Reports from the first known spy in Washington's National Press Building started flowing into the Lubyanka, the headquarters of Soviet intelligence, in 1933. There was a symmetry and an invisible connection between the buildings. The elegant Lubyanka, originally built as the headquarters of a Czarist-era insurance company, dominated one side of a square in central Moscow a few blocks from the headquarters of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while the Press Building is four short blocks from the White House. It took five minutes to drive from the Lubyanka to the Kremlin. In the ’30s a reporter could pick up a Coke in the lobby of the Press Building, hop into a taxi on 14th Street, and finish it in the Capitol rotunda before it warmed up. The Lubyanka and the Press Building were wired with state-of-the-art telecommunications technology; both buildings buzzed around the clock as their inhabitants struggled to stay on top of news streaming in from around the globe.

The parallels between the headquarters of the Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye (OGPU), as Soviet intelligence was called at the time, and the home base for the Washington press corps echo the real affinities as well as the misleading resemblances between journalism and espionage. A glance inside the two buildings revealed the essential differences. In 1933 there was a newsstand in the lobby of the Press Building, the National Press Club occupied its top floors, and the dozen floors in the middle contained the largest concentration of reporters in the United States, probably the world. In the Lubyanka's basement cells the innocent were starved, beaten, and shot, while above them thousands of employees worked for the world's largest, and arguably most ruthless, intelligence organization.

In contrast to the heavily guarded Lubyanka, the Press Building, designed and built to provide modern offices in the nation's capital for the world's news media, has always been open to the public. This accessibility created a constant flow of humanity that provided excellent cover for espionage. The tens of thousands of journalists who have worked and played in the Press Building over the last nine decades camouflaged a sprinkling of professional spies who pretended to be reporters and of real reporters who, motivated by ideology, patriotism, a longing for adventure, or greed, collaborated with foreign and domestic intelligence agencies.

The OGPU's first known operative in the building was Robert S. Allen, an American reporter who dabbled in espionage but was not a professional spy. He worked from an office on the 12th floor and was identified in an initial report to OGPU headquarters in January 1933 by the codename Sh/147. Subsequent reports used the cover name George Parker. A fixture at the Press Club, at Washington dinner parties, and on the pages of America's most prestigious newspapers, Allen produced a continuous stream of information and gossip that was essential reading for anyone interested in American politics, whether they were in Minneapolis or Moscow. Equally important to the almost infinitely patient Soviet spymasters, he was well positioned both to gain access over time to tightly guarded secrets and to identify other potential agents.1

Allen's Soviet handler provided his superiors in Moscow a thumbnail sketch of the new recruit's career, starting with a description of Washington Merry-Go-Round, a book Allen co-wrote in 1931. The OGPU officer penned a summary that would have made a great dust-jacket blurb: “The characters he depicts in the book are a reflection of the pettiness and emptiness of many of Washington's current Republican congressmen and Cabinet members.”² The book's actual dust jacket promised, and Washington Merry-Go-Round did a good job of delivering, access to “what the newspapers do not print about the politicians of this country and what the Washington correspondents write only between the lines: the inner realms of politics, society, the diplomatic corps, the White House and the press itself.”3

Allen “knows most of the lawmakers and cabinet members, and also has extensive contacts in all of the departments” of the US government, the OGPU report noted. It highlighted his friendship with Raymond Moley, the head of Roosevelt's brain trust. Moley coined the term “New Deal” and served during the transition as FDR's de facto chief of staff. Allen, his Soviet handler stated, also “knows Roosevelt himself, as well as the House majority leader” and “is a valuable contact, especially bearing in mind Roosevelt's future administration.”⁴

As in most real spy stories, many of the details of Allen's espionage career are unknown and will probably never be uncovered. The name of his OGPU handler isn't revealed in the fragmentary records about Allen that have leaked out of the KGB's archives. Not clear are how Allen linked up with the OGPU, the full scope of his espionage, and what motivated him to spy for the Soviet Union.

