Arvid Jacobson

Arvid Werner Jacobson (November 12, 1904 – April 1, 1976) was a Finnish-American communist who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Biography Jacobson's parents were Finnish immigrants from Lapua, Ostrobotnia. Jacobson was born in Covington, Michigan and was working as a high school teacher in Northville when, in the fall of 1932, he was recruited to work for the Soviet Military Intelligence by the Comintern agent "Mrs. Morton", a pseudonym of Aino Kuusinen, the wife of the Finnish communist leader Otto Wille Kuusinen.

With his wife Sally, he traveled to New York, where the fledgling GRU agent Whittaker Chambers was assigned the task of meeting Jacobson and making a fitness report. Chambers advised against using Jacobson 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, that operated in Finland.

The Finnish police uncovered the group after the suspected army officer Vilho Pentikäinen fled to the Soviet Union with military secrets. Jacobson was arrested in October 1933, along with his wife Sally,

Jacobson was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and in 1958 he served with Saul Gorn, Melvin A. Shader, and Edmund Berkeley on an ACM committee investigating the social responsibilities of computer scientists.

He retired in 1966 and died in Novi, Michigan in 1976.