Andrew Meier: The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service

Nearly everyone knows what life on Her Majesty's Secret Service is like: martinis, danger, and the best gadgets England has to offer, with a Bond girl waiting at the end of the adventure. Aspiring members of Stalin's Secret Service would discover a few key differences: neurotoxins, paranoia, and a trip to the gulag replaced all the best parts.

Cy Oggins died in a Soviet prison in 1947. But he was born in the United States, the son of Jewish immigrants in small town Connecticut. Surrounded by labor strife as a child, he became involved in radical causes after America's entry into World War I. But while many of his classmates at Columbia University settled down after graduation, Oggins went deeper into New York's network of underground Marxists. And within a few years, he and his wife, Nerma, had their first assignment from Moscow: a glamorous new identity awaited them overseas, in the socialist hotbed of Berlin. But so did a nest of other Soviet spies, some of whom were assigned to spy on spies.

Even after Meier's exhaustive research, gaps remain in the strange odyssey of an American who wound up imprisoned in a Soviet gulag. Nearly seven decades later, the Russian government was only willing to release 39 of the 162 pages in his arrest dossier. Naturally, Oggins himself kept few photos, letters, or records. Only scraps remain from his activities in Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, and Manchuria. There was no evidence to suggest Oggins was guilty of treason, or had ever failed to follow an order from Moscow. But at the end of the 1930s, he met the same fate as many true believers from the 1920s: arrest and imprisonment on unspecified charges. Unlike his fellow prisoners, Cy Oggins was an American citizen; like them, however, he would not escape the fate Stalin intended for him, not even after the intervention of the U.S. State Department. The Lost Spy is the story of how a small town kid followed his fervently-held ideals to a lonely death in one of the worst places in the world, and the terrible price he – and many others - paid in Stalin's service.

Andrew Meier is the author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall and Chechnya: To the Heart of a Conflict. A former Moscow correspondent for Time, he has reported from Russia and the former USSR for two decades. Meier has contributed to Harper's, the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. He is currently a writer-in-residence at the New School University in New York City.