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

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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.

The immediate subject of this book is the improbable lives of Isaiah (Cy) Oggins and his wife, Nerma Berman, two young Americans with large social consciences who became Communists in the 1920s. Cy was attending Columbia University, a hotbed of left wing activism at the time. Nerma was a firebrand for the socialist labor movement and met Cy during these activities. Cy and Nerma were enthralled with socialist ideology and the Bolshevik experiment in Russia. They joined the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), and to their lifelong regret, in 1928 signed on as undercover agents of the Soviet Union and set sail for Europe.

During their 11-year tenure as agents of Stalin, every aspect of their lives was controlled by their Soviet handlers in Russia. After devoted service in Berlin, Paris, China and the USA, all at considerable risk to themselves, in February, 1939 Cy was recalled to Moscow, promptly arrested for no discernible reason, and enslaved in the Siberian Gulag for eight years in conditions so harsh that it was a miracle that he survived at all.

Several years after he was arrested, Cy's imprisonment fortuitously came to the attention of the US State Department, which in 1942-1943 requested its war time ally to confirm that it was holding an American citizen, to provide the details of his crime and imprisonment, and to allow US representatives to visit him. These were things that the Soviets had agreed in writing to do at the time that President Roosevelt gave them diplomatic recognition in 1933. Interestingly, Cy's case reached the highest levels of the State Department, Secretary Cordell Hull and Acting Secretary Sumner Welles. There followed a year-long charade during which the Soviets first ignored the requests, then spent six months providing food and medical care to Oggins to bring him back from his near-death condition. They finally produced him for two perfunctory meetings in the Moscow Lubyanka in the ominous presence of KGB officers, and after a US request for his release, the Soviets simply refused. This at a time when the US was providing billions of dollars of Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union. Finally, after serving his term, Cy was executed by the NKVD in 1947 by injection with a nerve agent that sequentially disables all of the muscles of the body while the victim remains conscious and thus dies in slow agony.

Although the author spent six years researching Cy Oggins and devotes 300 pages to describing his double lives, in the end Cy does not emerge as a real person. He is just an abstraction, a plastic character who despite his intelligence and education, devoted his life to a false and malevolent ideology, and suffered years of torture and an agonizing death for his trouble. At the end of the book, one knows about as much about Cy Oggins the person as one knew at the beginning. The facts and events are all there, but Cy does not emerge as a real person.

The interest of the book lies not so much in the particulars of Cy Oggins's life, as unusual as it was, but in its value as a small anecdote of the real-life Communist party in the 1920s and 1930s. It is puzzling that during a period of national prosperity in the 1920s, so many of the intellectual and academic elite in the United States devoted their lives to a doctrine and a cause that on the surface was committed to social justice, but in reality was brutal and murderous in the execution. Perhaps part of the allure of Communism to people like Cy and Nerma was its place on the political spectrum in opposition to fascism, although Mussolini did not come to power until 1922 and fascism had not fully shown its ugly face until years later.

Perhaps they believed that the CPUSA was just another socialist political party seeking the betterment of the country. But that seems unlikely from the events described here. The Communist terrorist bombings of 1919 and the resulting "Red scare" and Palmer raids of 1919-1920 had driven the Communists underground and publicly stigmatized the party. Even today, many in the academic community profess that the CPUSA was an indigenous American political movement seeking social justice for the masses. But the evidence, some of it derived from Soviet archives temporarily opened in the 1990s, is otherwise. CPUSA was a creature of the Soviet Union, created, financed and controlled by Moscow. The author casually relates that Nick Dozenberg, a Soviet military intelligence officer operating in the US, helped found CPUSA in the 1920's. Did Cy and Nerma know this history when they embraced the Communist cause?

Interestingly, there are many significant parallels between Cy Oggins and Whittaker Chambers, the famous defector from the Communist underground who first identified Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent and indirectly catapulted the little-known Richard Nixon to the national stage. Both Cy and Chambers attended Columbia University, both joined the CPUSA in the 1920s, and both became underground Soviet agents. Chambers operated in the United States and Cy principally in Europe and Asia, but their experiences were much the same. A reading of Chambers's Witness, published in 1952, reveals striking similarities. Both were married to Communist zealots, both embraced Communism on purely ideological grounds, and both devotedly and unselfishly served the party for years, coming to realize in the end that the cause they devoted their lives to was ruthless and brutal. Chambers survived only because he secreted evidence of his spying operation and let the Soviets know that if they harmed him or his family, he would release this evidence. Cy Oggins was not so lucky, although Nerma and their son did manage to escape Paris in 1938 and found their way back to the United States, where they lived out their lives in relative peace in the country that Cy and Nerma loathed.

