Hede Massing

Hede Massing

Hede Massing or Hedda Massing, née Hedwig Tune, later: Hede Eisler, later: Hede Gumperz, an Austrian-born Soviet intelligence operative who served in the United States in the 1930s. She was an actress and journalist. After the Second World War she wrote about Richard Sorge for the German magazine Der Spiegel (1951), Massing had met Richard Sorge as a young man in 1923 in Germany and saw him again in New York in 1935.

Massing had been married to Gerhart Eisler (from 1920 to 1926), who in the 1930s was the Comintern representative in the United States. Her second husband (from 1927) was the then communist journalist and publisher Julian Gumperz. Massing and (from 1936) her third husband Paul Massing were members of an OGPU apparatus and functioned under the direction of a Soviet illegal officer based in New York. Massing was assigned several duties, including that of a courier between the United States and Europe. However, her most important assignment was that of an agent recruiter, a task she apparently carried out with great skill. Massing was assigned targets for recruitment by her Soviet supervisor. She used appeals to ideology, especially preying on the strong anti-Nazi sentiments of New Deal liberals who dominated the Washington scene of the Roosevelt administration in the early 1930s. Laurence Duggan was among her recruits. In 1935 Massing at a Communist cell meeting in a private home argued with Alger Hiss over whether Noel Field, a State Department spy, should work with her group or with The GRU.

This article is part of the Venona series.

Secret apparatus

Comintern

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Massing left the Soviet intelligence apparatus in 1938 after a period of disillusionment with her Russian handlers. Hede Massing did not admit to her work in Soviet espionage until 1947 and testified at the second trial of Alger Hiss. Covername "Redhead" occurred in Venona as an unidentified in a context that suggests that it was Hede Massing, and was identified as Massing in Robert L. Benson's The Venona Story, page 36.

Redhead group

The following member's are listed as members of the Redhead group handled by Hede Massing in the Gorsky Memo.

• Laurence Duggan, head of United States Department of State Division of American Republics
• Hede Massing, journalist
• Paul Massing, Institute of Social Research Columbia University
• Franz Leopold Neumann, consultant at Board of Economic Warfare; Deputy Chief of the Central European Section of Office of Strategic Services; First Chief of research of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal

External link

• Massing, Hede, Chapter 4:.The Routine of an Underground Agent, from This Deception. New York, NY: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, (1951), pp. 335.

Source

• National Counter Intelligence Center, Cold War Counterintelligence
• National Counter Intelligence Center, Copyright Notice
• Robert L. Benson, The Venona Story (Ft. Meade, MD: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2001).
• Alexander Vassiliev’s Notes on Anatoly Gorsky’s December 1948 Memo on Compromised American Sources and Networks