Boris E. Skvirsky

A Russian revolutionary and diplomat, who from 1922 to 1933 served as the Soviet unofficial representative in the USA and made a significant contribution into the US diplomatic recognition of the USSR in November 1933.

Boris Skvirsky was born on October 15, 1887, in Odessa, the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine) into the family of a landlord who soon went broke and turned to the trade of vodka making. He attended three years in a Jewish primary school and in 1906 graduated from a secondary school of commerce. Skvirsky joined the revolutionary movement during the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907. At its height in October 1905, he participated in the student protest movement in Odessa. He earned his living as a private tutor and in July 1907 applied for admission to the Tomsk Technical Institute, but failed the physics entrance examination. Afterwards, he joined his father in Harbin, Manchuria, where he earned his living teaching at a Jewish school and simultaneously participated in underground activities of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary party (commonly known as Eser party and its members as es-ery).  In June 1908 he was arrested and sentenced to a prison term in Harbin (which he served from June 1908 to June 1911) followed by “perennial exile.” In 1911, he was sent to exile in Yakutskaya Gubernia in the Russian Far East, where he taught at a Yakut school.  In Yakutsk from August 1912 to July 1913, he married Lydia I. Chevanova, a political exile and a former militant of the Eser party.  In July 1913, they escaped by separate routes and were reunited in Nagasaki, Japan.

From Japan Skvirsky proceeded to Brisbane, Australia, where he worked in various menial jobs while active in assisting political émigrés and in publishing a paper for Russian workers. Later, he managed to attend night classes in math and physics at a local university.  With the Russian democratic revolution of February 1917, Skvirsky became a  supporter of the democratic Provisional Government and sought its assistance to enable Russian political émigrés’ return to Russia. The Government gave money to send the émigrés back home, and on July 4, 1917, Skvirsky arrived in Vladivostok, where he found work as an office employee, joined the left wing of the Eser party and was elected a member of local Soviet (Russian revolution-bred form of government, which combined legislative and executive functions) from that party. In early 1918, after the right-wing socialists (commonly known as Mensheviks) and the Esers retired from the Soviets in protest to Bolshevik abuse of power, Skvirsky was elected member of the Vladivostok Zemstvo (the Russian system of self-government since 1864) and later vice-chairman of its executive council or Uprava. With arrival of the American Expeditionary Force Siberia (AEFS) in the Far East, Skvirsky managed to establish a rather close relationship with its commander Brigadier General William S. Graves. In 1920 Skvirsky occupied the post of assistant minister of foreign affairs in the Zemstvo Provisional Government of the Maritime Province.  After the departure of the AEFS in March 1920, the Japanese forces arrived in early April. By the end of the year, Skvirsky by then dissatisfied with the Eser party, established contact with the Far Eastern Bureau of the Bolshevik party (RCP (b)) and moved to Chita, the capital of the “buffer” Far-Eastern Republic (DVR) where he became an assistant minister of foreign affairs and in August 1921 applied for Communist party membership.

In mid-October 1921, Skvirsky was sent to Washington, D.C. as part of the DVR four-member “trade” delegation to the Washington Conference on Naval Disarmament and Far Eastern Affairs (November, 12, 1921 to February 6, 1922) and after it was closed continued for a few months as “acting chairman” of the Chita Delegation. After the DVR was incorporated into the RSFSR in November 1922, Skvirsky was appointed by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID) as its “unofficial representative” in the United States and in 1923, he was assigned as the Soviet diplomatic agent. By September of the same year, he organized Russian (later, Soviet Union) Information Bureau, which began publishing its magazine, Soviet Union Review, devoted to propaganda of the achievements of the socialist state, as well as a few economic publications to encourage potential business. Skvirsky soon became an authorized representative of VOKS – the Soviet society promoting cultural contacts – and helped to establish a program of Soviet-American cultural exchange. For 11 years Skvirsky was the chief spokesman for the Soviet Union in the United States and was instrumental in facilitating the US official recognition of the Soviet Union  in November 1933. In February 1936, The Washington Star wrote,

Not since the days of Citizen Zenet has any foreign diplomat a harder task in this country than Boris Skvirsky. Never has one acquitted himself better under difficult circumstances. For 11 years he was without official standing, and to his patient and tactful work in building solid foundations goes much of the credit for the resumption of Russo-American relations in 1933.

Skvirsky was appointed charge d’affairs at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. (later counselor) and continued with his diplomatic and cultural liaison functions until he was recalled to Moscow in February 1936 (to be succeeded by Constantine Oumansky.) In a farewell article, The Washington Post quoted Skvirsky as saying, “It has meant 15 years out of my life, but I have enjoyed it very much. I’ve come to have a very great respect for America, and I shall miss my many American friends…”

After a brief stay in Moscow, Skvirsky was sent to Kabul, Afghanistan as the Soviet ambassador, but was recalled to Moscow on November 1, 1937. In Moscow, he was immediately subjected to a vetting by a special branch of the Central Committee of VCP (b) – a routine procedure in the 1936-1941 period for communists returning from overseas postings, which, however, too often amounted to a purge. Meanwhile, the former ambassador was given a job of a head of “Medical Instruments” trust. Skvirsky’s “vetting” (or, rather, purge) was completed in late March 1938. Although he was cleared of the charges brought in the course of his party purge, its materials were transferred to the NKVD that arrested Skvirsky on July 15, 1938. According to the available information, Skvirsky spent almost three years in prison without trial. On July 8, 1941, soon after the Nazi attack against the Soviet Union, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR “for participation in a terrorist organization and espionage” and executed on July 30, 1941 at the Kommunarka testing ground not far from Moscow, which since 1937, was one of the major sites of mass executions. He was rehabilitated in November 1955. ¹

Abram Einhorn was born in Odessa, a cosmopolitan Black Sea port of the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine) on August 20, 1899 in the family of a Jewish locksmith Ossip Einhorn. At the age of 14, after graduating from a 4-grade city school, he joined his father’s trade, but after a few years joined the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1916, Einhorn joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party (RSDRP – internationalists) and soon after the Russian democratic revolution of February 1917, he joined the Bolsheviks. Einhorn was one of the organizers of the Alliance of Socialist Labor Youth in his native Odessa, and in January 1918, he took part in the armed uprising, which resulted in the victory of the Bolsheviks. After the Red Army was driven out of Odessa, Einhorn took part in the Russian civil war in the Ukraine and in the Volga region. For some time he was fighting as part of a Red Army armored train team, when his comrades-in-arms gave him a nickname, “Taras.” Einhorn returned to Odessa with the Red Army in the spring of 1919 and soon became head of department of operations of Odessa city Cheka. However, the Red Army was soon driven out of Odessa once again. Einhorn stayed back in Odessa under the White Army and managed to organize an underground intelligence network. After the Red Army final return to Odessa, Einhorn became deputy head of the secret operations department of the regional Cheka. However, in 1920 he was dispatched to Turkestan in Central Asia, where for two years he served as Cheka authorized representative.

In 1921, Einhorn shifted to the Intelligence Office of the Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Crimea. In 1921-1922, he briefly travelled to Rumania and Poland with intelligence missions and then came to Moscow to study at the oriental department of the Military Academy of the RKKA, from which he graduated in 1924. After his graduation Einhorn briefly worked as a functionary at the Comintern’s youth arm – The Communist Youth International, but soon shifted to the INO – the foreign intelligence arm of Cheka successor agency, OGPU. His revolutionary nickname, “Taras“, became his operational pseudonym.  In 1925-1926, Einhorn was posted as a clandestine (“illegal”) operative in Turkey, France, Germany and Palestine. In 1926-1927, he was posted in Italy under an official cover of a diplomat. After his return to Moscow in 1927, he worked at the INO OGPU oriental section, where he supervised operations in Iran and India. In 1928-1929, he was an “illegal” INO station chief in Iran. ¹

In early 1930, Einhorn arrived in New York, where he became part of an “illegal”station under the cover of a businessman engaged in market surveys with a view of purchasing tools and equipment for his trade mission in Iran or in the Middle East. But his real mission was to obtain American industrial secrets. In the semi-official history of the Russian foreign intelligence Einhorn is credited with laying the basis for OGPU industrial espionage operations in the United States. In particular, he is credited with obtaining a complete set of drafts of one of the military aircrafts designed by Sikorsky. One of the INO’s reports written in 1931 recognized Einhorn’s successes as “enormous.” Among his achievements the report listed “materials on chemical industry (evaluated as a $1 mln. saving for the Soviet industry); a complete set of materials on a Packard diesel engine and establishment of “regular communication line with America,” which was described as “live, illegal.” ² 

Among Einhorn’s achievements the above cited account listed “obtaining letterheads of American and Canadian documents… for the Soviet illegal intelligence.” Soon after his arrival in the USA Einhorn established contact with American Communist, Jacob Golos, through whom he would ensure a continuous supply of authentic US documentation for the needs of the Soviet foreign intelligence. In 1931, Einhorn recruited Catherine (Kitty) Harris, a Comintern functionary and a former common-law wife of the leader of the CPUSA, Earl Browder. Harris would become a long-time special courier of the OGPU-NKVD foreign intelligence during the 1930s and 1940s. ³ In the same year Einhorn married an American Communist Leonora Sarney, who would soon become his intelligence associate. ⁴ While working in the USA, Einhorn travelled to China and Japan with intelligence missions. ⁵

Einhorn returned to Moscow in the spring of 1934 or late 1933 ⁶ and briefly worked as an operative of the Special department of GUGB NKVD before he was sent to Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East in March 1935. In the Far East, Einhorn supervised intelligence operations targeted at Japan, China and the USA. However, in August 1936 he was suddenly summoned back to Moscow. ⁷ According to available accounts, since August 1936 Einhorn worked as head of inspection in the Moscow regional NKVD office, which was an apparent demotion. In February, 1937 he was further demoted to a position of an employee for special assignments at the counterintelligence department of GUGB NKVD.

Einhorn was arrested on March 21, 1937 on standard charges of Trotskyism, German espionage and contacts with the “enemies of the people,” the list of which included his brother, who was a prominent official in the Young Communist League. After a two-year detention in NKVD inner jail, Butyrka and one more prison, he was sentenced to eight-year prison term on June 21, 1939, which he served in prison labor camps in the Russian Far East. Having served his term, he was set free in the summer of 1945, but was deprived of the right to live in Moscow and other large cities. For a few years Einhorn worked in low managerial jobs in small regional towns until in 1949 he was arrested again by MGB and sentenced to “a perpetual banishment for free settlement” in the far eastern Krasnoyarsk region. Einhorn was rehabilitated in late 1954 and returned to Moscow in December, 1954 suffering from a spontaneous leg gangrene and died on January 14, 1955. ⁸

The published information about Heifets is scarce, probably because of his tragic fate in the twilight of Stalin’s era. Grigorij Markovich Heifets was born in 1899 in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia) in the family of Mendel Yakovlevich Heifets, a prominent figure in the Russian Social Democratic movement and the Jewish “Bund,” who was a member of the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Party (RSDRP). The uncle of Grigorij Heifets – Abram Yakovlevich Heifets (1890-1960) – is better known under the pseudonyms of Avgust [August] Guralsky [Guralski] and August Klein. He was an agent of Comintern since 1919 who among other things was one of the founding members of the CPUSA. 

Grigorij Heifets joined the revolutionary struggle at an early age. Since 1915, he was an active member of the Jewish revolutionary movement and member of the Jewish “Bund.” Exiled from Riga for revolutionary activities, he settled in the town Bogorodsk (now Noginsk) of the Moscow gubernia, where he continued his involvement in the Jewish revolutionary movement and in 1917, graduated from secondary school. In 1918, Heifets moved to Moscow – to be in the hub of the Bolshevik revolution. At first he worked in the department of education of the Moscow city council, but next year he was sent by “Bund” to the Red Army (RKKA) to fight in the Russian Civil War. He joined the Russian Communist Party [RCP (b)] at the western front, where he fought against the Polish forces. In March 1920, Heifets returned to Moscow and for some time studied at the department of social sciences of the Moscow State University. In January 1921, he became political commissar of the Kislovodsk resort area in the Northern Caucuses and took part in the armed struggle against the anti-Soviet forces, where he was wounded. 

After demobilization from the army, Heifets returned to Moscow. Having changed several positions in Moscow military and educational institutions, in 1922 Heifets joined the Department of International Liaison (OMS) of the Comintern. With his family background and fluent in several foreign languages (English, French, German and others), he was an ideal agent for this still mysterious Comintern department that was at the time building an agent network in many countries of the world. But soon Heifets’ services were also requested by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID). In 1924-early 1925, he served as acting head of the consulate and consular agent in Libau (now Leepaja) and Riga, were he simultaneously served as station chief of the OMS. In April 1925, Heifets became OMS station chief in Constantinople under the cover of the Soviet consular general in that city. 