The barbaric nature of the Soviet Union, which was run by one of the world's greatest mass murderers for almost 30 years, is effectively illustrated in the life of Cy Oggins. Once he entered the Soviet world, his life was literally not his own. Both he and Nerma knew that their NKVD handlers would just as soon shoot them as reassign them. In the words of Whittaker Chambers in Witness, few endeavors of a person "require him to demonstrate, daily, in action, his revolutionary faith beyond all appeals of country, family, friendship, and personal interest." At several points in their travels, the reader wonders whether they sat down on a park bench somewhere, looked each other in the eye, and said "what have we done? why did we put ourselves and our child into this prison?"

When Nerma became pregnant they were so fearful of their Russian handlers that Nerma had an abortion, an experience very similar to that of Chambers and his wife (Cy and Nerma allowed a second pregnancy to come to term, however, and that may have part of their undoing). When Cy barely escaped from war-torn Manchuria in October 1937, he was forced to stop off in Moscow during the height of the purges and was surprised that the Soviets even let him go. Later, when Cy and Nerma were reunited in Paris in February 1938, Meier writes "The revolution of Lenin had faded into the distant past and been replaced by a spiral of violence." Nerma had come to Paris from the United States, where several underground agents had recently been murdered by the NKVD. She knew that their lives were at risk -- ironically, not from the Western countries whose governments they were seeking to undermine, or from right-wing enemies of Marxism, but from the NKVD itself.

The abiding mystery of Cy and Nerma, and the thousands of socially conscious young people who flocked to Communism in the 20's and 30's in the name of social justice, is why they embraced an ideology that they should have known was pernicious. These people, after all, were not casual observers of the world political situation. The new government in Russia, from the very beginning in 1917, was dictatorial and repressive, hardly a workers paradise or a bastion of democracy and human rights. During this period, there were numerous articles, books, and first-hand reports of the Soviet government's brutality - available to anyone who cared to look. And although Stalin's purges and mass atrocities of the 1930s had not yet occurred when Cy and Nerma joined the party, the Gulag work camps were first opened in 1922, Lenin's early forays into the use of terror famines were well known, and the Cheka had already carried out thousands of state murders.

But certainly not long after their arrival in Berlin in 1928 Cy and Nerma must have realized that their Soviet masters were ruthless thugs. Whittaker Chambers realized in the mid-1930s that there was no essential difference between fascism and communism, that they were merely different flavors of the same political system, which as a matter of policy used terror and repression to achieve political and economic goals and maintain power. The true nature of Communism became painfully obvious in August 1939 with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Stalin and Hitler that partitioned Poland between the two and enabled the Nazis to start World War II. It is tragically ironic that Cy and Nerma, who clearly had the courage to follow their beliefs and to betray their own country in the process -- to spit in the eye of the United States as an evil oppressor of the working class -- cringed in fear of the country they embraced as the savior of the world?

Did Cy and Nerma eventually see that capitalism, with all its faults, was infinitely better than the communism of the Soviet Union, which in the 1930s intentionally and systematically starved millions of peasants to death in the Ukraine and Volga regions, condemned millions of its own citizens to slave labor in the Gulag, deported millions of others to die in the wastes of Siberia or Khazakstan, and murdered countless others? And all this in the name of an economic and political system for which Cy and Nerma were willing to die? How much better off were the zeks in the Gulag camps than even the lowest workers in the western democracies? Did there come a time when Cy and Nerma finally realized that they were serving a monster? The book does not provide clear answers to these questions, but suggests that Nerma, like many of the intellectual and academic elite to this day, remained loyal to Moscow and the Communist cause to the day she died.

"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!"

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.

Save your money or go to the library. I was pulled in by the title too, but the author doesn't deliver. You can read the entire book and still not know any deed that Cy Oggins or his wife actually did in their service as "spies" for the Soviet Union.

