Brian Goold-Verschoyle

Brian Goold-Verschoyle (5 June 1912 – 5 January 1942) was an Anglo-Irish member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who was recruited by the Soviet NKVD as a courier for its agents in Britain. After being sent as a radio technician to Republican Spain, in 1937 he revealed his disaffection with the Moscow party line. Detained on a Soviet freighter, he was returned to Moscow. He died in a Soviet prison camp in 1942, one of three Irish people identified as victims of Stalin's Great Purge.[1][2]

Early life

Brian Goold-Verschoyle was born in Dunkineely, County Donegal into a family from the Anglo-Irish gentry. After a childhood spent during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War and schooling at Portora Royal and Marlborough public schools[2] he moved in 1929 to England at the age of 19. He took part in an apprenticeship in English Electric Works in Stafford.

In 1931 he applied to join the Communist Party of Great Britain which prompted the MI5 to open a file on him. Eventually he became the party's leader in Stafford.[3]

Soviet courier

Goold-Verschoyle became a Soviet spy after visiting his brother Neil in Moscow.[4] The British domestic counterintelligence service, MI5, thought he was simply a "naïve supporter" of the Soviet Union unaware that he was being used to courier messages to the NKVD while he lived in London. His handler was Henri Pieck.

Goold-Verschoyle couriered UK agent's reports, mainly from John Herbert King, a British Foreign Office clerk, and delivered them to former Roman Catholic priest and NKVD spymaster Theodore Maly, for whom he was the principle courier. He was also a courier for Dmitri Bystrolyotov[5] In 1936 Goold-Verschoyle, who had formerly worked as a technician, traveled under an assumed name to Moscow to undergo wireless training. He was in love at the time with a German Jewish refugee named Lotte Moos. He took her to Moscow against orders, and accordingly fell afoul of his Soviet masters. He was then sent to the Spanish Civil War (Barcelona) under order to break off all contact with Lotte. However he disobeyed this order.[2]

Disaffection and arrest

During his stationing in Spain he got in trouble over his personal views. He was alarmed by what he perceived as the subversion of the Second Spanish Republic through the growing influence and authority of Soviet agents and their local Communist allies and by and the surveillance and prosecution of ideological deviance by the Soviet NKVD and Spanish SIM.[3] Concluding that Moscow had no interest in a socialist revolution it could not hope to control, his letters to family in Ireland revealed a growing sympathy for the anti-Stalinist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).

In April 1937, working as a technician for the radio station of the Republican Army in Barcelona he was sufficiently disillusioned with the growing influence and authority of the Stalinists that he asked to be released from service. His commander told him that he would have to wait a few days until a replacement was found. Several days later, he was asked repair radio equipment on a Soviet freighter. Once aboard he was detained, and with two members of the Communist Youth League found himself being shipped as a prisoner to Sevastopol. There the Irishman and the two Komsomol members were arrested by the NKVD and transferred to the Lubianka Prison in Moscow.[6]

Goold Vershoyle was eventuallysentenced to eight years of solitary confinement for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities. He died the Gulag inside an Orenburg concentration camp on 5 January 1942.[7][3]

  • Brian Goold-Verschoyle is mentioned in Walter Krivitsky's memoir I Was Stalin's Spy and in Karlo Stajner's memoir 7000 Days in Siberia.[6]
  • His childhood and later life is explored – along with that of his oldest brother, the communist Neil Goold-Verschoyle, and his sister, Sheila Fitzgerald – in the 2005 novel, The Family on Paradise Pier by Dermot Bolger.[8]
  • Danilo Kiš's collection of short stories A Tomb for Boris Davidovich contains a short story entitled The Sow That Eats Her Farrow that is based on the life of Brian Goold-Verschoyle.[9]

References
  1. McLoughlin, Barry (2007). Left to the wolves: Irish victims of Stalinist terror. Irish Academic Press. p. 117. ISBN 9780716529149. Retrieved 20 June 2017.
  2. Fleming, Diarmaid (16 June 2007). "Irish victims of Stalin uncovered". Retrieved 1 May 2022.
  3. Cliff, Shane (September 2010). "An Irish Communist and MI5 contra‐intelligence in the 1930's" (PDF). Nipissing University. Retrieved 4 May 2021.
  4. "Irish victims of Stalin uncovered". BBC News. 16 June 2007. Retrieved 19 July 2021.
  5. West, Nigel (7 May 2007). Mask: MI5's Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain. ISBN 9781134265763.
  6. Stajner, Karlo (1988). 7000 Days in Siberia. Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing Ltd. p. 51. ISBN 0862412080.
  7. Volodarsky, Boris (2014). Stalin's Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov. OUP Oxford. p. 295. ISBN 9780191045530. Retrieved 20 June 2017.
  8. "Summers before the storm". The Irish Times. 22 March 2005. Retrieved 15 June 2018.
  9. Christie, Stuart (15 February 2011). Arena Two: Anarchists in Fiction. ISBN 9781604862140.
  • Walter Krivitsky, I was Stalin's Spy, pp. 115–16. Ian Faulkner Publishing Ltd, Cambridge, 1992
  • Barry McLoughlin, Left to the Wolves: Irish Victims of Stalinist Terror
  • International Socialism – "Stalin's Irish Victims"
  • Dermot Bolger, The Family on Paradise Pier
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