(Politico) . . . .The authors also revealed that Stalin had a spy in Congress, an exasperating character who once “blazed up very much, claiming that if we didn’t give him money he would break with us,” according to his Soviet contact. To this day, Sam Dickstein is the only known U.S. representative to have served as a covert agent for a foreign power. His codename was Crook. . . .
. . . “We are fully aware whom we are dealing with,” says one NKVD memo. “‘Crook’ is completely justifying his code name. This is an unscrupulous type, greedy for money, consented to work because of money, a very cunning swindler. … Therefore it is difficult to guarantee the fulfillment of the planned program even in the part which he proposed to us himself.”
The Soviets apparently didn’t buy Dickstein’s claim that the money was solely for his investigators and “he demands nothing for himself” because of his ideological affinity with the USSR.
Dickstein’s undercover career suffered a near fatal blow when he was not only prevented from chairing the new committee—that honor would go to Democrat Martin Dies Jr., a dull clod from Texas who had turned against the New Deal—but he was also not even named as a member, apparently because his reputation had grown so noxious. . . .
. . . . Even without a seat on the panel, Dickstein sought to prove his worth as a Soviet spy.
He continued to produce materials on U.S.-based fascists and, in at least one instance, a Soviet defector whom Moscow was eager to have silenced. (Walter Krivitsky was found dead in a Washington, D.C., hotel room of an apparent, although not certain, suicide.)
Dickstein denounced the Dies Committee at NKVD request (“a Red-baiting excursion”) and gave speeches in Congress on Moscow-dictated themes.
He handed over “materials on the war budget for 1940, records of conferences of the budget subcommission, reports of the war minister, chief of staff and etc.,” according to an NKVD report. . . . . . (read the rest)
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The book that first revealed Dickstein as a Soviet spy:
