Robert S. Allen's peers had no idea that he had collaborated with Soviet intelligence, and if word had leaked out the resulting scandal could have ended his career. The men in the National Press Club felt quite differently about the second known foreign intelligence operative in the Press Building, Vladimir Romm. Reporters treated him as a representative of the Soviet state, and given the Bolsheviks’ reputation for conspiracy many assumed he was a spy. This did not prevent even conservative anti-communists from admiring him. No other Soviet official—and few Americans—was as well liked or respected in Washington as Romm.
Vladimir Georgievich Romm was born in May 1896 into a world that has so thoroughly disappeared that it is difficult today to even imagine. In the Romanov Empire, ethnicity—an amalgamation of race, religion, and language—was all-encompassing, defining possibilities and determining how people were identified by others, thought of themselves, and perceived their surroundings. The overarching importance of ethnic identity extended even to the name of Romm's hometown. As Jews, the largest population in the city, Romm's family called it Vilna, as did Russians, the third-largest group. While Romm was growing up, Vilna was known as the “Jerusalem of the North,” a description Napoleon, astonished by the sight of a Jewish city on the edge of Christian Europe, came up with in 1812. Poles, who ruled the city they called Wilno from the fourteenth century until Napoleon's defeat brought Russian rule, were the second-largest ethnic group. Lithuanians, less than three percent of the city's population when Romm was born, called it Vilnius.1
The Romms were a prominent family that had dominated and profited from Hebrew printing and publishing in Czarist Russia. Vladimir attended an elite private college in St. Petersburg, an opportunity that was generally denied to Jews. His father, George Romm, a physician, had been imprisoned for membership in the Bund, a Marxist Jewish organization, and as a boy Vladimir helped his two brothers run a clandestine cell of the underground Socialist Revolutionary Party.
Romm was conscripted into the Russian army in 1916, serving in the infantry and secretly preaching the merits of socialism to his comrades. After the Czar was deposed in March 1917, Romm served as a commissar, traveling in November 1917 to Petrograd as a delegate to the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. He likely witnessed one of the more dramatic moments of the revolution when messengers burst into the Congress at three a.m. announcing that the Winter Palace had been stormed and that members of the provisional government had been arrested. Few realized at the time, but this was one of the defining moments of the twentieth century: the establishment of the Soviet Union.
Romm's life in 1918 reflected the tumultuous times. He started the year in Novgorod, near Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called during the war), serving as an official of the local government. Spring and fall were a blur: back in Petrograd in May, working in the Popular Commissariat of Foreign Affairs; unemployed in June, living nine hundred miles north in Arkhangelsk, a bleak city on the coast of what Russians call the Northern Icy Ocean. By November Romm was a thousand miles south working for the provincial government in Voronezh. In December he washed up on the outskirts of his hometown, Vilna, and helped Soviet forces take control of the city.
By the end of this restless year, Romm found his life's calling. He had been recruited into the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (GRU), the Red Army's intelligence service. Romm became a member of the first, and most talented, generation of Soviet intelligence officers, an elite group of men, and a few women, born in the last years of the nineteenth century on the shifting edges of empires, who had experienced the downfall of the Hapsburgs and eagerly participated in the destruction of the Romanovs. They shared a passionate utopian vision of communism and, without exception, were ultimately consumed by the vicious reality of Stalinism. Americans and Europeans were impressed by their idealism, intelligence, and selflessness. Few of their Western acquaintances realized that these cultured patriots, who could discuss literature and art intelligently in three or more languages, were just as capable of stalking and brutally murdering “enemies of the people.”
In April 1919 Polish troops pushed the Soviets out of Vilna. Romm was posted as assistant military attaché in the Soviet embassy in Kaunas, capital of the independent Lithuanian state that had been created in 1918. He stayed until May 1921, organizing a network of espionage agents, then was transferred to Kharkov, Ukraine, where he witnessed, and must have had a hand in implementing, a massive crime against humanity. Intelligence officers like Romm were on the front line of a deliberate manmade famine. They forced peasants in Ukraine onto collective farms, confiscated their grain, and prevented them from leaving, condemning a million Ukrainians to agonizing deaths from starvation.2
Romm was sent on his first posting to the West in August 1922, splitting his time between Berlin and Paris. In the City of Light, he was part of a network of agents who infiltrated the city's cafés and garrets to keep the GRU's eyes on thousands of Russian émigrés as they hatched innumerable plots and counterplots aimed at overthrowing or spreading, subverting, or promoting the newborn Bolshevik regime.
