Introduction: Alexander Gumberg—Hide in Plain Sight and Admit Nothing
Counter-intelligence Analysis of the first Bolshevik Influence Agent
While researching my book, Willing Accomplices, I stumbled across Alexander (Alex) Gumberg. My analysis revealed that Alex was the first Bolshevik/Soviet intelligence operator to conduct covert (carried on overtly, but denied) influence operations against the USA.
Soon after the Bolshevik coup in Russian, probably early 1918, Petrograd (later Leningrad, before and later St. Petersburg). The head of the Red Cross mission to Russia, Raymond Robins (far left), poses with his car and friends. Front row, L to R: Robins, Jacob Peters (known as the Executioner of the Revolution, Cheka deputy); Lev Karakhan (Bolshevik diplomat and intelligence officer); second from right is Alexander Gumberg (Bolshevik agent acting as interpreter/guide/secretary to the unsuspecting Robins); and far right is Charles Stevenson Smith, head of the Associated Press in Russia.
While the Gumberg story was fascinating and important, Willing Accomplices was focused on the Willi Muenzenberg influence operations and their long-term effects in creating Political Correctness. I only just scratched the surface on Gumberg and his operations in Willing Accomplices.
I found that published works on Gumberg mostly relied on a few basic sources. Most common is the only biography of Gumberg, by James K. Libbey, published in 1977. Nearly all other mentions of Gumberg in secondary sources lead back to Libbey's biography.
Gumberg's papers, in the Wisconsin State archives, are the primary source mother-lode. Many sources on Gumberg reference his papers.
The other standard published source of information on Gumberg is Anthony Sutton's Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Gumberg appears in Sutton's work in several places.
Gumberg's archived papers are a masterwork of "hiding in plain sight." For his entire public and post-revolution professional life, Gumberg denied the obvious truth that he was an agent of the Bolshevik/Soviet regime. Yet his personal and professional activities revolved exclusively around serving the Bolshevik/Soviet regime as a middleman to American business/political/diplomatic powers. His papers demonstrate his careful dedication to hiding in plain sight to maintain his operational cover.
The published sources, Libbey and Sutton, sit on opposite extremes of interpreting Gumberg. Both are fallacious and wrong, each for different reasons.
Libbey swallowed the Gumberg cover story, and simply regurgitated it: Gumberg was a Russian-American businessman trying to help both countries. Libbey ignored sources that do not share this assessment, or he denigrates opinions that identify Gumberg as a Bolshevik/Soviet sympathizer with broad "Red-baiting" smears.
On the other extreme, Sutton comes to the right conclusion, but for totally erroneous reasons. Sutton goes off on a misguided tangent about Gumberg. The false path begins with Sutton's confusing Gumberg with another Comintern agent, Gruzenberg. It appears that Sutton's main sources were probably American diplomatic records from the Bolshevik revolution period. These sources, while surely entertaining, are clearly bad. Nearly all American diplomats during the revolution were on the outside looking in, for many reasons. Their information seems to have been mostly rumors that circulated in the diplomatic community, and other bad sources. Sutton's version of Gumberg, then, is essentially a fantasy.
The Cannata Papers
During my research, I reached out to a genealogy researcher on Ancestry.com, Rev. Dr. Ray Cannata (also known as The Man Who Ate New Orleans). Ray's ancestors, his Siebel relatives, it turned out, like Gumberg’s family, were natives of the same small town, Elizavetgrad, in the Kherson region of the Russian Empire. The tight Elizavetgrad network of socialists also included both Trotsky and Zinoviev, Bolshevik leaders, who played large roles in Gumberg’s success. Ray discovered a cache of personal letters in an abandoned family house in New Jersey. The letters included correspondence between Alex Gumberg and Ray's great-great-aunt, Edith Siebel, from 1908 to 1917.
Cannata graciously provided transcribed versions of his Siebel correspondence collection, and copies of the originals.
For the last twelve years, I've been slowly accumulating other sources, many from Russian language sources online. But also secondary sources, like books published by those who knew, worked with, or encountered Gumberg.
The Siebel letters provided quick refutations of what I came to call the "Libbey version" of Gumberg: that he was a "Russian-American businessman who was neutral and only wanted to bring the two countries together."
The personal letters revealed that Gumberg, while in America, was immersed in the Russian socialist revolutionary milieu, along with his brother, Josef Gumberg (Bolshevik pseudonymn Sergius Zorin). His foster family, the Siebels, were as well. The letters made clear that Gumberg was a socialist revolutionary, and that his activities before he returned to Russia for the Bolshevik revolution, were completely consistent with a socialist revolutionist operating under cover.
After I presented my findings from Willing Accomplices research to a Tea Party group in Loudoun County, Virginia in 2011, my soon-to-be friend, M. Stanton (Stan) Evans, approached me with questions about Gumberg. His book, Stalin's Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government (2013), was in proof versions at the publisher. He asked for details about my assessment of Gumberg as a Bolshevik agent. Satisfied with my analysis, Stan contacted the publisher to make a last minute revision. On page 66, Stan inserted my analytical conclusion as he introduced Gumberg: …he was a Soviet agent also, as the Soviet leaders gave him the task of interpreting for, and otherwise guiding [influential Americans caught up in the Bolshevik revolution]. Prior to hearing my analysis, Stan had relied on Libbey's interpretation, and a bit of the Sutton fantasy.
I continued to research Gumberg, as time permitted. I visited the Gumberg archive in Wisconsin, only for a few short hours. Gathering more and more sources, details, information, all corroborating my initial analysis, I just did not have the time to write it up.
More than ten years into this Gumberg Project, I'm now convinced of two things:
First, that Gumberg’s role as a pivotal player in the development of the geopolitical monster of the 20th century—relations between the USSR and the USA—is unrecognized. He manipulated America’s understanding of, and insights into, Bolsheviks and communism for the benefit of the Bolsheviks. He muddied the waters and laid the groundwork for confused Americans to support the Bolsheviks/Soviets even as they massacred millions and spread their tainted political beliefs around the world.
Second, that the historical record on Gumberg is horribly flawed. Neither the Libbey version or the Sutton version of Gumberg is linked to the reality of the man and his operations and results.
With those two realizations as the foundation, I've embarked on a quest to gather, analyze, and record the truth of Alexander Gumberg. To set the historical record straight on Gumberg's actual role and affiliations. To recognize Gumberg for the operational powerhouse he was. To answer and refute both Libbey's and Sutton's versions of Gumberg. To attempt to provide posterity with a more realistic view of Gumberg, his life and his operations.
Although there is likely a minimal audience for this project, I believe that history requires that Gumberg be realistically analyzed and represented. The last hundred years of misunderstanding Gumberg has likely caused faulty judgements and decisions by Americans.
Originally, I envisioned putting all my research together into a Gumberg book. But as I began focusing on the project, it seems like the sheer volume will require a couple of books.
As of now, the plan is to publish here a series of papers, as they are completed. These papers will then be compiled into book(s), as the project develops.