Arvid Jacobson was a Finnish-American Communist who spied for the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 in the 1930s.

Biography

Jacobson was working as a high school teacher in Detroit when, n the fall of 1932, he was recruited to work for the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU

GRU

GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...

) by the Comintern

Comintern

The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...

 agent "Mrs. Morton", a pseudonym of Aino Kuusinen, the wife of the Finnish communist leader Otto Kuusinen.

He traveled to New York where the fledgling GRU agent Whittaker Chambers

Whittaker Chambers

Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...

 was assigned the task of meeting Jacobson and making a fitness report. Chambers advised against Jacobson's use as an underground agent because of his truculent temperament and the fact that he was missing fingers on one hand.

Nevertheless, the GRU sent him to Europe as part of an apparatus of Soviet agents, led by the wife of Alfred Tilton

Alfred Tilton

Alfred Tilton was a Latvian who was head of Soviet Military Intelligence in the United States in the late 1920s. He is best remembered for having recruited Latvian-American communist Nicholas Dozenberg to work for the GRU late in 1927....

, that operated in Finland

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

. The Finnish police uncovered the group after a suspected Army Officer fled to the Soviet Union with military secrets. Jacobson was arrested in October 1933, along with his wife, and he promptly confessed to his role as an agent and revealed the existence of another Soviet apparatus working in Paris which included Lydia Stahl

Lydia Stahl

Lydia Stahl was a secret agent who worked for Soviet Military Intelligence in New York and Paris.She was born Lydia Chkalov in Rostov, in the south of Russia, in 1890. Once the wife of a Tsarist officer, she later married Baron Stahl, a Baltic nobleman, and emigrated to the United States where...

 and Robert Gordon Switz.

After a secret trial, the Finnish court sentenced Jacobson to six years imprisonment in April 1934. He was subsequently pardoned in July 1935 and returned to the United States.

Sources

• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999), pgs. 375, 469.
• Aino Kuusinen, The Rings of Destiny: Inside Soviet Russia from Lenin to Brezhnev, Morrow, 1974.
• Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case, New York: Random House, (1997), pg. 106