In 1927-1929, Heifets visited many countries on OMS assignments. He is mentioned to have visited China, Germany, Austria, France and other countries. With his dark complexion, while working undercover in Germany, he gave himself for a student-refugee from India by the name of Grimeril’. Under this name, in 1926 he reportedly received a degree in engineering in Jena. In April 1927, Heifets was an authorized representative of OMS in Shanghai, and in 1928 in Berlin. In February 1929 he became charge d’affairs of a popular “Ogonek” [Little Light] magazine in Moscow and in 1930 – editor-in-chief of “Izobretatel’” [Inventor] magazine. In that brief period he proved himself as a talented journalist and an expert in engineering. 

In 1931, Heifets joined the NKID’d “neighbors“- the INO OGPU and was soon posted in France. In 1934 Heifets was sent to the US West Coast with an assignment to organize a network of agents-“illegals” in the seaport cities to obstruct shipments of strategic materials to Japan. His activities were centered in San Francisco, where he reportedly established solid contacts in the leftwing circles and among the Jewish community.

Heifets returned to Moscow in 1935 to become assistant head of a division at INO’s Moscow Center. In July 1936, he was posted in Italy as station chief. While in Italy, Heifets reportedly established confidential relations with a young nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, who would later become a source for the Soviet intelligence. But in the summer of 1938 he was suddenly recalled to Moscow and discharged without explaining the reasons. His next assignment was to proceed to Vorkuta in the Far North to work at GULAG [Chief Directorate of the Labor Camps] of NKVD. Heifets refused, referring to ill health, and was soon appointed to the All-Union Society of Cultural Contacts with Abroad (VOKS) where he served as deputy chairman. 

Following the Nazi attack against the USSR on June 22, 1941, in October 1941, Heifets was reinstated as an officer at the NKGB First (intelligence) Directorate and sent to San Francisco as a station chief under the cover of Vice-Consul and an authorized representative of VOKS. Reportedly, he activated two of his agents from the 1930s. But more importantly, the English-fluent, worldly Heifets was good with making contacts among San Francisco scientific, cultural and literary elite – the task facilitated by his position as VOKS authorized representative. In San Francisco left-wing circles Heifets was known as “Dr. Brown.” His regular reports to VOKS, as well as the books he sent to NKID are a manual on who was who in the intellectual and cultural circles of the West Coast. Reportedly, Heifets’ main target was obtaining information on the atom bomb research, and, particularly, penetrating into the family circle of Robert J. Oppenheimer.  

Recalled in July 1944, Heifets returned to Moscow to become a division head at the Moscow Center, which worked on processing materials on the development of the atom bomb. In December of the same year he was promoted to Lt. Colonel. However, in early 1947 Heifets became victim of anti-Jewish purges of state security agencies. In April, 1947 he was fired and appointed as executive secretary of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (EAK) – at the time when the government had already passed a decision of its liquidation. In fact, that appointment was a setup: EAK was soon closed, its leader, actor Solomon Mikhoels, assassinated, while its other leaders were arrested and mostly executed. Heifets’ case was tried separately: in August, 1952 he was sentenced to 25-year imprisonment. In October 1952, the case was re-opened  with additional accusations added – resulting in changing the sentence to death in February 1953. Even following the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, when many political prisoners were freed, Heifets remained incarcerated in a prison hospital. His case was closed only in late December 1953, when he was freed and later rehabilitated. ¹

There is no reliable information about Heifets’ life in retirement. Most likely, he worked as a translator for one of Moscow publishers, which was a niche for other intelligence officers of his generation.

Noel Field’s story remains one of the most mysterious and controversial stories from the early Cold War period. Despite a significant amount of documentation from the archives of Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries that has surfaced since the early 1990s, there are still three huge  and significant gaps in the Noel Field corpus of documentation. The most voluminous part of this corpus, the so-called Noel Field Hungarian dossier ¹ — deposited at the Historical Archives of Hungarian State Security — has very little pre-1954 documentation left; most records were destroyed in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, reportedly on the instructions of Janos Kadar. Most importantly, there is not a single record of the intensive interrogations Field underwent while he was in solitary confinement in Hungary from 1949 until 1954.

As for the Russian archives, the miscellaneous “Noel Field” records that I have discovered there since 2005 are those that found their way into the Cominform, as well as into personal files from other sources, some of them  Hungarian. Although I have repeatedly seen references to a “Noel H. Field” personal file, no such file has thus far been discovered in the two publicly accessible archives holding the records of the Comintern, the Cominform and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR. My efforts to discover a KGB investigative file on Noel Field dating from the late 1940s to the early 1950s have thus far failed. An official response to my request for these records from the KGB successor agency, the FSB, said: “the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia is not in possession of information in respect of Field, H. Noel.” ² This suggests that the Russian investigative records and reports from the late 1940s and early 1950s might also have been destroyed, probably again after 1956.

Neither has there been any access to Noel Field’s NKVD foreign intelligence personal file, which is reportedly held at the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. Therefore, we have no ability to crosscheck the veracity of the stories that Field told in 1948, in a desperate attempt to ascertain his “party situation” (which he described as “an issue of life and death”). Similarly, it is difficult to check the veracity of the stories that Field told his Hungarian interrogators in 1954.

Except for the records of the U.S. Department of State from the 1930s, the U.S.-held records in re Noel Field are scarce.  Conspicuously, there are no records to shed light on the details of the relationship between Noel Field and Allen Dulles during World War II — and, most importantly, to prove or disapprove the allegations made in a 1974 book that Field’s arrest in Prague, in 1949, had been in some covert way set up by Dulles as part of a strategy to undermine the Stalinist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe.

Given this incomplete corpus of documentation, any telling of Noel Field’s life story will be non-definitive and, at this point, based mostly on the accounts which Field himself gave in 1946 and in 1948, while still free in Europe — as well as on the accounts he gave after five and a half years of solitary confinement. The latter accounts  exist as transcripts of 25 high-pressure sessions with Hungarian interrogators in 1954, when Field’s case was re-opened after Stalin’s death, and as a number of lengthy personal narratives which he wrote in between various interrogations.

Noel Field was born in London on January 23, 1904 to an established Quaker family. His American-born father, a well-known biologist named Herbert Haviland Field, was a director of an international scientific bibliographic institute in Zurich, Switzerland, which was a vast, encyclopedic enterprise in zoology. His mother, Nina Foote, was a British-born journalist, a Quaker who turned Communist in the 1930s. Field grew up in a home with strong traditions of pacifism, egalitarianism, humanitarian service and assistance to the victims of persecution. Schooled in Zurich from a young age, he took part in pacifist and charitable organizations. As an adolescent in Switzerland, he met his German-born future wife, Herta Katharina Vieser, with whom he would not part for the rest of his life.

Noel and Herta Field in 1925

After the death of Field’s father in 1921, his mother took Noel, his brother Hermann and two sisters to the United States. Herta Vieser followed Noel Field to America, where the two later got married. Noel Field studied political science at Harvard and obtained a Ph.D. from there in 1926. On September 1 of that year, he enrolled at the Foreign Service School in Washington, D.C., and in spring 1927, he became an employee of the Western European Affairs division of the Department of State. In 1930, he was promoted to senior economic adviser at that division. ³

Field was an internationalist who was disappointed that the United States had not joined the League of Nations, a fact which resulted in America’s declining international responsibility. At the Department of State, he was primarily occupied with the affairs of the League of Nations. His major field was limitation of armaments and disarmament. In late 1929, he helped to prepare draft papers for the First London Conference on Naval Disarmament – and then went to London to take part in the conference (January 21-April 22, 1930). In subsequent years, his work was closely connected with international disarmament discussions aimed at lightening the burden of large armies and navies, beginning with the General Disarmament Conference which opened in Geneva in 1932 and continued until 1935. Field served as Secretary of the U.S. delegation at its session, which began in June 1934. ⁴ On October 6, 1934, he was designated Secretary of the U.S. delegation to the London Naval Disarmament Conference, which opened on October 23, 1934. ⁵ In November 1935, Field was appointed Technical Assistant to the U.S. Delegation at the London Naval Disarmament Conference, which opened on December 9, 1935 and closed on March 25, 1936. ⁶

Meanwhile, at the Department of State, Field was considered a prospective head of the German branch. He chose instead to leave the State Department for a job at the League of Nations. In April 1936, soon after his return to Washington, D.C. from the London conference, Field joined the League of Nations in Geneva as a delegate in the disarmament division (the group focusing on demobilization) of its Secretariat. The Fields settled at villa La Chotte in Vandoeuvres, near Geneva. A few months later, Field prepared a memorandum on “Prospects respecting a resumption of disarmament activities of the League.” ⁷

Field was deeply moved by the civil war in Spain – and, particularly, by the impact of German Nazi and Italian fascist assistance deployed against Spain’s democratically elected government. In early 1939, he accepted a position with the League of Nations’s Intergovernmental Committee to oversee the repatriation of foreign nationals who had taken part in the Spanish civil war. ⁸ In the following months, Field saved many lives, often at great risk to his own, providing humanitarian assistance amidst the havoc of the war. Frustrated by the League of Nations’s inability to prevent the defeat of the Republican forces in Spain, as well as by the German aggression, he resigned from the League in October 1940.

By that time, Field had several years of service to the Communist cause behind him. Years later, he would place the beginning of his radicalization in 1927 – under the impact of the landmark Sacco and Vanzetti case (Italian immigrants who were accused and convicted of murder during a 1920 armed robbery) — when he began moving “leftward” from his former position as a self-described “pacifist idealist.” Field placed what he called “the first non-firm ties with the Communist Party of the USA” in “1932-1934,” when he “performed occasional unorganized work,” including writing for the Communist press under a pseudonym. ⁹

In that period Field befriended another State Department official, Laurence Duggan, whom he later described as his “best and almost only friend.” Duggan was the only colleague at the Department of State with whom Field “shared his views and intentions”; Duggan also supported Field “on some operations, for instance, in the organization of support for [Henri] Barbusse” during the 1933 tour of the French writer in the United States. ¹⁰

Noel Field’s motives “stemmed from his conviction,” rooted in President Roosevelt’s decision to grant diplomatic recognition to the USSR, “that the United States and the Soviet Union had a common mission to save the world from the abyss into which [the] capitalism and imperialism of the European powers were driving it.” Ultimately, according to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “the depression and the rise of fascism set his Quaker idealism in a communist mold.”  ¹¹

Years later, in statements to his Hungarian captors, Field would cite 1934 as the beginning of what he termed his “organized work.” In his own words, this was “re-orientation into special work in favor of M. [Moscow]” According to Field’s account, “in 1934 (perhaps even in 1933)” he met an “American journalist Kendall Foss, who had recently returned from Moscow.” At his home, he subsequently met “Hede Gumperz, an émigré from Germany,” and “probably also her husband Paul Massing,” a German Communist and social scientist who had recently been rescued from a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Hede Gumperz told Field that she and her husband were working for the Communist cause – helping the Soviet Union in its stand against the forces of imperialism and fascism. Field joined the enterprise – and was ordered “to cease all party contacts in the USA.” According to Field, he “handed over lots of information… – orally as well as in writing – about the State Department, but also about the London Naval Conference.” Field also introduced his close friend Laurence Duggan to Hede Gumperz. ¹²

In the mid-1930s, again according to Field’s written statements while in solitary confinement in Hungary in 1954, he met another young New Dealer, Alger Hiss, and his wife Priscilla. At least as traceable through surviving Hungarian records, the confusing story that then emerged was the first statement Field ever made suggesting that Hiss had also been involved in working with the Soviets; it appeared for the first time in a memo Field wrote after the second in a series of 25 often hostile interrogations, to which he was subjected after the investigation into the charges against him of American espionage had been reopened. Desperate to establish his 20 years of continuous loyalty to the USSR as a way of demonstrating that he could not have been an agent of U.S. intelligence, Field repeatedly told stories of how he had over the years “compromised himself” ¹³ by revealing his “work for the Soviet intelligence” to a few “outsiders.”

As Field told his interrogators, he first “broke discipline” “approximately in the summer of 1935” (two months later, Field would change the date to the fall of 1935) by confiding to Hiss that he (Field) was working for a Communist cause. According to Field’s first account, Hiss “tried to recruit” him “for the Soviet service,” or, as he said two months later, in his 22^nd interrogation, “Hiss requested” him “by occasion to work for the Soviet intelligence.” Field said that he had immediately reported his indiscretion to his contact, Hede Gumperz, who would tell him later that the damage he had caused by his lack of caution was “much greater” than he could imagine, and that “the whole work had to be reorganized.”

