Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (96 page)

Still another Soviet operative targeted at the Trotskyists arrived in
New York in 1942. Mark Zborowski had done major damage to the Trotskyists in France in the late 1930s. A message to Zarubin from Moscow
explained that he had moved to Poland from the Soviet Union with his
parents in 1921 at the age of thirteen. He had joined the Communist
Party, been arrested, and fled to France to escape a prison sentence.
While working for the Polish Communist Party in Paris,

"he was recruited in 1934 in France to cultivate Trotskyites. After that, on our
instructions, T. ["Tulip"/ Zborowski] left party work and broke off communications with the Polish Communists. In the summer of 1936 he began actively to
cover Trotskyite activities. He established contact with French Trotskyites
(Rousse, Nabal, and others), leaders of the international Trotskyite secretariat,
and with the Russian section, headed by Sedov [Trotsky's son], then became
Sedov's first assistant in the International Secretariat's work to publish Bulletin of the Opposition.' With his active participation we removed all of the secret archives of the International Secretariat, all of Sedov's archives, and a substantial portion of the "Old Man's" [Trotsky's] archives."

Moscow described Zborowski as "`a dedicated and tested operative; in
terms of his personality he is not energetic enough and shows little initiative. He must be systematically guided in his future work.... Since
`Tulip' [Zborowski] is of great interest regarding use of him to cultivate
Trotskyites in the U.S., try to find out his particulars through the agents
in the circles of the Menshevik Nikolayevsky, Sara Weber and Estrina."'
Zborowski received instructions to insinuate himself with Trotskyists
working on international affairs and particularly to "get very close to" Jean
Van Heijenoort, Trotsky's former secretary, who had access to his archives
at Harvard. A later message applauded that "`the opportunities for processing the "polecats" [Trotskyists] in the majority group have significantly
increased,"' with the reestablishment of communications with Zborowski,
but lamented that there were still no sources among the minority faction
in the Trotskyist movement, likely a reference to Max Shachtman's tiny
Workers Party, which had broken from the SWP.96

Zborowski's KGB liaison was yet another veteran of oppositional work
among the Trotskyists, Jack Soble. A native of Lithuania, he had joined
the German Communist Party in 1921. Married in the Soviet Union in
1927, he infiltrated the Trotskyist movement in 1929. Known as Abraham Senin, Soble and his brother, Robert Soblen, were leading figures in
the German branch of the Trotskyists until they were expelled in 1932.
The KGB dispatched both brothers and their families to Canada and then
the United States in 1940, where Jack initially supervised infiltration of
Trotskyists and other Russian emigre groups. As already discussed, he
later worked with Martha Dodd, Alfred Stern, and Boris Morros.

By 1943 the American Trotskyist movement, never a significant force,
was in dire straights. Leon Trotsky was dead. Its one toehold in the American trade union movement, leadership of Teamster Local 544, which
controlled intracity trucking throughout much of the Midwest, had ended
after the International Brotherhood of Teamsters expelled the Trotskyists
from the union. Finally, the U.S. government tried and imprisoned SWP
leaders under the sedition sections of the Smith Act in 1942. Nonetheless,
in 1943 the New York station had Joseph Katz meet with one of its
CPUSA liaisons, Bernard Schuster, to seek assistance for additional antiTrotskyist work:

"On our instructions "Informer'' [Katz] met with "Echo" [Schuster] to ascertain the latter's capabilities in cultivating the polecats [Trotskyists] "Dak" and
"Gay" [likely James Cannon and Max Shachtman]. E. gladly expressed a desire
to provide assistance to us in this matter. He can place at our disposal one person from "Da-k's" group and one from "Gay's" group. Recommend two or three
people from among the covert fellowcountrymen [Communists], whom we
need to get close to the polecats. Arrange, if necessary, for a well-known local
fellowcountrymen to quit the fellowcountryman organization under the guise
of dissenting on some issue, for the purpose of getting close to the polecats
and gradually gaining the trust of their headquarters. E. will pass along autobiographical information on these people to us very shortly.

At the same time E. said that he had helped us for many years but had
never received assistance from us in his fellowcountryman work. So he has
made a request for assistance, if possible, in covering the following questions
about the polecats, which are essential for orienting the fellowcountiyman
leadership: i. Number of members in the organization. z. Number of groups
and number of members in them. 3. The first and last names of polecats in the
"country" [USA]. 4. An analysis of their activities and their plans.

