Mark Zborowski

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Mark Zborowski (January 27, 1908 – April 30, 1990) was an NKVD agent (Venona codenames TULIP and KANT) and an anthropologist. He was the NKVD's most valuable mole inside the Trotskyist organization in Paris during the 1930s and in New York during the 1940s.

Zborowski was one of four children born into a Jewish family in Kuman, Kiev Gubernia, in 1908. According to the story Zborowski told friends, his conservative parents moved to Poland in 1921 to escape the October Revolution in Russia. While he was a student, Zborowski disobeyed his parents and joined the Polish Communist Party. His political activity led to imprisonment and he fled to Berlin where he was unsuccessful in finding employment. He moved to France and attended the University of Grenoble, studying anthropology and working as a waiter.

In 1933 the penniless Zborowski turned up in Paris with his wife and was recruited as an NKVD agent by the Leningrad emigré Alexander Adler. He provided the NKVD with a written background and revealed that his sister and two brothers lived in the Soviet Union. The NKVD took steps to infiltrate him into the Paris organization run by Leon Trotsky's son Lev Sedov. Known as Etienne, Zborowski befriended Sedov's wife, Jeanne Martin, and she recommended him for the position of Sedov's secretary. Because of his obsequious nature and untiring work, and because he was also a Russian speaker in what was essentially a French group, Etienne soon became indispensable to Sedov. He served as a member of the group's Central Committee, read and answered Sedov's mail, edited the Russian language version of the Bulletin of the Opposition, stored part of the Trotsky archive at his home, and served as Sedov's deputy in his absence. All the while Etienne reported on the activity of Trotsky (codename OLD MAN), Sedov (codename SONNY), and the Trotskyists (codename POLECATS) to his NKVD handlers.

Etienne's NKVD file contains several reports which must have strengthened Joseph Stalin's resolve to physically destroy the Trotsky family. In a report to the Center on January 1937 Etienne wrote, "SONNY, during our conversation in his apartment on the subject of the second Moscow trial and the role of the different defendants declared, 'Now we shouldn't hesitate. Stalin must be murdered.'" In a report dispatched in February 1937 he wrote that Sedov advocated terrorism: "The next time SONNY began talking about terrorism was when I came to his apartment to work. While we were reading newspapers, SONNY said that the whole regime in the USSR was propped up by Stalin; it was enough to kill Stalin for everything to fall to pieces."

On February 8, 1938 the overworked Sedov suffered a severe attack of appendicitis. Etienne convinced him to have the operation secretly at a small private clinic run by Russian emigres in Paris, the location of which Etienne immdiately revealed to the NKVD. Sedov was operated on the same evening and appeared, over the next few days, to have a normal recovery. Suddenly he became violently ill and despite repeated blood transfusions he died in great pain on February 16 at the age of thirty-two. Historians differ as to whether or not Sedov was murdered by the NKVD and there is considerable evidence to support either scenario.

After Sedov's death, Trotsky initiated an investigation of Etienne and entrusted the matter to Rudolf Klement, his one-time aide and organizer of Trotsky's Fourth International. Before Klement could complete the investigation an NKVD agent named Ale Taubman lured him to an apartment on the Left Bank and murdered him with the help of two other agents, the "Turk" and Alexander Korotkov. They cut off Klement's head and legs and stuffed the body parts in a trunk and threw it into the Seine. Several days later the Trotskyists received a typewritten letter from Klement accusing Trotsky of collaboration with Adolf Hitler. The letter, clearly an NKVD fabrication, was no doubt meant to explain Klement's disappearance and to denounce Trotsky at the same time. However, Klement's headless corpse washed ashore in August 1938 and was identified, from a scar on one hand, by two Trotskyists.

Etienne now became the leader of the beheaded Trotskyist organization in Paris and continued to edit the Bulletin of the Opposition, along with Lilia Estrin Dallin (codename NEIGHBOR). In 1939 the defector Alexander Orlov sent Trotsky an unsigned letter warning him that an NKVD agent named "Mark," fitting the description of Zborowski, had infiltrated the Paris organization. Much to her later regret, Dallin convinced Trotsky that the letter was NKVD disinformation meant to create fear within the Trotskyist faction. Meanwhile, Etienne played a small but significant role in the plot to assassinate Trotsky. At the founding conference of the Fourth International in Paris in September 1938, Etienne introduced his friend Sylvia Ageloff, an American Trotskyist and interpreter, to Ramón Mercader, the future assassin of Trotsky. The passionate Mercader seduced the unattractive twenty-eight year old woman. She blindly followed him to Mexico and infiltrated him into Trotsky's household. Mercader murdered Trotsky by striking him in the skull with an ice-axe on August 20, 1940.

Zborowksi fled to the United States following the Nazi invasion of France. The American Trotskyists David and Lilia Dallin assisted in his emigration and helped him obtain employment at a screw factory in Brooklyn. With money from an unknown source, he rented a fashionable Manhattan apartment in the Dallin's building and once again resumed his former occupation, spying on Trotskyists. His codenames TULIP and KANT appear in nearly two dozen Venona decrypts. He reported to the Soviet controller Jack Soble. Zborowski spied on the Dallins and helped the NKVD search for Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet engineer and mid-level bureaucrat who defected from a trade mission in 1944. Kravchenko published a book, I Chose Freedom (1946), which described the repressions in the Soviet Union, the purges, the collectivizations, and the slave labor camps.

By 1945 Zborowski's usefulness as an agent had come to an end. He turned his attention to his academic career and found employment, with the aid of Margaret Mead, as a research assistant at Harvard University. In 1952 he published Life is with the People (coauthored with Elizabeth Herzog), a groundbreaking study of Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe before the Second World War. The book received critical acclaim and has been reprinted numerous times. From 1951-1954 he conducted research at Cornell University. He became an American citizen in 1947.

The defector Alexander Orlov unmasked Zborowski before a hearing of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in September 1955. The FBI already knew that Zborowski was an NKVD agent from information they had obtained from their double-agent Boris Morros. Zborowski appeared before the Senate Subcommittee in February 1956. Since he was free from prosecution for his activities in France, Zborowski admitted to being an NKVD agent in Paris but he denied working as an agent in America. In his testimony he claimed that the NKVD had tried to enlist him as an agent in New York but he had refused: "At that time, I became almost--I became hysterical and I remember well, I hit my fist on the table and said, 'I will not do anything with you anymore.' And I walked out. Since then, I have not seen anyone." As the Venona decrypts clearly prove, Zborowski lied about this and other parts of his testimony.

Zborowski was convicted of perjury and after an appeal and retrial he received a four-year prison sentence in 1962. Following his release he resumed his academic career and published People in Pain (1969), a study of responses to pain by people of different cultures. He moved to San Francisco where, in time, he rose to the position of Director of the Pain Institute at the Mount Zion Hospital. He died in 1990 aged eighty-two.

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