Nelli [Nelly]

An NKGB foreign intelligence cover name in the early 1940s that appeared in the notes on KGB foreign intelligence files taken in the mid-1990s by the former KGB officer and journalist Alexander Vassiliev. The bearer of this cover name was identified in Vassiliev’s notebooks as Helen Lowry, the wife of Iskhak Akhmerov, the NKGB illegal resident in the United States (code named “Mer“). “Nelli” [Nellie] also appears as an unidentified cover name in two cables (from July 19 and October 14, 1944) partially decrypted in the course of the Venona operation.