Chivin

Alexander Vassiliev’s notes from KGB archives partially identify an individual named Chivin who may have also been a Soviet intelligence officer defector. The only information available about him was made public in the 1990s in Vassiliev’s notes.

Chivin, whose OGPU code name was Смит (Smith), was illegal rezident of a special rezidentura in New York known as “Yasha’s group.” This group was made up descendants from Russian families that Yakov (“Yasha”) Isaakovich Serebryanskiy had recruited to cooperate with the OGPU when he was working as an illegal in Palestine in the early 1920s. The group was separate from other rezidenturas and had the mission of recruiting agents for “deep penetrations” of strategic military installations. The agents would be activated to carry out subversive and terrorist operations in wartime.[i] “Yasha’s group” was later reorganized into the special operations group led by Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov.[ii]

While in New York, Chivin primary mission appears to have been to recruit operational support agents, including document forgers and couriers. Chivin was involved in recruiting Jacob Golos, who ran the OGPU-sponsored fraudulent travel document business World Tourists that supplied documents for OGPU travelers through the 1930s. Chivin was introduced to Golos in 1930 by a Russian émigré named Yakov Lvovich Pokrovsky, who assisted Golos in acquiring passports.[iii] Other sources indicate that Golos was formally recruited by OGPU illegal Abram Osipovich Eingorn (variant Einhorn), although it is possible Chivin and Eingorn worked together, as they were both in New York at the same time.[iv] While Sudoplatov mentions Golos as being playing a primary role in an OGPU network,[v] he makes no mention of Chivin (Smith).[vi]

In May 1934, the legal OGPU rezident in New York, Petr Davydovich Gutzeit, operating under the name Petr D. Gusev, a vice consul at the Soviet consulate general in New York, wrote to Moscow describing Chivin’s mission as recruiting sailors on steamships sailing between America and ports in Scandinavia, France, and Holland. Gutzeit reported, however, that Chivin’s work was inactive and Gutzeit asked that he be reassigned to San Francisco develop west coast contacts for the rezidentura, possibly for the same support mission. Gutzeit also requested that Golos’s activities be transferred to Gutzeit’s rezidentura. Moscow responded in August to that Chivin should transfer another agent named Andrey to Gutzeit to recruit sailors.[vii] Gutzeit was later arrested during the Purge in 1938, and during interrogations mentioned that Chivin had used Joseph Katz, a Soviet intelligence agent who was associated with Golos and later with Elizabeth Bentley, in his recruitment operations.[viii]

Chivin’s status was unclear as of September 1938, when the New York rezidentura sent a telegram to Moscow complaining that Chivin had practically been forgotten. At one point when Chivin traveled to New York he had only five dollars to his name, even though the New York rezidentura estimated that his work was worth a thousand dollars per month. Chivin was so worried that he had suffered a heart attack.[ix] Vassiliev’s notes from KGB files indicate that Chivin refused to return to the USSR on 15 August 1940.[x] No further information is available about his subsequent whereabouts.

[i] Vadim Abramov, Евреи в КГБ: Палачи и Жертвы (Jews in the KGB: Executioners and Victims) (Moscow: Jauza/EKSMO, 2005), pp. 292-297.
[ii] Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov, Спецоперации. Лубянка и Кремль 1930–1950 годы (Special Tasks: Lubyanka and the Kremlin 1930-1950) (Moscow: OLMA Press, 1997), p. 25.
[iii] Alexander Vassiliev, “Vassiliev White Notebook #1 Translated,” 2009, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Alexander Vassiliev Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/112564, p. 140.
[iv] Teodor Kirillovich Gladkov, Наш человек в Нью-Йорке. Судьба резидента (Our Man in New York: The Fate of a Rezident) (Moscow: Yauza EKSMO, 2007).
[v] Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: Lubyanka and the Kremlin 1930-1950, p. 165.
[vi] The SVR’s official public history of Soviet foreign intelligence also makes no mention of Chivin (Smith), although this series tends to ignore Soviet intelligence failures. See Yevgeniy Maksimovich Primakov, managing ed., Очерки истории российской внешней разведки (Essays on the History of Russian Foreign Intelligence), Volume 3 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya, 2003).
[vii] Vassiliev, “Black Notebook Translated,” pp. 40, 41.
[viii] Vassiliev, “White Notebook #1 Translated,” p. 142
[ix] Vassiliev, “Black Notebook Translated,” p. 152;
[x ] Vassiliev, “White Notebook #1