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The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service (review)

During the reign of Iosif Stalin, millions of Soviet citizens and tens of thousands of foreigners were sucked into the gruesome complex of prison camps operated by the Main Camp Administration, better known by its Russian acronym, Gulag. The Lost Spy is the story of one of those foreigners, an American named Cy Oggins, and of Andrew Meier’s almost obsessive effort to piece together his story. Meier’s quest started in 2000, when he traveled hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle to Norilsk, a nickel-mining city built by prisoners from the Norillag camp, which was notorious for its harsh conditions. When Meier, a journalist, interviewed aging Norillag survivors who had settled in Norilsk, he asked them whether any Americans had been in the camp. “A small birdlike woman” remembered an American. In the camp, she recalled, they called him “the American professor.” Armed with this clue, Meier went to Paris to meet Jacques Rossi, then 91 years old, a Norillag survivor who had written an encyclopedia of camp life. It turned out that Rossi had known the American, and had even once traveled to New York on an unsuccessful search for the man or his relatives. Rossi said that the man’s name was Cyrus Oggins, and that he had once been a history professor at Columbia University. Rossi, who had been a low-level Soviet intelligence operative in the 1920s and 1930s, was sure that Oggins had also been a spy, though they had never discussed the matter. Some of the details of Rossi’s story turned out to be wrong, but it was accurate enough to help Meier make the breakthrough that fueled his six-year investigation of the life and death of Cy (for Isaiah, not Cyrus) Oggins. Through Internet searches, inspired guesswork, and serendipity, Meier managed to track down Robin Oggins, the only child of Cy and Nerma Oggins. Working closely with Robin, a retired history professor who lives in upstate New York, Meier tried to piece together the sequence of events that took a bookish young man from the halls of Columbia University to the desolation of a Soviet prison camp. Meier’s pursuit of the story took him across Russia, and to Germany, France, and England. Along the way he mined archives, pried information from the former Soviet State Security organs, and consulted a veritable who’s who of scholars of Cold War espionage. Although Meier’s work yielded a great deal of fascinating detail about early American Communism and the Soviet Union’s clandestine services, he did not turn up much solid information about Oggins. Reading The Lost Spy, we learn that Oggins