Ignatiy Stanislavovich Poretskiy

Natan Markovich Poretskiy,[i] better known by his pseudonym Ignatiy (Ignace) Stanislavovich Reiss, was the first Soviet intelligence officer to succumb to the Great Purge. He is known better for his post-defection assassination in September 1937 than for his career, thanks to his wife’s writings that used his death for anti-Stalinist propaganda. However, his career showed many of the same themes as the pre-1931 defectors, with signs of additional Soviet evolution between 1931 and 1937.

Poretskiy lived less than two months after defection and had no time to write memoirs. Much of what we know about Poretskiy comes from two women who were close to him: his wife, who published under the names Elisabeth Poretsky, Elsa Reiss, and Elsa Bernaut; and one of his recruited sources, Hede Massing, who turned herself in to the FBI in the late 1940s. The FBI interviewed both women a decade after Poretskiy’s assassination, and both published books in which they described their relationship with Poretskiy and his intelligence activities.[ii]

Poretskiy was born in 1899 in Podwolcziska, Galicia, located on the distant eastern border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This small town produced several prominent Soviet intelligence officers, including two who were close friends since childhood and who both later defected: Poretskiy and Samuel Gershovich Ginzberg, who is better known by his pseudonym Walter Germanovich Krivitskiy (see below).[iii]

Poretskiy was educated in Lvov (then called Lemberg under Austro-Hungarian control), serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army during WWI. After the war, he studied law in Vienna and there became a leftist activist, joining the Polish Communist Party in 1919 in Lvov and working part time as a journalist for a leftist newspaper.[iv] He visited Leningrad in 1920, where he was recruited to collect military intelligence in Poland, including information about Polish army readiness and conditions of roads, bridges and railroads.[v] It was also in Leningrad where he first met Elsa Bernaut, his future wife. There is some inconsistency in accounts of his early career, and even Elsa reported their wedding date differently in different interviews; Elsa stated that she and Poretskiy were married in 1923 in Lvov in her 1937 statement to French police[vi]; in her 1947 FBI interview she stated they were married in 1922 in Poland.[vii] Nonetheless, they were together in Lvov when Polish authorities arrested Poretskiy for subversive activities and sentenced him to 5 years in prison. He served only part of his sentence, and Elsa later wrote that he escaped from a train en route to prison and disappeared from Poland.[viii] It is unclear exactly when this happened, although Elsa separately stated he left Lvov in 1923.[ix]

Elsa always described Poretskiy in glowing terms, characterizing him as a dedicated revolutionary who never varied in his convictions. She wrote panegyrically of his time in a Polish prison:

Despite the physical torment he suffered in prison, he kept his courage high. And when I was allowed to see him in a few weeks, I found that while his prison experiences had changed his physical appearance, his morale was stronger than ever…His imprisonment steeled Reiss and all the good and noble elements in his character were confirmed. Penetrated through and through with socialist culture he realized in his own life the doctrine of Marx – unconditional loyalty to the cause; the spirit of true comradeship was deeply anchored in his soul. He remained pure and uncompromising to the end.[x]

Despite inconsistencies, it is clear that when he traveled to Moscow he was recruited into the Razvedupr and became a Comintern OMS operative, fulfilling both intelligence collection and covert influence tasks until 1929. He took the operational handle “Ludwig,” sometimes spelled “Ludwik,” by which he is known in much of the materials of the time. His first intelligence tasks in Poland reflected Red Army military intelligence requirements during the Polish-Russian War. After his expulsion from Poland Poretskiy took a Comintern assignment in the Ruhr region of Germany, where he posed as a journalist and was known for opposing nationalist political trends.[xi] His assignments included supporting the German Communist Party in planning an armed uprising to protest the Weimar Republic’s failed economic policies and the increasing power of German nationalists. The uprising was called off at the last moment in October 1923 due to power struggles within the German leftist parties that could not agree on tactics, and indecision in Moscow about when to launch the revolution. However, militant cells in Hamburg did not get the word about the cancelation, and launched a labor insurrection, which was quickly quashed. Presaging what was to occur the following year in Bulgaria, the faltered insurrection left the communists discredited, and Comintern representatives, including Poretskiy, were forced to flee Germany.[xii]

