Brian Goold-Verschoyle

Brian Goold-Verschoyle (5 June 1912 – 5 January 1942) was an Irish member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who was recruited by the Soviet NKVD as a courier between its moles and their handlers in London. After being sent as a radio technician to Republican Spain, in 1937 he revealed his disaffection with the Moscow party line. Abducted by being lured aboard a Soviet freighter, he was smuggled to the USSR and died as a prisoner in the Gulag in 1942. He is one of only three Irish people who can be formally identified as victims of Stalin's Great Purge.

Early life
Brian Goold-Verschoyle was born in Dunkineely, County Donegal into a family from the Anglo-Irish gentry. His father, Hamilton Frederick Stuart Goold Verschoyle, a barrister, was a pacifist who supported Home Rule.

After a childhood spent during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War and schooling at Portora Royal and Marlborough public schools 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.

Soviet courier
Goold-Verschoyle became a Soviet spy after visiting his older brother Hamilton Neil Goold-Verschoyle and his Russian wife in Leningrad. The British domestic counterintelligence service, MI5, thought he was simply a "naïve supporter" of the Soviet Union. They remained unaware of the full truth until they learned years later from defecting Soviet GRU spymasters Gen. Walter Krivitsky and Henri Pieck, that Brian Good-Verschoyle had routinely couriered messages to the OGPU/NKVD and that he travelled in 1933, 1934 and 1935 to the USSR.

Brian Goold-Verschoyle also couriered classified papers from moles working within the British Government, particularly from John Herbert King, a British Foreign Office clerk. Goold-Verschoyle delivered the documents to former Roman Catholic priest and NKVD spymaster Theodore Maly, for whom he was the principle courier. He also worked as a courier for Dmitri Bystrolyotov. In 1936 Goold-Verschoyle, who had formerly worked as a technician, returned 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 and, to the dismay of his NKVD superiors, she accompanied him. Associated in the German Communist Party with the so-called Right Opposition, she was regarded as politically suspect. When Goold-Verschoyle completed his wireless training, he was assigned as a military advisor to the Second Spanish Republic, with express orders to break off all contact with Moos.

Disaffection and arrest
In Spain, Goold-Verschoyle was alarmed by what he perceived as the subversion of the Second Spanish Republic by both Soviet intelligence agents and the local Communists they directed. He particularly objected to the Red Terror: the surveillance and persecution of both real and suspected members of the anti-Stalinist Left as alleged fifth columnists by the Soviet NKVD and the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the Republic's Communist-controlled political police. Concluding that Moscow had no interest in any socialist revolution it did not control completely, Goold-Verschoyle's letters to Lotte Moos and to his family in Ireland revealed a growing sympathy for the anti-Stalinist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM, the militia with which George Orwell served and which inspired his memoir Homage to Catalonia).

By April 1937, while working as a technician for the radio service of the Republican Army in Barcelona, Goold-Verschoyle had become sufficiently disillusioned that he asked to be released from active service. His commanding officer told him that he would have to wait until a replacement could be found. Several days later, Goold-Verschoyle was assigned to repair radio equipment aboard a Soviet freighter. Once aboard he was arrested and, with two members of the Communist Youth League, he was shipped as a prisoner to the Soviet port of Sevastopol. There the Irishman and the two Komsomol members were handed over to the NKVD and transferred to the Lubianka Prison in Moscow.

Goold Vershoyle was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities. He died as a political prisoner in a Soviet gulag in Orenburg Oblast on 5 January 1942.

Goold Vershoyle was survived by his brother, Hamilton Neil Goold-Verschoyle, who subsequently emigrated from Ireland to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1987, by his sister Mrs. Shiela Fitzgerald, and by three younger siblings.

In popular culture

 * Brian Goold-Verschoyle is mentioned in GRU defector Walter Krivitsky's memoir I Was Stalin's Spy and in Gulag survivor Karlo Stajner's memoir 7000 Days in Siberia.
 * His childhood and later life are fictionalized – along with that of his oldest brother, fellow communist Hamilton Neil Goold-Verschoyle, and their sister, Sheila Fitzgerald – in the 2005 historical novel, The Family on Paradise Pier by Dermot Bolger.
 * 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 inspired by the life of Brian Goold-Verschoyle.