Samuel Gershovich Ginzberg

Samuel Gershevich Ginzberg was born into a Jewish family on 28 June 1899 in Podwolcziska, Galicia, the same town where Poretskiy was born. Ginzberg and Poretskiy were within a few months of each other in age, grew up together, and remained close friends until Poretskiy’s death. As with most Soviet personnel in the early history of the Soviet Union, when Ginzberg entered government service he selected a name that sounded less Jewish, and was known from the beginning of his intelligence career was Walter Germanovich Krivitsky.[i]

Information about Ginzberg comes from his own writings published in France, the United States, and Great Britain; and from British and American debriefings. He attracted attention in the West initially with a series of articles published in the Saturday Evening Post beginning in April 1939. He published these and other articles in book form later in 1939 in London under the title I Was Stalin’s Agent, and in New York City under the title In Stalin’s Secret Service.[ii] He also testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities in October 1939. However, like Poretskiy, he became best known for his death, which occurred under suspicious circumstances in February 1941, and which to this day is a source of debate about whether it was a suicide or a well-crafted, Soviet-sponsored assassination.

Ginzberg’s spent his young life in Ukraine, studying at a gymnasium in Lvov. He joined the Polish Communist Party in 1918, the year before Poretskiy, and then the Bolshevik Party in 1919. Ginzberg sponsored Poretskiy’s later admission into the Bolshevik Party in 1927.[iii]

Like Poretskiy, Ginzberg worked as a Comintern agent behind Polish lines during the Polish-Russian War from 1919-1921, conducting sabotage and propaganda operations. The Polish Communist Party subordinated itself to the interests of the Red Army during the war and took orders directly from Red Army commander Mikhail Tukhachevskiy, participating in sabotage operations and obstructing French-supplied weapons shipments. Ginzberg traveled throughout Poland organizing strikes and labor demonstrations to obstruct the weapons transfers. The Comintern also published and distributed pro-Soviet propaganda, including the Bolshevik newspaper Svit (Dawn) and a speech by Polish Communist leader Tomasz Dombal, who was imprisoned by the Polish government. Ginzberg describes the Polish-Russian war as the “one serious attempt made by Moscow to carry Bolshevism into Western Europe on the points of bayonets.”[iv] Similar to Graff, Ginzberg ascribed its failure to Stalin, whom he described as a self-interested and inept military tactician who disobeyed Tukhachevskiy’s order to protect the Red Army’s flank in 1920.[v]

Ginzberg was recruited into the Razvedupr in 1921, and completed intelligence training in 1922. In January 1923 he was working at Razvedupr headquarters when French and Belgian forces occupied the Ruhr region of Germany. Hoping to capitalize on German anger over the move, which compounded Germany’s humiliation brought on by the Treaty of Versailles, Ginzberg was among a group of Razvedupr officers dispatched to Germany to reinitiate Comintern operations that had been pushed underground after a failed Soviet attempt to establish a Bolshevik regime in Bavaria in 1919. Ginzberg joined Poretskiy, who was already in Germany, to establish clandestine cells among German Communists and organized militant units that the Soviets hoped would eventually become the German Red Army.

Ginzberg’s explanation for the failed October 1923 German revolution was Moscow’s indecision about a date to launch it. Comintern representatives in Germany received launch dates from Moscow several times in September and October 1923, only to receive cancellation orders soon thereafter. Finally, a date was set and cells were ready to act, but again a cancellation notice came from Moscow. But this time the notice came too late to reach the Hamburg cell, which launched its revolution alone and was quickly neutralized. Workers did not rise up against the government as the Comintern hoped. Instead, the brief uprising resulted in the opposite to what the Soviets had intended: Communist activists died and Communist-Left Socialist politicians were expelled from parliaments. The German revolution was over as quickly as it began.[vi]

Unlike Poretskiy, however, Ginzberg remained in Germany even after the failed revolution as a member of a Razvedupr cell that retained the best German agents for clandestine operations. He became a self-described German specialist, and operated against Germany for most of the next decade.[vii] Ginzberg believed that if the Soviet Union and Germany were to go to war, a sabotage network would be more valuable than an espionage network. Correspondingly, he organized his networks so that some of the agents assigned to espionage missions during peacetime could be employed as sabotage agents during war.[viii]

The failed Germany revolution was on par with other similar attempts to produce Bolshevik revolutions in Europe. According to Ginzberg, Lenin believed that successful revolutions would install Bolshevik regimes across Western Europe within a year of the revolution in Russia. Short-lived Soviet republics had even been established in Hungary and Bavaria as early as 1919, and in Persia in 1920. But the Bolshevik regime in Russia was heavily burdened with a civil war and was unable to support these fledgling regimes, which soon collapsed. Abortive Communist revolutions in Estonia in 1924 and Bulgaria in 1925 had similar results. Ginzberg adds that the failures in Hungary, Poland, Germany, Estonia, Bulgaria were analyzed in great deal in Moscow; however, in no case were Russian leaders or Bolshevism in general ever held at fault for the failures. Local leaders were blamed, and the myth of infallibility among Soviet leaders was always upheld.[ix]

Similar to themes in Graff’s writings, Ginzberg’s writings emphasize Stalin’s betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution both inside the Soviet Union and abroad. According to both Graff and Ginzberg, Stalin viewed foreign communist parties that slavishly followed directions from Moscow as just tools in his geopolitical political campaign. He had little respect for them beyond how he could use them. Ginzberg cast additional light on the cynical way that Stalin used and then discarded foreign communists who had worked loyally for the Soviet Union. He named foreign a number of foreign communists who, after following Comintern orders, traveled to Moscow only to be arrested, exiled, and executed in Soviet prisons.[x]

Ginzberg provided extensive information about the Comintern apparatus and priorities. He described the Comintern’s Lenin School, established in 1926, where foreign students were trained in Bolshevik politics and revolutionary methods. After initial political indoctrination, the most adept students graduated to Razvedupr-sponsored military-style training, where they learned to employ weapons and explosives in revolutionary endeavors. Then, only best of those students stayed even longer for intelligence operational training, including using radios and forging passports.[xi]

The first students at the Lenin School were from Central Europe, but eventually students from Britain and the United States began to arrive. Similarly, Comintern OMS money was initially mostly dedicated to Germany and Central Europe until Stalinism overshadowed the objectives of international revolution. Eventually students from Britain and the United States began to arrive at the Lenin School and priorities were shifted toward turning public opinion in the capitalist countries—France, Great Britain, and the United States—toward the Soviet Union instead of organizing revolutions in Germany.[xii]

