By 1944, the GPU must have regarded Mark Zborowski as one of their most brilliant field operators in the United States. He was informing on the Fourth International through his contact with the unsuspecting correspondence secretary Jean van Heijenoort and he had penetrated the Socialist Workers Party in New York. Now he had delivered a surprise bonus to his GPU controllers—he tipped them off about the defection of a top Soviet official, Victor Kravchenko, weeks before it took place.
But his GPU handler, Jack Soble, began to notice that his protege was becoming disinterested and remote. He remarked about this when he gave testimony against Zborowski in the 1958 perjury trial. He was asked by assistant US Attorney Kantor if Zborowski always got $150 a month. Soble replied, “Not always.” He then went on to explain the growth of Zborowski’s “split personality.”
Soble: In the latest period he got, I don’t know, he got maybe tired or maybe he wanted to go away from this work, or maybe he was already so well established in America that he understood he did wrong, and he wants to get away, as many others do. I understand it. I just did not understand it, but I understood already also, I say eight years ago I was tired and I run away from the Russians, and if I am in jail today, this is my fate and so on, you see, and under very bad and severe conditions, which I will be able I hope during the trial to describe to the counsellor why I swallowed these things, why I was in such a desperate mood. It is not because I became insane. It was because I was under terrible, very severe conditions.
[This is a reference to the incident when Soble swallowed one and a half pounds of nuts and bolts while in Lewisburg Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, in a grisly suicide attempt.]
Therefore, I say it again and again, that this man might have got tired, as I became tired eight years ago. I wish I would have had the courage to come out and to give up myself. Whatever would have happened, would have happened. But I didn’t have the courage and this is how it happens. So this man came, and he started working less active; he gave less material. He wasn’t already with Chaliapin. He was already instead of Chaliapin, Choundenko by the name Choundenko. This was the last Russian was here.
Q: In other words, instead of transmitting his material to Chaliapin, it was now Choundenko?
Soble: Yes. And if he wants even to—I mean, the matter is too tragic, and therefore, I want to avoid literature and I want to avoid jokes. It is too tragic. But we used to call him “Professor,” as he will remember. He wasn’t a Professor Choundenko, but he wasn’t at all fit for this country, whereas Chaliapin, you would never be able to say that he is Russian or he is somebody else or a foreigner. He was like an American. He used to wear good clothes, and very good appearance, whereas this man looked—I mean, he wore a coat, it was so long that you could have seen him from a long distance already. This is not an American. He was a man came from Kazakstan. I told you everything about Zborowski. Why should we play about this back and forth and accuse each other and so on?
This man had other manners, another attitude, another approach, in a very rough way. If somebody didn’t want to work, he used to say, “Well, I wish I would have had him in Kazakstan; I would have fixed him up very fast,” you see. He grew up in other conditions, as I understand, than Chaliapin even himself. So I said, “You handle him”—suddenly he came out one day with a statement. Here is Choundenko, and he says, “Zborowski, he works lately, don’t you see, passively, and he doesn’t give as much material as he used to give in the past, and I do not agree with it. What is the matter? You must be too liberal toward him” and so on. And I myself, I mean, felt also very often tired and exhausted, and I said, looking back, I mean, why and what for? So he said to me—so I was also aggressive. I wasn’t always like today, nervous and so on, but this man, I said to him, “Look, you want maybe to personally handle him. You go ahead and handle him personally and leave me alone. I will not go to Zborowski and force him to give additional material as you wish to do it in Kazakstan. It is not Kazakstan. It is the City of New York.” So this man said, “All right, I will handle him.” First he said, “Cut him down. How much do you pay in connection with the money?” I said “$150.” “Well, cut him down. Give him a hundred.”
Q: What happened when you gave him only $100?
Soble: He was very unhappy, and then I came back to Choundenko. Zborowski was very unhappy, and I came back to Choundenko, and I reported to him, “Listen, you made proposition once. You said one thing about it, that he became less active, that I handled him too liberally. I would like really that you should handle him.”
