Elizabeth Zubilin
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Elizaveta Yulyevna Zarubina (Russian: Елизавета Юлиевна Зарубина; January 1, 1900 – 14 May 1987). She was known as Elizabeth Zubilin while serving in the United States, and also known as Lisa Gorskaya. Born Lisa Rozensweig in Bukovina,[1] of Romanian background, she studied history and philology at universities in Russia, France, and Austria, and was freely conversant in Romanian, Russian, German, French, English, and Hebrew. She came from a family of revolutionaries related to Ana Pauker, a 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 1924. 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 Vladimir Ilich Lenin in July 1918. When the plot failed, Blumkin was pardoned and continued to work for Dzerzhinsky and Leon Trotsky.
In 1923, she joined the ranks of the 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 1929 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 (1929), 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.
According to Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona Schecter, Zarubina was "one of the most successful operators in stealing atomic bomb secrets from the United States". Together with Gregory Kheifetz (the Soviet vice-consul in San Francisco from 1941 to 1944), she set up a ring of young communist physicists around Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos to transmit nuclear weapon plans to Moscow.[2]
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-300-08462-5.
- Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona Schecter, "Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History", Potomac Books, 2002. ISBN 1574883275
- Pavel Sudoplatov, Anatoli Sudoplatov, Jerrold L. Schecter, Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994. ISBN 0316773522
- 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. ISBN 0679457240
- Edvin Stavinsky "Zarubins-the family "rezidentura"" "Olma-press" 2002 Moscow (in Russian).
[edit] External links
- Irina Titova, "Soviet Spy Who Outwitted Einstein", The Moscow Times, July 28, 2004
- (Russian) Vasily Zarubin, at the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service
- (Russian) Zoya Zarubina
- (Russian) Mysterious Erna