Poretskiy fled to Vienna, from where he operated under the Razvedupr rezidentura from 1924 to 1927 and where he resumed Comintern operations, focusing on support to covert activities in the Balkans and Southern Europe. His service in Vienna overlapped with both Nesterovich and Dzevaltovskiy, and he undoubtedly worked with them on Balkan Comintern operations.[xiii] An MI6 source in 1933 claimed that Poretskiy was a close friend of a man connected with the April 1925 bombing of the St. Nedelya church in Sofia.[xiv]

Unlike Nesterovich, for whom the St. Nedelya church bombing was a final straw (see separate entry), Poretskiy does not appear to have been fazed by the operation; it corresponded, after all, with Lenin’s philosophy of supporting revolutions in other countries as an essential task of a victorious revolution in Russia.[xv] Prokhorov even speculates that Poretskiy may have participated in Nesterovich’s assassination.[xvi] Rather, another event that occurred two years later likely had a greater impact on Poretskiy’s faith in Stalin: an SIS summary of information about Poretskiy asserts that in 1926 Poretskiy was among Soviet officers who openly disagreed with Trotsky’s expulsion from the Party.[xvii] To a Leninist devotee like Poretskiy, Stalin’s expulsion of Trotsky was a symptom of a broader Stalinist revisionism of Lenin’s philosophies; this was to be a major factor in Poretskiy’s defection a decade later.

However, in the late 1920s Poretskiy was still a valued Razvedupr officer. He returned to Moscow in 1927 and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his work in Vienna. The specifics of why he received the award are not known, but he was simultaneously promoted in rank and accepted as a full member of the All-Union Communist Party, sponsored by his long-time friend Samuel Ginzberg.[xviii] An SIS source described him as occasionally wearing a Soviet military uniform with a rank insignia of one rhombus, equating to a kombrig.[xix]

He returned to Europe in 1927 as an illegal Razvedupr officer. He spent part of 1927 in Czechoslovakia, where he established himself in his illegal identity while also recruiting sources in military factories. He then traveled to the Netherlands, where he became the illegal rezident, replacing Maks Germanovich Fridman, who later went on to be the illegal Razvedupr rezident in Germany. According to Prokhorov, Poretskiy’s primary target while stationed in the Netherlands was Great Britain, especially after Britain raided the London Arcos office in May 1927 and severed diplomatic relations with the USSR, leaving no venue in Britain from which to run intelligence operations.[xx] During this period Poretskiy targeted for recruitment a Dutch artist and architect named Henri Christian Pieck, who had been a communist activist in the Netherlands since the early 1920s. Pieck had come into contact with both Poretskiy and Ginzberg in the Netherlands and eventually became a trusted agent handler. He traveled to Moscow in 1930 for training and began his operational assignment in Geneva, Switzerland.[xxi] He was involved in some of Poretskiy’s most productive operations directed against Great Britain.

In 1929, Poretskiy returned to Moscow to take a headquarters position in the Razvedupr archives and teach military activities to Polish communists. While he was in Moscow, Poretskiy formally recruited Hede Massing, an Austrian communist who had supported clandestine communist activities in Vienna and Berlin since 1924. In the late 1920s, she had gained Soviet trust by fulfilling minor assignments for Richard Sorge, who later became famous for his Razveupr illegal work in Japan. When Hede was working at a bookstore in Berlin in 1928, Sorge introduced her to Poretskiy, describing him as a “very important individual.” She knew Poretskiy only as Ludwig, but she gained admiration because he actually paid for his books rather than stealing them. She met Poretskiy again in 1930 in Moscow where she was living with her third husband Paul Massing, who had taken a position at the International Agrarian Institute.[xxii]

In the early 1930s, a number of Razvedupr officers, including Poretskiy, transferred to the INO OGPU, whose operations were being more closely aligned with the Soviet civilian intelligence and state security service, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Народный Комиссариат Внутренних Дел; NKVD). Prokhorov asserts that this move was to strengthen the INO, which suffered from a shortage of experienced officers.[xxiii] When Poretskiy transferred, he took with him agents that he had recruited into Razvedupr networks, and with whom he had developed a close relationship, including both Hede Massing and Henri Pieck.

