Her parents' unhappy marriage (caused in large part by her father's constant philandering) alienated her from her family.

Eisler invited her to join his Communist-committed life by leaving her family and coming to live with him at his parents' home in a party marriage.

Massing pursued her acting career while living a domestic life amidst the top leadership of the KPD.

Meantime, by 1925, Gumperz became head of "all the German Communist party publishing" but quit in 1926 out of dissatisfaction with the Soviet Union, to which he had been traveling frequently on business (This Deception, p. 55).

They met Kenneth Durant, Mike Gold, and Helen Black (representative of the Soviet Photo Agency and in 1931 contributing editor to the New Masses when Whittaker Chambers began submitting short stories).

Meantime, Gumperz decided to return to Germany to write his doctorate at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main.

"[5] Both Massings later were members of the NKVD apparatus and in the USA worked under the direction of a Soviet officer, Fred (Boris Bazarov), based in New York.

She used appeals to ideology, especially to the strong anti-Nazi sentiments of New Deal liberals who dominated the Washington scene of the Roosevelt administration in the early 1930s.

In 1935, Massing, at a Communist Party USA cell meeting in a private home, argued with Alger Hiss over whether Noel Field, a State Department spy, should work with her group or with the GRU.

[6] Noel Field always denied this, but it seems clear that he changed his testimony more than once, depending on time and circumstance (e.g., Hiss Case vs. Czechoslovak show trial venues vs.

[8] Massing said in her memoir that she had left the Soviet intelligence apparatus in the late 1930s after a period of disillusionment with her Russian handlers and the Stalinist trials.

[9] Members of the Redhead group in the Gorsky Memo:[citation needed] Hede Massing had first met Richard Sorge at the Marxist Workweek in 1923 that led to the establishment of the Frankfurt School.

In an essay for the Neue Rundschau in 1953, "Richard Sorge: der fast vollkommene Spion" she called him a "near-perfect spy.