Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr

Author:John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr [Haynes, John Earl & Klehr, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, General
ISBN: 9780300129878
Google: M8p00bTFvRkC
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2000-01-01T00:24:52.105538+00:00

Spying on Other Enemies

Even when the KGB was not plotting the murder of Stalin’s enemies, Soviet intelligence wanted to know what they were doing and with whom they were in contact. In some cases, infiltration of exile communities was designed to identify individuals as possible recruits for intelligence work. In others, there were efforts to discredit or disrupt their activities. One KGB circular order shows the broad sweep of Soviet interest; sent to KGB stations in New York, Mexico City, and Paris in 1945, it ordered forwarding of material on “old and new Russian and nationalist émigrés, the Russian, Armenian and Mohammedan clergy, Trotskyites and Zionists.”21

Within the United States, the KGB had agents reporting on many of these groups. One unidentified agent, Alexandrov, reported on Russian émigrés, received a subsidy, and was promised Soviet citizenship. Another, Eugénie Olkhine, reestablished contact with the KGB in 1945 after a long break and supplied information about the Russian Orthodox Patriarch in the United States. She, too, was promised Soviet citizenship. Arrow (unidentified) worked among Carpatho-Russians, as did Eufrosina Dvoichenko-Markov, who also reported on Romanians and on several State Department employees with whom she had contact. Her son, Demetrius, was a U.S. Army sergeant on duty in Alaska. He was assigned to military counterintelligence duties and obtained some sort of manual that he turned over to the KGB. The KGB thought Demetrius had prospects, and it had a plan to fund his college education after the war.22

One of the most important Soviet agents working among émigrés was Sergey Kurnakov, a former tsarist cavalry officer who had immigrated to the United States and later became an ardent but undeclared Communist.23 In addition to providing information about his fellow immigrant Russians, Kurnakov was a highly active KGB liaison agent. As a reward for his services, the KGB arranged for Kurnakov and his son to return to the USSR. The KGB also had sources who trolled for information about Bessarabians and Ukrainians. Mikhail Tkach edited a pro-Communist Ukrainian-language newspaper and supervised a small network of subagents. Tkach’s daughter, Ann Sidorovich, and her husband, Michael, were part of Julius Rosenberg’s espionage network.24

Several agents were assigned to infiltrate Jewish organizations. If the cover name Polecats, which the KGB used for Trotskyists, reflected Stalin’s disdain for his ideological arch-enemy, the cover name for the Zionists in the KGB cables, Rats, was likewise a reflection of the Stalinist opinion of Jews. During World War II, for tactical reasons, the USSR encouraged the formation of Jewish groups in Russia that appealed to world Jewry for assistance. Always wary of Jewish nationalism, however, the KGB monitored all their activities. In 1943 Solomon Michoels and Itzhak Feffer, representatives of the USSR’s Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, toured the United States to great acclaim in Jewish communities. Feffer was himself a KGB agent. In 1947 Grigory Kheifets, who had run the KGB office in San Francisco for much of World War II, became Feffer’s deputy. Kheifets’s timing, however, was poor, as Soviet postwar purges took on an antisemitic air.

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