After that E. said that he has interesting connections in Cairo and Brazzaville (French Equatorial Africa) and capabilities for infiltrating agents into the "cabin" [OSS] on the line of its work for Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and other countries. After discussing all these facts, we concluded that we should utilize
"Echo's" capabilities and assign communications with him to "Informer" alone,
while gradually pulling "Sound" [Gobs] and the neighbors [GRU] away from
him. In our view, we must help E. in supplying the information of interest to
him about the polecats, since this will bolster his position in the leadership of
the fellowcountryman organization of the "country" and will make it easier to
work with him, which we can already begin now."97

The tiny Trotskyist movement in the United States never amounted
to more than a few thousand members, had minimal financial resources,
and had only a minor role in the trade union movement. Yet even when
the KGB lacked enough officers to service valuable political and technical spies, it dispatched additional personnel to America to recruit and supervise sources and agents aimed at this weak threat. It devoted considerable resources to neutralizing and destroying it, sending in infiltrators
to report on its activities, steal its documents, coerce its members, and harass its activists. It was an obsession that achieved its objective.

In 1933 Peter Gutzeit organized and was the first chief of the KGB legal station in the United States. He
was recalled in 1938, and KGB memos on this page note that he was executed during Stalin's purges on
charges of Trotskyism. Courtesy of Alexander Vassiliev.

persistent popular and media myth holds that the KGB was a
near superhuman organization, staffed by skilled officers carrying out sophisticated schemes designed by clever Moscow
overlords who had a long-standing plan on how to subvert the
West. (Historians have been less awed.) In this tabloid version of espionage history, the KGB effortlessly ran rings around American counterintelligence and deftly manipulated its resources to drain American secrets. Its operatives were carefully organized, followed strict guidelines,
and carried out their assigned tasks according to a calibrated regimen of
sophisticated intelligence tradecraft. Fed by alarmed Westerners eager to
emphasize the mortal dangers the USSR posed to open and democratic
societies, as well as by Soviet propagandists and their sympathizers anxious to buttress the reputation of Soviet power, this legend grew during
the Cold War. And after it ended, the release of intelligence-related material from Russian and American archives magnified the all-powerful KGB story line. Influenced by the documentation of the extensive and
even breathtaking number of Americans who had aided the KGB, many
commentators emphasized the proficiency of Soviet intelligence. These
revelations should not be minimized or avoided. The KGB's reach extended in many directions and touched many more Americans than historians once believed. Nevertheless, it is also important to understand
that along with its strengths, there were also limitations and failings.

Another reason to keep its success in perspective is that for many years
the KGB faced little serious or sustained opposition to its work. American
counterintelligence was woefully inadequate and inattentive. While the
KGB wasn't a ten-foot superman, until the mid-1940s its opposition could
have been described as a four-foot dwarf. With Washington policymakers
indifferent, for years the FBI devoted scant resources to counterintelligence, and once it began to pay attention in the late 1930s, its initial emphasis was on German and Japanese espionage. It took several years to develop counterintelligence expertise, and not until the end of World War II
did the Bureau focus significant resources on the Soviet challenge. Soviet
success, in other words, was not due solely to KGB skill, but also benefited
from American incompetence and indifference. The KGB's problems were
a combination of difficulties endemic to any espionage service, blunders
and policies peculiar to a Stalinist bureaucracy, and the double-edged
sword of its reliance on so many CPUSA resources.

KGB station chiefs faced daunting problems. The legal station chief, first
of all, was a very busy man. He had to have an official cover job with a Soviet institution that gave him his official reason for being in the United
States. To avoid suspicion on the part of American counterintelligence
and to prevent internal gossip among Soviet personnel, he had to spend
some time fulfilling the demands of that position, meaning that his real
job supervising Soviet espionage required long hours.

There were also, particularly in the 1930s, political niceties to observe.
The Soviet Union had finally managed to secure diplomatic recognition
from the United States in 1933 after more than a decade of isolation. As
part of the terms it had officially agreed to refrain from supporting Communist propaganda within the United States. Nevertheless, Communist
International support for the CPUSA continued without any noticeable
change. Irritated, the U.S. government delivered a diplomatic note to the
Soviets in August 1935 with a "most emphatic protest against this flagrant violation of the pledge given by the Government of the Union of Soviet Social Republics on Nov. i6, 1933, with respect to non-interference in the internal affairs of the United States." Despite its response that the Comintern
was a private body over which it had no control, the Soviet government worried that an espionage scandal linked to Soviet diplomats might ignite a
brouhaha that could get out of hand. Moscow Center warned its stations;
"`In the context of Washington, it is completely inadmissible to conduct recruitment in official agencies through our official division, as this will inevitably lead to the aforementioned complications."' Consequently, the legal
station chiefs and their officers had to tread carefully for a time. (Nothing
came of the protest: President Roosevelt decided to ignore Moscow's failure to live up to its agreement.)'
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