Poretskiy was assigned as an illegal OGPU officer in Berlin in 1931. Due to the rise of nationalism and militarism in Germany, German strategic information, especially economic and industrial information, became high on Poretskiy’s priority targeting list, placing him at risk of German counterintelligence scrutiny. Consequently, Poretskiy left Berlin in 1933 when Hitler formally took control of the German government, but he continued running operations into Germany from his new operational base in Paris. He operated under cover of a Soviet Planning Committee (GOSPLAN) specialist and journalist, which provided him access to German economic information. His cover was sufficiently convincing to fool an SIS source who encountered Poretskiy in 1933 and assumed that he had left intelligence work altogether and joined the GOSPLAN full time. The source reported that Poretskiy began in 1931 to discuss economic subjects and that he was formulating a variety of economic projects. Another SIS source reported that Poretskiy had targeted the German chemical company IG Farbenindustrie, recruiting an individual named Krupp.[xxiv]

Poretskiy assigned Hede Massing mostly logistical support tasks, including locating safe houses and mail drops. When Hede returned to Germany from Moscow in early 1930, Poretskiy tasked her to travel via Vienna and locate a house with a private room where two men could live without being required to register with local police. She also met with Russian officers who were traveling through Germany en route to foreign assignments and “attempt[ed] to rub off some of the obviously Russian characteristics” so they could more successfully fit into Western society. Poretskiy also tasked her with contacting several targeted people and setting up meetings for them for developmental purposes. She ceased her work for Poretskiy when she moved to the United States in 1933, but heard from him again when he decided to defect four years later.[xxv]

Another agent Poretskiy brought with him from the Razvedupr was Henri Pieck, through whom Poretskiy recruited British Foreign Office cipher clerk, John Herbert King. As Arutyunov reported several years previously, the OGPU greatly valued sources with direct access to British diplomatic correspondence, both because of the insights they provided into British policy and because British diplomats were well-informed observers of the politics within whatever country they served. King initially met Pieck in early 1934 when King was working at the British delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. King returned the London in 1935, but Pieck’s cover as an artist allowed him to travel frequently to the UK, and he met King again and offered an ostensible business deal. Pieck proposed that if King would supply copies of British diplomatic communications, Pieck would use the information for insider trading on stock markets and currency exchange markets. Poretskiy and Pieck had chosen a willing target, because King saw few career prospects for himself as a non-permanent Foreign Office employee with no pension and was eager to build a better financial future. He agreed to the business deal and began to pass sensitive Foreign Office documents to Pieck, who maintained an office in London not far from King’s office. King received £50-200 for each delivery, a significant sum for a low-level employee.[xxvi] Some of King’s material was sent directly to Stalin because of its high value, especially information about British diplomatic interaction with Nazi Germany.[xxvii]

In 1936, Pieck transferred the handling of King to an illegal officer, a Mr. Peterson, with whom King continued to do business until mid-1937. SIS asserted that Pieck’s removal from the King operation was a result of suspicion caused by SIS inquiries in the Netherlands about Pieck.[xxviii] Peterson took control of the operation and began requesting that King pass ciphers and cipher tables in addition to diplomatic cables, but King claimed to have refused.[xxix] Peterson was the cover name for Theodore Stephanovich Maly, an NKVD illegal who became the OGPU rezident in London in March 1936.[xxx] Maly received King’s information and passed it to Poretskiy, sometimes using Pieck as a courier, and Poretskiy forwarded it to Moscow. Maly replaced Leyba Lazerevich Feldbin (better known as Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov; see below) as rezident in London, and inherited from Feldbin responsibility for two other important British sources: another Foreign Office employee, Donald Maclean; and Harold A. R. “Kim” Philby.[xxxi] Poretskiy is reported to have approved the recruitment of Philby and likely served as a relay point for information coming from him, through Maly, to Moscow.

After Pieck’s removal from the King operation, Ginzberg and Poretskiy met him in Paris to give him a new assignment. A civil war was brewing in Spain, and both sides in the war were lining up support, particularly for the delivery of military supplies. While Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were making agreements with Nationalist forces, Stalin ordered clandestine Soviet support to Republican forces, both in the form of military supplies and through the Comintern-sponsored International Brigade that attracted anti-Nazi fighters from across Europe and North America. In June or July 1936, Pieck flew to Athens on Poretskiy’s orders to persuade the Greek Minister of War to order 40 military aircraft from private and governmental sources in Europe to be forwarded clandestinely to Spain. The Greek Prime Minister refused and Pieck was forced to leave Greece in a hurry without success. However, Pieck’s scheme was not the only of its type that the OGPU was attempting; when Pieck returned to France, he learned that a South American embassy in Paris had agreed to a similar deal.[xxxii]

