NONFICTION

The impetus for Andrew Meier's fascinating new book, "The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service," began with a simple question. Did the Soviet Union place American prisoners in its labor camps in Norilsk?

The city, which Meier dubs "that Pompeii of Stalinism in Russia's far north," was established in the 1930s and "has loomed in the Russian imagination as one of the most remote and forbidding corners of the country," he writes.

But did its camps hold Americans?

A Norilsk survivor, one of a few dozen who stayed in Norilsk after the camps closed, gave Meier an intriguing but incomplete answer: Yes.

" 'The American,' they called him," the survivor said. " 'The American professor.' "

Intrigued, Meier searched for a name. Finally, he got it from a Norilsk survivor who was living in Paris as "one of the favored witnesses of the French right wing, called upon regularly to testify to the evils of communism," Meier writes.

"The American professor" was Isaiah "Cy" Oggins. But he wasn't a professor. He "was one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviet Union," Meier writes.

Meier's account of how Oggins went from being an American spy for the Soviets to one of its millions of labor camp prisoners is breathtaking. It reads like a thriller, but as Meier writes, "This is an improbable but true tale."

Born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, Oggins grew up in a mill town in northeastern Connecticut, where he witnessed several labor disputes. Later, as a student at Columbia University, he found himself swept up in the radical politics that arose in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

Oggins joined the Communist Party in 1924, and he accepted his first mission for the party -- "a clandestine trip to Europe," Meier writes -- in 1926. Two years later, he received a bigger mission -- providing cover for other operatives using a safe house in Berlin.

Locked doors upstairs kept Oggins and his wife, Nerma, from knowing the actions of the mysterious men who came and went without speaking. Oggins slipped comfortably into his new identity as a dealer in objets d'art, though.

"The cover offered a number of advantages," Meier writes. "As a well-to-do American connoisseur, Cy could now take short trips at a moment's notice, to Oslo one weekend, Copenhagen the next. He could also carry large sums of cash in an assortment of currencies without arousing suspicion."

His cover story also allowed him to mingle with Berlin intellectuals.

Later, Oggins' handlers had him spy on survivors of the Romanov family in France, after which they sent him to spy on Manchuria's Japanese occupiers and Pu Yi, "the last emperor."

The masquerade ended with Oggins' arrest in Moscow in 1939. Convicted of espionage, he served an eight-year sentence in a Norilsk labor camp, after which he was killed by lethal injection in a medical laboratory.

"Only months before, in May 1947, Stalin had banned capital punishment," Meier writes. "The American prisoner, however, could not be released."

"The Lost Spy" works brilliantly on a number of levels -- as a fascinating history of the Soviet Union's spy network before World War II, as a harrowing account of the Soviet labor camps, and as a moving, personal story of a man caught under the wheels of history.
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.