Romm acquired his cover as a journalist in December 1924 when he was appointed head of foreign operations for the Soviet newspaper Trud (Labor). Three years later he was fired from the GRU for “not being completely devoted to the line of the Central Committee.”3 Romm's deviation must not have been considered serious, because rather than suffering the fates typically experienced by Soviet spies who fell from grace—imprisonment in a labor camp, even execution—he was allowed to transfer from military intelligence to the rival OGPU. The OGPU gave him the kind of assignment that was offered only to the most trusted individuals.
Romm was sent to Tokyo. His cover job was working as a correspondent for the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), the official Soviet government news service. Most Soviet citizens who traveled abroad were forced to leave their families behind as collateral against the temptation to defect. It is a mark of his superiors’ trust that Romm was accompanied by his wife, Galena, and their infant son. Both Japanese and French intelligence services quickly determined that he was a spy and kept an eye on him.
Romm traveled widely, spending a great deal of time in China, especially in Manchuria. He or his superiors had correctly anticipated that Northern China would be the launching pad for the Japanese empire's expansion. His job was to answer a critical question: Which way would the Japanese leap, south to China or north to Siberia?
While posted to Tokyo, Romm signed the “Declaration of the 83,” a critique of Stalin's foreign policy written by Leon Trotsky and other prominent Communists. Published just as the split between Stalin and Trotsky broke into the open, the declaration included extensive discussion of the situation in China, one of Romm's areas of expertise. After it became clear that Stalin had come out on top, Romm submitted a groveling letter to the Communist Party apologizing for signing the Declaration. He must have been valuable; he retained his life, freedom, party membership, and OGPU job.
In 1930, after spending two and a half years in Asia, Romm was sent back to Europe, reporting to OGPU rezidents (station chiefs) in Geneva and Paris. Since his previous European stint Soviet intelligence had woven intricate networks throughout Western Europe, penetrating government and industry. A well-oiled apparatus sent Moscow a stream of intelligence on defense strategies and military plans, diplomatic alliances and commercial secrets. Its top priority, however, reflected Stalin's obsession with enemies of the people. Russian emigre organizations were so saturated with Soviet intelligence agents that many would have collapsed if Moscow's provocateurs and informers had pulled out. Even as Mussolini and Hitler came to power, fascist dictators were secondary targets for the OGPU, as Stalin was fixated on gathering intelligence on, and plotting to kill, Trotsky.4
Romm maintained his cover as a journalist, working for TASS. He was treated by other foreign reporters both as a representative of the Soviet government and as an exemplar of the kind of men the regime was believed to be creating. John T. Whitaker, an American journalist who knew him in Geneva, where they both covered the League of Nations, later wrote that Romm “had come because Moscow anticipated the Japanese attack on Manchuria and believed that its success or failure would be decided by the diplomatic struggle in Geneva. Romm was one of their aces; they wanted a man of his ability and background on the spot in Geneva.”5
Romm was a living embodiment of Americans’ fantasy of Soviet Man: erudite, charming, and selfless. His demeanor in Geneva's Bavaria Hotel dining room, the unofficial nocturnal headquarters for international journalists and diplomats posted to the League of Nations, helped persuade influential men that the USSR could be integrated into the modern world. “Of the hundreds of correspondents of all nationalities at Geneva during this period, Vladimir Romm was among the most popular and widely known, especially among his American colleagues,” an American foreign correspondent remembered. “And this popularity had its effect in the almost unanimous press support of the Soviet's application for entrance into the League.” Romm's circle included Allen Dulles, a well-connected diplomat who returned to Geneva during the Second World War as an intelligence officer and went on to become the longest-serving director of the CIA.6
While Romm and his OGPU comrades were popular in the salons of the European elite, they were also engaged in less convivial activities. Soviet intelligence was very much a contact sport during Romm's second European posting. Well out of sight of the diplomatic receptions and dinners, GRU and OGPU officers and their agents operated with relative impunity, kidnapping and killing White Russians, even shooting their own agents who had come to be suspected of treachery.
