The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service

In 1947, Stalin had an American in his employ, Isaiah "Cy" Oggins, murdered by lethal injection just as he was finishing his eight-year sentence at the notorious Norilsk labor camp. Oggins had, along with his wife, been a Soviet spy since the 1920s, traveling the world, spying on exiled Romanovs, Germans and Japanese. Clearly, he knew too much, and it is a wonder that Stalin let him survive so long. The thread of Oggin's case was first publicly revealed in 1992, when then President Boris Yeltsin handed over a previously secret file to the U.S., in a flourish of post-Cold War good feeling. Author Andrew Meier seized on this thread and unraveled a fascinating tale of pre-war espionage. It is a story Meier tells extremely well, particularly by weaving it together with an account of his investigative work, so that you feel as if you are uncovering the tale for the first time along with him. In the end, one almost comes to understand these fervent intellectuals, who joined the communist cause to root out injustice, but ended up participating in murders and sabotage, corrupted and blinded by their idealism. Almost. As reviewed in Russian Life.

If you want a little cheering up and perspective in these challenging times, I suggest reading books about Stalinist Russia. What a wretched and miserable place and time. The Lost Spy is an extremely poignant, well written and tragic family social history about deluded American communists who fell victim to Stalin and the Soviet Gulag. I also highly recommend in the same genre The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis. Clearly, communism is the God that failed and these two books bring this tragic point home to Americans better than any political science or history textbook or monograph.

"The Lost Spy" by Andrew Meier is above all, a masterpiece of research, and story telling. The author takes the reader into a dark but fascinating labyrinth of idealism, espionage, and...murder. Jaded by labor disputes, union battles with striking workers, social unrest, anti-Semitism, and college politics mixed with America's entry into World War I, an intelligent young man named "Cy" Oggins... becomes lost in a diabolical world. "Cy" Oggins is seduced and mesmerized by the hallucinatory utopia espoused by Communism and the Soviet Union's "Great Social Experiment." Oggins, like so many of the others from the "Lost Generation" follow the flute of the Bolshevik Pied Piper and down the streets and alleyways of "No Return." Oggins weaves in and out of various Communist organizations until by 1928 or, 1929 "Secret Agent" Oggins was like "Bur Rabbit" in the Uncle Remus Story; stuck to the "Tar Baby," with no way out. "Cy" Oggin's radical Communist and revolutionary leanings were metastasized with his marriage to wife, and fellow revolutionary...Nerma. The couple was every bit as rabid in their missions as Kim Phillby, Richard Sorge, Morris and Lona Cohen, and Julius Rosenberg (to name but a few). Oggins and his wife start their quest in New York and on to Germany, Paris, China, and (Manchuria/Manchukuo) and then eventually, Moscow. Despite his numerous "duty stations" the reader can not help but wonder, just how important "Cy" really was to ..."The Center." Sometimes the reader gets the impression that Moscow was simply "toying" with this American communist (traitor to his own country). His work in China (on the ruins of Sorge's organization), was probably his most demanding and beneficial to Moscow overall. None the less, he was apparently being "shadowed" throughout his illustrious career. Either, the Soviets simply did not trust him (because he was an American?), or...felt he was a "double agent" for the American Secret services. Despite his services to Stalin and the Kremlin, "Cy" Oggins was arrested by the NKVD in 1939, became prisoner #568 at the infamous Lubyanka, sentenced to over 8 years at a Russian Gulag, and eventually... murdered by the Soviet people's decree in 1947. The author's description of his incarceration at the Lubyanka and Gulag is every bit as descriptive as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's, "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich." There is some speculation that "Cy" was in fact, a "double agent" (especially by the Russians). The U.S. Government did attempt to help negotiate his release both politically, and economically. However, it would appear this was done more to try and find out exactly what he knew than a valiant attempt to "bring him in from the cold." The author's research into Oggins past affiliations, and exposure of his radical history would appear to make him an unlikely candidate (in my opinion), for a "Double Agent" like Kim Phillby, or even Sidney Reilly. U.S. Intelligence operations during the 1920's

Andrew Meier's The Lost Spy is mesmerizing. Beautifully written, prodigiously researched, it kept me up all night (I read it in a single sitting), and I've been thinking about it ever since. An account not just of an intriguing, elusive man, but of an entire era. I can't recommend it highly enough.

The son of Russian Jewish emigrants, recruited into Stalin's intelligence organizations. Secret missions in Berlin and Paris and elsewhere in the years before World War Two. Betrayal and arrest and "liquidation" by the NKVD. It sounds like an Alan Furst spy novel, except it happens to be fact. Andrew Meier's "The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service" reveals the extraordinary story of Isaiah "Cy" Oggins, who rose from a childhood in a New England mill town to radical intellectual circles at Ivy League Columbia University and then secret service as a Soviet intelligence agent for more than a decade, before he was arrested during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, sentenced to eight years in a gulag prison camp, and then "liquidated" to avoid embarrassing publicity. In a masterful fashion Andrew Meier weaves together three chronologies through the length of his book: Oggins' background and activities as a Soviet operative, his arrest, imprisonment, and execution, and Meier's own quest to uncover the secrets behind Oggins's story. Of necessity, some of what Meier recounts must rest upon speculation, but it is very intelligent, well-informed speculation. He has reconstructed Oggins's story from an impressive range of sources, including formerly classified Soviet and American diplomatic and intelligence files.