When researchers in the early 1990s began gaining access to Hungarian security records, some authors cited this story of Field’s as a kind of “offstage corroboration” of Hiss’s espionage. Compounding the confusion, Field before his incarceration had written Hiss a letter, praising him as “an embodiment of the best Oliver Wendell Holmes tradition and as a man of unusual integrity.” ¹⁴

To learn more, click:

1)  The English translation of exactly what Noel Field wrote and said to his Hungarian interrogators in mid-1954 as proof that he had been an agent of the Soviet and not the U.S. intelligence – as well as the clues Field left to his possible sources.

2)  What Hede Gumperz (soon to become Hede Massing) first told the FBI, on December 7, 1948 (for the first time, after two years of talks with the Bureau) – and subsequently told the grand jury in the Hiss-Chambers case.

3)  How this story appears in the notes, which a former KGB officer and journalist, Alexander Vassiliev, took in the mid-1990s on the NKVD file on Laurence Duggan.

By the mid-1930s, Hede Gumperz and Paul Massing were, in fact, agents of the Soviet NKVD foreign intelligence (the INO), and Hede Gumperz was serving as a spotter, recruiter and courier for its “illegal” resident in New York, Boris Bazarov. Here is how Field himself described his “organized work” years later, during his interrogations in Hungary:

In the winter of 1935/36, when I attended one of the last sessions of the London Naval Conference, Paul Massing also stayed for some time in London and he continuously received reports and documents from me, which he copied. I think his headquarters was in Paris. On Christmas, I spent a few days with Massing in Switzerland (Arosa), where I wrote a detailed report about the conference.

During that time, Massing began to involve other members of my family into the work. My brother Hermann and his then wife, Jean Clark (later Liebermann) were living as exchange students in Zurich at that time. In 1934, they stayed in the Soviet Union and returned as enthusiastic Communists. I introduced them to Massing and in the beginning of 1936 on his order Jean came to London as a courier to receive my reports. Either at the same time or a little later, after my move to Geneva, even my mother, who was visiting my brother, was used by Massing for his work, especially for courier services. Likewise, my mother had travelled to the Soviet Union and returned as a Communist, too. ¹⁵

According to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Field wanted to help [the] Communist cause but had scruples about spying on his own government” – and presumably solved the ethical issue by taking a position at the League of Nations. ¹⁶

In the Geneva of 1936, Communism and the Soviet Union were the order of the day among left-wing and intellectual circles. The Fields soon joined these circles – and made lifelong friendships. A few months after they arrived in Geneva, their contact from Washington, D.C. days, Hede Gumperz, made an appearance at their home. Some time later, she brought a friend, whom she called “der Dicke” and introduced as the Czech citizen “Eberhardt Reiss.” In fact, “der Dicke” was the INO resident in Europe, Nathan Poretsky (known in the West as Ignacii Reiss.) In January 1937, Hede brought another visitor to the Fields’ home, this time the INO resident Walter Krivitsky. ¹⁷

In late summer 1937, Krivitsky came to Geneva again to tell Field that “der Dicke” was a traitor to the Communist cause and that dozens of comrades were in danger. Field was quickly summoned to Paris, where he met with a Russian whom he later described as “a man with the Lenin order”. This Russian, whose real name was Sergei Shpiegelglas, asked Field to go back to Geneva and stay on the alert for any appearance of “der Dicke” – and to warn his new contact, “a nice young Russian” whom Field knew as “Max.” “Der Dicke” did not appear, and in early September, Field learned from the Swiss newspapers about the assassination of the Soviet defector, Ignacy Reiss, in Switzerland. ¹⁸ It wouldn’t be long before Field learned of another betrayal, this time by Krivitsky. Following the assassination of Reiss on September 4, 1937, and the defection of Krivitsky the next month, Field’s contact with Soviet intelligence was, to use his own words, “temporarily terminated due to the fact that the contact had been betrayed.” ¹⁹

In the summer of 1938, the Fields traveled to Moscow as tourists, hoping “to clarify their membership in the Communist Party.” Here is how Field himself described the purpose of that trip in September 1948:

Summer of 1938:  A trip to M.[oscow] My application and application of my wife for the admittance into the party (American) with length of party membership since 1936; the application did not reach the American section of the Comintern; the American party had not been informed about it. ²⁰

In 1954, Field would expand on this story for his Hungarian interrogators. He said that, in Moscow, he and Herta had lived in the brand-new “New Moscow” hotel right across from the Kremlin – and met with Noel’s contact from Paris, whom he remembered only as “a man with the Lenin order.” (This man was  probably Sergey Shpiegelglas – at that time  acting head of the INO.) Another “Soviet comrade” the Fields met with was “Peter,” as well as his wife, “Natasha.” (“Peter” appears to have been the Soviet intelligence officer Vassily Zarubin and Natasha – his wife, Elizaveta Zarubina.) “Peter” turned to the American section of the ECCI to ascertain the Fields’ party status. ²¹

Earlier, when he was in Warsaw back in 1948, Field had written, rather pathetically:

Since 1936, I have been a responsible comrade, even during the period of isolation. In all situations, I acted and worked as a comrade. ²²

As to his contacts with the Soviet intelligence, here is what Field himself said on the subject to his Hungarian interrogators in 1954:

Finally, I like to emphasize, although it may go without saying, that I consider my illegal work at that time as a work for the party and not as spying. I acted as a Communist and did not betray my people. I made this point clear to the Soviet comrades during my visit to Moscow, and they totally agreed. This was also the reason why my wife and I did not join the Soviet Communist Party, which was offered to us, although we understood it to be an honor; instead, we joined the American party.

In 1954, Field described the period from the summer of 1938 to the spring of 1941 as his “political interregnum.” ²³

In Geneva, even after he lost contact with Soviet intelligence following the defections of Reiss and then Krivitsky, Field continued to be a “responsible comrade.” By his own account, he provided information to Vladimir Sokolin, a Soviet diplomat who became Vice Secretary General of the League of Nations in early 1937. Suggesting to Joseph Stalin that he appoint Sokolin to the United Nations, Narcom Maxim Litvinov had written, in late 1936: “… in the apparatus of the League there is a considerable layer of rather radical and pacifist individuals, who are looking to the USSR as a bulwark of peace and are ready to provide to us all kinds of service. It is necessary to use these people and supervise them….” ²⁴ Noel Field fits as one of those “radical and pacifist individuals” who required supervision. ²⁵

In early 1939, Field was appointed to the Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees ²⁶ By that time, he had already committed himself to rescuing refugees from Spain. In May of the same year, the Fields traveled to the United States on leave. According to State Department files, in early June Noel Field gave a sworn affidavit for the Dies Committee of the House of Representatives, in which he denied “radical activities.” ²⁷

In 1940, Field retired from the League of Nations, shortly after the expulsion of the Soviet Union following the beginning of the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. From 1941 to 1947, he worked as head of the American Society of Assistance of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC). Formed in May 1940 as a standing committee of the American Unitarian Association, the committee had a mission to provide humanitarian assistance to displaced persons in occupied countries. It opened an office in Lisbon, Portugal in June of the same year. In spring 1941, Field became its French Director, stationed at the Lisbon Mission’s affiliate in Marseilles. Noel and Herta Field were again saving the lives of innumerable refugees – including European Jews and anti-Nazi political leaders – from war-torn Europe.

In November 1942, faced with the threat of Nazi occupation of the whole of France, the Fields fled to Geneva. There, in late 1942 or early 1943, Field was appointed European Director of the Rescue Mission of the Unitarian Service Committee. According to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in that position “he did courageous work rescuing anti-Nazi (especially Communist) refugees.” ²⁸ Throughout that time, Field considered himself a “responsible comrade.” Here is what he wrote in 1948 about his “particular party work since 1941”:

In spring 1941, in the city of Marseilles, I worked with the Society of Refugee Assistance; [it was] Jules Humbert-Droz who recommended me to the Party structures. ²⁹  After that time, and until my discharge in the fall of 1947, I worked [providing] contact with important ³⁰ comrades (French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Italian, Austrian, Polish and Czech comrades.) My major task was to provide assistance to the cadres through USC (material assistance, medical assistance, escape from the camps or across the borders, accommodation at safe flats, etc.) For some time I was a liaison ³¹ between party groups in occupied France and Switzerland, … particularly for the German party. After the war, I mostly concentrated my work on repatriation of cadres to liberated countries – including Italy, Austria, Hungary and Germany. ³²

In 1943, Field  crossed paths with Allen Dulles, who had arrived in Bern in 1942 as mission head of  the U.S. wartime central intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS.) Dulles was, in fact, an old acquaintance of Field’s. When Dulles “had first entered the intelligence game as a young diplomat in Switzerland during the First World War, he met Herbert Haviland Field, an American zoologist and Quaker living in Zurich. Dulles worked with him on intelligence matters and became acquainted with his family, including young Noel.” ³³ Dulles and Field also knew each other “from the interwar period when both were involved in disarmament matters for the State Department.” ³⁴

The story of the World War II-period relationship between Noel Field and Allen Dulles is still puzzling and uncertain, and many questions about Field’s relationship with the OSS’s Bern office are left unanswered by the available documents from that period. The only thing that they establish with certainty is that “Field worked intimately with Dulles on relief and refugee matters.” ³⁵ There have been unsubstantiated allegations that “many of these files dealing with Field and the Unitarians have been sanitized.” Moreover the CIA allegedly “cleared the boxes of cables and letters between Dulles and Field from the Unitarian Service Committee files stored at Harvard.” ³⁶

For Allen Dulles, Field’s contacts among the leadership of European Communist Parties provided an opportunity to obtain information from behind the front lines, including from the territories occupied by Germany, as well as a pool of potential agents across Europe. Through Field, Dulles began to obtain first-rate intelligence information from Communist sources in Nazi Germany and the occupied territories, which was badly needed by the Allies. ³⁷ Discussing Dulles’s decision “to use his old friend’s Communist contacts,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote that “an intelligence chief in Switzerland who failed to make use of Field would have been delinquent. The Communists were an important part of the anti-Nazi resistance. It was Dulles’s job to collect intelligence from every source.” ³⁸

In December 1944, Field reportedly suggested to Dulles a plan for the OSS “to subsidize a group of German ‘anti-fascist’ refugees in France so that they could set up a Comité de l’Allemagne Libre Pour l’Ouest (CALPO) – to conduct political ‘reeducation’ in prisoner-of-war camps and recruit agents to be dropped in Germany for espionage and sabotage.” According to Schlesinger, in  February 1945 “Field arrived in Paris with a message from Allen Dulles,” who was submitting Field’s project for consideration by the OSS office in Paris. Schlesinger and his colleagues “found a tallish, stooped man, cultivated and courteous in appearance, soft-spoken but intense in manner.”

To Schlesinger and his colleague Albert E. Jolis from the OSS Secret Intelligence (SI) Branch, who talked with Field in Paris, “Field’s CALPO was obviously the extension to Western Europe of the Soviet-controlled Free Germany Committee set up in Moscow in 1943 behind a façade of captured German officers.” In Field’s list of potential recruits, Schlesinger and Jolis saw “a strong Communist flavor” – and they “both strongly recommended against the project.” But by that time, as Schlesinger would learn only later, CALPO was already “in touch” with OSS’s Special Operations Branch (SO) and its Special intelligence Branch (SI), which were “in urgent need of agents to drop into Germany” – and, like Dulles and OSS head William Donovan, were “ready to work with anybody who might help win the war.” ³⁹

At the end of the war, Field helped Hungarian Communists – with American funds – to return to Hungary, and aided other Eastern European Communist émigrés as well. After the war, he provided humanitarian aid to the Eastern European countries, particularly Hungary, where the Unitarian Service Committee opened an office.

