OT: Judith Coplon Socolov Dies

[Stephen Roy]

Off topic: No, not that Judyth...

One of the classic cold war spy cases. In late 1948, the famous Venona break of coded Soviet communications by the precursor of the NSA revealed a spy codenamed SIMA. Trianguation of the involved documents pointed to a political analyst in the Department of Justice named Judith Coplon, and surveillance indicated that she was in contact with Valentin A. Gubichev, an NKVD agent under UN cover. FBI agent Robert Lamphere dangled a fabricated document to Coplon, and she was arrested with the document in her possession while meeting Gubichev. She was convicted in her second trial, but it was reversed on appeal on technicalities, with the notation that she was clearly guilty. Coplon married her attorney and dropped into obscurity in New York, later opening two restaurants. She died last Saturday at 89.

Her daughter, who shared Coplon's left/progressive orientation, told the press that her mother's actions would not be considered treason if they were for a higher good. I'm not so sure it would be a good idea to let people who turn over secret information to foreign powers decide if it is for some higher good.

[Robert Howard]

Off topic: No, not that Judyth...

One of the classic cold war spy cases. In late 1948, the famous Venona break of coded Soviet communications by the precursor of the NSA revealed a spy codenamed SIMA. Trianguation of the involved documents pointed to a political analyst in the Department of Justice named Judith Coplon, and surveillance indicated that she was in contact with Valentin A. Gubichev, an NKVD agent under UN cover. FBI agent Robert Lamphere dangled a fabricated document to Coplon, and she was arrested with the document in her possession while meeting Gubichev. She was convicted in her second trial, but it was reversed on appeal on technicalities, with the notation that she was clearly guilty. Coplon married her attorney and dropped into obscurity in New York, later opening two restaurants. She died last Saturday at 89.

Her daughter, who shared Coplon's left/progressive orientation, told the press that her mother's actions would not be considered treason if they were for a higher good. I'm not so sure it would be a good idea to let people who turn over secret information to foreign powers decide if it is for some higher good.

My interest in this post, involves Robert Lamphere not that Judith Coplon isn't interesting, I kept looking at various Governmental Report's in reference to the period prior to

the Kennedy Assassination, that would reference cryptography, Signal Intelligence Service, various codebreakers which would always reference FBI codebreaking, I finally

got around to realizing that Lamphere was a major part of that area......

Here is what I have on him;

The FBI-KGB War

Excerpt from his book

page 316 Philby was long suspected to have ghostwritten the biography of Gordon Lonsdale,.......even that was a lie his real name was Konon Trefemovich Molody

Robert Lamphere,

A cryptology and counterintelligence expert, Robert Lamphere was instrumental in identifying major Russian espionage agents, including Judith Coplon and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Born in 1918 and raised in Idaho, Lamphere attended the University of Idaho in an accelerated law program, then transferred to the National Law School (George Washington University) while working for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He graduated in 1941, and shortly thereafter joined the FBI.

Lamphere was first assigned to the Birmingham, Alabama, field office; seven months later, he was transferred to New York City, where he served from 1942 to 1947. Most of his cases in his first three years in New York involved Selective Service violations. By 1945, his work focused exclusively, as a member of the Espionage Squad, on counterintelligence. In 1947, Lamphere moved to Washington where he worked in developing evidence to ensure the conviction of alleged communist spy Gerhard Eisler. Returning to New York briefly after the conclusion of the trial, Lamphere was permanently transferred to FBIHQ, where he spent the rest of his Bureau career. The major cases on which he worked included the Judith Coplon and Rosenberg espionage cases. Lamphere played a crucial role in American counterespionage history. In the postwar period, he worked closely with military cryptologists in the National Security Agency (and its predecessor agency, the Army Security Agency) to identify the Soviet intelligence operatives and their American recruits cited in cover names in Soviet consular messages that NSA had intercepted and deciphered. By comparing the deciphered information to FBI intelligence files, Lamphere was able to identify members of the Soviet espionage networks of the World War II and Cold War periods recruited by Soviet intelligence operatives among Americans and their allies. Code-named Venona, this project succeeded in breaking up several Soviet spy rings. The existence and success of the Venona project was publicized in 1995 when the National Security Agency released the decrypted Soviet messages.