A parenthetical comment at the bottom of an OGPU memo—“(For now the payment is 100 American Dollars a month)”—shows that Allen's involvement with Soviet intelligence went beyond the legitimate give-and-take of a reporter with a source.⁵ It may explain why a journalist like Allen with no ideological or familial ties to communism or the USSR agreed to spy for Stalin's secret intelligence service. On the other hand, money may not have been the only, or the primary, reason Allen provided information to the OGPU. He wasn't a communist, but he was, in the 1930s, a man of the Left and an ardent antifascist.

Whatever his motivation, there can be no doubt that Allen was acting as a witting agent of a foreign intelligence service. Relationships between reporters and sources are sometimes ambiguous; Allen's collaboration with the OGPU wasn't close to the gray zone. Allen had seen enough of the world to recognize the boundary between journalism and spying, and to know he'd stepped over it by accepting money from a foreign intelligence agency to hand over confidential information obtained from American government officials.

A short, red-haired man with an impulsive, incendiary temperament, by 1933 Allen had already had enough adventure to last most people a lifetime. In 1916, as a sixteen-year-old, he quit his job as a copy boy at the Louisville Courier Journal, lied about his age to join the Army, and rode into Mexico as a private in General John J. Pershing's expedition against Pancho Villa. Two years later, Allen followed Pershing to Europe, sailing home in 1918 as a boy lieutenant. Soon after returning to the Midwest, he hung up his uniform and enrolled in the University of Wisconsin to study journalism.6

Most journalism students ease into the profession, but Allen wasn't satisfied covering football rivalries or school board meetings. Working as a police reporter for the Madison Capital Times, he risked his neck infiltrating and writing exposés of the Ku Klux Klan. The stories earned Allen a scholarship to study abroad. He picked the University of Munich, arriving in time to write freelance accounts for the Christian Science Monitor of Adolph Hitler's November 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch—a failed attempt to take control of Bavaria and use it as a springboard to Berlin—and the future Führer's subsequent trial.⁷

When Hitler entered a makeshift courtroom on February 27, 1924, to defend himself against a charge of treason, Allen was close enough to report that the prisoner “laughed and joked and shook hands with a number of friends and supporters who rushed up to him and encouraged him to keep his head up, whereupon Hitler replied. ‘Ach! Wir werden schon siegen’ (We shall win all right).”⁸

Like other foreign journalists at the trial, Allen was befriended by an avuncular Nazi—and future American intelligence operative—named Ernst Hanfstaengl. Speaking in fluent English, Hanfstaengl tried to smooth the rough edges off Nazism. He failed to charm Allen, who claimed the honor of being the first American journalist to despise Hitler.⁹

Allen's reporting from Germany led to a job in Washington reporting from an office in the National Press Building for the Christian Science Monitor, an influential paper with a national readership.

Ironically, at the time when he was recruited as a paid covert informant for the Soviet Union, Allen was viewed by his peers as a victim of espionage. President Herbert Hoover, incensed by his portrayal in Washington Merry-Go-Round, had demanded that the Secret Service identify its author or authors. They quickly homed in on Allen. As the OGPU file noted, “Hoover insisted that he be fired.”10

The Monitor immediately sacked Allen, bringing tensions between the Washington press corps and the White House, which had been simmering for years, to a boil. From the moment he stepped into the White House, Hoover had barely tolerated the press. Relations between the Fourth Estate and the leader of the executive branch dimmed as the Depression cast an ever-darker cloud over America, and Hoover's name became a synonym for misery. Shantytowns came to be called “Hoovervilles;” newspapers were dubbed “Hoover blankets.” A president once celebrated by the press as “The Great Humanitarian” seethed as his reputation withered. Enraged by stories he considered defamatory, Hoover struck back, encouraging his personal secretary, a former private investigator, to spy on and intimidate reporters. Allen's unmasking and rapid dismissal, rare victories during a period when almost nothing went right for Hoover, were savored in the White House and lamented at the Press Club.