In the winter of 1945-1946, Noel and Herta Field traveled to the United States and Mexico. Later, Field would write that on his visit to New York, he tried to ascertain his and his wife’s “party situation” from Max Bedacht (a member of the Politburo of the CPUSA), “who promised that he would try to clear up this matter.” On the same trip, Field learned that “three people he worked with from 1935 to 1938 [had] turned traitors.” They were Walter Krivitsky, who committed suicide in 1941, and Hede and Paul Massing, who, as Field wrote, “at that time kept silent about me for personal reasons.” ⁴⁰ Field did not specify how he had learned that the Massings had “turned traitors.” Neither is it clear from Hede Massing’s account to the FBI: “In 1945, Hede saw the Fields in New York and deduced from their behavior that both were still in espionage apparatus and weren’t going to come out. … Hede felt relieved of personal responsibility to them.” ⁴¹

In any case, a few months after Field returned to Switzerland in the fall of 1946, he confided in Edgar Woog, the political secretary of the Swiss Party of Labor (a socialist party founded in 1944 by some of the leading members of the Swiss Communist Party that was banned in 1940):

In the fall of 1946, … Woog met Field again, and in the course of the conversation Field said that he had great personal difficulties: it looked likely that he would not be able to return to America, since American leadership of the organization of assistance – the Unitarian Service Committee – plans to launch an investigation of him, since he had assisted Communists. It is also possible that he would lose his current job. This would also mean a serious financial problem for him. He did not know what to do: he did not want to return to America, since he was afraid that he would be prosecuted. He stated that he planned to go somewhere in South-Eastern Europe. ⁴²

Meanwhile, in the United States Hede Massing began confessing to the FBI – and implicating Noel Field. The Bureau tipped off the Unitarian Service Committee, which, first, cut the funds for Field’s operation, and next, in October 1947, fired Field from the USC “on political reasons.” ⁴³ Unemployed and suspected of being a Soviet spy in the United States, Field hoped to find work as a correspondent “for the progressive American press.” Concerned that his American sojourn permit for Europe would expire by the end of 1948, Field accepted an invitation to go to Prague, Czechoslovakia in April of that year.

In May 1948, Field undertook “an educational trip to Poland in preparation for work as a correspondent for the progressive American press.” ⁴⁴

Noel and Herta in Warsaw, 1948

In Warsaw, Field received an offer from the newly founded American liberal magazine, the National Guardian, to become its reporter on East European affairs. As far as Field could recall in 1954, he was recommended to the National Guardian – a magazine connected with the movement behind Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party bid for presidency in that year’s presidential elections —  by his friend from the 1930s, Alger Hiss. (In the far more definite recollection of two of the Guardian’s editors, Field was instead suggested for the job by a left-wing British MP named Konni Zilliacis). ⁴⁵

In August, while still in Warsaw, Field learned from the Western press about the public hearings of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, in which Whittaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor and self-described former Communist, accused Hiss of being a secret Communist. “Scared” that he could “be pulled into” what would later be known as the Hiss-Chambers case, Field hurried to write to the National Guardian that he “would temporarily not be able to work due to health reasons.” ⁴⁶

Now Field felt trapped in Eastern Europe and destined to remain there: in a sense, the Iron Curtain fell behind his back. Under a great shadow in the United States, he felt he was lacking the necessary Communist credentials to begin a new life behind the Iron Curtain. In desperation, he wrote a passionate letter on September 9, 1948 to Jacub Berman, the Polish Politburo member in charge of security apparatus, asking him to help clarify his own and his wife’s Communist Party status with Berman’s “Soviet colleagues.”

Click here to have a look at the Russian translation of Field’s letter to Berman, which found its way to the Foreign Commission of the VCP (b) in early March, 1950.

Even through the multiple veils of a triple translation (I am using the 1950 Russian translation of the Hungarian translation of Field’s original letter to Berman, which he wrote in French), Field’s voice comes through, sounding wretched. He explained that, for him and his wife, settling the problem of their party status “is a question of life and death”: “After all those hardships I have suffered remaining outside of the party and without taking part in the work of the party, for us being outside of the party is a matter of life.” And then: “… in the absence of the party card I have already faced difficulties during my stay in Poland. This has been painful to me because I feel exceptional love for the People’s Poland and admire its achievements and goals. I am aware that until my problem is resolved, the difficulties and obstacles, which I have faced in Poland and in other countries will increase. I think that this is an unbearable situation for a Communist.” To his letter, Field attached a seven-page reference on the history of his “party activity,” written in German, which, as he explained, he knew better than French. ⁴⁷

Within one day, Field left Warsaw for Prague – to apply for a resident permit in Czechoslovakia in the hope of obtaining a lecturing job at the University of Prague. While in Prague, Field continued to follow the press reports on the U.S. investigations in the evolving Hiss-Chambers case. In October, a letter he received from Alger Hiss temporarily relieved his fears. But in early December he learned from the U.S. papers that Chambers had produced a cache of copies of State Department documents as proof of Hiss’s espionage (which would become known as the Baltimore documents.)

Meanwhile, in Prague, Field himself fell under the surveillance of Czech security (known as the StB). The Communist officials whom he had once helped during the war now refused to see him: in the heated atmosphere of late 1948, just talking to an American meant danger. As Igor Lukes, professor of international relations and history at Boston University, wrote after scrutinizing the former Communist archives in Prague:  “Noel either did not understand the situation or he felt he had nowhere else to go.” The Czechs, for their part, “had heard from Budapest of his contacts with Allen Dulles and they were ready to close in on him.” But “when the StB sat down to interrogate Noel Field regarding his contacts with the OSS, he surprised them: he identified himself as an officer of Soviet intelligence. The StB were taken aback by this news, and they decided to let him go. At the end of 1948, Noel left Prague for Paris.”

Meanwhile, old Communists began to get arrested in Budapest and, under pressure, admitted that they had been American spies. One of those arrested, Tibor Szönyi, mentioned that during the war he had carried letters between Noel Field and Allen Dulles. The Hungarians demanded that the Czechs arrest Noel Field and hand him over to Budapest. The StB located Field in Czechoslovakia and trapped him, requesting that he go back to Prague. On May 11, 1949, Field was arrested in Prague and disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. Desperate to find her husband, Herta Field, who had stayed behind in Switzerland, came to Prague on August 4, 1949 – only to be driven by the StB to the Hungarian border on August 27, 1949. By that time, Field’s younger brother, Hermann Field, had followed Herta and Noel into the abyss – he was arrested at the Warsaw airport and taken to a secret prison outside Warsaw. ⁴⁸

Meanwhile, in Budapest, Noel Field was secretly interrogated – in order to knock out of him “confessions” to be used in the first in a series of political show trials in Eastern Europe. This trial would become known as the Rajk trial, after the chief defendant, Laslo Rajk – a lifelong Communist and top party theoretician who had been Hungary’s all-powerful Interior Minister and later its Foreign Minister. According to the official Hungarian version of the trial, known as the “Blue Book” during World War II, “on the order of Allan [sic] Dulles, the head of the American spy organization, OSS in Switzerland, recruited a spy-cell from among the Hungarian Trotskyites, residing there.” According to the indictment, in Switzerland Tibor Szönyi had “found connection to Noel H. Field, one of the leaders of the American intelligence service, then with Field’s superior, Allan Dulles, the European head of the USA intelligence organization, Office of Strategic Service [sic] (OSS). Field’s specialty was to recruit spies from so called ‘leftist’ elements, and he ran Swiss emigrant spy-cells recruited from among different nationalities”. ⁴⁹

Noel Field was not tried, nor did he appear as a witness in the Rajk trial or subsequent trials. However, a mere association with Field, or even a brief crossing of paths, became a death sentence for dozens and a curse for hundreds of Communist officials in Eastern European countries. Reading through personal files from the period retained as part of the Comintern collection in Moscow, or through Cominform files, you are stunned by the implications of the mere appearance of Noel Field’s name.

We will never know exactly what Noel Field told his interrogators and/or torturers in the months preceding the Rajk trial and in the subsequent period, when his naming of names facilitated the staging of show trials and purges in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European nations. As I have said, most Hungarian records from 1949 to 1953 pertaining to Noel Field were destroyed in the aftermath of the 1956 rebellion in Hungary. The surviving Hungarian records from before 1954 are few and do not include any records of interrogations of Noel Field. The only glimpse we have into this picture comes from a Polish account of the interrogation of Noel Field on August 27, 1949 by Józef Światło, then an officer of the Polish state security (and a future defector.) The Russian-held records, although filling in some of the gaps, appear to have been sanitized too, probably during the same period. In any case, the tragic fallout from Noel Field’s wartime activities in France and Switzerland has been estimated to be “five hundred people from all parts of the world dragged through the mire,” with “the names of 12,600 people … included in criminal and intelligence registries.” ⁵⁰

Budapest house where Noel and Herta Field were kept in solitary confinement.

After their disappearance behind the Iron Curtain, Noel and Herta Field were kept in solitary confinement in Budapest, with no idea of each other’s fate.

A year after Stalin’s death, Noel Field wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (by that time renamed the CPSU). This letter appears to have been retained only in Hungarian records. (My thorough search for any trace of it in the Soviet Central Committee’s records at the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) ended in failure.) In a section of that lengthy document, which Field sub-titled “2. Fundamental Explanations, Analysis and Self-Criticism,” he pledged two things. First, that he “had been a loyal, devoted and active communist for more than 20 years, who risked his life for the Communist Party more than once.” Second, that he “had 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.” ⁵¹

According to the Hungarian records, on June 15, 1954 the “investigation in the case of Noel H. Field and Herta K. Field” was renewed, and their “systematic interrogation” began. Here is how the two Hungarian security officers who were responsible for the enterprise summarized the charges at the start of the renewed investigation:

… 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 the American intelligence.

b) After the end of World War II, he was spying in the People’s Republic of Poland and in Czechoslovakia for the Americans. ⁵²

From June 15 to October 4, 1954, Noel Field went through 25 grueling interrogations and wrote 41 lengthy memos and “explanations.” For her part, Herta Field went through three interrogations in early August of 1954 and wrote 11 detailed memos. After 23 interrogations, when Field “emphatically denied having been a recruited agent of the American intelligence and … emphasized that he was a communist,” his interrogators were still scheming to “unmask his hostile activities” by “employing a cell agent” in the person of one Dr. Tamas Pasztor. ⁵³

According to the Hungarian files, the factor that finally sealed Field’s case was an undated reference (“spravka”) sent from Moscow some time in late September 1954. Here is what it said, in part:

… since the end of 1947 Noel Field hasn’t had a regular workplace. In 1948, he was staying in Poland and Czechoslovakia for a long time, where he created an impression that he was an American Communist journalist being chased by reactionary circles.

At the end of 1935, when Noel Field was working at the State Department, he was involved  in the work of the Soviet intelligence. The foundation for his recruitment was his displayed sympathy for the Soviet Union. Field stayed in touch with [the] Soviet intelligence until the year 1937.

When he left the Soviet Union for Switzerland, he was retained as an agent. After we had received the message in 1942 that Field would stay in Geneva and work as a manager for the USC Europe there, a new attempt was made to contact him in spring. However, at the end of a long talk with the person from the NKVD, Noel Field and his wife announced that the password, which had been given to them in those days, would be out-dated and was no longer plausible and that the five years without any contact had led them to commit on another line. Noel Field refused to speak about the commitment and to whom it was given. After that, all connections to him were broken. ⁵⁴

On October 6, 1954, Hungarian state security finally concluded that “although in contact with Dulles, Field was not an American spy and his pro-Communist activities and contacts have been proven.” The reference went on to say that since “the Fields did not want to return to America for fear of charges of un-American activities,” they “would like to settle in a country of People’s Democracy.” ⁵⁵

In November 1954, Noel was finally reunited with Herta. The first question he asked his beloved wife, after  years of separation, was reportedly: “Have you remained faithful to the Party?” ⁵⁶ Noel and Herta Field were granted political asylum and settled in Budapest. Till the end, they did not condemn the Communist regime that had subjected them to torture and years of misery. Field entitled the last article he wrote in Budapest, for the American magazine Mainstream, “Hitching Our Wagon to a Star.” ⁵⁷

Tomb of Noel Haviland Field in the Farkasréti Cemetery, Budapest; photo by Nemkovethem, September 2008.

Noel Field died in 1970, his wife Herta in 1980.

The first – and thus far, the only – book-length story about  Noel Field, The Red Pawn, by the American journalist Flora Lewis, was published in 1965. The second book dealing with Field’s story, Operation Splinter Factor, by British journalist Stewart Steven, was published in 1978. Steven suggests that Noel Field was “set up” by his old friend Allen Dulles, through Józef Światło, Dulles’s agent at the Polish state security agency, in order to create havoc in the Soviet bloc and light a fuse that might cause its eventual disintegration. In 1987, Steven’s account was circumstantially corroborated in a book by the FBI spy hunter, Robert Lamphere, who wrote that “Field had worked for Donovan and the OSS, but we knew he had also been an agent of the KGB, and had spied for Walter Krivitsky …, and it had been suggested that the CIA added to KGB suspicions in a rather clever way.” It is difficult to say whether Lamphere was relying here on his own knowledge or simply referring to Steven’s book. ⁵⁸

In the absence of any definitive corroboration, click here to have a look at a fascinating early 1950 note from Józef Światło to the Hungarian party head, Matias Racosi that found its way into the Cominform records in Moscow.

