accomplish the wet business. In his 1952 memoir, Whittaker Chambers describes the impact of the defections and (in most cases) assassinations of fellow spies: Suddenly, revolutionists with a lifetime of devoted activity would pop out, like rabbits from a burrow, with the G.P.U. close on their heels—Barmine from the Soviet legation in Athens, Raskolnikoff from the Soviet legation in Sofia, Krivitsky from Amsterdam, Reiss from Switzerland. Not that Reiss fled. Instead, a brave and a lonely man, he sent his single-handed defiance to Stalin: Murderer of the Kremlin cellars, I herewith return my decorations and resume my freedom of action. But defiance is not enough; cunning is needed to fight cunning. It was foredoomed that sooner or later the door of a G.P.U limousine would swing open and Reiss's body with the bullets in the defiant brain would tumble out—as happened shortly after he deserted. Of the four I have named, only Barmine outran the hunters. USA government In New York City, Barmine applied for political asylum and citizenship as one of the earliest high-ranking Soviet government defectors to the United States. In the days before the formation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Barmine does not appear to have been debriefed at all by the United States government regarding his extensive knowledge of Soviet leaders and policies. In 1941, Barmine joined a U.S. Army anti-aircraft unit as a 42-year-old private soldier. In 1942, he obtained his U.S. citizenship. In 1943 and 1944, Barmine worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the wartime agency responsible for external intelligence and sabotage against Axis countries. After a period of writing articles for various journals as well as his second book in 1945, Barmine joined Voice of America in 1948, serving for sixteen years as chief of its Russian branch. Testimony On December 14, 1948, after an interview with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, Barmine revealed that Soviet GRU Director Yan Karlovich Berzin had informed him prior to his 1937 defection that American professor and former Office of War Information director Owen Lattimore was a Soviet agent. In 1952, Barmine testified under oath before a Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (McCarran Committee) that he was told by Soviet GRU Director Berzin that Lattimore was "one of our men". In his memoirs, Barmine related how he and fellow members of the Soviet GRU were surprised to learn of the burgeoning support for Soviet