Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (86 page)

As the pace of the FBI's investigation of atomic espionage picked up
in 1950, the Cohens remained under the FBI's radar. The KGB, how ever, didn't know that and took no chances. In March 1950 they were
warned to prepare to flee the country, and in the summer they quietly
left New York, making their way to the Soviet Union via Mexico. The FBI
remained unaware of them until an informant in 1953 mentioned having
known Morris Cohen as an ardent Communist. A routine check found
that in mid-195o Morris had abruptly resigned as a New York City schoolteacher, and the couple had also abandoned their furniture in the apartment they hastily vacated. They had told their family that they were moving to the West Coast, but correspondence from them had been brief,
had not provided a new address, and then ceased. Although suspicious,
the FBI had no leads until 1957, when it arrested Rudolf Abel (real name
William Fischer), a KGB illegal officer operating under a false identity in
the United States. In his safe deposit box the FBI discovered photographs
of the Cohens, with recognition phrases used to establish contact between
agents who have not met previously. Not surprisingly, that spurred a
major FBI effort that generated information on their backgrounds but
no real clues as to what had happened after they disappeared in 1950.

In 1961 the British Security Service rolled up a Soviet espionage ring
that ran a source at the Portland Underwater Weapons Establishment,
which carried out British nuclear submarine work. Among those arrested
was a New Zealand couple, Helen and Peter Kroger, antiquarian book
dealers who ran the ring's safe house and shortwave radio. A fingerprint
check showed that the Krogers were the long lost Cohens. Defiant, the
Cohens denied all, including refusing to admit their true identity. They
received twenty-year sentences but were exchanged in 1969 for several
Britons being held by the Soviet Union. After the exchange, the Cohens
lived in Moscow on KGB pensions, lionized in their final years as heroes
of Soviet espionage. Lona died in 1992, Morris in 1995.54

A handful of Americans did technical work for the KGB, serving as radio
operators. By and large, Soviet intelligence used its own officers as radio
operators. Most often, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, it used ciphered commercial telegrams and radiograms to and from Moscow as its
primary means of quick communication. Lengthier reports and documents were shipped in diplomatic pouches. The Soviet Embassy and consulates also had radio transmitters and used them as well-or, rather,
tried to use them. Moscow Center sent Alexander Feklisov to the United
States in February 1941 with orders to set up and run the station's short wave radio transmitter. But Feklisov noted in a report: "We were unable
to obtain radio transmitters for all of 41. We attempted to in late 41, but
the transmitter sent by the Home [Moscow] didn't work well. We built a
new one in the summer of 1942 with the help of agent "Condenser." -55

"Condenser" was Kenneth Richardson, who was born in Baltimore
in 1884. By the early 192os he was a wealthy man, owner of a factory that
produced radio parts. He went bankrupt, however, and worked thereafter as a ship's radio operator. A longtime Communist, he married a
woman who concealed her own Communist ties behind membership in
the Daughters of the American Revolution. Richardson had been friends
with Earl Browder since the 19zos. Jack Childs, a high-level CPUSA official who became a secret FBI informant in the 1950s, told the Bureau
that Browder had selected Richardson to attend a Comintern training
school around 1934 or 1935. He returned to New York in late 1936 and
began work as a radio operator for a Comintern network.56

In 1939 Browder turned Richardson over to the KGB. A report states
that the KGB sent him "to the USSR with his wife to study techniques of
conducting illegal intel. work." He returned later that year but "was not
actively used by us until 1942," when Feklisov needed assistance making
the shortwave radio link work. He helped Feklisov by building "several
radio transmitters for us for the needs of our stations in the West," for
which he was paid $15o a month.

American law, however, required that long-range radio transmitters
be licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. The Soviets
had ignored the requirement, and in 1943 the government leaked to the
press that the USSR was operating unlicensed radio transmitters from its
embassy and consulates. In the Soviet view American regulations did not
apply to their diplomatic facilities, but rather than argue about it, Moscow
Center ordered the transmitters shut down, and the relationship with
Richardson ended. The KGB revived contact in 1945, but in 1947 Feklisov offered a cautionary note:

"Condenser [Richardson] has great respect for and is devoted to "Helmsman"
[Browder], whom he considers the most educated and experienced Marxist in
the U.S. So it was a heavy blow to him when "Helmsman" was expelled from
the party in early 1945 for pursuing a policy of conciliation with capitalism,
which resulted in the weakening of the class struggle in the U.S. and a pullback by the Communist Party from leadership of this struggle. Although the
split that had occurred in the party had apparently not affected "Condenser's"
attitude toward our country and our work, it was still not hard to notice traces
of a certain personal dissatisfaction with us, over our leaders' supposed indif ference toward the affairs and fate of the local CP." ... In the future he should
be recruited for work only on condition that the relationship between us and
"Helmsman" is good. He will work only after he gets consent from Helmsman.

Nothing more was written of Richardson in KGB documents in Vassiliev's
notebooks. Given that relations between the Soviets and Browder only
got worse, at some point Richardson and the KGB probably went separate ways. 57

In 1950 Moscow Center criticized its Washington station for producing
only limited intelligence. In an indignant reply, Washington placed the
major blame for its problems on Bentley's defection, as well as on the
large number of agents who had been exposed. But it also mentioned
that "`Vig has chosen to betray us."' On inspection, the defensive Washington station had exaggerated the extent of "Vig's" betrayal.58

"Vig" was Lee Pressman, a prominent figure in American labor history. Born in 1906, Pressman attended Cornell; was a classmate of Alger
Hiss at the Harvard Law School, where he graduated second in his class;
and worked with Hiss at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration of
the Department of Agriculture, where they together attended meetings
of its secret Communist unit, the Ware group. He later held staff positions with the Works Progress Administration and the Resettlement Administration and briefly practiced law in New York before he went to
work for the labor movement in 1936, serving as general counsel for the
newly organized CIO, working closely with its leader, John L. Lewis, and
his successor, Philip Murray. Neither Lewis nor Murray had any Communist sympathies, but they were willing to work with Communist trade
unionists as long as they were in charge. One of Pressman's unofficial
roles in the CIO was liaison between the CIO's Communist faction and
its predominately non-Communist leadership.59

Pressman's position in the CIO became more and more untenable as
Murray slowly separated himself from his former Communist allies after
World War II. When the CIO signaled that it would not tolerate its constituent unions supporting Henry Wallace's Communist-backed candidacy
for president in 1948, Pressman resigned and went to work for the Progressive Party, running on its ticket for Congress. The House Committee
on Un-American Activities subpoenaed Pressman during its investigation
of Alger Hiss, but he invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions. In 1950, however, after the outbreak of the Korean War, he resigned from the American Labor Party (the New York affiliate of Wallace's
Progressive Party), charging that it had fallen under Communist sway.
Subpoenaed again by Congress, this time he testified grudgingly. It was
this testimony that provoked the KGB Washington station to tell Moscow
in October, "`Vig has chosen to betray us,"' as well as the earlier comment
to Moscow that ""Vig," apparently, has chosen the path of provocation. "60

But Pressman had only partially betrayed the Communist cause. Like
Alexander Koral and engineer spy Nathan Sussman (discussed in chapter 6), "Vig" found himself pressed by the FBI and potentially facing espionage-related charges, so he sought to make partial disclosures and
offer partial cooperation to stave off prosecution while providing only a
fraction of what he really knew. He admitted that he had been a CPUSA
member from 1934 to 1936, naming John Abt, Charles Kramer, and
Nathan Witt as fellow members of the Ware group, but he exonerated
Hiss and, in any case, described the group as a harmless Marxist study
group. And he acknowledged that despite not carrying a party card, he
had considered himself to be a covert ally of the Communist Party until
the late 1940s. Beyond that, however, he deceived, misled, and lied."r

In the late 1940s Pressman functioned as part of the KGB's support
network. With many of its former sources exposed and facing grand juries, congressional investigations, and possible indictments, the KGB
needed to assure its exposed agents of financial and legal assistance.
Pressman, then in a private legal practice in New York, assisted in that
task. In September 1949, acting through him, the KGB paid Victor Perlo
$250 for an analysis of the American economic situation and, more generously, simply delivered $1,ooo in October to relieve his economic distress (these sums are the equivalent of approximately $11,ooo in 2008
dollars). The plan of work for the Washington station in 1950 summarized Pressman's task: "Vig-covering the activities of the Progressive
Party. Receiving general information about the status of our exposed
agents." A 1951 KGB report noted that Pressman had been its conduit for
funds to pay for lawyers for Harold Glasser, Victor Perlo, and other members of the Perlo apparatus when they were subpoenaed by the House
Committee on Un-American Activities, but no details or the extent of financial aid were specified.62

