The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service: An American in Stalin's Service

Summary

For half a century, the case of Isaiah Oggins, an American brutally murdered in 1947 on Stalin’s orders, remained sealed in the secret files of the KGB and the FBI—a footnote buried in the rubble of the cold war. In 1992, it surfaced only briefly, when Boris Yeltsin handed over a dossier to the White House. But the real story of what happened to Isaiah “Cy” Oggins, one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviet Union, remained an elusive mystery, even to his own family.

For Andrew Meier the hunt began in 2000. While researching his acclaimed portrait of post-Soviet Russia, he heard vague rumors from elderly camp survivors of an American lost to Stalin’s gulag. Meier could not know his quest would take eight years and that the story of this unknown spy, an early compatriot of Whittaker Chambers and Sidney Hook, was so exceptional that it could be mistaken for a thriller.

But fiction this is not. As Meier writes about the greatest unknown American spy before the cold war, “this is an improbable, but true, tale.” Over time, Meier’s discoveries began to accrete, the research filling half an apartment, with declassified dossiers from archives around the world and, above all, the discovery of a surviving son last seen by his father in prewar Paris.

The Lost Spy then charts Cy Oggins’s evolution, from his birth in 1898 in a Connecticut mill town to his graduation from Columbia, to recruitment by Soviet operatives. Oggins embodied the left-leaning generation that came of age during World War I: a brilliant young man of immigrant Jewish roots, who, when confronted by America’s poverty and labor strife, could not sit idle. When Oggins fell in love with Nerma Berman, a Russian-born firebrand, the turn was final.

Enlisting in Stalin’s secret service, the couple embarked on their perilous odyssey in 1928. In Berlin, Oggins posed as a wealthy antiquarian dealer to run a strategic safe house. In Paris, he spied on the surviving Romanovs. And in Manchuria, Oggins served behind enemy lines, spying on the Japanese occupiers and their puppet emperor, Pu-Yi, “the Last Emperor.”

By the 1930s, even if Cy and Nerma dared to change course, they were trapped. For all his devotion to that “ideological delirium that possessed the planet,” he, too, fell victim to Stalin’s merciless paranoia. After more than eight years in the gulag, Oggins was “liquidated,” murdered by lethal injection in the KGB’s secret laboratory, his family not even informed.

The Lost Spy is a sterling example of investigative journalism, a luminous tale that will rewrite the history of Soviet intelligence in the West.