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

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: secret policemen, New York, United States, State Department (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Former Time Moscow correspondent Meier (Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall) tells a remarkable story about Cy Oggins, a Columbia University undergraduate who joined the fledgling Communist Party in 1920. Recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1926, he went to Europe in the guise of an academic; his residences acted as centers for Soviet espionage. After 1930 he sailed to China and Manchuria for various undercover schemes, then traveled to Moscow in 1939 during Stalin's purges. Despite long, loyal service, he was arrested and sent to an Arctic gulag and despite frantic pleas for Oggins's release from his wife, and more modest U.S. government efforts, the Soviets murdered Oggins in 1947 to keep his story from getting out. In Soviet archives, Meier saw a heavily censored fraction of Oggins's 162-page file, supplemented by the FBI's massive records, compiled thanks to J. Edgar Hoover's lifelong fixation on Communists. These files plus the author's extensive research have produced a rich account of American communism's early years as well as the bizarre, tragic odyssey of an American who devoted his life to serving the U.S.S.R. 16 pages of illus. (Aug. 11) ""
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From Booklist

An impressive history detective, Meier unearths the story of Isaiah Oggins (1898–1947), an American attracted to communism and enlisted in 1928 by the Soviet Union’s intelligence services. From Oggins’ enrollment in Columbia University to his execution, Meier traces Oggins’ odyssey of ideology and espionage with thoroughness and evenhandedness. What Oggins did as a Soviet spy seems opaque––though Meier patches together his likely tasks in Berlin, Paris, and China––but more visible is the reaction of Americans who encountered Oggins after he disappeared into the clandestine Red world. One was the intellectual Sidney Hook, whose memoirs describe a chance meeting with his former friend in Berlin. Other Americans to record sightings of him were diplomats in Moscow, who in 1943 attempted to obtain Oggins’ release from the gulag and repatriation to the U.S. Explaining to Oggins’ living son how that effort failed, as well as the fate Meier discovered that Stalin personally ordered for Oggins, supplies intimate emotional force to this account, which is an original chronicle, another personal tragedy, in the deadly literature about Stalinist espionage. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (August 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393060977
• ISBN-13: 978-0393060973
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #547,964 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An enthralling account of an espionage mystery, August 5, 2008

By	Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The son of Russian Jewish emigrants, recruited into Stalin's intelligence organizations. Secret missions in Berlin and Paris and elsewhere in the years before World War Two. Betrayal and arrest and "liquidation" by the NKVD. It sounds like an Alan Furst spy novel, except it happens to be fact.

Andrew Meier's "The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service" reveals the extraordinary story of Isaiah "Cy" Oggins, who rose from a childhood in a New England mill town to radical intellectual circles at Ivy League Columbia University and then secret service as a Soviet intelligence agent for more than a decade, before he was arrested during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, sentenced to eight years in a gulag prison camp, and then "liquidated" to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In a masterful fashion Andrew Meier weaves together three chronologies through the length of his book: Oggins' background and activities as a Soviet operative, his arrest, imprisonment, and execution, and Meier's own quest to uncover the secrets behind Oggins's story. Of necessity, some of what Meier recounts must rest upon speculation, but it is very intelligent, well-informed speculation. He has reconstructed Oggins's story from an impressive range of sources, including formerly classified Soviet and American diplomatic and intelligence files.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing Book, August 23, 2008

By	Joshua Henkin - See all my reviews

Andrew Meier's The Lost Spy is mesmerizing. Beautifully written, prodigiously researched, it kept me up all night (I read it in a single sitting), and I've been thinking about it ever since. An account not just of an intriguing, elusive man, but of an entire era. I can't recommend it highly enough.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE LOST SPY, September 2, 2008

By	Joseph R. Calamia (El Paso, Texas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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"The Lost Spy" by Andrew Meier is above all, a masterpiece of research, and story telling. The author takes the reader into a dark but fascinating labyrinth of idealism, espionage, and...murder.

Jaded by labor disputes, union battles with striking workers, social unrest, anti-Semitism, and college politics mixed with America's entry into World War I, an intelligent young man named "Cy" Oggins... becomes lost in a diabolical world.

"Cy" Oggins is seduced and mesmerized by the hallucinatory utopia espoused by Communism and the Soviet Union's "Great Social Experiment." Oggins, like so many of the others from the "Lost Generation" follow the flute of the Bolshevik Pied Piper and down the streets and alleyways of "No Return."

Oggins weaves in and out of various Communist organizations until by 1928 or, 1929 "Secret Agent" Oggins was like "Bur Rabbit" in the Uncle Remus Story; stuck to the "Tar Baby," with no way out.

"Cy" Oggin's radical Communist and revolutionary leanings were metastasized with his marriage to wife, and fellow revolutionary...Nerma. The couple was every bit as rabid in their missions as Kim Phillby, Richard Sorge, Morris and Lona Cohen, and Julius Rosenberg (to name but a few).

Oggins and his wife start their quest in New York and on to Germany, Paris, China, and (Manchuria/Manchukuo) and then eventually, Moscow.

Despite his numerous "duty stations" the reader can not help but wonder, just how important "Cy" really was to ..."The Center." Sometimes the reader gets the impression that Moscow was simply "toying" with this American communist (traitor to his own country). His work in China (on the ruins of Sorge's organization), was probably his most demanding and beneficial to Moscow overall. None the less, he was apparently being "shadowed" throughout his illustrious career. Either, the Soviets simply did not trust him (because he was an American?), or...felt he was a "double agent" for the American Secret services.

Despite his services to Stalin and the Kremlin, "Cy" Oggins was arrested by the NKVD in 1939, became prisoner #568 at the infamous Lubyanka, sentenced to over 8 years at a Russian Gulag, and eventually... murdered by the Soviet people's decree in 1947.

The author's description of his incarceration at the Lubyanka and Gulag is every bit as descriptive as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's, "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich."

There is some speculation that "Cy" was in fact, a "double agent" (especially by the Russians). The U.S. Government did attempt to help negotiate his release both politically, and economically. However, it would appear this was done more to try and find out exactly what he knew than a valiant attempt to "bring him in from the cold."

The author's research into Oggins past affiliations, and exposure of his radical history would appear to make him an unlikely candidate (in my opinion), for a "Double Agent" like Kim Phillby, or even Sidney Reilly. U.S. Intelligence operations during the 1920's and 1930's were much more simplified (compared to the Soviets) who were at that time, infiltrating the entire United States and its government agencies. "The Haunted Woods" by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassilieve gives the reader a good example of this fact.

"The Lost Spy" is an outstanding piece of investigative journalism and a real asset to any historian. A tremendous and exciting read that should be enjoyed and experienced by anyone interested in history, politics, and society as a whole. The icy winds of the "Cold-War" are still blowing, and what occurred during the time of "Cy" Oggins is still going on.

A SUPERB BOOK ......"DON'T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT!"