A KGB 1951 report also said, "'Nig" turned traitor; however, we do
not know whether he betrayed "Ruble" [Glasser] to the Amer. authorities."' But, in fact, Pressman had not betrayed Glasser or the other Soviet agents he had assisted earlier. Instead, when interviewed by the FBI,
Pressman said that in the fall of 1949 Yury Novikov, a Soviet diplomat, had
hired him to handle legal work for estates left by Americans to Soviet
beneficiaries and consulted with him on other issues, including which
lawyer to hire to defend Valentin Gubichev, a Soviet citizen arrested along
with Judith Coplon and charged with espionage. Pressman said that he
became increasingly uneasy about the relationship and feared he was
being slowly drawn into murky waters. The legal relationship he admitted with the Soviet Embassy provided a plausible pretext to pass money
to Pressman that he could then pass along to members of the Perlo group,
and his story appears to have been crafted to explain meetings with a Soviet official that he feared he would have to explain. In fact, Novikov was
a KGB officer; he appears in KGB files under the code name "Krok." (In
1953 the government declared Novikov persona non grata for his role in
Soviet espionage.)"3

Pressman also had assisted Soviet intelligence in the mid-1930s. In
December 1948 Anatoly Gorsky prepared a report on Soviet sources who
might have been exposed by defectors. Among those Gorsky listed as potentially compromised by Whittaker Chambers was "`Vig'-Lee Pressman, former legal adviser of the Congress of Industrial Organizations."64

Chambers told Assistant Secretary of State Berle in 1939 that Pressman had been a member of the Ware group and publicly repeated the assertion in 1948. At that time Pressman indignantly denounced Chambers's statement as "the stale and lurid mouthings of a Republican
exhibitionist," only to reverse himself in 1950 and admit his participation
in the Ware group. But Gorsky was writing about more than Chambers's
revelation that Pressman had been a secret Communist in the mid1930s.
Chambers had also told Berle (and elaborated in the late 1940s) that in
late 1936 or early 1937 GRU agent Philip Rosenbliett had asked him to
find a lawyer willing to help with the purchase of arms for the Sovietbacked Spanish Republican government (illegal under American neutrality laws). Berle's notes indicated that Chambers had introduced Mack
Moren (pseudonym of an unidentified GRU agent) to Pressman, then in
private law practice in New York. Chambers stated that Pressman had
accompanied Moren on a trip to Mexico to obtain American aircraft for
use in Spain. During his 1950 testimony Pressman admitted meeting
Whittaker Chambers in 1936 and stated that Chambers brought him a
client, a J. Eckhart, who had credentials from the Spanish Republican
government and wanted Pressman to accompany him to Mexico to assist in purchasing munitions. According to Pressman, they made the trip, but
the mission did not succeed. But Pressman insisted that the affair had
been a routine legal matter with no connection to espionage.'

Eckhart also appears in KGB documents. In the autobiography she
wrote for the KGB in 1944 Elizabeth Bentley stated that in November
1936 one of her Communist contacts "`introduced me to one of the
"neighbors"' [GRU's] operatives, who was involved in obtaining planes for
Spain. Two meetings, then he left until the late spring of 1937. He was interested in getting into an Amer. aircraft plant, but his plan failed. He
continued to keep in contact with me, but in the fall of 1937 he said that
the work was finished and he was going home. He was called "Joe." He
left in Jan. '38 after turning me over to his assistant, "Marcel.""' A note
in Bentley's KGB file recorded that Moscow Center "sent an inquiry to
the Red Army Intelligence Directorate in Dec. 1944." It responded,
""Joe" is an old GRU probationer who is living in NY and is in the active
network. Marcel, too." In her 1945 FBI deposition Bentley elaborated
that "Joe" was Joseph Eckhart and "Marcel" was Michael Endelman. The
FBI located Endelman in 1947, then a UN employee. He admitted
knowing Eckhart and Bentley in the mid-193os and that he might have
used the name "Marcel" with Bentley. He insisted that no espionage was
involved but had no clear explanation for what had been going on aside
from his having a sexual relationship with Bentley. The FBI did not locate
Eckhart but determined that he had entered the United States in 1921
and become a citizen in 1935.66