Donald Niven Wheeler
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| Donald Niven Wheeler | |
| Born | October 23, 1913 White Bluffs, Washington |
|---|---|
| Died | November 8, 2002 (aged 89) Seattle, Washington |
| Education | Reed College |
| Employers | Yale University Department of Agriculture Department of Treasury Office of Strategic Services |
| Spouse | Mary Lukes Vause (m. 1938) |
Donald Niven Wheeler (October 23, 1913 - November 8, 2002) was an accused Soviet spy.
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[edit] Education
He was a graduate of Reed College and also attended college in England. He received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and there he joined the university branch of the Communist Party. He did post-graduate work at the University of Paris but dropped out to join the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. There he met Mary Lukes Vause, a fellow graduate of Reed College, a new mother and the widow of his best friend, Clare Vause. They were married in 1938. [1]
Duncan Lee, a college classmate described him as a really "progressive person".
[edit] Government
Wheeler was associated with various Comintern organizations before being employed by the government, first in the United States Department of Agriculture, later the Department of Treasury. From 1941 to 1946, Wheeler was employed by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, D.C. Wheeler was a member of the white collar unit of the Communist Party of the District of Columbia. Franz Neuman, who worked with him in the OSS gave a good report to Moscow, describing him as "a calm and progressive man".
[edit] Perlo group
In November 1943, Earl Browder, Chairman of the CPUSA, turned control of the Perlo group of Soviet spies over to Jacob Golos two months before his death and the group was subsequently taken over by his girl friend, Elizabeth Bentley.
As a member of the OSS Research and Analysis Division, Wheeler received secret and confidential 'ditto' copies of monthly and semi-monthly reports of political developments throughout the world. Wheeler passed these reports as well as handwritten and typewritten material of cable reports from State Department and the OSS to Soviet intelligence. Wheeler provided information on the organization and policies of British intelligence services and furnished memoranda prepared by the Foreign Nationalities Branch of OSS on material relating to the particular racial groups and activities within the United States.
Beginning in 1944, the entire range of OSS planning documents on the postwar occupation of Germany were supplied to KGB head Pavel Fitin through Wheeler. Wheeler was considered the most active operative within the Perlo group and his complicity was corroborated by information exhumed from the NKVD archives in the 1990s. Wheeler appears in Venona as a Soviet source under the cover name "Izra".
[edit] Death
He died on November 8, 2002 in Seattle, Washington.[1]
[edit] References
- ^ a b "Donald N. Wheeler, Communist, dies at 89", People's Weekly World. Retrieved on 2008-05-31. "Donald Niven Wheeler, a scholar, dairy farmer and longtime member of the Communist Party USA, died in Seattle, Nov. 8. He was 89."
[edit] Further reading
- Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
- Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999), pgs. 106, 225, 251-56, 257, 259, 261, 264, 286.
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