the USA. In 1935, El’man followed Arthur Artuzov, then head of the INO,  to the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army. He was one of the organizers of purchase and delivery of arms for republican Spain. Arrested on November 5, 1937 on charges of “espionage and membership in a counterrevolutionary organization,” El’man was sentenced to death on February 26, 1939, and executed on the same day. He was rehabilitated in 1956. ¹⁷

Emelyanov, ?: An official connected to the Soviet Chief Directorate on the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy.

Emelyanov, Vassili Sergeevich (1901 – 1988) was a prominent Soviet scientist and statesman. From 1957 to 1960, he was the head of the Main Directorate on the Use of Atomic Energy of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In 1960-1962, he was the chairman of the State Committee on the Use of Atomic Energy of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Emelyanov was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1965.) ¹⁸

Epshteyn, Shakhne: Described as associate of Julius Hammer at Pravda.

The description looks confusing when checked in the available archival records and publications. Epstein, Alexander Borisovich (who used the name Shakhno Epshtein as his literary pseudonym) (1881-1945) was a professional revolutionar, public figure, journalist and literary critic, who wrote both in Hebrew and Russian. Having joined the social democratic movement in Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1904, Epstein was arrested in Warsaw in 1905 and again in 1907, when he was imprisoned and then exiled. Having fled from exile, Epshtein first came to Vienna, later to Geneva. In Geneva he began writing for the Russian émigré social-democratic press and immigrated to the United States in early 1910. Having settled in New York, Epshtein wrote for the socialist press and became one of the founders of the Jewish section of the Socialist Party of America. In 1917, Epshtein returned to Russia, where he joined the Communist wing of the Jewish Bund. From late 1918 until August 1919, he worked in Odessa, and then moved to Moscow, to be appointed as one of the editors of Agitprop, where he worked under the pseudonym “V. Klimov.” In early 1920, he worked in Vitebsk and then was called back to Moscow to do party work as a publisher in the Jewish section.

In May 1921, Epshtein was dispatched by Comintern to the United States. For two years, he lived in the USA illegally, using a pseudonym of Arthur Staly [Steily?]. He took an active part in the organization of the Communist Party (“Workers Party”). Under the name of Joseph Berson, he worked as an editor of a Jewish weekly, “Emes” [“Hemes”?] and as well as one of the founders and editors of the Jewish Communist weekly, “Freiheit.” According to the CPUSA reference from January 1929, during the seven years of his stay in the USA, Epshtein “took an active part… in all the phases of the party work. He was a member of the Central Bureau of the party’s Jewish Section; was one of the founders and editor-in-chief of the party Jewish daily, “Freiheit,” worked in other party language publications. Back in the USSR, Epshtein was appointed editor of a monthly literary Hebrew journal, “Die Rote Welt” in Kharkov, Ukraine. In mid-1930s Epstein returned to Moscow, where he, again, worked for the Hebrew press. In 1942, he was appointed executive secretary of the newly founded Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and edited its newspaper until he died in 1945. ¹⁹

Fabrizi, ? General: Contact of Martha Dodd in 1937.

Most likely, a garbled spelling of the name of a Polish general Kazimierz Fabrycy (1888-1958). Given the known details of Fabrycy’s CV, Martha Dodd’s report looks rather unlikely. Fabrycy was a member of the Polish Legions in World War I, fought against the Bolsheviks in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920-1921. From 1926 to 1931, he was the first deputy war minister and in May 1934 he became inspector of the army with headquarters in Lvov (then part of Polamd.) Following the Nazi invasion in Poland, Fabrycy became the commander of Armia Karpaty and later Armia Malopolska. However, surrounded by the Nazi panzer forces, he deserted his army and went to the Polish headquarters in Brest. After the defeat of the Polish armed forces in September 1939, Fabrycy managed to move to France. He was later given assignments of small importance in the recreated Polish Army in the Middle East area. After the end of war, Fabrycy remained in the emigration, and died in London in 1958. ²⁰

Face, ?: Possible DOS employee. (Possibly a cover name.)

This was not a cover name, but an apparent translation garble of the name of Herbert Feis, Economic Advisor for International Affairs to the Department of State in the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. Herbert Feis was the author of some 13 books, and won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his work, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (1960). The Herbert Feis Prize is awarded annually by the American Historical Association to recognize the recent work of public historians or independent scholars. ²¹

Fainberg, ?: Associated with Amtorg in 1924 according to Vasily Delgass.

A likely candidate is Fineberg [Feinberg] Vladimir Grigorievich (1894-1938), who was head of the Main Directorate of Fuel Tool Building [Glavgormash] in 1930s. Arrested in February 1938, he was sentenced to death and executed on April 8, 1938 for “membership in counterrevolutionary terrorist organization.” Rehabilitated in 1956. ²²

Farrell, Michael: Described as the head of an American displaced persons agency in Austria in 1950.

Likely, Michael A. Farrell, who appears on the “Foreign Service” List of 1952 in the Department of State/Austria/Vienna section. ²³

Fisher, ?: KGB agent slated for infiltration into Germany via the battle front, late 1941.

Likely William Fischer, the famous Soviet “illegal” station chief in the United States from 1948 to 1957 known in the West as Rudolf Abel – the name of his late friend, which he gave at the time of his arrest in the United States in 1957. Although the identity of the name in Vassiliev’s notes is certain, the real-life William Fischer had never been “slated for infiltration into Germany.”

After the Nazi invasion into the USSR on June 22, 1941, William Fischer was drafted to serve at the Fourth Directorate of NKVD-NKGB that was responsible for intelligence and sabotage behind the frontlines, where he assumed responsibility for ensuring radio communication with the groups infiltrated behind the frontlines in the Nazi occupied Ukraine and Belorussia. In 1943-1944, Fischer took part in operational radio games against Abwehr and SD known under the code names of “Shkola” [School”], “Berezino” and “Kuriery” [“Couriers.”] In August-September 1944, in the course of operation “Berezino,” Fischer, dressed in Nazi uniform, took part in seizure and subsequent recruitment of a group of Nazi saboteurs in Belorussian forests. ²⁴

Fleisher, ?: Described as OSS officer/staff.

Fleisher, Henry C. served in the OSS during the World War II in the rank of Master Sergeant. He was awarded with the Bronze Star. ²⁵

Formayster, ?: GPU counterintelligence officer, 1924.

A likely candidate is Formister (Formeister), Alexander Romanovich (1887—1937), an officer of state security (GB) since 1919. From 1924 to 1930, he was the head of the OGPU counterintelligence department (KRO). In 1930-1931, he simultaneously served as assistant head of the OGPU Department of Operations. He retired in 1937 but was arrested in May, 1937, sentenced to death and executed on August 28, 1937; rehabilitated in 1958. ²⁶

Fovitsky, ?: Described as editor of Novoye Russkoye Slovo and rector of the Russian People’s University.

Fovitskii (Obolenskii), Alexei Leonidovich (1876-1931) was a formerly well-known Moscow literary critic and writer, who emigrated from Russia in 1921. In New York, he taught at the Russian People’s University and was one of the editors of Novoe Russkoye Slovo. Since 1929, he headed the pedagogical bureau of the Russian emigration. ²⁷

Fratkin, ?: Soviet employee of Amtorg.

A likely candidate is Fradkin, Alexander Efimovich (1895-1937), who in 1936-1937 was the director of engineering department of Amtorg. Previously, he served as the director of engineering department of the Soviet Trade Mission in France. Arrested on November 9, 1937, he was sentenced to death on December 25, 1937 on charges of “espionage and membership in a saboteur terrorist organization” and was executed on the same day; rehabilitated in 1955. ²⁸

Freiheits Partei: Described as an organization that Alfred Stern had aided at some point in the past.

Likely, Die Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei (NSFP, auch NF), translated as the National Socialist Liberty Party, which existed in the Weimar Republic in 1924-1925.

Furtseva, Ye.: Described as someone who met with Victor Hammer in 1964.

Apparentky, this was Ekaterina Furtseva, the Soviet Minister of Culture from 1960 to 1974.

Galkovich, ?: Described as Soviet General Consul in San Francisco in the 1930s.

Galkovich, Moissei Grigorievich (1932-1937) was a Soviet historian, expert in the Far East and diplomat since 1932. In 1920s he published a number of articles in scholarly journals and in 1928, a book, Soedinennye Shtaty i dal’nevostochnaja problema (The United States and the Far Eastern Problem.) From 1932 to 1934, he was the First Secretary at the Soviet embassy in Tokyo and in 1934-1935, he was the Soviet Consul General in San Francisco. Later, he served as deputy head and head of the press department of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. ²⁹

Gay, ?: KGB officer, Moscow center.

Gai, Mark Isaevich (the real name Shtoklyand) (1988-1937) was one of the leaders of the Soviet state security, 2^nd rank commissar of GB (November 1935.) He joined Cheka in May 1920, and served in Ukraine until he was transferred to Moscow in May 1922. Since May 1927, he worked in leadership positions at the economic directorate of the OGPU – promoted by August 1931 to its deputy head. In December 1932 he was transferred in the same position to the OGPU Special Department and became its head in June, 1933. He remained in this position following the creation of the NKVD in July 1934. Gai supervised the purges of military experts who used to serve in the pre-revolutionary army and all kind of “opposition members.” However, in late November 1936, he was sent away from Moscow  and appointed head of the NKVD office in the East Siberian region. Arrested on April 1, 1937, Gai was sentenced to death on June 20, 1937 and executed on the same day. ³⁰

“Gerson, Virginia: Described as OSS officer/staff.”

Gerson, Virginia B. is listed in the index of the personnel files of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS). ³¹

Gorb, ?: Assistant head of OGPU INO, 1932.

Gorb, Mikhail Savelievich (real name Roisman, Moissei Sanelevich) (1894-1937) was one of the leaders of the OGPU Foreign Intelligence, Senior Major of GB (1935.) Gorb joined the INO in January, 1921. From 1922-1924 he was posted in Germany with an intelligence assignment. In April 1924 he became an assistant to the head of INO OGPU and in August 1931 he became deputy head of INO OGPU. In 1933-1934 he was head of the 4^th division of the same agency and from August 1934 he was deputy head of the Special Department and later of the 3^rd department of the GUGB NKVD (counter-intelligence department.) Before his arrest in April 1937, he had briefly served as head of the Central Directorate of Weights and Measures. Executed in August 1937, rehabilitated in 1956. ³²

Gorbunov, N. P. : Described as manager of the Sovnarkom.

Gorbunov, Nickolai Petrovich (1892-1938) was a geographer, chemist, engineer and a Soviet government leader, member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who briefly served as charge d’affairs of Sovnarkom from December 1920 to early 1923 and was the Secretary of the Academy of Sciences from 1935 to 1937. ³³

Grabar, ?: Described as an art expert who advised Victor Hammer.

Grabar’, Igor Emanuilovich (1871-1960) was a famous Russian and Soviet artist, a prominent art historian, educationist and museum official, who was one of the founders of museum organization, art restoration and preservation of historical and art monuments in the USSR. ³⁴

Gromov, ?: Senior KGB officer, 1950.

One possible candidate is Anatoly Gorsky, who probably used the name  Gromov while working undercover at VOKS (Society for Cultural Contacts with Foreign Countires) in early 1950s. “A. Gromov” appears in the VOKS files from 1951 as Deputy Head, Department of the countries of South-Eastern Europe. ³⁵

Gulick, L.: Chief of a division of the War Production Board. Also spelled Gullick in the notebooks.

Luther Halsey Gulick was a prominent social scientist and an expert on public administration; mostly known as the president of the Institute of Public Administration from 1921 until 1982. Gulick held many important war-time posts, including that of director of the Office of Organizational Planning of the War Production Board (WPB). ³⁶

Gunter, ?: Described as an assistant to Harold Glasser at Treasury in 1945.

Gunther was an economist at the Division of Monetary Research, Department of the Treasury, who appears in its records from 1945, however, without a first name. Probably, identical with John W. Gunter?

Grunther, ?: Described as an American general.

Gruenther, Alfred Maximillian, General (1899 – 1983) was the youngest World War II Major General who served as the principal American planner of the allied invasions of North Africa in 1942 and Italy in 1943. After the war, he became deputy commander of U.S. forces in Austria in 1945; was appointed supreme allied commander in Europe and as a four-star General, served as commander-in-chief of the U.S. European Command from 1953 until his retirement in 1956. After retiring from the Army, Gruenther served as president of American Red Crss from 1957 to 1964. He was the recipient of many US awards, including the Distinguished Service Medal with three oak leaf clusters and honorary degrees from American universities. ³⁷

Gutshneker, ?: Had some relationship to Yelizaveta Gorskaya (Zarubina).

Gudshneker was one of the names used by the famous Soviet intelligence officer Elizaveta Zarubina in the 1920s. Her first husband, Spiru, worked in Vienna in 1924-1927 under the name of Willie Gudshneker. ³⁸

Hanse, ?: Described as someone who might become an aide to President Roosevelt in 1933.

Probably, Alvin H. Hansen (1887-1975)? American Keynesian economist, who is credited with bringing the 1930s Keynesian economics revolution to the United States.

Helfgott, Leo: Soviet intelligence source/agent. Helfgott was a medical doctor and cancer specialist. Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Bubi”. The identification of “Bubi” as Helfgott is based on the overlap between what is said of “Bubi” in Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks and Simon Rosenberg’s (“S-7”) statements to the FBI in the Armand Feldman case.

Likely garble of the name of Gel’fot (Helfot), Leo, who was an officer of the Soviet “illegal” intelligence from 1931 until his death in 1938. Leo Gel’fot was posted in the USA for some time in 1937, with his main task was to obtain information on the new methods of individual protection against poisonous gases, as well as treatment of the victims of gas attack. While in the USA, Gel’fot died of pneumonia. Gel’fot was a medical doctor, graduate of the Vienna University, however, described not as a “cancer specialist,” but as a radiologist. ³⁹

Herman, ?: Identified as a GRU officer who confessed being a Trotskyist and German spy in the late 1930s.

