Grigory Kheifets

In 1919, he joined the Bolshevik party and, from 1919-1920, fought in the Red Army in the Russian Civil War on the Western Front and the Caucasus, where he was lightly injured in his arm.

[4] After the war, he briefly served as secretary to Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya[5][6] In 1921 Kheifets joined the Comintern as an agent of the OMS under diplomatic cover.

While working illegally under the guise of a student from India, he received an engineering degree from Jena Polytechnic, Germany, where he established several underground cells.

[7] In the summer of 1938, he was recalled to Moscow, dismissed from the NKVD, and appointed deputy chairman of VOKS, an international cultural exchange organization.

According to the former Soviet head of intelligence Pavel Sudoplatov, Kheifets established confidential contact with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.

[4][7] During the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the investigators invoked Kheifets's name several times, probing his contacts in Hollywood,[13] including Bertolt Brecht,[14] Paul Robeson,[15] and others.

Their assignment was to raise money and convince American public opinion that Soviet anti-Semitism had been crushed due to Joseph Stalin's policies.

Before their departure, NKVD Chief Lavrenti Beria instructed Mikhoels and Feffer to emphasize the outstanding contribution of Jews to science and culture in the Soviet Union.

[7] In 1944 and the first half of 1945, Stalin developed a strategic plan to use the Jewish issue to bring in international investment to rebuild the war-torn Soviet Union and to influence the postwar realignment of power in the Middle East.

A surveillance photograph was taken by Manhattan Project security officials. On the right is Grigory Kheifets, the NKVD Resident in San Francisco from 1941 to July 1944. On the left is his successor, Gregory Kasparov. In between them is Martin Kamen , a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley's Radiation Lab. The photo is courtesy of the National Security Agency.