Vladimir Pravdin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (June 2007)

Vladimir Pravdin or Roland Abbiate (born August 15, 1905) He was born in London, and lived at one time in the United States during the early twenties. Pravdin was a senior KGB agent. His wife, Olga Pravdin, also served in the KGB. During the 1930s, Pravdin had been involved in killings and kidnappings in Europe for the KGB, including the assassination of Ignace Reiss, a GRU officer who defected in 1937. Reiss was caught by the NKVD in Switzerland, where he was killed as an object lesson to potential defectors. Pravdin disappeared after the murder. Later, during World War II, he turned up again in the United States where he served as a Soviet diplomat, Vladimir Sergeyvich Pravdin.

Later, in the United States, Pravdin operated under cover as the head of TASS News Agency from 1944 to 1945. Among Pravdin's contacts while serving in the United States were Judith Coplon Josef Katz, Bernard Schuster, and Josef Berger.

In Washington, Pravdin, posing as a TASS reporter, made the acquaintance of such people as the famous correspondent Walter Lippmann and others. On one occasion, he met with a person with three children to offer money for certain unspecified information and who was code-named by the KGB as Blin (or Pancake for “bliny”). From scraps of information about Blin-- that arose from the brief breaking of the Russian code in the materials the U.S. labeled as “Venona”-- the FBI concluded that Blin “appears” to be I.F. Stone.^[1]. But the FBI was not at all certain and, in fact, the FBI agents argued over whether Blin was Stone. The New York office of the FBI offered three reasons why Stone was not Blin.^[2] Including the fact that Blin should have been someone “whose true pro-Soviet sympathies were not known to the public...” and hence could not be Stone. The FBI also had another prospect in mind: Ernest K. Lindley, who better fit the profile of a “very prominent journalist” and who, like Stone, had three children. ^[3]. But the most obvious reason why Stone was not Blin was shown in the cable that indicated Blin was afraid of contact with the Tass reporter, Pravdin and feared working with Pravdin lest he draw the attention of J. Edgar Hoover.^[4]. By contrast, I.F. Stone was already attacking J. Edgar Hoover frequently in 1943 ^[5] and the FBI were saying “Stone is known to the bureau because of his hostile editorial comments made against the FBI as early as 1936. He has repeatedly attacked and villified the Director and the FBI ^[6].

In the plain language of the cable decrypt, BLIN was willing to provide information but declined to cooperate with the NKVD because the approach had been clumsy, but left open the possibility of future cooperation.^[7]

In 1945, while serving as a senior adviser to the American delegation at the founding conference of the United Nations, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Harry Dexter White met with Pravdin and answered a series of questions about U.S. negotiating strategy and possible ways for Moscow to defeat or water down American post-War proposals.

Pravdin left the United States and returned to the Soviet Union on 11 March 1946.

Anatoli Golitsyn, another Soviet defector in the 1960s, also claimed that Pravdin was active in Austria after World War II, often passing as a Frenchman.

[edit] Sources

• United States. A Counterintelligence Reader. Vol. 1 Chap. 4. National Counterintelligence Center. no date.
• FBI Venona file - page 37
• FBI Albert Einstein file
• Venona: Decoding Espionage in America, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale University Press, 1999, pgs. 53, 158, 212, 225, 237, 240, 241, 242, 243, 248.
• The Venona Story by Robert L. Benson
• MacPherson, Myra. "All Governments Lie." New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

[edit] References