Apparently German [Hermann], Johann Hansovich, who from 1930 to 1936 served as an operative of the RU Moscow Center, including as division head of its 1^st (Western) department. From 1936 to 1938 he was a military advisor of the Republican army in Spain. He was awarded with the Order of Lenin, but purged on June 8, 1938. ⁴⁰

Ilk, ?: Senior KGB officer, Moscow, 1935.

Il’k (real name, Guenzberg), Bertold Karlovich, was Senior Lieutenant of GB. A native of Galicia (then Austrian-Hungarian Empire), he joined the INO OGPU in mid-1926 – to be posted as an “illegal” resident in Germany (cover name “Beer”/”Beyer”), and after 1930 running groups in France and England. Following his return to Moscow in 1935, he was shifted to counterintelligence, but arrested in April 1937 and executed in June of the same year. ⁴¹

Kamensky, ?: Soviet intelligence officer. Executed in Stalin’s purge of his security services in the late 1930s.

A garbled description of Kaminsky, Ivan Nickolaevich (1896-1944), who was the INO foreign intelligence officer from 1922. Betrayed by a traitor, Kaminsky committed suicide when the Abwher (German military intelligence) tried to arrest him in Zhytomir in 1944. ⁴²

Karin, ?: Soviet intelligence officer/agent known to Jacob Golos and later arrested in the purge of the security services.

Apparently Karin, Feodor Yakovlevich (1896-1937), who was a Soviet State Security (GB) operative and official in the 1920s and 1930s who worked periodically as an “illegal” station chief (“resident”) in the United States between 1927 to 1933. In January 1935, Karin was appointed head of the 2nd (oriental) department of the Red Army intelligence (RU). Arrested on May 16, 1937, he was sentenced to death and executed on August 21, 1937.  ⁴³

Karmen, ?: A unidentified Soviet described as having known Robert Capa in the Spanish Civil War.

Apparently, Roman Lazarevich Karmen (1906 –1978), who was a  Soviet war camera-man, film director and one of the most influential figures in the Soviet documentary fim making – sometimes considered the Soviet answer to Leni Rifenstahl. Karmen became world famous as war camera-man after Spain (1939), which he shot at the battlefields of the Civil War in Spain. He is also well-known as the camera-man for Leningrad in the Fight (1942), about the Siege of Leningrad, and particularly Moscow Strikes Back (the title of the English version of the film (1942) about the crushing defeat of the Nazi troops in the Battle of Mosocow that won the Oskar in the same year. He was also known in the West as a camera-man for The Nuremberg Trials (1946). ⁴⁴

Karoly, ?: Described as someone denied a visa to enter the United States at the request of the Horthy government.

Apparently, Count Mihaly Karolyi (1875-1955), a former Hungarian leader (1918-1919) and exile in France. The description in the “Concordance” file is not correct: in late 1934, Karolyi was to visit his sick wife in the United States and planned to use the trip to testify at the Senate Munitions Inquiry (hearings of the Special Committee to Investigate the Munitions Industry, commonly known as the Nye Committee) that the loans made by American bankers to certain foreign governments were to be used in financing the war. However, he was notified by the U.S. State Department that he could not speak publicly. ⁴⁵

Kenig, ?: Described as a prominent general, likely French, 1948.

Apparently, Marie Pierre Koenig (1898-1970), who was promoted to general in 1942 as a commander of the 1st Free French Brigade in Egypt. Later, he was given command of the Free French force that took part in the D-Day landings in France in 1944 and was appointed military governor of Paris after its liberation. After the war Koenig headed the French occupation zone in Germany (1945-49) and served as minister of defense in 1950s. ⁴⁶

Khurgin, ?: Associated with Amtorg in 1924 according to Vasily Delgass.

Khurgin, Isaja Yakovlevich (1887-1925) arrived in the USA in 1923 as a representative of a German-American transport society, previously served in Poland as a trade representative of Ukraine. Is described as an organizer of Amtorg in 1924 and its first chairman, who drawn in the Long Lake near New York City on August 27, 1925 under mysterious circumstances. ⁴⁷

Kipura, ?: Described as an Austrian film actor, 1935.

Apparently Jan Wiktor Kiepura (1902-1966), the famous singer (tenor) and movie actor of Polish descent, who starred in European and Hollywood movies in 1930s before he immigrated to the USA after the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland. After a successful American singing (Metropolitan Opera) and movie career, he died in New York in 1966. ⁴⁸

Kittovsky, Klaus: Described as grandson of Emil Fuchs.

Professor Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski (1934 – ), a prominent German computer scientist, who is the nephew of Klaus Fuchs.

Knopinsky, ?: Described as official of Glavkontsesskom.

In late 1920s, Knopinsky was a member of Glavkontsesskom [Russian abbreviation for the Main Directorate for Concessions]. He is known as the official behind the failure of “Gillette” to organize production in the Soviet Union. ⁴⁹

Ko, ?: Soviet scientist, linked to Nikolay Vavilov.

The only likely candidate is Komarov, Vladimir Leontievich (1969-1945), a prominent Russian Botanic and Geographer, the President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1936 until July, 1945. On July 8, 1945, General Petr Fedotov, then head of the NKVD counterintelligence, sent a “top secret” reference [“spravka”] to Stalin, Molotov and Malenkov. A week before the elections of a new president of the Academy of Sciences, the reference said the following about Stalin’s candidate, Academic Lysenko: “Has no authority with the biologists of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, including with Academic Komarov V.L. and Orbeli L.A.; particularly the latters attribute to him (Lysenko) the arrest of Vavilov N.I.” ⁵⁰

Kondrashov, S.: KGB officer, Moscow, 1966.

Kondrashov, Sergei Alexandrovich (1923-2007) was a senior officer of MGB-KGB foreign intelligence since 1951, Lt.-General. From 1962, he worked at the Moscow headquarters, first, as deputy head of its department “D”, then head of Austrian-German department, and from 1968, as head of the “A” service; later deputy head of the KGB foreign intelligence; retired in 1992. ⁵¹

Kornienko, ?: Soviet intelligence officer Moscow Center, 1939.

Likely T.N. Kornienko, who in 1939 was head of the 3^rd department (counterintelligence) of the GUGB NKVD.

Kovarsky, ?: Described as faculty supervisor of Engelbert Broda at Cambridge University.

Likely Lew Kowarski (1907-1979), a renowned nuclear physicist of Russian origin, a naturalized French citizen (1939). In the same year, he was part of a research team with ProfessorsFrederic Joliot and Hans Halban, that performed the crucial experiments that established the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. In 1940, Kowarski and Halban fled to Britain and continued their work at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Kowarski was responsible for the design and construction of the first nuclear reactor in Canada (1945), and the first two reactors in France (1948 and 1952). He also played a key role in the founding of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), and was named as its first Director of Scientific and Technical Services in 1954. Kowarski published well over 100 papers, mostly in English, ranging in style from technical to popular. In 1960s and 1970s, he held visiting professorships at Purdue University, University of Texas at Austin, and Boston University. ⁵²

Kreshin, Boris Mikhailovich: Soviet intelligence officer. Also known as Borukh Moiseyevich Kresshin.

The only discovered source for the Yiddish name is a book written by a former KGB officer Vladimir Chikov with American writer Gary Kern, that was published in French and later in Russian. Kreshin is not mentioned in a comprehensive biographical reference book, The Jews in the KGB and in various Russian on-line resources. The particulars of Kreshin look identical to the particulars of Boris Mikhailovich Krotov. ⁵³

Kropotov, ?: KGB officer, Berlin station early 1930s.

Kropotov, Petr Nickolaevich (1894- late 1930s) was a Soviet intelligence officer, who joined the OGPU in 1925 and later supervised its INO scientific-technical line. In early 1930s, he worked at the INO’s Berlin station. ⁵⁴

Krotov, Boris Mikhailovich: Soviet intelligence officer in the U.S., 1947-1950 NY. Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Bob”. “Bob” was identified in the Venona decryptions as Boris Krotov on the London-Moscow channel in 1945.

According to some sources (for instance, Russian on-line encyclopedia, “Intelligence and Counterintelligence in Person,” Krotov’s real name was Kretenshield, which, if true, may explain the Kreshin-Krotov confusion. ⁵⁵

Kulsky, ?: Described as legal counsel of the Polish government in London.

Likely Wladyslaw W. Kulski (1903 -1989), a prominent Polish diplomat and educator, who was Minister Plenipotentiary at the Polish Embassy in London from 1940 to 1945. After the war, Dr. Kulski became Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama (1948-1951), Syracuse University (1951-1964) and Duke University (1964-1973); he was an author of several books, including The Soviet Regime (1954) and held both Fulbright and Guggenheim research awards. ⁵⁶

Lebedinsky, ?: Soviet intelligence officer/agent know to Jacob Golos and later arrested in Stalin’s purge of his security services.

Probably, Igor Lebedinsky, who was the INO station chief in Vienna in 1920. ⁵⁷

Leitner, Rudolph: Described as a German in the U.S. with some connection to the Nazi regime.

Dr. Rudolph Leitner (1891-1947) was an Austrian. Before joining the NSDAP in 1936, he had served as a consul in Chicago in the 1920s, and then posted at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. from 1932 to 1936 (or late 1935) first, as councellor and later (1934) as charge d’affaires. After about a year and a half at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin as vice-director of its political department, he was appointed consul general in Pretoria, South Africa, where he served in 1938-1939. In 1947, he died in captivity in a Soviet detention camp. Leitner happened to be a patron of Fritz Kolbe, the U.S. “best intelligence source on Germany” in 1943-45. From mid-1936 to 1941, Kolbe worked under Leitner, first, at the political department of the Nazi Foreign Ministry, then, from February 1937 to 1939, at the German consulate in Cape Town, South Africa, who was the acting consulate general; and again, from the fall of 1939 to 1941, in Berlin, when Leitner “was responsible for many issues relating to the war” – and found Kolbe “indispensable.” ⁵⁸

Levine, Benjamin: Described as providing information on Walter Krivitsky via an Amtorg lawyer in 1940.

Likely, Benjamin Levine, the brother of Isaac Don Levine.

Liveit-Levit, ?: KGB officer, 1930s. Cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Ten”.

Livent-Levit, Samuil (Samuel) Vulfovich (1898-1938) was a Soviet intelligence operative in the 1920s and 1930s; Captain of State Security (GB).

To be continued.

In this dossier you may find discussion of some of the most obvious cases of misidentification of some of the cover names that appear in Vassiliev’s notebooks.

Case I: Source “11^th”/”Willie” misidentified as David A. Salmon

In the Alexander Vassiliev Notebooks “Concordance” file of the “Cover Names, Real Names, Abbreviations, Acronyms, Organizational Titles, Tradecraft Terminology,” compiled by espionage historian John Earl Haynes in 2008 and posted at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s website, ² we read:

 “11” (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Soviet intelligence source/agent at the State Department, subsource of “10”/“Leo”. Likely David A. Salmon. Also known as “Willy”. ³

“11^th”/“Willie” (apparently a German-origin pseudonym that Haynes and his co-author, historian Harvey Klehr misspelled as an anglicized “Willy) ⁴ was misidentified as “likely David A. Salmon.” “10th”/”Leo” was Ludwig Lore, who served as an agent-group-leader [“gruppovik”] and talent-spotter for the INO OGPU “illegal” station in New York from early 1930s until 1937. Lore was giving one of his sources at the Department of State as David A. Salmon, to justify a handsome monthly stipend of $500 for that alleged source. However, this misidentification was based on an incomplete set of notes, which Vassiliev had taken on circumstantially related files (mostly on the file of another Soviet source, Laurence Duggan, an official at the Department of State.) A much more definitive story of Ludwig Lore’s operations that was apparently based on Lore’s case-file, was written by a retired KGB Major General Julius Kobyakov for the third volume of the semi-official history of the Russian foreign intelligence. Kobyakov’s chapter is clear that by the spring of 1937, the Soviet “illegal” operatives in the United States had uncovered Lore’s cheating and ascertained the identity of his real source at the Department of State.

In fact, Vassiliev’s notes on Laurence Duggan’s file provide a definitive clue that by May, 1937, the Soviet operatives had learned the real identity of “11^th”/”Willie.” Under his notes on the Moscow Center’s May 14, 1937 letter to its New York resident, “Nord” (Boris Bazarov), that asked if the source “19th” [Laurence Duggan] could provide more materials “regarding the US data on the Soviet military-naval supply orders,” Vassiliev made the following notation in brackets, that apparently was his brief summary of Bazarov’s response to the Center’s query:

     “[The actual “11” didn’t give “19” the folder, because these materials should not be of interest to 19.]” ⁵

 Click here to read more on the misidentification of David Salmon as source “Willie”/”11th”

Case II: Source “James” misidentified as a Thomas Schwartz 

John Haynes’s “Concordance” file of the “Cover Names, Real Names, Abbreviations, Acronyms, Organizational Titles, Tradecraft Terminology,” says:

 “James” [Dzhems] (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): Thomas Schwartz, 1935, described as former German consul. ⁶

 In Alexander Vassiliev’s notes on a few communiqués from 1934 and 1935 “Dzhems” (“James”) was described as a former German consul in New York by the name of Schwartz who provided “valuable information regarding German activities in the USA and Europe” in exchange for a monthly stipend of $400. According to Vassiliev’s excerpted notes, “James” was originally a contact of American journalist Ludwig Lore, who since early 1930s served as an agent-group-leader [“gruppovik”] and talent-spotter for the INO OGPU “illegal” station in New York, which until August 1934 was headed by an “illegal” resident Valentin Markin ["Davis”] Following Markin’s death in August 1934, “James” was reportedly transferred from a contact with Lore to a direct contact with Soviet “illegal” operatives and was ultimately put in contact with “Jung,” which was the cover name of the Soviet “illegal” Iskhak Akhmerov during his first posting in the USA. ⁷

From this brief account it follows that as of 1934-1935, “James,” described as the former German consul in New York by the name of Schwartz was continuously run on the New York “illegal” line, originally through the contact with Ludwig Lore and since or after September 1934, through the contact with Soviet “illegal” operatives (unidentified “King,” who was soon substituted by “Jung”/Akhmerov.) Vassiliev’s notes provide one more clue to “James”’s identity – that as of late 1934, the former German consul worked “at a commercial company.”

