Brian Goold-Verschoyle (5 June 1912 – 5 January 1942) was an Irish member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who was recruited by the Soviet NKVD as a courier between its moles and their handlers in London.
They remained unaware of the full truth until they learned years later from defecting Soviet GRU spymasters Gen. Walter Krivitsky and Henri Pieck, that Brian Good-Verschoyle had routinely couriered messages to the OGPU/NKVD[6] and that he travelled in 1933, 1934 and 1935 to the USSR.
When Goold-Verschoyle completed his wireless training, he was assigned as a military advisor to the Second Spanish Republic, with express orders to break off all contact with Moos.
He particularly objected to the Red Terror: the surveillance and persecution of both real and suspected members of the anti-Stalinist Left as alleged fifth columnists by the Soviet NKVD and the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the Republic's Communist-controlled political police.
[3] Concluding that Moscow had no interest in any socialist revolution it did not control completely, Goold-Verschoyle's letters to Lotte Moos and to his family in Ireland revealed a growing sympathy for the anti-Stalinist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM, with whose militia George Orwell served and which inspired his memoir Homage to Catalonia).
He died as a political prisoner in a Soviet gulag in Orenburg Oblast on 5 January 1942,[7]: 295 [3] one of only three Irish people who can be formally identified as victims of Stalin's Great Purge.
Having lived in Moscow during the purge that claimed his brother, Goold returned to Ireland where, during the Second World War, he was interned with members of a now banned IRA.