Stephen Laird, born Laird Lichtenwalner, (August 1, 1915 - February 15, 1990) was an American journalist, working as a ''Time'' magazine reporter and

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainmen ...

correspondent. He was also accused of being a

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

spy and supposedly becoming a communist in the 1930s and the 1940s and provided information to agents of the Soviet Union. Laird was allegedly recruited by the Soviets while he was at

Swarthmore College Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeduca ...

in the early 1930s. Laird told the ''Allentown Morning Call'' in 1986 that he became close friends with future Soviet ambassador to the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

Oleg Troyanovsky Oleg Alexandrovich Troyanovsky (24 November 1919 – 21 December 2003) was ambassador of the Soviet Union to Japan and China and was the Soviet Permanent Representative to the United Nations (from 1976 to 1986). Troyanovsky was born into a di ...

, who was son of Aleksandr A. Troyanovsky, the first Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1934 to 1938, while at Swarthmore. Oleg was a fellow student and member of the football team, of which Laird was assistant coach, and later became a foreign policy assistant and interpreter for

Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secreta ...

and adviser to

Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...

. Laird was supposedly considered to be a politically well-developed person by the MGB in 1944 and being used as an agent. In 1949 he was living in Vic Vaud,

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

. His case was referred to the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

in the fall of 1950. The story of Laird's secret life surfaced for the first time in the Venona files. Laird's reported code name in both Soviet intelligence and the Venona files is "Yun".

References

* John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, ''Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America,'' Yale University Press
Time Writer From Emmaus Dies In France
{{DEFAULTSORT:Laird, Stephen American male journalists American reporters and correspondents Swarthmore College alumni American spies for the Soviet Union American people in the Venona papers 1915 births 1990 deaths