It is difficult to say if Vassiliev’s co-authors, historians Haynes and Klehr, had tried to pursue these clues before they wrote without a shade of doubt in their identification of another of Ludwig Lore’s sources:

        The KGB New York station also assigned Lore liaison duties with Thomas Schwartz, a former German consul living in New York who had become a KGB source. … ⁸

 But does Thomas Schwartz fit in with the particulars of “James” in Vassiliev’s notes? 

In Vassiliev’s notes Thomas Schwartz appears in an October 3, 1935 report by “Grin” on Nazi activities as “Grin”’s “contact, who worked in the German office at the Worker’s center” in New York. ⁹ A “German office at the Worker’s center” looks a rather unlikely place for “a commercial company” – “James”’s reported workplace as of 1934-1935.

“Grin” is identified as journalist John Spivak, who covered the activities of Trotskyists, as well as pro-Nazi groups in the United States. “Grin”’s report was sent to Moscow from the INO New York “legal” station, whose operations and sources were compartmentalized from the operations and sources on the “illegal” line. (This is apparent from a hand-written notation under “Grin”’s report made by “Nickolai”, which was the cover name of Petr Gutzeit, the INO “legal resident” from 1934 to 1938.

These disconnects make a Thomas Schwartz in Vassiliev’s notes an improbable candidate for the former German consul Schwarz (a more proper German spelling than in the translation of Vassiliev’s notebooks.) Still, the question remains: Who was the actual former German consul in New York Schwarz?

A quick check in the on-line records of The New York Times revealed that the actual name of the former German consul was Dr. Paul Schwarz (1882-1951) – a long-time German civil servant and diplomat, who served as the German Acting Consul and Consul General in New York from 1928 to early 1933, when he was ousted by the Nazis. According to contemporary reports, “the genial, portly consul” was very popular with newspapermen and “always known as a liberal,” who proclaimed himself “an enemy of the Hitler regime.” As a result, on April 11, 1933, Schwarz became the first German diplomatic official to be dismissed by Hitler. He decided to remain in the United States, considering that there was no place for people like him in Nazi Germany. ¹⁰

When in April 1933 his diplomatic passport became obsolete, Dr. Schwarz went to Montreal and returned to the United States as an ordinary immigrant – determined to eventually become an American citizen. Soon after, he became an investment counselor with Halle & Steiglitz, who offered him a job despite the fact that the former diplomat of twenty years had never seen a stock market ticket. Dr. Schwarz remained in the brokerage business for many years to come. ¹¹ In the same year, he joined Inter-Scholastic German Club and emerged as a distinct public voice against the Nazi atrocities. Dr. and Mrs. Paul Schwarz lived at 230 Central Park South, and were popular figures in New York social life – entertaining visiting dignitaries at St. Moritz Hotel, attending numerous social functions, frequenting luxurious spa resorts.  

In April 1939, Dr. Schwarz and his British-born wife entered into American citizenship. ¹² In a patriotic gesture, on April 26, 1942, the 60-year old former consul registered in New York for military duty. ¹³ By that time he was completing a book about the Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, which would be published next year. ¹⁴ Dr. Schwarz died in Bonn, Germany in August 1951. ¹⁵

Case III: Agent “Paul” misidentified as Maxim Lieber

The “Concordance” file compiled by John Earl Haynes asserts:

“Lieber, Maxim: Soviet intelligence agent. Immigrant from Poland, naturalized U.S. citizen. Lieber, a literary agent, was a Communist and undertook a variety of tasks for the CPUSA underground and Soviet intelligence in the 1930s, including assisting Whittaker Chambers’ GRU-linked apparatus. Chambers’ stated that Lieber had the cover name “Paul” in the underground.282 Cover names in Vassiliev’s notebooks: “Paul”, “Pol”.”

 ““Paul” [Paul']: (cover name in Vassiliev’s notebooks): Pseudonym treaded as a cover name. Likely Maxim Lieber. “Paul” was used by a GRU agent who approached Harold Glasser in 1940 in connection with “Karl’s” group. Whittaker Chambers identified “Paul” as the pseudonym of Lieber and discussed has role in the party underground and as part of GRU espionage activities.350 Note that while Glasser reported he was approached by “Paul” [Paul'], KGB officers in their summaries often substituted “Pol” [Pol’] a Russian variant of Paul, for Paul’, the other Russian version of Paul.”

 ““Pol’” (cover name in Vassiliev notebooks): See “Pol”. Russian variant of the name Paul.” 

“Paul” was a Russian cover name that appears in Alexander Vassiliev notes as a German name, spelled in Russian as [Pa-ul'] and as a French name, which is spelled in Russian as [Pol']. It does not appear as a Russian name [Pa-vel].” The French cover name “Pol’” also appears in a single Venona decryption of a cable sent from Washington, D.C. to Moscow on March 30, 1945. ¹⁶

As a German name “Paul” appears in Vassiliev’s notes on a few NKGB documents from December 1944. They describe “Paul’’” as someone who “in June 1940 tried to find an approach” to “Ruble,” previously used to meet with “Karl — an incident which “Ruble” described in his personal history [“avtobiografiia”], which he prepared for NKGB resident in Washington, D.C. Anatoly Gorsky [“Vadim”] at the time of his recruitment. Upon receipt of this information, Moscow Center ascertained that “Paul’” “worked for the neighbors,” that is, the military intelligence service, GRU – and instructed Gorsky “to warn ‘Ruble’ not to come into contact with “Paul’” in case the latter “appeared again.” ¹⁷

As a French name, “Pol’” appears in Vassiliev’s notes on a cable sent by “Vadim” to Moscow Center on March 5, 1945, which describes some circumstances of a person with a cover name “Ales,” who appears as “Vadim”’s target for recruitment. “Pol’” is described as someone with whom “Ales” “came in contact” “after the loss of contact with ‘Karl‘” – and with whom “Ruble” “declined” to make contact. “Vadim”’s follow up cable from March 30, 1945, which was partially decrypted in the course of Venona operation and is commonly known as “Venona 1822,” ascertained “Ales”’s status as a source of NKGB’s military neighbors.“Pol’” appears as someone with whom “Ales” “has been working” “in all the recent years,” and “who also occasionally meets [with] other members of the group.”

The correlation of circumstances described in Vassiliev’s notes and in Venona 1822 makes it certain that both Russian variants of the name Paul – as a German and as a French name – stood for the same person, who appeared as an agent of the GRU. That person likely used the name as the so-called “street” or “work” name – an assumed name an agent uses in his everyday contacts in the underground.

In Vassiliev’s notes and in Venona1822 the identity of the agent hidden behind this cover name was not identified. In the course of his libel suit in London against the British publisher of John Lowenthal (a lawyer, writer and Alger Hiss defender), Vassiliev was questioned about the identity of “Pol’” in his notes on “Vadim”’s March 5, 1945 cable. At that time Vassiliev said that he did “not know the real name of a person with a code-name ‘Pol’ or ‘Paul’.”¹⁸ However, a few years earlier, in his letter to Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation magazine, Vassiliev explained that “code-names ‘Pol’ (or Paul)” referred to “an operative (probably station chief) of the Soviet military intelligence (GRU) in the U.S.” ¹⁹       

Since 2007, John Earl Haynes and his co-author, Harvey Klehr, have been misidentifying this cover name as Maxim Lieber, on a sole merit that this left-wing literary agent and an associate of Whittaker Chambers in 1930s, had used the name “Paul” (spelled by Chambers as an English name) as his name in the “Communist underground.” 

However, crosschecking these sources against information and documentation that has recently become available in Russia, confirms that “Pol’” and “Paul’” both refer to the same person with the cover name of “Doctor.” “Doctor” has recently been identified in Russian publications as an agent-group leader and liaison officer of the GRU’s “Omega” group ["rezidentura"] in Washington, D.C. from 1940 to 1945, which was headed by station chief Lev Sergeev (“Moris“). 

In Russia, “Doctor” appeared in a few books and a magazine article written by Vladimir Lota, a writer with military background and a privileged access to the GRU records. ²⁰ Lota’s description of «Doctor” is rather confusing, probably, deliberately, to prevent identification of this man, who, according to Lota and other sources, had never been suspected in cooperation with the Soviet intelligence.

A more clear description of “Lota” has been provided by Mikhail Boltunov, a Russian military journalist and editor-in-chief of “Orientir” (Orientation) magazine published by the Russian Department of Defense. ²¹

In a chapter devoted to Lev Sergeev and his “Omega” group, which is apparently based on the same or similar primary sources that were used by Lota, Boltunov describes Sergeev’s first meeting with “Doctor” a month and a half after his own arrival in Washington on April 1, 1940 (that is, in mid-June, 1940.) For this meeting, Sergeev travelled to New York, where “Doctor” lived. From Boltunov’s account of the meeting it is clear that prior to it “Doctor” had tried to resume contact with a few sources the contact with whom was broken following the betrayal of agent “Sotyi” (“100^th”) in 1938. ²² These particulars correlate with “Ruble”’s account that in early 1940 he was approached by “Paul’” 

Boltunov further describes “Doctor” as “the key figure of Sergeev’s station [“rezidentura”], its group-leader [“gruppovod”], who performed liaison functions in Sergeev’s “Omega” group.

Describing the group’s operation, Boltunov emphasizes that its resident, Sergeev, himself had not met with any of his sources – with liaison functions performed by “Doctor,” who was specially trained in this tradecraft and travelled for the meetings to Washington, D.C. from his base in New York. ²³ These particulars correlate with the description of the liaison functions of “Pol’” both in March 5, 1945 cable in Vassiliev’s notes and in the follow up March 30, 1945 cable in Venona decryption. The latter said that “Pol’” was someone who had been a continuous contact of the GRU source “Ales” and who “also meets other members of the group…” 

So, “Paul’”/”Pol’” is identical with “Doctor,” which was this man’s operational GRU cover name. But could he be Maxim Lieber? 

According to the particulars in Boltunov’s account of the archival sources, “Doctor” was a medical doctor by occupation and background and a long-time agent of the Soviet military intelligence, who was recruited in Europe “in 1934 by a well-known military intelligence officer Oskar Stigga and in 1930s performed various intelligence tasks in Poland, Rumania and Austria.” “Following the decision of the Center, he moved to the USA in 1939,” settled in New York and later obtained a license for private medical practice. ²⁴ 

These particulars exclude Maxim Lieber as a candidate for the cover name of “Doctor” – and, by implication, exclude him as a plausible candidate for “Paul’”/“Pol’”.

To be continued

This problem surfaced during Vassiliev’s civil litigation in London in 2002-2003 after he had filed a libel suit against Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. – the publisher of an article by John Lowenthal, a lawyer, writer and Alger Hiss long time defender. ¹ During the pre-trial proceedings, Vassiliev himself acknowledged the problem with the titles of the documents at least twice – when questioned about the copies of some of his hand-written notes that he submitted in proof of his claim that in the course of his research in the intelligence files from the 1930s and 1940s, he had seen “documents mentioning Alger Hiss by his real name in his capacity as a Soviet agent.” ²

For instance, on February 1, 2002, when questioned about the documents from the files of “Nigel” (Michael Straight) and “Prince” (Laurence Duggan) that appeared in The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – the Stalin Era (1999) that Vassiliev co-authored with an American writer, Allen Weinstein, Vassiliev said, “My notes do not mention specific titles of the documents.” As an explanation, he added that “in the 1930’s, operational cables and letters usually had no titles.” ³ 

Without access to the original files, it is difficult to check if this was, indeed, so. Among a few Xerox copies of the declassified NKVD intelligence documents from the 1930s in my possession, there is a single page from a file the notes on which appear in Vassiliev’s Black Notebook. ⁴  On top of page 27 of the Black Notebook (translation) we see Vassiliev’s excerpted notes under what appears to be the document’s title:    

 p 29 Questions that require special attention (draft of “Omega’s” combined assignment for 1937):  

          1. Aviation: high-speed airplanes with powerful weapons and controlling devices for them; 

           2. Naval fleet: high-speed battleships and cruisers, armor, weapons, controlling and steering devices, submarine batteries;  

           3. Tanks: engines, armor, weapons, devices.  

           4. Chemistry: new war poison gasses.  

           5. Stopping airplane engines mid-flight; remote control; night vision.

However, according to my Xerox copy of the original file page, Vassiliev’s notes turn to be made on the second part of the third (under No 98) of the three points (Nos 96, 97 and 98) that appear on this page. The page itself looks like a part of some early 1937 or late 1936 letter from the Moscow Center to its U.S. outpost. The copy clearly displays the title of the 98^th point – with the text to follow:  

     98. On the draft of the “Omega” integral assignment for 1937.  

     Sending to you as a separate attachment on the film the draft of the integral assignment “Omega” for 1937 that has been developed by the center’s operatives.  

     This draft has not yet been approved and we are sending it only for your orientation.  