The author seems detached from anything that approaches "being judgmental" about these two deciding to spy for Stalin - and you never find out why they did.

The only tisk tisking is saved not for Cy Oogins the spy but for his older brother who was (Gasp!) a Republican who actually ran for office and loved his country.

My opinion: The author got too close to Son of Cy the Spy and wound up writing a nice little book about his father the spy - who wasn't such a bad guy after all (except for the spying stuff)....nice gesture, disappointing book.

If you want a little cheering up and perspective in these challenging times, I suggest reading books about Stalinist Russia. What a wretched and miserable place and time. The Lost Spy is an extremely poignant, well written and tragic family social history about deluded American communists who fell victim to Stalin and the Soviet Gulag. I also highly recommend in the same genre The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis. Clearly, communism is the God that failed and these two books bring this tragic point home to Americans better than any political science or history textbook or monograph.

Andrew Meier's intriguing and well thought out story is outstanding. Very intertwined and developed, he has a very credible, and well researched take on this period of Russian US history. I could not put the book down, finished it in 2 day's, slow reader only reason. But that's fast for me, very. I'm so intrigued with the story, and it's beautifully crafted writing style. I WOULD HIGHLY recommend it!

At times a bit cliché but still thoroughly entertaining. Gives a unique inside view of socialism in the early 20th century while following the trail of a forgotten cold-war victim. Cy and Norma Oggins gave their lives to the revolution. But, as with so many revolutions before, the hero became the victim of their own idealism. Cy would pay with his life in Stalin's gulag. Whatever your political affiliation, you cannot help but empathize with the tragic subjects of this tale. While following this story the reader is also treated to an interesting cast of characters including the socialist who changed his views so dramatically as to become the head of the neo-Conservative movement. It is an episode in American history nearly forgotten but brought to vivid life here. At times the jump from scene to scene in Cy's life makes it difficult to capture the timeline of events but it keeps the story moving and provides insights that might be lost if told chronologically. So, despite the non-chronological approach to history, the story is well told and keeps the reader's attention. Very well done.

This story of the life and fate of an American radical who spied for the USSR and was rewarded with his liquidation by the Stalinists can be appreciated on many levels. First, it is an exciting spy story, better than any fictional account. Secondly, it is a devastating expose of American radicalism in the first half of the twentieth century. Finally, and here one can be misunderstood, it is the story of the Jews' fascination with Communism and the nemesis that resulted.

American radicals were so disenchanted with American life in the first part of the 20th Century that they were easily taken in by Communism. Many of them were not in impoverished circumstances and suffered most probably from various infantile psychological disorders. The experience of the New Left in the second half of the 20th Century confirms that radicalism is a serious disorder. Jews in particular, in Europe and America, were drawn to Communism because of the Jewish experience of persecution by Christian and ex-Christian societies. They had more justifiable reasons for radicalism. But they also suffered more than non-Jewish radicals. Fascism exploited the Jewish attraction to Communism and made them its special victims. The Communists could count on the help of Jewish comrades but could also break out into anti-Jewish persecution when convenient. Communism pretended to abolish religious and ethnic hatred but nothing was farther from the truth.

The subject of this book, Cy Oggins, was Jewish as were so many of his Communist associates and handlers. Even the diabolic Communist doctor who murdered him for Stalin was Jewish. This corroborates the thesis of Yuri Skezkine in his pathbreaking book "The Jewish Century," namely that despite periodic outbreaks of Stalinist anti-Semitism the Jews did better under Bolshevism in the USSR than any other group and remained loyal to the Soviet system for a very long time. It has been in the interest of neoconservative Zionists to claim that the Communist regime persecuted and targed the Jews but this is obviously untrue. But anti-Semitism was increased among all the victims of Communism by the knowledge that many, but not most, Jews were favorable to the Bolsheviks. Zionism and Communism were deadly enemies in the quest for Jewish allegiance and it is not clear which ism did the Jews more damage.

In the end, radicalism is an evil outgrowth of infantile disorders and we should all be vigilant against it no matter what form its takes and no matter where.

This is an exciting book with many valuable lessons to discover.

One of the great things about this book is that the reader gets a peak into the era. There is little known about the actual character, but while reading you really start to pick up a certain feel. The only downside was that the timeline was a little tough to keep up with.