On June 2, 1934, Romm stepped out of the small circle of diplomats and journalists who frequented Geneva's Bavaria Hotel and onto the pages of the New York Times. “One of the most significant visitors from the Soviet Union to the United States since the Bolshevist revolution will depart for Washington next Thursday,” the Times reported. “He is Vladimir Romm of the newspaper Izvestia, who will be the first permanent correspondent of the Soviet press in the United States.” Before Romm departed, American reporters were invited to a lunch in his honor at Izvestia's headquarters on Pushkin Square in central Moscow. The boisterous group included Izvestia editor Karl Radek, the most colorful member of the Bolshevik inner circle and the only top Communist to socialize with American reporters. The Americans, enlivened by liberal quantities of vodka, wished Romm well and assured him his life in Washington would be far easier than theirs was in Moscow.7
Romm's arrival in Washington was noted in the Goldfish Bowl, the Press Club's irreverent newsletter, which reported in July 1934 that he was “Russia's first native contribution to the Washington press corps since we recognized the Soviet.” It added that “Mr. Romm, ably introduced about town by our own Larry Todd, represents Izvestia, semi-official Soviet morning newspaper with 2,000,000 subscribers.” Todd, a popular Press Club member, headed the TASS office on the thirteenth floor of the Press Building, which he shared with Romm.8
Romm attended State Department briefings, White House receptions, and society dinner parties. As the first Soviet journalist in the United States and one of a handful of Soviet citizens living in Washington, he was the object of intense curiosity. Curiosity quickly turned to respect as Romm tirelessly responded to endless questions about life in the Soviet Union, communism, and Stalin. In addition to reporting—for Izvestia and for the OGPU's successor, the NKVD—Romm acted as an informal ambassador, giving speeches to university students, meeting with industrialists, and swapping stories with American reporters.9
Romm told his American friends that he'd taught himself English while living in Tokyo by listening to jazz phonograph records. He knew more popular American songs than most professional singers.10
The Washington press corps admired the somewhat reserved Romm. They were bowled over by his blond, vivacious wife, Galena, who told one and all that her name meant “chicken” in Italian, and by their eleven-year-old son, who was known by the very American nickname “Billy.”
Ernie Pyle, a journalist whose stories about ordinary Americans made him one of the most loved and influential writers of the era, devoted an entire column to praising Romm in terms that would have made an Izvestia editor blush: “You could call Vladimir Romm a devout Communist. He feels that his life belongs to the party, and that giving it his complete devotion is little enough. I didn't get that from him, but from his friends. He doesn't try to propagandize you. He talks gently, in a low soft voice, about his paper and his American friends and about America. He doesn't try to sell Russia to you.”11
Pyle continued: “He is courteous and affable. People like him. But nobody knows much about him. That is because of his deep feeling that the party, and not he, is of importance. It isn't even a conscious reticence about himself. It is sober preoccupation with the cause.” Pyle noted that Romm spoke English, French, and German well, and “some Italian and Japanese.”
Romm “expects to go back to Russia in a year or two, and probably stay there,” Pyle reported. “He hasn't taken foreign assignments for pleasure or the adventure, but because he feels he should go out in the world and learn how people of other nations think and live. It gives him a broader and more accurate background for his future work back in Russia.”
