Buben [Tambourine]

The name of a leader of a small group of sources of the NKGB foreign intelligence in the United States in the latter part of the 1930s, and probably the early 1940s as well, who has been identified as Louis Budenz, a labor activist, journalist and American Communist Party official until 1945. The name surfaced in early 2005, when notes on a KGB report about the failures suffered by Soviet intelligence in the United States were posted on the H-HOAC website. These notes, since then known as the Gorsky List, were made in 1994, in the course of archival research by a former KGB officer and journalist, Alexander Vassiliev, for a book undertaken as part of a joint Russian-American publishing project. (Though this book was never written, that research would later become the basis for a book named The Haunted Wood, co-authored by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev.) According to Vassiliev’s notes of the Gorsky List, “Buben” was the head of a group of six people, which reportedly was formed in the mid-1930s as part of an attempt by OGPU foreign intelligence to penetrate American Trotskyite organizations.