The Lost Spy by Andrew Meier - review

Dominic Sandbrook questions what drove an American to spy for Stalin, in his review of 'The Lost Spy' by Andrew Meier

One bleak night in February 1939, as the snow was falling on Moscow, the men came for Cy Oggins. They took him from his hotel room, bundled him into the back of their van, jammed him into a tight wire-mesh cubicle with no room to sit down, and drove to the Lubyanka, the dreaded iron-shuttered prison of the Soviet NKVD. There, in a solitary cell on a long, windowless corridor, in the harsh light of a bulb that never went off, he waited. Nobody ever told him why he had been arrested.

Cy Oggins had always believed himself to be marching in the vanguard of history, his life dedicated to a revolution that would build heaven on earth. Instead, this serious young man from small-town Connecticut became one of the revolution’s forgotten victims, destroyed by the cause to which he had pledged himself.

In this intriguing, chilling book, Andrew Meier calls him the “lost spy” – an American idealist who joined the Communist Party as a student in the Twenties, gave up his academic career to become a secret agent for Stalin, and ended his days a broken prisoner of the Gulag, trapped thousands of miles from home in the bitter cold of the Russian Arctic.

Like many of his intellectual friends, Oggins was deeply attracted to the dream of world revolution. He moved to Greenwich Village, then a melting pot of socialism and bohemianism, and married a short, spiky Yiddish radical, Nerma, herself never far from the front lines of activism and argument."

As a piece of historical detective work, Meier’s book is a triumph. He traces Oggins’s extraordinary life from his childhood in a bookish Jewish family in New England to his student days at Columbia in the 1910s where, amid the passionate arguments over American entry into the First World War, he found his way into radical politics.

Like many of his intellectual friends, Oggins was deeply attracted to the dream of world revolution. He moved to Greenwich Village, then a melting pot of socialism and bohemianism, and married a short, spiky Yiddish radical, Nerma, herself never far from the front lines of activism and argument.

But then Oggins’s journey deviated from the familiar path of the young New York intellectuals in the Twenties, many of whom later repudiated their youthful radicalism and became the most ferocious anti-Communists of all. Instead of finishing his doctorate on the fall of the Spanish empire, Oggins somehow allowed himself to be seduced into the secret world of Soviet espionage. Why him? We do not know, and Meier refrains from speculating.

Perhaps, as a Jewish boy from WASPish New England, Oggins felt a desperate need to fit in, to be accepted into a clandestine institution that offered solidarity and support. But plenty of other bright Jewish boys, equally alienated from the American mainstream, followed different paths. Why Oggins chose the secret life remains a mystery; all we know is that his choice eventually killed him.

At first his spying career contained all the danger, glamour and excitement of a novel by Eric Ambler or Alan Furst, those supreme chroniclers of the secret world of the Thirties.

After sailing from New York, he settled in Berlin, then convulsed by the death throes of the Weimar Republic. By 1930 he was in Paris, the epicentre of international espionage in the interwar years, where White Russian émigrés, Stalinist secret agents, fascist sympathisers and socialist firebrands mingled in the bars on the Left Bank.

Soon he was on the move again: first Shanghai, seething with tension as the Japanese prepared to strike into China; and then the Manchurian port of Dairen, from where he reported to Moscow on Japan’s readiness for war. By this point, however, Oggins was already doomed. As the Soviet regime turned on itself in the late Thirties, not even the NKVD was immune, and like thousands of other loyal Communists, Oggins fell victim to the paranoia of Stalin’s purges.

In a final cruel twist, though, it was his own country that signed his death warrant – not, as his family suspected, because Washington made no effort to get him out of the Gulag, but quite the reverse. When the State Department tried to have him released in the mid-Forties, the Soviet authorities decided that he knew too much, and had him killed by lethal injection – a callous reward for his years of service.

That Oggins’s life was a waste and a tragedy is not in doubt, but I wonder whether a man who spent so long spying for Stalin could be quite the innocent idealist that Meier portrays.

The truth is that we do not really know what inner dreams or demons drove him to his death, and despite Meier’s keen eye for detail and historical sweep, Oggins always remains an enigma.

That should not detract from a fine achievement: not only a spy story worthy of John le Carré, but a grim reminder of the brutal reality of Stalin’s secret world. continues here

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