Working from the offices of TASS, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, in New York and one floor above John Franklin Carter in the National Press Building, Vladimir Sergeyevich Pravdin did exactly what Carter only imagined he had accomplished. From the fall of 1941 to the summer of 1945, the Soviet intelligence officer used journalism as a cover for an effective espionage operation. Pravdin pulled it off because he was everything Carter wasn't: disciplined, tough, and above all ruthless. The contrasts between Carter and Pravdin exemplify the differences between professional spies who pretend to be journalists and journalists who moonlight as spies.
Although the irony of a Soviet newsman's being named Pravdin, which means “man of truth” in Russian, must have occurred to American reporters and editors, given his serious demeanor it is unlikely that anyone joked with him about it. Pravdin wore the name like the suits he purchased on London's Regent Street. The name was comfortable because, like everything about his well-tailored persona, it was a lie.
Pravdin's real name was Roland Abbiate. He was born in England, the son of a French cellist from Monaco. When Abbiate was six, the family moved to the tsar's glittering capital, St. Petersburg, where his father joined the faculty of the conservatory. Abbiate left Russia in 1920 as a sixteen-year-old, living in Monte Carlo and Marseilles before arriving in New York in 1926. According to a Russian biography, he was a waiter at the Astoria Hotel on Times Square from 1926 to 1928.1 He actually did spend a few months working in New York hotels in 1926, but for most of his stay in New York Abbiate was an involuntary guest of the US government. He was arrested in April 1926 for impersonating an immigration officer and, after serving a two-year prison term, was deported to England.2
Men like Abbiate who were comfortable sliding between cultures and languages—he spoke English, French, and Russian flawlessly—were valuable to Moscow. Abbiate's sister had been recruited into the OGPU, Stalin's intelligence service, and he followed her into the service in 1931.3
Always impeccably dressed and occasionally armed, fond of a good drink, capable of seducing women and of calmly extricating himself from mortal peril, Pravdin was a real-life James Bond, minus the wink and witty repartee. A short autobiography he submitted in 1944 to Moscow Center, as the intelligence service's personnel referred to its headquarters, reads like the resume of a character from a spy story.4
“February 1935: was sent to Norway to determine the precise whereabouts of the Old Man; completed assignment in one month.” The Old Man was Trotsky; locating him was the first step in a planned assassination.
“August 1936: Accompanied a ship carrying military equipment from Finland to Bilbao. In the English Channel, prevented transfer of the ship to Franco's naval forces by threatening the ship's captain with immediate execution.” At the time, the Basque region was surrounded by Franco's forces and the port of Bilbao was a critical entry point for military supplies headed to the Republican government opposing Franco. Losing the ship would have been a blow to the Republicans, and a disaster for Abbiate, who would certainly have been imprisoned and would likely have been executed.
“February 1937: Was sent to the countryside with an assignment to liquidate Old Man; after failing to carry out the assignment, was recalled in May to fulfill another one.” The “countryside” was Soviet intelligence's cover name for Mexico. Abbiate was one of many Soviet agents who attempted to penetrate Trotsky's inner circle. Three years later, one of them succeeded and plunged an ice pick into the Old Man's head.
“July 1937: On my own, tracked down and liquidated Raymond.” Raymond was the cover name for Ignace Reiss, a Soviet intelligence officer who, disgusted by the execution of old Bolsheviks in the purges, had sent Stalin a letter returning his Order of the Red Banner medal, resigning from the NKVD, as OGPU had been renamed, and announcing his allegiance to Trotsky. Immediately after sending the letter, Reiss went into hiding from the assassins he knew Stalin would certainly send. The task of silencing his comrade fell to Abbiate. To set the trap, Abbiate seduced Reiss's one-time lover, Gertrude Schildbach, convincing the much-older woman that he had fallen madly in love with her and wanted to marry her. Acting on Abbiate's orders, Schildbach gave Reiss a box of strychnine-laced chocolates, but, fearing that Reiss's wife or child would be killed, she immediately snatched it back. Abbiate quickly improvised another plan, instructing Schildbach to lure Reiss to an isolated road in Switzerland where he “liquidated” the defector with a Soviet PPD-34 submachine gun. Reiss died with a lock of Schildbach's gray hair in his clenched fist.5
The execution of Reiss had been conducted sloppily. In addition to recovering the poisoned chocolates, Swiss police found a blood-stained coat at the crime scene with a receipt from an upscale London tailor in the pocket made out to “R. Abbiate.” Abbiate and Schildbach eluded the police and made their way to Moscow. Her squeamishness over possibly poisoning an innocent woman and child was not appreciated in the Lubyanka. Instead of being rewarded with the romantic bliss Abbiate had promised, Schildbach was arrested and sent to a Siberian prison camp, while he was rewarded with a promotion.6
Lookout notices for Abbiate had been posted to borders from Dover to Singapore, but as he'd never used it before, “Pravdin” was not among the five aliases listed on the bulletins.7
Traveling on a Soviet diplomatic passport and with credentials identifying him as an editor at TASS, the man known for the rest of his life as Vladimir Pravdin arrived in New York in September 1941. He quickly came to the FBI's attention. For the next four and a half years, the bureau was on the lookout for Abbiate and was also keeping an eye on Pravdin; it had no idea that they were the same person.8
British intelligence was also in the dark. At a time when Pravdin was known to members of British Security Coordination in New York, a British counterintelligence officer wrote a memo noting that Abbiate and another Soviet agent “seem to have disappeared from human ken since they were involved in the murder of Reiss in 1937.”9 The memo suggested removing Abbiate from a “post-war black list,” of individuals who were to be excluded from Britain when normal travel resumed. The recipient of this memo, a senior British intelligence officer named Kim Philby, must have been pleased. A longtime Soviet agent, Philby relished evidence of his British colleagues’ cluelessness. Philby approved the proposal to strike Abbiate from the list.
Returning to Manhattan, the city where he'd been arrested fifteen years earlier, marked a complete reversal of fortune for Pravdin. Now he was dining with the editor of the New York Times and the chiefs of the Associated Press and United Press wire services in hotel restaurants like those where he'd once waited tables.
In January 1944, Pravdin was promoted to head of TASS operations in the United States and co-leader of the NKVD's US operations. He shared intelligence responsibilities with a twenty-nine-year-old officer who had little experience and, according to whingeing memos Pravdin sent to Moscow Center, very limited abilities. In April 1945 his rival was shipped off to San Francisco, and Pravdin was officially put in charge of Soviet intelligence in New York and Washington.
Pravdin traveled often to Washington, transforming the TASS bureau in the Press Building from a news-gathering organization that did some spying on the side into an intelligence operation that used journalism as a cover for espionage. The TASS men worked under stern photos of Lenin and Stalin in a single room on the top floor of the Press Building, certain the FBI was taping their phone and bugging the office. It isn't surprising that they didn't spend much time behind their desks, preferring to soak up whiskey and gossip at the Press Club bar, hang around the State Department press room, and attend White House briefings and congressional hearings.
The longtime TASS Washington bureau chief, Laurence Todd, was one of the most popular reporters in Washington. There is no evidence he was a Soviet intelligence agent, but he must have been aware of his colleagues’ covert activities. Before joining TASS, Todd worked at a news service that was a front for Soviet espionage, and for decades at TASS Todd worked elbow-to-elbow with Soviet intelligence officers. His circle of close friends encompassed more than a dozen Americans who spied for Stalin, including several who were alarmingly indiscreet. Only an idiot would have been unaware that his colleagues and friends were stealing political and military secrets from the US government, and Todd wasn't an idiot. In November 1936 he was one of two Press Club members who correctly predicted the exact number of electoral votes Roosevelt would receive, and five years later he was the only member of the State Department press corps to pass an exam given to prospective Foreign Service officers.10
Todd and the other American journalists who reported to the TASS office in the National Press Building during World War II were on friendly terms with an impressive range of Washington insiders: reporters, editors, and publishers; diplomats; government officials; labor union and Democratic Party operatives; and, naturally, individuals who were openly or secretly members of the Communist Party of the United States.
Under Pravdin's leadership, the TASS bureau operated on two parallel tracks. In addition to cultivating sources who spoke with him and other TASS employees openly, treating them as legitimate reporters, Pravdin managed and recruited a roster of spies. He used the Press Building as a base for handling agents with positions in the White House, the Treasury and Justice Departments, as well as at the British embassy.
The Americans who spied for Stalin in Washington during Pravdin's tenure were motivated by a deep, almost religious faith in communism. From Pearl Harbor to the Japanese surrender they justified their actions by convincing themselves that while it was illegal, stealing secrets for an ally was honorable, even patriotic. This argument is contradicted by some uncomfortable facts: many had spied for the USSR during the time when Stalin and Hitler were allied, and those who were given the opportunity continued to spy after the war, when they believed violent conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable.
In addition to using employment at TASS as a cover, Soviet intelligence prioritized the recruitment of American journalists. In 1941, twenty-two of the NKVD's American agents were journalists. The only occupation to surpass journalism was engineering, with forty-nine agents stealing so much sensitive military technology that the Soviets worried they would run out of the 35mm film that was used to make copies.11
Few reporters have regular access to classified information, but many associate with individuals who generate and are privy to the nation's most closely guarded secrets. In addition to picking up information and insights from sources and providing expert commentary on politics, journalists are well-positioned to identify individuals who might be willing to betray their country.
Pravdin had talent-spotting in mind in the spring of 1944 when he transferred Samuel Krafsur, an American working in the TASS New York bureau, to the news agency's Washington office and recruited him as an NKVD agent. Krafsur had already risked his life for communism by volunteering as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a battalion of American communists, and being wounded in the Spanish Civil War. In a memo to Moscow Center, Pravdin wrote that Krafsur was “absolutely devoted to the USSR” and had provided a list of more than twenty potential recruits. Krafsur's “extensive connections will give opportunities for obtaining valuable information and also of studying individual subjects for signing on” as agents, Pravdin noted.12
Even more than their role as talent-spotters, journalists were valued as agents and sources because Moscow Center believed they had sensitive inside information that never made it into print. This was mostly wishful thinking. Then, as now, journalists generally published everything they knew—and occasionally things they didn't know.
One exception to this rule Walter Lippmann, the most influential journalist in America. Lippmann aimed to influence, not just report on events, so he spent more time working behind the scenes shaping events than reporting on them. He was a confidant of presidents, prime ministers, senators, generals, and, above all, the elite that made and executed American foreign policy.
