For half a century, the case of Isaiah Oggins, a 1920s New York intellectual brutally murdered in 1947 on Stalin's orders, remained hidden in the secret files of the KGB and the FBI--a footnote buried in the rubble of the Cold War. Then, in 1992, it surfaced briefly, when Boris Yeltsin handed over a deeply censored dossier to the White House. This book at last reveals the truth: Oggins was one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviets. Based on six years of international sleuthing, journalist Meier traces Oggins's rise in beguiling detail--a brilliant Columbia University graduate sent to run a safe house in Berlin and spy on the Romanovs in Paris and the Japanese in Manchuria--and his fall: death by poisoning in a KGB laboratory.
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