Jacob Golos (born Yakov Naumovich Reizen, Russian: Яков Наумович Рейзен; April 24, 1889 - November 27, 1943) was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary who became an intelligence operative in the United States on behalf of the USSR.
A founding member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), circa 1930 Golos became involved in the covert work of Soviet intelligence agencies.
[2][3] A revolutionary from a young age, Reizen joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1904, becoming active in the group's Bolshevik wing headed by V.I.
[1] He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to eight years of hard labor, a term ultimately commuted by the government of Tsar Nikolai II to lifetime exile to Yakutia in northern Siberia.
[4] Immediately after the close of the Detroit gathering, Golos and a number of his comrades in the Russian Federation, including Alexander Stoklitsky and Nicholas Hourwich, traveled to Chicago to attend another convention.
[5] In his personal history and personnel forms written in Moscow in 1926, Golos dated his work as a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Section (New York) as from 1919 to 1925.
[6] In 1926 Golos traveled to the Soviet Union as a participant in the American "Kuzbas" (Kuzbass Autonomous Industrial Colony), located near the Russian city of Kemerovo.
[8] Golos remained in charge of the passport operation until turning the job over to Hungarian party functionary J. Peters, who also served as a link with the Soviet intelligence in 1930s.
[8] In the spring of 1930, Golos became involved in the Communist Party's "machinery of investigations," charged with keeping tabs with the activities of a number of labor unions and party-affiliated mass organizations.
"[1] According to archival notes taken in the early 1990s by Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer and journalist, Golos' initial contact seems to have been with the GPU's New York station chief, Chivin ("Smith").
[1] Another interpretation of the documents, favored by historian Svetlana Chervonnaya, argues that first contact was made by Abram Einhorn ("Taras"), a Soviet intelligence agent who worked in the United States from 1930 to 1934.
By the start of 1933, Golos was heading the Communist Party's World Tourists venture, an operation that generated revenue and provided funds for various CPUSA activities.
[9] The last of these visits took place in 1937, during the height of the Ezhovshchina (or the Great Purge)— the mass campaign by Stalin of secret police terror in which millions of Soviet citizens suspected of political disloyalty, espionage, or economic crime were arrested, and hundreds of thousands executed.
[10] Upon his return to the United States in January 1938, Golos confirmed at a session of the governing Political Committee of the American Communist Party that there was indeed a mass secret police operation in effect in the USSR.
Fully aware of Stalin's purges and terrified that returning to the Soviet Union would mean being sent to the Gulag or shot, Golos not only refused to share his sources with other NKVD officers, but he also told them that he had hidden a sealed envelope containing the details of the USSR's espionage operations in America.
Its members worked in several government departments and agencies in Washington, D.C. and provided classified information to the USSR through Earl Browder, the General Secretary of the Communist Party USA.