Q: When did this occur, Mr. Soble?
Soble: This occurred in the last part of 1945—not in the last period. I mean around the half of 1945. I cannot mention exactly the name, but this was exactly in 1945, not in the first time. No, no, wait a minute, excuse me one moment. Yes, the second half of, the early part, the second half of 1945. He said “I will handle him.” Well, this was a way how I brought Choundenko together with Zborowski.
Q: After Choundenko took over, as you have described, Mr. Soble, did you stop seeing Zborowski completely?
Soble: No. We had, you see—this is what I say we were personally, maybe Choundenko was right that he suspected a certain liberalism or personal friendship or so on. He has nothing to do with this now. It has to do with the country now. So we had after that social meetings from time to time, where Choundenko did not know even about it. We used to meet at restaurants in the evening for a couple of hours to exchange information and so on, and he, Zborowski, used to tell me that Choundenko is rough, and he doesn’t like him, and so on and so on.
By this stage the two GPU agents—the controller and the informer—had developed a personal as well as a professional relationship. Soble was asked about it.
Q: Mr. Soble, do you ever recall telephoning Zborowski’s house?
Soble: Yes.
Q: Did you ever speak to anybody other than Zborowski?
Soble: Yes. I spoke to his wife.
Q: Did you and Zborowski ever discuss your wives?
Soble: Well, we didn’t go into details and we didn’t discuss it very much, but I know that Zborowski a couple of times made remarks that his wife, I mean, helped him, and that she knew about the things which he is doing.
Outside spying, Zborowski had other interests, chiefly academic ones, which began to flower. From the screw factory in Brooklyn, he progressed to a job with the Army Service Forces at 165 Broadway, where he helped to compile a Russian-American dictionary. His official title was “assistant editor, language unit, Army Service Forces” for the years 1944-1945. His next position was with the American Lloyd Company, a firm engaged in shipping parcels overseas. He stayed there about a year before becoming affiliated to the Jewish Scientific Institute at the corner of 123rd Street and Broadway. He was made librarian with the Vivo Scientific Institute. It was here that his career took a mercurial turn. He met the renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict, and through her became a consultant with the Columbia University Research on Contemporary Culture. With a grant from the United States Navy he worked with Benedict on a study of contemporary Jewish communities in Europe.
Out of this project he became study director of the American Jewish Committee. The federal government’s Department of Mental Health gave him a three-year grant of $24,000 to study “the reaction of various races of people to pain.” This three-year project finished in 1953 with the publication of his first major work, Cultural Components in Responses to Pain. During the latter part of his research, Zborowski moved to Boston where he was attached to Harvard University, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then at the Cornell Medical College. His next appointment was sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation to conduct research at the Veterans Hospital on Kingsbridge Road, in the Bronx. It was a study of “reaction to pain among disabled veterans.” Zborowski had intimate knowledge of this from his work for the GPU: the murders of Leon Sedov, Trotsky’s secretaries Rudolf Klement and Erwin Wolf, and NKVD defector Ignace Reiss. But there is no evidence that he incorporated this data in his academic endeavors. By this time he was getting $13,000 a year grant—a generous income in the early 1950s.
Zborowski’s career was brimming with success. On the 10th anniversary of his arrival in America he held a party to which all his old friends, like Mr. and Mrs. David Dallin, were invited. “I pleaded with him that I hate parties.” Mrs. Dallin recalled later, “and I don’t want to go. But he said. ‘It is impossible. You brought me over to the United States. You are the main person. You must come. This time make an exception.’ So I came to the party, and there was Margaret Mead and many anthropologists. You know how it is at parties.”
On December 2, 1954, Zborowski’s safe haven came crashing down when two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came to see him. Had the Dallins finally tumbled him? Had van Heijenoort found something which exposed him? Had someone in the Socialist Workers Party unmasked him? Nothing of the sort. Zborowski’s double role was exposed by General Alexander Orlov, the former Red Army officer and NKVD chief who had defected from the Stalinist regime in 1938.