Lamphere retired from the FBI in 1955 to accept a position with the Veterans Administration, where he worked on investigations, security, and internal auditing. When he resigned in 1961, he was deputy administrator, the second-highest position in the Veterans Administration. He then worked in the private sector. After retirement, Lamphere wrote The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story, published in 1986 and reissued with three new chapters in 1995. Lamphere has lectured extensively and has served as a discussant in television productions concerning espionage-related issues.

pages 338-339, The FBI : A Comprehensive Guide

- Anton Theoharis

1. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA) - February 17, 2002

Deceased Name: ROBERT J. LAMPHERE FBI AGENT SUPERVISED INFAMOUS COLD WAR SPYING CASES

Robert J. Lamphere, an agent of the FBI who supervised the investigations of some of the biggest espionage cases of the Cold War, including those of the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs and Kim Philby, died Jan. 7 in a hospital in Tucson, Ariz. He was 83.

The cause of death was prostate cancer, but he also had Parkinson's disease, said his wife, Martha, his only survivor. He lived in Green Valley, Ariz., and Hayden, Idaho.

Mr. Lamphere was not as well known as his friend James J. Angleton, who headed counterintelligence operations at the CIA. But he had a hand in every major Soviet spy case from the end of World War II through the mid-1950s.

At one point, he was working 22 hours on some days, conducting what he called "a raging monster" of an investigation of a Soviet spy ring. He was in daily contact with J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director.

Mr. Lamphere was involved in deciphering the code used by the KGB, the Soviet intelligence apparatus, in spy communications until 1945. Using the code, he helped unearth clues pointing to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as spies in 1953.

Messages were not always clear at first. Code names and descriptions of meetings did not necessarily identify an agent immediately, but as more became known and connected with other information, a vast spy network was exposed.

"We had no idea that such a thing as the Rosenberg case would develop when, in the spring of 1948, we began these investigations based on the 1944-45 KGB messages," Mr. Lamphere said in his 1986 memoir, "The FBI-KGB. War: A Special Agent's Story."

But step by step -- and spy by spy -- he followed a trail through the cases of Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold and Ruth Greenglass to the Rosenbergs. Mr. Lamphere said he did not think Mrs. Rosenberg should have been executed because she had acted under her husband's direction and because, as the mother of two boys who would be orphaned, she would draw sympathy.

Robert Joseph Lamphere was born in Wardner, Idaho. He graduated from the University of Idaho and attended its law school before finishing his degree at the National Law School in Washington.

He joined the FBI because he was "attuned to the idea of being among the very best," he said, and worked first in Alabama. He was transferred to New York City, where he made 405 arrests in three years. When he was transferred to the Soviet-espionage squad, he worried that it would not be as satisfying as the criminal cases he had been working on.

It turned out to be anything but monotonous. He was soon told of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, because of evidence that Soviet agents were stealing information.

"The enemy just went on and on," he wrote. "When you get rid of one spy, another would take his place."

His largest contribution was in using deciphered Soviet cables to build espionage cases. After Hoover received an anonymous letter in 1943 reporting espionage by Soviet agents, analysts were assigned to break the Soviet code. In October 1948, Mr. Lamphere joined the project full time. He worked with Meredith Knox Gardner of the Army Security Agency, a brilliant linguist who spoke six or seven languages, including Sanskrit.

"I would bring Meredith some material and he would print in a new word over a group of numbers," Lamphere said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1996. "Then he would give a little smile of satisfaction. He was a brilliant cryptanalyst."

The messages were sent from 1943 to 1945. The Soviets changed the code well before Philby, head of British intelligence in Washington, was briefed in 1949 by Mr. Lamphere on Venona, as the project was code-named. The Soviets already had an undercover agent on the project.

But even if Venona did not yield up-to-date information, it spoke volumes about the maze of Soviet espionage networks, who the agents were, what had been sought and what was obtained.

One document that was decoded over several years was a report on the progress of the Manhattan Project. It was written by Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist who had been attached to the research group at Los Alamos, N.M., and had gone on to work at the British atomic energy research center. Information gathered by Mr. Lamphere led Fuchs to confess that he had been passing information to the Soviets.

Mr. Lamphere was sent to London to get Fuchs' full story. He found that the spy's American contact, known as Raymond, was Harry Gold. Then, like links in a chain, more spies were found, including the Rosenbergs.

An even higher priority than catching the spies, however, was safeguarding the secrecy of Venona. President Harry S. Truman was not even told about it, and it was publicly revealed only in 1995.

Mr. Lamphere left the FBI in 1955. For the next six years, he held high positions in the Veterans Administration.

Afterward he was an executive of the John Hancock Mutual Insurance Co.

Mr. Lamphere, who spent years deciphering the dark secrets of Soviet espionage, was strongly critical of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's crusade against Communists.

"McCarthy's star chamber proceedings," Mr. Lamphere wrote, "his lies and overstatements hurt our counterintelligence efforts."

END

2. Record, The (Hackensack, NJ) - February 27, 2002

Deceased Name: ROBERT J. LAMPHERE , 83; LED FIGHT AGAINST SOVIET SPIES

Robert J. Lamphere, an FBI counterintelligence specialist who supervised many of the most notorious postwar Soviet espionage cases, including the atomic spy case that led to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, has died. He was 83.

Mr. Lamphere, a resident of Green Valley, Ariz., and Hayden, Idaho, died of prostate cancer Jan. 7 in a hospital in Tucson, Ariz.

The key to one of the United States' greatest Cold War counterintelligence coups was the top-secret breaking of the Soviet wartime code, which led to deciphering intercepted messages that had been sent by the Soviet consulate in New York and its embassy in Washington to Moscow between 1944 and 1945.

Information gleaned from those deciphered messages and the FBI investigations presided over by Mr. Lamphere led to unmasking not only the Rosenberg spy ring but many other Soviet spies.

Cracking the Soviet wartime code was a long, tedious process, and little progress had been made when Mr. Lamphere was transferred from the New York field office to the Soviet espionage section at FBI headquarters in Washington in 1947.

The several pages of partly decoded Soviet messages that he found in the section's safe were mostly blank, containing deciphered words and code names that were virtually meaningless.

But Mr. Lamphere was impressed that cryptanalysts in the Army Security Agency had managed to make even a few partial breaks in the supposedly impregnable Soviet code, and he proposed offering the FBI's assistance in providing information that might help them further crack the complicated numerical code system.

"The KGB messages were to change my life," Mr. Lamphere wrote in his 1986 book, "The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story." "More important, they were to affect the course of history: In the coming years, their revelations would lead directly to decisive actions that the FBI took against KGB operations in the United States."

Born Feb. 14, 1918, in the Coeur d'Alene mining district of Idaho, Mr. Lamphere grew up in Mullan, Idaho, where his father leased the rights to mine underground ore deposits. After attending the University of Idaho and its law school, Mr. Lamphere completed his degree at the National Law School in Washington, D.C.

Attracted both by the FBI's elite "crime-busting" image and "the idea of being among the very best," Mr. Lamphere joined the FBI after law school in 1941.

After leaving the FBI in 1955, Mr. Lamphere worked at the Veterans Administration, where he rose to the rank of deputy administrator within five years. From 1961 to 1981, he was an executive with John Hancock Mutual Insurance Co.

He is survived by his wife, Martha.

3. State, The (Columbia, SC) - February 27, 2002

Deceased Name: ROBERT LAMPHERE -- Worked on Soviet spy cases

TUCSON, Ariz. -Former FBI counterintelligence specialist Robert Lamphere, who supervised many of the most notorious postwar Soviet espionage cases, died Jan. 7 of prostate cancer. He was 83.