Pyle may have been right about Romm's motives, but in fact many of the Soviet spy's adventures in Washington were pleasant, and they certainly didn't prepare him for his future in Russia. The warm embrace of the Washington press corps gave Romm a front seat at events like the annual Founder's Day dinner at the National Press Club, held in 1936 on a warm evening in May. Romm watched President Franklin Roosevelt, the guest of honor, laugh as journalists lampooned him and his cabinet in a series of skits. The contrast with Moscow, where the penalty for joking about Stalin was imprisonment or death, must have been shocking.12
Romm traveled to Yosemite National Park in August 1936 to participate as one of two representatives of the Soviet government in a conference convened by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), an international organization dedicated to fostering peaceful relationships among nations bordering the Pacific Ocean. Characteristically, he was remembered as one of the hardest-working participants. Inevitably, Americans who spent time hiking around the park and in roundtable discussions with Romm came to view him as a friend. As the only participant who could speak Russian, English and Japanese, Romm seemed to be everywhere and to know everything and everyone.13
There was, however, one important thing that Romm didn't know: he wasn't the only Soviet spy in Yosemite Park. In an extraordinary coincidence, Romm spent much of the meeting sparring with a member of the Japanese delegation, a young journalist who like Romm was an expert on China—and, unknown to Romm, a spy for Stalin. Ozaki Hotsumi was the most important member of an intelligence ring that operated in Tokyo under the direction of the legendary Soviet intelligence officer Richard Sorge. To preserve his cover, Hotsumi argued passionately at the Yosemite meeting against the Soviet position, rationalizing Japan's expansionist policy in China. Romm accused Hotsumi of defending an imperialist government led by warmongers.14
The conference marked a turning point in Hotsumi's career. His skillful justification of Japan's expansionist policy in China brought him to the attention of powerful politicians, and the friendships he forged in Yosemite with Japanese aristocrats put him on a path to penetrating the inner circle of Japan's political and military elites.15 Five years later, these connections allowed Hotsumi to obtain precise information about the timing of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, intelligence that Stalin, at great cost to the Soviet Union, ignored.
Soon after Romm returned from California, he and Galena told their American friends that they had received instructions to pack up and return to Moscow. It was, they said, a temporary stop, as he'd been assigned to a prestigious new position as Izvestia's London correspondent. Soviet ambassador Alexander Antonovitch Troyanovsky hosted a farewell lunch at the Soviet embassy, mirroring the send-off Romm had received before leaving Moscow. Romm may have believed he was actually headed to London, but it is almost certain that as Troyanovsky toasted his long-time friend, the old Bolshevik knew or suspected the truth. As the OGPU defector Walter Krivitsky wrote, a “barbed-wire frontier separate[d] the old Bolshevik Party from the new. During the purge there was only one passport across this frontier. You had to present Stalin and his OGPU with the required quota of victims.”16
Even if he chose to ignore it, Romm was aware of the danger. A number of his comrades had been recalled to Moscow with sugar-coated promises, only to be arrested, imprisoned, and, more often than not, executed. His former superiors in Berlin and Paris had already fallen victim to the madness. They were falsely accused—and, in an almost universal feature of Stalin's purges, had falsely confessed—to absurd charges of treasonous plots. Romm's fate was more dramatic, and grotesque.
Shortly after Romm's return to Moscow, foreign correspondents and international diplomats flocked to the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union to attend one of the show trials of prominent Communists that Stalin used to consolidate power. The audience heard Stalin's chief prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, accuse Karl Radek, the former Izvestia editor, Lenin confidant, and central committee member, of plotting with Trotsky to commit an astounding range of crimes: assassinating the Leningrad Party chief Sergey Kirov, sabotaging the Russian railways, and plotting to overthrow Stalin and return capitalism to Russia. Even Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times and a sycophantic apologist for Stalin, was shocked when Vyshinsky announced that the witnesses at the trial would include Romm, who had been arrested and had confessed his participation in the Trotskyist conspiracy.17
When word of Romm's arrest reached the National Press Club, his friends were stunned. Though their circumstances couldn't have been more different, members of the Washington press corps reacted just as countless loyal communists did when, after answering a late-night knock on their apartment doors, they found themselves in one of the NKVD's “black raven” police vans speeding through Moscow to the Lubyanka: “There must be some kind of misunderstanding. If only someone can get word to comrade Stalin, everything will be sorted out.”
Charles O. Gridley, a Denver Post reporter who was president of the National Press Club, immediately launched a campaign to convince the Soviet government that they'd made a terrible mistake. Gridley and a Who's Who of the Washington press, including editors and reporters representing the New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press, sent a cable to Duranty, asking him to present it to the American ambassador for delivery to Soviet authorities. The former OGPU operative Robert Allen was among the signers.
