Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (84 page)

The FBI began interviewing members of the Silvermaster espionage
ring in January and February 1947, hoping to get confessions that would enable it to bring charges against some of the suspects. For more than a
year, it had wiretapped those Bentley had named, investigated their activities, followed them, and otherwise sought to obtain direct evidence
of participation in espionage that would provide a basis for prosecution.
All the efforts had failed. Warned that she had gone to the FBI, those
who knew her or might have been known by her had destroyed any incriminating correspondence, ceased removing documents, and pretended
to be ordinary, if left-wing, liberals.

Thus prepared, when confronted by the FBI, most did not panic and
either refused to answer questions or gave misleading or untruthful accounts. But when the Bureau questioned the Korals, Alexander made
some damaging admissions. At his first interview, he felt he had to account for being seen at the Silvermaster home. He claimed that he had
indeed acted as a courier for a mysterious individual named Frank, whom
he had met in 1939 and for whom he had made twelve contacts with individuals in New York and Washington. Because of his younger son's illness, he was in dire need of money; "he would give his own life's blood
for the health of his boy." Frank approached him, saying he knew from a
friend that Koral needed money to care for his son. Koral's task was to
meet someone, using a magazine as a signal, identify himself as Al, obtain
material, and deliver it to Frank the next day. For these services Frank
had paid him $z,ooo in cash.32

Questioned about what he thought this activity was, Koral explained
that Frank said he was in the woolens business, and he assumed it involved illegal procurement of government contracts. In another interview he did express some misgivings that arose after he read about the
Gouzenko spy case in Canada: "This matter bothered him considerably
and he realizes that what he did is not legal." Returning home from the
second of his two visits to Silvermaster, he told Frank, who came to his
house, that he was being watched, and that was their last contact. He denied being a Communist but admitted his wife received Communist literature. Helen Koral professed ignorance. She claimed not to know
Frank but was aware about his financial arrangement with her husband.
She denied being a Communist or ever participating in clandestine meetings. Both Korals refused to name people who knew about their son's
illness in 1939 or their current friends. Richard Koral, also questioned,
admitted being a member of the American Youth for Democracy, a Communist youth group, and knowing Anatole Volkov, a graduate student at
the University of North Carolina and Helen Silvermaster's son and Greg-
oiy's stepson. (Bentley had identified Volkov as assisting in his parents' es pionage network.) The FBI didn't believe the Korals' mix of partial admissions combined with a cock-and-bull story, but neither did it have sufficient evidence to bring a criminal charge. They were never prose-
cuted.33

The KGB had had no contact with the Korals since the end of 1945
and was unaware of their contact with the FBI in 1947, the year it attempted to revive some of its old American networks. Andrey Graur, a
senior KGB officer, wrote a memo in September asking permission to
contact Gregory Silvermaster and proposing that "`Art [Helen Koral], a
former courier between our division and `Robert' [Silvermaster], before
he was deactivated in connection with `Myrna's' [Bentley's] betrayal,"' be
assigned to the task. Graur also set out the recontact protocol that had
been set up in 1945. But in October, before Helen could be contacted,
Moscow Center heard from its American station that Alexander Koral
had been summoned to a "trial," likely a U.S. grand jury or possibly a
congressional committee hearing, and with that it ended attempts to recontact them. The House Committee on Un-American Activities called
Alexander to testify in mid-1948, but he invoked the Fifth Amendment
and also refused to confirm that he had admitted to the FBI that he had
carried out courier missions to those accused of having been Soviet
sources. The KGB concluded that the Korals had cooperated with the
FBI and wrote them down as "traitors."34

Anatoly Gorsky, former Washington KGB station chief, in late 1948
prepared a list of Soviet officers, agents, and sources who might have
been exposed by betrayals by six former agents. For each defector Gorsky
listed those whom he or she might have identified to American authorities, along with their cover names. Four were well known-Chambers,
Bentley, Hede Massing, and Budenz; the fifth and sixth were the Korals:

"Berg" and "Art's" group

1. "Berg"-Alexander Koral, f. [former] engineer of the municipality of NY

z. "Art"-Helen Koral, "Berg's" wife. Housewife.

3. "San"-Richard Koral, son. Student.

4. "Long"-Norman Hait, engineer for the "Sperry Gyroscope Company" in
New Jersey.