Lamphere was instrumental in providing FBI assistance to experts in the Army Security Agency who would eventually break the Soviet's top-secret code, one of the United State's greatest Cold War achievements.

Officials deciphered intercepted messages that had been sent by the Soviet consulate in New York and embassy in Washington to Moscow in 1944 and 1945.

Information gleaned from those deciphered messages and the FBI investigations presided over by Lamphere led to the unmasking of spies, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of passing secret atomic-bomb information to the Soviet Union. They were executed in 1953.

Lamphere was born Feb. 14, 1918 and joined the FBI in 1941. After leaving the FBI in 1955, Lamphere worked at the Veterans Administration. From 1961 to 1981, he was an executive with John Hancock Mutual Insurance Co.

4 New York Times, The (NY) - February 11, 2002

Deceased Name: Robert J. Lamphere , 83, Spy Chaser for the F.B.I., Dies

Robert J. Lamphere, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who supervised the investigations of some of the biggest espionage cases of the cold war, including those of the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs and Kim Philby, died on Jan. 7 in a Tucson hospital. He was 83.

The cause of death was prostate cancer, but he also had Parkinson's disease, his wife, Martha, his only survivor, said. He lived in Green Valley, Ariz., and Hayden, Idaho.

Mr. Lamphere was not as well known as his friend James J. Angleton, who headed counterintelligence operations at the Central Intelligence Agency. But he had a hand in every major Soviet spy case from the end of World War II through the mid-1950's.

At one point, he was working 22 hours on some days, conducting what he called "a raging monster" of an investigation of a Soviet spy ring. He was in daily contact with J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director.

Mr. Lamphere was involved in deciphering the code used by the K.G.B., the Soviet intelligence apparatus, in spy communications until 1945. Using the code, he helped unearth clues pointing to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as spies in 1953.

Messages were not always clear at first. Code names and descriptions of meetings did not necessarily identify an agent immediately, but as more became known and connected with other information, a vast spy network was exposed.

"We had no idea that such a thing as the Rosenberg case would develop when, in the spring of 1948, we began these investigations based on the 1944-45 K.G.B. messages," Mr. Lamphere said in his memoir, "The F.B.I.-K.G.B. War: A Special Agent's Story" (Random House, 1986), written with Tom Shachtman.

But step by step -- and spy by spy -- he followed a trail through the cases of Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold and Ruth Greenglass to the Rosenbergs. He said that a frame-up of the Rosenbergs, long suggested by their supporters, would have required that the F.B.I. set out to get the couple years before the agency even knew who the Rosenbergs were.

Mr. Lamphere said he did not think Mrs. Rosenberg should have been executed because she had acted under her husband's direction and because, as the mother of two boys who would be orphaned, she would draw sympathy.

He thought Mr. Rosenberg deserved the death penalty but only if in announcing it the judge made it clear that the sentence would be reduced if he cooperated with the F.B.I. Mr. Lamphere recommended the sentences to Mr. Hoover, who sent them to the court in his own name.

Robert Joseph Lamphere was born on Feb. 14, 1918, in Wardner, Idaho. He graduated from the University of Idaho and attended its law school before finishing his degree at the National Law School in Washington.

He joined the F.B.I. because he was "attuned to the idea of being among the very best," he said, and worked first in Alabama. He was transferred to New York City, where he made 405 arrests in three and a half years. When he was transferred to the Soviet espionage squad, he worried that it would not be as satisfying as the criminal cases he had been working on.

It turned out to be anything but monotonous. He was soon told of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, because of evidence that Soviet agents were stealing information.

"The enemy just went on and on," he wrote. "When you get rid of one spy, another would take his place."

His largest contribution was in using deciphered Soviet cables to build espionage cases. After Mr. Hoover received an anonymous letter in 1943 reporting espionage by Soviet agents, analysts were assigned to break the Soviet code. In October 1948, Mr. Lamphere joined the project full time. He worked with Meredith Knox Gardner of the Army Security Agency, a brilliant linguist who spoke six or seven languages, including Sanskrit.

