The Sobolevicius family came from Lithuania. The senior Sobolevicius was a wealthy fur trader. In the early 1920s two sons went to study in Germany, where they became members of the Communist Party. When the Left Opposition emerged inside the party, they both joined. Jack Soble took the party name Senin while his elder brother was known as Roman Well. (In 1962 a New York District Court convicted Well for being a Soviet spy. After jumping bail he was extradited from Israel. But he committed suicide on his way to London’s Heathrow Airport on September 6, 1962. By this time he was neither known as Sobolevicius, nor Well. He was Dr. Robert Soblen.)

In December 1932 Trotsky, in exile in Prinkipo, Turkey, launched into a political struggle to resolve “the crisis in the German section of the Left Opposition.” The struggle was bound up with the “Third Period” policies of Stalinism, under which the social democrats in Germany and every other capitalist country were designated as “social fascists.” While the Trotskyists fought in the working class for the united front against the fascists and their imperialist backers, the Stalinists split the working class by physical attacks on social democratic workers and even electoral pacts with the fascists. The disruption of the German Trotskyists was the work of Senin and Roman Well. It amounted to the political liquidation of the Left Opposition and capitulation to the Stalinists.

The life of Jack Soble, the Soviet master spy, has never been told in detail before: how he was recruited, what his job was in the Left Opposition, how he later came to the United States, what he did there. We have consulted hitherto unpublished court testimony given by Soble before Judge John M. Cashin on November 6, 1958, during a perjury trial. Soble, who was serving a prison sentence for espionage, gave a lengthy account of his early life.

He was born in Lithuania on May 15, 1903, and travelled to Germany when he was a teenager to study at a college in Leipzig. In 1921, when he was just 18, he joined the German Communist Party. He graduated from college in 1927 and travelled to Moscow where he was married to “Myra” on November 24, 1927. The date is significant, since it was the peak of Stalin’s bureaucratic persecution of Trotsky and the Left Opposition and the eve of Trotsky’s expulsion from the party. Soble returned to Germany, where he began studies at the Berlin University. It was here that he became a member of the Left Opposition. It led to his expulsion from the German Communist Party in 1929. Soble told the court that he was coerced into becoming a GPU agent after his wife returned to the Soviet Union in 1931. A far more likely story is that Soble was recruited in 1927 but this, nevertheless, is his account of how it happened.

Q: Did a time come, Mr. Soble, when your wife returned to Russia?

Soble: Yes, she returned in 1931, but with no political purpose, for no political purpose or attachments. She returned in 1931 to see her ailing mother.

Q: Some time after your wife returned to Russia to see her mother, did you get a notice to appear at the Russian Embassy in Berlin?

Soble: Yes, a short time later.

Q: And what happened? What did you do?

Soble: I mean I want to explain to the jury also, excuse me, this ...

Q: Go right ahead, Mr. Soble.

Soble: Otherwise I cannot understand, it is very hard to understand, how I got from the Russian Embassy a letter I should come over there, because I was not a Russian citizen. I was a real Lithuanian citizen at that time. There was a couple involved, who were friendly to my wife, who worked in the Soviet Trade Mission in Berlin. Officially, I mean they worked, and I got acquainted with them, too, through my wife. My wife didn’t know anything else about their attachments with the Secret Service. My wife worked there as a typist for a short time, and this couple, as we were sure later, have organized all this to get me into the net at that time, because I had nothing to do with the Secret Service. I was just at that time a full Trotskyite and a student at the university.

Soble protesteth his innocence too much! But there is more to come. On arrival at the embassy he presented the letter and there was some delay before an official went off to check why he had been summoned.

Soble: He went to another room and then he suddenly appeared with another man, who called me into the other room—a hunchback man, he was. I mean, I remember his name, too, if you want his name.

Q: Now, Mr. Soble, did this man tell you something?

Soble: Yes, he started speaking with me about my family situation, suddenly. He knew everything about my wife, she returned to Russia.

Q: Did he make a proposition to you?

Soble: To see her ailing mother, and that I am in the Trotsky movement. I mean at that time the Trotsky movement—there were no purges. There was nothing else that you can compare with the later years, because as a matter of fact even years later in 1934 the Party congress, at that congress, they were all accepted back. Zinoviev, and all the leaders except Trotsky, who was in exile abroad.