“All members of the Washington newspaper corps have read with anxiety of the arrest of our colleague, Vladimir Romm,” the telegram stated. “In our dealings with Romm we found him a true friend and advocate of the USSR. Never once did he even faintly indicate lack of sympathy for or disloyalty toward the existing government. He did more than any other Soviet envoy to popularize the Stalin regime in this country.”18
When Romm was escorted, squeezed between two armed guards, into the courtroom the next day, it became clear why he'd been sucked into the madness. Previous show trials had depended on forced confessions, but the effect had been somewhat blunted by a lack of detail. In the absence of a storyline, it was difficult for some to follow or believe in the plot. Radek's prosecution opened the curtain on a new kind of Stalinist tragic opera, one in which fantastic confessions from the accused were rendered somewhat more credible by elaborate testimony from secondary characters.19
To weave together the story of a grand conspiracy between Radek and Trotsky, Vyshinsky needed a human link between the protagonists. Not only did Romm know Radek, Romm had been in France at precisely the time Trotsky was shuffling around the country trying to avoid Soviet assassins. Conveniently for the Soviet fabulists, Romm had also traveled between Paris and Geneva at exactly the times when Radek had visited the League of Nations. He was the perfect candidate for the role of counterrevolutionary vector. Adding icing to the cake, Romm's signature on the Declaration of the 83 was presented as evidence of his devotion to Trotsky.
Stalin's interrogators so ruthlessly broke the spirits of the accused with physical and psychological torture, and especially with entirely credible threats to their families, that witnesses eagerly admitted to terrible crimes. Perversely, some loyal Bolsheviks felt that by falsely testifying against themselves they were serving the cause they'd devoted their lives to advancing. The prosecutors who orchestrated the trials compensated for the absurdity of their accusations by providing compliant witnesses with piles of false facts, details that added an air of verisimilitude to what would otherwise have been farcical dramas. The descriptions of precise details of the crimes convinced gullible people around the world that the trials were fair, while the sight of dedicated Bolsheviks freely confessing to heinous crimes terrified those who knew they were lies.
“I had full knowledge of the terrorist plot against the Soviet Government,” Romm testified, as he launched into an account of how he'd acted as a courier, conveying messages between Radek in Geneva and Trotsky in France. Romm described a meeting with Trotsky at the end of July 1933 in a dark alley in Paris near the Bois de Boulogne. Soviet intelligence apparently didn't realize that the French authorities hadn't permitted Trotsky to set foot in Paris and that he'd been sick in bed hundreds of miles away at the time Romm was supposed to have met him.20
Trotsky, Romm said, had steeled him for his mission, which was nothing less than destroying the Soviet Union, by quoting a Latin proverb: “What medicine cannot heal, iron will heal, and what iron cannot heal, fire will heal.” Romm told the court that he had smuggled a letter from Trotsky to Radek pasted inside the cover of Tsusima, a Russian novel about Czarist Russia's humiliating naval defeat in the Russo-Japanese war. The letter, Romm and Radek told the court, described how Japan and Germany were poised to conquer the Soviet Union, as well as deals Trotsky had made to give the USSR's enemies territorial concessions in exchange for appointing him ruler of Russia. Radek testified that he had burned the letter.
Romm admitted that he'd agreed with Trotsky's son to serve as eyes and ears for the counterrevolution in Washington. “So!” Vyshinsky cried, “You were correspondent for Izvestia and special correspondent for Trotsky!”
“It is a sad and dreadful thing to see your friends on trial for their lives,” Duranty wrote in the New York Times. “And it is sadder and more dreadful to hear them hang themselves with their own words.” Duranty wrote that he had “known and liked” Romm since 1930. His old friend spoke in the courtroom “with the same charm and courage that made him popular among Washington newspaper men—one of the most exclusive and intelligent groups in the world and one that would never tolerate anyone shoddy or second rate.” Incredibly, Duranty—who worked out of the two-room TASS office in the National Press Building when he visited Washington in preference to the well-appointed New York Times offices—seemed to believe that his old friends Romm and Radek were guilty as charged.21
Referring to the Russian journalist's signature on the Declaration of the 83, Duranty told his readers that “Mr. Romm declared he was a Trotskyist by conviction because he was not satisfied with the policy of Josef Stalin in China in 1926–27.”
