Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (99 page)

Ovakimyan was once again scheduled to return to Moscow in May
1941, although whether restored to good odor or still facing a dark future is unknown. In any event, the FBI intervened to end any doubts
about his bona fides. Based on information from Armand Feldman, the
FBI arrested him as an agent of a foreign government who had failed
to register as required by law. As the panicked New York station posted
additional guards and prepared to burn documents in case the FBI
attempted to storm the consulate, the commissar for state security,
Merkulov, instructed Pastelnyak, temporarily in command in New York:
"Let Gennady [Ovakimyan] know: We will take all necessary measures
in your case. Hold tight, deny everything.... Don't worry about your
wife and daughter. We will take care of them. We are confident about a
favorable outcome of the case and that you will conduct yourself in a worthy manner." The Nazi attack on the USSR in June brought a warming in Soviet-American relations, and the State Department turned aside the
FBI's desire for prosecution. Deported in exchange for the emigration
of several Russian-born wives of Americans, Ovakimyan returned to
Moscow as a respected senior officer, supervised Anglo-American operations, and rose to the post of deputy head of foreign intelligence.''

Graur and Butkov had treated Ovakimyan's reliance on Jacob Golos
as damning evidence of his treasonable Trotskyist links in their 1939 indictment. Yet no relationship brought the KGB more benefit than its contact with Golos, and none ultimately caused it as much difficulty. Born in
18go in Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine, Yakov Naumovich Tasin was first arrested
in 1907 while managing an illegal Bolshevik printing press and sent to
Siberia. He escaped and made his way to America via Japan and China.
Active in the Socialist Party's Russian-language affiliate, he became a
charter member of the American Communist Party in 1919 and adopted
"Jacob Golos" as his /files/08/36/13/f083613/public/party name. He lived and worked in the Soviet Union in the early 192os and became a member of the Soviet party.
He returned to the United States in 1923, after American party leader Jay
Lovestone appealed to the Central Committee of the Soviet party to send
him back, citing "his significant influence among the Russian working
masses in the United States.... It was a mistake by our party to have allowed him to leave America to work in the Soviet Union." Golos held
several mid-level CPUSA positions in the 1920s, including party organizer in Detroit; head of the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia;
and business manager of Novy Mil, a party-aligned Russian-language
newspaper. He returned to the USSR a few years later for work at the
CPUSA-backed American industrial colony in the Kuzbas region in
Siberia and was again accepted into the Soviet Communist Party. But
with Soviet party permission, he once again came back to the United
States in 1929 for new CPUSA assignments."

Golos became president of World Tourists, a CPUSA-financed travel
and shipping agency in 1932 and held that position until his death in
1943. Trafficking in false passports and facilitating the clandestine movement of both CPUSA and Comintern activists around the globe, the business enabled him to serve both American Communist and Soviet interests. A close friend of party leader Earl Browder, he also served on the
powerful Central Control Commission, which oversaw party discipline
and kept track of secret party members. The KGB first recruited him in
1930 "for work on the passport line." Through his connections with a
clerk in the Brooklyn passport office who had a gambling problem, Golos
procured genuine passports by having sham applicants provided by the
CPUSA present birth certificates of people who had died young or nat uralization papers provided by cooperating party members. The KGB
tried to establish direct ties with the clerk, but he "categorically refused
and wants to work only with Sound [Gobs]." (The KGB's cover name for
Golos, "Sound," was a play on words. "Gobs" in Russian means "voice.")`

While his relationship with the KGB started with passports, over time
Golos became its chief liaison with the CPUSA. With his personal relationship with Browder and position on the party's Control Commission,
Golos could call on party resources to perform a multitude of tasks for the
New York station. His Russian origins and status as an old Bolshevik also
contributed to his easy working relationship with Soviet intelligence.
Grigory Rabinovich, a KGB officer who had two tours in the United
States, wrote in late 1939 that he had had "a total of 500-600 meetings
with Sound [Gobs] in two years." Describing him as the American "station's principal agent for 1o years," he listed the areas where he had provided assistance: "Trotskyites, the selection and checking of people for
intel. work, passports, the establishment of covers, the settlement of problems with the leadership of the CPUSA, individual complex assignments."
Rabinovich recalled that the press of the station's business with Golos required "sometimes 3-4 meetings a day." In a 1938 report Gutzeit observed that because of security concerns, the station's reliance on "party
contacts" was "`of course, undesirable and dangerous,"' but given the demands on the station and its resources, "We have no choice but to work
through Sound."20

