He Knew Too Much

...He was murdered in prison in 1947...

...Despite that, the State Department was willing to lend his wife nearly $1,200 to pay for his trip home...

...Agents were sometimes switched from one Soviet intelligence apparatus to another, but it is a sign of how little is known of Oggins’s activities that even his immediate employer is unclear...

...Recruited for Soviet espionage sometime in the mid-20s, Oggins made his fi rst trip as a courier to Europe in 1926...

...Although he suggests that Oggins was employed by the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence, he also believes he was an agent of the Communist International, and later has him working for the OGPU, the regular intelligence service...

...Obtaining some of Oggins’s KGB fi le, Meier has also scoured American diplomatic fi les and received materials under the Freedom of Information Act...

...He met his future wife, Nerma, at the Rand School, a center for socialist education...

...The Yeltsin government discovered a memo from KGB chief Victor Abakumov to Stalin and Molotov recommending he be liquidated...

...Learning that an American had been kept in Norilsk, a remote camp in Siberia, he eventually uncovered his name and was able to locate and befriend his son, Robin Oggins, a medieval historian at SUNY Binghamton...

...Harvey Klehr is the Andrew Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory...

...The NKVD representative monitoring the meeting agreed to provide photographs so the U.S...

...Her son explained to Meier that she had been consumed by guilt, but had never acknowledged what she and her husband had done to destroy their lives...

...Following a French crackdown on Soviet operations in 1933, Oggins traveled to Spain and the United States before undertaking an assignment in China where he apparently was used to spy on the Japanese...

...Trying to reconstruct the life of a spy can be like squeezing assumptions and might-have-beens into hard facts, and Andrew Meier cannot avoid the trap...

...could invent...

...That explanation, however, begs the question of why Oggins was not just left to rot in the Gulag, and whether he had any more knowledge of unknown Soviet spy rings than Chambers, Igor Gouzenko, Elizabeth Bentley, and Louis Budenz, all of whom had already exposed Soviet sources...

...government could verify his citizenship, which it soon did...

...Born in Willimantic, Connecticut, in 1898 to Russian emigres, he worked for Soviet intelligence from the mid-1920s until his arrest in Moscow in 1939...

...Informed by the State Department that her husband had died in prison in 1947, Nerma Oggins survived until 1995, dying at the age of 97...

...He tries to connect Oggins to all kinds of major Soviet intelligence operations with claims that he “must have” or “should have” been involved with, or known, to other spies, but there is simply no documented or oral evidence...

...But he then claims that Oggins “was killed because of HUAC”— The House Unamerican Activities Committee...

...Remarkably, the United States government undertook an effort to free him...

...Isaiah (Cy) Oggins was one of the earliest Soviet agents recruited in the United States...

...Meier justifi ably treats that self-serving story as fi ction, but puts forward an even more improbable explanation for his execution...

...She was a fi ery Yiddish-speaking Communist functionary under whose infl uence he joined the Communist party in 1924, one year before his Columbia acquaintance, Whittaker Chambers...

...Convicted the following year, despite denying he had committed treason, Cy Oggins vanished into the Gulag...

...His latest book, with John Earl Haynes, is In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage...

...He Knew Too Much The killing of Stalin’s American-born agent BY HARVEY KLEHR The collapse of the Soviet Union and release of snippets of information from its voluminous espionage fi les has brought back to life a number of long-forgotten, and sometimes never-known, spies whose exploits and antics have reminded us that truth is sometimes stranger than any fi ction John Le Carr...

...He believes that the Oggins must have known Max and Grace Granich, Soviet operatives in China, but there is no evidence...

...Remarkably, he became the subject of an offi cial American government inquiry during World War II and was actually interviewed by American diplomats before Soviet offi - cials decided it was too risky to allow further contact or to release him...

...The Oggins saga, however, soon entered the documentary record...

...As a loyal Communist, she remained silent about her missing husband...