"I would bring Meredith some material and he would print in a new word over a group of numbers," Mr. Lamphere said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1996. "Then he would give a little smile of satisfaction. He was a brilliant cryptanalyst."

Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a speech in 1997 called the men's collaboration "intellectual dedication that Americans have a right to know about and to celebrate."

The messages were sent from 1943 to 1945. The Soviets changed the code well before Mr. Philby, head of British intelligence in Washington, was briefed in 1949 by Mr. Lamphere on Venona, as the project was code-named. The Soviets already had an undercover agent on the project.

But even if Venona did not yield up-to-date information, it spoke volumes about the maze of Soviet espionage networks, who the agents were, what had been sought and what was obtained.

One document that was decoded over several years was a report on the progress of the Manhattan Project. It was written by Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist who had been attached to the research group at Los Alamos, N.M., and had gone on to work at the British atomic energy research center. Information gathered by Mr. Lamphere led Mr. Fuchs to confess that he had been passing information to the Soviets.

Mr. Lamphere was sent to London to get Mr. Fuchs's full story. He found that the spy's American contact, known as Raymond, was Harry Gold. Then, like links in a chain, more spies were found, including the Rosenbergs.

Mr. Lamphere said Mr. Fuchs told him that information he provided probably hastened Moscow's development of an atomic bomb by several years.

An even higher priority than catching the spies, however, was safeguarding the secrecy of Venona. President Harry S. Truman was not even told about it, and it was publicly revealed only in 1995.

Mr. Moynihan has suggested that revealing Venona's existence much earlier might have been better, to dramatize for doubters that Soviet espionage was, indeed, widespread. Disclosure might have prevented persecution in cases where evidence was scant, he said.

Mr. Lamphere left the F.B.I. in 1955. For the next six years, he held high positions in the Veterans Administration. Afterward he was an executive of the John Hancock Mutual Insurance Company.

Mr. Lamphere, who spent years deciphering the dark secrets of Soviet espionage, was strongly critical of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's crusade against Communists.

"McCarthy's star chamber proceedings," Mr. Lamphere wrote, "his lies and overstatements hurt our counterintelligence efforts."

Robert

[Stephen Roy]

I once viewed Lamphere with some suspicion after reading of his role in the cold war spy cases, Rosenberg and Coplon cases, but I found myself a lot more understanding of him after reading his book.

[Robert Howard]

I once viewed Lamphere with some suspicion after reading of his role in the cold war spy cases, Rosenberg and Coplon cases, but I found myself a lot more understanding of him after reading his book.

I kept trying yesterday to remember who Judith Coplon reminded me of, and I remembered it was Elizabeth Bentley, who died less than two months after

JFK did.......There are some other thought provoking details in this post as well......

September 6, 1933

Sorge arrives in Japan, via Paris, USA

Vancouver. He resides at Number 30 Nakasaka, Cho Azabu, Tokyo

or

Number 30 Nagasaka Machi, Azabu ku

Similarities between Richard Sorge and George DeMohrenschildt

1. Sorge’s great uncle, whom Sorge alleged was his grandfather

and DeMohersenschildt lived in the USA.

2. Sorge’s father, and DeMohrenschildt’s grandfather

both working for the Nobel oil interests in Baku.

3. Sorge’s first wife was named Christiane; Jeanne DeMohrenschildt

George’s daughter (1940) is named after her mother but adopts the name Christiane.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=40389&relPageId=32

Fall? 1940

Guillame “Bill” Hoorickx, Belgian artist living in Paris in 1965, 66 years old

tells of first wife living with Mikhail Makarov aka Carlos Alamo, Molotov’s nephew?

