His father, whose surname was originally Graff, was a teacher and came from an ethnic German [citation needed] colonist family, while Alexander's mother was Ukrainian.

[citation needed] In 1935, Barmine was transferred from the Red Army to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces.

Barmine had been a protege, co-worker, subordinate, or confidant of many of the Soviet Union's leading generals, diplomats, and government officials who were arrested, imprisoned, and shot during the Great Purge under Stalin in 1930s.

[6] In July 1937, after discovering co-workers rifling his desk and searching his offices in the dead of night, he received a letter from his 14-year-old son Boris, who wrote his father that he, his brother, and Barmine's mother were going "far, far away to bathe in the sea.

In his 1952 memoir, Whittaker Chambers describes the impact of the defections and (in most cases) assassinations of fellow spies: Suddenly, revolutionists with a lifetime of devoted activity would pop out, like rabbits from a burrow, with the G.P.U.

Instead, a brave and a lonely man, he sent his single-handed defiance to Stalin: Murderer of the Kremlin cellars, I herewith return my decorations and resume my freedom of action.

It was foredoomed that sooner or later the door of a G.P.U limousine would swing open and Reiss's body with the bullets in the defiant brain would tumble out—as happened shortly after he deserted.

[7]In New York City, Barmine applied for political asylum and citizenship as one of the earliest high-ranking Soviet government defectors to the United States.

In the days before the formation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Barmine does not appear to have been debriefed at all by the United States government regarding his extensive knowledge of Soviet leaders and policies.

[1] In 1943 and 1944, Barmine worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the wartime agency responsible for external intelligence and sabotage against Axis countries.

[2] After a period of writing articles for various journals as well as his second book in 1945, Barmine joined Voice of America in 1948, serving for sixteen years as chief of its Russian branch.

[8] In 1952, Barmine testified under oath before a Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (McCarran Committee) that he was told by Soviet GRU Director Berzin that Lattimore was "one of our men".

[citation needed] After attending the Red Army's general staff school, he was eventually assigned to the Soviet Foreign Office and Commissariat of Trade.