On his arrival in the United States, Orlov secretly wrote to Trotsky in Mexico telling him that a GPU agent named “Mark” was working at Leon Sedov’s elbow. He gave an identikit description of the agent without knowing his surname was Zborowski. Mrs. Dallin, who was in Mexico at the time, was shown Orlov’s letter by Trotsky. She told him she thought the letter was a GPU fake. Now, 15 years later, Orlov was to succeed in finally unmasking Zborowski. But not without some obstacles—again provided by the Dallins.
Orlov gave his story before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on two occasions: in secret “executive session” on September 28, 1955, and in public session on February 14, 1957. When Orlov reached the United States after his flight from Spain, he went to earth. He changed his identity and began working, according to some sources, as a humble librarian. He explained that after his arrival in the US:
I lived in complete hiding because I had to dodge assassins which would be sent, or which had been sent, I am quite sure, by the Soviet NKVD on orders of Stalin. When I broke with the Soviet government I had to think of my mother and the mother of my wife, who remained in Russia. So I wrote a letter to Stalin, with one copy to Yezhov, who was the right hand man of Stalin, warning them that if anything happened to our mothers or if I were killed, my memoirs would be published and the secrets known to me about Stalin’s crimes exposed. To show forcefully enough to Stalin that I meant business. I, in spite of the protests of my wife, attached to that letter a whole list of Stalin’s crimes, with some of the expressions which he himself used in secret conferences with the NKVD chiefs when he was preparing, fabricating the evidence against the leaders of the revolution during the Moscow Trials. That probably had a certain effect...
Orlov’s deep sense of self-preservation was well-founded. Most of his NKVD colleagues in Spain were murdered by Stalin’s assassins. Before he made his getaway, several traps were set for Orlov. Senate subcommittee chairman James Eastland asked why.
Orlov: In order to liquidate me. At that time, if you remember, all the big officials, all the big shots, were liquidated one by one and especially every chief of the NKVD, because they knew too much. Because I knew the scripts of the (Moscow) trials, how they were made, because I knew personally the people who interrogated them, the inquisitors who tortured them. Stalin wanted that myth to stick in history that those were traitors, Hitler’s spies, and only he alone was the savior of the revolution and of communism. In March 1937, as early as in March 1937, my first cousin, who was a member of the central committee of the party and the head of the NKVD in Ukraine, was liquidated, and they tried to liquidate me in Spain.
In 1953, when he was certain that their mothers could no longer be alive because so many years had passed, Orlov submitted a manuscript to the editors of Life magazine. During the subcommittee’s secret session Orlov told what happened:
In April 1953 I published my articles in Life magazine, exposed the Kremlin dictatorship. In this way I came out of hiding. After that I met a number of writers and once I met one of them who lived in Paris, a Russian socialist leader, (Raphael Abramowitz). I asked him whether he knew a man by the name “Mark” who worked in Nicolaevsky’s institute. He said he knew. Then I told him that man was a spy, he was an agent provocateur.
On July 6, 1954, a year later, Orlov received a letter from Mr. David Dallin, the writer on Soviet affairs and husband of Lola Estrine. The Dallins did not hear about Orlov’s revelations until the following year since they spent most of 1953—from January 10 to November 3—in Paris, the period, incidentally, covering the split in the Fourth International with Pabloite revisionism. Orlov told the committee:
Here is the letter in which he writes that he wanted to see me because he wanted to write a review about my book and because he is writing a new book about Russia, he would like to have my advice. I met him on July 6, 1954, and I arranged that meeting very cautiously because I knew Dallin’s wife was herself a Trotskyite and an intimate member of that circle of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov, and of Mark, at that time in Paris. Because they were close friends I was afraid that if Mark learns from that that—excuse me, I must say something else. When I told a couple of writers here about Mark, that that agent provocateur might be flourishing now in Europe and so on, they talked among themselves about that man and Mark learned that General Orlov, the former high ranking official of the NKVD, was exposing him. That is why I arranged that meeting with Dallin very secretly because if Mark learned from Dallin’s wife that Orlov was coming to see them, well, nobody knows what might have happened.
