Grafpen, Gregory Borisovich (1891 – ?)

An operative of the OGPU-NKVD foreign intelligence in the 1930s and a Lieutenant of the State Security (the GB).

Gregory Grafpen was born in 1891 in Odessa. In 1906, he graduated from a six-year city school and, in 1909, from a three-year vocational school, after which he became a printer at a print shop. Biographies of Grafpen say that he lived in the United States from 1908 to 1912, but the 1908 dating is questionable. While in the States, Grafpen reportedly joined the American Socialist Party. After his return to Russia (date uncertain, probably after the beginning of World War I), Grafpen was drafted into the army and served as a junior officer. In 1918, he joined the Red Army, where he served as commander of a communications platoon and later a battalion of the 57th Infantry Division. From August 1920 to April 1921, he served as a military commandant of the cities of Kiev and Chernigov in Ukraine. From 1922 to 1927, he worked in various capacities at different Soviet financial and trade agencies.

From 1927 to 1931, Grafpen worked as the business manager and director of an import office at the Amtorg Trading Corporation in New York City, an intermediary in Soviet export-import operations with American companies. In New York he came in contact with OGPU foreign intelligence (then commonly known as the INO). Back in Moscow in September 1931, he became an officer of the INO and served in several offices at its Moscow headquarters until April 1938, when he was posted to London as a “legal” intelligence resident. In London, Grafpen worked under the diplomatic cover of an attaché at the Soviet Embassy, using the assumed name of Blank. Among other responsibilities, he was running one of the members of the famous “Cambridge Five” agent group, Donald Maclean, and after the latter’s departure to France, another member of the same group, George Cairncross.

In November 1938, Grafpen was suddenly summoned back to Moscow, which at that time could only mean facing purges. Arrested on December 29, he was discharged from the NKVD service in January 1939, tried and sentenced to five years in a prison labor camp for “association with Trotskyites.” Released in 1943 from a prison camp in the Russian European North, he worked in various management jobs at agricultural and food-processing enterprises which served that same camp – and then, from 1946 to 1951, at the Pechora Railway. Following Stalin’s death, his sentence was overturned on September 22, 1956. After his rehabilitation, Grafpen retired and moved to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Particulars about his later life, as well as the date of death, are unknown. ¹