Elizabeth Zubilin
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Elizaveta Yulyevna Zarubina (Russian: Елизавета Юлиевна Зарубина; 1900 – 14 May 1987). She was known as Elizabeth Zubilin while serving in the United States, and also known as Lisa Gorskaya. Born in Russia of Romanian background, she studied history and philology at universities in Russia, France, and Austria, and was freely conversant in Romanian, Russian, German, French and English and Hebrew. She came from a family of revolutionaries related to Ana Pauker, the founder of the Communist Party of Romania. She was one of the most successful agent recruiters, establishing her own illegal network of Jewish refugees from Poland, and recruiting one of Leó Szilárd's secretaries, who provided technical data. She was the wife of Soviet Intelligence Rezident Vasily Zarubin.
Zarubina was an active participant in the revolutionary movement in Bessarabia after World War I. In 1919 she became a member of the Komsomol of Bessarabia. Elizabeth became part of the intelligence system in 1919 as a junior case officer in Felix Dzerzhinsky's secretariat. She met and fell in love with Yakov Grigorevich Blumkin, the assassin of Count Wilhelm Mirbach, the German ambassador in Moscow in 1918. Blumkin was a key figure in the plot of the Socialist Revolutionaries against Lenin in July 1918. When the plot failed, Blumkin was pardoned and continued to work for Dzerzhinsky and Leon Trotsky.
In 1923 joined the ranks of Austrian Communist Party. From 1924 through 1925 she worked in the embassy and trade delegation of the USSR. Form 1925 to 1928 she worked in the Vienna Rezidentura.
In 1930 Elizabeth and Blumkin were posted as illegals in Turkey, where he sold Hasidic manuscripts from the Central Library in Moscow to support illegal operations in Turkey and the Middle East. Blumkin gave part of the sale proceeds to Trotsky, who was then in exile in Turkey. Elizabeth denounced her husband and Blumkin was immediately recalled to Moscow and executed by a firing squad. Shortly thereafter Eizabeth married Vasily Zarubin, and they traveled and spied together for many years, using the cover of a Czechoslovakian business couple for work in Denmark, Germany, France and the United States.
In Germany during April of 1941, Elizabeth Zarubina is credited with obtaining important information on Germany.
[edit] References
- Russian Foreign Intelligence Service
- Pavel Sudoplatov, Anatoli Sudoplatov, Jerrold L. Schecter, Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster, Little Brown, Boston(1994).
- John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999).
- Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999), pgs. 162, 249-50, 251, 274, 276, 303, 341.
- Zoya Zarubina (in Russian)
- Mysterious Erna (in Russian)
