Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service
by Andrew Meier, Norton, 2008
Reviewed by Jon Porter
In January 1943, the consular list of every
U. S. citizen known to be living in the Soviet Union contained 169
names: 56 government officials, 30 students, 11 journalists, 4
teachers, a missionary, and Cy Oggins, an American citizen in
Moscow's dreaded Butryka Prison. Meier, in this masterful book,
tells his story, painstakingly reconstructed from private and
governmental archives, including access to Oggins's censored KGB
files.
The son of Russian Jewish emigrants, Oggins graduated from
Columbia University and was soon recruited by Soviet operatives,
working first for the Comintern in a Berlin safe-house, then moving
to Paris to spy on exiled Romanovs for the OGPU (which later became
the KGB), and then working undercover for the Soviets in Shanghai
and Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Accused of being a double agent,
he was arrested in Moscow in 1939 and sentenced to eight years in
the gulag for espionage, despite the revelation at his trial that
there was no evidence to confirm his guilt.
In 1947, his sentence completed, Oggins was "liquidated:" killed
on Moscow's orders with an untraceable injection of curare to
prevent him from revealing what he knew about clandestine Soviet
operations and the horrors of the gulag. Beautifully written, The
Lost Spy is a compelling story of youthful idealism during the
great social upheaval between the wars and a haunting historical
thriller.
-Jon Porter teaches in the interdisciplinary Global and
Historical Studies Program at Butler University.