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John Spivak ( 1897 – September 30, 1981 ) was a Connecticut-born freelance journalist who contributed to numerous publications including The Daily Worker, The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Journal, The New York Sun, The New York Post and Esquire. An outspoken socialist, he is believed to have been a secret member of the CPUSA and to have been involved in espionage activities on their behalf.

Journalistic Career
Spivak experienced early success covering the West Virginia Coal Mine Wars of 1919 for the New York Call and the Charleston Gazette. In 1921, he conducted publicity and investigative work for the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee and he supported his family through much of the 1920s by writing for Bernnar Macfadden’s publications, including the New York Evening Graphic and Physical Culture, under various pseudonyms. He edited (and ghost wrote most of the content of) True Strange Stories for a period of time before leaving to write The Devil’s Brigade, a history of the Hatfield-McCoy feud.

In 1932, after extensive investigation of the penal servitude system in Georgia, Spivak published Georgia Nigger, a sympathetic, fictionalized account of life on a Georgia chain gang. The book was praised by the New York Times and the NAACP, but failed to achieve the same degree of popular success as Robert Ellior Burns’ I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang!, published several months prior. Spivak testified in Burns’ successful attempt to resist extradition from Illinois, and the surreptitious photographs of grueling corporal punishment employed against Georgia prisoners were introduced into evidence. Georgia Nigger was serialized in the Daily Worker, the CPUSA’s official organ, which inspired the International Labor Defense to ask Spivak to cover their defense of the Scottsboro Boys. Spivak ultimately provided trial coverage for a variety of leftist papers including the Daily Worker, France’s L’Humanité, and the Associated Negro Press.

Spivak devoted much of the 1930s to writing exposés of American fascist and anti-Semitic groups, and political and financial ties between vocal extremists and American conservatives who took a more moderate positions in public. A Jewish socialist, Spivak frequently argued that politically conservative groups were deeply tied to foreign and domestic anti-Semitic movements, and that that politically conservative Jewish groups which aided right wing causes indirectly supported anti-Semitism. Additionally, he criticized individual Jewish-American businessmen who did not divest their German holdings after the rise of the Nazi party.

In the fall of 1934 he published a series of articles titled “Plotting America’s Pogroms” in New Masses which discussed German propaganda efforts in the United States and achieved an unusual degree of prominence in non-leftist circles. The articles contained alleged evidence of financial ties between Nazi agents and Pennsylvania Representative Louis T. McFadden, who had introduced material drawn from the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” into the House record. They also alleged that George Sylvester Viereck and Ralph M. Easley had attempted to introduce anti-Semitic propaganda into the United States on behalf of the German government.

In winter of 1935, he published a pair of articles from on the Business Plot, an alleged attempt by American business interests to back a coup led by Marine General Smedley Butler. Though the House Un-American Activities Committee endorsed Butler’s claims that he had been approached by a well financed agent claiming to represent Wall Street business interests, his testimony was censored to remove allegations against specific public figures. Having requested the public files HUAC’s public files from its hearings on the incident, Spivak was accidentally granted access to an unexpurgated version of Butler’s the testimony, which he published side by side with the censored version. Spivak argued that the committee and mainstream newspaper interests had intentionally downplayed the plot to protect the reputations of the plotters.

In 1940, Spivak published Shrine of the Silver Dollar, an expose on Father Charles Coughlin which, in addition to cataloguing the priest’s pro-fascist and anti-Semitic statements, and publicized the fact that Coughlin and his close associates had speculated heavily in the silver market while the priest urged the public to lobby for silver-backed currency.

In 1967 he published A Man in His Time, an autobiographical work containing anecdotes about his ideology and notable discussing his career.

Covert Activities
In addition to his public career, Spivak is alleged to have been involved in espionage activities on behalf of leftist causes. According to Elizabeth Bentley, he was a CPUSA member who worked closely with Jacob Golos. [Haynes, http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page44.html]. Former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev asserts that Spivak was a Soviet asset codenamed “Green”, and was “before 1941 used on the Trotskyites”. .

The FBI believed that Spivak and Leon Josephson burglarized the office of O. John Rogge while the latter was serving as David Greenglass’ attorney, and were responsible for the photostatic copies of Rogge’s notes which were released to sympathetic members of the press in an effort to discredit Greenglass’ testimony against Julius and Ethel Rosenburg. [Romerstein and Breindel The Verona Secrets at 252.]

His autobiography, while open about his socialism, does not discuss his opinion of internecine Soviet struggles, the CPUSA, the Rosenbergs, Golos or Bentley in any detail. It does imply that his faith in the Soviet Union was shaken by Khruschev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin.