On November 21, 1955, writer Henry Kasson broke the news of Mark Zborowski’s career as a Stalinist agent in The New Leader in an article based on the secret testimony of NKVD defector General Orlov. Kasson wrote:
The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee is probing in executive session the case of an important Soviet secret agent, hitherto unknown to the public. He is Mark Zborowski, 48, a resident of New York since 1941 and the author of a widely-read book, Life Is With People. He concluded by saying, “Only a fraction of Zborowski’s deeds have thus far been revealed, especially those of recent years. But from the known facts it is clear that Zborowski has been a loyal and important Soviet agent for many years.”
Kasson wrote about Zborowski’s contacts with the Soviet official who defected in 1944, Victor Kravchenko. “It appears that only Moscow’s wartime need of US friendship prevented the NKVD from taking reprisals against Kravchenko,” he said.
But although there was a lifelong GPU agent on their doorstep, the FBI still did not pounce. This was all the more remarkable since J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men were at the center of the McCarthyite era of smearing, witch-hunting and framing trade unionists, writers, actors, musicians, and academics. On the surface of it, Zborowski appeared a prize target for the McCarthys: a fully-fledged GPU man occupying a senior academic post in the government health service receiving substantial federal research grants. But no witch-hunt took place.
He was eventually indicted on April 21, 1958, on a perjury charge—of telling the FBI lies. And the charge related to conflicting stories he had told them in 1955, three years earlier. Why was there such a lapse between when the offense took place and when he was brought to court? No explanation has ever been given. General Orlov must have been astonished by the snail’s pace of American “justice”: he must have marvelled that the US authorities allowed one of Stalin’s top spies to remain at large after he himself had testified in secret session in 1955: “It is my firm belief that that man Zborowski, all through those years, has been in the United States an agent of the NKVD conducting espionage on a large scale.”
There was, however, one note of anxiety struck during his testimony. He mentioned that during an interview with the FBI they told him, “Don’t be afraid of that Mark Zborowski.” And Orlov drew the conclusion that: “He was something like talking or cooperating but it was not said in so many words, that was my impression.” The net drew even tighter around Zborowski when his GPU controller Jack Soble was arrested on January 25, 1957, and charged with a series of espionage and conspiracy offenses. It soon became known that Soble was singing like a bird. It was Soble who made the official identification of Zborowski during a confrontation session at the New York FBI headquarters. During testimony in Zborowski’s perjury trial, he described how it happened.
Q: Mr. Soble, if I can direct your attention to October 7, 1957. Do you recall what occurred on that day?
Soble: On October what?
Q: On October 7.
Soble: 19...?
Q: 1957.
Soble: On October 7, 1957, I mean, this was a day before I was sentenced and I was confronted with Zborowski.
Q: What happened? Tell us what you saw and what was said.
Soble: I was brought in. I was brought upstairs to a room where I did not know, as I say, from the beginning. “Where am I going?” I even asked one of the agents, “Where am I going?” He says, “‘Well, never mind. You will see.” And he brought me into a room where there were sitting two or three people with him together. I mean, I don’t remember it exactly, because I really didn’t pay attention to how many were there, were sitting there, but I know two or three agents were sitting with Zborowski. I mean, they asked me, they didn’t ask me this before, they asked me “Who is this man?” Well, I looked at him and I said, “This is Mark Zborowski.”
According to Soble, Zborowski was then asked if he knew Soble. He replied, “Well, I know this man. I recognize him from the pictures in the newspapers.” Soble was flabbergasted. He had read in the newspapers that Zborowski had appeared before the Senate subcommittee in 1957 and made a full “confession.” He had also agreed to cooperate with the US authorities. Soble said: “I was mixed up. Then I said, ‘Listen, Zborowski, you don’t have to pity me. I appreciate very much what you say here, that you don’t know me . . .’”
Then a curious thing happened: “And then the agents interfered . . . I mean I don’t remember the details. They interfered and they just took me out from there, also in a very fast way. I didn’t understand what is what.”
Then something even stranger occurred. “They brought me back. I don’t know why or for what reason. They brought me back and I said again, I mean, ‘I used to pay you money’ and so on, and you know that. So what is the matter with you? Did the Russian Secret Service destroy your life, yes or no? Where are you now? I mean, in one field or in another field? In one camp or another camp? Are you telling now the truth or at another time were you telling the truth? And suddenly he said, ‘Well,’ again a change of attitude, and he said, ‘Well, yes, I know him. I know this guy’.”