"Smart"-Elliot Goldberg, engineer for an oil equipment manufacturing
company in NY.

6. "Huron"-Byron T. Darling, engineer for the "Rubber" Company

~. "Teacher''-Melamed, teacher at a music school in NY

8. "Cora"-Emma Phillips, housewife

9. "Lok"-Sylvia Koral, former employee of the Code Section of the Office
of War Information.

10. "Siskin"-Eduardo Pequeno, businessman in Caracas (Venezuela)

ii. "Express Messenger"-Richard Setaro, journalist/writer, f. employee of
the "Columbia Broadcasting System." Currently in Buenos Aires.

12. "Artem"-A. Slavyagin, our cadre employee. Currently in the USSR.

13. "Twain"-S. M. Semenov, station chief of KI [Committee of Information]
tech. intelligence in Paris. At pres.-on leave in Moscow.

14. "Aleksey"-A. A. Yatskov, our cadre employee, currently in the
USSR.

15. "Julia"-O. V. Shimmel, our cadre employee, currently in the USSR.

i6. "Shah"-K. A. Chugunov, our cadre employee, currently in the USSR.35

Aside from Alexander, Helen, and Richard Koral, four of the other
thirteen listed in "Berg" and "Art's" group were KGB officers who had
served at the KGB New York or Washington stations ("Artem"/Slavya-
gin, "Twain"/Semenov, "Aleksey"/Yatskov, and "Julia"/Shimmel). The
other eight were KGB sources and agents, seven American and one
South American. "Huron"/Darling appeared in the Venona deciyptions,
but the FBI had never been able to identify him (see chapter z). Richard
(Ricardo) Setaro, deputy chief of the Latin American department of
CBS Radio (see chapter 3), had been identified in the decryptions as a
Soviet agent who "was used by us [KGB] earlier for the most part on liaison with Artur [Grigulevich], as a meeting point for couriers," and to
do background checks on Central and South Americans of interest to
the KGB. Eduardo Pequeno's cover name, "Siskin," appeared in the decryptions as a South American KGB contact, but the FBI could not attach a real name to it. Leah Melamed and her father ran a safe house in
New York and did other tasks for the KGB New York station. She was,
for example, a mail drop used by Boris Morros (see chapter 8) for communications with the KGB. The Korals recruited Sylvia Koral (Alexander's cousin) as a Soviet source shortly before she left for London to
work in the code section of the Office of War Information, where the
KGB London station took over her management. Nothing is known of
Norman Hait, and even the English spelling of the name is uncertain.
Nor is anything known of Elliot Goldberg other than what Gorsky wrote
of him. Emma Phillips's cover name, "Cora," appeared in a deciphered
1944 KGB cable as an American Communist recruited by Akhmerov,
but nothing was said of her activities. The FBI attached a real name,
presumably Phillips, to "Cora," but the NSA redacted the name when it opened Venona in the mid-199os, possibly indicating that she had cooperated with the FBI.36

Despite the KGB's conviction that the Korals had betrayed it, their
cooperation with the FBI appears to have been limited to the fantasy
they invented about doing courier work for the unknown "Frank." Neither admitted any knowledge of espionage or awareness of the materials
they were picking up or delivering, and both lied about their Communist
attachments. Apart from Silvermaster, whom the FBI had observed meeting Alexander, and Semen Semenov, who Alexander told the FBI resembled one of the men he had met, they implicated no one else. Certainly Alexander said nothing of Byron Darling, who was the real person
behind the "Huron" in the Venona decryptions whom the FBI was intent on tracking down because of hints in the deciphered messages that
the unknown "Huron" was involved in atomic espionage. In his congressional testimony Alexander took the Fifth Amendment on all substantive
questions. He lost his job with the New York school system and sued to
get it back; a court upheld the dismissal in 1950. He died in July 1968.
Helen Koral died in April 1979.

