Further notes on Goold-Verschoyle
Extracts from: I was Stalin's Spy
By W G Krivitsky
Published by Ian Faulkner Publishing Ltd, Cambridge, 1992
[The book was first published in 1939]
ISBN 1857630076 - Pages 115-116
I do not know the number of anti-Stalinists executed in Loyalist Spain. I cold describe scores of individual
cases, but I shall confine myself to one probable victim who may still be alive. The few facts which I shall relate may help his
family to save him. A young Englishman, a radio engineer named friend, had a brother in Leningrad, married to a Russian girl. He
was an enthusiastic anti-Fascist, and Soviet Russia was the land of his dreams. He succeeded, after long efforts, in gaining admission
to the Soviet Union, and took up his residence there.
When Soviet intervention began, he was dispatched to Spain as a radio technician. Early in 1937, a report arrived at
the Moscow headquarters of the OPGU to the effect that friend was showing "Trotskyist sympathies". I knew the boy, and there
is no question that he was whole-heartedly devoted to the Loyalist cause and to the Soviet Union. True, he had associated with
Socialists and other radicals, which was only natural for a young Englishman unaware of the invisible Chinese Wall segregating the
Soviet personnel from the Spaniards.
Later I asked one of the OPGU officials in Moscow about him, and was answered evasively. On further inquiry I learned
that friend had been brought home as a prisoner to Odessa. I was told of the trick by which he had been taken. The OGPU in Spain had
lured him on to a Soviet vessel, pretending that he was needed to repair the ship's radio transmitter. Friend had no suspicion that
the OGPU was after him. Once on board, he was seized. On April 12, he was put in the dungeons of the OGPU in Moscow. To this day, his
brother in Leningrad and his family in England do not know what happened to him. Nor have I been able to learn whether he was
executed as a "spy" or lives now in a remote concentration camp.
This extract would echo the piece carried by MacEoin, with the obvious problems of the persons' name and nationality.
Presumably anyone living in Russia would be a strong contender for using a pseudonym. Presumably the author may not be able to distinguish
English and Irish accents. McGarry cites this book in his book on Spain to give information on Gould.
Extract from
7000 days in Siberia
by Karlo Stajner
Published in 1988 by Canongate Publishing Ltd,
Edinburgh. Originally published in Serbo-Croat in 1971. Joel Agee
translated this edition.
ISBN 0862412080 - Page 51
The story of Goold-Verschoyle is of particular interest. This young Irishman had joined the republican Army as a
volunteer during the Spanish Civil war and worked as a radio technician for the Barcelona radio station. When he noticed that the NKVD was
gaining more and more influence in the republican Army, he reported to his commander that he was a republican but not a communist, and since he
now appeared to be fighting for a communist, not a republican Spain, he asked to be released from service. The commander told him that he would
have to wait a few days until a replacement was found.
Several days later, a soldier approached him and asked him to come to the harbour, where there was a ship with defective
radio equipment.
Goold-Verschoyle took his tool bag and boarded the
ship; it was a Soviet freighter. He had scarcely stepped into the cabin
where the defective equipment was supposed to be when the door shut
behind him and he found himself in the company of two members of the
Communist Youth League. The ship departed and didn't stop until it
reached the harbour of Sevastopol. There the Irishman and the two
Komsomol members were arrested by the NKVD and taken to jail. Later they
were transported to Moscow, where they were accused of being British
spies and were sentenced to 8 years in prison.
The author of these notes says of himself that he was
born on 15th January 1905 in Vienna, moving to Yugoslavia in
1922 and from there to the USSR in 1932. He was arrested on November 4th
1936 in Moscow and spent the next 20 years in a series of concentration
camps. His "crime" was being "a Gestapo spy" and of
involvement in the murder of Kirov.
On page X11 of the introduction to his book Stajner
says that "in Austria, he was, from the end of the First World War,
a typesetter and a member of the directorate of the Communist Youth
League. He worked at the Youth Section of the International. In the
twenties, he enjoyed excellent relations with Yugoslav communists and
came to work in Yugoslavia. In Zagreb, following party orders, he
founded and directed the printing press which issued the party's
clandestine publications. He collaborated with a number of
revolutionaries of the period, carried out different missions,
travelled, was imprisoned in Zagreb, Paris and Vienna, worked for the
Comintern in Berlin, and finally, in 1932, under orders from the
Yugoslav Communist Party, left for the USSR. A month after his arrival
in Moscow, where he immediately presented himself to the Balkan section
of the Comintern, he was named director of the printing press and
publishing house of the Communist International. He worked there for 4
years, and still held that post when, in 1936, he was arrested."
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