Grigory Kheifets
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Grigory Kheifets, also known as Grigori Kheifetz (1899-1981), was a Soviet intelligence officer, lieutenant colonel of the NKVD-MGB. He was one of the principals in the Soviet nuclear espionage. From December 1941 until July 1944 he was the San Francisco Soviet intelligence station chief, or Rezident.[1]
Early Life
Grigory Markovich (Girsh Mendelevich) Kheifets (Григорий Маркович Хейфец) was born on May 7, 1899 in Dvinsk, Latvia to tradesman Mendel Yankelevich Kheifets and Tsivya Abramovna Leyvy. The family soon moved to Riga (where his father worked in a printing shop). Since 1915 he has been a member of the Bund. In 1915 the authorities banished the family from Riga. In 1917 Kheifets graduated from a vocational school in Bogorodsk. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1919. In 1919-1920, he fought in the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, in the Western Front and the Caucasus, where he was lightly injured in his arm.[2] After the war, he briefly served as secretary to Lenin's widow Nadezhda Krupskaya[3][4]
Career
Since 1921 Kheifets worked in Comintern as an agent of OMS under diplomatic cover. In 1924, he was OMS’s rezident in Latvia posing as a Soviet consular agent, and from April 1925, in Constantinople under the cover of Consul General. In 1927-1929, he was an OMS emissary in China, Germany, Austria, France and other countries. While working illegally under the guise of a student from India he received an engineering degree from Jena Polytechnic, Germany, where he established several underground cells. From April 1927 he was the OMS representative in Shanghai, and from 1928, in Berlin. In February 1929 he returned to Moscow to become Executive Secretary of the “Ogonyok” publishing house, then Managing Editor of the “Inventor” magazine. Since June 1931 - he is on clandestine assignments in France and the United States. Upon returning to the USSR in October 1935, he became assistant section head of NKVD INO (intelligence)[2][4].
Since July 1936 - Kheifets was a rezident in Italy, where he recruited the young physicist Bruno Pontecorvo[5]. In the summer of 1938 he was recalled to Moscow, dismissed from NKVD and appointed deputy chairman of VOKS. In October 1941, he was reinstated in NKVD and from November 1941 was the NKVD station chief in San Francisco under the guise of the Soviet Vice Consul. There he launched work on the intelligence support for the Soviet nuclear project. He established a confidential contact with the scientific director of the US nuclear project, J. Robert Oppenheimer. In November 1944 he was recalled to Moscow. Since December 1944 he was senior analyst, and then, head of the department of the 1st Directorate (intelligence) of the NKGB. Since May 1946 Kheifets serves as head of the department of department "C" of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR[2][5].
In 1947, he was dismissed from MGB and appointed Deputy Executive Secretary of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). On November 13, 1951, he was arrested in the JAC case. On February 2, 1953 Heifetz was sentenced to capital punishment. The sentence was stayed and investigation resumed on April 23, 1953, and on December 28, 1953, he was released and fully rehabilitated[2][3][4]. He died in Moscow in 1981[2].
HUAC Hearings
During the hearings of the House Unamerican Activities Committee the investigators invoked Heifetz's name a number of times probing his contacts with Bertolt Brecht[6], Paul Robeson[7] and others. Kheifets was also implicated in the Haakon Chevalier affair as the Soviet operative behind the abortive attempt to recruit the head of Manhattan Project J. Robert Oppenheimer[8]
California on the Crimea
In 1943 a world-famous actor of the Moscow Yiddish State Art Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, together with well-known poet Itzik Feffer, toured the United States on behalf of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. Before their departure, NKVD Chief Lavrenti Beria instructed Mikhoels and Feffer to emphasize the great contribution of Jews to science and culture in the Soviet Union[5]. Their assignment was to raise money and convince American public opinion that Soviet anti-Semitism had been crushed as a result of Joseph Stalin's policies.
In 1944 and the first half of 1945, Stalin's strategic motivation was to use the Jewish issue as a bargaining chip to bring in international investment to rebuild the war-torn Soviet Union and to influence the postwar realignment of power in the Middle East. Stalin planned to use Jewish aspirations for a homeland to attract Western credits.
Intentions to form a Jewish republic actually existed, based on a letter addressed to Stalin from the Jewish Antifascist Committee. Part of the letter, published for the first time in 1993, stated:
The creation of a Jewish Soviet republic will once and forever, in a Bolshevik manner, within the spirit of Leninist-Stalinist national policy, settle the problem of the state legal position of the Jewish people and further development of their multicentury culture. This is a problem that no one has been capable of settling in the course of many centuries. It can be solved only in our great socialist country.[9]
The letter, the existence of which is officially admitted in the journals of the Communist party,[10] is still not declassified. Kheifetz said the letter was a proposal with details for a plan to make the Crimean Socialist Republic a homeland for Jewish people from all over the world.
The co-ordination and execution of Stalin's plans to lure foreign investors was entrusted to Kheifetz[5]. The Soviet plan was for him to lay the groundwork for American investment in the metal and coal mining industries in the Soviet Union. It was rumoured that Mikhoels might be offered the post of chairman of the Supreme Soviet in the proposed new republic. Apart from Molotov, Lozovsky, and other high-ranking officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mikhoels was the only one aware of Stalin's plans to establish another Soviet republic. Stalin hoped to receive $10 billion in credits from the U.S. for the restoration of the Soviet economy after the war.
The plan to lure American capital was associated with the idea of a Jewish state in the Crimea was called California in the Crimea. Kheifetz widely discussed the plan in America.
Family
• Wife - Maria Solomonovna Aleinikova (1900-1975), a graduate of
Polotsk gymnasium for girls.
• Daughter - Cecilia Grigorievna Aleinikova-Kheifets (1922-2004), doctor-
ophthalmologist, was married to the immunologist and virologist David Goldfarb[11] (1918-1990).
• Grandson - Alex Goldfarb (1947 - ), biochemist and activist.
• Granddaughter - Olga Goldfarb (1952 - ), pediatrician.
See also
References
- ^ The Venona Story, Robert L. Benson, Center for Cryptological History, National Security Agency.
- ^ a b c d e Колесников, Юрий. СРЕДИ БОГОВ. Неизвестные страницы советской разведки (in Russian). ISBN 978-5-8041-0679-0.
- ^ a b Redlich, Shimon (1995). War, the Holocaust and Stalinism. Harwood Academic Publishers. p. 88.
- ^ a b c Abramov, Vadim (2005). Jews in KGB (in Russian). Moscow: Yauza-EKSMO. ISBN 9785699137626.
- ^ a b c d Sudoplatov, Pavel (1995). Special Tasks. United States: Little, Brown.
- ^ McLellan, Joseph (1979-04-08). "Bertolt Brecht by J. Edgar Hoover". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
- ^ Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives. p. 4496.
- ^ Stanley, Alessandra (2 October 2017). "The Communist Party's Party People". NYTimes.com.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Literaturnaya Gazeta, July 7, 1933.
- ^ Izvestia CC CPSU, no. 12, 1989, p. 37. The letter was not shown with the archival material of the Jewish Antifascist Committee that was displayed in Washington, D.C., during President Yeltsin's visit in 1992.
- ^ "Гольдфарб, Давид Моисеевич", Википедия (in Russian), 2022-06-20, retrieved 2022-11-19