Isaiah Oggins

Isaiah Oggins (also known as Ysai or Cy) (July 22, 1898 – 1947) was an American-born communist and spy for the Soviet secret police. After working in Europe and the Far East, Oggins was arrested, served eight years in the Gulag detention system, and was summarily executed on the orders of Joseph Stalin.

Background

The third of four children, Oggins was born 1898 in the mill town of Willimantic, Connecticut, the son of Simon Melamdovich (who changed his name to "Oggins" in America) and his wife Rena, both Jewish immigrants from the Abolnik shtetl near Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania. Oggins's parents arrived in New York in 1888. They had three other children.

Career In 1923, Oggins became a Communist by joining the Workers Party of America. The same year, he changed jobs to work for Yale University Press as a researcher.

The Ogginses moved from Berlin to Paris in the spring of 1930. In Neuilly-sur-Seine, they watched White Russians, Trotskyites including Trotsky's Paris-based son, Lev Sedov, and the family of Michael Feodorovich Romanov. After exposure of l'affaire Switz (1933–1934, involving Robert Gordon Switz, Lydia Stahl, and Arvid Jacobson ), the Ogginses left Paris (September 1934) and returned to the States with their young son Robin (b. 1931). After a brief stint in New York, they left for San Francisco. Leaving his wife and child behind, Cy Oggins set off for China in September 1935, where he served through 1937.

Death

In May 1947, it was decided to murder Oggins because the Soviets feared that if the spy were repatriated to the United States, as the US government had requested, he would defect and reveal Soviet secrets. By mid-summer, Oggins was taken to Laboratory Number One (the "Kamera"), where Grigory Mairanovsky injected him with the poison curare, which takes 10–15 minutes to kill.

The Lost Spy

In 2008, Andrew Meier, formerly Moscow bureau chief for TIME magazine, published a biography of Oggins called The Lost Spy. The book resulted from a decade of investigative research into the mysterious circumstances of Oggins's imprisonment and death. It included documentation from Soviet, American, and Swiss archives

Requests to FSB

Oggins's son has continued to ask for information about his father's death from Soviet successor agencies like the Russian Federal Security Service (generally known by its Russian acronym "FSB").

Personal life

On April 23, 1924, he married Nerma Berman (1898–1995), a Rand School student and Communist activist, born in the Skapiskis shtetl (also near Kovno). She became secretary of the New York division of the National Defense Committee of the Rand School for Red Scare victims Scott Nearing and other professors.

The Oggins had one son, Robin, born 1931.

Nerma Berman Oggins drifted from job to job and lived in the New York City area. She retired in 1965 and lived for a time on the Lower East Side at the Henry Street Settlement. She later moved to Vestal, New York to be near her son. She died in Vestal on January 27, 1995.