Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (46 page)

There is no report about exactly how the KGB cut its ties with Lore,
but there is no mention of him or "Willy"/Salmon after April 1937. While
the KGB developed other State Department sources, some of senior
rank, none would have the broad access to DOS communications that
"Willy"/Salmon had had from 1934 to 1937.9

An important Soviet espionage source in the justice Department in the
late 1930s was later exposed but avoided prosecution and was lauded by
some academicians as an innocent victim of McCarthyism. In 1937 the
KGB New York station chief, Peter Gutzeit, notified Moscow of a new
source it was developing in Washington:

"In the local fellowcountryman [Communist] organization, there is a comrade
who studied at Princeton University with Morris [Abraham Glasser]. He enlisted his help for the Communist movement. They contacted the party organizer in Washington. M. did not officially join the cell. He started procuring
documents from his department. We instructed "Sound" [Jacob Golos] to go
to Washington and arrange with the party organizer to have him handed over to a different person, `who is apparently a worker in the local fellowcountryman organization.' The party organizer spoke with M., and the latter agreed.
The person is new, but not the line. In order to be consistent throughout the
connection with M., this line required someone who would not arouse any suspicions on M.'s part (knowledge of the language, local conditions, etc.) for
being of foreign descent, and given these prerequisites, there was unfortunately no other candidate besides Brit [KGB officer Armand Feldman].... I
ask that you look kindly on Brit's actual report on M., which could have been
much better both in content and style. Having become American enough to
pass for an American, he simultaneously lost his command of Russian. Dialectics."

Real name-Abe Glasser. 22 year old bachelor, lives in W. Works in the
Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice. M. works in a separate office
studying various problems and receives materials from the justice Department
archives. He said that he does not work for the money. Brit, however, gave him
$5o to treat some secretaries he knew.

Abraham Glasser, born in New Jersey in 1914, had compiled a distinguished academic record at Rutgers and Princeton Universities before
coming to Washington in December 1935 to join the Justice Department
as a "special attorney assigned to research." (Abraham Glasser had no relationship to Harold Glasser, discussed elsewhere.) Gutzeit's memo
makes clear that initially the KGB let Glasser believe he was reporting to
the American Communist Party and not to the agency of a foreign power.
A later KGB New York station report reinforced the point, commenting
that Glasser was "glad that he is not a spy and that he works to improve
America" and "gave materials on work being carried out against the
American Communist organizations and foreign spies."10

While Glasser worked on a number of research tasks, his principal
job was writing "The Use of Military Force by the Federal Government
in Domestic Disturbances, 1900-1938," a report that focused on government use of military force in labor strikes and race riots and against
subversives. His assignment gave him access not only to justice Department files (including those of the FBI) but also to reports from the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department. He used his assignment to build a massive collection of documents. His research files,
designated the "Glasser Files," are part of the justice Department records
at the National Archives, and the microfilm version fills nineteen reels.
From the point of view of the KGB, it was an ideal assignment for a
source. In January 1938 New York station officer Gayk Ovakimyan told
Moscow Center about Glasser's research assignment, noting, "In the mid dle of '37, in connection with work that had been assigned to him, he was
granted special authorization to access the War Intelligence archive," and
that using this access, ""Morris" [Glasser] obtained: a) materials of Amer.
War Intelligence on the activities of Russian White Guard organizations
in Manchuria and China (report from intelligence agent in China). b) top
secret material on the so-called `partisan movement in Siberia' (from an
agent in Warsaw). c) [materials] on the internal economic and polit. situation in Germany. He obtained them at the end of Jan. '38. + Materials
from the archive of the justice Department, in particular, the FBI."
Ovakimyan also reported delivery of

"The latest materials from Amer. mil. intelligence secured by us through
source "Morris." ... i) P. I.-top-secret reports from the Amer. mil. attache in
Germany about issues of Hitler's for. policy, the tactics of German diplomacy,
the tasks of the German fascists regarding the USSR, etc. The reports cover
the period Nov. '35 through November '37. 2) P. IL-top-secret reports from
the Amer. mil. attache in Poland about the following issues: the separatist
movement in the Ukraine, the Ukrainian mil. org. in Poland, Poland's assistance to the Ukraine during the revolution. The reports cover the period '301 33. 3) P. III-IV.-Top-secret reports from the Amer. mil. attache in Switzerland about the following issues: the international policies of certain Europ.
countries, the work of the League of Nations, as well as about the issue of the
Italo-German-Japanese alliance. Material covers '35-'37."

