Karin, Feodor Yakovlevich (1896-1937)

A Soviet State Security (GB) operative and official in the 1920s and 1930s who worked periodically as an “illegal” resident in the United States between 1927 to 1933.

Karin (whose real name was Todres Jankelevich Krutyanskij) was born to the family of a government employee in the village of Susleny, in the Bessarabia gubernia of the Russian Empire. At the age of 15, he began earning his living as a clerk in the office of a defense lawyer, and he joined the revolutionary movement soon after. In 1918, he joined the Red Army as commander of the reconnaissance squad of the 1st Bessarabian Brigade and was commissar of the All-Ukrainian criminal investigation authority. In 1919, he joined the Cheka in Bessarabia but soon transferred to the Cheka Special Department in Moscow and then, in 1921, to the Cheka Foreign Intelligence Department (the INO).

From 1922 to 1924, Karin worked as an “illegal” intelligence operative in Rumania, Austria and Bulgaria. In 1924, he was posted as a “legal” resident in Harbin, China, under the cover of a Soviet consulate official. From 1927 to 1933, he worked as an “illegal” resident in the United States, Germany and France. In early 1934, Karin returned to Moscow to become the head of the first section of the INO. In May 1934, the head of the INO, Arthur Artuzov, described him in an official memo as “among the top ten best intelligence organizers in the USSR.”

That same month, Karin was transferred (along with Artuzov) to the Intelligence Directorate of the Staff of the RKKA, which was the GRU’s predecessor agency. In January 1935, Karin was appointed head of the 2nd (Oriental) department of the Intelligence Directorate. In this capacity he supervised the early stage of the Japanese mission of the famous spy, Richard Sorge. Karin was arrested on May 16, 1937, in the first wave of purges in the Red Army, and then sentenced to death and executed on August 21, 1937. He was rehabilitated in 1956. ¹