Hede Massing
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Hede Massing or Hedda Massing, née Hedwiga Gompertz or Hede Gompertz, was an Austrian-born Soviet intelligence operative who served in the United States in the 1930s and wrote for the German magazine Der Spiegel. Massing knew Richard Sorge as a young man in Germany and met him again in New York City in 1935 after his recruitment and wrote about him in 1951 for Der Spiegel.
Massing had been at one time married to Gerhart Eisler, the Comintern representative in the United States. Massing and later her husband, Paul Massing were members of an OGPU apparatus and functioned under the direction of a Soviet illegal officer based in New York. Massing was assigned several duties, including that of a courier between the United States and Europe. However, her most important assignment was that of an agent recruiter, a task she apparently carried out with great skill. Massing was assigned targets for recruitment by her Soviet supervisor. She used appeals to ideology, especially to the strong anti-Nazi sentiments of New Deal liberals who dominated the Washington scene of the Roosevelt administration in the early 1930s. Laurence Duggan was among her recruits. In 1935 Massing, at a Communist Party cell meeting in a private home, argued with Alger Hiss over whether Noel Field, a State Department spy, should work with her group or with the GRU. Massing testified to that episode at Alger Hiss' 2nd trial.
Massing left the Soviet intelligence apparatus in 1938 after a period of disillusionment with her Russian handlers. She did not admit to her work in Soviet espionage until 1947 and testified at the second trial of Alger Hiss. The cover name "Redhead" appears in Venona as an unidentified person in a context that suggests that it was Hede Massing, and she was identified as Massing in Robert L. Benson's The Venona Story, page 36.
[edit] Redhead group
The following members are listed as members of the Redhead group handled by Hede Massing in the Gorsky Memo.
- Laurence Duggan, head of United States Department of State Division of American Republics
- Hede Massing, journalist
- Paul Massing, Institute of Social Research Columbia University
- Franz Leopold Neumann, consultant at Board of Economic Warfare; Deputy Chief of the Central European Section of Office of Strategic Services; First Chief of research of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal
[edit] External links
- Massing, Hede, Chapter 4:.The Routine of an Underground Agent, from This Deception. New York, NY: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, (1951), pp. 335.
- Woman With a Past, Time Magazine, Monday, Dec. 19, 1949
[edit] Source
- Office of National Counter Intelligence Executive, Cold War Counterintelligence
- Office of National Counter Intelligence Executive, Copyright Notice
- Robert L. Benson, The Venona Story (Ft. Meade, MD: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2001).
- Alexander Vassiliev’s Notes on Anatoly Gorsky’s December 1948 Memo on Compromised American Sources and Networks