Ginzberg described the Comintern as mainly a communications and finance channel to relay Stalin’s vacillating policies to the communist parties of the world, which were expected to comply without question. Foreign communist parties themselves never raised enough money to cover more than a small portion of their own expenses. The Comintern OMS covered the rest. Consequently, the OMS enjoyed considerable control over foreign communist parties. Financial transfers evolved and became more sophisticated over the history of the Comintern, from shipping bags of confiscated diamonds abroad to sending cash via diplomatic pouches.[xiii]

Ginzberg used the example of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to illustrate Stalin’s control: before the pact was announced on 23 August 1939, communist parties around the world advocated the Soviet political narrative of anti-fascism and collective security. Anti-Fascism was the primary recruitment lever to attract people toward sympathy with the Soviet Union and cooperation with the NKVD. The day after the announcement, those same communist parties rejected collective security and the fight against fascism and advocated for cooperation with Germany against the capitalist West. Ginzberg similarly explained that Stalin’s Purge could not have been carried out successfully without the cooperation of communist parties around the world, since they vigorously pushed the Stalinist line particularly in Europe and the United States.[xiv]

Communist leaders in Europe and the United States were expected to direct their loyalty to the Comintern above their own countries interests. Ginzberg stated, for example, that Earl Browder, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the United States, was completely controlled from Moscow, and that “the moment he stops obeying these instructions, he ceases to be a member of the American Communist Party.” The Communist Party of the United States was initially expected to repay Comintern money by acquiring U.S. passports and travel documents to be used for clandestine travel by the OGPU, Razvedupr, and Comintern. Later in the 1930s, U.S.-based communists became sources of military technology. Ginzberg quoted a Razvedupr official in the United States as saying, in response to the question of why he used American Communist Party functionaries so much for espionage, “Why not. They receive good Soviet money. They’ll never make a revolution, so they might as well earn their pay.”[xv]

As Hitler took control of Germany in 1933, the traditional Comintern mission of encouraging communist revolution faded and the Comintern shifted its emphasis to anti-Nazism, which attracted European leftists who would not have openly sided with Bolshevik revolution. When the Comintern became a personal instrument of Stalin those leftists transferred their allegiance directly to him. According to Ginzberg, up to the early 1930s, 80 percent of OGPU agents were recruited from among communist circles. However, as the Nazi Party began to take hold in Germany, OGPU could use public fear of Nazism as a draw for recruits. By the time Ginzberg defected, he estimated that only 50 percent of OGPU recruits were from communist parties, the rest coming from other anti-fascist circles.[xvi]

However, according to Ginzberg anti-fascism was only the public manifestation of a two-sided Soviet foreign policy toward Germany. In Stalin’s assessment, Germany was both a public enemy and a private ally. In 1934, Stalin enlisted Soviet propagandist Karl Radek to articulate the public line of this policy. He wrote articles excoriating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, linking them to a Soviet-concocted British imperial scheme to oppose the Soviet Union. Even while Radek was articulating the public line, he was fully aware of negotiations underway with Berlin toward a pact of alliance. Ginzberg recounts a conversation he had with Radek, in which Radek revealed the secret side of the Soviet relationship with Germany: “Only fools can imagine we could ever break with Germany. What I am writing here is one thing—the realities are something else. No one can give us what Germany has given us. For us to break with Germany is simply impossible.”[xvii]

Stalin’s secret aspirations to build a relationship with Germany were partially founded in Hitler’s blood purge of the Nazi Party in June 1934, which became known as the Night of Long Knives. Ginzberg claims that Stalin was impressed by Hitler’s decisiveness in eliminating internal opposition and he studied Hitler’s tactics closely, laying the foundation for Stalin’s purges over the following four years.[xviii] Stalin considered that Hitler’s purge was the sign of a strong leader, the type of leader Stalin wanted to be.[xix] Ginzberg wrote, “[Stalin] had a profound contempt for the ‘weakling’ democratic nations, and an equally profound respect for the ‘mighty’ totalitarian states. And he was guided throughout by the rule that one must come to terms with a superior power.”[xx]

Even before the Night of Long Knives, Soviet intelligence organizations were both working against and cooperating with German intelligence. Ginzberg described a relationship between the two countries’ intelligence services that had existed since the institution of the Treaty of Versailles, and that Berlin was a clearinghouse for intelligence reporting of common interest to both the Soviets and Germans. Soviet intelligence operations against Poland and Great Britain were run from Berlin with the full awareness of, and in some cases the support from the German government.[xxi]

While the two services shared some information at the government level, their cooperation did not extend to the field level and they did not typically share agents, although they did inadvertently recruit the same agents at times. Ginzberg gave the example that came to light when Austrian counterintelligence arrested a Soviet intelligence network in December 1931, and an agent in the network was also being run by German intelligence. Razvedupr Chief Jan Berzin dispatched Ginzberg to Vienna to sort out the ensuing flap and to prevent the existence of German-Soviet intelligence cooperation from becoming public knowledge.[xxii] Ginzberg told MI5 that, in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he was certain that Soviet and German intelligence were still cooperating, although by 1939 Ginzberg had already defected and was only providing his opinion, not inside knowledge.[xxiii]

This liaison relationship did not, however, prevent Soviet intelligence from working against Germany. Ginzberg’s career was primarily focused on Germany, and he spent time in various European countries running operating against Germany and German allies, particularly collecting military and technological intelligence. After a brief tour at Razvedupr headquarters, Ginzberg worked abroad in Germany (1926-1927), France (1927-1928), Italy (1928-1930), and Austria (1931), and he was recognized for his outstanding achievements: in 1928 he was awarded an honorary military weapon for successful operations.

