Irving Lerner

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Irving Lerner (7 March 1909, New York City - 25 December 1976, Los Angeles) was an American citizen and an employee of the United States Office of War Information during World War II who worked in the Motion Picture Division. Lerner was allegedly involved in espionage on behalf of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU). Arthur Adams was Lerner's key contact.

In the winter of 1944, a counterintelligence officer caught Lerner attempting to photograph the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, which was part of the Manhattan Project. The cyclotron had been used in the creation of plutonium and Lerner was acting without authorization. Lerner resigned and went to work for Keynote Recordings, owned by Eric Bernay, another Soviet intelligence contact. Arthur Adams also worked at Keynote.

Lerner was cinematographer, director, or assistant director on documentary films such as One Third of a Nation (1939), Valley Town (1940), The Land (1942) directed by Robert Flaherty, and Suicide Attack (1950). Lerner was also producer of the OWI documentary Hymn of the Nations (1944).

[edit] References

FBI memo, “Soviet Activities in the United States,” 25 July 1946, Papers of Clark Clifford, Harry S. Truman Library.
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999), pg. 325.