Q: Well, now, at this time, Mr. Soble ...

Soble: Excuse me, I am sorry. Do you understand me, because I am not very distinctly speaking? I must apologize.

Q: Now, at this time, Mr. Soble, in 1931, at the Russian Embassy in Berlin you were speaking to this man Belov: did he make a proposition to you?

Soble: Yes. Finally. I mean, he didn’t come out right away, you know. He said—first of all he showed me that he knows my whole situation. That I was in the party, that I am now in the Opposition, that I am expelled from the party, that my wife didn’t say it when she returned. I said Why should she say it? She is not a party member and she didn’t need even your visa. She has a Russian passport. She went to see her ailing mother and I expect her back. He said, “Well, I must disappoint you. I mean I don’t make threats but in a friendly way, if you will not—I know that you love your wife—if you will not—if you want to see her back”—I mean this is a full truth as I am telling you that and not a single word added—“if you want her back some day you have to quit the Trotsky movement and to go back to the party.”

Q: Were you given any specific assignment?

Soble: I said. “Well, I have not made up my mind about that but this is everything now to me and I don’t know even how you found it out, the whole thing.” He said, “Well we find out everything,” he said. And then, well, I will have—he said, “I will have to tell you again. I mean you have been in the Communist Party. Many Trotskyites are returning to the party, why do you have to endanger now your wife and your life here and not go back to the party?” I said, “Well, I will think it over.” I remember all the details of this. When I got up he said to me, he offered—I mean, a walletful of money, and I was at the time, you know, I mean I don’t minimize at all my guilt or nothing. As I said after I pleaded guilty for many moments which I had to go through, the investigation, and therefore I don’t know why other people are hiding and changing their statements three times a day.

Q: Mr. Soble, Mr. Soble.

Soble: I am sorry; I know.

Q: I know you feel strongly, but if you will, Mr. Soble, you have to try to tell your story, the events that occurred and things that happened to your life in answer to my questions only.

Soble: I am sorry.

Q: Now, Mr. Soble, this man who spoke to you in the Russian Embassy, did he tell you that you were to have a specific assignment for the Soviet Union?

Soble: Excuse me, I want to tell you. I mean, I don’t forget, still never mind my nervous condition and the things in the past which are being exploited which I hope I will have an opportunity to explain in the future to people why I did it but as I told you, I want to finish the story that the jury, the honorable judge and the court should understand me. He opened a walletful of money and I was at that time very strongly — a very strong idealist, and he said, “Well, pick out whatever you wish,” even before I gave him the answer. I said I was going to think it over at the beginning. I said, “I have to think it over if I go back to the party, and if I have to save my wife and so forth.” He said, “Pick it up.” I said, “Well, if I am going to do that, to go back to the party, I am not going to do that for money.” And I — well, he understood that he made a mistake because he was very excited after that, and he said, “All right, so I will see you another time if you make up your mind. I have anyway your phone number.”

Soble said that he left the embassy, but he did not telephone the hunchback. In due course, however, the GPU telephoned him and arranged a second interview. This time they got straight down to business. The hunchback Belov told him: “Your wife is a Soviet citizen and she will never be able to come back to join you. It is not a threat. It is just like this.” He also warned him about the Left Opposition: “Anyway, the Trotsky movement is not a movement of the future. They are going back all to the party and you will have to go back one day, so make it better now than later.” Soble’s “burning idealism” faltered. He told the court, “I agreed.” At this point, presumably, his hand dipped into the wallet.

He explained to the court the nature of his counter-espionage work. “My assignment,” he said, “was to gather Trotsky information. Firstly, the German group, I mean the German group wasn’t large, and to give it to them. I mean, what they called party work. He didn’t even tell me that this is secret work. You see, they called it at the beginning, you know, they called it, they played on my idealism. I understand that, how they did it, and they called it party work.” Soble was soon a leading member of the Left Opposition in the German section. He explained other assignments which he undertook for the GPU.

