Golos, Joseph (Raisen, Jacob)

(1890–1943)

   After immigrating to the United States as a political refugee from tsarist repression, Golos joined the American communist movement. During the Russian civil war, he returned to his homeland to serve the infant Soviet state and was recruited into foreign intelligence. In 1927 he returned to the United States, where he worked as an illegal. His cover was the head of World Tourists, which arranged travel for Americans interested in visiting the Soviet Union. The cover allowed Golos to move money and people into and out of the United States. Golos was one of the key people in the Soviet intelligence network. His code name was “Zvuk” (Sound). He acted as a recruiter and agent handler as well as the link between agents recruited by the Communist Party and the NKVD. His most important sources were the agents of the Silvermaster group, more than 20 American civil servants who volunteered to work for Soviet intelligence in the 1930s. Golos also managed an operation that forged passports for Soviet agents. One of Golos’s couriers was his lover, Elizabeth Bentley, who maintained contact with important sources in the U.S. Treasury Department, the White House, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Julius Rosenberg contacted Golos in the early 1940s and was referred by him to a Soviet case officer. The strain of managing cover companies, forging documents, and running agents took a terrible toll on his life and Golos died of a heart attack in late 1943. His death seriously unsettled Soviet intelligence operations in the United States. The NKVD rezidentura badly handled some of his agents, and their ham-handedness convinced Bentley to defect.