...Pavel Sudoplatov, a longtime KGB offi cer imprisoned for 15 years after a purge of the intelligence services in 1953, recounted in his memoirs his belief that Oggins was actually a double agent and that Nerma had cooperated with the FBI in 1942 after she learned about his imprisonment...

...The couple left Berlin in 1930 for Paris, where their assignment seems to have been spying on various White Russian exiles, particularly Romanovs, and where their son, Robin, was born in 1931...

...Although Nerma later told her son that it was the United States which prevented his father from returning home, Meier has documented that it was, instead, the Soviet Union which concluded that it was too risky to allow Oggins to come back to America with his knowledge of Soviet agents and operations...

...Meier calls it “the height of his espionage career...

...He told them he had not had a lawyer at his trial or pleaded guilty, but admitted he had used a false passport to enter the Soviet Union...

...This newest entry in the genre exhibits both the benefi ts fl owing from these excavations and the shortcomings perhaps inevitably associated with them...

...Returning to the United States in 1939, Nerma may have continued to work with the Communist underground, although the evidence is, again, thin...

...by 1928 he and his wife were working out of a safe house in Berlin, where Oggins posed as a dealer in art objects...

...Meier, a Moscow-based journalist, fi rst became interested in Oggins in 2000 while interviewing survivors of the Gulag...

...His case briefl y came to public attention in the 1990s, when the Yeltsin government investigated the Soviet murders of American citizens and possible imprisonment of Vietnam POWs...

...Oggins, he claims, must have known the two, even though “the evidence is scant, but it is diffi cult to imagine how Cy could not have encountered both men...

...Nor did Whittaker Chambers ever mention him, despite assertions that he must have known about his activities...

...While an investigation quickly established that Oggins was, indeed, an American citizen, the State Department and FBI also concluded that he was a Soviet spy as well...

...After a six-month delay, so Soviet authorities could allow him to put on weight and partially recover his health, Oggins met with American diplomats in a Moscow prison...

...More problematically, Meier speculates that the safe house in Berlin may have been used to manufacture fake passports or to copy stolen documents...

...A former Polish POW who had crossed paths with Oggins in a labor camp informed Polish authorities about him, and in February 1942 the State Department learned that an American citizen was in the Gulag...

...Returned to the Gulag, Cy Oggins was taken to an NKVD medical laboratory in Moscow in 1947 and injected with curare...

...Meier concludes, not unreasonably, that Steinberg’s defection had triggered Oggins’s arrest...

...The lack of evidence leads to speculation even Meier calls “unlikely...

...The red scare in Washington meant that, if he returned, Oggins could be forced to testify and expose important Soviet spy rings...

...American authorities in Russia demanded to meet with Oggins, as provided for in the agreement establishing diplomatic relations in 1933...

...Posing as a dealer in Asian antiquities, and later as the American representative of an Italian company, he lived in Darien, Connecticut...

...He mentioned nothing of spying and asked to come home, warning that he would not long survive...

...Cy Oggins’s superior in China, Max Steinberg, a mysterious Soviet operative who defected to Switzerland in the late 1930s, returned to the Soviet Union in 1956 and was imprisoned a year later...

...Then he suggests it could have been used in a counterfeiting scheme orchestrated by two Latvianborn Soviet assets, Nicholas Dozenberg and Alfred Tilton...

...An unexpected encounter with old friends from New York—Sidney Hook and his fi rst wife, later memorialized in Hook’s autobiography—suggested that Oggins was already nervous about his new career, confessing to being both tired and lonely...

...Oggins was converted to radicalism while a student at Columbia during World War I. After briefl y teaching in New York City he returned to Columbia to work on a dissertation, but was forced to drop out for fi nancial reasons in 1922...

...Oggins returned to Paris via Moscow in the spring of 1938, but quickly returned to the Soviet capital for unexplained reasons and was arrested in February 1939...

...The result is a fascinating story of an idealist marching to his own ruin, but one that suffers from enough major gaps to frustrate readers, and forces Meier to resort to speculation rather than evidence to fi ll in details of Oggins’s life and exploits...