In 1997, Field’s story became the subject of a documentary by Swiss film producer Werner Schweizer, Noel Field – Der Erfundene Spion (Noel Field, the Invented Spy.) In 2005, a comprehensive compilation of Noel Field documents from Hungarian and other Central and Eastern European archives was published in Germany. ⁵⁹ Still, a complete story of Noel Field’s life is yet to be written.

Edward Stettinius

American industrialist and high government official who was the U.S. Secretary of State from December 1944 to June 1945.

Edward Stettinius was born in Chicago on October 22, 1900 to Edward Reilly and Judy (Carrington) Stettinius. His father, Edward R. Stettinius, Sr. (1865-1925) made his fortune in the Chicago wheat pits and later became a successful businessman. In 1915, he was retained by J.P. Morgan to organize a department for munitions purchase by the British and French governments during World War I. Through his efforts, the U.S. arms-making capacity exceeded the combined capacity of Britain and France by war’s end, and Stettinius Sr. won the “tag of father of the military industrial complex.” In 1916, he became a full partner in J.P. Morgan and Co. He was described by his contemporaries as possessing “a meticulous, almost obsessive, attention to detail” and an “almost terrifying sense of responsibility.” ¹ The younger Stettinius grew up in a mansion on the family’s 13-acre estate on Staten Island and graduated from the Pomfret School in 1920. He continued his education at the University of Virginia, but left college in 1924 without a degree, reportedly neglecting his studies in favor of social work. In 1924, he joined the General Motors Company as a stock clerk but ascended the corporate ladder rapidly. By 1926, Stettinius had become assistant to General Motors Vice-President John Lee Pratt, who was a friend of the Stettinius family. That year, he married Virginia Gordon-Wallace, who came from a prominent family in Richmond, Virginia. Intent on improving the lives of GM’s workers, Stettinius developed a program of employee benefits. In 1931, he was named the company’s vice-president in charge of industrial and public relations.

Stettinius’s continued commitment to social work – and particularly his work for unemployment relief projects – brought him in contact with New York’s governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. After Roosevelt was elected president, he invited Stettinius to work on the Industrial Advisory Board in the National Recovery Administration (NRA), but Stettinius’s early government service turned out to be short-lived. In 1934, he moved to U.S. Steel Corporation as chairman of its finance committee, and in 1938 he became its board chairman.

Stettinius’s successful business career and proven abilities as an efficient top manager, along with his strong sense of social responsibility, continued to impress President Roosevelt. In 1940, Roosevelt succeeded in luring Stettinius back to government service to be director of the Priorities Division of the Office of Production Management (OPM). On August 28, 1941, Harry Hopkins asked Stettinius to take over from him the administration of the government’s Lend-Lease program, which was rapidly growing in scale; on September 2, Stettinius became the administrator of Lend-Lease Aid to the Allies. In 1943, he wrote a book, Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. ²

In 1943, Roosevelt appointed Stettinius under secretary of state. In that capacity, he headed the U.S. delegation to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference with representatives of the other Great Powers in the summer of 1944 – and is credited with succeeding in brokering an agreement on the structure of the future United Nations Organization. In November 1944, the U.S. Senate confirmed Stettinius as the replacement for Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who had to retire due to ill health.

Stettinius with Anthony Eden and Averell Harriman at Yalta, February 1945

As secretary of state, Stettinius continued the reorganization of the Department of State he had begun as under secretary, tightening its structure, enhancing its manageability, bringing it into closer contact with other government agencies – and improving its relations with the public at large. At the same time, he was occupied with laying the groundwork for the future United Nations Organization. In early 1945, Stettinius accompanied President Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference of the leaders of the Big Three (February 2-8, 1945), to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany and discuss the fate of the liberated or defeated countries of Eastern Europe, the future United Nations Organization and other issues. Stettinius is credited in particular with achieving agreement among the Big Three on the provisional rules of procedure for the UN Security Council, which were developed at the Department of State under his supervision.

After the Yalta Conference, Stettinius led the U.S. delegation at the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace, which was held in Mexico City on February 21-March 8, 1945, and is commonly known as the Chapultepec Conference. There he lined up Latin American support for the United Nations and facilitated the adoption of The Act of Chapultepec (March 3, 1945), which was a significant milestone in the history of Pan-Americanism.

On his return to Washington, D.C., Stettinius’s major commitment was laying the groundwork for the conference in San Francisco that would officially create the United Nations. He led the U.S. delegation in San Francisco and was present at the United Nations’ official founding on June 26, 1945. But he had to resign his office the following day, after President Harry Truman, President Roosevelt’s successor, made it clear that he wanted to see Justice James F. Byrnes, his former mentor in the U.S. Senate, as his Secretary of State.

Stettinius accepted the position of U.S. representative to the United Nations and led the American delegation to the first United Nations General Assembly, which opened in London on January 10, 1946. Deeply committed to the success of the United Nations (a commitment which was one manifestation of his devotion to the political legacy of President Roosevelt), he nevertheless resigned this post too, in June 1946 – out of frustration with what he saw as President Truman’s failure to use the United Nations as a vehicle to resolve tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Stettinius retired to his family farm in Virginia and served for a time as rector of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Within a short time, he became a business partner in a group which foresaw a need for a peacetime ship registry system administered by a private company. In 1948, International Registries, Inc. was established under Stettinius’s leadership with the Registered Agent Office in New York City, to register ships and corporations under the Liberian flag. ³

Troubled by charges of Roosevelt’s “betrayal” of American interests at the Yalta Conference, Stettinius decided to write a detailed and accurate insider’s account of that historic meeting to set the record straight. The resulting book, Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference was published after Stettinius died of a heart attack in February 1949. ⁴

Stettinius is remembered in Russia, along with President Roosevelt and his aide, Harry Hopkins, as one of the key figures who ensured American assistance to the Soviet Union in its fight for survival against Nazi attack. After decades of enforced silence regarding the scale of the American Lend-Lease program, the Russian translation of Stettinius’s 1944 book, Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory, was published for the first time in Russia in 2000. ⁵

Harry Lloyd Hopkins

A federal administrator and presidential advisor who is known in 20th-century American history for his unwavering loyalty to President Franklin Roosevelt, his hard-driving enthusiasm for the New Deal and his “piercing understanding” of World War II problems.

Harry Lloyd Hopkins was born on August 17, 1890 in Sioux City, Iowa, the fourth child of David Aldona Hopkins and Anna Pickett. His father ran a harness shop and eventually made his long-time passion, bowling, into his career. His mother was deeply religious and an active Methodist. Thhe family soon moved to Nebraska, then to Chicago, and finally to Grinnell, Iowa, where Hopkins graduated from high school and studied American politics and the British parliamentary system at Grinnell College. He graduated cum laude in 1912.

Hopkins’s first job after graduation was with Christodora House, a settlement house on New York City’s Lower East Side which was one of the working-class relief efforts in the Progressive Era. His next move was to the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, where he served as a “friendly visitor” and superintendent of the employment bureau. In 1915, he was appointed executive secretary of the New York Bureau of Child Welfare, which administered pensions to mothers with dependent children. Hopkins’s early experience played a significant role in shaping his ideal of government responsibility for impoverished Americans. ¹

After America entered World War I, Hopkins wanted to enlist in the Army but was rejected for health reasons. Instead, he moved to New Orleans to serve as Director of Civilian Relief for the Gulf Division of the American Red Cross – and eventually moved up to head the Red Cross divisions in the American Southwest. In 1922, Hopkins returned to New York City to become Chief of the Division on Health Conditions for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor; in 1924, he became the General Director of the New York Tuberculosis Association. He also took part in drafting a charter for the American Association of Social Workers and became its president in 1923.

In 1928, Hopkins supported Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt for governor of New York. In 1931, Roosevelt chose Hopkins to run America’s first state relief organization – the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA). Modeled on the Red Cross relief program, it worked to combat the effects of the Great Depression in New York State and helped hundreds of thousands of people to survive through the most difficult times. Hopkins’s work in creating and running TERA paved the way for his leading role in President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration.

In 1932, Hopkins supported Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency and his promise of a ‘New Deal’ for Americans. In early 1933, Hopkins moved to Washington, D.C. to become director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which would provide immediate relief for the country’s millions of homeless and hungry residents. While remaining head of FERA, Hopkins was simultaneously appointed Civil Works Administrator (CWA) in November 1933, to put about four million people to work during the harsh winter of 1933-1934. In 1935, he was appointed head of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), to put another three-and-a-half million people to work. Hopkins also served in other New Deal emergency relief agencies – such as the President’s Draught Committee, the Industrial Emergency Committee and the National Emergency Council – and on the boards of many other New Deal agencies like the National Resources Planning Board. Roosevelt’s speechwriter, Robert E. Sherwood, wrote later that “Hopkins came to be regarded as the Chief Apostle of the New Deal and the most cordially hated by its enemies.” ²

In 1937, Hopkins was operated on for stomach cancer – a disease he would continue to battle for years to come. In December 1938, he became Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce, but resigned in November 1940 due to health problems. From 1940 to 1945, Hopkins continued as Roosevelt’s confidant, adviser and personal representative. Reflecting on Hopkins’s role, Roosevelt said in 1941: “. . . as President . . . you’ll learn what a lonely job this is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins who asks nothing except to serve you.” ³ Hopkins served as Roosevelt’s personal manager at the 1940 Democratic National Convention. During his visit to the White House in May 1940, he spent the night in a suite which at one time had been President Abraham Lincoln’s study. Hopkins would continue living in that suite, which was just down the hall from Roosevelt’s room, until December 1943.

On New Year’s Eve in 1941, Roosevelt sent Hopkins to London as his personal representative –to gain firsthand knowledge of Britain’s needs during the crucial early phase of World War II which became known as the Battle of Britain – the largest and most sustained aerial bombing campaign up to that date. Hopkins’s almost daily conversations with Churchill during the six weeks of his stay in London were the beginning of a long friendship. Hopkins was among the few people who had the privilege of addressing Churchill by his first name.

Hopkins’s reports to Roosevelt played a key role in the debate over the president’s ‘Lend-Lease’ bill to aid Britain by providing it (and eventually several other Allied nations) with weapons and supplies without requiring payment upfront. Hopkins spearheaded the rapid passage of the Lend-Lease Bill, first by the House of Representatives, on February 8, 1941, and then by the Senate a month later. Roosevelt appointed Hopkins to administer the Lend-Lease Program, with the vague authority to “advise and assist me in carrying out the responsibilities placed upon me” by the passage of the bill. ⁴ Although lacking the official title, Hopkins thus came to be regarded by many journalists as “deputy president.” He became famous for his unbureaucratic style and for getting things done by bypassing bureaucratic red tape. Hopkins played a pivotal role in preparing the U.S. Armed Forces and private business for war production. He was also a member of the War Production Board (WPB) and the Pacific War Council, an intergovernmental agency established in 1942 to coordinate the Allied war effort in the Pacific and Asian World War II campaigns.

Hopkins was a pioneer in establishing the practice of private diplomacy. On his missions as President Roosevelt’s personal representative, he managed to facilitate agreement on issues that would have had little chance of being resolved had the negotiations been carried out by an official diplomatic representative. Hopkins thus played a key role in facilitating accord between the leaders of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union during the war effort. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, both Roosevelt and Churchill, the British Prime Minister, saw aiding the Soviet Union as crucial to defeating Germany – provided the Soviet Union could survive the Nazi onslaught. Hopkins volunteered to fly to Moscow to find out for himself if the Soviet Union would be able to hold off the Germans.

In late July 1941, Hopkins took a 24-hour flight to Moscow, seated in the machine-gunner’s metal chair in the rear of the plane, to meet Stalin and other Soviet leaders in person. It took Hopkins just two days to dramatically increase Western understanding of the Soviet situation. “I had no conversations in Moscow,” he reported, “just six hours of conversation. After that there was no more to be said. It was all cleaned up at two sittings.” Hopkins came away convinced that the Soviet Union would be able to blunt the German advance. He also convinced Stalin of the need to call a conference of representatives of the three governments to study the strategic needs of each front in the war. The conference took place in Moscow in October 1941, and Hopkins’s efforts eventually helped Roosevelt to extend Lend-Lease legislation to aid the Soviet Union.

