Witczak Case

The Witczak Case was a U.S. investigation of “Soviet espionage” which began after the defection in Canada in early September 1945 of Igor Guzenko, a cipher clerk in the office of the military attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa.

Among the information from the Soviet military attaché’s files which Guzenko had secreted was the cover name of Ignacy Samuel Witczak – a longtime GRU “illegal” agent residing in Los Angeles on a false Canadian passport. An FBI investigation revealed that Witczak worked as an instructor at the University of Southern California and probably “set up clandestine GRU networks along the West Coast.” In late fall 1945, “Witczak” went on a trip, and agents from the FBI Los Angeles office followed him all the way to New York, where the tail was turned over to agents from the New York “Soviet squad.” This office put “fifty or sixty men out to watch his logical departure places.” However, “Witczak” had already managed to catch a train back to Los Angeles, where he would play a cat-and-mouse game with the Bureau’s West Coast agents for the next couple of months before he finally managed to disappear.

A few years later, the FBI was able to trace some of “Witczak”’s West Coast operations; having located people in California who had worked for the Soviet “illegal,” the agents were able to obtain confessions from some of them. However, the FBI had never learned the real name of “Witczak” – nor the true scale and purpose of his activities. ¹

Click here to read how two American historians, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, turned “Witczak” into an “agent-sleeper.”

Witczak’s cover was blown in Russia in early 1990s, when his real name was revealed to be Zalman Vulfovich Litvin in publications written by GRU brass. ²