Ignace Poretsky in 1931. After first serving as a courier, she used
her U.S. passport to move to New York, where she was joined by
her husband after his release from a concentration camp. In the mid-
1930s, they were transferred to the new foreign intelligence branch of
the NKVD (Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs).
As a recruiter (code name redhead), Massing focused on the
strong anti-Nazi sentiments of New Deal liberals, such as Noel
Field, who dominated the federal government. Although she and her
husband were summoned to Moscow at the height of the Stalinist
purges and interrogated by the NKVD, they managed to return to
the United States and quietly drop from Soviet service. The 1939
Nazi-Soviet Pact sealed their disillusionment. During World War
II, Massing found a job making gun mounts for a shipyard in New
Jersey. In the winter of 1946–1947, prompted by an investigation of
her first husband, Massing was debriefed by the U.S. Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI). She testified before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities and at the second perjury trial of Alger Hiss.
Until her death in March 1981, besides continuing to cooperate with
the FBI, Massing served as a consultant to the Central Intelligence
Agency. Her autobiography, This Deception, appeared in 1951.MASSING, PAUL (1902–1979). A German sociologist associated
with the Frankfurt School as well as a spy for the Soviet Union, Paul
Massing was born in Grumbach (North Rhine-Westphalia) on 30
August 1902. In 1929, after receiving a doctorate from the University
of Frankfurt am Main, he took a position in the German Department
of the International Agrarian Institute in Moscow. On his return to
Berlin with his wife Hede Massing in 1931, he reluctantly joined
the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands and became engaged in the
anti-Nazi resistance. This activity resulted in his arrest and solitary
confinement in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1933. Re-
leased five months later, Massing joined his wife (who held a United
States passport) in New York and began working for the foreign
intelligence section of the NKVD under the code name vacek.
Despite their growing disillusionment—underscored by the onset
of the Moscow purge trials—Massing and his wife returned to the
Soviet Union in October 1937, determined to observe conditions
firsthand and to avenge the sudden death of their NKVD controller
286 • MASSING, PAUL