Hopkins and Stalin, July 1941

Many American diplomats pointed to Stalin’s special affinity for Roosevelt’s assistant. Charles Bohlen, who accompanied Hopkins to his later meetings with Stalin, as a translator, recalled that Stalin once said in his presence that Hopkins was “the first American to whom he had spoken “po dushe” – from the soul.” ⁵ According to Averell Harriman, Stalin displayed more open and warm cordiality to Hopkins than to any other foreigner. Throughout World War II, Hopkins continued to play a crucial personal role in Great Powers diplomacy, accompanying Roosevelt as his personal aide to the Allied conferences in Casablanca (January 4-24, 1943), Quebec (August 1943), Cairo (November 22-26, 1943), Tehran (November 28-December 1, 1943) and Yalta (February 4-11, 1945). At Yalta, Hopkins was suffering from intense pain but nevertheless participated fully in making plans for Germany’s ultimate defeat and establishing the accords for the post-war world.

At the conclusion of the conference, Hopkins was too sick to continue the trip back home with Roosevelt on board the USS Quincy cruiser and had to take a few days rest in Marrakech, Morocco before returning to the United States. Roosevelt, who had expected Hopkins to help him write a speech on the results of the conference on the way home, was disappointed. It turned out that he and Hopkins would not see each other again. On his return to the United States, Hopkins went straight to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He was still there when Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12. Although too sick to give President Harry S. Truman the same kind of service he had given to Roosevelt, Hopkins undertook his last mission to Stalin in late May of 1945 – at the height of the United Nations Charter Conference at San Francisco – to iron out differences between the Allies and plan for a July meeting between Churchill, Stalin and Truman in Potsdam, Germany.

On July 2, 1945, Hopkins retired from government service. He settled in New York, but his plans to begin writing about the war and Roosevelt were frustrated by his crumbling health. In September 1945, he made what turned out to be his last trip to Washington, D.C., to receive the Distinguished Service Medal from President Truman. Two months later, Hopkins checked into New York’s Memorial Hospital, where he died on January 29, 1946.

Asked to name two Americans (besides President Roosevelt) who had made the greatest contributions to the defeat of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill named General George Marshall among military leaders and Harry Hopkins among civilians.

Hopkins in 1941

Hopkins is remembered in Russia as a highly trusted representative of President Roosevelt who negotiated with the Soviet leadership and contributed greatly to strengthening the Russian-American partnership that had defeated the Nazis. In the memory of older generations of Russians, his name is gratefully associated with “Lend Lease” – the great American program of wartime assistance which connoted not just tanks, guns and aircraft for victory, but also canned meat, powdered milk and warm clothes at a time of dire need. After decades of silence about the American contribution to the Russian victory, we now know that every seventh Red Army aircraft, every third ton of aviation petrol and every second truck were U.S.-made. During the Yalta Conference, Stalin acknowledged that “Lend-Lease had greatly contributed to the victory,” and that without American assistance “the victory would have been different”— meaning the cost of victory in human lives.

Hopkins is remembered in modern-day Ukraine as well, to judge from a 2009 article entitled “Ukraine Needs Harry Hopkins.” Considering the personal qualities that enabled Hopkins to go down in history “as an example of a highly efficient and honest administrator” “who was able to earn the trust of such different leaders as Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt,” the writer emphasized Hopkins’s understanding of the plight of the common American, his unselfishness, his personal modesty and his ability to distance himself from politics: “Harry Hopkins had clean hands – and, most importantly, he had never strived for power.” ⁶

The Smearing of Harry Hopkins as a Soviet Agent

In 1990, a book written by Christopher Andrew, a British historian, and Oleg Gordievsky, a former high-level KGB officer who had defected to the West in 1985, suddenly claimed that Hopkins was “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States.” Entitled KGB: The Inside Story of its Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, and based on Gordievsky’s recollections of a lecture he heard when he was a KGB intelligence trainee, the book described how Iskhak Akhmerov, the former Soviet “illegal” resident in the United States during World War II, had intimated to young KGB trainees that he had had secret meetings with Hopkins. These meetings allegedly began before Hopkins made his first trip to Moscow in July 1941 and continued throughout the war years. ⁷ Although Andrew and Gordievsky were immediately taken to task by some British and American authors, ⁸ this fantastic story, amazingly, remains unchallenged to this date. Moreover, since 1990 it has often been “serialized” in books, newspaper and magazine articles, on-line encyclopedias and postings. Recently, Gordievsky’s fable found its way into a Russian World War II espionage novel.

Following the release in 1995-1996 of Venona documents – partially decrypted Soviet intelligence communiqués from the World War II period – the late U.S. Air Force Department historian Dr. Edward Mark undertook to identify Hopkins behind the cover name “19” in a single, partially decrypted cable from May 29, 1943. The cable was signed by “Mer,” which was then Akhmerov’s cover name. ⁹ In this cable, Akhmerov reported information he had heard from “19” on discussions of the chances of opening a second front in Europe in 1943. These discussions took place at the conference between Roosevelt and Churchill and the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C. from May 15 to May 25, 1943, commonly known by its code name, TRIDENT. At the time of the cable’s release in 1996, “19” was not identified by Venona translators, who erroneously made an assumption (and, in fact, a handwritten notation) that Hopkins was behind another cover name, “Zamestitel’,” which is Russian for “Deputy.” Dr. Mark went a step further: having consulted the TRIDENT attendance records, he concluded that “Zamestitel’” was Vice-President Henry Wallace and “Source No. 19” “was most likely” Harry Hopkins. ¹⁰

As we now know, “19” or “19th” was the cover name used for U.S. State Department official Laurence Duggan in NKVD foreign intelligence communiqués from 1936 to 1944. ¹¹ Wallace appears as “Lotsman” [“Navigation pilot”] elsewhere in decrypted Venona cables.

Nevertheless, in his 1999 book The Sword and the Shield (this time written with another KGB defector, former KGB archivist Vassili Mitrokhin), Christopher Andrew cited Mark’s “detailed, meticulous and pervasive study” as “plausible but controversial evidence” that “Hopkins sometimes used Akhmerov as a back channel to Moscow.” In Andrew’s account, “Hopkins’s confidential information so impressed the Center that, years later, some KGB officers boasted that he had been a Soviet agent.” Andrew was careful to qualify that “these boasts were far from the truth. Hopkins was an American patriot with little sympathy for the Soviet system. But he was deeply impressed by the Soviet war effort.” ¹² Andrew’s qualification notwithstanding, some authors thought that “the biggest news” in his 1999 book was the “new evidence that proves that Harry Hopkins, the closest and most influential adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, was a Soviet agent.” ¹³

Except for Gordievsky’s tale about Akhmerov’s lecture, however, not a single story about Hopkins as a “Soviet agent” has emanated from the ranks of former KGB officers to this day. Moreover, when interviewed on the subject, these former officers vehemently deny Gordievsky’s assertion. Former KGB operative Colonel Oleg Tsarev, for example, is known for his collaboration with two Western authors on books about the history of KGB intelligence. ¹⁴ During his time as a KGB intelligence trainee, Tsarev used to attend Akhmerov’s lectures, which he remembered vividly. Tsarev told me in an interview (which turned out to be his last one) that Akhmerov “had never named any names” in his lectures. ¹⁵

KGB Lieutenant-General Vitaly Pavlov, who supervised Akhmerov’s preparations for his second U.S. mission in 1941, as well as his early operations in the States in the first months of 1942, said much the same thing. On his return to Moscow in early 1946, Akhmerov told Pavlov “in great detail about his meetings with various political figures in the United States.” Pavlov asserted that “Akhmerov had never met with Hopkins and Hopkins had nothing to do with Soviet intelligence.” ¹⁶

Click here to read more excerpts from interviews with Lt.-Gen. Pavlov.

Moreover, the story Gordievsky told does not withstand simple documentary crosschecking. According to Gordievsky, Akhmerov’s secret meetings with Hopkins began before Hopkins made his first trip to Moscow in July 1941. But that July Akhmerov was still in Moscow – his U.S. posting was approved that month – preparing for his forthcoming trip. He did not leave Moscow until September – and reached the United States in December, after a long and roundabout trip. ¹⁷ Russian published sources unanimously place Akhmerov’s second term in the United States from 1942 to 1945 – eliminating any basis for Gordievsky’s story. ¹⁸

The improbability of Gordievsky’s story does not end with Akhmerov’s absence from the United States in 1941 – the time of his alleged initial approach to Hopkins. Explaining “the nonsense of Gordievsky’s allegation,” General Pavlov told me that due to Akhmerov’s “low social standing in the United States (small businessman) there was no chance of his ever meeting Hopkins.”

Pavlov’s oral evidence has recently been confirmed with the release of the notes on KGB intelligence files taken from 1994 to 1995 by the former KGB officer and journalist Alexander Vassiliev, in the course of his work on a Russian-American collaborative book project. Vassiliev made detailed notes on a summary report on his tenure in the United States written by Vassili Zarubin, the “legal” resident in the United States from 1942 to 1944. Zarubin wrote the report in September 1944, upon his return to Moscow. In his profile of Akhmerov’s work during that period, Zarubin wrote: “He has a very isolated lifestyle abroad, and as a rule he has no neutral connections apart from his cover. Because of this factor, ‘Mer’ [Akhmerov] meets only with our people, which creates needless risk if he is being tailed.” ¹⁹ In all of Vassiliev’s voluminous notes, there is not the slightest hint about confidential contacts between Hopkins and Akhmerov or any other Soviet intelligence operatives.

Click here to see where Hopkins appears in Alexander Vassiliev’s notes.

Nor does the possibility of a confidential relationship between Hopkins and Soviet intelligence operatives appear anywhere in Russian diplomatic files.

Click here for some of the references to Hopkins in Russian files from the World War II period.

Michael Straight

An American government official, magazine publisher and writer.

Michael Straight was born in New York on September 1, 1916, the youngest child of Willard Straight, a senior investment banker with J.P. Morgan, and Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, the daughter of former Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney and an heiress, philanthropist and social reformer. Willard Straight died in late 1918, while serving at the Paris Peace Conference in the aftermath of World War I. In 1925, Dorothy Straight married Leonard Knight Elmhirst, British agricultural economist and educationist, and in 1926 she brought Michael to England to be subsequently educated at Dartington School in Devon – an experimental community based on Progressive theories which she had founded with her second husband. Brought up on the progressive teachings of Dartington, Straight traveled in India, took part in a Pittsburgh steel strike and danced in a ballet company sponsored by his mother – before spending a year at the London School of Economics. In 1934, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study economics.

At Trinity Straight was attracted to socialism and radical politics. He became close friends with left-wing students and soon joined a cell of the British Communist Party (CPGB) cell at Trinity and as well a Cambridge University branch of the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union, at the time commonly known as the SCR. In August-September 1935, Michael Straight made a trip to the Soviet Union organized by the Cambridge SCR branch (as part of a group of six Cambridge students.) He also joined a secretive circle known as the Apostles, which included students who would become known decades later as members of the so-called “Cambridge Five” espionage group working for the Soviet Union.

In 1937, in distress after the death of his close friend, poet John Cornford, in the Spanish Civil War, Straight submitted to recruitment by a member of the Apostles, Anthony Blunt – for what was described to him as work for the Comintern. Soon, he was assigned the cover name “Nigel.” The game plan was for Straight to return to the United States and get himself employed. From the very beginning, Moscow operatives had no illusions about their new recruit. “He has very little experience and sometimes behaves like a child in terms of romanticism,” said an early August 1937 report on meetings with Straight. “He thinks that he is working for the Comintern, and he must be left with this delusion for a while.” ¹

Straight returned to the United States later in August of 1937 and was soon contacted by a Soviet “illegal,” Iskhak Akhmerov, who introduced himself as Michael Green. Straight would never learn the true identity of his new acquaintance or discover his affiliation with the Soviet intelligence. From the very beginning, Akhmerov sensed “some ideological hesitation” in his new source. In one of his reports to Moscow, he wrote that “‘Nigel’ was not such a solid and dedicated party member” as Moscow had described him in its profile. ²

Finally, on January 24, 1938, Akhmerov was able to report to Moscow that “‘Nigel’ managed to get himself hired at the Department of State – as an assistant to a counselor in its department of international economic affairs.” Straight always maintained that the only documents he had ever supplied to Michael Green were those written by himself. The notes on his NKVD file taken in the mid-1990s by a former KGB officer and journalist, Alexander Vassiliev, to some extent confirm this statement. In instructions to Akhmerov on March 26, 1938, Moscow Center requested that its “illegal” agent intensify his work with “Nigel” – and deplored that the latter “does not yet provide authentic materials, but only his notes,” which are out-of-date. ³

By late May of 1938, Straight still had not lived up to the Soviets’ hopes. “I am stating with regret that thus far, there have been no successes in the development of ‘Nigel’’s work,” Akhmerov reported on May 24, 1938. “I meet with him weekly. I talk with him for hours about work and politics, thus far, with no result.” Only in June did Akhmerov finally receive from Straight his long-promised report on armaments, and the next month Straight delivered a lengthy report on British military and raw material reserves compiled by the U.S. consul in London. Finally, Akhmerov had something to send to Moscow. In the fall of 1938, Straight brought Akhmerov a copy of a State Department report on German penetration in South America. It turned out to be the same report that had been obtained earlier from Laurence Duggan, another source at the Department of State. At the Center, they viewed Straight as “a prospective big agent” – and advised Akhmerov not “to burn him,” that is, not to put him at risk by using him “for obtaining some non-urgent material or relating its approximate content.” Moreover, Moscow considered using Straight for pilfering documents a potential risk to the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. Nevertheless, in early 1939 Straight brought Akhmerov another report, which had been shared with him by an acquaintance from the European department of the Department of State: a report on the origins and consequences of the August 1938 Munich agreement between Nazi Germany, Great Britain and France that led to the partitioning of Czechoslovakia. ⁴

With the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (commonly known as The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) on August 23, 1939, Straight’s attitude changed. On September 7, he told “Michael Green” about his “disappointment with the Soviet Union and sharply criticized the Soviet policy, as well as the policy of the Amer. Comparty” (CPUSA). According to Akhmerov’s report, Straight said candidly that “his attitude to us has become ambivalent,” meaning that his “connection” might be soon terminated. Still, Akhmerov’s “educational work” produced some temporary results: On October 25, he reported to Moscow that he thought he had “managed to straighten out ‘Nigel,’” who finally agreed with his “analyses of the international situation.” In late 1939, Akhmerov departed for the Soviet Union. According to Vassiliev’s notes on “Nigel’s” file, throughout the entire period from 1937 to 1939 “Michael Straight was still thinking that he was working for the Comintern.” ⁵

According to Vassiliev’s notes, Straight was next approached by an operative of the Washington “legal” residency with the cover name “Igor,” who was to keep an eye on Straight. Behind this cover name was an experienced NKVD intelligence officer, Constantine Mikhailovich Kukin, who was working at that time under the cover of a second secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. ⁶ Kukin probably approached Straight in his official capacity of a diplomat. According to Vassiliev’s notes, by that time “cooperation with Straight was de facto terminated: he ceased bringing any materials.” By late 1940, according to Vassiliev’s reading of Nigel’s file, “there was not a single NKVD intelligence officer left in Washington, and ‘Nigel’ was left without any oversight, since there was no one in New York either who could take him under control.” ⁷

By May, 1941, Straight resigned from the Department of State to become the editor of The New Republic magazine, which had been founded by his parents and was still being financed by his mother. ⁸ In the months before the United States entered World War II, he shifted the magazine’s editorial policy to encourage American involvement in the anti-Nazi struggle.

Meanwhile, Moscow continued to consider Straight one of its promising assets. According to Vassiliev’s notes, in mid-July 1941 Straight was approached “by an agent of the New York ‘legal residency,’” whom he told that he had resigned from the Department of State and worked at The New Republic. When Akhmerov began his second tenure in the United States in early 1942, resuming contact with Straight was high on his agenda. Straight’s obvious lack of commitment (as well as concerns on this score in Moscow) notwithstanding, according to a reference compiled at Moscow Center in late February 1942, “it was decided to continue work with Michael Straight, since he had interesting connections and was close to the Roosevelt family.” Vassiliev’s notes make it clear, however, that despite his high hopes, Akhmerov “proved unable to resume business cooperation with ‘Nigel,’ although their personal relations remained friendly.” ⁹

Click here to have a glimpse of an English translation of a fascinating Moscow NKGB document from April 1942, which discusses Moscow’s plans regarding “Nigel” Scroll to top of the documents’ p. 2

Any friendly relations aside, in June, 1942 the Moscow NKGB foreign intelligence Center filed a report received from its chief resident in the USA, “Maxim,” whose real name was Vasilii Zarubin: ““‘Maxim’ thinks that N. has been ideologically corrupted: this is borne out by his anti-Soviet statements. For instance, he contends that in the war with Germany, the USSR is defending narrow national interests and that the worldwide Communist movement is not at all important to the USSR. In his view, the Sov. Union can be given a certain degree of assistance only because the war being fought by the USSR benefits England and the USA.” ¹⁰ But the friendly “personal relations” were obviously short-lived, for in the later part of 1942 Straight joined the US Army Air Corps and went through training to become a heavy-bomber pilot. He did not see any action, however, and spent the entire war in the American Midwest.

With the war’s end, Straight returned to New York and became publisher of The New Republic magazine. He hired former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace to be the magazine’s editor. Wallace’s name on the magazine mast doubled the circulation but he soon resigned to run for the presidency. Straight took over the editorship himself, having endorsed Harry Truman for president in the election of 1948. During the late 1940s, the Soviets continued to occasionally watch Straight, probably more as a source of perceived threat than as any prospect. According to Vassiliev’s notes, on May 14, 1946, the Soviet foreign intelligence London station reported to the Moscow Center: “N. [Nigel] came to L.[London] to visit his ailing mother. Met with “Johnson” (A. Blunt) and “Hicks”(Burgess). He declared that he had abandoned his polit. convictions because of disagreements with the CPUSA’s line.” ¹¹ According to Vassiliev notes, as of 1948, Nigel was still occasionally followed by three agents of the Soviets in New York. ¹²

In 1954, Straight wrote a book called Trial by Television, which was critical both of the recent McCarthyite witch-hunts and of Communism. In 1956, he left The New Republic and began writing novels.

In 1963, facing a background check after an offer from the Kennedy Administration to become chairman of the Advisory Council on the Arts, Straight voluntarily confessed to Kennedy assistant Arthur Schlesinger that he had a Communist past and had worked for some time for the KGB. Schlesinger referred him to the FBI. Straight was next debriefed by MI5 and turned in his British recruiter, Anthony Blunt. Since nothing was publicly revealed at the time, Straight was later able to become deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a position he held from 1969 to 1977. In 1993, he described his youthful Communist activities in his memoir, After Long Silence. Straight maintained until his death, on January 4, 2004, that he “was not a spy in the accepted usage of the word.” ¹³ This assertion is circumstantially corroborated in a brief profile of Straight in the semi-official history of Russian foreign intelligence, which limits his “work for the KGB” to briefly “passing some information” during “a few meetings with a Moscow representative before the war.” [[14. Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi vneshnei razvedki, tom 4, 1941-1945, Moskva: Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenija, 2003, s. 200. (The Essays on the History of Russian Foreign Intelligence, Vol. 4, 1941-1945, Moscow: International Relations, 2003, p. 200).]]

Kukin was born on November 23, 1897 to a working class family in Kursk. There is no information about his education or employment before the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. He served in the Red Army (RKKA) in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. In November 1918, he organized armed resistance groups to fight against the German forces in Byelorussia. In September 1919, he became an assistant regiment commander of the 12th Army. In 1920, as chairman of the revolutionary committee (“Revcom”) in the Crimean town of Bakhchisarai, he organized the fight against local gangsters. For his “courage and heroism in combat” Kukin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. ¹ After the end of the Civil War, he continued to serve in command positions in the Red Army until his discharge in 1926.

From 1926 to 1929, Kukin worked in Moscow as a Communist Party functionary; one of his jobs was as a member of the Moscow City Communist Party Committee. In 1929, he was admitted to the Institute of Red Professorship [Institut krasnoi professury], an institute of higher learning that trained social science lecturers and research scholars, as well as cadres, for the Central Communist Party and government agencies. In addition to his regular studies, Kukin went through intensive English language instruction. After his graduation in 1931, he became an operative of the OGPU foreign intelligence department (the INO), and in the fall of that year he was posted in London as a “legal” operative under the cover of a department head at Arcos Ltd. – the All-Russian Cooperative Society Ltd. From the 1920s until World War II, Arcos was a network of Soviet foreign commercial organizations based in London. Kukin’s work received rave reviews at Moscow Center, and he became a Center operative after his return to Moscow in late 1932.

In 1934 (according to his NKID personnel file; 1933 according to the biography posted on the website of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Kukin was posted in Harbin, Manchukuo as a “legal” operative under the cover of a department head of the Soviet Trade Mission. (Manchukuo was a puppet state set up by the Empire of Japan in Manchuria, China in 1932.) The main task of the OGPU’s Harbin station in that period was to inform on the activities of the Japanese in the country, and particularly the Japanese Kwantung Army, which was stationed in Manchukuo. Reportedly, Kukin managed to acquire substantive contacts in the circles that were of interest to Soviet intelligence. According to some Russian accounts, he was shifted in 1935 to a special-missions group named the SGON – the Special Group for Special Purposes. (This group is commonly known as “Yasha’s group” or “Uncle Yasha’s group,” after its head, Yakov Serebryansky) These accounts report that in 1935 Kukin was part of a special group that was involved in sabotage missions in China. The story seems to have originated with a book, Different Days of Secret War and Diplomacy, 1941, attributed to the Soviet spymaster, Pavel Sudoplatov, ² which was published a few years after Sudoplatov’s death by his son, Anatoly Sudoplatov. ³ But the Sudoplatov-sourced account does not agree with the available documentation. According to Kukin’s SVR bio, he had to return to Moscow in 1934 “due to a serious illness.” This is circumstantially confirmed by the reference cited above from Kukin’s NKID personnel file, according to which Kukin worked in Moscow as an instructor at the Political Office of the People’s Commissariat of Roads from 1935 to 1937. ⁴ This means that he was discharged from foreign intelligence service in 1935 and remained out of it until 1937.

In mid-1937, Kukin was reinstated as an operative of NKVD foreign intelligence and was soon posted in Washington, D.C. as a “legal” operative. Sudoplatov’s post mortem account in The Different Days of the Secret War and Diplomacy, 1941 erroneously describes Kukin as an “illegal,” ⁵, but the documented evidence of his “legal” status is unequivocal. According to Russian diplomatic files, “beginning in August 1937 Kukin was posted at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. as an attaché,” and in July 1938 he was promoted “to a vacant position as Second Secretary.” ⁶

In late 1940, Kukin returned to Moscow, where he became an operational officer at foreign intelligence headquarters. In 1943, he was posted in London as a “legal” resident under the cover of a position as Counselor at the Soviet Embassy. There, he became a substitute for Anatoly Gorsky, who became the “legal” resident in Washington, D.C. the next year. From Gorsky, Kukin took over running the famous Cambridge Five group of spies. According to his SVR biography, “Kukin not only managed to maintain the high level achieved earlier, but was able to obtain important documentary materials on all the issues of interest to the Center. Under his supervision, the residency continuously informed the Soviet political leadership on the policy of England, the USA and other nations, as well as on their plans for post-war reconstruction in Europe.” ⁷

Following the reorganization of the Soviet intelligence agencies in 1947, Kukin briefly became the resident of the newly established “umbrella” structure, The Committee of Information (KI) – and was simultaneously appointed Soviet Ambassador to Great Britain. Later in 1947, he returned to Moscow to continue his intelligence service at Moscow headquarters, as head of the First (Anglo-American) Department of MGB foreign intelligence, which was then part of the KI. He retired in 1952 and died in Moscow in 1979.

Henry Wallace

An American government and political leader who was Secretary of Agriculture in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration (from 1933 to 1940), Roosevelt’s second Vice President (from 1941 to 1944), Secretary of Commerce (from 1945 to 1946) and a third-party presidential candidate in 1948.

Henry Wallace was born on October 7, 1888 in a frame farmhouse near the town of Orient, Iowa, into a family of farmers turned publishers. His father, Harry Wallace, was the son of the Reverend Henry Wallace, who by 1888 was the publisher of the largest local newspaper and the editor of Iowa’s most influential farm journal. His mother – a deeply religious woman, brought up by a strict Methodist aunt – was a strong influence upon her son. Young Henry Wallace grew up in a home where idealistic notions of service to one’s fellow man were valued more than the pursuit of personal wealth and power. The Wallaces’ attitude toward farming was a mixture of religion, a sense of duty and a scientific pursuit. In 1892, the family relocated to Ames, Iowa so the father could complete his education at Iowa State College. In late 1893, Harry Wallace earned his bachelor’s degree and was appointed associate professor of dairying at Iowa State. Soon, he founded a semi-monthly, Farm and Dairy, and invited his father, Henry Wallace, to become its editor. Eventually, the paper developed into an influential journal, which advocated the application of science to agriculture, in addition to efficient planning and management.