“It is still a mystery,” Duranty wrote, that men like those on trial “could continue to follow Trotsky” when it had been obvious since 1923 that “Stalin was the man Russia needed and [was] Lenin's destined successor.”22 Of course, it is even more of a mystery how Western reporters like Duranty could continue to praise and tell lies on behalf of Stalin despite clear evidence of his crimes against humanity.
The Times reporter had no illusions about Romm's fate. “Mr. Romm is not on trial—not yet, at least. But he is not a good risk for life insurance.”23
Duranty was a cynical Stalinist, but the American ambassador, Joseph Davies, was something worse: a complete fool who accepted the Moscow show trials at face value. He wrote to Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, to assure him that Romm's testimony must be true because he provided so many details. “While his appearance on the stand was rather downcast, he looked physically well and as far as I could judge, his testimony bore the hallmarks of credibility,” Davies wrote.24
Romm's friends in the National Press Building were naive about the Soviet Union, but they weren't as stupid as Davies. Press Club president Gridley led a delegation of editors and reporters to the Soviet embassy, located in an elegant mansion on 16th Street, a short walk from the Press Building, where they expressed their “shock and dismay at the news of Mr. Romm's arrest.” Washington Post editor Felix Morley spoke for the group, telling Ambassador Troyanovsky that they knew Romm well and had often spoken with him about the Soviet Union, and that “he defended the policies of the Soviet government without qualification and with every indication that he believed in them wholeheartedly. Regardless of our views, we were compelled to recognize his brilliance and persuasiveness. In view of our experience with him, it will be extremely difficult for us to believe that he is guilty of any deliberate act of disloyalty to the Soviet government.” A statement the reporters handed Troyanovsky noted that Romm had been “a member in good standing not only of the press gallery but also of the National Press Club,” described him as “a journalist of unusual attainments and ability,” and expressed “a lively professional and personal concern about Mr. Romm.” The leaders of the Washington press corps were not sentimental men; their efforts on Romm's behalf were a testament to the extraordinary affinity they felt for him.25
The reporters apparently had no idea of the danger they were placing Troyanovsky in. The ambassador didn't want to remind anyone in Moscow about his close relationship with Romm, which stretched back to Tokyo and to his comrade's ill-advised decision to sign the Declaration of the 83. Countless men and women had been destroyed in the terror as a result of casual contacts with someone who was later purged. The Press Club delegation also failed to grasp the complete irrelevance of Romm's innocence. If Troyanovsky was touched by their naiveté, he kept his feelings to himself.
The ambassador tried to make the best of a bad situation, treating his visitors cordially and acknowledging that he shared their opinions of Romm's abilities. With a straight face, he also confided that Romm had been an outspoken Trotskyite prior to his posting to Washington. Describing Trotskyism as a kind of indecent addiction, Troyanovsky said that he'd helped wean his friend of the affliction, that while Romm was in Washington it seemed he'd been cured, but that, alas, it had been secretly lurking beneath the surface.26
Many of Romm's former friends in Washington were convinced of his innocence, but some influential American journalists—especially those who viewed Stalin and the USSR favorably—found it hard to believe that the Soviet government would present outrageous lies as truths, or that innocent men would confess to crimes. In an editorial published on January 26, 1937, the liberal New York Post posited,
The Moscow trials require one to believe either (1) that Leon Trotzky [sic] is a monster or (2) that Joseph Stalin is a monster. And no ordinary monsters. For either Trotzky and some of his followers have plotted with German and Japanese emissaries to dismember the Soviet Union so that they might overthrow Stalin, or Stalin has staged the greatest frameup in world history to discredit Trotzky…. In all thirty-three men have confessed. Almost all of them were old revolutionaries, men who had faced death and torture. One must believe either (1) that their confessions are true, or (2) that not one of the thirty-three had the courage to let out a protest before the assembled representatives of foreign powers and the foreign press. Not one.27
The editorial was written by Isidor Feinstein. In subsequent editorials, Feinstein, who is better known by the pen name he adopted the next year, I. F. Stone, made it clear he believed the official Soviet version of the show trials.28 Even in those days, long before he became famous as a skeptic's skeptic, Stone was known as a muckraking gadfly who delighted in skewering the powerful, exposing mendacity and shaming politicians by publicizing their concealed conflicts of interest. Stone had accused the FBI of “carrying on OGPU tactics” against organized labor and written an editorial condemning the terror Stalin had unleashed after the assassination of his rival Sergey Kirov.29
Stone knew that the Soviet secret police employed brutal, immoral tactics, and he was acquainted with reporters who swore that Romm was innocent, but he never connected these thoughts. Stone traveled often to Washington in 1936, working out of the Post's National Press Building office. Given his interest in the Soviet Union, as well as numerous common friends in the small circle of Washington reporters, it is almost certain that he met Romm at the Press Club or a social event.