His tour in Italy was under cover as a scholar doing research on the history of slavery in the Vatican library, but his intelligence mission included obtaining the plans for an Italian submarine.[xxiv] Mussolini had agreed to sell the Soviet Union the plans for an outmoded model, but Stalin wanted the most recent. So in 1928, Ginzberg used a communist sympathizer to make contact with an Italian engineer who was willing to sell the plans.[xxv] For the effort, Ginzberg received the Order of the Red Banner in 1931. His network later collected the plans for a French submarine,[xxvi] and he acquired the decryption key for German diplomatic communications, giving Moscow the ability to intercept German secret negotiations with other countries.[xxvii]

Not all operations turned out as successfully. He ran two agents in Germany who provided the plans for a new aircraft engine, and the Razvedupr passed the plans to a Soviet aircraft factory, which implemented them directly without any alteration to obscure the source. Unfortunately for Ginzberg’s agents, Germany had recruited an agent inside that same Soviet plant that received the plans, who reported their existence to German intelligence, leading German counterintelligence to arrest and execute the Soviet agents in Germany. The officers in the Soviet Union who were responsible for providing the unaltered plans to the aircraft engine factory and revealing the sources were also shot.[xxviii]

Ginzberg returned to Moscow in 1932 and took Marxism-Leninism courses under the Central Committee of the Party in 1933.[xxix] He also reportedly served as the Deputy Director of the Institute of War Industries in 1933-1934,[xxx] where Ginzberg’s role may have been to ensure that intelligence-derived technological information was used properly. These two assignments were probably simultaneous, as students in senior schools often worked at the same time as they were studying.

He was then assigned to his final Soviet intelligence post as the illegal rezident in the Netherlands from October 1935 until his defection in September 1937, where he focused most of his effort on collecting intelligence about Germany and running sources into Spain. In 1936, Razvedupr received reports about German-Japanese negotiations to create an anti-Comintern agreement. Information about the agreement was a high-priority intelligence requirement and Moscow pressed for documentary proof throughout 1936. In August 1936, Ginzberg’s agent network obtained a file from Berlin containing German intercepts of Japanese communications with Tokyo during the anti-Comintern pact negotiations. The Razvedupr in Holland already possessed to Japanese code book to decode the messages. And thus, Stalin received direct information about German-Japanese collaboration before the anti-Comintern pact was signed on 25 November 1936.[xxxi]

Despite this success, in December 1936, INO Chief Slutskiy instructed Ginzberg to reduce operations against Germany.[xxxii] Stalin expected good news from his chief negotiator in Berlin, David Kandelaki, who had reinvigorated German-Soviet negotiations toward a Soviet-German trade pact, and Stalin did not want clandestine operations against Germany to spoil his chances. Ginzberg quoted OGPU chief Yezhov as saying, “We must come to terms with a superior power like Nazi Germany.”[xxxiii] Ginzberg would certainly agree with the statement made by American historian Teddy Uldricks: “It seems that the traditional image in Soviet historiography of a USSR committed unequivocally and as a matter of principle to an anti-fascist, anti-aggression collective security must be rejected.”[xxxiv]

Germany rebuffed Stalin’s secret overtures in 1937, and Soviet public messaging continued to portray Germany and fascism as the primary threat to the Soviet Union. When Chief of the General Staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other senior Red Army officers were arrested in June 1937, they were charged with espionage on behalf of Germany and quickly executed.[xxxv] These charges allowed the Soviet Union to continue to portray itself to the world as the bulwark against an aggressive Germany, affording Soviet intelligence numerous opportunities to recruit anti-Nazi sources.

Ginzberg’s prediction that Hitler and Stalin would reach a nonaggression pact was the biggest bombshell in his revelations. He made the prediction in his Saturday Evening Post article on 29 April 1939, saying “Stalin wants to avoid war at any cost. He fears war most. If Hitler will assure him peace, even at the price of important economic concessions, he will appease Hitler further and give him free hand in all other directions.”[xxxvi] In his book published in November 1939, Ginzberg triumphantly reminds readers that he had predicted the German-Soviet pact several months before it was announced.[xxxvii] Soviet intelligence sources that had been recruited on anti-fascist grounds were particularly shocked when Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which tore away the veneer of anti-Nazism and showed the reality of Stalin’s plans.[xxxviii] However, although the Hitler-Stalin pact inhibited recruitments among leftists, it made it easier for Soviet intelligence to recruit former White Russian sources, who responded to appeals to Russian nationalist sentiments rather than Bolshevism, Stalinism or Trotskyism. Stalin’s domination of the Baltic states especially appealed to Russian nationalists.[xxxix]

Ginzberg also connected Soviet intervention in the civil war in Spain in 1936 on the side of the anti-fascist Spanish Republicans with Stalin’s efforts to woo Germany. From his position in The Hague, Ginzberg claimed to have dispatched agents to Spain and Portugal to establish source networks soon after the Civil War began. The Razvedupr also received orders to arrange clandestine arms shipments to Spain from every possible source. The Razvedupr was willing to use as many agents as needed for this effort, even if the agents were compromised in the operation.[xl] The need for aircraft was particularly urgent to counter imported Italian and German planes flown by Franco’s forces. Ginzberg’s agents unsuccessfully approached the French Foreign Ministry to obtain transit clearance for weapons en route to Spain, but later found Latin American governments to be more amenable, and they succeeded in securing import certificates to cover the weapons’ ultimate destination in Spain. Ginzberg also wrote about dispatching an agent to an unidentified government in Eastern Europe to purchase aircraft. The incident mirrored Henri Christiaan Pieck’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Greek government to participate in an aircraft deal in support of Spain.[xli]

Comintern rhetoric attracted thousands of foreigners to Spain to fight in the International Brigade. Ginzberg wrote, however, that the Comintern soon faded into the background and the OGPU took charge of the volunteers and conducted a purge in Spain similar to what was happening in the Soviet Union. Stalin used the OGPU in Spain to filter the volunteers and identify which ones supported him and which did not. Ginzberg described later defector Leyba Lazerevich Feldbin’s/Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov’s job in Spain as identifying and eliminating dissidents, independents, and anti-Stalinists, which Moscow collectively labeled “Trotskyists.”[xlii] Feldbin/Orlov later vehemently denied having anything to do with purges in Spain, but Ginzberg illustrated the “countless disappearances” of International Brigade volunteers by noting one particular example of a Communist volunteer whom he described using the code name FRIEND. FRIEND was a young British communist who was eager to support Moscow in any way he could. He was trained as a radio technician and traveled several times to Moscow hoping to get work. He was rebuffed three times from 1933 to 1935 and told to go home and await instructions. He traveled to Moscow a fourth time in February 1936 on Ginzberg’s recommendation, enrolled in an OGPU radio-operator course, and was sent to Spain to support OGPU operations. After a short time in Spain, the OGPU accused FRIEND of having Trotskyist sympathies, arrested him, and sent him to prison in Russia.