      Some of the points of the integral assignment you will, probably, consider as already realized. We ask you to approach this issue in all objectivity and with full responsibility and to send us your considerations concerning the project as a whole.  

      In a nutshell, the questions that will, from now on, basically require all your attention may be formulated as follows:  

      1. Aviation: high-speed airplanes with large-yield weaponry as well as control instruments for them;  

      2. The fleet: fast-sailing battleships and cruisers, armor plating, weaponry, control and navigation instruments, submarine batteries;  

      3. Tanks: engines, armor, weaponry, [control] instruments.  

      4. Chemistry: new chemical warfare agents.  

      5. Air engine stoppage; teleautomatics; night vision.  

      It is possible and necessary to develop other aspects of military equipment, but only so that it does not hurt the procurement of materials on the main group. ⁵ 

The comparison between the two texts makes it clear that Vassiliev’s title “Questions that require special attention” was his own description of his sketchy extraction from the document.  Two other points – 96 and 97 – appear on the same page of my Xerox copy under their specific titles:  

     96. About Sandus. Re the letter No 9 from 2.XII.36 paragraph 31.  

     97. On obtaining materials on the stratosphere plane through Ganzaker. ⁶ 

CLICK HERE to have an idea of an original document from the 1930s  

In many cases, the absence of a title simply makes any correct attribution of a particular document difficult or even impossible (as in the case cited above.) However, in some cases this deficiency may result in misreading of the document itself. This problem became apparent in the course of Vassiliev’s London libel case.  

Late in the pre-trial proceedings, Vassiliev produced a copy of his notes of a list with 14 names – including those of Alger Hiss and his brother Donald Hiss, which a Soviet agent code-named “Raid” drafted in mid-March 1945, at the request of the NKGB resident in Washington, D.C., Anatoly Gorsky. “Raid” was identified by Venona translators as the cover name for Victor Perlo, a Marxist economist and New Deal official. Here is how these notes look in the so-called “court bundle.” ⁷  

Click here to see the scans of the notes that Alexander Vassilev produced in court   

Vassiliev’s  typed notes that he produced in London appeared under the following title:  

A List of people who according to”Raid” have been cooperating with the Soviet intelligence service, apart from those he is working regularly at present. Dated 15 March 1945. 

Answering in an open court a question about the title of his notes on the “Raid”’s list, Vassiliev said:  

What you have on page 309 above the table – it is my explanation of the meaning of the table. It is very close to text I have in my notebook, but I just put here the Soviet intelligence service; but this is not the direct translation of what I have in the notebook. ⁸ 

Vassiliev’s explanation to the court was puzzling, since, answering an additional question, he said that the “table” was “a copy” from his notebook, but he did not “remember how it looked like exactly – probably a photocopy of a document written by Victor Perlo.”

 With Vassiliev’s notebooks finally posted in 2009 at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s website, one would expect to find a solution to this puzzle. However, the Russian title of the list that appeared in Vassiliev’s White Notebook #3, turned to be a carbon copy of the Russian title in the London court bundle:

 s.91 Spisok lits kotorye po svedeniyam “Rejda” sotrudnichajut s razvedkoi, krome tekh, s kem on v nastoyaschee vremya regulyarno rabotaet. Ot 15.03.45. ⁹      

Its English re-translation, made in 2007, had a slight difference from the translation in the London court bundle – the change of the verb “cooperate” to “work”, although the verbatim translation of the Russian verb “sotrudnichajut” is “collaborate” and “cooperate”, but not “work”, which in Russian would be “rabotajut”:

List of people who, according to “Raid’s” information, work with intelligence, except for those with whom he currently works on a regular basis. From 15.03.45 ¹⁰

 The plot gets thicker when we find apparently the same document referred to in quite different words in Vassiliev’s notes on a the cable sent to Moscow by “Vadim,” the NKGB station chief in Washington, D.C. Anatoly Gorsky, to which the Perlo’s list was likely attached: 

“Raid’ gave us a list that includes 14 people with ties to groups led by some people named Blumberg and Schimmel (from Congress) and ‘Bill’ (‘Albert’). ¹¹

Vassiliev’s notes give no clues to explain the obvious disconnect between this description of the Perlo’s list and its title on the next page in the same White Notebook #3. Vassiliev himself shed some light on this discrepancy in one of his draft chapters that he wrote for his first Russian co-author, Allen Weinstein, in mid-1990s. In his Russian manuscript, entitled “Istochniki v Vashingtone” (“The Sources in Washington”) that Vassiliev provided to Weinstein in 1996, he added two footnotes – apparently to explain to his co-author the nature of  the groups led by the obscure Blumberg and Schimmel:  

(71) “Bill” and “Albert” – pseudonyms of Akhmerov. On the work of this group see further, as well as the chapter “Itskhak Akhmerov and the “Pal”’s group.”  

(75) Herbert Schimmel – an employee of Senatore Kilgore apparatus. Everywhere (in particular, in the materials on the “Mole”) he is mentioned under his own name; there is no information about [his] cooperation with intelligence. ¹² 

(74) Blumberg used to head the party group in Washington and gathered information for CP USA leadership. [See further section on the “Mole” [“Krot”];  

When quoting “Vadim”’s cable in The Haunted Wood, Allen Weinstein used only the first half of the Perlo list’s description provided by “Vadim”: 

… [Victor Perlo] gave us a list including fourteen men definitely connected with the groups. …” ¹³ 

Weinstein’s archival citation (to Arch No 45100, v. 1, pp. 100-102) leaves no doubt that he cited from Vassiliev’s Sources in Washington manuscript. Given Weinstein’s omission, the readers of The Haunted Wood were left to guess what kind of groups these 14 men were linked to. ¹⁴  

If Weinstein had omitted and blurred the description in Vassiliev’s draft manuscript, ten years later, Vassiliev’s second co-authors, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, ignored it altogether – preferring the description that Vassiliev provided in London in 2003:  

 “List of people who, according to “Raid’s” [Perlo’s] information, work with intelligence, except for those with whom he currently works on a regular basis. From 15.03.45.” ¹⁵ 

CLICK HERE to read more about the “Perlo List.”

Here, we will look at how different interpreters in the last two decades have sifted the evidence and handled the story. First, there was the Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt who gained access to files on Noel Field in the early 1990s and said they indicated that Hiss had been a spy. Then there was Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist, whose notes on the KGB foreign intelligence documents he saw in mid-1990s were used as the basis for three different books by American authors: Allen Weinstein’s revised version of his 1978 book Perjury (1997); Weinstein’s later book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – the Stalin Era (1999), which he co-authored with Vassiliev; and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr’s 2009 book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, they co-authored with Vassiliev. These books must be compared to a draft that Vassiliev himself wrote in 1996, while he was working with Weinstein, entitled The Sources in Washington.

At the end of the day, it is up to the reader to decide what part of the record, if any, is true.

See also “Dinner Party” at the Fields’ I: Whittaker Chambers’s and Hede Massing’s Accounts (1939-1948)

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ II: Noel Field’s Account, with additional comments by Hede Massing and others (1948-1954)

Early 1990s, Budapest, Hungary:

Maria Schmidt, a 34-year-old Hungarian historian, gains access to some part of the Noel Field files at the Hungarian Interior Ministry – and finds statements by Field that seem to directly implicate Alger Hiss in espionage.

October 11, 1992:

Maria Schmidt presents her findings in what she termed Noel Field’s 1954 “pre-release interviews” at a seminar sponsored by New York University’s Institute for the Humanities.

October 15, 1992:

In an Op-ed piece in the New York Times, writer Sam Tanenhaus claims that Maria Schmidt’s findings contain “unimpeachable” evidence that will “seal the case against Alger Hiss.”

April 1993, New York:

Sam Tanenhaus publishes the story of Maria Schmidt’s findings in an article in Commentary magazine.

November 8, 1993, New York:

Lawyer Ethan Klingsberg disputes Maria Schmidt’s reading of Noel Field’s Hungarian dossier in an article in the Nation magazine – based upon his reading of the same dossier in Budapest.

1994-1995,  Moscow:

Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist, gains access to some of the records of the KGB foreign intelligence. He makes handwritten notes and writes draft chapters for what was at the time planned as a Russian-American collaborative book project on the history of Soviet espionage in the United States in the Stalin era.

1997, United States:

American writer Allen Weinstein publishes the second edition of Perjury, his 1978 book about the Hiss-Chambers case – incorporating notes made in 1994 by Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist, on KGB foreign intelligence files. The revised edition of Weinstein’s Perjury cites a somewhat confusing discussion by Soviet operatives about Alger Hiss approaching Noel Field to recruit him for the Communist cause, and the approach’s aftermath. As cited by Weinstein, the episode looks like a total dating confusion – either through Weinstein’s inaccuracy or through some original confusion at the source. But nobody seems to notice.

1999, United States – The Haunted Wood evidence:

Practically the same account appears in The Haunted Wood – a book by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, which is based on Vassiliev’s research in KGB foreign intelligence files. Here too, the narrative is a total dating and factual confusion – due either to Weinstein’s carelessness or to some original confusion at the source. Again, nobody seems to notice.

Most notably, Weinstein and Vassiliev say the “dinner party” episode took place at some time during the winter of 1935-1936 – the same dating that  Hede Massing gave when she broke the story in her December 7, 1948 interview with the FBI. (In her December 8, 1948 testimony to the grand jury, she gave an alternative dating as “the winter of 1934-1935” – and kept to that earlier dating in her testimony at Hiss’ second perjury trial.)

Neither the FBI and the grand jury, in 1948, nor Weinstein, in the 1990s, bothered to check the U.S. State Department records for Noel Field’s itinerary – to see that both dates were impossible. In October 1934, Noel Field sailed for London as secretary for the U.S. delegation to the London Naval Limitation Conference – to return to Washington only sometime in January of 1935. In late November of 1935, he sailed for London again– to spend the period from December 1935 through March of 1936 as technical secretary to the U.S. delegation at the second Naval Limitation Conference. Both in 1934-1935 and in 1935-1936, Herta Field accompanied her husband. ¹

Weinstein simply ignored the many inconsistencies in the fragments he cited.

1999, United States – Hiss Case grand jury transcripts unsealed:

In October 1999, the Hiss Case grand jury transcripts are finally unsealed – to reveal Hede Massing’s December 8, 1948 testimony about her “dinner party” story.

Summer 2005, New York:

Jeff Kisseloff, New York writer and managing editor of the Alger Hiss website, obtains Hede Massing’s FBI file in response to his FOIA request. Among the 800+ pages in the file, he discovers a record of Massing’s interview with the FBI agents on December 7, 1948 – the first time that she told her story of her encounter with Alger Hiss at the Fields’ apartment  in Washington, D.C.

2005, Berlin – Der Fall Noel Field published:

A comprehensive compilation of Noel Field documentation from the archives of Hungary and other Eastern and Central European countries is published in Germany – providing easier access to the Noel Field corpus of documentation. ²

May 2007, Hoover Archives, Stanford University, California:

Jeff Kisseloff discoveres a 240-page Russian manuscript in the recently unsealed Allen Weinstein Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives, which I identify as Alexander Vassiliev’s draft of a considerable part of The Haunted Wood.  The manuscript is called The Sources in Washington. At long last, we see a Russian original of the confusing “dinner party” story presented in the second edition of Weinstein’s Perjury and later in The Haunted Wood.

Click here to compare accounts of the so-called “dinner party at the Fields’ ” episode in The Haunted Wood and in Vassiliev’s Sources in Washington draft manuscript.

[In Vassiliev’s account  based on his reading of a file of Laurence Duggan, another State Department official and Noel Field’s friend, the story appears as part of a discussion of security problems which the NKVD “illegal” operatives encountered while cultivating Duggan as a recruitment prospect. In the absence of Vassiliev’s notes on any primary source file (the most logical would have been the personal files of Noel Field or Hede Massing, which Vassiliev apparently did not see), we are left with second-hand sources once or twice removed.

That is, we learn about Noel Field’s alleged encounter with Alger Hiss not from any contemporary account by Field himself, but from an ex post facto account that Hede Massing (at that time still known under the name of Gumperz and referred to as “Redhead”) wrote for her Soviet handlers. We are also dealing with the Soviet New York “illegals”’ reports to Moscow Center or with the Center’s messages to its New York field station – again, mostly sourced to Hede Massing’s account of the events. This makes Vassiliev’s notes on the episode not just a second-hand source (which all Vassiliev’ s notes are, by virtue of being third-party notes and not Xerox copies), but a second-hand source once or even twice removed. To any trained historian, a long transmission line like this is about as reliable as a game of telephone.

In addition to this probably garbled transmission line, a careful content analysis of Vassiliev’s notes on the_„episode suggests some confusion – if not deliberate misleading – by the source, that is, “Redhead”, or Hede Massing.

Vassiliev’s Russian account is clear that “Redhead”’s memo was written in April 1936 – based on a story that Noel Field “told her a day before his departure to Europe.” Noel and Herta Field left for the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland around mid-April, 1936, after a brief stay in Washington, D.C. following their return from London around April 1. This provides the time-frame for Vassiliev’s account on “Redhead”’s April 1936 memo. According to it, Field tells to the “Redhead” that Alger Hiss has attempted to solicit from Field “a report on the London conference.” This appeal takes place “about a week before his [Noel’s] departure from Washington.” This could only refer to Field’s departure for the League of Nations in Geneva in April 1936, and not his previous departure for the Second Conference on the Limitation of Naval Armament in London in late November, 1935, because in the same memo Field is reported to say to Hiss “that he had already reported on a conference.” ³

This statement is followed by the “Redhead”’s remark: “When Alger, whom, as you probably remember, I had met through “Ernst”[LINK to “Ernst”] [that is Field]…”

Vassiliev’s account of  “Redhead”’s April 1936 memo provide no leads to the dating of that earlier meeting between the “Redhead” and Hiss. “Redhead”’s wording – “as you probably remember” – does not suggest that the alleged meeting could have happened within the brief time span between Noel Field’s arrival from London around April 1 and his subsequent departure for Geneva.

