Arvid Jacobson was a Finnish-American Communist who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. This article is about communism as a form of society and as a political movement. ...

Jacobson was working as a high school teacher in Detroit when he was recruited to work for Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) by the Comintern agent "Mrs. Morton," the wife of Otto Kuusinen, in the fall of 1932. He travelled to New York where the fledgling GRU agent Whittaker Chambers was assigned the task of meeting Jacobson and making a fitness report. Chambers advised against Jacobson's use as an underground agent because of his truculent temperament and the fact that he was missing fingers on one hand. Nevertheless, the GRU sent him to Europe as part of an apparatus of Soviet agents, led by the wife of Alfred Tilton, that operated in Finland. The Finnish police uncovered the group after a suspected Army Officer fled to the Soviet Union with military secrets. Jacobson was arrested in October 1933, along with his wife, and he promptly confessed to his role as an agent and revealed the existence of another Soviet apparatus working in Paris which included Lydia Stahl and Robert Gordon Switz. Emblem of GRU spetsnaz GRU is the English transliteration of the Russian acronym ГРУ, which stands for Гла́вное Разве́дывательное Управле́ние (Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie), meaning Main Intelligence Directorate. ... The Comintern (Russian: Коммунистический Интернационал, Kommunisticheskiy Internatsional – Communist International, also known as the Third International) was an international Communist organization founded in March 1919, in the midst of the war communism period (1918-1921), by Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), which intended to fight by all available means, including... Otto Ville (Wilhelm) Kuusinen (known in Russian as Отто Вильгельмович Куусинен) (1881–1964) was a Finnish and Soviet politician, literature historian, and poet, who after the defeat in the Finnish Civil War fled to Bolshevist Russia, where he worked until his death. ... Jay Vivian (David Whittaker) Chambers (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer, editor, Communist party-member-turned-defector, best known for his testimony about the espionage and subversion of Alger Hiss. ... Alfred Tilton or Joseph Paquett, posed as a Canadian immigrant but was actually an Illegal Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) Officer in the United States in the late 1920s. ... Lydia Stahl was an American assistant to Alfred Tilton, a Soviet Miltiary Inteligence (GRU) Officer in the United States in the late 1920s. ...

After a secret trial, the Finnish court sentenced Jacobson to six years imprisonment in April 1934. He was subsequently pardoned in July 1935 and returned to the United States.

References

• Whittaker Chambers, Witness, Random House, 1952.
• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999), pgs. 375, 469.
• Aino Kuusinen, The Rings of Destiny: Inside Soviet Russia from Lenin to Brezhnev, Morrow, 1974.
• Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York: Random House, (1997), pg. 106