enigma books
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A DEATH IN WASHINGTON ISBN#978-1-929631-14-8 • hardcover 2003 $ 29.00 “Walter Krivitsky was arguably the first, and one of the most significant examples, of that most remarkable of phenomena, the Soviet intelligence defector. Such individuals have proved exceptionally useful in allowing Western intelligence agencies gain an insight into the Kremlin’s most secret activities, and they have been responsible for the identification of the overwhelming majority of spies and traitors arrested before and during the Cold War.
“Another name that is to be found in one of MI5’s three Krivitsky personal files is that of Kim Philby, who evidently was still sniffing the wind in November 1946 and asking MI5’s John Marriott for certain leads in the case. Was he anxious about his own position? We know from his autobiography, My Silent War, that he was always acutely aware of the Damocles sword hanging over him, in the form of Krivitsky’s reference to the spy sent to Spain during the civil war….” When Krivitsky came to America he thought he’d put Stalin’s goons behind him, an ocean away. But that was not the case and soon after his arrival he was followed and hounded by the Communist and fellow-traveling press that denounced him in every possible way. Yet Krivitsky persisted and testified in London with MI5 and MI6. We now know that his testimony was relayed back to Moscow and from then on he was on Stalin’s and Beria’s death list. “A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror therefore combines both history and intrigue, but it does one thing more: it unfolds a dreadful and intense human drama. The man who died in the shadow of the Capitol, whom the District police failed to identify and sent to the morgue, allowing the room to be cleaned, turns out to be a man at the end of an age, one of the so-called Great Illegals, a determined true believer in the Marxist-Leninist dream. He was the spy who always thought ahead and, as such, one of the most restless spirits within that restless tribe known as the Soviet defectors.” Soviet master spy Walter G. Krivitsky was a small, dapper and very nervous man who happened to be the first and one of the key defectors to warn the West early on about the Stalin regime. He became friends with Whittaker Chambers, encouraging him to come forward and thus precipitating the Alger Hiss case. Krivitsky provided the British with clues that would certainly have unmasked the Philby spy group, but following his debriefing in London he was found out by Anthony Blunt, who warned Moscow. And Krivitsky was found dead in the Bellevue Hotel in front of Union Station in Washington, D.C. This is the first book to recover all original documents released by the British archives and the FBI in 2002-2003. This book is not simply the final word on the Krivitsky mystery it is also a model of how exciting and thrilling true espionage history can be when events themselves are allowed to take over and be recounted by a master of the subject. Gary Kern earned his doctorate in Russian literature at Princeton University. He has published numerous articles and books on Russian literature and history, including studies of Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Leon Trotsky. His eight books of translation from Russian include Lev Kopelev's The Education of a True Believer and Anna Larina-Bukharina's This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. In 1996, his behind-the-scenes consultation with The Washington Post led to the public exposure of a major atomic spy, Theodore Hall. A Death in Washington, begun in 1985, is the first book on Krivitsky and the first to incorporate his British intelligence files and his suicide notes in the research. Nigel West is a former MI6 officer and the well-known author of many books on espionage, specializing in the Venona decrypts and KGB operations in Great Britain. From the Times Literary Supplement “Kern deserves the gratitude of the many who have been intrigued by this case but despaired ever finding an account to make satisfactory sense of it. By research which is both meticulous in detail and comprehensive in range (including Russian-language sources) he has provided a compelling account of Stalin’s creeping coup d’état and the mortal firestorm through which he purged the Soviet bureaucracy of any capacity for resistance. That Krivitsky and those like him were people who lived under pseudonyms and worked in the shadows makes Gary Kern’s achievement all the more impressive.” Gary Kern’s volume is the biography of the most important “Old Bolshevik” defector, whose knowledge of Soviet intelligence was encyclopedic. A Death in Washington is both a document of Stalin’s crimes and a high stakes drama of a defector’s attempt at survival. Kern dug deep and discovered much that was unknown about Krivitsky’s eighteen years of spying, sabotage, and subversion.
[This book] overcomes official Washington’s institutional reluctance to release information, as well as the barriers imposed by the esoteric nature of intelligence. It emphasizes the menace of a totalitarian regime, always a lurking threat. This book is great! |