Moscow Center first paid serious attention to Gobs in 1937, when
one of the New York station's officers, Liveit-Levit, suggested that he was
not candid about where he was getting some of the information he gave
the KGB. Golos, in fact, habitually protected his party-based sources and
wanted the KGB to work through him and not directly with them. He
may have wanted to enhance his importance, but he also feared that once
the KGB found a source useful, for reasons of security it would isolate
him or her from the party. Golos, a long-serving CPUSA official, saw no
need to lose party assets. When Moscow asked about Liveit-Levit's comment, Gutzeit responded angrily:

"Re Sound [Gobs]. Again some kind of nonsense. Sound has been known to
our department for 7 years. Many people knew this source before Ten's
[Liveit-Levit's] arrival, and no one had any doubts about his exceptional devotion to us. (After all, it's no secret that Sound is an old fellowcountryman
[Communist] with the local organization.) But now Ten appears, starts some
kind of review of people and work (neither one has anything to do with him),
writes you about this, and you, instead of putting him in his place, also start to
`doubt' and ask questions: `Who is Sound?' This would be funny if it didn't si multaneously show that you really don't know the people, even those who have
a long record of contact with us."

Moscow was not chastised, demanding "`your opinion about Sound as of
today"' and warning, "`The very fact that an agent has worked with us for
many years, along with his fellowcountryman work, doesn't give us a guarantee against betrayal and under no circumstances provide grounds for
complacency."' Still, for the moment, Moscow Center was satisfied. Golos
and Gutzeit visited Moscow in November 1937 and met with Abram Slutsky, chief of KGB foreign intelligence, to discuss the KGB's needs, particularly for arranging American passports and travel documents for its
personnel. Golos also sent his Russian-born wife and American-born son
to the USSR in the mid-1930s to live there permanently.21

But as the paranoia in Moscow deepened, KGB headquarters began
to see its station's "principal American agent" in a sinister light. In April
1938 Golos's KGB file ominously recorded that he had known at least six
officers arrested for treason, including Gutzeit. But when interrogated,
Gutzeit, who does not appear to have confessed, praised Golos's assistance to the KGB New York station. In any event, officers at Moscow
Center began to debate Golos's status. One memo took a favorable view,
noting the many positive remarks in the file about his assistance to the
KGB, Liveit-Levit's own status as an enemy of the people (undermining
his criticism of Golos), and Golos's sending his family to the USSR as indications of his loyalty. But the file also noted Ilya Durmashkin's confession that Golos had sent Mensheviks and Trotskyists to the USSR.22

In September 1939 a Moscow Center officer, P. Pshenichny, wrote
an unqualified condemnation of Golos:

"The defense of "Sound" [Gobs] by the enemy Gutzeit, I think, also entitles
one to think that "Sound" is not our man. During "Sound's" time in Moscow
Slutsky received him in Gutzeit's presence. I think he probably received an assignment of a counterrevolutionary nature. "Sound" was an object of interest
for the enemies Slutsky, especially Passov, Shpigelglaz, Grafpen, Kamensky,
Sobol, Gutzeit.... An investigation conducted in early September 1939 revealed that Sound joined the Communist Party as a Menshevik in order to
subvert the party from within, that he has been associated until recently with
Cannon (one of the leaders of the Amer. Trotskyites, who is personally connected to Trotsky), Chertova (her real name is Sara Weber, who was Trotsky's
secretary), managed through I. L. Durmashkin (sentenced to the supreme
penalty in 1938) the Trotskyite organization at Amtorg and sent Trotskyites
and SRs [Social Revolutionaries] to the Sov. Union for counterrevolutionary
work (from I. L. Durmashkin's testimony).