Stone's editorial about the Radek trial is easier to understand in the light of a secret that he carried to his grave. While working to promote the New Deal, and writing sympathetically about Stalin, he had also sealed a secret bargain with representatives of the Soviet government.
Soviet intelligence files reveal that Stone was introduced to an officer of the NKVD in April 1936. The young journalist had been spotted as a possible recruit by a long-time Soviet intelligence agent, Frank Palmer, the head of Federated Press, a leftist news service that presented itself as an alternative to the middle-of-the-road Associated Press. Stone was assigned the cover name “Blin” (pancake). By mid-May Blin had entered the “channel of normal operational work”—meaning he had been recruited as a witting agent—according to a note in the NKVD files. Decades later, Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB general, confirmed that Stone had been a Soviet agent in the 1930s.30
Stone probably didn't give the Soviets classified information—it is unlikely that he ever had access to any—but he was nonetheless a valuable and valued agent.
Unlike in novels and films, most espionage doesn't involve white-knuckle exploits of muscular secret agents. To support the work of spies who steal secrets, operatives are needed to serve as couriers, provide cover identities, and identify and help vet potential recruits.
To understand the utility of someone like Stone beyond his obvious ability to write stories that helped the USSR, it is helpful to imagine yourself in the shoes of a Russian intelligence officer posted in 1935 to the Soviet consulate in New York or the embassy in Washington. In contrast to elite operatives like Romm, you don't speak English well and don't have a nuanced understanding of American society. Yet your career, possibly your life, depends on your ability to persuade Americans to put themselves at tremendous risk by spying on their own country. To make the task even more harrowing, there is only one thing even more pressing than establishing and maintaining a network of informants who are willing and able to provide valuable information: doing so without getting caught. A single screw-up—a clumsy approach to an American who runs to the police or the newspapers, or a failure in tradecraft that alerts the FBI—will result in your expulsion.
Agents like Stone who could identify potential recruits and describe their motivations, weaknesses, and access to information were priceless to Soviet intelligence. This was especially true in the first few years after the establishment of diplomatic relations, when it became possible for intelligence officers to work under diplomatic cover in New York, Washington, and San Francisco.
In addition to his value as a talent spotter, Stone helped the Soviet cause through his writing. Soviet intelligence prioritized the recruitment of “agents of influence.” These were typically individuals like journalists who penned editorials and who were in a position to shape public opinion or tweak government decisions in ways that favored the Soviet Union.
The May 20, 1936, NKVD report noting Stone's recruitment stated that “he went to Washington on assignment for his newspaper,” has “connections in the State Department and Congress,” and knows “Prince.” Prince was Frank Prince, the nation's leading expert on anti-Semitism, an investigator who worked for the Anti-Defamation League as well as for congressional committees.31
Responding to a Soviet directive to provide derogatory information about the Hearst Corporation newspapers, a bastion of anti-Bolshevism, Stone reported that it had entered into a contract to supply Nazi Germany with a large consignment of copper.32
More important from the perspective of an intelligence agency desperate for recruits, Stone reported that Hearst's star reporter in Berlin, an American named Karl von Wiegand, was disillusioned by his employer's close ties to the Nazi regime. Von Wiegand had known Hitler since 1922, when he had hired the then-obscure rabble rouser to write commentaries for the Hearst newspapers about German politics. In the 1930s von Wiegand wrote stories praising the German dictator and suggesting that the Führer would never provoke or risk war with his neighbors. At the same time, von Wiegand privately opposed the Nazi regime and Hearst's pro-fascist editorial policy. He even met in secret with President Roosevelt in 1935 to express concerns about Hearst's support for Hitler.33
Stone reported that von Wiegand had traveled to the United States on the maiden voyage of the Hindenburg zeppelin. The NKVD, Stone suggested, could approach him through his son-in-law, Joseph Freeman—a friend to the USSR. Freeman's brother Harry worked for TASS in its Press Building office.34 There is no evidence, however, that the NKVD recruited von Wiegand.
