'The Lost Spy' by Andrew Meier
BOOK REVIEW
An American in Stalin's secret service.
ON THE night of Feb. 20, 1939, three Soviet secret policemen knocked on a door at the Hotel Moskva in the Russian capital, asked to see the (fake) passport of its occupant, gave him a few minutes to gather some belongings and whisked him away to the notorious Lubyanka prison. Charged with espionage, he was questioned for almost a year before being sentenced to eight years in Norilsk, a mining center hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle and one of the bleakest islands in the Gulag Archipelago.
So far, so routine. Something like this occurred to millions of Russians during Stalin's paranoid regime. But this arrestee was different. He was an American citizen named Isaiah Oggins. And he was not spying for his native land. Since the 1920s, he had been a Russian spy, working in several countries, including his own. Andrew Meier's "The Lost Spy," a biography of Oggins, is, necessarily, a little vague on those matters. Putting it mildly, it is not in the nature of a secret agent's work to leave an easily documented record of his clandestine activities.
Nevertheless, "The Lost Spy" is utterly fascinating, a sad and sinuous study of true belief carried beyond all reason by a man who committed himself to the labyrinthine way without once, so far as Meier can determine, openly discussing what motivated him or offering an ideological rationale. That makes him, in some sense, a perfect spy, a guy who took his secrets with him to his unmarked grave.
In retrospect, it is easy to imagine Cy -- the name he formally adopted -- Oggins leading an entirely different life. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in Willimantic, Conn., where his father was a shopkeeper. Meier speculates that his radicalization may have begun when the Industrial Workers of the World attempted to organize the American Thread Co., Willimantic's dominant employer, during the radical agitations that preceded America's entry into World War I. Maybe so, but Cy entered Columbia University in 1917 intent upon becoming a historian. He probably supported the antiwar movement that preceded the U.S. declaration of war, and he was certainly influenced by the oppressive campaign against radicals in the postwar years, but one suspects it was his courtship and marriage to Nerma Berman, a tiny, noisy, radical firebrand, that completed his conversion to communism. Still, for a time he pursued his doctorate at Columbia, while Nerma worked and studied at the Rand Institute, then the nation's most famous leftist school. When his money ran out, he took an editorial job at the Yale University Press. By 1928, the couple were in Berlin, working for the Soviets.
