Isaac Don Levine
Isaac Don Levine was born in Mozyr, Russia, on 19th January, 1892. Levine became a socialist and became involved in anti-tsarist political activity. In 1911 he emigrated to the United States and settled in Missouri.
Levine became a journalist and found work with The Kansas City Star. In 1917 he covered the Bolshevik Revolution for The New York Herald Tribune. His reports eventually were turned into a book, The Russian Revolution (1917). He would return to Russia in the early 1920s to cover the Russian Civil War for The Chicago Daily News. In the 1930s he worked as a columnist for William Randolph Hearst. Levine also wrote a critical biography of Joseph Stalin, entitled Stalin (1931).
In 1939, Levine met Whittaker Chambers, a former member of the American Communist Party. Chambers told Levine that there was a communist cell in the United States government. Chambers recalled in his book, Witness (1952): "For years, he (Levine) has carried on against Communism a kind of private war which is also a public service. He is a skillful professional journalist and a notable ghost writer... From the first, Levine had urged me to take my story to the proper authorities. I had said no. I was extremely wary of Levine. I knew little or nothing about him, and the ex-Communist Party, but the natural prey of anyone who can turn his plight to his own purpose or profit."
Levine arranged for Chambers to meet Adolf Berle, one of the top aides to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. John V. Fleming, has argued in The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War (2009) that Chambers told Berle that Alger Hiss was one of the communist agents in the government. According to Chambers, Berle reacted with the comment: "We may be in this war within forty-eight hours and we cannot go into it without clean services." Berle, who was in effect the president's Director of Homeland Security, raised the issue with Roosevelt, "who profanely dismissed it as nonsense."
Levine also collaborated with the Soviet intelligence agency defector, Walter Krivitsky, for a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post, exposing what was going on in the Soviet Union. In November of the same year, the series was collected into a book titled I Was Stalin's Agent (1939). One of the most powerful sections of the book was an account of Stalin's involvement in the Spanish Civil War. "Stalin's intervention in Spain had one primary aim... namely, to include Spain in the sphere of the Kremlin's influence... The world believed that Stalin's actions were in some way connected with world revolution. But this is not true. The problem of world revolution had long before that ceased to be real to Stalin... He was also moved however, by the need of some answer to the foreign friends of the Soviet Union who would be disaffected by the great purge. His failure to defend the Spanish Republic, combined with the shock of the great purge, might have lost him their support."
Levine also provided testimony to the Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on 8th December, 1948. According to Karl Mundt of the HUAC, Levine named Laurence Duggan in executive session. Duggan, who had worked for the State Department during the Second World War, was interviewed by the FBI. Duggan denied being a communist or a spy, but he told agents he had been approached twice in the 1930s by Frederick V. Field and Henry Collins to become a spy. On 20th December, Duggan jumped from the sixteenth-floor window of his New York office on West 45 Street.
John V. Fleming has described "a notorious reactionary if not an outright Fascist". Levine edited the anti-communist magazine Plain Talk. He also worked for Radio Free Europe in West Germany. Other books by Levine include Stalin's Great Secret (1956), Soviet Intervention in Hungary (1957), The Mind of an Assassin - The Man Who Killed Trotsky (1959), I Rediscover Russia (1964), Intervention (1969) and Eyewitness to History: Memoirs and Reflection (1973)
Isaac Don Levine died on 15th February, 1981.
Primary Sources
(1) Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)
For years, he (Levine) has carried on against Communism a kind of private war which is also a public service. He is a skillful professional journalist and a notable ghost writer... From the first, Levine had urged me to take my story to the proper authorities. I had said no. I was extremely wary of Levine. I knew little or nothing about him, and the ex-Communist Party, but the natural prey of anyone who can turn his plight to his own purpose or profit.
(2) John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War (2009)
Jan Valtin himself did not exist. The probable author of the book was Isaac Don Levine, a notorious reactionary if not an outright Fascist. The opposite view was that the book was absolutely true. Every incident described happened to the author, Jan Valtin (Richard Krebs), and happened exactly as described. It is possibly ironic that this was the view that Krebs himself had to adopt. Clearly he had never been entirely frank even with his intimate friend and collaborator Isaac Don Levine, who either actually believed or found it commercially helpful not to disbelieve that the book was essentially "straight" autobiography. The publisher Koppell also at least acted like a true believer. For the fact of the matter was that while Out of the Night might be gripping as a novel, as an autobiography, an "historical document of our times," it was commercial dynamite. At that moment the die was cast. Levine and Koppell sold the book on terms that left Krebs no choice, even if he should have wanted to exercise one. It was a step that would create big problems for the author....
An important pillar of Isaac Don Levine's career was his ability to get "exclusives" with people prominently in the news. A native speaker of Russian, he often had a comparative advantage in dealing with Russians abroad. As of 1941 his greatest coup to date was his access to the recently defunct General Krivitsky, "head of Stalin's Secret Service." He was still going strong at the time of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, when he gained unique journalistic access to Marina Oswald, the Russian-born widow of the assassin. Valtin was potentially his greatest find ever, and he was determined to present him as the absolutely genuine article. The jury of the Book-of-the-Month Club, heavily lobbied by left-wing "experts" no less than by the likes of Koppell and Levine, felt their individual reputations on the line. They required of Koppell, who then required of Krebs, a detailed memorandum that would provide external textual proof of the major episodes of the book.