I met Dallin without his wife, because I knew his wife was a very close friend of that Mark. So I was cautious. There was quite an interesting and strange conversation between me and Dallin. I asked Dallin about that agent provocateur, whether he knew him. He said, yes, surely he knew Mark. He asked me, “Do you know his last name?” I said “No.” Does the name Zborowski mean anything to you? I said, “No.” Have you ever seen that man and here I said no, because I was afraid that through blabbering and so on that Mark might find out that I was able to identify him. I asked Dallin where might that man be now. He answered: “I don’t know.” Then I ventured, “Mark is probably now in Poland, a big chief of the NKVD, because that was the region where he grew up.” Dallin shrugged his shoulders and said, “Maybe.” Then my wife said—she was present—“Maybe Mark got stranded in France during the war?” Then Dallin said, “No, he departed from France.” You will understand why that sounded strange to me from what I have to say later.
On December 25, 1954, I had a second appointment with David Dallin. He asked me, he wanted to see me, and again, get advice on the book he is writing. I asked him where we should meet. He said, “Well, if you could come to my apartment.” I said I would. “You probably won’t like to have my wife present.” A strange remark from a husband. I said, “On the contrary, I will take my wife and I will be glad to meet Mrs. Dallin too.” We went to their apartment. And then, Mrs. Dallin during the conversation about Mark suddenly remarked: “You know Dallin and I were instrumental in bringing Mark into the United States.” I said, “What? Is he in the United States?” “Yes, indeed. He came here in 1941. He is already an American citizen.” And she said she met him at the pier.
That was a big surprise to me because had Mr. Dallin told me that Mark was here in this country, I would immediately have exposed him. I wish to emphasize here that as soon as I came into the open, while talking with the FBI officials and naming a number of spies and talking about the NKVD work, I mentioned to them Mark, but I didn’t know his name was Zborowski and they probably put it in the index under the name of Mark. They asked me where he might be. I said if he was alive he must be somewhere in Poland. But when I learned that from Dallin’s wife, I immediately took steps—that was the 25th of December, that was Christmas. Two days later I went to the US Attorney’s office at Foley Square (New York) to one of the assistants whom I knew and told him immediately about the story that Mark Zborowski, an agent provocateur, is now a naturalized citizen and is now here in the United States.
Many questions arise about the attitude of the Dallins. Why, for example, did Mr. Dallin decline to tell Orlov that Zborowski was in the US at their first meeting? Why was he so evasive?
Mrs. Orlov made some telling points in this connection as she sat beside her husband during the Senate’s secret hearing.
Mrs. Orlov: I have a comment. If Mr. Dallin and Mrs. Dallin helped this man to come to America … how is it possible that Mr. Dallin in the presence of myself and my husband—in what restaurant was it?
Mr. Orlov: Longchamps Restaurant.
Mrs. Orlov: What date? I ask you to put this down—said that he does not know where this man is and my husband said, “Maybe he is in Poland, big chief in the NKVD.” He said, “Maybe.” “Maybe he was in France,” I said, “during the war killed there.” He said, “No, I know he left France.” Was it not natural for him to tell Orlov, “You look for a man, that man is here. Maybe you can do something about it.” But he put a very interesting question: “Can you recognize Zborowski?” My husband said, “No.” Can you recognize him? “No.” Did you know his last name? My husband said, “No.”
Mr. Dallin’s questions show that he was not so much anxious about the immediate exposure of Zborowski, but more about whether or not Orlov knew the complete identity of “Mark.” Orlov left with the belief that the Dallins were trying to “shield” Zborowski. Why?