Ginzberg wrote about FRIEND in is first Saturday Evening Post article in April 1939.[xliii] He did not mention in the article, but did tell MI5 during debriefings, that FRIEND was actually Brian Goold-Verschoyle, who had served for a short time in early 1936 as a courier between John Herbert King and Henri Christiaan Pieck in London. Although Ginzberg never publicly named Goold-Verschoyle, his mother Sylvia recognized her son’s description in the Saturday Evening Post article and sent Ginzberg a heart-wrenching letter asking him for help to find Brian. Sylvia sent Brian’s girlfriend, Margarete Charlotte Moos, to New York in 1939 to meet Ginzberg and appeal for his help; Ginzberg suspected Moos of being an OGPU agent. On Sylvia’s appeal, the British Foreign Office consulted with the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir William Seeds, for advice on approaching the Soviet authorities about locating Goold-Verschoyle who had allegedly disappeared in the Soviet Union. Seeds responded that, if Ginzberg’s information was correct, it would be a sensitive matter and the mere mention of it could derail ongoing British-Soviet negotiations. Sylvia wrote to Ginzberg in August 1939, “You are the only person who can help to save his life for us as you knew him personally during his adventures.”[xliv] Ginzberg told the truth when he responded that he did not know any more about Brian’s fate than he had published in April. Only after ten years did Goold-Verschoyle’s name resurface in brief press statement by German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann, who was also a victim of the Purge and had met Goold-Verschoyle in prison in 1938. She said Goold-Verschoyle had been sentenced to 11 years in prison, sent to a prison camp in the Arctic, and was never heard from again.[xlv]

The OGPU also took advantage of the influx of foreigners into Spain for operational purposes. According to Ginzberg, one of the most valuable aspects of foreign fighters volunteering in the International Brigade was their passport. When an International Brigade volunteer arrived in Spain, the OGPU confiscated his or her passport and told the volunteer it had been “lost.” The OGPU then sent it to Moscow to be used for OGPU operations, particularly prizing the passports American and Canadian volunteers.[xlvi] Many International Brigade volunteers complained that their passports have ben confiscated and never returned, confirming Ginzberg’s assertion. Ramón Mercader, the NVKD-hired assassin who killed Lev Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 was traveling on a passport that had originally belonged to a Canadian International Brigade volunteer.[xlvii]

Along with the thousands of Western communists who trekked to Spain believing that Stalin’s intervention was intended to spread international communist revolution, Ginzberg himself initially hoped Spain might reignite the old Bolshevik revolutionary spirit. In July 1936, after the trial of the Sixteen in Moscow, Ginzberg met in Paris with a shaken Poretskiy, who proposed that the two old friends make a break with Stalin together to protest the executions. Ginzberg, however, offered two reasons why they should persevere. First, he advised patience to allow the Spanish Civil War to play itself out, with the hope that it would revive the October Revolution and sweep Stalin from the scene. Aid to the Spanish Republicans would honor the memory of the executed old Bolsheviks. He also warned Poretskiy that they had nowhere else to turn; they would not consider cooperating with Western intelligence services, and they had no contacts in Trotskyist circles.[xlviii] Ironically, both Poretskiy and Ginzberg later establish contacts with Trotsky supporters, and Ginzberg surrendered himself into the hands of the French government and provided voluminous information to British counterintelligence.

Ginzberg eventually assessed that Soviet intervention in Spain was actually a foreign policy move to strengthen Stalin’s bargaining position in Europe, not a revolutionary renewal. He wrote that the problem of world revolution—the dream of the old Bolsheviks—had long since ceased to be a priority for Stalin, as evidenced by Stalin’s “communism in one country” and his imprisonment and murder Lenin’s direct associates. Although Stalin continued to cover his intervention with Comintern rhetoric, claiming “the Spanish struggle is not a private affair of Spaniards. It is the common cause of all advanced and progressive mankind,” he was selective in his choice of recipients for his largess. Ginzberg wrote that Stalin would only support elements within Spain that bowed to Stalin’s leadership without reservation. He withheld support to any others, even communists and socialists, who presumed to express independence from Moscow. According to Ginzberg, Stalin intended intervention to bring Spain into Moscow’s political sphere of influence, which would persuade Paris and London to accept stronger ties with Moscow, ultimately to become bargaining chips with Hitler.[xlix]

Similar to Graff’s claim of uniqueness, Ginzberg claimed, “I happen to be the sole survivor abroad of the group of Soviet officials who had a direct hand in organizing Soviet intervention in Spain, and I am the only one now free to expose this dramatic chapter of current history. As Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Western Europe, I was on the inside of every major step taken in the Spanish matter by the Kremlin.”[l] Although he was personally aware of Feldbin/Orlov’s role as chief of OGPU operations in Spain,[li] he did not know that Feldbin/Orlov had defected in July 1938. He also never mentioned Graff’s possible peripheral role in supplying arms for Spain, although Ginzberg did know that Graff had defected, since they met each other in France in 1937 before they both left for the United States.[lii]

Ginzberg was back in Moscow from March to May 1937 for consultations. He knew that Poretskiy was in trouble when he was asked why Poretskiy never reported that his brother had been killed while serving with the Polish Army against the Soviets in 1920. Such a question was a sign that the NKVD was delving into Poretskiy’s background and looking for compromising material against him. When Ginzberg returned to Europe in May 1937, Poretskiy had already made up his mind to break with the Soviet Union, and Poretskiy sensed that that Ginzberg was also considering it. Poretskiy proposed that the time was at hand to drop everything and disappear. But Ginzberg still argued against it, contending that the Soviet Union was still the only hope of the workers of the world; Stalin would pass, but their fellowship of struggle would prevail. It was their duty to stick to their posts. Whether Ginzberg’s argument was sincere or self-survival is unclear. They parted with the understanding that they would wait and watch events in Moscow before acting. Poretskiy acted on his own only a few weeks later.[liii]

In August 1937, the NKVD sent Spiegelglas to Western Europe to eliminate several defectors, including Poretskiy. Ginzberg told the French police that Spiegelglas met him in Paris and sounded him out about how far he was willing to go in participating in Poretksiy’s assassination.[liv] Spiegelglas made it clear to Ginzberg that he expected Ginzberg’s active assistance in assassinating his long-time friend Poretskiy. Ginzberg initially tried to deflect the task by acting as if he did not understand what Spiegelglas was implying. But when Spiegelglas removed all ambiguity, reminding Ginzberg that he had sponsored Poretskiy’s party membership and thus was responsibility for him, Ginzberg knew he could play dumb no longer. He was forced to choose whether to betray his friend or make his own escape. He chose the latter.[lv]