Recognizing Lippmann's stature, the NKVD had recruited his personal secretary, Mary Price, as an agent in 1941.13 For two years she rifled his files, eavesdropped on his conversations, and scanned his correspondence, passing on everything of interest to the NKVD. By 1943 Price was burned out. Over the objections of Soviet intelligence officers, she resigned from undercover operations and started to work openly for organizations affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States of America.14
The NKVD did not, however, lose access to Lippmann. To the service's surprise, Pravdin developed a close working relationship with the doyen of American journalism, whom the Soviets referred to by the cover name “Imperialist.” Pravdin's cover name was “Sergey,” a nod to his patronymic.
A March 31, 1944, memo from the NKVD's New York station to Moscow Center described Pravdin's unlikely success in cultivating Lippmann:
Contrary to all expectations, the person with whom “Sergey” succeeded in achieving the biggest results in the task of establishing a good relationship was with “Imperialist.” The primary reason for this is the fact that “Imperialist” himself obviously was seeking to have connections with responsible representatives of our circles in the [United States]. He views the acquaintance with “Sergey” precisely in this light, and naturally he is attempting to use the acquaintance with him to determine our viewpoint on various issues of international politics. He is doing this, of course, very subtly, with the utmost tact. It should be recognized that, by attempting to draw “Sergey” into making candid comments, “Imperialist” is sharing his own information with him.15
They met so regularly that in reports to Moscow Pravdin referred to his “usual talks” with Lippmann. Lippmann, a man who couldn't list humility among his virtues, must have thought he was in control of the situation. He was, after all, the most famous journalist in the English-speaking world, while as far as Lippmann knew Pravdin was merely the director of a second-rate news agency's US operations. In fact, Pravdin, a trained and hardened intelligence operative, had the upper hand. A man who could induce Schildbach to conspire to murder the only man who had loved her wouldn't find it difficult to seduce an American journalist into telling him more than he should.
Reports the two men filed in confidence after one of their long, chatty meetings in May 1944 illuminates their relationship. After the lunch, Lippmann called Joseph Grew, a senior State Department official, to pass on information he'd acquired from Pravdin. Lippmann told Grew that the USSR had territorial ambitions in Port Arthur, in Manchuria. Pravdin had also confided that the Soviet Union was concerned about how the United States would perceive its support for communists in China. Grew, who had been US ambassador to Japan at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, sent a report on Lippmann's account of Pravdin's unsurprising comments to the secretary of state.16
Pravdin's report to Moscow about the same lunch suggests that he got much more from the conversation. Lippmann had told him that the US military leadership was confident of the success of the coming invasion of Europe, and that officials in Washington had assured Eisenhower that sufficient trained reserves were available to ensure reinforcement of the invading forces. Lippmann described Anglo American relations, reporting to his Soviet acquaintance that Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius had told him that Churchill initially opposed the Americans’ invasion plans but had come around to supporting them. Lippmann passed along Washington's views on Soviet-Polish relations, advising that Moscow give up its claims to Lvov; described confidential conversations he'd had with US ambassador to the USSR W. Averell Harriman about the Soviet Union's entry into the war with Japan; and reported that the United States expected to seize the Philippines, Formosa, and Singapore by the end of the year.17
In December 1944 Lippmann told Pravdin about private conversations he'd had in Europe with General Dwight Eisenhower about American military plans. The US Army, Lippmann said, was planning a “breakthrough onto the left bank of the Rhine in the middle of January” and assuming it would coincide with a Soviet offensive in Poland heading toward Krakow.18
While signing up Lippmann as a witting Soviet agent was out of the question, recruiting or, more accurately, re-recruiting the journalist I. F. Stone, the Washington editor of the Nation magazine, was very much on the NKVD's agenda. The two men were, by temperament and political affinity, polar opposites.
Lippmann was conservative and elitist, an assimilated Jew who so thoroughly embodied the establishment that he advocated limiting the number of Jews admitted to Harvard. He was worshipped at the Press Club, while Stone was merely tolerated there—and only until 1943. That's when he invited an African American attorney to a club luncheon. Management refused to serve them; it might not be able to bar a black man from sitting in the ballroom, but the Press Club certainly wasn't going to feed him. Unable to persuade more than nine club members to protest against its adherence to Washington's Jim Crow traditions, Stone resigned from the Press Club and denounced it in the pages of the Nation.19
In September 1944 Pravdin and Krafsur tried several times to approach Stone to propose that he resume spying for the Soviet Union, but each time he brushed them off. Pravdin finally met privately with Stone in October and made the pitch. According to Pravdin's account of the conversation, Stone said he'd like to help out, and that he had been avoiding the Soviets only because their approaches weren't sufficiently discreet. Stone indicated that he wasn't averse to the NKVD's topping off the salary he earned from the Nation. His circumstances, however, had changed since he had worked for Soviet intelligence in the 1930s. Now he was a family man with three children and a substantial income. Pravdin requested resources from Moscow to facilitate the “establishment of business contact” with Stone.20
Based on the information that has leaked from the KGB's files, it isn't clear whether Stone was put back on the NKVD payroll, but it is certain that he stayed in touch with Pravdin after the Soviet intelligence officer indicated he was an intelligence officer seeking secret information. Washington's loudest whistleblower, a man who made a career ferreting out malfeasance and hypocrisy, felt no need to inform his readers that the Soviet Union was trying to recruit him and other journalists as spies.21
While Stone didn't have access to secrets, the most important agent Pravdin recruited, Judith Coplon, routinely handled classified information that was of great importance to Soviet intelligence. A twenty-seven-year-old Barnard College graduate who worked for the Department of Justice, Coplon was brought to the NKVD's attention in 1943 by another Barnard alumna, Flora Wovschin. Wovschin was working at the Office of War Information and living with Yuri Okov, an employee of the Soviet consulate who happened to be an officer of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. A memo in the NKVD files noted that when Wovschin became pregnant, Okov paid half the cost of an abortion, and that she frequently visited the Soviet consulate.22
Coplon gave confidential information from her job at the Department of Justice's economic intelligence unit to Wovschin, who told her that the secrets would be passed on to the Communist Party of the United States. Coplon was delighted and excited to be helping the cause. Unaware that Wovschin, following instructions from her Soviet friends, had broken off contact with the Communist Party, Coplon was anxious to deepen her commitment by joining the party.
