Brian Goold-Verschoyle

Brian Goold-Verschoyle (5 June 1912 – 5 January 1942) was a member of the Communist Party of Ireland and was one of the three Irish people killed during the Great Purge ordered by Joseph Stalin.[1]

Early life

Brian Goold-Verschoyle was born in Dunkineely, County Donegal into the Anglo-Irish gentry. After he finished his schooling, he moved to England to work as an engineering technician. However, after visiting his brother in Moscow, he was recruited into Soviet espionage. His childhood and later life is explored – along with that of his oldest brother, the communist Neil Goold-Verschoyle, and his sister, Sheila Fitzgerald – in the 2005 novel, The Family on Paradise Pier by Dermot Bolger.[2] The collection of short stories A Tomb for Boris Davidovich contains a short story entitled "The Sow That Eats Her Forrow" that is based on the life of Goold-Verschoyle.[3]

In 1929 he moved to England at the age of 19 and took part in an apprenticeship in English Electric Works in Stafford. In 1931 he applied to join the Communist Party of Great Britain which prompted the MI5 to open a file on him. Eventually he became the party's leader in Stafford.[4]

Spy

Goold-Verschoyle became a Soviet spy after visiting his brother Neil in Moscow.[5]

He was said by MI5 to be a "naïve supporter" of the Soviet Union; unaware that he was being used to courier messages for the NKVD while he lived in London. He was controlled by Henri Pieck.

Goold-Verschoyle couriered UK agent's reports, mainly from John Herbert King, a Foreign Office clerk and gave them to Theodore Maly whom he was the principle courier for. He was also a courier for Dmitri Bystrolyotov[6] In 1936 he traveled under an assumed name to Moscow to undergo wireless training. Previously he had worked as a technician. He fell in love with a German Jewish refugee, Lotte Moos, and took her to Moscow against orders, falling foul of his Soviet masters. He was then sent to the Spanish Civil War (Barcelona) on the condition that he broke off all contact with Lotte. However he disobeyed this order.

He is mentioned in Walter Krivitsky's memoir 'I Was Stalin's Spy and Karlo Stajner's memoir 7000 days in Siberia.

Arrest

During his stationing in Spain he got in trouble over his personal views. He disliked what he perceived as the Soviet Army taking control of Spanish areas without consulting the Spanish and the surveillance and punishment of ideological deviance by the Soviets.[4]

His letters to his family in Ireland reveal a growing sympathy for the anti-Stalinist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).

In April 1937, he was asked to report to Barcelona harbour to repair a ship's radio. When he embarked he was escorted to the radio cabin and the door was locked behind him and he was left in there with two Komsomol members. who were also kidnapped.[7] He had in effect been kidnapped and when the ship arrived in USSR he was immediately transferred to the Lubyanka (KGB) prison in Moscow. He was eventually sentenced to eight years of solitary confinement for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities. He died in an Orenburg gulag on 5 January 1942.[8][4]

References
  1. McLoughlin, Barry (2007). Left to the wolves: Irish victims of Stalinist terror. Irish Academic Press. p. 117. ISBN 9780716529149. Retrieved 20 June 2017.
  2. "Summers before the storm". The Irish Times. 22 March 2005. Retrieved 15 June 2018.
  3. Christie, Stuart (2011-02-15). Arena Two: Anarchists in Fiction. ISBN 9781604862140.
  4. http://libfiles.nipissingu.ca/HDI/Theses%20&%20Dissertations/not%20yet%20catalogued/an%20irish%20communist%20and%20M15%20contraintelligence.pdf
  5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/6759483.stm
  6. West, Nigel (2007-05-07). Mask: MI5's Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain. ISBN 9781134265763.
  7. 7000 Days in Siberia by Karlo Stajner page 51
  8. Volodarsky, Boris (2014). Stalin's Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov. OUP Oxford. p. 295. ISBN 9780191045530. Retrieved 20 June 2017.
  • Walter Krivitsky, I was Stalin's Spy, pp. 115–16. Ian Faulkner Publishing Ltd, Cambridge, 1992
  • Barry McLoughlin, Left to the Wolves: Irish Victims of Stalinist Terror
  • International Socialism – "Stalin's Irish Victims"
  • Dermot Bolger, The Family on Paradise Pier
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