Background
Pravdin was born in London, and lived at one time in the United States during the early twenties.
Pravdin was born in London, and lived at one time in the United States during the early twenties.
He later became a Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) agent, stationed in the United States. During the 1930s, Pravdin had been involved in killings and kidnappings in Europe for the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), including the assassination of Ignace Reiss, a GRU officer who defected in 1937. Reiss was caught by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs in Switzerland, where he was killed as an object lesson to potential defectors.
Pravdin disappeared after the murder.
Later, during World World War II, he turned up again in the United States where he served as a Soviet diplomat, Vladimir Sergeyvich Pravdin. Later, in the United States, Pravdin operated under cover as the head of Telegraphic Agency of the USSR News Agency from 1944 to 1945.
Among Pravdin"s contacts while serving in the United States were Judith Coplon Josef Katz, Bernard Schuster, and Josef Berger. On one occasion, he met with a person with three children to offer money for certain unspecified information and who was code-named by the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) as BLIN ("bliny" is Russian for "pancake").
In the plain language of the cable decrypt, BLIN was willing to provide information but declined to cooperate with the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs because the approach had been clumsy, but left open the possibility of future cooperation.
From scraps of information about BLIN that arose from the brief breaking of the Russian code in the materials the United States. known as the Venona project, the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that BLIN “appears” to be I.F. Stone. Stone biographer Myra MacPherson has contended that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was uncertain about whether BLIN was, in fact, Stone, noting that, unlike Stone, BLIN was identified as someone “whose true pro-Soviet sympathies were not known to the public..”. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also considered the possibility of Ernest K. Lindley, who better fit the profile of a “very prominent journalist” and who, like Stone (and BLIN), had three children.
Another cable indicated that BLIN was afraid of contact with Pravdin lest he draw the attention of J. Edgar Hoover.
I.F. Stone was already attacking J. Edgar Hoover frequently in 1943 and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was of the view that “Stone is known to the bureau because of his hostile editorial comments made against the Federal Bureau of Investigation as early as 1936."
In 1945, while serving as a senior adviser to the American delegation at the founding conference of the United Nations, Assistant Secretary of the United States. Treasury Harry Dexter White met with Pravdin and answered a series of questions about United States. negotiating strategy and possible ways for Moscow to defeat or water down American post-War proposals. Pravdin left the United States and returned to the Soviet Union on 11 March 1946.
Anatoli Golitsyn, another Soviet defector in the 1960s, also claimed that Pravdin was active in Austria after World World War II, often passing as a Frenchman.