The US government had a strict ban on employing Communist Party members. Although many civil servants hid their party membership, the NKVD was worried that the Justice Department would find out if Coplon joined. Not only would she be fired, but the resulting investigation could ensnare Wovschin and others. Writing to Moscow Center in February 1944, an NKVD officer in New York warned that if Coplon wasn't recruited soon and instructed in tradecraft, “it is not out of the question that she will feel so weighed down by being cut off from the local progressive movement that she will decide to officially join the local fellowcountryman organization and then she will be lost to us.”23 “Fellowcountrymen” was a cover name for the Communist Party.
The NKVD's requests to Moscow became more insistent. In July 1944 an officer in New York warned that Coplon “is talking more and more often about her desire to establish direct contact with the fellowcountrymen. It is urgent that she be recruited” and instructed to avoid contact with the party.24
To head off the threat and recruit her as an agent, Pravdin met Coplon on January 4, 1945. He was impressed. “There is no question about the sincerity of her desire to work with us,” Pravdin reported. “In the process of the conversation [Coplon] stressed how much she appreciates the trust placed in her and that, knowing whom she is working for, from now on she will redouble her efforts.”25
Her position gave Coplon access to information that was interesting to Soviet intelligence but not compelling. Pravdin's confidence in her, however, was soon rewarded. The Justice Department shifted Coplon to a department that reviewed foreign agent registration documents, a job that required access to classified FBI counterintelligence files. At first she worked on cases involving France, but she was quickly transferred to the department's top priority, the Soviet Union. The Justice Department even paid for her to take Russian classes.
Pravdin warned Coplon to avoid removing documents from the office until she was completely trusted. She ignored the admonition, bringing a cache of documents to Pravdin soon after their first meeting. Don't worry, she told him: no one was watching her or her co-workers, sensitive files were strewn around the office where anyone could look at them, and employees were not searched when they exited the building.26
Because it was far easier to prove that spies had failed to register as foreign agents than to catch them red-handed committing espionage, investigating and prosecuting violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act was a common counterintelligence tool. As part of her job, Coplon received—and passed to the NKVD—information about FBI spy-catching methods and details of its investigations of suspected Soviet spies. The NKVD warned its agents to break-off contact with several individuals after Coplon revealed they were under investigation. Her information prevented the FBI from identifying numerous Soviet spies.
Even with the benefit of Coplon's access to information about FBI investigations of Soviet espionage, Pravdin found the task of maintaining operational security immensely challenging and nerve-wracking. He inherited sprawling networks of spies populated almost entirely by Americans who were secret members of the Communist Party. Pravdin's predecessors had given these agents freedom to operate in ways that violated the most basic precepts of Soviet intelligence doctrine and common sense. For example, in March 1945 Moscow Center reacted with alarm to its officers’ failure to control Wovschin, who was known by the cover name “Zora.” Instructions were sent to “immediately and in detail enlighten our liaison about the serious mistakes he has committed in the work with ‘ZORA.’ As an ultimatum warn ZORA that if she does not carry out our instructions and if she undertakes steps without our consent, we shall immediately terminate all relations with her. Forbid ZORA to recruit all her acquaintances one after the other.” The memo cited security risks posed by Wovschin's activities as an illustration of not only the NKVD's failure to adequately control and educate its agents, “but also the lack of understanding by our operational workers of the most elementary rules in our work.”27
Loose lips and sloppy tradecraft made it inevitable that eventually one of the many agents operating in Washington would be discovered. Agents from different networks socialized and discussed their espionage activities with each other and kept incriminating materials in their homes. Because they knew each other's identities, if a single spy were compromised or defected, the FBI could quickly learn about the activities of scores of spies. Pravdin was horrified to learn that some of his agents were so undisciplined that they attempted to recruit friends and relatives, revealing their connections with Soviet intelligence to individuals who had not been cleared by Moscow.28
Just as troubling for Pravdin, many of the agents working for Soviet intelligence in Washington were emotionally unstable. The NKVD's messages to Moscow Center were filled with accounts of personal and professional jealousies, bickering, adulterous affairs, even a ménage à trois. The entire edifice was resting on a house of cards that could be toppled by the slightest wind.29
After one particularly frustrating meeting with an agent in Washington, Pravdin wrote a bitter memo to Moscow Center complaining that American communists “are always ready to promise the moon in words, but never carry out our assignments if they require effort and time.”30
This was an exaggeration. Although they lacked the discipline and work ethic that Pravdin expected, the agents he was responsible for in Washington and throughout the country produced a continuous, valuable stream of high-level intelligence. During Pravdin's tenure as co-director or head of NKVD operations in the United States, the service's spies obtained technical data that accelerated the Soviet Union's acquisition of atomic weapons and jumpstarted its development of radar, jet aircraft, and a host of other modern military technologies. On the political side, Stalin was briefed about secret deliberations in the White House, Pentagon, American intelligence services, and State Department. He knew about Roosevelt's conversations and conflicts with Churchill, American and British plans for winning the war and for dealing with their vanquished enemies, and their attitudes toward the Soviet Union.