After Poretskiy’s assassination in September 1937, Ginzberg appealed to the French government for protection. He lived in France for over a year and the French Surete General debriefed him, mostly in connection with Poretskiy’s murder investigation. Ginzberg identified several NKVD agents in France who had been involved in the murder, and he described his encounters with Poretskiy just before Poretskiy’s defection in July. He punctuated his debriefing to the French by saying, “Please be very careful with this information, for my life, like that of Reiss, is naturally in danger as well.”[lvi]

Although the French police provided him with protection, he still felt he was being hounded by Soviet surveillance.[lvii] He decided to settle in the United States hoping to escape the Soviets’ grasp and he and his family arrived in the United States in November 1938 on a 4-month temporary visa. The FBI later reported that his entry into the United States was expedited by a letter to the U.S. embassy in Paris from Leon Blum, the former Socialist Prime Minister of France.[lviii] His sense of safety in the United States was shattered on 7 March 1939, when he was approached in New York City by an OGPU officer with whom he had previously worked in the Netherlands, Sergey Basov, known in the United States as “Serge Bassoff.” Basov was a former Soviet sailor who had immigrated to the United States and gained U.S. citizenship, which gave him legal use of a U.S. passport.[lix] This incident frightened Ginzberg, and he never again felt completely safe and predicted his own assassination on multiple occasions.

His first U.S. government debriefing occurred in January 1939 at the U.S. State Department. The transcript of that debriefing is not available, but the FBI later briefly related that he provided “information concerning certain aspects of Soviet developments with which he was familiar.” He was debriefed again at the State Department again on 15 March 1939, a week after the Basov incident. This debriefing focused heavily on that incident, including details of the encounter and how he escaped. He also reminded State Department officials that his temporary visa was set to expire on 31 March. When asked whether he wanted police protection, he declined saying that he only wanted to live quietly in a remote place, but he needed his visa extended in order to do that. He further provided basic information about the existence of a legal and illegal OGPU rezidentura in the United States.[lx]

He was debriefed a third time at the State Department on 28 June 1939, when the primary goal of the State Department interviewers was to learn about the Soviet use of fraudulent U.S. passports. He described the activities of Adolph Arnold Rubens, whom Ginzberg knew as Ewald, who led a network of about 20 agents who obtained approximately 100-150 U.S. passports for Soviet intelligence use. The network also acquired birth certificates and naturalization certificates to support Soviet intelligence cover operations. Ginzberg denied ever having used a fraudulent U.S. passport himself because he did not speak English and the OGPU required that a person who traveled with a U.S. passport should be able to communicate in English well enough to plausibly pass as a U.S. citizen.[lxi]

Ginzberg also provided details of a number of other Americans who had been involved in Soviet intelligence work in Europe, including Nicholas Dozenberg, Alfred Tiltin, Margaret Browder (alias Jean Montgomery), Dr. Valentine Burtan, and Katherine (Kitty) Harris. He identified two Soviet intelligence officers who had worked or were working in the United States: Boris Spaak (Spak) was the chief of Soviet intelligence in New York until May 1937, and Boris Bykov was probably in charge of the operation to assassinate Ginzberg. Ginzberg estimated that New York rezidentura consisted of about 15 people, each of which ran about 20 agents, totaling 250 to 300 people who were in some way affiliated with Soviet intelligence. [lxii]

It appears that the FBI first heard of these State Department debriefings in April 1944, when the Philadelphia FBI Field Office responded to an FBI Headquarters assignment to inquire with the Immigration and Naturalization Service regarding Ginzberg’s immigration status. The FBI had heard second-hand through Ginzberg’s lawyer, Louis Waldman, that Ginzberg had given immigration authorities information about Soviet espionage agents in the United States. The Philadelphia Field Office responded that FBI Headquarters should ask the State Department.[lxiii]

The FBI never conducted a comprehensive debriefing of Ginzberg. On 27 July 1939, FBI agents debriefed Ginzberg at the Waldman’s office in New York, where he told them about the Sergey Basov incident and his concerns for his safety. The FBI’s assessment of the information was that it was the same as Ginzberg had written about in one of his Saturday Evening Post articles and then in his book. The FBI initiated an investigation of Sergey Basov but the investigation found no conclusive information about Soviet intelligence activities. The FBI also asked Ginzberg about General Emilio Kleber, whom the FBI believed was identical with Moishe (Maurice) Stern who was responsible for Soviet espionage activities in the United States in the early 1930s. Kleber had been the commander of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Ginzberg agreed that Kleber’s real name was Stern, but disagreed [incorrectly] with the FBI’s assessment about Kleber’s involvement in U.S.-based espionage.[lxiv] Ginzberg’s contradiction of the FBI’s assessment of Kleber, along with his testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had no first-hand information about Soviet intelligence activities in the United States, may have dissuaded the FBI from further pursuing Ginzberg.[lxv] Little of value came from the FBI’s debriefing.

Despite Ginzberg’s stated desire to live quietly, he appeared in a number of public venues representing his views of Stalin and the Soviet Union. For example, he spoke at a meeting at Town Hall in New York, appearing with the anti-Soviet journalist George Sokolsky.[lxvi] His most prominent public appearance was before the U.S. House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities on 11 October 1939, where he answered questions about Stalin’s influence over the Communist Party of the United States through the Comintern and the organization and functions of Soviet state security elements.[lxvii] As is typical of congressional hearings, the questions posed to Ginzberg represented more the political predispositions of the congressmen than a desire to fully delve into his knowledge.

Ginzberg wrote about a Soviet operation to counterfeit U.S. currency, which he described as an attempt by Stalin to add hard currency to the Soviet treasury.[lxviii] The operation resulted in arrests of OGPU agents in Germany in 1929 and in the United States in 1933 after police found counterfeit currency originating from the Soviet Union. Ginzberg identified Dr. Valentine Burtan as an OGPU agent in the United States who assisted in laundering currency. Burtan was arrested in 1933 for passing $100,000 in counterfeit U.S. currency, but prosecutors made no connection to the Soviet Union, despite press stories at the time that tied him to Russia.[lxix] The FBI did not open an investigation into Burtan’s connection to the OGPU until after he was released from prison in 1944, and then mostly because of his ties to the Communist Party of the United States, not because of Ginzberg’s information.[lxx]

