Isaac "Pop" Folkoff also known as "Volkov," "Folconoff," and "Uncle" (1881 -1975), was a senior founding member of the

California Communist Party California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

and West Coast liaison between

Soviet intelligence This is a list of historical secret police organizations. In most cases they are no longer current because the regime that ran them was overthrown or changed, or they changed their names. Few still exist under the same name as legitimate police fo ...

and the

Communist Party USA The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), is a communist party in the United States which was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revo ...

(CPUSA).

Career

In 1904, a 24-year-old Folkoff arrived

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

, where he ran an embroidery business. He helped found the California Communist Party and had gone as a delegate for the founding of the Communist International ("

Comintern The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, was a Soviet Union, Soviet-controlled international organization founded in 1919 that advocated world communism. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress to ...

") in Moscow in 1919. A former garment presser and self-taught Marxist philosopher, Folkoff specialized in fund-raising for party causes. He was in charge of

West Coast West Coast or west coast may refer to: Geography Australia * Western Australia *Regions of South Australia#Weather forecasting, West Coast of South Australia * West Coast, Tasmania **West Coast Range, mountain range in the region Canada * Britis ...

operations. He worked as a courier passing information to and from Soviet sources, and as a talent spotter and vetter of potential espionage recruits. He also worked as a

Case Officer In intelligence organizations, agent handling is the management of so-called agents (called secret agents or spies in common parlance), principal agents, and agent networks (called "assets") by intelligence officers typically known as case o ...

. His code name in Soviet intelligence and in the

Venona The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (later absorbed by the National Security Agency), which ran from February 1, 1943, until Octob ...

files was "Uncle". Notes taken in 1939 by

Adolph Berle Adolf Augustus Berle Jr. (; January 29, 1895 – February 17, 1971) was an American lawyer, educator, writer, and diplomat. He was the author of ''The Modern Corporation and Private Property'', a groundbreaking work on corporate governance, a prof ...

show that

Whittaker Chambers Whittaker Chambers (born Jay Vivian Chambers; April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer-editor, who, after early years as a Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet spy (1932–1938), defected from the Soviet underground (1938), ...

told him:

West Coast-Head : "The Old Man"-Volkov is his real name - daughter a Comintern courier. He knows the West Coast underground-Residence: San Francisco or Oakland

When Grigory Markovich Kheifitz, formerly personal secretary to

Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 19 ...

's wife

Nadezhda Krupskaya Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya ( rus, links=no, Надежда Константиновна Крупская, p=nɐˈdʲeʐdə kənstɐnˈtʲinəvnə ˈkrupskəjə; 27 February 1939) was a Russian revolutionary and the wife of Vladimir Lenin ...

, came to San Francisco in 1941, he began meeting with Folkoff to develop information and recruit intelligence workers among American Communists.

Venona

According to the

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...

, Folkoff appears in several

descripts as "Uncle": * April 18, 1945: "Uncle told us..." * May 18, 1945: "According to information from Uncle..."

Personal

Folkoff married Minni. 1930 census data shows that their niece Minnie Folkoff and nephew Robert Folkoff lived with them at the time. Robert Folkoff was a veteran of World War I.

References

Sources

* *

John Earl Haynes John Earl Haynes (born 1944) is an American historian who worked as a specialist in 20th-century political history in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. He is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist and anti- ...

and

Harvey Klehr Harvey Elliott Klehr (born December 25, 1945) is a professor of politics and history at Emory University. Klehr is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America (many written jointly with ...

, ''Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America'' (New Haven:

Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day, and became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and operationally autonomous. , Yale Universi ...

, 1999), pgs. 234, 235, 239.

External links