In addition to recruiting agents and supervising the work of NKVD officers who ran clandestine networks, Pravdin debriefed valuable agents who had been serving the Soviet cause for many years. He met in the summer of 1944 with one of the NKVD's top sources, an Englishman named Donald Maclean. The son of a former cabinet member and a graduate of Cambridge, Maclean was the embodiment of the British establishment. At Cambridge he had been recruited into the USSR's most devastatingly effective spy ring along with Kim Philby and four others. The Cambridge spy ring penetrated the highest echelons of British government and society.31
When Pravdin met with Maclean, he had been posted to Washington as first secretary in the British embassy. This position gave him—and the NKVD—access to high-level diplomatic intelligence, especially about the Anglo American relationship, a topic of importance as Stalin schemed to peel back the strong bond between Roosevelt and Churchill. Maclean's work facilitating cooperation on atomic weapons between the United States and the UK also provided access to information of great value to the USSR.32
Pravdin debriefed some of Soviet intelligence's most productive American spies. For example, he traveled in May 1945 to San Francisco, ostensibly to report for TASS on a conference where the treaty creating the United Nations was being negotiated, but actually to meet with an NKVD agent, Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury.33 White, a senior advisor to the US delegation, told Pravdin that President Truman and Secretary of State Stettinius “want to achieve the success of the conference at any price.” If pushed, he revealed, they would be willing to give the Soviet Union a veto over UN actions. This and other inside information White provided to Pravdin put the USSR at an advantage in negotiations with the American and British governments.34
Pravdin received a rare rebuke from Moscow Center in May 1945. His decision to hire William Dodd Jr., to work as a reporter for TASS at its Press Building bureau without seeking approval from Moscow had been a mistake.35 Dodd was the son of the former US ambassador to Nazi Germany. His work for TASS had been reported in newspapers, attracting unwanted attention to the news agency. He had been identified as a potential recruit by I. F. Stone in 1936 and recruited as an espionage agent in 1938 by his sister, Margaret Dodd.36
The NKVD secretly gave Dodd $1,000 in 1938 (equal to about $17,000 in 2017) to finance his unsuccessful effort to unseat a conservative Democratic member of Congress in Virginia. Moscow Center was so enthused by the notion that it could subsidize a congressional candidate that it sent a message to NKVD officers in New York asking for a budget estimate for a comprehensive program aimed at electing a slate of pro-Soviet politicians. The Soviet officer assigned the task threw up his hands, complaining that it was impossible to know how much it would cost to fund campaigns and pay off journalists; doing it right might require $1 million a year for each politician.37
In December 1939, Dodd, who had been assigned the cover name “President,” asked Moscow to help him purchase the Blue Ridge Herald newspaper to support his plan to run for Congress again. “The direction of the newspaper will depend entirely on us,” an NKVD officer in New York reported. “We will work out every detail of the newspaper's agenda with ‘President.’” The Soviets planned to mask their involvement by ensuring that the paper hewed to a moderate editorial line. “It should not be too left-wing, and it should not be pro-Soviet—nor, it goes without saying, should it be anti-Soviet.” The goal was a “moderately liberal local newspaper with a direct connection to liberal Washington journalists.”38 Moscow Center allocated $3,500 for the purchase, $1,500 short of the amount Dodd needed. He neither purchased the paper nor ran in the 1940 primary.39
Dodd kept in touch with Soviet intelligence, providing interesting bits of information but nothing of great value. In 1943, while working in a midlevel job at the Federal Communications Commission, he was called before a House committee that was investigating communist subversion. In a muddled performance at a public hearing, he disavowed all connection with or sympathy for communism but also admitted that he'd written several pro-communist magazine articles. Moscow Center wrote a scathing review of his performance, telling its officers in New York that Dodd had “conducted himself in a foolish and sometimes disgraceful manner.”40 Congress forced the FCC to fire Dodd.
Dodd's decision to take a job at TASS in 1945 amounted to a public advertisement that he was indeed a communist. Moscow Center, irritated by his bungling congressional testimony and seeking to avoid unwanted attention to its espionage activities, instructed Pravdin to fire Dodd.
While Pravdin and his comrades had achieved incredible access to American secrets, information from Coplon and other sources made Soviet spymasters uneasy. Hints of danger had been filtering into the Lubyanka for some time. In the spring of 1944, the NKVD learned from one of its agents, Lauchlin Currie, a senior assistant to Roosevelt, that American codebreakers were on the verge of decrypting high-level Soviet cables.41
In February 1945, Wovschin set off alarms in Moscow Center when she revealed that American counterintelligence knew some of the cover names the Soviets used in their encrypted communications, such as Bank (State Department), House (Moscow Center), and Club (Department of Justice). The NKVD changed its cover names and continued to try to impose discipline on its unruly volunteer spies.
Pravdin's biggest security headache was Elizabeth Bentley. Bentley, whose Russian cover name was umnitsa or “clever girl,” had been the courier, assistant, and lover of Jacob Golos, the most important Soviet spy handler in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. Golos (“voice”) was an alias. His real name was Jacob Reizen. Starting in the early 1930s, Golos forged tight links between Soviet intelligence and the Communist Party of the United States, operating for years with loose direction from Moscow. His romantic relationship with Bentley, whom he met after recruiting her as an agent, was among Golos's many violations of tradecraft rules.
The FBI had missed an opportunity to catch Bentley. When Pravdin first arrived in New York, the bureau took an interest in his wife, Olga Pravdina, tailing her for several months before deciding she was nothing more than an overweight housewife. If the G-men who followed her to grocery stores and movie theaters, describing her as “quite heavy set” and recording that she “has big feet and wears flat heeled shoes,” had been more persistent about tracking her activities and less fixated on her appearance, they might have discovered that in April 1942 Pravdina started meeting with Bentley.42
Following Golos's death in November 1943, Moscow Center told Pravdin to split up the agent networks that she handled and bring them under the control of trained, disciplined handlers. Bentley bitterly resisted demands to turn over agents to professionals who had been sent from Moscow, and quickly came to despise and fear the rough-edged Russian NKVD officers who insisted on cutting her off from the tasks that made her life meaningful. Fortified by several dry martinis, in September 1945 Bentley told an NKVD officer exactly what she thought of him and his colleagues, referring to them as “gangsters.” She threatened to reveal all that she knew to the FBI. After sobering up, Bentley realized she'd made a serious, possibly fatal mistake. She knew of at least one American woman who had been “liquidated” by Soviet intelligence and feared similar retribution.43
The NKVD did consider killing her but decided that less extreme measures—giving her a few thousand dollars, finding her a job and perhaps a husband—would suffice. These tactics might have worked, but the combination of a romantic encounter with a man who falsely claimed to be an FBI agent and a dispute over money with the Communist Party pushed Bentley over the edge. Convinced that the FBI was poised to swoop in any minute and that the Soviets would kill her if she didn't reconcile with the NKVD, Bentley decided it was time to choose sides.
Bentley later said that God had spoken to her, but it seems more likely that she analyzed her options and decided that a jail cell was more attractive than a coffin. In long sessions over fourteen days between November 9 and 29, she gave the FBI a detailed and fairly accurate picture of Soviet espionage networks in Washington and New York, prevaricating only to spare some agents whom she considered friends. On the 30th, she signed a 105-page statement that identified many of the Soviet Union's most valuable American agents and included leads that could allow the FBI to identify more.
Bentley's information was compelling, but she had no documentary evidence; in a courtroom it would be the word of a woman who could easily be depicted as hysterical or unhinged against sworn denials by men who had sterling reputations.
To gather evidence to support prosecutions, the FBI decided to turn Bentley into a double agent. Making statements in the privacy of the FBI's Manhattan offices was one thing, but meeting face-to-face with the men and women she was betraying was a far more daunting and unpleasant task. It was, however, an offer Bentley could not refuse. Having confessed to committing espionage during wartime, a crime punishable by death, Bentley felt she had to do whatever the FBI asked.
The plan might have worked if the FBI had implemented it properly. Ironically, it was disrupted by a mistake made by none other than J. Edgar Hoover. Recognizing the importance of Bentley's information, the FBI director had imposed restrictions on communicating about her identity, which were intended to prevent leaks. He even ordered the bureau to refer to her by a male cover name, “Gregory.” Contrary to his own strict instructions, Hoover discussed the case with someone who did not have an absolute “need to know,” William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination. By November 20, roughly in the middle of her first round of FBI debriefings, news of Bentley's defection traveled from Stephenson to Philby, the NKVD's agent in British intelligence. Philby immediately conveyed the news to Moscow.
On Thanksgiving Day, eight days before Bentley signed her statement, and before the FBI deployed her as a double agent, Pravdin received an encrypted message from Moscow Center: Bentley “has betrayed us.”44 The Soviets knew that Bentley's information would allow the FBI to capitalize on the shortcuts and mistakes they had made in the United States over the previous decade. Scores of agents were at risk of detection and arrest. The espionage edifice Pravdin had been desperately trying to fortify had collapsed, but the tip-off that originated with Hoover allowed Pravdin and his comrades to protect their agents from being crushed in the rubble.
Pravdin was instructed to “take the appropriate precautionary measures,” such as establishing passwords and methods of contact for the future, then break-off contact with all American agents.45
Bentley had identified Pravdina as a Soviet intelligence officer, prompting the FBI to assign a team of G-men to resume its surveillance. It was too late. Pravdin had already warned Bentley's contacts that she had switched sides, and he and his wife had ceased communicating with American agents. Because the Soviets acted quickly, Bentley's information, which could have put scores of Soviet spies in prison, resulted in only one successful prosecution, of a government economist named William Remington.
While complete disaster had been averted, the era of virtually unfettered access to American secrets was over. Soviet intelligence had many successes over the coming decades, but it never came close to achieving the depth of penetration of the US government, military, and industry that it had during World War II.
