Flora Wovschin

This article is part of the Venona series.

CPUSA

American Students Union

American Youth for Democracy

Office of War Information

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Flora Don Wovschin was born 20 February 1923 in New York City. Her mother was Maria Wicher and her stepfather was Enos Wicher.

Wovschin was born 20 February 1923 in New York City and attended the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University and Barnard College. At Barnard she was active in the American Students Union and may have been a member of the American Youth for Democracy. She attended Barnard with Marion Davis Berdecio and Judith Coplon whom Wovschin later recruited both into service for the NKVD.

From 9 September 1943 to 20 February 1945 she worked in the Office of War Information then transferred to the United States Department of State She resigned from the State Department 20 September 1945. Wovschin acted as courier between Judith Coplon and Soviet intelligence. Wovschin transmitted to the Soviet Union the information that Americans had somehow become aware of NKVD internal codenames for various American institutions, including CLUB, HOUSE, BANK and CABARET, as used in the NKVD's most secret communications. Coplon had discovered that somehow the government had obtained access to the NKVD's most secret messages and worked out the meaning of certain regularly used codewords.[1]

After the war she renounced her American citizenship and travelled to the Soviet Union and married a Soviet engineer. An FBI counterintelligence report on Wovschin has a hand written not in the margin stating she may have died serving as a nurse in North Korea. Her code name in Soviet intelligence and in the Venona project is "Zora".

Further reading

• Bernard Schuster and Joseph Katz: KGB Master Spies in the United States, E.M. Hyde, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Volume 12, Number 1, 1 January 1999 , pp. 35-57(23). [2]

Source

• 227 Moscow to New York 13 March 1945, p.1
• 227 Moscow to New York 13 March 1945, p.2