A tentative dating is suggested in the April 26, 1936 report to Moscow by the “Redhead”’s Soviet handler, Boris Bazarov, that was apparently sent to Moscow along with her memo. Vassiliev quotes Bazarov informing Moscow that “Redhead and Hiss… got exposed to each other more than two months ago” – thus circumstantially dating the meeting some time in February of the same year.

In Vassiliev’s account of the follow-up communiqués between Moscow Center and its New York operatives, the above-mentioned meeting between the “Redhead” and Hiss is referred to as something that had happened a rather long time ago.

In its May 3, 1936, response to “Redhead”’s memo, Moscow Center expressed its puzzlement at “the motives behind ‘Redhead’’s meeting with Hiss,” who by that time appeared under the cover name “Jurist.” Moreover, it was the Center’s understanding that the meeting had taken place after its instruction that “Jurist” was connected with the “neighbors”, that is, Soviet military intelligence, and had to be kept at a distance. For any such “hands off” instruction to be sent, there should have been some previous report from the field operatives, which would then be followed with an inquiry sent to the sister service. All this may have requested more time than Noel Field’s brief stay in Washington in April 1936 would have allowed.

The plot thickens when we read Vassiliev’s account of the response to Moscow’s May 3 communiqué, which was written on May 18 by another “Redhead”’s handler in the United States, Iskhak Akhmerov [emphasis added]:

“‘Redhead’ had met ‘Jurist’ only once throughout all the time of her stay in this country, and this took place in winter. She went to that meeting with c.[omrade] Nord’s knowledge. After you had informed us that he had a contact [“svyaz’] with the neighbors, we did not see him, that is ‘Jurist’….”  ⁴

Since, as we have already seen, the Fields were in London from late November 1935 till the end of March 1936, there could be no meeting at the Field’s apartment – as Hede Massing used to describe her only encounter with Hiss –in the winter of 1935-1936. As to the winter of 1934-1935, on April 26, 1936, Bazarov was apparently referring to a meeting that took place only “more than two months” before that date.

How could the two Soviet “illegal” operatives happen to be so inaccurate in their reporting to Moscow? The reason for their dating disconnect can only be Hede Massing’s fuzzy reporting. According to her testimony to the grand jury on December 8, 1948, Hede Massing came to the United States in October 1933. She “could not exactly establish the date” when she “had met Noel Field” for the first time, hesitating between 1934 and 1935, but Noel Field definitely dated their initial meeting “in the year of 1934.” ⁵

–  In her April 1936 memo, Massing dated the initial encounter between Hiss and Field as taking place “approximately a week before” Field’s “departure for Europe,” which, as we have ascertained earlier, could only be fot the League of Nations in Geneva. ⁶ However, Field himself cited different timing for his encounter with Hiss that should have logically preceded the follow up Massing-Hiss meeting.

As discussed in the “Dinner Party” at the Fields’ II (Noel Field’s Account, July 6, 1954, Budapest), Field told his Hungarian interrogators that he first “broke discipline” and revealed himself to Alger Hiss “approximately in the summer of 1935” – and subsequently moved the date two months forward to the fall of the same year. ⁷ Both dates leave sufficient time for this encounter between Field and Hiss to have taken place before Field sailed for Britain on or just after November 29, but leave no chance of a follow up winter Hiss-Massing meeting. Nor do they explain Massing’s apparent dating of Hiss’s approach to Field as some time in April 1936.

The dating morass gets thicker when we go back to Hede Massing’s own description of the circumstances under which she first heard from Noel Field that a friend of his, Alger Hiss, was “trying to win him” [recruit him for the Soviet cause]. On December 8, 1948, Hede Massing told the grand jury that she could “remember exactly when it was” – meaning “not the date, but the occasion, the situation.” The “occasion” was “on a boat with the Fields on the river… in Washington,” when Field’s wife Herta went swimming while Hede and Noel “had this discussion.” ⁸ A boat trip and swimming fit with Field’s “summer of 1935” dating and may be O.K. for a nice early fall weekend, too. But this more certain dating is a total disconnect with Hede Massing’s and her Soviet handlers’ reporting in the spring of 1936.

In her testimony at the second Hiss trial (1949-50) and then in her 1951 memoir, This Deception, Hede Massing expanded on her early testimony, adding that she met Hiss on instructions from her Soviet handler, “Boris” (Boris Bazarov) – and dating her meeting with Hiss at Noel Field’s apartment in the fall of 1935. Noel Field had never mentioned any meeting between Hede Massing and Alger Hiss subsequent to the one-on-one encounter he described between himself and Hiss. Moreover, he told his Hungarian interrogators in 1954 that he never told Alger Hiss anything about his Communist contacts, saying, verbatim: “Of course, I did not tell Hiss anything about the Massings.” ⁹ This, by implication, rules out any subsequent meeting between Hiss and Hede Massing – whether “in the fall,” “in winter” or at any other time.

One may ask if this evidence of Noel Field’s should be dismissed, since it was given while still in solitary confinement and under the duress of a series of 25 interrogations. But this part of Field’s story looks no less – and no more – credible than the other part of his story about “compromising himself” to Hiss. One must either believe his story as a whole – or dismiss it altogether. If we believe Field, then by implication the story of Hede Massing’s encounter with Alger Hiss would be the fruit of the imagination of an exalted and impetuous woman with an obvious inclination to add drama to her stories – a person, as her Soviet handlers described her, “who was unable to educate not only an agent, but [even] herself.” ¹⁰ As for the “dinner party” dialogue attributed to Hiss and Massing, which has for decades been part of many accounts of the Alger Hiss case, it is probably best left for history’s dustbin.

At the end of the day, we are left with two stories: one as it appears in Vassiliev’s notes on NKVD intelligence communiqués, at least part of which is contaminated at the source and part possibly garbled in the transmission process; and another as told by a man who had spent more than five years in solitary confinement, under the duress of a long series of interrogations – at pains to prove his alibi against charges of being an American spy. From the standpoint of the analysis of historical sources, both accounts are on too shaky ground for jumping to any conclusions, leaving the case open until there are further disclosures from Soviet intelligence annals.

May, 2009:

The Yale University Press releases  Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, based on a second use of Vassiliev’s notes from the mid-1990s. Simultaneously, Vassiliev’ s notebooks with his hand-written notes are posted on the website of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. ¹¹

To Haynes and Klehr, Vassiliev’s American co-authors, Vassiliev‘s “notebooks offer contemporaneous KGB documentation that cor­roborates all of the main elements of the story” that was provided in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Hede Massing, Noel Field  and Whittaker Chambers, whom the two historians term “three participants in this episode” without any qualification. ¹² Strictly speaking, only Noel Field was a direct participant, with Hede Massing, who probably never met with Hiss at all, as a second-hand source. As for Chambers, it is difficult to determine the degree of his personal knowledge of the episode in the absence of any independent documentary corroboration,

On careful reading, Vassiliev’s notes are nothing like a “contemporaneous documentation,” as his co-authors would have it, but rather seem to be an ex post facto discussion of certain  earlier reports, mostly sourced to such an unreliable witness as Hede Massing. Haynes and Klehr apparently did not bother to carefully correlate the conflicting pieces of evidence in Vassiliev’s notes themselves, nor to crosscheck them with either the testimony given by Hede Massing in 1949-1950 or with exactly what Noel Field said and wrote in 1954 – not to mention checking Noel Field’s itinerary in 1935 and 1936. As a result, their assertions fall apart upon crosschecking.

If we are to believe Haynes and Klehr, “the material” in Vassiliev’s notebooks offered “new details about Hiss’s relationship with Soviet intelligence.” However, on crosschecking, Vassiliev’s notes have turned out to be not much different from the account that Vassiliev submitted to his first co-author, Allen Weinstein, in 1996, which was the basis for the stories Weinstein told, first, in his revised edition of Perjury (1997), and then, in The Haunted Wood (1999).

Click here to compare the versions of this material as found in Vassiliev’s Yellow Notebook # 2 and in his draft manuscript, The Sources in Washington.

Click here to compare Allen Weinstein’s account of this episode in The Haunted Wood with its appearance in Vassiliev’s Russian manuscript, The Sources in Washington.

Limiting themselves to the plain meaning of Vassiliev’s notes on the reported meeting between Hiss and Field, Haynes and Klehr simply recount the Hiss-Field encounter thus: “Hiss, … approached his friend Noel Field in early 1936” in an attempt “to recruit him for his GRU-linked apparatus.” ¹³ As ascertained above, Noel Field could not have been approached “in early 1936” for the simple reason that he was continuously in London (except for Christmas, which he spent in Switzerland) until about April 1, 1936. Had they done that easy crosschecking, Haynes and Klehr would not have simply quoted Boris Bazarov writing to Moscow Center on April 26, 1936, that “Redhead and Hiss… got exposed to each other” “more than a couple of months ago” ¹⁴ – that is, during the time when Field was continuously in London.

In the same “plain reading” mode, Haynes and Klehr make an awkward attempt to validate Hede Massing’s story of her meeting with Hiss at the Fields’ apartment:

Hede Massing in testimony at the second Hiss trial (1949-50) and in her 1951 memoir related that Boris Bazarov, her KGB superior, in­structed her to meet with Hiss and evaluate him. Massing stated that in the fall of 1935 she met Hiss at Noel Field’s apartment, a meeting con­firmed in Akhmerov’s 1936 report above. She wrote that after dinner she and Hiss bantered about whose apparatus Field would join; neither one admitted which organization employed them. … Whittaker Chambers also testified about the incident at the Hiss trials and in his memoir, stating that Hiss had reported his meeting with Massing (confirming Akhmerov’s prediction to Moscow that Hiss “no doubt informed his superiors about the meeting”)… ¹⁵

As indicated above, Akhmerov’s May 18, 1936 report does not “confirm” anything, since it – improbably – dates the Massing-Hiss alleged meeting as “winter.”  As for Chambers, I have not seen anywhere that Chambers “testified about the incident at the Hiss trials.”

CLICK HERE to recall how Chambers described the incident in the expanded version of his stories in Witness. (“1952: United States”)

What is important here is that Chambers was clear that he had not heard about Hede Gumperz (Massing) from Alger Hiss. In Chambers’s account, after Alger Hiss “reported” to him “that Noel Field claimed to be connected with “another apparatus,” he queried J. Peters, a CPUSA functionary who at the time served as a liaison with the

Communist so-called “informational groups” in Washington, D.C.:

“It is probably the apparatus of Hede Gumperz” [Hede Massing], he said. I had never heard of Hede Gumperz. I asked who she was. “Oh, you know,” said Peters – a stock answer when no more will be said. …

Chambers was also clear that he had heard about the “dinner party” (which he described as a “supper”) story only from Hede Massing’s testimony at the Hiss second perjury trial – as well as from her This Deception book that was published in 1951. ¹⁶

It is difficult to prove (or disprove) that the story Chambers tells here was his own second-hand account of what he had once heard from Alger Hiss. Perhaps it was a simple reiteration of accounts Hede Massing had given earlier, at Hiss’s second perjury trial and in her book, which Chambers saw about a year before his own book, Witness, came out in print. At any rate, a report by Hiss on a meeting with Massing does not seem to be part of Chambers’s story. As for Field, he was clear, in 1954, as we have noted earlier, that back in the 1930s he knew nothing about Chambers, and only learned about him from the newspapers he read in Europe from 1948 to May, 1949, before his arrest.

Among other oddities in Haynes and Klehr’s reading of Vassiliev’s notes on the incident is their discovery of Alger Hiss’s “GRU cover name”:

A Moscow Center annotation on the letter specified Hiss’s cover name, “A. Hiss—‘Jurist,’” and noted that Hiss was an attorney in Washington. Likely “Jurist” was Hiss’s GRU cover name because the KGB had little reason to provide its own for someone who reported to GRU. ¹⁷

First, at that point the New York “illegals,” Bazarov and Akhmerov, were not themselves sure if Hiss “reported” to the military neighbors or to the “fraternal” (a cover name for the CPUSA. Second, NKVD foreign intelligence (there was no KGB until 1954) would have had no means of learning a cover name used by their military neighbors (at that time known as the RU, or Intelligence Directorate). Even if the foreign intelligence leadership in Moscow had queried the leadership of the sister service, the only report they would have received would have been whether a certain individual were an agent or, more generally, belonged to their sphere of interest. “Jurist” was definitely a cover name assigned by NKVD operatives for the purpose of their own operational correspondence.

In their effort to prove that all the existing evidence fits together nicely, with no room left for any confusion or uncertainty, Haynes and Klehr simply misread (or misrepresent?) the evidence. We have already seen that the context for Noel Field’s 1954 evidence was a “renewed investigation” into his case on charges of spying for the Americans. True, the investigation began more than a year after Stalin’s death, when the process of rehabilitating the victims of Stalinist terror was underway in the Soviet Union and had spread to Eastern Europe. Still, Noel Field’s interrogation records reveal that he had a grueling experience, often under great emotional pressure: throughout all those months, he was still in solitary confinement and had no contact with the outside world or even with his wife, Herta, who was confined in the same building.