Pravdin, Pravdina, and their daughter sailed from New York on the Kirov on March 11, 1946.46 Blamed for the collapse of the Soviet Union's American networks, and under suspicion as a foreigner, Pravdin was fired the next year. He committed suicide in Moscow in 1970.47
Moscow Center had been warning its officers in the United States since 1941 that the FBI was bugging their offices and tapping their phones. The alarm had turned out to be premature, but by the time Pravdin departed the FBI was doing this and more. The bureau tapped the TASS office phone lines in the basement of the Press Building and photographed envelopes before the mail was delivered. It recruited a building maintenance worker who collected the TASS office's trash every evening and handed it over to agents in the FBI's Washington Field Office who had the unenviable job of sorting through the cigarette butts, chewing gum, and paper scraps for clues.48 Before TASS moved its desks and photos of Lenin and Stalin to larger offices on the ninth floor in 1947, the FBI obtained a key to its new suite and a copy of the floor plan, and made sure that their surveillance of the news agency's mail and trash was not interrupted.49
In early 1948 the NKVD gradually and carefully began reactivating agents who hadn't been compromised by Bentley. Just as it looked like the situation had stabilized, however, another typhoon struck.
An American NKVD agent who was working as a linguist for a US Army codebreaking operation, William Weisband, told his Russian handler in February 1948 that the Americans were making great progress in decoding and decrypting the Soviet Union's most sensitive communications. Weisband had literally peered over the shoulder of American codebreakers as they read portions of cables sent during the war between Moscow Center and the NKVD's New York station. Separately, in 1949, Philby, who had been posted to Washington as liaison between British foreign intelligence and the FBI, learned the details of the decryption program, which came to be known by the cover name “Venona.”
The NKVD's use of cover names meant that decrypting cables was only the first step toward identifying Soviet agents. In December 1948, the FBI made the first of what ended up being hundreds of identifications. The bureau didn't have to go far to find the spy. It was Coplon.
The FBI put Coplon under surveillance and fed her documents that were certain to be of great interest in the Lubyanka. Coplon took the bait, bringing the secret counterintelligence files to New York. She was arrested moments after passing them to a Soviet diplomat in March 1949. To Hoover's immense frustration, although there was no doubt of her guilt, Coplon walked away from two trials after convictions for espionage and conspiracy were overturned on legal technicalities. Even more troubling to Hoover, the FBI had been forced to acknowledge that it had illegally tapped Coplon's phone.
Coplon ended up running two Mexican restaurants in New York that during the Cold War attracted both FBI agents and KGB officers hoping to catch a glimpse of the spy who got away. She married her defense attorney and never spoke in public or with her family about her involvement with Soviet espionage.50
Stories about Bentley's revelations, the Coplon prosecutions, and other spy cases heralded the beginning of the Cold War and sparked a search for communist infiltrators.
Moscow Center decided it needed to get a firmer grip on its Press Building outpost. Todd was demoted to senior correspondent in 1949 when a Russian NKVD officer, Mikhail Fedorov, replaced him as bureau chief. The Army's Venona decryptions had rendered Krafsur useless as an agent so the NKVD had TASS fire him. Todd was unceremoniously put out to pasture two years later.
The Washington press corps tolerated but did not hide their distaste for the Soviets who stepped into the positions once held by Todd and Krafsur. The two congenial Americans had been replaced by sour foreigners who religiously attended White House and State Department press conferences but never asked questions, and who took great umbrage at suggestions that they were propagandists or spies.
Washington reporters’ already dim view of their TASS colleagues darkened considerably in April 1951, when William Oatis, an Associated Press reporter, was arrested in Prague. Czechoslovakia resisted American demands to release Oatis, tortured him into confessing to espionage, and put him on trial. Actually, Oatis was “tried” several times, undergoing four or five dress rehearsals with real judges and prosecutors and an audience of carefully chosen government officials. Oatis didn't know until it was over if a given performance was a real trial or a rehearsal. The procedure ensured that when journalists and government officials came to watch the actual trial, Oatis and witnesses recited the lines they'd been fed. It also minimized the chances that they would ad lib or slip in anything unexpected. Oatis was convicted on July 4, 1951, and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.51
Calls for reciprocation and revenge rang out from the barstools in the Press Club Tap Room to the halls of Congress. Politicians demanded that Soviet bloc journalists be expelled from the United States, or at least that their government-issued press credentials and privileges be revoked. To increase the pressure on Czechoslovakia, the FBI raided the TASS offices in New York and the Press Building, asserting the government's right to inspect business records to confirm that the news agency was complying with the Foreign Agents Registration Act.52
The Press Club denounced the Czech government and demanded that it release Oatis. The statement wasn't sufficient for some of its members, who agitated for throwing the TASS men out. Resistance to erecting an Iron Curtain around the club came from an unlikely source: New York Daily News reporter Frank Holeman, chairman of the club's Board of Governors. Holeman, a pal of Vice President Richard Nixon's, had no sympathy for communism. A young man with a quick wit and an abiding confidence in the value of fair play, he did, however, believe in the inalienable right of reporters to swap lies over the rims of alcoholic beverages.
It was certainly difficult to argue that allowing Soviets to enjoy the benefits of Press Club membership presented a national security risk. Nothing discussed in its bar stayed secret long. In those days, as Holeman remembered decades later, the club was a colorful mix of “people who could recite Beowulf and people who knew exactly which horse was running at the fifth race at Hialeah and what his chances were.” It was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with a bar that was supposed to close at 2:00 a.m. but sometimes stayed open much later. Most nights three or four men could be found snoring in the library's overstuffed chairs, and at least one remittance man made the club his home, rarely venturing beyond its front door.53
National Press Club members at rest. In the 1950s and 1960s, Press Club members often used its comfortable chairs to recuperate after an evening at its bar.
