Arvid Jacobson

Jacobson was born in Covington, Michigan[1][2] and was working as a high school teacher in Northville[3] 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.

[4][5] 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,[3] and he promptly confessed to his role as an agent and revealed the existence of another Soviet apparatus working in Paris, which included Lydia Stahl and Robert Gordon Switz.