Although Reiss is Poretskiy’s best known pseudonym, he traveled in numerous aliases during his career. Hede Massing repeated a story she had heard Poretskiy tell about when he was traveling by train and stopped at a customs point for a passport check. The customs official collected the passports of the travelers and Poretskiy went to the canteen to wait. When the official came back and began handing out the passports, Reiss’s mind went blank; he could not remember who he was that day. Finally, after all the other passengers had collected their passports and the conductor called “All Aboard!”, the customs officer ran up to Poretskiy and said, ‘Mr. Gold, here is your passport, hurry or you will miss the train.’”[xxxiii]

Throughout the decade beginning in 1926, Poretskiy developed a growing disillusionment with Stalin’s policy of building communism in one country, a philosophy that contradicted Lenin’s aspiration to export communism throughout the world. However, while Poretskiy expressed disagreement with Trotsky’s expulsion from the Party in 1926, as did many other Leninist adherents, there is no indication that he actively supported Trotsky. Damaskin claims that Poretskiy warned Trotskiy about a Stalin-ordered assassination plot, which prompted Trotsky to escape to Norway in June 1935.[xxxiv] However, it is unclear when Poretskiy would have informed Trotsky about the plot, as there is no evidence that Poretskiy had contact with Trotsky or his supporters before 1936. Poretskiy was promoted to captain of state security in December 1936, indicating that the NKVD did not suspect him of contact with Trotsky at that time.[xxxv]

The first of Stalin’s public purge trials occurred in August 1936, resulting in the executions of Zinoviev and 15 other senior Party officials who sided with Trotsky; these senior Soviet officials came to be known as “The Sixteen.” Poretskiy was personally acquainted with several of the condemned, and when the news reached him in Europe it caused him to seriously question the cause for which he was working. An MI6 source reported that Poretskiy began to openly express his disapproval with the 1936 executions.[xxxvi] Elsa later wrote:

After the first trial the question of the break became acute. He would wait no longer, he had made up his mind. And now I tried to dissuade him from being over-impulsive, to talk things over with other comrades. I was justifiably afraid for his life. I pleaded with him not to walk out alone, to make the break along with other comrades but he only said: “One can count on nobody. One must act alone and openly. One cannot trick history, there is no point in delay.”[xxxvii]

Elsa wrote further that Poretskiy and Ginzberg met privately after the “Sixteen” were executed and discussed breaking with Stalin then. Ginzberg, however, persuaded Poretskiy to remain loyal to the Soviet Union. He argued that Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War was a positive sign that Stalin’s philosophy of “socialism in one country” was being rejected; he encouraged Poretskiy to await the results in Spain to see whether the proponents of international revolution would defeat Stalin. Ginzberg also argued that he and Poretskiy had nowhere else to turn. They could not appeal to the enemy intelligence services for protection, and they had no connections with Trotsky’s camp.[xxxviii]

A Vozrozhdenie article about Poretskiy’s assassination published a month after the event asserts that Poretekiy’s dissatisfaction with Stalin had grown to the point that he joined forces with Trotsky’s Fourth International in spring 1937.[xxxix] The article went on to claim that Poretskiy was recruiting others to join as well, including a long-time friend, Gertrude Schildbach, from whom he received a letter expressing her dissatisfaction with Stalin. When Poretskiy and Schildbach met, they discussed their mutual dissatisfaction with Stalinism. However, Poretskiy was unaware that the OGPU was monitoring contacts with Trotskyists, and that Schildbach’s letter was a provocation.

In June 1937, Hendricus Sneevliet, a Dutch socialist and associate of Trotsky’s son Lev Lvovich Sedov, received information that Poretskiy wanted to meet him. Although he initially hesitated, unsure with which side of the Stalin-Trotsky conflict Poretskiy sympathized, Sneevliet agreed to the meeting. Sneevliet had known Poretskiy since the late 1920s when Poretskiy was posted in the Netherlands. They had then discussed the already-apparent split in Soviet politics, but because Poretskiy remained openly loyal to the Soviet leadership at that time, he and Sneevliet parted ways. In their June 1937 meeting, Poretskiy informed Sneevliet of his plans to make a final break with the Soviet Union and expressed anxiety about his wife and son. Sneevliet advised the Poretskiy to announce his break openly in a newspaper as previous defectors had done, to shield him from Soviet repercussions. However, Poretskiy claimed his motive was not to betray the Soviet Union, but to break with what he viewed as Stalin’s betrayal of the Soviet ideal; he planned to inform the Central Committee of the Communist Party first before going public.[xl] This proved to be a fatal mistake, as it made it easier for the NKVD to track him down for assassination without public visibility.[xli]

