Peters, Josef

(c. 1895–?)

   This man who left a long shadow across American and Soviet intelligence history had a number of aliases: Alexander Goldfarb, Isador Boorstein, and Alexander Stevens, as well as Josef Peters. He was born in Cop, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He immigrated illegally to America after World War I and served as a militant in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). In 1931 he was recalled to Moscow and trained to be head of the Comintern’s illegal section inside the CPUSA. For the next six years, he served as a conduit between the American party and the Soviet intelligence services, traveling monthly to meet with agents in Washington. During this time, he ran Whittaker Chambers and helped establish a number of intelligence rings in Washington and New York. In 1938, when Chambers left the Communist Party and his life as a Soviet agent, Peters was blamed by Moscow and was fired. His replacement, Rudy Baker, was even better at managing the sensitive CPUSA-NKVD relationship. Peters later appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and admitted that he was an illegal immigrant. He refused to answer any questions about his intelligence activities and was deported to Hungary. Peters’s heritage was the establishment of tight links between the CPUSA and the intelligence services, which made the Soviet successes of the 1940s possible.

   See also Browder, Earl.