Soble: So later on Trotsky found out my name, I mean, from the organization, through Sedov. Sedov was at that time in Berlin, and at the beginning I didn’t know Sedov. At the beginning I was a real German Trotskyite and Sedov was living in Berlin and he got acquainted with me and he told me if I would like to make a trip on my vacation to Trotsky, to visit Trotsky, who was at that time at Prinkipo in Turkey.

Q: Did you make that trip, sir, to Turkey?

Soble: I made the trip, yes, in 1931.

Q: Who did you see there?

Soble: Trotsky.

Q: Anyone else?

Soble: And his secretary was there too. John Franken (Jan Frankel).

Q: Did you report on that visit to anyone?

Soble: Yes, I reported on this visit to the Russians.

Q: Did you meet Trotsky again?

Soble: Yes, I met him in 1932 in Copenhagen.

Q: Copenhagen, Denmark?

Soble: Yes, while he was on his way to Norway.

Q: Did you report on that visit to anyone?

Soble: This was only a short visit, a half an hour or so. I reported on this visit to him.

Q: To whom?

Soble: To the Russians. Mainly there were involved at that time things which they wanted to find out how many of the people are capitulating from the party, and how is his mood, if he is ready to change his line and his attitude and so on, and he was irreconcilable.

Q: Did you ever report on Sedov to anyone?

Soble: Yes.

Q: To whom?

Soble: Also to the Russians.

Q: Sedov was Trotsky’s son, is that right?

Soble: Yes.

Trotsky’s relentless and “irreconcilable” struggle against the Well-Senin clique in the German section brought them into the open and led to a public break with the Left Opposition. They returned to the Soviet Union in 1933 when Soble became involved in weaving the Moscow Trials frame-up. At one stage Soble was going to give lying testimony about conversations with Trotsky but Stalin decided to put someone else in the witness box to report on these discussions. Someone, incidentally, whom Trotsky had never set eyes on. Stalin decided not to expose Soble at this stage because he needed him in the future for other, more important work. In his court testimony in New York in 1958, Soble skates unconvincingly over this period. He simply mentions that he began working for the newspaper Bakinski Rabotschi, for the press department of the trade union organization, the Profintern, and later as an editor for the Deutsches Zentral Zeitung, the German-language newspaper published in Moscow. “It was liquidated when the Stalin-Hitler Pact was signed,” Soble explained. He did admit carrying out one further espionage job for the GPU in the 1930s.

Soble: In the end of 1935 there suddenly came this—’36 and the beginning of ’37—there came suddenly—they called me to the Russian Secret Service, and they said if I would like to make a trip to Paris. This is not a big assignment. This is in line with the Trotskyites, and I had to say yes and I went.

Q: And what was your assignment on that trip? Were you looking for someone?

Soble: Yes I stayed there a couple of months. I didn’t even know whom I will meet, and finally they told me I should go on a boat. I should go from Paris to Marseilles. They bought me the tickets and I should go, there is a Jan Frankel, whom I knew from Prinkipo, what I said before, the secretary of Trotsky, which was at that time in 1931, whom I met the first time in Prinkipo. He is now leaving for Mexico—it was at Trotsky’s secretariat—and I can meet him, he will be on this boat. The boat he is leaving from Genoa and will arrive at Nice and from Nice he is going to Napoli and from Napoli he is going then straight to Mexico. So I will have the opportunity to stay only one night from Nice to Napoli, and I will meet there Jan Frankel. I said I don’t know if Jan Frankel wants to go back to the party, and they said, well, you have to try.

Soble told the court that he tried. He approached Frankel on the boat’s sundeck and tried to engage him in discussion about their past together in the Opposition. “I saw right away that he is hostile,” Soble recounted, “he doesn’t want to talk and to speak ... I saw that there was no use of doing that, and I just went away in the morning.”

Soble then began the most dangerous part of his spy career—his infiltration into the United States, where he helped establish a GPU spy network. It started, according to Soble, with a “fantastic offer” from Stalin’s secret police. It certainly was. The year was 1940 and Hitler’s armies were already on the rampage in Europe. With the borders of the Soviet Union sealed, Soble claims that the secret police called him up and offered to send him, his wife and son, his parents, and his brothers and sisters abroad—providing “you work for us.”