Q: Did you leave the room?
Soble: And then they took me out again from the room. And today I see Zborowski has another attitude. I don’t understand the whole case. I mean, it is not my business, but this is how I understand it.
The evidence against Zborowski was overwhelming. Two FBI agents, Walter Wagenheim and McKenna, testified that when they first interviewed the defendant he lied to them: he admitted that he was connected with the Trotskyist movement in Paris, but denied that he had ever worked for the GPU in Europe or the United States. The government case rested on the fact that Zborowski denied knowing Jack Soble when in truth he did. Zborowski’s defense was that he had not known Soble by his name but only by his alias “Sam” and therefore had not knowingly lied to the FBI and the grand jury. During the course of the case the government proved conclusively that Zborowski knew Soble very well indeed: they met between 40 and 50 times in New York on official espionage business in the 1940s.
The main thrust of the defense case was to discredit Soble’s sensational testimony. Because of his own trial ordeal, Soble was a sick man. After one day’s evidence, he collapsed outside the court and had to be rushed to the hospital. The defense counsel repeatedly suggested that Soble was mentally unstable and his evidence was unsound. Soble admitted under cross-examination that while held at Lewisburg prison he had been given a course of electric shock therapy but he refused to be rattled by the hectoring defense lawyer.
At the climax of Soble’s testimony, the government produced the evidence which put Zborowski’s guilt beyond any doubt. It was a letter written by Soble to Vassili Zubilin, the former head of the GPU in the United States. Soble gave the letter to one of his GPU contacts, Boris Morros, a Hollywood entrepreneur, to transmit to Moscow. What Soble didn’t know was that Morros was a double agent: he was working for the GPU and the FBI. He wrote it in 1956, shortly after Zborowski had made his public testimony before the Senate and had stated his intention of helping the US authorities to the best of his ability. Soble naturally assumed that if this was correct, it wouldn’t be long before his cover was blown and he would be arrested. (As with all good spy stories, the facts are never so simple. The fact is that the US authorities already knew about Soble since the early 1950s from Morros!)
The letter that Soble wrote to Morros was raised in the last stages of Zborowski’s perjury trial.
Q: With regard to that letter, Mr. Soble—that is defendant’s exhibit N—do you recall writing the letter?
Soble: This letter—
Q: The Russian is attached to it, Mr. Soble. Do you want to look at the Russian? Is that your handwriting?
Soble: Yes.
Q: And that letter is headed “About Mark Zborowski”?
Soble: Mark Zborowski, yes.
Q: Mr. Soble, when you wrote that letter, that was prior to your arrest in this country. Is that correct?
Soble: Yes.
Q: And you transmitted that letter to Boris Morros?
Soble: Yes.
Q: And, to your knowledge at that time, Mr. Soble, Boris Morros was also an agent of the Soviet government? Is that correct?
Soble: Yes.
Q: And did you tell Boris Morros what to do with that letter?
Soble: Yes. I told him to transmit it to the Russians.
Q: Then this letter in which you described Mark Zborowski was written by you while you were still a free man in this country prior to your arrest?
Soble: Yes.
Q: And given to a Soviet agent for transmittal to the Soviet Union?
Soble: Yes.
But instead of going to the Kremlin, Soble’s letter on Zborowski went straight to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI in Washington. Exhibit N reads in full:
Mark Zborowski, 2451 Webb Avenue, the Bronx, New York City (Telephone Cypress 5-8262). The efficiency of an agent. I don’t know what they are going to do with Mark Zborowski’s telephone number in Moscow, but he is complete. You must know him from his old activity among the Trotskyites. You must also know his big and active work among the Mensheviks and deserters from the USSR. Let me only mention certain episodes: the running of Kravchenko in the 1940s; the close “friendship” with the Dallins, the husband known as Professor Dallin and his wife an active Menshevik-Trotskyite. It is regrettable that Zborowski was introduced to me by comrade Shalyapin (Chaliapin) working here under the supervision of Vasily Mikhailovich (Zubilin) in the 1940s, and he knows my real name. This year a “bomb” has exploded here and Barmin, (General Orlov), formerly a Soviet diplomat, presently an active collaborator of the FBI and intelligence services, found accidentally from the Dallins that they have a friend, a certain Zborowski. He told Dallin that Zborowski is a GPU agent and that he had known him as far back as the beginning of the ’30s as a GPU agent working among the Trotskyites.