On 11 February 1941, the day after Ginzberg was found dead, the FBI interviewed Joseph Dorn, a businessman who had been employed by the Bank Sass Martini, which Ginzberg mentioned in his writings as an institution through which the Soviet Union laundered counterfeits U.S. currency in Germany.[lxxi] Dorn told the FBI his first encounter with Ginzberg was in 1929, when Ginzberg came to the newly chartered bank and wanted to deposit money. Dorn states that he was worried about the deposit, because Ginzberg had brought newly printed, small-size $100 bills, which Dorn had never seen before; the new bills were first circulated in the fall of 1929. On some points Dorn contradicts Ginzberg’s published story, particularly the allegation that the bank had been purchased secretly by Soviet operatives. Dorn claims legitimate investors had bought the bank, but that Ginzberg brought the U.S. currency to deposit in the bank in December 1929, just days after the bank had been approved for operation. Despite the contradictions, many points and names in Dorn’s story align with Ginzberg’s account.[lxxii]

The FBI used Ginzberg’s 1939 information, mostly derived from State Department debriefings, in its debriefings of Feldbin/Orlov in 1953.[lxxiii] However, Feldbin/Orlov contradicted much of Ginzberg’s reporting, most likely to cover his own story, leading both the FBI and MI5 initially to draw the incorrect conclusion that Feldbin/Orlov was not the same as Nikolskiy, whom Ginzberg identified as the OGPU rezident in Britain in 1935. Feldbin/Orlov later provided second-hand information to the FBI in an October 1953 interview indicating that a person who had helped Ginzberg publish his Saturday Evening Post articles had cast doubt on their reliability. The person, presumably Isaac Don Levine, reportedly told Feldbin/Orlov that when Ginzberg saw the English language versions of the articles he tried to stop their release because they contained inaccurate information. Feldbin/Orlov claimed that Ginzberg was concerned because the articles characterized him as a general in Soviet Army intelligence, which Ginzberg never was.[lxxiv] The veracity of Feldbin/Orlov’s story is questionable, since Ginzberg, is reported to have achieved the rank of kombrig in the Razvedupr, which is the equivalent to a brigadier general.[lxxv] According to NKVD records, Ginzberg was promoted to captain of state security in November 1936.[lxxvi]

Separately, the FBI also used Ginzberg’s information in the debriefing of Ismail Guseynovich Akhmedov, who defected during World War II.[lxxvii]

Ginzberg’s Saturday Evening Post articles caused little stir in London and MI5 initially doubted Ginzberg’s credibility. Soon after the Saturday Evening Post articles first appeared, communist newspapers Daily Worker and New Masses responded with vitriolic language to discredit him. They claimed that he was a fraud, that writer Isaac Don Levine actually wrote the articles, and that the content was fiction. The New Masses referred to Ginzberg as “Shmelka,” the Yiddish diminutive for Samuel, equivalent to “Sammy.” Ginzberg may indeed have been called Shmelka when he was a boy. The New Masses continued by claiming that Ginzberg was “just the kind of adventurer that the infamous Yagoda would pick for his anti-Soviet dirty work.”[lxxviii]

Ginzberg biographer Gary Kern suggests that the spellings of names in the New Masses editorial, the personal details about Ginzberg, and the slur against Yagoda indicate that the article was likely NKVD misinformation; Yagoda, the former NKVD chief, had been purged in March 1938. Nevertheless, the New Masses piece spurred a public debate about Ginzberg’s background, name, and credibility as a source of information. Many on the left were inclined to subscribe to the New Masses version of Ginzberg rather than Ginzberg’s own.[lxxix]

While Ginzberg’s credibility was being debated in the press, in September 1939, Isaac Don Levine approached the U.S. State Department and passed information he had obtained from Ginzberg regarding Soviet espionage in the UK. The State Department introduced Levine to the SIS representative in Washington, and Levine gave the SIS representative information obtained from Ginzberg about three spies in the British foreign affairs establishment: one, a cipher clerk named King (John Herbert King) who was “selling everything to Moscow”; another Foreign Office cipher clerk who had committed suicide several years earlier (Ernest Holloway Oldham, who committed suicide in 1933); and a third unnamed spy working in what Ginzberg called the “Political Committee Cabinet Office.”[lxxx]

Ginzberg further provided partial information about Henri Christiaan Pieck, but withheld key information because Pieck was Ginzberg’s friend who was “not acting for mercenary motives but through idealism and sympathy for the [Spanish] ‘loyalists’ and may now be on our side due to Stalin’s treachery.” Levine’s initial information contained some mistakes, such as claiming King had used the name “Dr. Lessner” when he traveled to the Netherlands; Dr. Martin Lessner was actually Ginzberg’s cover name. But the information was enough to launch a whirlwind investigation of King that led to his arrest and prosecution on 18 October 1939, just six weeks after first receiving Ginzberg’s initial reporting.[lxxxi]

In December, the SIS representative in Washington recommended that the British government invite Ginzberg to London for debriefing, partially to have direct access to him without Levine as an intermediary.[lxxxii] While MI5 was arranging for Ginzberg to travel to Britain, SIS passed to MI5 further information from a source in the United States who painted Ginzberg as an anti-Stalinist, but also an anti-capitalist who associated with communists and Trotskyists in the United States. The source claimed that the FBI had approached Ginzberg for debriefings but that Ginzberg had refused, supposedly retorting he ”couldn’t see why he should help the capitalists in any country, not even America.”[lxxxiii] This SIS source appears to have provided false information, because no such refusal appears in Ginzberg’s FBI file, and by the time of his trip to the UK he had already been debriefed at the State Department and FBI four times. The source’s biased information did not deter the British government from inviting Ginzberg to London for debriefings.

In discussions of how to approach debriefings of Ginzberg, SIS and MI5 planned to focus on Soviet methods and Soviet military espionage operations in the UK and elsewhere. The information from Levine provided a basis for initial debriefings, but MI5 planned to withhold, at least initially, information that might appear to steal Ginzberg’s thunder, such as that John Herbert King was already in custody. They also withheld the fact that SIS had a source named Hooper in the Netherlands in contact with Pieck. But this data, as well as the information that resulted from the investigation of King’s espionage, provided a foundation on which to determine the veracity of Ginzberg’s information.[lxxxiv]

Despite initial British misgivings, Ginzberg became the first Soviet intelligence officer that the British government extensively interrogated. The first debriefing in London took place on 23 January 1940. He initially repeated information that Levine had passed to London previously about King; Ginzberg was surprised when the MI5 eventually told him that King was already in prison serving a 10-year sentence for espionage. He also provided some vague information about the “Council of State” source, handled by Theodore Maly.[lxxxv]

