Valentin Markin

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Valentin Markin (aka Oskar, Herman, Davis, Walter, Arthur Walter) (?-1934) was the chief illegal resident and director of both GRU and NKVD espionage operations in the United States from 1933 to 1934.

Little is known of Markin's early life. It is said that he was the son of a janitor father and school-teacher mother from St. Petersburg. He joined Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) and was stationed in Berlin in the 1920s, where he married a nice Armenian girl who worked for the Soviet trade mission. His superior in Berlin was Ignace Reiss. At some point, Markin left the GRU and secured a position with the Foreign Department (INO) of the NKVD.

The novice GRU agent Whittaker Chambers met with Markin, posing as Hermann , in New York City in 1933. He was, Chambers wrote, "a short, sturdy figure confined in a tight-fitting, rumpled suit and elevated on high-heeled German shoes." His brush like mop of hair looked like it had been cut with a sickle. "I felt," Chambers continued, " that I had met what is much more unusual in life than a thoroughly good man-a thoroughly bad one."

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) provided the authors Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev an unprecedented peek into their archives for the preparation of The Haunted Wood (1999). One of the startling revelations in the text was that Valentin Markin had a source inside the U.S. State Department, codenamed WILLIE, who had access to "numerous ambassadorial, consular, and military attache reports from Europe and the Far East," and could "filch transcripts of recorded conversations Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his assistants had with foreign ambassadors." The Soviets paid WILLIE the extraordinary sum of $15,000 per year for the documents, which he passed to Markin through an intermediary codenamed LEO, a freelance journalist who had access to his office in the State Department. We do not know the true identities of these two traitors because it is the SVR's policy not to reveal the names of uncompromised agents. But since this tale lacks any other corroborating evidence, the notion that it is a clever bit of SVR disinformation cannot be dismissed.

[edit] Sources

• Whittaker Chambers, Witness, Random House, 1952.
• Walter Krivitsky, In Stalin's Secret Service, Enigma Books, 2000 ISBN 1-929631-03-0
• Hede Massing, This Deception, Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1951.
• Elisabeth K. Poretsky, Our own people: A memoir of 'Ignace Reiss' and his friends, University of Michigan Press, 1969. ISBN 0472735004
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era, Random House, 1999.