Here is how Field’s Hungarian interrogators themselves described these circumstances – almost four months into the interrogation process:

… On the 15^th of June 1954, we began the renewed investigation in the case of Noel H. Field and Herta K. Field and their systematic interrogation. Field is suspected by us of the following offences:

a) … From 1941 to 1947, he had close contact to Allen Dulles and was spying during this time for American intelligence.

b) After the end of the Second World War he was spying in the People’s Republic of Poland and in Czechoslovakia for the Americans. ¹⁸

In the course of that investigation, Noel Field was subjected to 25 interrogations and was made to write several detailed personal histories and many memos in answer to his interrogators’ additional questions. Even after 23 interrogations, Hungarian security officers thought “it necessary to employ a cell agent” (that is, a stool pigeon) “to unmask the hostile activities of Noel Field,” who “emphatically denies having been a recruited agent of the American intelligence” and, instead, “emphasizes that he is a Communist and worked for the Communist cause.” ¹⁹

Haynes and Klehr’s description of the rehabilitation process is in stark contrast to Hungarian accounts of Field’s continuing psychological ordeal:

After Stalin’s death in early 1953, East European Communist authorities sought to undo the damage done to their regimes by the absurd purge by rehabilitating those falsely accused. Hungarian security police (and later the security authorities of other East European Communist regimes) asked Field, in prison in the Hungarian People’s Republic, to provide an uncoerced, accurate account of his activities to assist not only in his own rehabilitation but also that of those falsely accused in his ear­lier confessions…. The transcripts of his rehabilitation interviews were not made public until the 1990s, … ²⁰

Haynes and Klehr definitely did not take the trouble to read through the hundreds of pages of Noel Field‘s 1954 Hungarian dossier, which, in addition to Hungarian, is available only in German. Instead, they simply concur with Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt:

Field’s secret testimony conformed to Massing’s and Chambers’s testi­mony at the Hiss trials and in their memoirs, as well as the documents quoted in Vassiliev’s notebooks, with the exception that Field in 1954 re­membered Hiss’s approach having been in 1935 while the documents demonstrate that it was early 1936. ²¹

It is unnecessary to repeat that, rather than “demonstrate” anything, the documents on which Vassiliev took notes regarding the so-called “dinner party at the Fields” story only contribute to the existing confusion.

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ I: Whittaker Chambers’s and Hede Massing’s Accounts (1939-1948)

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ II: Noel Field’s Account, with additional comments by Hede Massing and others (1948-1954)

Here, we will examine what Noel Field had to say between 1948 and 1954 about both Hede Massing and Alger Hiss – and what they said about him. Field was arrested in Prague in May 1949 and imprisoned until November 1954 in Budapest, where he underwent intensive interrogations on suspicion of being an American spy.

At the end of the day, it is up to the reader to decide what part of the record, if any, is true.

See also “Dinner Party” at the Fields’ I: Whittaker Chambers’s and Hede Massing’s Accounts (1939-1948)

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ III: Skeletons in the Closet (1990s and 2009)

Sept. 9, 1948, Warsaw:

In Warsaw, Noel Field writes a letter to Jacub Berman (a Polish high official responsible for state security), attaching a “brief history” of his party activities. Neither document makes any mention of Alger Hiss. ¹

October 20, 1948, Prague:

Noel Field writes to Leo Bauer about a report he read in the October 16, 1948 Herald Tribune (Paris edition):

…

“The House Un-American Activities Committee released a 1.300 page transcript of testimony alleging that two Communist underground networks operated in the United States State Department prior to the war.

“The disclosure was made at a secret session … on August 27 by Whittaker Chambers, … He asserted one Communist underground was headed by Alger Hiss and said the other was Noel Field, … as its head.

“Mr. Chambers testified that the two rings worked independently of each other and said Mr. Hiss found [out] about Mr. Field’s Communist affiliations only by accident.

“Mr. Hiss has filed a libel suit against Mr. Chambers for statements repeated outside the Committee hearing.” ²

December 7, 1948, the Massings’ farm, Pennsylvania:

FBI agents interview Hede Massing about Julian Wadleigh[LINK to Wadleigh] when she volunteers “to furnish some additional information concerning Alger Hiss,” which she had not “previously furnished” since, as she says, “her mind was not exactly clear concerning the matter. She felt she now could reconstruct the events with a fair degree of accuracy.”

“After about a year, and possibly in the winter of 1935-1936, NOEL FIELD told HEDE that someone else was also recruiting him to do the same work and he did not know just what to do.  HEDE told NOEL that she would like to meet this person who was trying to recruit him, so they could have it out.  FIELD said he would arrange to have HEDE meet the person.

According to HEDE, approximately a week later, FIELD had a dinner party at his apartment in Washington. HEDE recalls that HERTA FIELD, NOEL’S wife, was present, along with NOEL, herself and ALGER HISS.  She cannot recall whether or not anyone else was present, possibly a few others.  HISS’ wife was not present.

NOEL FIELD told HEDE that HISS was the person who was trying to recruit him. He told her this either before or on the night of the dinner.  HEDE stated that she was impressed by HISS’ good looks, his charm, and his intelligence, and they got along very well.  Immediately after the dinner and at the first moment when HEDE and ALGER HISS could get together, they had a conversation, which, to the best of HEDE’S recollection, is as follows:

ALGER HISS:        “Well, you are the famous girl who is meddling in my affairs.”

HEDE MASSING:  “And you are the man who is meddling in my affairs.”

ALGER HISS:        “What is your apparatus.”

HEDE MASSING:  “I shouldn’t ask that question of you. You shouldn’t ask it of

me.”

(They both laughed at this)

ALGER HISS:       “Well, we’ll fight it out to see who gets NOEL.

HEDE MASSING: “I’ll beat you in this game because I’m a woman.”

After this either HEDE or ALGER said:

“What difference does it make who gets NOEL. We’re both working for the same boss.”

HEDE cannot recall whether she made this statement or whether ALGER made it.  The statement meant to HEDE that they were both working for the same boss, the Communist international movement.  HEDE stated that there was no question in her mind that HISS was working for some branch of Soviet Intelligence or for the Comintern and was trying to recruit FIELD to work with him, and further this branch was in competition with her group headed by “BORIS”. HEDE stated that throughout the evening, she got along very well with ALGER HISS. They seemed to agree on everything.  After the meeting, HEDE returned to New York and reported the results of her meeting with ALGER HISS to her superior, BORIS. BORIS was delighted and slapped HEDE on the back and said, “Good girl”.

He instructed her not to see HISS in the future.  HEDE stated that she never saw ALGER HISS either before or after this one dinner party at NOEL FIELD’S. ³

December 8, 1948, New York, Hede Massing’s testimony to the grand jury in the Hiss case:

Hede Massing tells the grand jury in New York essentially the same story [emphasis added].

… Now, did you have an occasion to meet an individual known as Alger Hiss?

A   Yes, I have met him.

Q   When did you meet Alger Hiss?

A   I met Alger Hiss only once. I believe that I met him, and I am not certain, and that is one of the reasons why I didn’t come forward before - - it might have been the winter of 1934-1935, and it might have been the winter of 1935-1936.   I am not certain of that, but it was just one meeting.

A   And then was … then was this dinner arranged between Alger Hiss and the Fields. And one of the reasons why I  haven’t spoken about this before is that it was one of the haziest evenings in my … [she meant to say “life” but was sidetracked] – I^’m trying to recollect — I don’t even know whether there were any other people invited. I sometimes see the evening as a dinner party at the Fields with other people around, and I sometimes see the evening as a bouffe supper.  I do recall having spoken to Alger alone in the room to the right of the hall at Noel Field’s apartment and I just don’t recall whether there were other people or not. It might have been that it was just we four.  I know that Mrs. Hiss was supposed to come that evening and she did not. That I know.

…

Q  You mentioned, Mrs. Massing, that you haven’t talked about this before. When did you first talk about this with the FBI, this Hiss Incident?

A   Yesterday.

Q   Yesterday?

A   Yes. And I want to say right here why I didn’t.  There are three reasons for it. One is that — the most essential one is a technical one that held me back. First of all, I had forgotten it for years. And when I first saw the picture of Alger Hiss at the San Francisco conference I thought, “Oh, this is the fellow I met at Field’s.” And then I felt how wonderful that he must have left the service, …

… When Alger Hiss came into this terrific thing now with Chambers, of course I thought about it all the time and I have seen, mean­while, Bill McCarthy, who has almost become a friend of mine, in the FBI service, several times, and there was one evening before I was called to the Un-American Activities Committee where I met Bill McCarthy and was on the verge of telling him about that. This leads to the third reason why I hesitated to speak about it. My husband at present, Paul Massing, knows nothing about my knowing Alger Hiss and I felt that it was very hard for Paul Massing to establish himself in this country. He is not an American citizen yet. … and I just don’t want to jeopardize his chances. … And also I thought, since I don’t know it clearly, since it is so vague, I cannot help very much. … And so I didn’t talk about it. I wanted to speak to Bill McCarthy the evening before I went to the Un-American Activities Committee [when?] Paul Massing arrived and I didn’t get the chance. At the Committee I was not asked. Paul Massing was asked whether he knew Нiss, and he doesn’t and he said no. Would I have been asked, I certainly would have had to speak about it, because I was determined to say what I knew under oath. But I wasn’t asked.

Q When were you before the Committee, what date?

A  There you got me. Last month. But I don’t know when.

q Would you say it was in November, the middle of November?

A   It might have been the end of September.

MR. WHEARTY:    In Washington or New York?

THE WITNESS;    Washington.

[For an explanation of why the story did not come out during the Thomas Committee hearing on September 22, 1948 – see the entry for that date in “Dinner Party” at the Fields’ I.]

A  … I do remember distinctly having had a lot to drink, … I had many drinks there, too. And I had a conversation with Mr. Hiss that ran, аs I remember it, like this — whether it was I or he who said it first “Well, you are meddling in my affairs,” whether it was I or he who said, “Well, no; you are meddling in my affairs.” Whether it was he who said or I who said — and this is the vagueness — “But we are working for the same boss, anyway.” That is the gist of the conversation. I mean, there were many other things, you know, of course, but this is the significant sentence. And it would be much more significant would I know who said it. But it might be that he said it, and it might be that I said it.  And this is one of the reasons. You see, this is all I have and it didn’t seem enough to comment and say yes, I know that Alger Hiss did this and this and that and that. This is the sentence I think was said either by him or by me.

…

Q   Was there any prior conversation with the Fields, saying you wanted to meet Alger Hiss?

A   Yes. When Noel said that he had this very close friend of his whom he thought whom he considers a man of high ethics and moral standards, a man of Marxian — a trained Marxian, an educated Marxian, a man who is versed in politics, a man whom he admired very greatly, … and he said, “You know, he is trying to … win me as you do, and I am tending to be with him. I know him so much longer than you.” And I said, “Well, why won’t you let me meet this man?”  This was the previous conversation, …

…

A … As a matter of fact, it was sprung on me very suddenly, and I remember exactly when it was. Not when, not the date, but the occasion, the situation, I was on a boat with the Fields on the river this is in Washington.

Q   The Potomac?

A   Yes.

…

And I remember that Herta, his wife, went out swimming, and Noel and I had this discussion. And, as a matter of fact, I think … it was something Noel had planned to tell me, obviously, something he wanted to confront me with, … It was an important issue to him; that he had spoken with me … I had never known that Alger Hiss was a friend of Noel’s until then when Noel told me that there is this man whom he regards as such and so, and so forth. …” ⁴

Noel Field, Hungarian dossier, 1948 – 1951:

The most voluminous part of the corpus of documentation in the Noel Field case is the so-called Noel Field Hungarian dossier, ⁵ deposited at the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security. This collection has very few pre-1954 documentation left after the destruction of records in the aftermath of the Hungarian events of 1956 (reportedly on the instruction of the Hungarian leader Janus Kadar). Most importantly, there is not a single record of Field’s interrogations in Hungary from 1949 until 1954.

There are no references to Alger Hiss in available Noel Field documents from October 24, 1948 to December 1951. (There are 11 such documents published in German translation in Der Fall Noel Field, documents 4-14, pp. 31-112).

June 1949, Geneva, Switzerland:

During the first Hiss perjury trial, a Swiss attorney visited Herta Field in Geneva on behalf of the Hiss defense. Mrs. Field told the attorney that Hiss and Massing had never been in the Fields’ apartment at the same time. Before she could be contacted again by the defense, Herta Field disappeared behind the Iron Curtain.

December 1949, New York, Hiss’ second perjury trial:

Hede Massing testifies at the second Hiss perjury trial that:

In 1935 – “in late summer or early fall” – she had attended a small dinner party at the Fields’ home in Washington. There was a second guest, Alger Hiss. Massing has spoken with him privately. She repeated the conversation for the jury’s benefit. “I said to Mr. Hiss, ‘I understand that you are trying to get Noel field away from my organization into yours,’ and he said, ‘So you are the famous girl that is trying to get Noel field away from me.’ And I said, ‘Yes.” And he said, as far as I remember, ‘Well, we will see who is getting to win,’ at which point I said, ‘Well, Mr. Hiss’ – I did not say ‘Mr. Hiss’ – ‘Well, you realize that you are competing with a woman,’ at which either he or I said, the gist of the sentence was, ‘Whoever is going to win we are working for the same boss.’ ⁶

Defense witness Henricas Rabinavicius, a former OSS member, testified that he had heard Massing give a somewhat different account of her alleged meeting with Hiss at a dinner party in September, 1949, just prior to the second trial. (The dinner party took place in the home of Eugene Lyons, a journalist, who was feeding suggestions from Richard M. Nixon, among others, to prosecutor Thomas Murphy during the trial.)

According to Rabinavicius, at the party, Massing said she was sent to Washington to contact young men in the State Department but that she “carefully concealed” her affiliation so as not to frighten them away. She said she was trying to recruit Field into an anti-fascist organization but that she had learned he was already a member of an organization with a colleague of his in the State Department, Alger Hiss. He said she made no reference to any comment Hiss may have made about the two of them working for the same boss. ⁷

1951, United States:

Hede Massing publishes her memoir, This Deception, in which she repeats the same story she told at Hiss’s second perjury trial, with some more flowery detail.