In 1910, the younger Wallace graduated from Iowa State College, where he studied plant genetics and crossbreeding. He discovered and patented a hybrid corn that was more productive and disease-resistant than normal corn. This achievement allowed the young Wallace to found his own business to manufacture and distribute the plants, a venture that gave him valuable experience for his later career in public service. The communal society of turn-of-the-century Iowa, with its agrarian lifestyle, made a life-long impact upon Wallace’s values, particularly the idealism which is usually associated with his name.

Eventually, Wallace went to work for the family paper, then called Wallaces’ Farmer, and in the early 1920s he became its publisher after his father became Secretary of agriculture in the administrations of Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. The Wallaces were long-standing Republicans, but the younger Wallace broke with his father’s party in 1928 over the issue of farm relief and high tariffs. That same year he campaigned for the Democratic candidate, Alfred E. Smith, in the presidential elections. This brought Wallace to the attention of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was urged by Smith to run for governor of New York in 1928. In 1932, Wallace supported Roosevelt in the latter’s bid for the presidency. When Roosevelt became president, he appointed Henry A. Wallace to be his Secretary of Agriculture on March 4, 1933.

An idealist and intellectual, Wallace proved to be an efficient administrator as well. At the height of the Great Depression, he launched an activist farm program to limit production, subsidize growers and raise prices – and gradually implemented government planning in the farm belt. Determined to preserve the rural way of life, Wallace at the same time saw farming as a business and worked to make it profitable through a combination of New Deal programs, including the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Farm Credit Administration, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Soil Conservation Service, the food stamp and school lunch programs, etc. He also managed to turn the Department of Agriculture into one of the largest government departments, and it came to be considered the best-managed department during the New Deal years. With his long-term interest in agricultural science, Wallace also significantly expanded his department’s scientific programs. Its research center at Beltsville, Maryland came to be regarded as the largest agricultural station in the world.

In the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Wallace was a great secretary of agriculture. In 1933 a quarter of the American people still lived on farms, and agricultural policy was a matter of high political and economic significance. … Today, as a result of the agricultural revolution that in so many respects Wallace pioneered, fewer than 2% of Americans are employed in farm occupations – and they produce more than their grandfathers produced 70 years ago.” ¹

With time, Wallace’s liberal agenda expanded to include concern for the situation of labor and the urban poor, as well as for the growing threat from Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Japan. By the late 1930s, he had become an outspoken internationalist and a true Rooseveltian liberal. In 1940, posing America’s hard choice between the economy of Hitler’s New Order, America’s traditional unregulated system and the alternative regulated economy of the New Deal, Wallace argued: “Freedom in a grown-up world is different from freedom in a pioneer world. As a nation grows and matures, the traffic inevitably gets denser, and you need more traffic lights.” ² An original thinker and a prolific writer, during the years of the Great Depression Wallace was, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, “second only to Roosevelt as the most important figure of the New Deal.” ³

This explains Roosevelt’s choice of Wallace as his running mate when he decided to run for an unprecedented presidential third term in 1940. By that time, Wallace had a formidable following among the liberals, farmers, labor and minorities who made up the New Deal voting block – and looked like a logical presidential successor. Faced with resistance from the leadership of the Democratic Party, which saw Wallace as too idealistic and lacking the supporters needed to balance the ticket, Roosevelt threatened to drop out of the race – and ultimately won Wallace’s nomination as vice-presidential candidate.

As vice president, Wallace was the leading spokesman for American liberalism and increasingly an advocate of the idea that the world war should usher in a new era, which he called the “Century of the Common Man”: “I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come out of this war—can be and must be the century of the common man.” ⁴ Wallace was an early advocate of the creation of a permanent United Nations organization. On December 28, 1942, in a radio address on the 86th anniversary of the birth of President Woodrow Wilson, Wallace said: “The task of our generation—the generation which President Roosevelt once said has a ‘rendezvous with destiny’—is so to organize human affairs that no Adolf Hitler, no power-hungry warmongers, whatever their nationality, can ever again plunge the whole world into war and bloodshed.” Speaking before Detroit labor leaders on July 25, 1943, he urged that the goals of the New Deal must be taken up again – both in the United States and internationally.

In early 1944, speaking about his vision for post-war America, Wallace addressed the hopes of rank-and-file Americans and warned “the Big Three—Big Business, Big Labor and Big Agriculture”— that “if they struggle to grab federal power for monopolistic purposes [they] are certain to come into serious conflict unless they recognize the superior claims of the general welfare of the common man.” To realize these claims, Wallace saw a need for “the maximum use of all our resources in the service of the general welfare.” ⁵

Despite Wallace’s articulate commitment to Roosevelt’s vision for a better world, in 1944, when choosing the running mate for his fourth presidential campaign, Roosevelt bent to the strong opposition to Wallace among the Democratic Party leadership – probably to avoid the risk of division within the party. Although deeply disappointed, Wallace nevertheless accepted Roosevelt’s offer to become his Secretary of Commerce. Following Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, Wallace continued as Secretary of Commerce for President Harry Truman until the fall of the next year, when Truman dismissed Wallace after the latter’s September 12, 1946, speech at Madison Square Garden. In that speech, Wallace publicly voiced his opposition to Truman’s increasingly tough approach to the Soviet Union. ⁶

After his resignation as Secretary of Commerce on September 20, 1946, Wallace soon became the editor of the New Republic magazine. With the first winds of the Cold War, he quickly became one of the most prominent critics of American foreign policy and the course Soviet-American relations had taken since President Roosevelt’s death. In his crusade for change in U.S. policies, Wallace crossed paths with a nationwide organization, the Progressive Citizens of America, formed in December 1946. By late 1947, when Wallace decided that the only way to effect change in America was to run for president on an independent ticket, the Progressive Citizens of America began moving toward becoming a third party.

The party was launched in Philadelphia at the National Founding Convention of the New Party on July 23 -25, 1948. It adopted the name the Progressive Party and nominated Wallace for president. In his acceptance speech, Wallace made the case for the Democratic Party’s betrayal of the ideals of the New Deal. “In marched the generals—and out went the men … who had planned social security and built Federal housing, the men who had dug the farmer out of the dust bowl and the workman out of the sweatshop.” ⁷

Wallace visits the Soviet Embassy with his wife and daughter, May 1945

The party was endorsed by the CPUSA and counted a number of secret Communists among its founders, the members of its National Committee and Wallace’s advisors and speechwriters. The party’s ticket included universal government health insurance and civil rights; it opposed the Berlin airlift and blamed the United States for the Communist conquest of Czechoslovakia. Judging from memos and profiles in the Russian files from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, the American Communists had covertly “played a decisive role in the organization of the party and have extended to it their complete support,” but considered Wallace to be their “temporary ally.” In the Soviet view, the Progressive Party was “a bourgeois party of a liberal direction.” ⁸ Despite the behind-the-scenes Communist influence and the continuous interest on the part of the Soviets, who saw Wallace as a political figure the “progressive forces” could rally around, in the Soviet-era files he does not look like a “tool of Moscow.” This frequent charge during the 1948 campaign cost Wallace votes even among his expected constituency. It is difficult to say whether Wallace was naive in not noticing the Communists’ role in his party – or whether he, too, saw the Communists as his ‘temporary allies.’ Wallace’s dream soured at the polls, where he received only a little more than 2% of the votes nationwide.

The presidential campaign of 1948 became the final act in Wallace’s political life, after which he began gradually drifting into political obscurity. The Molotov Papers collection in Moscow contains a once-secret TASS report from February 26, 1950 on Wallace’s speech at the Progressive Party convention – heavy with Molotov’s pencil marks. Molotov’s pencil stopped at the words, “We must fight for God and for America, … to save America from a false Prussian concept that ‘Force is law.’ We are not Prussians. We are not materialists, we are Americans.” ⁹ In the summer of 1950, Wallace walked out on the party over the issue of the war in Korea. In 1952, he published, Where I Was Wrong, describing his reversal on leftist politics. By that time, he had retired to his experimental farm in upstate New York – to return to the experimental farming and agricultural science of his youth. In the 1956 presidential election Wallace voted for Eisenhower, the Republican candidate – but he was enthusiastic about the election of Democrat John F. Kennedy in 1960. He died on November 18, 1965.

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Vladimir Georgievich Dekanozov

Soviet statesman and one of the leaders of the Soviet State Security (GB) in the 1930s. Dekanozov was head of the NKVD foreign intelligence from December 2, 1938 to May 13, 1939, and then, from May 1939 to 1947, was assistant head of the People’s Commissariat (later Ministry) of Foreign Affairs.

Dekanozov, whose real name was Dekanozishvili (or Dekanizishvili), was born in 1898 in Baku (now Azerbaijan) to the family of a controller of an oil company. His father later became the leader of the socialist-federationalist party in pre-revolutionary Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire. The son graduated from the first gymnasium (a seven- or eight-year school which provided secondary and high school education) in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia) and studied in the medical departments of the Universities of Saratov and Baku. Dekanozov took part in the revolutionary movement in Transcaucasia, including the underground revolutionary movement in Baku in 1918. That same year he joined the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and, in 1919, worked at the Ministry of Healthcare of Azerbaijan. In May 1920, he joined the Russian Communist Party (RCP (b)).

From 1920 to 1921, Dekanozov was the commander of a special detachment of the 20th division of the 11th army of the RKKA. In June 1921, he transferred to the Azerbaijan Emergency Commission, commonly known as the Cheka, as an operative of the department that was fighting gangs. There he came to know Lavrentii Beria, who would later become his patron. Until 1931, Dekanozov served in leadership positions in the Cheka agencies of Azerbaijan and Georgia. Meanwhile, the influence of the special services increased in all spheres of Soviet life, and, as a result, Dekanozov moved in December 1931 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, where he served as the secretary in charge of transportation and supplies. In February 1934, he became the head of the Central Committee’s Department of Trade. In October 1936, he was transferred to the Council of People’s Commissars of Georgia, where he became the People’s Commissar (Narcom) of the food-processing industry. In March 1937, he was simultaneously appointed chairman of Georgia’s state planning authority (Gosplan). During 1937, he also became a delegate [member] of the Soviet quasi-parliament, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

In late 1938, after Lavrentii Beria became the People’s Commissar (Narcom) of Internal Affairs, Dekanozov followed him to Moscow. On December 2, 1938, Beria appointed Dekanozov head of the counterespionage department (known at that time as the 3rd department) of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD of the USSR – and, simultaneously, head of NKVD foreign intelligence (then known as the 5th department of the GUGB NKVD.) On December 17, 1938, he was also appointed deputy head of the GUGB NKVD. In that capacity, he became the main assistant to Beria in the latter’s purge from the NKVD of the protégés of its former Narcom, Nickolai Ezhov. Dekanozov also supervised the purges of the army, which had already been weakened by arrests in 1937 and 1938.

On May 4, 1939, Dekanozov was transferred to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and appointed its Deputy People’s Commissar (Narcom). On August 23, 1939, the Soviets and the Nazis signed a non-aggression pact, often known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, after the Soviet and Nazi foreign secretaries who signed the pact and its accompanying secret protocols. That same year, Dekanozov became a candidate for membership in the Central Committee of the VCP (b).

In the summer of 1940, Dekanozov was in Lithuania, where he coordinated efforts to annex Lithuania to the territory of the Soviet Union – as well as a campaign of arrests of “anti-Soviet elements” there.

In late November 1940, Dekanozov was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Berlin (while remaining the Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs) – remaining in that position until the Nazi attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. During 1941, he became a full member of the party’s Central Committee. It is a common wisdom in Russia that as an ambassador, Dekanozov proved unable to appraise the situation and evaluate the Nazi plans against the Soviet Union. In fact, according to recently published documents, Dekanozov did appraise the situation and warned his immediate boss, Molotov, of the Nazi plans to attack the Soviet Union. After his return to Moscow he remained the Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Beginning in October 1941, Dekanozov supervised the work of several departments of the commissariat, which were responsible for Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Mongolia, China, and all the nations that were allies of Nazi Germany. In addition, he controlled the commissariat’s finances, personnel and consular affairs.

In March 1947, Dekanozov was fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and transferred to the Main Directorate of Soviet Overseas Property. He was based in Budapest, where he worked with another Beria protégé, Vsevolod Merkulov. Reportedly, the reason for Dekanozov’s demotion was a scandalous story about sexual harassment of a young woman.

In 1949, Dekanozov was fired again, and this time, he had no job for several years. Then, in 1952, he was appointed to the board of the Committee of Radio Broadcasting. In April 1953, at a time when Beria was consolidating his power following Stalin’s death, Dekanozov was named Minister of Internal Affairs of Georgia – only to be fired and arrested on June 30, following Beria’s arrest. On December 23, 1953, he was sentenced to death and executed. ¹