In December 1937 Slutsky summoned "Sound" for a discussion, which
was attended by the now-convicted Gutzeit. They also sent his wife Silvya
Solomonovna Golos to the Union and she was accepted for Sov. citizenship.
She is currently being investigated by Department z of the GUGB [Chief Administration of State Security] for an association with the Trotskyite Gladkov,
who during the period 1928-1932 was in the Trotskyite organization of Amtorg. Based on the foregoing, "Sound" must not be left in the rosters of U.S.
agents under any circumstances. Since "Sound" knows a great deal about the
station's work, I would deem it advisable to bring him to the Soviet Union and
arrest him."23

But then, just as its later arrest of Ovakimyan had put an end to
doubts of his loyalty, the FBI intervened to complicate Pshenichny's
damning portrait of Golos. In October 1939 five FBI agents appeared at
World Tourists with a search warrant and a grand jury subpoena. The
Nazi-Soviet Pact had temporarily ended the justice Department's indifference to covert Soviet activities in the United States, and it charged
that World Tourists had failed to register with the justice Department as
an agent of the Soviet Union. Ovakimyan, unaware that Golos was under
suspicion in the USSR, wanted him to flee to Moscow to avoid testifying
to the grand jury and possible prosecution. Ovakimyan worried that federal investigators would figure out from World Tourists' accounts that
from May 1937 to July 1938 Moscow had transferred more than $54,000
through the company (the equivalent of nearly $8oo,ooo in zoo8 dollars),
money laundering being one of the services Golos provided for the KGB
and the Comintern. Golos, however, didn't want to go, citing a CPUSA
policy of "`not running away,"' and Ovakimyan allowed that his "'disappearance will cause harm to the fellowcountiymen (CPUSA)."'24

If Moscow wanted Golos back to arrest him as a Trotskyist, it had a
pretext. But the U.S. government's prosecution argued against his being
a traitor. Initially, Moscow instructed Ovakimyan not to take any actions
but observe how the situation played out. In early January 1940 he reported that he continued to feel it was essential for Golos to leave but
Browder objected, and Moscow told him to defer to the latter's wishes.
In the meantime the Comintern had provided a favorable biography on
Golos, and a positive appraisal came from his former contact Grigory Rabinovich. The World Tourists matter ended with a plea bargain whereby
Golos pled guilty and received a slap on the wrist: a fine and a suspended
sentence .25

But at Moscow Center Pavel Fitin had decided that Ovakimyan was
a traitor and his relationship with Golos was part of the problem. Pastel nyak, Ovakimyan's deputy, warned Moscow that Golos endangered the
New York station's operations and recommended deactivating him.
Pastelnyak secretly reported to Moscow Center that Ovakimyan had ordered him to meet Golos but he had refused: "`I was sure he had tails relentlessly dogging his heels,"' adding suspiciously, "`provided he himself
was really honest in our work."' Pastelnyak regarded Golos's role in KGB
operations with contempt: "`There is a view among certain operatives ...
that Sound [Gobs] is the de facto station chief in the U.S. He supplies
people for all sorts of services and assignments in every area of work"'
and "`if anything were to happen to them [Gobs and American agent
Joseph Katz], much of what has been created would fall apart.' "26

A KGB memorandum written in July 1940 asserted that further investigation had confirmed Durmashkin's 1938 confession that Golos was
a Menshevik and Trotskyist who had "`at various times sent a number of
persons to the USSR to conduct subversive work"' and concluded: "`It is
urgently imperative to isolate "So." ["Sound"/Golos] from all of the station's affairs and to recall him immediately to the Union. For "So." to stay
any longer in the U.S. jeopardizes all of our work just because of the absolutely impermissible situation that he knows in effect more than the
station chief."' At this time Golos also heard that his wife, residing in
Moscow, might be seriously ill, and the KGB arranged for his son to cable
him to return. Although the unsuspecting Golos was now ready to leave
the United States, the CPUSA leadership was still reluctant and, in any
case, the State Department refused two requests for a passport. Since he
was under a two-year suspended sentence from his plea agreement and
it was assumed that the FBI kept an eye on him, any attempt to leave illegally would risk arrest and serious legal consequences. He stayed in the
United States, and after Ovakimyan's vindication and the Nazi attack in
June 1941, Soviet intelligence priorities changed and concerns about
Golos's loyalty vanished.27