On November 11, 1957, Soble gave an exclusive interview to Hearst special writer Jack Lotto in which he said the “fantastic offer” came from Beria, head of the NKVD. He said that Beria said to him: “I have heard of the good and loyal work you have done for the party. Comrade Stalin remembers your name and the services you performed regarding that dastardly enemy of the state, Trotsky.” Still the innocent idealist, Soble said that he replied to his superiors, “What do you mean I will work? Where will I go? Where will I get the visa and so on?” And they said, “You will go out to Japan, and then you will try where you can get a visa.” So, the Soble family, three generations of them, set off across Siberia for Vladivostok. They got their visas to enter Japan—“We had to fight for them.” From there they travelled to Canada where they returned to a branch of the family trade—the fur business. Soble explained: “We had an offer from our brother who lived in Canada at that time, who started building up a bristle business.”

From the bristle business in Canada, Soble quickly got into the spy business in the United States. It all happened in a roundabout way. “I didn’t get in touch with them at all,” Soble told the perjury trial, “but one day arrived a letter at my brother’s home in Montreal with an offer, with a bristle specification. I mean, people were always interested in Russian and Chinese bristles because these are very good bristles for paint brushes, and we used to buy them in Europe too, I mean, my father and everybody, and they offered us specification bristles. At that time everybody was interested particularly because they were the last shipment of bristles already during the war from Russia to this country, so bristle prices were going up.”

But this was no ordinary bristle specifications offer. This one came from Amtorg, the Russian trade mission in New York. And although it was addressed to Soble’s brother, the offer was to Soble himself. It was a transaction not to be missed. He went to Amtorg, where he met the chief of Razno Export named Mikhail Fomin and they talked about bristles.

I met him officially at Amtorg, and he asked me right in the beginning if I am staying here for a couple of days. I said it depends. I mean, if I will be able to sell these bristles because my brother and the other partner, I have no money for this, they find the price too high, and if they will correspondingly or accordingly reduce these prices they might accept it. He said where am I staying and I said the Hotel Paris here in New York, and he said all right, so let’s make it come back tomorrow or a couple of days, I don’t recall it exactly, as long as you stay here. I said I will stay here a couple of days, I won’t stay long, and I will give you the answer, I must consult people about it. I cannot do it myself. The prices are going up now. They are not going down. I cannot reduce them myself.

These heady negotiations went on. A couple of days later Soble returned and was told: “All right, we are still not made up our minds about it.” But as the conversation drew to a close, “he changed in the last two minutes and he skipped it all and said, Look, a friend of yours wants to see you.” I said, “Who is this man?” He flushed and he said, “Well, you know him and he knows you. So this might help you buy these bristles’ and so on. Well, I wasn’t sure. There are other things involved. If you want to, he will visit you tomorrow morning at the Hotel Paris’.”

Promptly the next morning, between 10 and 11 o’clock, there was a knock on Soble’s door at the Hotel Paris. In stepped a Russian who introduced himself as Zarubin. Soble later identified him from the newspapers as Mikhail Vasilevich Zublin, the head of the NKVD in the United States. There is no record that Soble ever returned to the family trade. He was back in the business he knew best—espionage. He was on active service again.

At the request of his superiors, Soble and his wife, Myra, and their son, Lawrence, moved from Montreal to New York where he could be closer to his work! He used to meet his embassy contact man every three or four days. Although his early work remains blurred in the court testimony, he was frank about it in the newspaper interview with Jack Lotto in November 1957:

The immediate job was to investigate and report on the Trotskyites and on Jewish and Zionist organizations. There were three Trotskyite groups in New York City and a Russian agent had been planted in each group. I met the three Trotsky agents, each at a different restaurant, to get their reports. From them I received the names and addresses of the members, occurrences at meetings and activities, and trends of the Trotskyite movement.

In 1943 Soble was introduced to the embassy’s No. 2 GPU agent. He preferred to remain anonymous. Soble told the jury that they once met in a restaurant and the agent said, “You know, I have a name of a famous man.” I said, “What is your real name? Why are you so always afraid?” He said, “Well, my name is, what for do you need it? My name is——.” I said, “You know my name. Why don’t I have to know your name?”** He says, “Well, my name will remind you of the name of a famous well-known world wide Russian singer.” I said autobiographically, “Chaliapin,” so he laughed. He said, “You guessed it very fast.”

