By the time of Leon Trotsky’s assassination, August 20, 1940, Hitler’s armies had marched into Paris and taken over. The final Nazi thrust began in May and it was all over by June 25, when the armistice was signed. When the Nazi command occupied Paris, Zborowski, his wife, and child moved to the town of Vic-en-Bigorre in the southern border area. He took with him the graduate degree in ethnology he had obtained at the Sorbonne in 1937: apart from espionage, Zborowski was a diligent student. It was here that he obtained the necessary papers and finance to travel to the United States. It happened like this…
Throughout his period in the Left Opposition and then the Fourth International, Zborowski was loyally and loudly protected by one person—Lola Estrine, Mrs. David Dallin. She now became instrumental in getting Zborowski out of war-torn Europe. She met him in Toulouse to help him get a visa via the American consul in Bordeaux. It was not the first time that Zborowski had sought help from Mrs. Dallin about his papers. The first time was in November 1936, at the time of the GPU break-in to steal Trotsky’s archives. Before a US Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee in March 1956 Mrs. Dallin was asked: “Now, Mrs. Dallin, did he ever tell you that he had false papers?” “Yes,” she replied. “You know, when the story of the archives came out, the French police started to investigate the whole matter. So he rushed to me and asked me, ‘Do what you can. Don’t name me to the police, because my papers are false. And they will find out, and I am lost’.” Did she warn Sedov of Zborowski’s panic? There is no record of it. Instead, she replied, “I said, ‘I can’t do it. How can I do it? I will try to protect you, but I can’t hide it, because you were one of the men who brought it (the archives) over. If you start misleading them, it won’t work out at all’.”
In this instance, Mrs. Dallin showed scrupulous respect for the French police and the law. There was not the same attention, however, when it came to acquiring papers to get him into the US. She explained under cross examination ...
Q: Mrs. Dallin, you did help bring Mr. Zborowski into the country, did you not?
Mrs. Dallin: Yes.
Q: And what did you do? What steps did you take?
Mrs. Dallin: First of all, I procured an affidavit for him, and since it was a family of three persons, I needed a very good affidavit. So I approached my uncle, who is a rather wealthy man, and he, not knowing Zborowski, and not knowing anything, gave him the affidavit, or gave me the affidavit for him, and I placed all the papers, and I obtained a visa here, and then he came over.
Zborowski and family travelled to Philadelphia from Lisbon, capital of “neutral” Portugal, late in 1941. Mrs. Dallin helped pay the fares. They were detained by the immigration authorities for a short period and she travelled to Philadelphia to assist a safe entry into the country. “Naturally,” recounted Mrs. Dallin, “I found him a place to live, and I saw him very often ...” Then through a contact in the Trotskyist movement she got him a job too.
Mrs. Dallin’s naivete knows no bounds. As she was Zborowski’s closest friend, didn’t she ever wonder how he kept financially solvent during the rigors of life in the Left Opposition in Paris? She told the Senate subcommittee:
I never saw him working, you see. And I was always amazed, how can a person live with a family without working. So he told me that he works for a man who built radios, and is a seasonal worker, and he works four to six months, and then the next six months it is enough for him to cover expenses. Finally, I never saw when the six months was. So I said, “What’s the matter with you? Did you lose your job?” He said, “Yes, I lost my job.” I said: “How do you live now?” He said: “You know, my mother died in Poland and she left some money, and I am getting every month money from my mother, and thus I can go to the Sorbonne and study at the university, and I have enough money to cover it, modestly.” I was very happy for him, not thinking that the money came from the NKVD, naturally.
During the Senate investigation into “The Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States” in 1956, Zborowski largely corroborated Mrs. Dallin’s story of how he came to America. But for a scholar and master spy, he suffered appalling lapses of memory. When he was asked who helped him get into the US he replied, “Mrs. Dallin.”
Q: I see. But didn’t you have actual sponsors on your application form?
Zborowski: My sponsor on my application form—in Paris, France?
Q: Yes.
Zborowski: I don’t remember that sponsors were needed. I just don’t recall any sponsors on the application form in France.
Q: Now, when did you come to the United States, actually?
Zborowski: I came to the United States seven days after Pearl Harbor, December 15, 1942.
Q: 1941.
Zborowski: 1941. I am sorry. 1941.
Once settled in New York, Zborowski resumed his close friendship with the Dallins—Mr. David J. Dallin was a writer, author of nine books. Coincidences never stopped happening to Mrs. Dallin. She recalled that “all of a sudden he moved into the same building that we lived in.” As the Dallins were extremely well-off people, the thought may have crossed their minds that it was a luxurious address for a poor Jewish refugee from the impoverished Fourth International. If they had any doubts, they are not recorded. According to Zborowski at the time he was working in a metal factory as a “screw machine operator”—not the kind of occupation to finance a Manhattan apartment. The only explanation for his gracious living was that he was back on the GPU payroll.