A Washington Post columnist wrote that Allen's firing “is of more than passing interest because of its possible bearing on the espionage atmosphere that has prevailed over the nation's capital for the past two years.”¹¹ The columnist added, “Whether there is anything to it or not, it is amazing the number of people here, in our official life and on the fringe, who sincerely believe their telephones are being tapped. They know what they are talking about, they insist; they can hear the click. And they relate hair-raising instances of being shadowed.” Reporters who felt the Hoover administration was terrorizing them petitioned the Press Club to form a committee to investigate White House censorship.

Fear of White House surveillance didn't stanch the flow of gossip or deter Allen and his co-author, Drew Pearson, from writing a sequel, More Merry-Go-Round. They didn't describe the scene at the Press Club—reporters drinking moonshine, playing poker and billiards, smoking cigars, spitting tobacco, and occasionally urinating into tall brass spittoons—but they did repeat stories told there that were far more colorful and truthful than those that made it into newspapers. “Washington probably boasts more small, independent bootleggers per capita than any other city in the country and has established a unique and universal system of liquor distribution,” Allen and Pearson wrote.12 Secreted among the city's monuments were “quiet unobtrusive places where, if the right word is spoken, one may enter a guarded door, place one's foot on a rail, and partake of Maryland rye, cut Scotch or beer, usually spiked, but sometimes the genuine article brought from Baltimore.” The Merry-Go-Round sequel reported that one of the liveliest speakeasies, located in an alley across the street from the State Department, was forced to close when “an act between a Follies girl and a derelict newspaper man” brought unwanted attention.

The Merry-Go-Round books sold 180,000 copies, an impressive achievement in the depth of the Depression.

The success of the two books—and the fact that Allen and Pearson had been fired—prompted them to team up on a syndicated newspaper column, also called Washington Merry-Go-Round. The column took off slowly. When Allen started working for Soviet intelligence Washington Merry-Go-Round was earning its two authors a grand total of twenty-five dollars a week. Allen kept bread on the table by reporting for the Philadelphia Record. A hundred dollars a month from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics must have been a welcome boost.¹³

Allen may have come to the OGPU's attention when he and Pearson reported in their column on December 8, 1932, that William Borah, an irascible Idaho Republican who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “didn't support Governor Roosevelt, but he is eager to cooperate with him—on Soviet Russian recognition.” Washington Merry-Go-Round followed up on December 19 with a report on a “steady drift towards Russian recognition.”14

The next month, Allen disclosed a bit more information to his Soviet intelligence contact than he had provided to the public. Borah, one of the most powerful politicians in Washington, had informed Allen in confidence about a conversation with Senator Robert Bulkley, a Democrat from Ohio. Allen reported to the OGPU that after visiting Roosevelt, Bulkley told Borah, “You are going to win out on Russian recognition when Roosevelt takes office. He told me he was going to act promptly on that as soon as he takes over.”¹⁵

The news must have been welcome in Moscow. Stalin viewed America as a counterweight to Japanese aggression in the Soviet Far East, a source for technology desperately needed to modernize Soviet industry, and a base for espionage against European nations and the Russian diaspora.¹⁶

Allen's report to the OGPU on Borah illustrates the asymmetry in US and Soviet intelligence capabilities. At a time when the United States had almost no capacity to collect or analyze foreign political intelligence and the Kremlin was a black box to American policymakers, men in the Lubyanka were privy to a private conversation between two US senators revealing a controversial, secret policy decision made by America's next president. It was the dawn of a golden age for Soviet intelligence in America, a period lasting more than a decade, during which Stalin's operatives, including a surprising number who were handled by officers based in the National Press Building, peered into every crevice of American society. From the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, spies reporting to Moscow penetrated the White House, the Justice and State departments, the military and its contractors, Congress, and Hollywood.¹⁷

