A Life (And Death) Shrouded in Utter Secrecy

"A Death In Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror." By Gary Kern. Enigma. 491 pp. $29.

After the November, 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky by Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader in Mexico, Walter Krivitsky, then famous for being the highest ranking Soviet intelligence operative ever to defect to the West, reckoned himself to have now reached the top of Josef Stalin's hit list. On Feb. 11, 1941, he was found dead in the Bellevue Hotel in Washington, D.C., an apparent suicide. In "A Death In Washington," writer Gary Kern considers not only the mystery of whether Krivitsky's death was actually, as some believed, a "forced" suicide (a technique in which Soviet agents excelled), but also the mystery of a now-forgotten life shrouded in the secrecy attendant to being a spy.

Born Samuel Ginsberg on June 28, 1899 in Podwoloczyska, then a part of Austro-Hungarian Poland just across the border from the Russian Empire and now located in Ukraine, Krivitsky came by his internationalist sentiments easily. Kern writes that "already by 1912 ... the thirteen-year-old Samuel joined the Communist Youth Movement and began to read its literature." (The fact that there were as yet no Communist parties in 1912 reflects not so much poor scholarship as the "anti-Communist" ideological viewpoint that pervades the book.) In his 1939 autobiography, "In Stalin's Secret Service," Krivitsky wrote, "In 1917 I was a youngster of eighteen, and the Bolshevik Revolution came to me as an absolute solution to all problems of poverty, inequality and justice."

Ginsberg took a revolutionary pseudonym, and he soon displayed a particular talent for espionage and undercover work, preparing Polish revolutionary literature in Vienna, as well as operating in Berlin and Prague. Following the Bolshevik defeat in the 1920 Russo-Polish war, he went to Moscow and then back to Germany, where he was involved in various Communist uprisings that he later characterized as "cooked-up schemes of military coups d'etat, general strikes and rebellions, none of which had any substantial chance of success." Subsequently, as Krivitsky later wrote, "international Communists" like himself -- in distinction to the "Soviet Communists" whose prime allegiance was to Stalin -- "built in Germany for Soviet Russia a brilliant intelligence service, the envy of every other nation." Krivitsky proposed infiltration of the Nazi party but was rebuffed by higher-ups who thought Hitler a mere puppet of German capitalists. In Krivitsky's opinion, this lack of foresight was due to "simplistic Marxism," as he later called it.

Krivitsky's life was the stuff of spy movies never even made -- it was that secret. Kern claims Krivitsky actually rented rooms in Castel Gandalfo, the Pope's summer residence, when spying in Rome in the late '20s. The spy later spent nearly six months in prison after the right-wing Dollfuss government seized power in Austria in 1933, organized arms shipments for the defense of the Spanish Republic against Francisco Franco's military uprising, and claimed to eventually have become Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence for western Europe.

"A Death in Washington's" greatest strength is its rwecounting of the Stalinist horrors that finally drove Krivitsky to defect in Paris on Oct. 6, 1937, despite believing in the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution until his death. A veteran undercover agent who may himself have "liquidated" other agents, Krivitsky understood the obviously absurd confessions of the Bolshevik leaders in the three Moscow show trials of the 1930s as products of a similar idealism. In his opinion, Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, Karl Radek and Nikolai Bukharin confessed to having all along been enemies of the revolution to which they had actually given their lives because "weakened and tortured ... they were 'confessing' to crimes against the Party in a last desperate effort to be of service to it."

But for all these interesting insights into a fascinating, if chilling shadowy world, the book has several serious problems. The footnotes, while voluminous, do not always make it clear exactly who is the source of a particular statement, and there are certain disingenuous aspects starting with a dust cover that features Krivitsky's photo with a rifle sight and the words "Betrayed by the Philby Spy Ring" superimposed upon it. The book's only support for this claim is an unsubstantiated allegation that, a month before Krivitsky's death, Kim Philby's fellow spy Anthony Blunt handed the Soviets a report in which, Kern acknowledges, "It is not clear how much information was ... on Krivitsky." Kern's only documented instance of Blunt turning over "a copy of the complete debriefing" to the Soviets is dated June, 1941 -- four months after Krivitsky's death.

Similarly, there may be less than meets the eye to the book's opening citation from the Feb. 11 issue of The New York Times, which quoted Krivitsky: "If they ever try to prove that I took my own life, don't believe it." Two hundred pages later, we find that the source of this quote appears to be not Krivitsky himself, but Joseph Brown Matthews, investigator for the Communist-hunting House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. To his credit, Kern does acknowledge that the evidence does not support any firm conclusion as to whether or not Krivitsky was a true suicide.

For many, the book's greatest stumbling block will be its overriding right-wing interpretation of the 20th century. We read of the "so-called Russian Revolution" and the "so-called Irish Republican Army." We read of "the anticlerical atrocities and other measures of the Spanish left" with not a word of criticism of civilian deaths at Franco's hands. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's advisor Harry Hopkins and his vice-president Henry Wallace are "determined ignoramuses." And, perhaps most egregiously, Kern writes that "as many as 500 men were purged in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade" -- an astounding claim, given that there were only 3,300 of these Americans fighting with the Loyalists in support of Spain's elected government, but one that does not merit a footnote in a book that contains 697 others.

And then there's the book's second chapter comparing Bolshevism to al-Qaida, in which phrases like "wars of liberation" and the "Third World" come with quotation marks because they are seen as little more than euphemisms for what Kern sees as Soviet attempts "to drain the resources of the United States." Simplistic views like this led the United States into Vietnam, and, for that matter, the Soviet Union into Afghanistan.

There are things to be learned in this book, but they may not be worth what you have to wade through to find them.

Tom Gallagher is a San Francisco-based writer.