In the same year, 1943, Zubilin and Chaliapin arranged a meeting between Soble and “an old agent of ours.” They were sitting in a car when Zubilin said, “Chaliapin will introduce you to a man who is an old agent of ours, and who worked in the same field as you worked abroad among the Trotskyites. And he will give you big information about this because he is connected with them, as he was connected abroad with them, and he worked for us.” Soble added, “They mentioned that he worked for them since 1928 in Europe continuously. And I still asked is he a party member or so on, and they said, well, don’t go into this, he belonged in Poland to the Communist Young Organization when he was a youngster, and we are taking care of him; but he is a secret agent.”

One day Chaliapin took Soble to a restaurant in the 40th Streets of Manhattan for the meeting. “It was during the day, in the early afternoon,” Soble recalled. “I remember this quite distinctly, and we walked in, and it got up a man who was waiting for us.” The man Soble shook hands with that afternoon was Mark Zborowski, the Stalinist agent inside the Fourth International in Paris. He, too, had been assigned to the United States. He, too, was back in business infiltrating the Trotskyist movement. How had he done it?

***

More than anyone else, it was Trotsky who politically unmasked the Sobolevicius brothers when they were Stalinist agents inside the German section of the Left Opposition. It began on December 28, 1932, when he wrote impatiently and angrily to the leadership in Germany:

Dear Comrades,
The crisis in the German section called forth by Comrade Well (Dr. Robert Soblen) and his group makes the following communication necessary in order to clarify the matter. When I met Comrade Senin (Jack Soble) in Copenhagen, he stated that Comrade Well complained that I corresponded only with his opponents and not with him. (Imagination doesn’t have to be stretched too far to appreciate why the Sobolevicius brothers wanted Trotsky to write directly to them!)

I was completely surprised by this news since the numerous interruptions of our correspondence always came from Comrade Well and occurred each time I made some critical remark or did not agree with him on one question or another. From Well’s letters, conversations, and many articles, in any case, I have long ago seen that he takes a vacillating position on many questions. I have often insisted that Comrade Well formulate his misgivings, replies, etc., in a precise manner. He has never done this.

That the vacillations of Well have condensed into an explosion surprised me all the more since Comrade Senin (Jack Soble), who takes approximately the same standpoint, assured me in Copenhagen of complete agreement (Trotsky’s emphasis), and in the course of a two-hour discussion we went through practically all the important questions. Since then, from my whole experience with Well… I have become convinced that he is unfortunately too much inclined to put purely personal factors ahead of political and principled ones.

In a succession of letters, resolutions, and instructions to the Left Opposition throughout Europe, Trotsky admonished comrades who had “spoken too mildly” on the Well issue. He wrote: “Capitulation to the enemies of the party means the same thing as stepping over into the camp of counterrevolution.” And again: “It is no secret that Well is most confused in his opinions. All attempts to help him to a clearer insight in innumerable letters were in vain. The confusion in this case finally crystallized into a completely Stalinist form.” He wrote to the sections in 1933 after the Sobolevicius brothers formally broke from the Left Opposition, saying:

A half an hour before their capitulation, all of them, Graef and Mill^[1] and Well and Senin, drew back with indignation at the mere thought of the possibility of their return to Stalin’s camp. And thirty minutes after their last oath, they broke with the Opposition in the most impudent and noisy manner in order to immediately raise their price in the market of the Stalinist bureaucracy. At the mildest estimate, we can call these people nothing but the garbage of the revolution. In the Comintern, in the GPU, in each national section, there is a special apparatus for the disintegration of the Left Opposition, composed for the most part of deserters of the Opposition or of Stalinist agents.

If the German comrades take the necessary trouble, they will surely discover the connection of such agents which leads from Well and Graef to Manuilsky and Menzhinsky.^[2] It stands to reason that no agent can destroy a historically progressive tendency embodied in the tradition of revolutionary Marxism. But it would be an unpardonable frivolity to ignore the actions of the Stalinist agents for the introduction of confusion and disintegration as well as direct corruption. We must be attentive and watch out!