Ginzberg reported that by the late 1930s the Soviet Union viewed Great Britain in terms that would match the Cold War-era phrase the “main enemy.” Since 1935, Stalin had considered the Soviet Union to be at war with Great Britain: “The aim of Stalin’s war is the destruction of the British Empire.”[lxxxvi] In 1935, Stalin directed both the OGPU and Razvedupr to prepare for war, and for the OGPU to begin collecting military intelligence in parallel with the Razvedupr.[lxxxvii] The Soviet Union was intensely anxious to follow British colonial affairs and Razvedupr agents worldwide reported on this topic. The Razvedupr had a specific section dedicated to studying British colonial influence, especially in the Near and Far East, focusing on military vulnerabilities that could be exploited in case of war. For work in the Near East, the Razvedupr used agents of nationalities who could freely operate there, such as Georgians, Romanians, Persians and Turks.[lxxxviii] The Soviets viewed the Suez Canal as a point where the Soviet Union could attack Britain with influence and sabotage agents.[lxxxix] Razvedupr analysts compiled reports for the General Staff that contained information about movements of troops, conditions of natives, and religious and economic issues. Ginzberg remembered seeing a report on 1929 Arab uprisings, presumably referring to the “Western Wall” riots in August 1929.

In 1935 there was no Razvedupr illegal rezident in Great Britain for two reasons: the Razvedupr could not find anyone with good enough English language skills who could be ”legitimized” as an illegal; and, according to Ginzberg, the OGPU was gaining primacy over the Razvedupr. Initially, Razvedupr sent agents into Great Britain with German or British passports. The Razvedupr did not immediately realize how easy it was to obtain U.S. passports, but they came to that realization in 1928-1929; after that, they usually carried Canadian or U.S. passports.[xc]

The Razvedupr paid little attention to the dominions, because they were too remote to be of interest. The Razvedupr had a man in Canada, but he was only there to assist in obtaining Canadian passports.[xci] The Razvedupr had one man in Sydney, Australia, who was part of the Shanghai rezidentura. He was mainly there to monitor the possibility that a movement would arise advocating Australian independence from the British Empire.[xcii] Stalin regarded independence for the dominions as a sign of imperial weakness.[xciii]

Razvedupr had little success in India. Some information about India was obtained from London, Singapore, and Shanghai and Razvedupr recruited some Indian expatriates in Berlin, but they proved to be unproductive. In 1933, the Razvedupr compiled a book about India that was purported to contain anything a military commander would need in a military campaign there. Much of the information came from library sources in Britain, but some secret material came from Shanghai, including details of the naval base at Singapore.[xciv]

MI5 pressed Ginzberg for details about the unnamed agent in the “Political Committee Cabinet Office,” or “Council of State,” which MI5 interpreted as meaning the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID). Because Ginzberg did not handle the source himself, he had only vague identifying information, including only a partial name of the organization where he worked. He believed the source was a young idealist from titled family, a graduate of Oxford or Eton, whose name might begin with a “P.” Ginzberg was, however, familiar with reports from the source, which he had seen in Moscow beginning in 1936. INO Chief Slutskiy and NKVD Chief Yezhov had shown Ginzberg a compartmented report from this source in Moscow in spring 1937 that discussed British defense measures and memos on the situation in Germany from the British ambassador in Berlin. The report also identified five Soviet Foreign Ministry officials supposedly working for British intelligence, supplying information of such a secret character that it convinced the NKVD that British intelligence had penetrated the upper levels of the Soviet Foreign Ministry. The report was printed in five copies—for Stalin, Yezhov, Slutskiy, People’s Commissar for Defense Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov, and Commander-in-Chief of Naval Forces Vladimir Mitrofanovich Orlov.[xcv] The fact that reports from this agent were delivered directly to the most senior Soviet military and security leaders shows that the information was highly valued and is an indicator that high-level British national security information was of the utmost Soviet interest at the time. MI5 showed Ginzberg the document cover of a CID report, and Ginzberg recognized it as being like the one he saw in Moscow.[xcvi]

After years of investigation, MI5 came to the conclusion that the source of these documents was Donald MacLean, who had access to these reports at the time Ginzberg indicated. However, that conclusion came only after MacLean had defected to the Soviet Union in 1951.[xcvii] Ginzberg also noted another source whom Maly handled in Britain, and whom Maly had sent to Spain on the order of Yezhov to assassinate Franco. The young man was an aristocrat with friends in the Foreign Office.[xcviii] It later appeared that this source was likely Harold (Kim) Philby, but that conclusion also came too late to stop his espionage damage or bring him to justice.

Ginzberg claimed that Soviet intelligence fully exploited the Communist Party of Great Britain, facilitated by Soviet propaganda portraying the Soviet Union as the world anti-fascist leader. Although the number of communist agents in Great Britain was not as great as Moscow would have liked, those who were there would act as Soviet sabotage agents upon orders from Moscow; he predicted that as many as 500 British workers would sabotage factories and key infrastructures if war broke out between the Soviet Union and Britain.[xcix] Additionally, since 1935, whenever British Communist Party leaders Harry Pollitt and William Gallacher visited Moscow, the Razvedupr interviewed them on the political situation in Great Britain, the British General Staff, conditions in the British Army, and other military-related topics. Ginzberg warned that, while British Government may be right to think that during peacetime the Communist Party of Great Britain can be kept in a weak state, the Soviet Union would use it as a tool against Great Britain during times of war.[c]

Ginzberg noted that the Razvedupr was responsible for instigating anti-military agitation in the British forces. In 1925, this “decomposition work,” as Ginzberg called it, was viewed as an element of world revolution. Anti-military propaganda work had traditionally been more successful in France than it was in Britain, particularly because it initially used unsophisticated methods. But when Stalin discarded the concept of world revolution, the purpose for the agitation transitioned into preparing for war with Great Britain, and it became more effective. Ginzberg surmised that there were military officers in the British Forces at the time of his defection who were prepared to work for the Soviet Union to the detriment of British interests.[ci] MI5’s summary contained the aside that Ginzberg was obviously unaware of the measures that MI5 had been taking for many years to frustrate Communist activities in the British forces.