1952, United States:

Whittaker Chambers publishes his memoir, Witness, in which he greatly expands his early version of the association between Noel Field and Alger Hiss. Chambers conspicuously sources part of his knowledge to what he heard from Walter Krivitsky in the late 1930s and to Hede Massing’s 1951 book:

… From my first day in Washington, I had heard the name of Laurence Duggan as a likely underground recruit. I also heard constant rumors about Duggan’s great friend, Noel Field, a Harvard man and a Quaker of good family who was in … the West European Division of the State Department. ….

Hiss began an intensive campaign to recruit Field and Duggan. They reached the point of talking very openly to Noel Field. I was afraid to ask just how openly they were talking, for I might have been tempted to urge caution, and in such delicate negotiations much must be left to the tact of the negotiator, in this case Alger Hiss. …

I was soon to learn just how far the two young State Department men had gone. One night Alger reported to me that Noel Field claimed to be connected with “another apparatus.” “Is it possible?” Alger asked me in surprise. “Can there be another apparatus working in Washington?”

I told him that it was quite possible, that it was probably a parallel apparatus.

I asked Peters what he knew about it. “It is probably the apparatus of Hede Gumperz” [Hede Massing], he said. I had never heard of Hede Gumperz. …. Peters urged me to let Noel Field alone. But Alger’s spirit was up. He was determined to recruit Noel Field.

At the second Hiss trial, Hede Massing testified how Noel Field arranged a supper at his house, where Alger and she could meet and discuss which of them was to enlist him. ….

… It was General Walter Krivitsky who first told me that Noel Field had left the State Department on orders from his apparatus to work for Krivitsky, who was then chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Western Europe.

During the Hiss Case, Noel Field, his wife, his adoped daughter and his brother all disappeared into Soviet-controlled Europe. From this I infer that they had knowledge about Alger Hiss and others  that made it inadvisable to leave the Fields in any part of Europe or the United States where American officials or subpoenas could reach them.

… Hede Massing has told the facts, in so far as she knows them, in This Deception.  ⁸

December 17, 1951, Budapest, where Noel Field is imprisoned. All the following entries refer to the period during which Field was in prison in Hungary:

Alger Hiss’s name appears in an innocuous-looking footnote, in a reference on the interrogation of Noel and Herta Field. The record of the interrogation itself is unavailable.

[Footnote] 7:  Field befürchtte, da sein Name im Herbst 1948 im Kontext der Alger-Hiss-Affäre von Whittaker Chambers vor dem HUAC genannt wurde, daß man ihn dort ebenso wie seinen Freund Alger Hiss vorladen bzw. Gegen ermitteln würde (vgl. Dok. 49, bes. S. 508f.). ⁹

August 22, 1952, Budapest:

Alger Hiss’s name is mentioned – again innocuously – in a reference on a Noel Field dossier compiled by Major Szendy for General Kretschmer, Hungarian Interior Ministry, dated Aug. 22, 1952:

… Field confessed …, only now recognizing that he had become a tool for the American intelligence and that he had also handed over other people to the American intelligence. Field emphasized repeatedly, that decades ago, while he was in the USA, he had approached the Communist Party and had cooperated with the Soviet intelligence agencies for a long period of time; he did not know why this connection was cut off. Furthermore, he emphasized that the House Committee on Un-American Activities was investigating him in connection with the case of Alger Hiss. Field stated that he had been trying to clarify his membership in the Communist Party since 1938 (when he travelled to Moscow) and that he was promised, last time in Poland, that this would happen…. ¹⁰

March 18-22, 1954:

Noel Field did not mention Hiss in a long memo he wrote on March 18-22, 1954, to the Central Committee of the CPSU, in which he described his “political life” and contacts in great detail. In particular, he wrote:

…I have been a loyal, devoted and active communist for more than 20 years and risked my life for the communist party more than once;

2. I have never been, neither directly nor indirectly, neither officially, nor unofficially, a spy or a spy agent and have never worked for the American intelligence or any other hostile secret service or a promotion job. … ¹¹

June 15, 1954, Budapest, First Interrogation of Noel Field:

Alger Hiss was briefly mentioned by Field in the course of his first interrogation after the investigation in his case was resumed (probably, following Field’s letter to the Central Committee of CPSU, in which he tried to prove that he was innocent of the charges of espionage on behalf of the USA):

… In the year 1934 (as far as I remember) I got in touch with the German communist[s] Paul Massing and Hede Gumpertz who informed me that they were spying for the Soviet Union. I handed over lots of information to them – orally as well as in writing – about the State Department, … ¹²

This statement contradicts Hede Massing’s testimony to the grand jury in the Hiss case that, while in the United States, Field refused to pass any information and/or documentation from the Department of State, explaining his refusal as follows:

“… there was nothing of interest for you, and even if there was, it would be impossible for me tо get it, and even if I got it, it would be impossible for me to get it out; and anyway, this is the thing I can’t do, particularly since I do not see that this is going to fight fascism in Germany anyway.”    This was Noel Field’s attitude, which he maintained throughout his time in America. ¹³

To a question about the Massings, Field replied:

… At first, the Massings didn’t give any evidence about me. … during a trip to the USA in 1946, I met Hede Gumpertz, who informed me that she didn’t work for the Soviet Union anymore. Gumpertz was trying to establish contact with me and frankly asked whether I was working for the Soviet Union, which I denied. In response, she told me that so far she hadn’t revealed to the authorities that she had been in contact with me and was not planning to do so. Later on, I discovered from evidence at the trial against Alger Hiss and from confidential letters of my friends that Hede Gumperz and Paul Massing had revealed my name. At this time, one could hardly call me to account because I hadn’t returned to the USA and besides, there couldn’t be proof against me. ¹⁴

June 16, 1954, Budapest, Second Interrogation of Noel Field:

During his second interrogation on June 16, 1954, Field was asked about his “political contacts” in Paris and New York, “Eberhard Reiss,” Walter Krivitsky and Hede and Paul Massing; the name Hiss did not appear in the memo on the interrogation (the transcript of the interrogation is missing.) ¹⁵

June 23, 1954, Budapest:

Hiss’s name is mentioned in Field’s memo, “Professional Activities,” which he wrote for his Hungarian captors on June 23, 1954. Explaining that his State Department colleague, Laurence Duggan, whom he called his “best and almost the only friend,” “was the only one who knew” about “his intentions,” Field added in brackets: “(later Hiss, too).” ¹⁶

In the same memo, Field repeatedly mentioned Hiss in connection with his, Field’s, failed efforts to find himself a job. In the first job search episode, from 1939, Hiss sent a telegram to Field in Geneva about “a job offer as a political consultant for the newly designated Governor of the Philippines” [Francis Sayre]. Field wrote that he had later learned that “the matter came to nothing due to the opposition of a certain circle in the State Department.” (In fact, Field was not the only candidate whom Hiss had suggested for the vacancy.)

In early 1948, while in Europe, Field wrote to Hiss and his brother about his (Field’s) prospects to become an Eastern European “representative or reporter” for the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace. In mid-May 1948, Field received an offer from the newly founded National Guardian magazine – “on the recommendation of Hiss,” as far as he remembered. But after he “read in the press about the campaign of the Committee of Un-American Activities against Hiss,” Field got “scared” that he might be pulled into that investigation and wrote to the National Guardian that for the time being he was unable to work for health reasons. ¹⁷

July 6, 1954, Budapest:

In a memo on “The History of my political activities” that Field wrote for his Hungarian captors on July 6, 1954, he  described a story about his “indiscretion” with Hiss. In a subsection on “Illegal work until membership in the party, 1935-1938, Washington and London,” Field wrote [emphasis added]:

… In one case, my discipline broke down which became my fate years later (1948-1949).

We became friends with Alger Hiss, who was an official at one of those New Deal agencies established by Roosevelt, as well as with his wife Priscilla. During our meetings we mutually discovered that we were both communists. Approximately in the summer of 1935, Alger Hiss tried to recruit me for the Soviet service upon which I made an inexcusable indiscretion by answering that he would be late. Of course, I did not tell him anything about the Massings, however, it was terrible enough. I immediately reported that incident to Hede Gumperz. She blamed me intensely for that. She would not know what her superior, whom I by the way never got to know, would say to that. Some time later, she said to me that the damage I had caused was far worse than I could imagine and that due to that mistake the whole work had to be reorganized. From that time on, the Massings’ attitude towards my possible transfer to the League of Nations changed. Until then, of course, they had put pressure on me to keep working at the State Department. From now on their opposition dissolved. …

…   As I came to know from the press in 1948, Alger Hiss had informed his own illegal contact about our conversation. To our misfortune, not only the Massings had become traitors, but also Whittaker Chambers, the contact of Hiss. During the summer of 1948 Chambers was questioned about me in a secret meeting of the Committee on Un-American Affairs; excerpts from those transcripts were published in October 1948 causing a sensation in the press. ¹⁸

In the same memo, Field told about another encounter with Hiss, this time in 1939, which, he explained, followed from his earlier “revealing himself” to Hiss:

… For one or two days, we detoured to Washington [1939] above all to see Alger Hiss. From the press I knew that Krivitsky roamed around in Washington and I had to expect him to expose me. Because Hiss in principle already knew about me, I could inform him without further violating the discipline that I was in danger because of a traitor. I reached agreement with him that, in case he heard about anything, he would send me a warning in a covered way. [Field used a German word, “Decknamen,” meaning “pseudonym” or “a cover name.”] However, I never received such a warning. I do not know how much evidence Krivitsky has given against me. ¹⁹

Hiss’s name appears next in Field’s account of the letter that he sent to Leo Bauer in mid-September 1948:

… In Prague (app. in mid-September 1948) Leo Bauer, who spent his holiday in the Tatra Mountains, was waiting for me. … At this time, the press reported intensely about the case of Alger Hiss and I informed Leo Bauer that I also feared complications. … ²⁰

Finally, Field mentioned a letter that he received from Hiss in October, 1948, which he described as “an easing letter” from his friend “who, of course, could not write openly”:

… In November [1948] … Since I was equipped with a new passport and nothing new had come up in the USA (moreover, I had gotten an easing letter from Hiss), nothing would be in the way for a temporary return to Geneva. I travelled in the beginning of December (via Paris). …

… A short letter from Hiss (who of course could not write openly) I interpreted in the same way. [Hiss said] Those who forced me to openly accept the fight and even to file a libel suit, were those who knew the least about my political past. … ²¹

September 1, 1954, Budapest, Herta Field’s memo, “My trip to Germany in 1934”:

Herta Field was also held captive in Communist Hungary from 1949 to 1954, in the same prison house where her husband was being held. She too was interrogated. In the available records of the three interrogations of Herta Field in early August, 1954, Herta was not questioned about her husband’s story of his lack of discretion with Hiss. In one of the memos written for her captors, however, she did provide some background on that episode’s dating confusion. Then, on September 1, 1954, she wrote a memo entitled “My trip to Germany in 1934.”

According to Herta Field’s account, in early October of 1934 she accompanied her husband to London for the Naval Limitation Conference (where he was to serve, first, as secretary of the U.S. delegation and then, starting in November, as technical assistant to the U.S. delegation). According to her, the U.S. delegation arrived in London in early October, 1934. Herta left Noel in London and proceeded to Germany to pay a visit to her family – only to join him sometime in December and then travel to Germany again to be with her family for Christmas. She dated her return to the United States “together with the [U.S.] delegation” “sometime in January 1935.” ²²

September 23, 1954, Budapest, Noel Field’s 22^nd interrogation:

The name of Alger Hiss appears again in the course of Field’s 22nd interrogation, on September 23, 1954. That interrogation centered around Field’s contacts with Soviet intelligence, beginning with his relationship with Hede and Paul Massing. Field mentioned Alger Hiss in his answer to the 14th question of the interrogation – about Field’s attitude to the Massings’ insistence that he should move from the Department of State to the League of Nations:

Did you approve that, or rather, did you agree with that?

I remember that at first they did not approve my decision to leave the State Department, neither they resolutely opposed it. After that incident with Alger Hiss, they also said that I now had to leave the State Department.

What was most important regarding this incident with Alger Hiss?

As far as I remember, in the beginning of 1934, through a mutual acquaintance, I came to know Alger Hiss, who was then employed at the Department of Agriculture. The person concerned had a left oriented attitude and hence between us an intimate friendship developed. During the fall of 1935, Alger Hiss requested me by occasion to work for the Soviet intelligence. I cannot remember exactly what I responded, in any case I let him know that I had already worked in this field.

So you did reveal to Alger Hiss that you were working for the Soviet intelligence?

Yes, that is true.

Later in the interrogation, Field mentioned Hiss in an answer to a question about his contacts during his visit to the United States in the fall of 1937:

Whom of your old friends and acquaintances did you meet in the USA?

During my stay in the USA, I was in Washington where I went to the Department of State to visit some of my former colleagues. Without any doubt, I also met Alger Hiss, but for sure I cannot remember any details. Neither can I remember exactly the names of the employees, whom I visited at the Department of State.

For what purpose did you travel to Washington, particularly, visited the Department of State?

My reasons were merely personal; I wanted to pay a visit of friendship to my former colleagues and best friends Laurence Duggan and Alger Hiss. Besides, I visited relatives including my wife’s sister.

Still later in the same interrogation, after Field named other people to whom he had compromised himself, the name of Alger Hiss reappeared in that context:

Besides Paul Bertz, to whom else did you reveal that you have worked and still work for the Soviet intelligence?