Since 1954, the FBI have been working on Zborowski. During this year, the whole story was published in printed pages (New York Times, Herald Tribune, New York Post and in the newspapers of the White Guard, also in the pages of the New Leader). To confess I expected to be arrested at any moment because Zborowski knows me well by name, but in spite of it, I have not been bothered up to now. Probably Zborowski has been silent about me, the same way as he was silent about the names of other people. Irrespective of the fact that he criticized the NKVD at the hearings of his affairs before the Senate committee, that he stated that he “now is a loyal American,” he did not name any names of his fellow collaborators. At the present time he is under subpoena of the Senate committee and under the weekly effusions of mud-slinging on the part of the Dallins, the latter very vexed that they had confidence in him for many years and that the Dallins had made it possible for him to get a visa to come to the United States.
Barmin personally came out against him in the Senate committee and Mrs. Dallin did the same. Senator Eastland (chairman of the committee) wants to expel him from the USA and to put him into prison if possible. He is also being accused of the theft of the files of Trotsky in Paris in the Thirties and indirectly they are trying to pin the death of the Grey One (Trotsky) onto him, this is not true. I beg of you to think how you can get him out of here. You yourselves understand that my personal situation has not been improved by this. It has become really tight. I beg of you to consider this and to take the most urgent measures.
The letter was fantastically damaging for Zborowski. It proved that not only did he know Soble, but he knew him very well, and for a very long time. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and Judge John M. Cashin gave Zborowski the maximum sentence for perjury—five years. Mrs. Bernaut, Ignace Reiss’s widow, observed the closing stages of the trial from the public gallery, watching the accomplice to murder as he sat impassively throughout. She concludes her book Our Own People with her recollections of the end of the trial.
Many of Etienne’s fellow anthropologists attended the trial and gathered round him during the recesses, ostentatiously demonstrating their friendship and faith in him. They knew nothing of agents or secret police, or of Soviet political matters; to them a Soviet agent and a perjurer was merely an innocent victim of political persecution. They were determined to apply their methodology of primitive cultures to modern terror, as I realized when a prominent American anthropologist said to me after the trial, “In this country we are against human sacrifice.”
Zborowski successfully appealed against his conviction in the US Court of Appeals on the grounds that the defense had been denied access to testimony which Soble gave before a grand jury shortly before Zborowski’s arrest. At a retrial in 1962, four years later, he was again convicted and sentenced to three years and 11 months. But he did not serve the full sentence.
Where are the other principal characters now? Jack Soble served five years of his seven year sentence and was freed in September 1962 for good behavior. He was given early parole “for outstanding work in the prison office and library.”
His brother, Dr. Robert Soble, was arrested in 1961 and convicted of Soviet espionage, largely on the testimony of his brother, Jack Soble. He fled to Israel and was being extradited back to the United States when he committed suicide on his way to London’s Heathrow Airport in September 1962.
Mark Zborowski and his wife live in quiet luxury in San Francisco. He has an impressive job at the Medical Anthropology Department of Mount Zion Medical Center, presumably still investigating the effect of pain on the human species. When we asked him to comment on his GPU career, Zborowski said: “This is all a long time ago. I am not interested in this.” When our photographer began taking his picture, his wife and spy accomplice said: “You can do nothing with these pictures if you know what’s good for you.”
Mrs. Elsa Bernaut, widow of Ignace Reiss, lives in Paris. She lives alone with her memories. In a picture album she has a photograph of four children—her son, Roman; Nora and Era Nin; and Seva Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson. All three of their fathers were murdered by Stalin’s secret police.
Mrs. Lilia Dallin, Lola Estrine, lives in New York. She has been busy lately because Pathfinder Press, the publishing house of the Socialist Workers Party, has asked her to write the foreword to a collection of Leon Sedov’s works. And what else is there to note about the Zborowski-Soble affair and the murder of the founder of the Fourth International and its early leaders? The damning and deafening silence from Joseph Hansen and the so-called leaders of the Socialist Workers Party.