Ginzberg advised the British government about how to handle a Soviet fifth column in British society. Ginzberg was surprised that there was no recognition in British press of the gravity of the threat that the Communist Party of Great Britain posed to Britain, especially during wartime. Ginzberg believed that Stalin would go to any lengths with Hitler to accomplish the destruction of the British Empire.[cii] He recommended that the British government prepare anti-Soviet propaganda to counter Comintern messaging, emphasizing that “Bolshevism, Leninism, and socialism are dead in the Soviet Union, and that no genuine attempt is now being made to carry out the teachings of Karl Marx. The Soviet Union has become a rigid dictatorship maintained by a system of wholesale purges, and Stalin is attempting to maintain his unstable position by a policy of military aggression.”[ciii]

Ginzberg reported to the MI5 that the Razvedupr also ran more tactical source networks on the Russian Western Front reaching out 50 miles beyond Soviet borders. Reports from the network dealt with military matters, not political or civilian.[civ] Both the Razvedupr and OGPU ran sabotage networks in Poland, and both had recruited agents in key government positions. The Razvedupr also conducted “decomposition” operations in the military forces of Poland and other Eastern European countries. Polish communists were instructed to join the Polish military and to appear to be “very good soldiers,” so that they can rise in rank and be of even greater value to the Soviet Union when they were needed.[cv]

In general, Ginzberg described three primary missions of the OGPU: to collect political, economic, and commercial information; to supervise and monitor Soviet and local communist party organizations and personnel; and to penetrate anti-Soviet and White Russian organizations. The Razvedupr and the OGPU were clearly separate organizations from 1922 to 1934 and friction had existed between them for many years. Military and naval information was the Razvedupr’s purview, but of secondary importance for the OGPU until the mid-1930s, when Stalin lost faith in the Red Army leadership and ordered the OGPU to take greater control over Razvedupr operations.[cvi] The Red Army had disagreed with Stalin on a number of foreign policy issues, such as the sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway to Japan, and the military was behind its leaders more than behind Stalin. According to Ginzberg, Stalin knew that the military leadership would never agree to a pact with Hitler, so he decided to remove them to clear the way for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.[cvii]

The OGPU enjoyed greater access to sources than the Razvedupr because of its ability to threaten and blackmail the families of Soviet citizens and White Russians. In countries of low political but higher military importance, such as Romania, Poland, and Hungary, the Razvedupr controlled the majority of agents. However, in more strategically important countries, such as France and the UK, OGPU was predominant, even in the collection of military intelligence. The OGPU was supposed to report all military intelligence to the General Staff, although at times the reporting did not happen.[cviii]

By the time the MI5 completed its debriefing of Ginzberg in February 1940, MI5 described his information as “most important and valuable.”[cix] The interrogations led to a large volume of corroborated information about Soviet agents and sympathizers in Britain and about Soviet targeting of British information worldwide. The interrogation results were compiled into an extensive report titled “Information Obtained from General Krivitsky During His Visit to This Country, January-February 1940.” The report was marked with the caveat, “This information is highly confidential. It is particularly requested that the documents should be kept in a safe, should have the smallest possible circulation and that no information contained therein should be quoted in official correspondence without previous reference to M.I.5.”[cx] In January 1944, an internal memo to the Deputy Director General of MI5 indicated that MI5 had never mentioned to the United States that Ginzberg had come to the UK for debriefings. At some time prior to 1944, MI5 had provided an expurgated version of the report, but the full report was still held closely.[cxi]

Ginzberg returned to Canada in February 1940 and stayed there awaiting permission to reenter the United States. He eventually left Canada on 26 September 1940 and settled his family quietly in the New York City area.[cxii] But his quiet life was short; he was found dead on 10 February 1941 in a hotel in Washington, DC. He had predicted his own assassination numerous times. However, to this day it is unresolved whether his death was a suicide or an assassination, and theories circulated in the press for years after about a possible Soviet hand in his death. The FBI took little interest in his death, firmly deflecting recommendations that it insert itself into the investigation, despite requests by Ginzberg’s attorney, Louis Waldman.[cxiii] Waldman tried to make an appointment with J. Edgar Hoover directly, but Hoover did not make time for him and wrote in the margin of a note about Waldman’s phone call, “Be certain to just listen. Point out case is in the hands of local police & FBI has no jurisdiction, that coroner found it to be a suicide, & even if murder it would still be a local police matter.[cxiv]

Isaac Don Levine was among those who maintained that the death was a Soviet-sponsored assassination. Levine published a series of articles in his right-wing magazine, Plain Talk, in 1948 in which he presented information that he had obtained from Ginzberg, including information that is not mentioned in Ginzberg’s State Department or FBI debriefings. For example, Levine claims that Ginzberg told him of two Americans recruited as Soviet assets: one inside the U.S. embassy in Moscow during the tenure of the first U.S. ambassador to Moscow, William C. Bullitt, from 1933 to 1936; and the other a U.S. Army major working on the Army Staff who had died while working as a Soviet agent. Levine also talked about Ginzberg’s association with Whittaker Chambers, who had been a Razvedupr agent from 1932 until his break with his Soviet handlers in 1937. Levine had arranged for the two former Razvedupr-affiliated men to meet in July 1939. Ginzberg and Chambers had many common acquaintances, and Chambers was particularly struck by Ginzberg’s prediction of a Soviet-German alliance. During their first encounter, the two men sat through a whole night discussing different perspectives of various Soviet intelligence cases, Ginzberg from the headquarters perspective, and Chambers from the field. One case they knew in common was that of Valentin Borisovich Markin (alias Arthur Walter, Oskar), the illegal Razvedupr rezident in United States. Markin was a young, promising Razvedupr officer who had previously worked in Berlin under Poretskiy. However, in 1934, Markin was killed by Chicago gangsters who found had out that he had exchanged Soviet counterfeit dollars for genuine dollars.[cxv] Ginzberg and Chambers filled in gaps in each other’s knowledge of the case.[cxvi]

Based on Ginzberg’s revelations and encouragement, and with the added catalyst of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Levine convinced Chambers to share his knowledge of Soviet intelligence activities with President Roosevelt. Chambers met Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State, in September 1939 and provided dozens of names of U.S. government officials and Communist Party members who had been part of Chambers’ espionage network.[cxvii] Ginzberg also provided a foundation on which Chambers’s allegations rested when he testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee in October that members of communist parties around the world are expected to cooperate willingly with Soviet intelligence.[cxviii] Consequently, Ginzberg’s defection was indirectly related to Chambers’s decision to reveal his information.[cxix]

Ginzberg’s legacy included numerous espionage investigations in the UK and the United States based on the over 60 Soviet agents he revealed, along with several enduring controversies, not the least of which was his own death. But more importantly, he provided increased knowledge of the Soviet Union’s changing approach to intelligence and security operations under Stalin. That knowledge informed British and American views of Soviet activities for many years after his death.