As I have already stated earlier, I disclosed myself to Alger Hiss in 1935.  In 1942, I revealed my secret mission to Maria Weiterer and Paul Merker, and in 1948 in Warsaw to the Indian journalist Jo Silva. …

Why was it neccessary to divulge your secret mission to these persons?

Alger Hiss wanted to recruit me for the Soviet intelligence as well. At that time, I did not find the right answer straight away and thoughtlessly made him understand that I had already been working for the Soviet intelligence.

Nearly at the end of that long and grueling interrogation, in which Noel Field was asked 119 questions chiefly relating to his contacts with Soviet intelligence, he mentioned the name of Alger Hiss one more time:

“What consequences did the betrayal of the Massings have on you later?

The Massings had indirectly informed the USC [Unitarian Service Committee, where Field worked for many years] headquarters in Boston that I was a communist and that I had contacts to communists prior to the war. In my opinion, this had also contributed to my discharge from the USC. In 1948 in Warsaw, I learned from the press that Massing was testifying to the HUAC. I do not have any knowledge about the content of this interrogation. I can only assume that it was in connection with the case of Alger Hiss, which was going on at that time.” ²³

September 24, 1954, Budapest:

After 22 lengthy interrogations and dozens of memos written by Field, his Hungarian interrogators still did not believe him to be a bona fide Communist and an agent of Soviet intelligence – and not a “recruited agent of the American intelligence.” Hence, one of his interrogators, Major Hullay, schemed to “unmask” Field’s “hostile activities” by employing “a cell agent”:

“… He emphatically denies having been a recruited agent of the American intelligence and ever having spied for them or executed secret jobs. He emphasizes that he is a communist and also worked in terms of that.

To unmask the hostile activities of Noel Field it is necessary to employ a cell agent [stool pigeon]. We suggest Dr. Tamas Pasztor as the cell agent [stool pigeon]. … ” ²⁴

September 29, 1954, Budapest, 24th Interrogation of Noel Field:

In the 24th interrogation, Noel Field was questioned about his association with Walter Krivitsky, and on that occasion he mentioned the Hiss case and the role of Whittaker Chambers [emphasis added]:

In 1948, I saw the name of Krivitsky in the press. That was during the Alger Hiss case in the USA. At that time a person named Chambers was interrogated as a witness, and he said that in the mid-1930s I was one of Hiss’s communist contacts. In his testimony Chambers also mentioned that the fact that I was a communist became obvious from Krivitsky’s newspaper articles.

What do you know about the articles that Krivitsky wrote after his betrayal?

I do not know anything about that, I learned about it only from Chambers’s statement that Kritivitsky had published articles. It is possible that I had heard something earlier, but I cannot remember it.

The interrogator then asked four more questions, trying to ascertain what Noel Field knew about Krivitsky’s “anti-Soviet book.” Field had no information to share, but he said instead that he assumed from the information that had reached him in Europe that his “communist activities before the war”— during his time at the State Department — had been “found out,” and that this was the reason for his decision “to settle in Prague.” The interrogator next questioned Field about another defector from the Soviet cause, Whittaker Chambers:

Who was Chambers whom you have mentioned in your previous statement?

I did not know him personally at all. I saw his name for the first time in the press in the summer of 1948, [while I was] in Warsaw. His name was mentioned in the press as someone who was interrogated as a witness in the Alger Hiss case.

My only knowledge about Chambers’s activities was what he said in his statement, in fact, what was reported in the press regarding that. As far as I can remember, the newspaper reports said that Chambers was a communist before the war and as such he was in contact with Alger Hiss and that he served as a contact between the party and Hiss as well.

From the next questions, it appears that the Hungarian interrogator did not know much about “der Alger Hiss-Affäre,” as he called it:

Was there any discussion of Alger Hiss as a man of the Soviet intelligence ²⁵ during the  Alger Hiss affair, particularly, in the testimony of Chambers?

Initially, there was no talk about that; Chambers obviously did not say anything about that, because he did not want to unmask ²⁶

The next series of questions reveal that the interrogator did not know much about Chambers either – or about the ex post facto sources of Field’s knowledge:

Nevertheless, Chambers was a man of the Soviet intelligence?

Seemingly yes, but that was revealed later, in 1949, when the FBI began investigation in this case. ²⁷

How did you learn that Chambers was working for the Soviet intelligence as well?

In the beginning of 1949, the press reported that secret government documents had been found at Chambers’s place and it was concluded that he must have been a man of the Soviet intelligence.

Was this accusation confirmed later on?

I do not know, since I was imprisoned in the meantime and did not have any more opportunity to follow the press reports.  From what I had heard, the legal proceedings were instituted against Alger Hiss and, by contrast, not against Chambers.

In a former statement you have declared that Chambers was the main contact of Hiss. ²⁸ How did you know about that?

Chambers himself stated that he was the contact between Hiss and the party. From what Hiss had told me, he had worked for the Soviet secret intelligence. ²⁹

From that, I surmised that Chambers was Hiss’s main contact on the intelligence line. That was confirmed later: firstly, because secret documents procured by Hiss were discovered at Chambers’s place; secondly, in the aftermath of Chambers’ statement that he knew about the conversation between me and Hiss, in which he [Hiss] tried to recruit me for the intelligence work.

Thus Chambers knew about your contact to the Soviet intelligence as well?

Yes, he knew about that.

Has Chambers become a traitor in your view?

Yes.

What is your opinion based on?

In connection with the betrayal of Chambers, I can only state that he worked for an anti-Soviet newspaper. He also engaged in anti-Soviet propaganda in front of the Un-American Committee. With his statements, he appeared as someone who wanted to unmask the communists working at the government agencies. About those things I did not have any specific knowledge, I only read about that in the newspapers.

At this point the interrogation was interrupted “temporarily.” ³⁰

October 5, 1954, Budapest, the 25^th interrogation of Noel Field:

Interrogation of Field was not resumed until a week later, on October 5. In what turned out to be Field’s last interrogation, he was again grilled about his past associations with “traitors” from the Soviet cause, Hede and Paul Massing, Walter Krivitsky and Ignacii Reiss (whom Field knew as “Eberhardt Reiss”).

In his third question, the interrogator asked about another “traitor,” Whittaker Chambers, whose name was brought up by Field late in the interrogations [emphasis added]:

Did Chambers become a traitor as well after he heard from Hiss about your work for the Soviet intelligence?

Apparently, yes.

Why do you say, apparently?

In fact, it is not right to say that Chambers has “apparently” become a traitor. Instead, it would be correct to say that he “did become a traitor”.

How do you know that he in fact became a traitor?

I know that from the press and from the published statement protocols of the Un-American [Activities] Committee, which I read in 1948/49 in Geneva.

At this point, the interrogator suddenly went back to charges of Field’s American espionage:

Provide information about compromising reports, which were given from your superior traitorous contacts to the American authorities.

About that, I have no knowledge whatsoever.

The interrogation was getting increasingly hostile, with Field trying to prove that he had been betrayed by Krivitsky and the Massings, while the interrogator grilled him about the substance of his story.

The interrogator then brought up Chambers’s name for the last time, with this question:

All the evidence seems to indicate that, initially Krivitsky, and later the married couple the Massings and Chambers, have betrayed your work for the intelligence. Again, I ask you the question, why didn’t the American authorities take proceedings against you?

Field could not provide a definite answer until the end of the interrogation. ³¹

October 6, 1954, Budapest:

It appears from Field’s Hungarian dossier that his case was finally sealed by a reference sent from Moscow, apparently in response to a Hungarian request. On October 6, Major Hullay, from the Main Investigative Department of the Hungarian Interior Ministry, wrote a Top Secret report, entitled “Field’s connection to the Soviet intelligence agencies.”

The five-page report, which gave a concise account of Noel Field’s revelations “about his connection to the Soviet intelligence agencies,” did not mention anything he had said about his indiscretion to Alger Hiss, whose name appeared only in the footnote to the report, which reads as follows:

Note: Field also unmasked his connection to the Soviet intelligence in 1935 to the American citizen Alger Hiss, and revealed himself to the Indian journalist Jo Silva in 1948 as well.

The married couple Paul and Hede Massing, who recruited the Fields in 1935 for intelligence work, committed betrayal and carried out anti-Soviet propaganda openly. ³²

See also “Dinner Party” at the Fields’ I: Whittaker Chambers’s and Hede Massing’s Accounts (1939-1948)

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ III: Skeletons in the Closet (1990s and 2009)

Here, we will examine what Hede Massing said to the FBI, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the grand jury in the Alger Hiss Case, the jury at Hiss’s second perjury trial, and in her memoir — as well as what Whittaker Chambers said about her.

At the end of the day, it is up to the reader to decide what part of the record, if any, is true.

Summer 1939, Washington, D.C.:

Former Soviet intelligence operative and defector Walter G. Krivitsky mentions “H. Massing” as a Soviet intelligence liaison in an interview with a representative of the U.S. Department of State on June 28, 1939:

“…

Hand-written notation: See Boris Bazarov, nee “Fred” – “Boris”

H. Massing’s [1 word illegible]

… Boris Spaak or Spak. … ¹

Sometime in 1939, probably summer:

Whittaker Chambers meets Walter Krivitsky, according to Chambers’s own recollection; the two exchange their stories and Chambers hears certain names for the first time. ²

September 2, 1939, Washington, D.C.:

Whittaker Chambers visits Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in the company of journalist Isaac Don Levine, in an attempt to inform President Roosevelt of the existence of a Communist underground operating within U.S. government agencies. Berle makes notes about Chambers’s revelations, which come to be known as the Berle List. The section about the State Department says:

STATE

Post—Editorship, Foreign Service Journal. Was in Alexandria

Unit of CP—in “Underground Apparatus”—

Duggan—Laurence—(Member CP??)

(Wadleigh) Wadley—Trade Agreement Section

Lovell—Trade Agreement Section

Communist Shop Group

Elinor Nelson—Laurence Duggan—Julian Wadleigh—

West European Div’n—Field—still in—

(Levine says he is out went into I.E.O.

Then in committee for Repatriation

His leader was Hedda Gompertz. ³

Fast forward to 1952, to Whittaker Chambers’s memoir, Witness:

… In 1939 I gave to … A.A. Berle, the name of Laurence Duggan as someone whom I believed, though I was not certain, to be connected with a Soviet apparatus. …

My belief was based upon two incidents. When Noel Field left for Europe, Alger Hiss asked him if he would not use his great influence with Duggan to recruit him into the special apparatus.

Noel Field replied that, since he was going away, “Duggan would take his place.”

Hiss and I both assumed, therefore, that Duggan was working with the Massing apparatus.

Hede Massing has told the facts, in so far as she knows them, in This Deception.] ⁴

March 20, 1945, Westminster, MD:

Chambers mentions Noel Field’s name in an interview with Ray Murphy, a State Department official:

“… In a special category were Noel Field and Laurence Duggan of the State Department. Field was described as a member at large of the Party. Duggan was not. Neither was connected with the underground and in fact the underground had orders to refrain from contacting them. The special liaison of Field and Duggan was Hetta Gumperts. She is now in the personnel Department of the Toss Shipbuilding Corporation and is married to Paul Massing, a former member of the German Communist Party described by General Krivitsky in his book. Massing is a penologist for the State of Pennsylvania, and they have a farm near Quakertown, PA. He is also known as Karl Billinger. Hetta Gumperts is a Viennese Jewish girl. When Field went to the League of Nations in 1936 he left Duggan in her special care. Gumperts was a Communist International agent. It is understood that Field and Duggan disclosed any information she wanted to know.” ⁵

August 27, 1948, Washington, D.C.:

At a closed session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Chambers testifies about the existence in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s of two Communist underground rings, with one headed by Alger Hiss and the other by Noel Field – working independently of each other. Chambers says that “Hiss found [out] about Mr. Field’s Communist affiliations only by accident.”

“On August 27, 1948, Whittaker Chambers linked Noel Field to his own accusations against Alger Hiss, claiming that Hiss had tried to ‘draw Field in’ to Hiss’s alleged Communist espionage cell, only to discover that Field ‘was already a Communist working in another apparatus.’” ⁶

September 2, 1948, Washington, D.C.:

The FBI’s Guy Hottel informs FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that HUAC has discovered an association between Alger Hiss and Noel Field.

Later in September, 1948, Washington, D.C.:

Hottel refers Director Hoover to his Sept. 2 letter regarding the association between Hiss and Field, brought to light by HUAC:

“Ref. to my letter dated Sept. 2, 1948, … You will note in the reference letter that LOUIS A. RUSSEL, Investigator for the Committee, had advised that the Committee had become aware of an association between ALGER HISS and NOEL FIELD.” [2 graphs redacted] ⁷

September 22 (21?), 1948, Washington, DC:

The Thomas Committee questions Paul and Hede Massing regarding an association between Alger Hiss and Noel Field – but the Massings refuse to help the Committee make the link.

September 22, 1948, Washington, D.C.:

FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. receives a teletype from its New York Office with information about the Thomas Committee’s hearings:

“9/22/48 65-9940-108 Teletype-NYC Re: Paul Wilhelm Massing

The Thomas Committee questioned PAUL and HEDE MASSING regarding ALGER HISS and NOEL FIELD. The Committee indicated that HISS had recommended NOEL FIELD for a State Department position around 1940. The Committee apparently was trying to show that HISS knew of FIELD’s activities at the time he recommended him. [Paul?] MASSING was unable to help concerning this. (NOEL FIELD is an American citizen employed by the Unitarian Service Committee. He was recruited by MASSING and acted as a Russian Agent in Europe – later seen in Moscow in 1938. He allegedly misappropriated funds from OSS for Communist purposes.)” ⁸

To continue reading this timeline, see:

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ II: Noel Field’s Account, with additional comments by Hede Massing and others (1948-1954)

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ III: Skeletons in the Closet (1990s and 2009)