Given the foreign subject matter of the material Glasser delivered, he
surely understood by that time that the destination of his material was
not the American Communist Party headquarters in New York."

Ovakimyan also reported that Glasser had been tasked to help expose
a "provocateur" in the CPUSA. In Justice Department archives, he had
discovered two reports, one on a conference of CPUSA cadres held in
Chicago on 18 January 1938, and the other of party activists in Detroit
from September 1937. Ovakimyan told Moscow:

"because in the process of investigating this affair, we studied the autobiographies of most of the members of the Central Committee and local fellowcountryman organization and, in particular, of the aforementioned participants in the
conference, we automatically narrowed the candidacy down, by process of elimination, to William Weinstone." Sound [Gobs] was instructed to obtain biographical information about him. 42 years old. From '29 to '30, he was the district organizer for NY. In '3i-'32-delegate in the Amer. section of the Comintern in
Moscow. Returned in 33. Serious disagreements with Browder. From '34 to the
pres.-leader of the Michigan organization, which has its center in Detroit.12

Weinstone, a founding member of the American Communist Party
and one of its leading figures in the 192os, had challenged Earl Browder
for supremacy in the CPUSA in the early 1930s. He had lost but still retained a significant post as district organizer for the influential Michigan
party organization. By 1938 he was already in bad odor in the CPUSA
because of his rocky stewardship of the Michigan organization and dissatisfaction with his relationship with Communist cadres in the United
Auto Workers. When this report charging him with being an FBI informant (for which there is no independent evidence) reached Moscow
and, presumably, Browder (via Golos), it further undermined Weinstone's standing. In mid-1938 Browder removed him from his position
and demoted him to party educational work, ending his career in the
party's executive leadership. Despite being shunted aside, Weinstone remained in the CPUSA and in his position supervising party education
programs loyally promoted whatever was the ideological line of the day.
In 1951 the government convicted him of sedition under the Smith Act,
and he was sentenced to two years in prison, something that would not
have happened if he had ever cooperated with the FBI as Ovakimyan be-
lieved.13

Glasser also alerted the KGB to the FBI's opening of an investigation
of Jacob Golos and "World Tourists," his CPUSA-linked travel firm. He
was, however, able to reassure the Soviets that the Bureau was mainly interested in Golos's role in the recruitment and transport to Europe of
volunteers for the International Brigades and was unaware of Golos's links
to the KGB.14

Glasser's work for the KGB was interrupted in mid-1938, when Armand Feldman, his Soviet contact, vanished (see chapter 6), and Gutzeit
noted, "Brit [Feldman] disappeared with Morris's [Glasser's] materials: a
report on the cultivation of an espionage ring in the U.S." Fearing Feldman had defected, the KGB New York station deactivated Glasser at the
end of June 1938. However, as the USSR prepared to sign its non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, Moscow pressed to reestablish contact
with this valued source. In August 1939 Moscow Center told Ovakimyan,
the new KGB New York station chief: "`We think that at present, it would
be expedient to renew ties with Morris. Now in particular, the American
intelligence documents he gave could be of great interest to us. Taking
into account the fact that Morris might have been betrayed by Brit, it is
essential to be very careful when renewing ties with him and to keep up
the connection infrequently. One meeting per month is quite enough,
and these infrequent meetings could be arranged in a way that would preclude failure. It is essential to send someone local to contact Morris,
rather than contact him directly yourself."'15

