Elsa Poretsky
 Elsa Poretsky    (spook) | |
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| Born | Elsa Bernaut |
The wife of Soviet intelligence officer Ignace Poretsky. | |
Elsa Poretsky (Born:Bernaut) was the wife of Soviet intelligence officer Ignace Poretsky.
Wife of Ignace Poretsky
Elsa met Ignace Poretsky in Moscow in 1921. Using the name Ignaz Reiss he was working as a spy for Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka. They married and returned to Poland with her husband. In 1922 he was arrested and charged with espionage. Facing a five-year sentence he managed to escape on the way to prison.
Ignaz Reiss, accompanied by his wife, Elsa Poretsky, was now sent to work inBerlin. During this period he became friends with Karl Radek, Angelica Balabanoff, Theodore Maly, Richard Sorge and Hans Brusse. In 1927, he returned briefly to the Soviet Union, where he received the Order of the Red Banner. Reiss spent time in Vienna before obtaining a post in Moscow, where he joined the Polish section of the Comintern.
In 1937 he declared his defection in a letter addressed to Joseph Stalin.[1] He showed his wife a copy of the letter he had sent to Stalin. She now realized that "our world was gone forever, we had no past, we had no future, there was only the present." They had no income and nowhere to go. They also had no legal status anywhere.[2]
An NKVD team assassinated Ignace Poretsky on 4 September 1937 near Lausanne, Switzerland.
Elsa arrived in the United States on 11th February, 1941. She reverted to her maiden name of Bernaut and got a job at Columbia University. Her true identity was discovered in 1948 and she was interviewed by the FBI
She died in 1978.
Spartacus Educational has a full article on Elsa Poretsky