It is impossible to know whether Stone's writing about the USSR in general, and the Radek trial in particular, was shaped by his entanglement with the NKVD, or whether both Stone's covert work for Soviet intelligence and his editorial positions are better understood as reflections of his faith in Soviet Communism. What is certain is that Stone abused his readers’ trust by claiming to present an objective account of the Soviet reality while secretly working for the NKVD. An accurate depiction of the show trials from a leftist like Stone would have convinced many Americans of Stalin's barbarity.
Stone and the New York Post may have been fooled by the Radek trial, but other American reporters understood what was happening in Moscow. A few days after Stone's pro-Stalin editorial hit the streets, the syndicated columnist Rodney Dutcher told his readers what the trial looked like to members of the National Press Club: “Few happenings abroad in late years have caused so much emotional disturbance—especially among the newspaper crowd, which is sure Romm was loyal to his government—as worry over the possibility that Romm might be shot.”35
Stalin and his regime were savage, but they tried to present a human face to the world. Konstantine Aleksandr Oumansky, who had succeeded Troyanovsky as Soviet ambassador to Washington, told the credulous US ambassador Davies that pleas from the Press Club had led to a mitigation of Romm's sentence. He was, Oumansky claimed, “sent to do work in the interior.”36
In fact, Romm was executed in the usual fashion, by a bullet fired into the back of his head, on March 8, 1937. Galena was forced to suffer the horrors of a Siberian labor camp, while their son was turned over to an orphanage and subjected to the cruelties imposed on children of enemies of the people.37
The execution was not announced, so reporters didn't know Romm's fate when, a few weeks later, Oumansky, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon, told them the USSR was “fundamentally on the side of democracy but is surrounded by enemies and we must defend ourselves.”38
Romm wasn't the only former National Press Club member to suffer from the fatal embrace of the Soviet Union's intelligence services. Alexei Neimann, chargé d'affaires at the Soviet Embassy, had joined the club a month before Romm's arrival in Washington. Neimann returned to Moscow in 1935 and continued to work for the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In contrast to Romm, Neimann had not made much of an impression at the Press Club. None of the reporters who jumped to Romm's defense was in touch with him when the NKVD arrested him on August 9, 1937, and none was aware of Neimann's execution on April 8, 1938. Along with millions of other Soviet citizens who had been unjustly executed or imprisoned, Neimann and Romm were “rehabilitated” in 1956.39
Allen, Romm, and Stone were the first of a long line of Soviet intelligence operatives who used the National Press Building as a base for espionage, operating with relative impunity despite often-intense FBI surveillance. Soviet intelligence had a continuous presence in the building, but they were never alone. Over the decades, spies pretending to be journalists, and journalists moonlighting as spies, working to advance the interests of a number of governments—including that of the United States—have hidden in plain sight in the NPB's offices and corridors.
From the early 1930s to Pearl Harbor, German and homegrown fascists, American and Soviet Communists, British intelligence operatives, Japanese agents, and members of an unofficial, unnamed private intelligence network that reported to President Roosevelt all rubbed shoulders in Press Building elevators, jostled against each other in its narrow corridors and stood shoulder to shoulder at the Press Club bar. Mingling among the thousands of legitimate journalists, lawyers, and lobbyists who reported to the building every day, they pursued covert agendas: plotting to make America safe for plutocrats by overthrowing the government, inciting racial hatred in pursuit of an imaginary homogeneous past, giving Stalin's espionage networks a foothold in Washington, and conspiring with British intelligence officers to shape American public opinion and defeat politicians who advocated neutrality.
Governments didn't have a monopoly on espionage and subversion conducted in the Press Building. Especially during the long years of the Great Depression and the anxious months that culminated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, private citizens and corporations plotted behind Press Building doors to advance agendas that had a great deal in common with the fascism that was spreading across Europe.