in Brussels. Hoorickx, Makarov and Czech agent for British munitions firm Rauch

go around together

Hoorickx gets date with Princess Sherbatov for Makarov as Alamo, a Uruguyan

just before learning Makarov’s true identity. George DeMohrenschildt says

Mrs. Max Gali Clark is Princess Sherbatov,

Hoorickx’s second wife is Anna, a Russian

Red Orchestra:35

page 129

Warren Commission

CD 294

Maurice Hyman Halperin

Traveled to the USSR in October 1958

On 15 July 1960 Maurice Hyman Halperin and his wife Edith Frisch Halperin applied at the US Embassy in Moscow, USSR for a renewal of their passports. Halperin is reported

to have stated that he had been in the USSR since December 1958 as a visiting professor of the Social Sciences Division of the USSR Academy of Sciences on a contract which

expires in 1961. In 1948 Elizabeth BENTLEY an admitted former Soviet agent admitted that she had become acquainted with Halperin in the latter part of 1952 through

arrangements made by Jacob Golos a known Soviet espionage agent. She further stated that during the time Halperin was employed by the Office of Strategic Services

in Washington D.C., he supplied Golos with information to which he had access in his office. In late 1953 Halperin left the United States for Mexico after refusing on

constitutional grounds to tell the United States Senate Internal Sub-Committee whether he was ever a member of the Communist Party.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=10695&relPageId=130

Elizabeth Bentley Is Dead at 55; Soviet Spy Later Aided U.S.; Wartime Agent Went to F.B.I. in 1945--Testified at Trial of Rosenbergs Figure in a

Political Era 'On Borrowed Time' White Resigned in 1947 Remington Convicted

Special to The New York TimesThe New York Times

December 4, 1963, Wednesday

NEW HAVEN, Dec. 3--Elizabeth Bentley, a Soviet spy in the United States during World War II who later aided the United States, died today in Grace-New Haven Hospital. She underwent surgery for an abdominal tumor yesterday.

Chicago Tribune (IL) - December 04, 1963

MISS BENTLEY, SPY WHO QUIT RED ROLE, DIES

Testimony Helped Put Rosenbergs in Chair

Deceased Name: Elizabeth Bentley

New Haven, Conn., Dec. 3 (AP) -- Elizabeth Bentley, 55, the communist spy who renounced her Moscow ties and helped to unmask a web of war time Red treachery in this country, died today.

After renouncing communism, Miss Bentley served as government witness at two of the anti-communist trials of the 1950s -- the atom spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed, and the perjury trial of William Remington.

Miss Bentley had been in Grace-New Haven hospital since Nov. 18 and underwent abdominal surgery on Monday. Before she became ill, she had been teaching English in a Middletown, Conn., school for girls.

Cloak and Dagger Life

Her life was one of turbulent cloak-and-dagger contrasts.

Miss Bentley had neither the looks nor the inclination for the traditional role of Mata Hari, the World War I German spy who employed sex for purposes of espionage.

She pictured her role during World War II as that of stealthy courier for the Russian underground in this country, spurred on in her espionage duties by her ardor for Jacob Golos, then chief of Red secret police in the United States.

Golos died in 1943 and two years later Miss Bentley walked into the FBI office in New Haven to renounce communism and begin a new career as government informer and witness against American communist conspirators.

Boasted of Her Contacts

Born in New Milford, Conn., Miss Bentley was graduated from Vassar college and studied also at the University of Florence in Italy.

She joined the communist apparatus in Washington in the 1930s and Golos became her first Russian contact.

In war time Washington, Miss Bentley boasted of more than 40 contacts with American Communists holding key positions in such super-sensitive agencies as the Pentagon and the office of strategic services.

Bared Browder Link

At the trial of the Rosenbergs, Miss Bentley testified she relayed orders from Moscow to Earl Browder, war time head of the American Communist party, and collected information in this country for transmission to Russia. She linked one of her contacts to the Rosenbergs.

Miss Bentley's accusation that one of her government contacts was William Remington led to a loyalty investigation against the young commerce department economist, formerly with the war production board.

Remington twice was convicted of lying to a federal grand jury in his denial that he was a Communist and sentenced to 3 years in prison.

END

The really strange part is that Bentley, IMO was being used by the FBI in Philadelphia.

also see

google books

Clever girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the spy who ushered in the McCarthy era By Lauren Kessler

The Meredith Gardner thread, here on the Forum, also delves somewhat into this area.

See

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6182&st=0