Robert Soblen

Dr. Robert Soblen (November 7, 1900 – September 11, 1962) was a Lithuanian-born psychiatrist and reputed Soviet spy.

In 1940, Robert Soblen, his brother Jack, and their families emigrated to the United States. It was alleged that Soviet Secret Police Chief Lavrenty Beria sent them.

Soviet spy, Hollywood producer, and later U.S. double agent Boris Morros charged him with engaging in espionage activities. During World War II, Dr. Soblen allegedly provided the Soviets with secret documents from the Office of Strategic Services and information from the Sandia nuclear-weapons development center at Albuquerque.

Soblen was a psychiatrist at New York's Rockland State Hospital, when he was arrested. Rockland State was the hospital called "Juniper Hill" in "The Snake Pit", though it was considered progressive for its time. Fifteen years after the war, in December 1960, the FBI arrested Soblen on a charge of wartime espionage, which could carry a death sentence.

In August 1961, Soblen was sentenced to life imprisonment but released on bail pending an appeal. At the time, Soblen was diagnosed with inoperable leukemia. Soblen immediately appealed his sentence and his bail was set at $100,000. Bonding agencies refused to lend to him: his wife scraped up $40,000 out of savings and life insurance policies. An acquaintance, George Kirstein, publisher of the liberal weekly, The Nation, rounded up the remaining $60,000. Heiress Helen Lehman Buttenwieser, was persuaded to provide security for the bond. She was the partner of Soblen's lawyer, Ephraim S. London, and was herself an attorney for Alger Hiss.

The FBI did not place surveillance on Soblen, viewing him as a low risk for flight, because of his illness and the high bond raised by private parties, who would lose the money. After Soblen's final appeal was rejected by the courts, in June 1962, Soblen fled to Israel, which guaranteed that all Jews had Right of return. He was quickly expelled but that expulsion became something of a scandal, in Israel, among Jews who felt that the Right of Return was inviolable, as guaranteed by Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) article 13. Soblen stabbed himself aboard the plane taking him back to the United States, and was taken off at London. British doctors determined that his leukemia was dormant and he might live several years. Britain rejected an appeal for political asylum, and when he was about to be deported again, Soblen took a fatal overdose of barbiturates.

References

• Haynes, John Earl, and Klehr, Harvey, Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics, Cambridge University Press (2006)

• The Spy Who Skipped, Time Magazine, August 6, 1962

• Glenn Fowler, Ephraim London, 78, a Lawyer Who Fought Censorship, Is Dead, New York Times, June 14, 1990