Samuel Dickstein

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Samuel Dickstein (February 5, 1885 - April 22, 1954) was a Democratic Congressional Representative from New York, a New York State Supreme Court Justice, and spy for the Soviet Union. He played a key role in establishing the committee that would become the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Dickstein was born near Vilnius in present-day Lithuania, and immigrated to the United States in 1887 with his parents, who settled in New York City. There he attended public and private schools in New York City, the College of the City of New York, and graduated from the New York City Law School in 1906. He was admitted to the bar in 1908 and commenced law practice in New York City. He served as special deputy attorney general of the State of New York from 1911-1914, member of the board of aldermen in 1917, member of the State Assembly 1919-1922. He served as a member of the Democratic County Committee and was elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-eighth Congress and was reelected eleven times. He resigned from Congress on December 30, 1945. He served as Chairman on the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization (Seventy-second through Seventy-ninth Congresses).

Dickstein was a spy for the Soviet Union while a sitting member of Congress. The Soviet NKVD case handlers code-named him “Crook” due to his greedy compensation demands. Dickstein gave Moscow information on fascist groups in the U.S. and war budget materials. He is the only Congressman known to have spied for the Soviet Union while a member of Congress.

He was instrumental in establishing and serving as vice chairman of the temporary Select Committee on Un-American Activities (the Dies Committee) in 1938 to investigate fascist and Nazi groups in the United States. Later the same committee was renamed the House Committee on Un-American Activities when it shifted attention to Communist organizations. Dickstein was paid $1250 a month from 1937 to early 1940 by the Soviet spy agency the KGB, which hoped to get secret Congressional information of anti-Communist and pro-fascist forces. When Dickstein left the Committee the KGB dropped him from the payroll. ^[1]

Dickstein later served as a Justice on the New York State Supreme Court until his death in New York City.

References

1. ↑ Complete Idiot's Guide to Spies and Espionage, Alpha. April 1, 2003. ISBN 0028644182, p. 36: "Among the early Soviet recruits [was]...U.S. Congressman Samuel Dickstein, who demanded such high payments that the Soviets gave him the code name "Crook." Details of these and other Soviet spies were not revealed until decades later, when some of the archives of the KGB were made available to researchers.", p. 156-157: "Code-Name: Crook Another of the unusual cases was Congressman Samuel Dickstein. Dickstein headed the House Committee on Un-American activities in 1937, which then focused on the activities of fascist groups in in the United States. Dickstein met with the Soviet ambassador, and offered to sell information uncovered by the committee regarding pro-facist Russian groups in the United States. The KGB assigned Dickstein the code name Crook. Dickstein asked for $2,500 a month to supply information and after the Soviets offered $500 a month, he counter-offered at $1,250 a month. When Congress selected Martin Dies to head the committee, Dickstein's value to the Soviets fell off. After a series of arguments over the value of his continued services, the Soviets broke off contact with him in January 1940. Altogether, Dickstein (Crook) had received $12,000, estimated by historian Allen Weinstein, who published the story later in 1997, to be the equivalent of more than $133,000 in dollar value of that year...The activities of strange characters like Martha Dodd, Samuel Dickstein, and Michael Straight were not fully understood until years after their espionage careers, with the opening of Soviet archives and the research of diligent historians like Allen Weinstein", p. 274: "However, even if American traitors made amateurish spies, several of them inflicted serious damage to American security. Some, like Samuel Dickstein (Chapter 10) or John Walker (Chapter 17), went undiscovered for years."

• Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999).
• Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy Testimony that the Dickstein Committee Suppressed, John Spivak, The New Masses, January 29, 1935.