Joseph Katz

Joseph Katz (* 1912 or 1913 in Lithuania ; † 2004 in Israel ) was a Jewish American who worked as an agent for the Interior Ministry of the USSR from the 1930s to the late 1940s and was one of its most active liaison agents .

activity

At times he worked for the NKVD as a command officer and group leader, to camouflage he was co-owner of a Soviet foreign company for the production of gloves.

Katz's main task was initially to select and recruit suitable candidates for espionage activities from among the ranks of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) .

In 1941, according to information from the Venona papers, he and Amadeo Sabatini were involved in the alleged murder of the Soviet GRU defector Walter Kriwitzki . According to other sources, Kriwitzky is said to have committed suicide. Joseph Katz's aliases in the VENONA project were X , Douglas and Informer .

In November 1943 the agent leader Jacob Golos died , whereupon his lover Elizabeth Bentley took over the duties of manager and courier. Katz, whom Bentley knew as Jack , was responsible for the recruitment of new agents for the New York TASS office from 1944 and was subordinate to the head of the office, Vladimir Pravdin . This was the most active time in Joseph Katz's career.

In September 1944, Katz was relieved of his duties for the TASS office and reported directly to the Soviet chief of espionage in Washington Anatoly Gromov . The aim of Gromov's actions was to better separate the individual agents from one another as part of a new security program.

In mid-October 1944, Katz was supposed to establish contact with a person named Margarita . Katz met Margarita several times, but made no attempts to recruit her because she made him suspicious of comparisons between Stalinism and National Socialism and did not appear to him as a possible cooperative employee. He decided to just keep watching her. Margarita continued to cause concern for Moscow's secret service. On October 6, 1944, the New York office sent a message to Moscow according to which, based on statements by Katz, Margarita was fond of the service, but not of the country (the Soviet Union). The New York resident expressed his confidence in Katz's judgment and recommended that they be followed.

Katz and Bentley did extensive work in New York and Washington. Bentley eventually named more than 80 people from a dozen government institutions that supplied information to Soviet intelligence. Katz informed Bentley at their first meeting in October 1944 that Gromov had been sent to the United States to improve the security of NKGB operations. One aspect of the modernization was that Bentley should give control of all those agents to the NKGB who had not been handed over to NKGB officers before.

After Bentley defected to the FBI in 1945 , Gromov sent a detailed report to Moscow with various proposals for her assassination. Was to carry out this murder, for which shooting, poisoning, as well as the pretense of accident or suicide had been considered, Joseph Katz; however, the murder was never carried out.

persecution

It was not until 1950 that the former agents Harry Gold and Tom Black identified Katz , and in 1953 the Americans tried to contact him. By this time, however, Joseph Katz had long since left for France. Attempts to get hold of him through contacts between the USA and France or to lure him onto American soil, an American boat or plane, proved futile. When FBI agent Lamphere finally managed to interview him in Israel , he denied ever having been a Soviet agent.

Living in France and Israel

In Western Europe, Katz had founded a company to camouflage courier services between Europe and the USA. Katz lived in France from 1948 to 1951 and then moved to Israel. In the 1970s, Lamphere, who had no longer any connection with the FBI, managed to contact Katz unofficially while he was visiting his brother Morris Katz on Long Island and to interview him for his book project.

literature

• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr : Decoding Soviet Espionage in America , Yale University Press, Venona 2000, ISBN 0-300-08462-5
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America-the Stalin Era , Random House, New York 1999
• Earl M. Hyde, Bernard Schuster and Joseph Katz: KGB Master Spies in the United States , International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 12: 1 (1999): 35-57 (using the materials of the VENONA project).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, & David Gurvitz: The Two Worlds of a Soviet Spy. In: commentarymagazine.com. March 2017, accessed July 13, 2020 . 
2. Jump up ↑ Allen Weinstein, Alexander Vassiliev: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era , Random House, New York 1999, p. 108
3. ^ Earl M. Hyde, Bernard Schuster and Joseph Katz: KGB Master Spies in the United States , International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 12: 1 (1999): 35-57
4. ^ Walter G. Kriwitzki: I was Stalin's agent ; Nevertheless-Verlag Grafenau-Döffingen 1990; ISBN 3-922209-33-5 ; here: Afterword by Helmut G. Haasis
5. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Alexander Vassiliev: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era , Random House, New York 1999
6. ↑ Venona August 21, 1944
7. ↑ Venona 11 April 1944
8. ^ Venona 1337, New York to Moscow, September 19, 1944
9. ^ Venona 1411, New York to Moscow, October 6, 1944
10. ↑ Kathryn S. Olmsted: Red Spy Queen - A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley , UNC Press 2002, ISBN 0807827398 , p. 106 f.
11. ^ Report of the Senate Internal Affairs Subcommittee 1956, in: Ex-Spy Tells of Work for Soviet , New York Times May 18, 1956
12. ^ Robert J. Lamphere, Tom Shachtman: The KGB-FBI-War: A Special Agent's Story , Mercer University Press, 1995, ISBN 0865544778 , pp. 280 f.
13. ^ Robert J. Lamphere, Tom Shachtman: The KGB-FBI-War: A Special Agent's Story , Mercer University Press, 1995, ISBN 0865544778 , pp. 295 ff.