Maurice Hyman Halperin (1906–1995) was an American writer, professor, diplomat, and accused Soviet spy (NKVD code name "Hare").
Biography
Maurice Hyman Halperin was born on March 3, 1906, in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1927, he received an A.B. from Harvard College, in 1939 an MA from the University of Oklahoma, and in 1931 a doctorate from the Sorbonne.
Career
Academics
In 1930, Halperin lectured at the Sorbonne while studying there.
In 1935, Halperin traveled to Cuba with the League of American Writers to investigate possible human rights abuses. Sometime during this period, Halperin joined the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA).
Halperin taught at the University of Oklahoma, with summer 1941 as visiting professor at the University of Florida.
Government
In late summer 1941, Halperin began working for the US federal government as a Latin American specialist. From 1941 to 1945, served as division chief (Latin America) in the Office of the Coordinator of Information, soon the Research Division of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and served as special assistant to Duncan Chapin Lee.
During this period, he may have become an espionage agent and agreed to provide intelligence for the Joseph Stalin-era Soviet intelligence service, the NKVD. Halperin's alleged NKVD codename was "Hare." He became a member of the Golos spy network (operated by the NKVD's chief of American operations Gaik Ovakimian).
With access to the OSS cable room, Halperin could secure copies of secret U.S. reports from any part of the world. Through the Golos spy network, Halperin provided Soviet intelligence with a large quantity of sensitive U.S. diplomatic dispatches, including reports from Ambassador John Gilbert Winant in London on the position of the Polish government-in-exile towards negotiations with Stalin, Turkey's foreign policy toward Romania, the State Department's instructions to the U.S. Ambassador to Spain, the U.S. embassy in Morocco's reports on that country's government, reports on the U.S. government's relationship with Vichy and Free French factions and persons in exile, reports of peace feelers from dissident Germans passed to the Vatican, U.S. attitudes towards Josip Broz Tito's Communist Front activities in Yugoslavia, and discussions between the Greek government and the United States regarding Soviet ambitions in the Balkans. Halperin also distorted OSS reports with false information in order to reflect the views of Stalin, the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party of the United States.
After the OSS was dissolved in 1945, Halperin transferred to the State Department and worked as an adviser to United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson, again on Latin American affairs. Halperin was an advisor to the United Nations at the first conference in San Francisco (with Alger Hiss serving as acting secretary general). He helped establish a Hebrew language service for the UN, beamed to Palestine.
In 1946 (or 1949), Halperin resigned from the State Department to take the position of chair of Latin American studies at Boston University.
HUAC investigation (1948)
On July 31, 1948, ex-Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley testified under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee and related details which she first shared with the FBI in 1945. In 1945, Bentley, who had inherited the Golos network, defected from the Soviet underground and sought out the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During questioning, Bentley told FBI agents that from 1942 to 1944, Halperin at OSS had delivered "to Mary Price and later to myself mimeographed bulletins and reports prepared by OSS on a variety of topics and also supplied excerpts from State Department cables to which he evidently had access." Bentley added that "some time early in 1945 'JACK', [Soviet agent Joseph Katz] the Russian contact at that time, told me that Halperin had been accused by General William J. Donovan, the head of OSS, of being a Soviet agent..." The next day, the FBI notified Harry S. Truman's White House that "according to a "highly confidential source," among those "employed by the government of the United States" who "have been furnishing data and information to persons outside the Federal government, who are in turn transmitting this information to espionage agents of the Soviet government," was "Maurice Halperin, Office of Strategic Services." Subsequent surveillance of Halperin disclosed that he was in contact with Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Lauchlin Currie, Philip and Mary Jane Keeney, and others.
SISS investigation (1953)