He was asked: “Will you tell us how you came to the United States?”
Zborowski: How I came to the United States? The question is how I came to the United States?
Q: Yes.
Zborowski: I came to the United States as an immigrant on an immigrant visa.
Q: In the year 1941?
Zborowski: In the year 1941.
Q: Right there, were you an NKVD agent when you came to the United States?
Zborowski: No, I did not—I broke with the NKVD in 1938 and after 1938 I was not an NKVD agent, and I didn’t—
The chairman, Senator James O. Eastland: Well, now, did the NKVD consider you an agent when you came to this country?
Zborowski: I don’t know whether they considered, but probably they did.
Eastland: They what?
Zborowski: Probably they did.
Eastland: Probably they did?
Zborowski: Yes, sir, because I never formally told them.
Eastland: But your answer is that the NKVD did consider you an agent when you came to this country?
Zborowski: I said, the NKVD probably would consider me as their agent because I never formally broke with the NKVD.
Eastland: You never formally withdrew?
Zborowski: That is right.
It is impossible for Zborowski to have simply withdrawn from active service. Such things don’t happen in the Stalinist secret service, or any other espionage organization. It must be recalled that his reports went direct to Stalin’s desk in the Kremlin and he was Stalin’s prize anti-Trotskyist infiltrator. He wasn’t in a position to walk off the job; had he done so, he would have been hunted down and murdered long before. In his New Leader article, “The Zborowski Case,” writer Henry Kasson explained Zborowski’s induction into the US spy ring this way: “Soon after his arrival here, Zborowski contacted the resident NKVD representatives. (According to his version, they located him; more probably, he found his way to them.)” (New Leader, November 21, 1955.)
Zborowski gave a completely different version of events. According to him, an NKVD agent re-recruited him on a sunny day on the beach at Coney Island, Brooklyn. He said a man approached him saying, “Finally we did find you.” They went to a boardwalk cafe where “he asked me where I had been, what I am doing, what I intended to do. And that is all to the best of my recollection. That is about all there was.”
Q: He did not give you an assignment?
Zborowski: No assignment, at this time.
Q: And then what happened after that? What was your next contact with him or anyone associated with him?
Zborowski: Then there was another person who called me and this person told me to meet him at a cafe, and it was at a later period of time already, because I moved to Manhattan. It was 208 West 108th Street, where I lived. And he called me on the phone and told me to meet him. “It is a friend calling,” he said.
Q: To meet him where?
Zborowski: To meet him at some bar at Lexington Avenue.
Q: A bar on Lexington Avenue. That is in Manhattan.
Zborowski: That is right.
Q: Now, how did he identify himself?
Zborowski: He didn’t identify himself. I was to be there and have an illustrated magazine in my hand.
Zborowski did not rush to the FBI for protection, but dutifully showed up at the bar with a magazine under his arm where his friendly caller told him. “It is time for you to work.” He went on, “Go establish your old contacts with your old friends, with the American Trotskyites, with the Russian immigrants and so on.” Zborowski claims he replied: “I can’t do that.”
Q: In other words, he then asked you to establish contact with the Trotskyites and Mensheviks.
Zborowski: That is right.
Q: And with whom else?
Zborowski: With this group of people whom I knew.
Q: Yes. Well, you were meeting these people at that time, were you not?
Zborowski: Yes. But I was meeting only very few people. I used to meet only, I think, Mrs. Dallin and Mr. Dallin, and maybe another person or two. I never met any American Trotskyites here. But he said to re-establish contact with the American Trotskyites, which I refused. I told him I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t re-establish any contact with them.
Q: Did you refuse?
Zborowski: Yes. I said, again, no: “I will not do that.” I said, “It is very hard for me. I cannot, I cannot speak the language, I would not be able to do it.”
With some drama, Zborowski told the senators that this was the meeting that forced his final break with the NKVD. “At this time, I became almost—I was almost hysterical, and I remember very well, I hit my fist on the table and said, ‘I will not do anything with you any more.’ And I walked out. Since then I have not seen anyone.”
No one can say that Zborowski got a grilling from the Senate subcommittee. It was a delightfully mild interrogation. But even the assembled senators from Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, Texas, Wyoming, North Dakota, Indiana, and Idaho, looked on in disbelief. The committee never pressed Zborowski for further information about his early work in the United States. Indeed, the dapper and distinguished anthropologist attached to Harvard University may never have been exposed at all but for one man. It was General Alexander Orlov, the NKVD defector, who emerged in the 1950s to blow Zborowski’s lifetime cover as a GPU spy.