Richard Koral's future career may not have included working for Soviet intelligence, but it certainly was not commonplace. He finished law
school at Chapel Hill, where he and his wife "were the most radical people in the left in North Carolina," and received his degree but was never
admitted to the bar. After returning to New York, Richard became an organizer for the United Furniture Workers union. Police arrested him in
October 1951 with two other men in a Westchester factory with "acid
and knives, burglars' tools, stench bombs and several vials of chemicals
that could be used in starting fires." Before being caught, they had destroyed furniture worth $1,700 with acid and knives. "The acid was so
strong that it had eaten into the trousers of two defendants, and when
they were arraigned the men wore cell blankets around their legs." Koral,
still dressed, was charged with burglary and malicious mischief and held
on $40,000 bail. Police linked the case to the destruction of $9,000 worth
of furniture in another factory, where two locals of the United Furniture
Workers were engaged in a jurisdictional dispute.37

Richard Koral went to jail for five years. Someone sent him a magazine on cooling large buildings, and he began to correspond with the editor. After his release, he joined the magazine and eventually became
managing editor and an acknowledged expert on air-conditioning machinery for large buildings. He was founder and director of the Apart ment House Institute, which trained building superintendents-like his
father. The author of a book, Foundation for the Solar Future, as late as
2000 he served as director of the Division of Continuing Education at
the New York City College of Technology.

The KGB picked several of its couriers from Communists who had
proven their reliability and acquired experience abroad, often on Comintern assignments. One was Amadeo Sabatini, born in Italy in 1909, who
came to the United States as a child. A Young Communist League member since 1923, Sabatini joined the CPUSA in 1930 in Pennsylvania. He
had dropped out of grade school and gone to work in the mines, where
he was a stalwart in the small Communist-aligned National Miners
Union. He rose swiftly in the party, and in 1933 the CPUSA sent Sabatini to the International Lenin School (the Communist International's
elite training academy), but he attended classes for only a few months
before being recruited to work for the next two years as a Comintern
courier throughout Europe.38

Sabatini fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln
battalion. Records in Moscow show that he served with the Communist
Party's "Control Commission," which exercised political discipline over
Americans serving with the International Brigades. He held the rank of
company political commissar, and one history of the Americans in the
brigades noted his uncompromising speech calling for the execution of
deserters. At some point, possibly in Spain, the KGB recruited him as an
agent. In 1938 it dispatched him to France for a surveillance mission on
KGB defector Walter Krivitsky. Sabatini returned to the United States
in November 1938.39

From 1939 to 1943 Sabatini worked for the KGB on various support
tasks, generally under the direction of Joseph Katz. At first he and another agent, Irving Schuman, continued surveillance of Krivitsky, then
living in New York. Sabatini even rented an apartment across the street
from Krivitsky's residence. Katz gave Sabatini and Schuman $400 to purchase peanut-vending machines, and they operated a business as a cover
for a few months. Sabatini also ran a parking lot that adjoined one run by
Katz. After Krivitsky's suicide in 1940, Sabatini worked regularly as a
courier. One KGB report evaluating operations in the United States between 1939 and 1941 noted: "'There is, in addition, a group of valuable
agents who are used for the station's operational activities (surveillance, background checks, removals, eavesdropping, etc)-`Informer,' `Nick,'
`Veil,' `Adam,' and `Carmen' as a safe-house."' These American agents
were "Informer"/Katz, "Nick"/Sabatini, "Veil" (unidentified but possibly
living Schuman), "Adam"/Eva Getzov, and "Carmen"/Helen Koral.40

Beginning in 1943, Sabatini lived in Los Angeles, employed by the Bohn
Aluminum and Brass Company, which made shaped metal parts for aircraft plants, and worked under Gregory Kheifets, chief of the KGB San
Francisco station. His most important contact was Jones York, a longserving and valued KGB source in the aircraft industry. One year later,
however, Sabatini reported that he was under surveillance and his telephone
was tapped, so he stopped coming to meetings and warned his contacts
that there should be no more communications. Although Sabatini thought
that York might have betrayed him (or that York had come under suspicion
and he had been observed visiting him), the explanation was different. In
August 1943 J. Edgar Hoover received an anonymous letter identifying a
number of Soviet diplomats as KGB officers. One of those named was
Kheifets, officially a Soviet diplomat at the USSR's San Francisco consulate.
The FBI put him under surveillance and in October watched as he "exchanged envelopes and packages on the streets of Los Angeles" with Sabatini. The FBI then installed wiretaps on Sabatini's phone and in January
1944 picked up a telephone call from someone who knew Sabatini and was
trying to arrange a meeting. Sabatini told the caller he didn't know him and
made other statements that indicated an effort to warn off the caller and
break contact, a sign that he suspected his phone was tapped.41