A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror

Walter G. Krivitsky (nee Samuel Ginsburg) was one of the U.S. government's most valuable weapons in the wars of intelligence and espionage, from his 1938 defection from the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign of terror to his mysterious death in a Washington hotel in 1941. But not until this meticulously researched work has the range and depth of his career as a spy been fully detailed, first for the Soviets and then for England and the U.S.; Kern also carefully considers the three possible scenarios for Krivitsky's unsolved death. An""ascetic and workaholic"" who never drank and who remained""on the job 16-18 hours a day,"" Krivitsky rose through the ranks of the Soviet intelligence agency OGPU (the early version of the KGB), later claiming to have ended up directing Soviet military intelligence through all of Western Europe. Kern details how Krivitsky managed to survive during the peak of Stalin's horrific purges. He also shows how Krivitsky's debriefing by England's famous MI5--in which he supposedly gave the names of almost 100 Soviet agents operating throughout the world, 61 of whom were located in the U.K.--missed some of the clues that could have earlier broken the infamous Cambridge spy ring led by Kim Philby. Most importantly, Kern captures how Krivitsky was representative of the""restless spirit"" of the Soviet defectors who came after him,""the first generation of intelligence aces who helped to establish the most far-reaching and successful espionage operation in the world,"" and who nevertheless worked against that operation after Stalin had betrayed their social idealism.