Allen had good sources in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the only effective American foreign-intelligence organization in the decade leading up to World War II. They informed him that the United States wasn't going to make a fuss about communist subversion in Japan, and Allen passed the news to Soviet intelligence. “Roosevelt shares the general attitude of the admirals and Navy strategists that an uprising ‘of any kind’ is to be hoped for in Japan,” Allen told the OGPU. Naval intelligence officers knew that radicals plotting against the Japanese government were communists, Allen said, but they “manifest no hostility because of this fact. What their attitude would be if a Communist regime were to be set up in Japan they do not say. But to start with they would view with ‘friendly’ interest internal turmoil in Japan.”18

The ONI secrets Allen passed on included details about Japanese military preparations in the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands, specks on the map that Tokyo was administering under a League of Nations mandate. Japanese authorities had rebuffed American requests to visit, so in the summer of 1932, Allen reported, “Four American naval officers, speaking Malayan, disguised themselves by staining their skins, and reached the islands as native fishermen.” They discovered extensive military fortifications.¹⁹

Allen's reports on Japan suggest he was actively responding to Soviet requests, not merely passing along scraps of information that he happened to come across. In the early 1930s, the US government and military were secondary targets for Soviet intelligence. The Lubyanka was far more interested in Washington as a source of information about the USSR's potential adversaries—and Japan topped the list. The information on Japan Allen provided to the OGPU never made it into Washington Merry-Go-Round columns.²⁰

Perhaps to demonstrate that he had personal access to the highest ranks of government, Allen gave his OGPU handler a letter on Columbia University letterhead that he had received from FDR confidant Moley. It requested Allen to “in all confidence, go the Congressional Library and look up the files of Wallace's Farmer and give me your opinion of Wallace as (a) a Progressive and (b) a man of forceful expression. You will readily see why I am asking for this and I turn to you as a good judge of these questions.”21 Henry Wallace was appointed secretary of agriculture in the first Roosevelt administration, a critical position at a time when ameliorating conditions in the Dust Bowl and pumping up deflated commodity prices were prerequisites to pulling America out of the Great Depression.

Allen's work as a covert agent for the Soviet Union didn't last long. It isn't clear when or why he stopped feeding the OGPU confidential information. The last known report mentioning information from Allen was sent in February 1933. Maybe the Soviets tired of paying for slightly enhanced versions of stories that anyone with a nickel to spare could read in the Merry-Go-Round columns. Given Soviet intelligence agencies’ penchant for developing sources over long periods of time, it is more likely that Allen broke off the relationship. Possessing a strong temper, a short fuse, and no patience for threats to his independence, it is easy to imagine that he chafed at requests to gather sensitive political or military information. Or perhaps he no longer needed the money. Washington Merry-Go-Round quickly became one of the nation's most widely distributed columns, and a profitable business.²²

The records that have leaked out of the KGB's archives about Allen do not tell the whole story of his apparently brief collaboration with Soviet intelligence. He was privy to confidential information from FDR's brain trust, the War Department, and Congress that would have been of interest in Moscow. Few people knew as much as Allen about the peccadillos, secrets, and weaknesses of Washington's power elite—information of tremendous value to a foreign intelligence agency seeking to recruit spies.

Allen may not have broken any laws by passing information to Soviet intelligence. The Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires anyone who works on behalf of a foreign government to publicly register with the Justice Department, wasn't enacted until 1938. He definitely violated confidences, both with men and women who wouldn't have shared their secrets with him if they'd had an inkling that their insights would be transmitted to the Kremlin, and with readers, who had no idea Washington Merry-Go-Round's reporting was tainted: in its early days by a covert financial relationship with Stalin's secret police, and later by the specter of exposure that must have been in the back of Allen's mind whenever he reported on issues of interest to the USSR.

Allen spied for the OGPU for only a short time, but he remained entangled in the world of espionage for decades, including serving as an intelligence officer for General George Patton during World War II. Throughout the early decades of the Cold War, Allen was both predator and prey, ferreting out and publishing secrets from American intelligence agencies and becoming the subject of efforts to plug leaks, including an illegal CIA wiretap.