The New York station moved cautiously, but Glasser had no inhibitions. In November 1939 Moscow Center noted that Glasser had already
delivered "1) An excerpt from a file of the Dies Committee (the Dept. of
Justice requested these materials from the Committee, and Morris
[Glasser] made a copy; z) Excerpts from the files and correspondence of
the justice Dept. pertaining to various matters; 3) copies of reports by
the West Coast Division of U.S. War Intelligence (San Francisco) for
1918-1920. "Morris' obtained all the aforementioned materials on his
own initiative and without our permission. We have not yet recommenced
work with him and think it is essential to wait until the investigation by
the Dies Committee is over."'is

Moscow Center planned to reactivate Glasser in 1941 through the
new illegal station chief it had dispatched to the United States, but the latter died when a U-boat sunk his ship in transit. In August 1941 the KGB
reestablished direct contact with Glasser through one of its American
couriers, Zalmond Franklin. Franklin brought back the bad news that
Glasser "has come under suspicion and was dismissed from his job. He
is charged with belonging to the fellowcountrymen [CPUSA] and passing secret documents to the Germans on the instructions of the fellowcountryman organization." (The FBI charged that Glasser was cooperating with the Soviet Union. The reference to Glasser passing documents
"to the Germans" was either a misstatement by Franklin or "Glan," the
KGB New York station officer who sent the report to Moscow, or a reflection of the FBI's assumption that in light of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Soviet spies in the United States directly or indirectly assisted German intelligence.) A follow-up message stated:

"Morris [Glasser] was connected to our operative `Brit' [Feldman], who suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. There is reason to believe that `Brit' was
taken by FBI agents.... To top it all off, the justice operative who was in
charge of `Morris's' case, by the name of McGuire, mentioned the name of
`the Soviet engineer Ovakimyan' and asked whether `Morris' knows of him.
`Morris' didn't know Ovakimyan, but the mention of some Soviet engineer
puzzled him. In short, this whole matter is so mixed up that we're not able to
form a clear picture of the situation. We are convinced, however, that unless
all of this was a set-up, Morris was given up by one of his numerous connections, and now it's extremely difficult to determine in what area the betrayal
took place .-17

The KGB's suspicion that Feldman had betrayed Glasser, was, in fact,
correct. He had quietly moved to Canada hoping to avoid the attention
of American security and the KGB. But in 1940 the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police (RCMP) located him, and, facing deportation to the Soviet Union, he and his wife provided information about his intelligence
work (including a network that procured false Canadian passports) in return for being allowed to stay. The RCMP informed the FBI, and while
Feldman refused to return to the United States (and possibly be required
to give public testimony), he gave a limited account of his American activity to FBI agents. Among the items he provided were the identification
of Ovakimyan as a KGB officer operating under Amtorg cover and Abraham Glasser as a Soviet source in the justice Department. Mrs. Feldman
said her husband had received a gold watch as a reward for developing
contact with a justice Department official "through whom he was able to
obtain information which exposed a traitor to the OGPU organization."
While Feldman described Glasser as "a fanatical Communist sympathizer" with whom he had met several times, he told the FBI that the
"only information he ever obtained from the individual pertained to Spanish loyalists and efforts to send them planes and munitions." In light of
KGB documents, the last statement was inaccurate, and Feldman was
seeking to minimize the extent of Glasser's espionage."

With Feldman unwilling to return to the United States and testify,
the FBI felt it did not have enough evidence to prosecute Glasser but
that at least he could be discharged from federal service. In May 1941,
Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold, Glasser's boss and friend
in the justice Department, told him that a loyalty issue dealing with communism had come up. Glasser immediately went on the offensive; in a
letter to Arnold he denied any involvement with communism and claimed
that three years earlier similar charges against him had been made by the
stepfather of his then fiancee, now his wife, because that person hated
Jews. Arnold accepted Glasser's statements at face value and gave him
his wholehearted support. But the FBI was adamant that it had reliable
information that Glasser had been delivering justice Department documents to Soviet agents. In June Attorney General Robert Jackson suspended Glasser without pay and ordered the case reviewed by Assistant
Attorney General Matthew McGuire.ry