Credit: National Press Club archives
Holeman won the battle to ensure that TASS employees and Soviet embassy staff retained the right to wander through the blue cigar haze of the Press Club's cardroom, hear from heads of state at its formal luncheons, and enjoy the opportunity to buy a drink on Sundays, when every other bar in town was closed. To show his appreciation, the press attaché invited Holeman to a lunch at the Soviet embassy. Over vodka, caviar, and blinis, Holeman was introduced to Georgi Nikitovich Bolshakov, a GRU officer who had replaced Fedorov as TASS bureau chief.54
Bolshakov had spent a decade in military intelligence before being posted to Washington, but he wasn't stamped from the standard Soviet intelligence officer mold. Armed with self-deprecating humor and an irrepressible smile, he was the first Soviet journalist-spy in Washington since Vladimir Romm left in 1936 possessing the self-confidence to socialize with American reporters. Bolshakov owed his position to his friendship with Khrushchev's son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, and had served as a personal assistant to Soviet marshal Georgi Zhukov. He had the easy manner of a man comfortable around power.
Though they were an unlikely couple, Holeman, who hid his hardscrabble roots behind a patrician persona and a bow tie, developed a tight bond with Bolshakov. The American newsman told Nixon about his comrade, and the vice president, eager for insight into Soviet politics and personalities, encouraged the friendship. For four years, Holeman peppered Bolshakov with questions about the Soviet Union, including some Nixon had suggested, and passed on the gist of the Russian's answers to a politician who had built his career on hardline anti-communism. Bolshakov, his superiors, and Khrushchev knew that his comments were being passed to the vice president.
Like other intelligence officers posted to the TASS office, Bolshakov had to perform his cover job and live on a TASS salary. This was intended to maintain the fiction that they were reporters, give them legitimate reasons to contact potential recruits, and make it somewhat more difficult for the FBI to distinguish between the “clean” TASS employees who worked exclusively as journalists and professional intelligence officers. Bolshakov wrote stories chronicling the history of American race riots and other sordid sides of life in the United States.
Just before Bolshakov's scheduled return to Moscow in 1955, he introduced Holeman to another GRU officer, Yuri Gvozdev, who was posing as a cultural officer in the embassy. Holeman's role expanded from friend and drinking companion to secret intermediary. He conveyed messages from Gvozdev, which he believed came from Khrushchev or those close to the premier, to Nixon, and Nixon used Holeman to send messages back to the Soviet leadership. Both sides felt they benefited from an informal exchange of views, unencumbered by the need to clear their messages with bureaucrats or to formulate them in the bone-dry language of diplomacy. The Daily News essentially gave Holeman a year-long sabbatical when he was elected president of the Press Club in 1956, so he had plenty of time to cement his relationships with Soviet intelligence operatives and with Nixon.
During crises, the messages Holeman communicated between the Soviet and American governments were urgent and specific. For example, in February 1958 Gvozdev asked Holeman how the United States would respond if Moscow's ally, Syria, moved troops into Lebanon. Holeman conveyed Nixon's response: “Stop at the Lebanon border or you'll be in real trouble.” That summer, after Eisenhower sent troops to defend Lebanon, it was Gvozdev's turn to warn the United States to back off. The Soviets would interpret the movement of US or British troops toward Iraq as a provocation, he said. If it felt threatened, the Soviet Union would attack the United States, not its allies in Europe or the Middle East, Gvozdev told Holeman.55
Holeman also passed on a message that was intended to avoid an armed confrontation in the heart of Europe. In November 1958 Khrushchev issued a public ultimatum: the United States, Britain, and France had six months to withdraw their forces from Berlin. The implication was that if they failed to do so, the Soviets would impose a blockade. West Berlin's population had grown too large for a repeat of the 1948 airlift. The use of force to get food to the city could quickly spin out of control. In Washington and Moscow, it seemed that if there was going to be a third world war, Berlin is where it would start.
Holeman carried a message to Nixon from Khrushchev: contrary to the bellicose ultimatum, the Soviet Premier had no intention of starting a war over Berlin.56 Back channels like the Gvozdev-Holeman connection allowed leaders of the superpowers to gain understanding of each other's intentions at a time when a false move by either side could have triggered World War III. As soon as the Berlin situation calmed, Gvozdev enlisted Holeman to facilitate a visit by Nixon to the Soviet Union. The negotiations were successful and the vice president made the trip in July 1959, famously debating Khrushchev at an exhibit about American daily life in Moscow's Sokolniki Park.57
Frank Holeman, New York Daily News reporter and intermediary between Soviet military intelligence officers and senior US government officials.
Source: National Press Club archives
The New York Daily news reporter told Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, that the Soviets didn't believe that he was simply a reporter. He joked with her that she should call him “Frank Holeman, boy spy.” While Holeman didn't work for either American or Soviet intelligence, he was trusted by both the White House and the Kremlin. The temptation for Holeman, a tabloid reporter who had dedicated his life to breaking news, to reveal the secrets he'd learned must have been tremendous. Yet throughout the Cold War, during the countless hours he spent telling stories at the Press Club bar, and in articles he wrote for the Daily News, Holeman never even hinted at his role as a covert communications link between the United States and Soviet leadership.58
By the end of the Eisenhower administration Holeman had conveyed messages that helped defuse some of the most dangerous confrontations of the Cold War.
He was, however, just getting started. After the election of John F. Kennedy, Holeman's life became far more interesting.