Nevertheless, understanding the risks, Poretskiy arranged to send Sneevliet a telegram signal in case of emergency that would convey the need to come to Paris to look after Poretskiy’s family. Sneevliet received the telegram soon after hearing of the murder of “Han Eberhart,” Poretskiy’s alias, and he hurried to Paris to find Elsa.[xlii]

Poretskiy’s last trip to the USSR was in 1935, per Elsa’s memoirs, where it was proposed that his next assignment would be the illegal rezident in New York to replace Boris Yakovlevich Bazarov (real surname Shpak), under whose supervision Hede Masing worked.[xliii] Poretskiy never took that position, but the prospect of traveling to America never completely went away. In the late summer of 1936, while Hede Massing was in Paris on a courier trip, Poretskiy gave her $7,000 and asked her to take it to the United States, not declare it at customs, and deposit it in a New York City bank account in the name Stephan Brandt. Assuming that it was an NKVD assignment, she did as he instructed and sent him the bankbook.[xliv] Poretskiy also investigated the possibility of obtaining a visa to the United States during his trip to Amsterdam to visit Sneevliet, intending to use the $7,000, taken from NKVD operational funds, as a cushion to facilitate his emigration.

In addition to Sneevliet, Poretskiy sent letters or reached out personally in June to several of his friends and agents to inform them that he was breaking with the Soviet Union. He discussed his plans with Ginzberg when he returned to Paris after meeting Sneevliet, and Ginzberg tried to dissuade him again for his own safety.[xlv] He also sent a letter to Paul and Hede Massing, warning them not to return to the Soviet Union under any circumstances. However, the Massings did return to Moscow, were not arrested, as Poretskiy had predicted, and later returned to the United States on behalf of the NKVD.[xlvi] Poretskiy also wrote a letter to Pieck explaining his intention to break with the Soviet Union. Pieck stated that this had a strong effect on him, as Pieck described Poretskiy as the “finest man I have ever met in my life.”[xlvii]

Then, on 17 July 1937, Poretskiy sealed a letter addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and gave it to a friend in the Soviet Embassy in Paris asking that it be forwarded to Moscow. Poretskiy began by stating that he should have written the letter when the “Father of His People” (referring to Stalin) had “The Sixteen” murdered in the cellars of Lubyanka a year earlier. He warned that “truth will win the battle, and the day of judgment is near, much nearer than the gentlemen in the Kremlin think…Down with the lie of socialism in one country. Return to Lenin’s International!” He enclosed his Order of the Red Banner, stating that he could no longer wear an award granted by what he termed a counter-revolutionary regime. His letter was the first time a senior-level insider of Stalin’s regime had dared to attack Stalin in public since the purge began.

Poretskiy expected that the week it would take for the diplomatic pouch to arrive in Moscow would give him time to find a suitable hiding place. However, Moscow had already dispatched Sergey Mikhailovich Shpigelglas, deputy INO chief and a notorious OGPU hatchet man, to Paris to neutralize him, either by kidnapping and returning him to Moscow or by assassinating him abroad. Shpigelglas was involved in several other assassination assignments the same year, including the neutralization of Arutyunov. Shpigelglas intercepted the letter and put in motion an operation involving nearly a dozen agents to locate, follow, lure, and assassinate Poretskiy. The agents included Gertrude Schildbach, who was either insincere in her anti-Stalinist sentiments during their earlier meeting, or was coerced into acting as an NKVD lure. She invited him the Lausanne, Switzerland, to further discuss his dissatisfaction with Stalin, but the trip ended up being a trap. He was found on 4 September 1937 near Lausanne, Switzerland, with multiple bullet wounds and both the French and Swiss governments initiated investigations to identify his murders. When Swiss police found his bullet-ridden body, he was carrying a Czech passport in the name Hans Eberhardt, and they were only able to identify him Elsa when came to the police station after reading about the murder in the newspaper.[xlviii]

Much has been written about the investigation that followed Poretskiy’s assassination, and will not be repeated here. But other Soviet intelligence officers followed Poretskiy’s example over the following year and a half and learned from his mistakes. He became a symbol for those who broke with the Stalinist regime, even prompting Trotsky to invoke his memory a year after his death: “Reiss made a more significant contribution to the treasure of the proletarian struggle than all whistleblowers disillusioned with Stalin combined.”[xlix]